Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Ten: The Job

Dini and I woke up at five. We went to the gym, and we took a virtual walk up the adjacent canyon to the rim (accelerated, of course). My love is tough and wiry, with a dark intensity that captured my heart. Even her humor is dark. She is, simultaneously, pragmatic as only the French can be. Dini called it quits on our idyl early.

“You’ve got work to do, Cherie. And so, do I. Let’s take a shower and go for breakfast. Feed me one of your stomach-reaming specialties, so I can hardly breathe when I’m finished. I want to sit in the clinic like a burnt scrap of toast all day and breathe on the patients. Preventive medicine at its most potent!”

“Don’t pull at my heart strings, Dini. You know you love it. You never had hot until I came along.”

And so, we did that. I wound up at seven o’clock in my aerie atop the rim of the Valles, looking down four kilometers and across two hundred towards the other rim. It wouldn’t really have mattered where I was. My window was the same kind of displayscreen that played what came from the perimeter cams. For all I knew from the image, I could have been anywhere in Lowell, even in one of the storage rooms at the back. But I wasn’t. My office was on the front. It was immediately adjacent to the canyon I was to conquer with my airline. Next to the outer wall that was the limit of our personal experience. Beyond that was a hellish world that looked as innocuous as one of those sweet pancakes on a plate. Only our machines could go out in that.

I never did stay in one place long enough to have a sound system. I love music, especially American music of the twentieth century. I play it, but I am limited to the basic capabilities of my cam system. There are compensations. One of the marvels of our age is instant access to all the masterworks of the electric age, but universality has costs in fidelity. Can’t be helped. My favorite was female jazz singers, and my favorite among them was a woman who was named Carmen McRae. I call her a woman because that was the term she would use. Fem was an attempt to equalize men and women using language. It is an obvious failure and each time I hear it, it rings my bell. What a fraud!

There is one collection of songs she did that burns. One especially shows the intelligence of her vision, and it shakes me with her perception each time. It is called “Woman Talk” and it is the best of the best in that album (what they used to call such a collection). If you need to understand the quality of feminine intellect, you only need play that song. The complicated woman she enacts in that scene she sets won’t let you doubt it again. If ever we come upon other intelligent beings, what shines will not be the way we count blocks, or pile rocks; it will be the unique perspective of our artists. That is what constitutes our humanity. A person like me can only wonder at such people.

Done with the morbid thoughts of “Don’t Explain” and “Woman Talk,” Carmen skipped on to “Kick Off Your Shoes,” and my mood lightened. I looked out my window into the ochre mist of dust on the horizon. It was so different than the pearly mists of the Andes where I was born yet still reminiscent of them. The view of the mountains out my window always settled me. I can love this world. I am not one like Klara who keeps the gardens of Giverny on her office wall to remind her of the softer vistas of old Earth.

I did some lists of things we needed to do before we started the actual work of building the line. We had to set it up first. Lou Mazzini, my assistant, had done the Quonset for our existing line. We needed a construction shed to assemble our ships and equip them. We also required a place to store our supplies. It had to be half again as large as our previous shed, but it didn’t need to be enclosed. If it had a roof shielded in the usual way, the sides could be open, and we could wear surface suits that were far more comfortable than space suits. Even the diffuse atmosphere of Mars was much more supportive than the vacuum of space. If you didn’t need to worry about the radiation, the suits could be quite minimal.

If we were taking a trip down to Lowell using the train to tow our airship, we could take our sheds and available equipment down with us when we did it. The ship would carry it easily. Since we had already done this on a small scale, we had quite a bit of stuff left over. Constructors, tools, spare pylons, rails, and some chemset. That stuff needed to be transported south. We could just pile it on the ship and move it with no extra trouble. It was designed for ore, but that flatbed would move anything.

Chantelle was in first. She was always a treat to look at. Her skin was a lustrous black that was plush velvet. Her skull was round, perfectly circular, and faultless. How had she managed to avoid childhood scrapes? Her obsidian eyes flashed when she was brooked. With her air of authority, that was not often. I was a bit scared of her and the others, Lou, and Boris, more so. She insisted on doing things just so. I usually let her have her way. Things got done.

“Chantelle, we need to assemble our leftover airship supplies to move to Lowell. They will be sent on the first trip behind the train. I will ask Lou to do the fabrication of the Quonsets. Like the ones we built for Borealis. You might want to pick up some interest in the fanpages by showing the preparations. There will be plenty of shots showing constructors loading stuff on the airship.”

While I was talking to Chantelle, Lou walked in and went into his office. He was sitting down at his screen when I walked in. His displayscreen had a still of the Roman Forum, a structure that no longer existed. It was destroyed with all coastal Italy in the tsunami that followed the Impact. As usual, his coffee-coloured face looked unhappy.

People’s sensitivities are such that you learn never to refer to the scenes that they choose for their wallpaper. It saddened me to see it, but I didn’t know precisely what his family had lost. Some people like to fall in a hole, it makes them feel better. Personnel files only skim the surface. The substance is in the emotional toll that comes down through families. And, since the aftershocks keep coming, you don’t know how raw the wound is. You learn to let them tell you if they need to.

“There will be two of the huts, end to end. One will be for final fabrication and the other for the airships. We will erect them just east of the existing train station. That should be plenty for now. When we really get going, we may need another one. We will need to use at least two of the constructors to tow the ship to the Junction. It shouldn’t be too hard. We only have a few kilometers to go, and the land around there is flat. Don’t we still have some of the frames we used to make the last trusses in one of the sheds?”

“I know where they are, Mo. It will take us a while, though. The stamping machine we used for the last beams we fabricated is too small to do two lines quickly.”

“Well, get it set up and start tonight, if you can. The machines can work through it. We can finish some trusses while we are still stamping the rest. I hope you have enough material. I want to get this started before they change their minds.”

“They won’t do that. This is a big deal for them. They are going to make plenty of money on this. They are developing their property.”

“They may not be so happy when they start thinking about what this will do for us, Lou. Better communications do funny things to a community. Changes they might not like when they start thinking about it. I have found from long experience that it is harder to stop projects that are in motion than ones that are still on the boards. Also, I want to have the image of the ship being towed behind the train up on the fanpage asap. That’ll be another harbinger. I want to do this, and I want to improve my chances as much as possible. The more speed, the more inertia.”

Just then, I got a text from Klara: “Can you make our meeting now, Mo?”

That didn’t seem like a casual invitation. I wound it up and prepared to go. I had already instructed my associates. That’s why we had a group. They would start the job just as well as me. I took a last lingering look at my mountain view. It might be the last time I could sit in contemplation for a while.

The elevator down is always a kick. Four kilometers is a long way for such a ride. You are not aware of how fast you are going. It is very fast, but you start slow, and stop the same way. There is no funny feeling of dropping in the pit of your stomach. The hydraulic mechanism they put in after the cable is much better. With increased traffic they needed the faster speeds that hydraulics made possible. The four kilometers took about five minutes. Still, at the bottom as I alighted to see the valley wall in front of me, I felt that I had come a long way. Since the physical sensations didn’t betray it, I guess it must have been in my head.

Klara’s office was to the right, along with all the other ones. Most of the executive offices were up top where there was more space, but the essential ones, like the Director’s, Medical, Nurse/Constable’s office, and Psychiatric (now unfortunately empty for lack of an incumbent), were on the ground floor.

I could see there was someone else in the office besides Klara. When I got to the door, I saw Linh was sitting in the right-hand chair.

“I didn’t intend to sandbag you, Mo. I could use a cup of coffee. What about you, Linh?

She nodded. I knew she liked coffee.

Klara led us out all the way to the back of the cafeteria where the Rose and Brier was. It was the pillar at the back where Alex had set off his first bomb. The mark, black as pitch, still greasy, was left on the pillar with the paintings of remembrance still ringing it. I don’t think anyone will ever want to paint that over. Certainly, now, it is a vivid reminder of the price we have paid to get where we are, and the cost of letting others take our fate into their hands. It is an inescapable fact that Alex (and Khloe) got here to do what they did because someone down there was careless with our lives.

“I thought it might be a little more private for us to meet outside my office. Linh tells me there is no surveillance here. She should know if anyone does. It’s not really about the airline; Mo. Linh has told me she has a fix for the sandstorms. No problem with that. But there is a problem with the reporting we have already been asked to do. Neither Linh nor I have been particularly faithful in filing the reports. It’s intimidating to have a shadow on Earth, but it’s also insulting. No one would like it or think that the interference was even a little bit helpful. At best, they are trying to control us, and at worst they are preparing to replace us. I don’t think the people here would be better off if either of those things happened.

“There is something else. Not only are they becoming insistent on the filing of the reports, but they have advised me they want to use a new technology to file them. They have a new kind of radio that allows for instantaneous communication. They expect to be able to have vid conferences with us on a regular basis. They say they will be sending us this new radio. They don’t say what it is. It is black box technology.”

“Klara asked me to speculate on what kind of tech could accomplish this. It’s hard to figure, though. The laws of Physics are unavoidable. Radio transmissions between Earth and Mars take an average of twenty light minutes and there is no way around that. No way, that is, except Einstein’s sneaky action at a distance. Entanglement would avoid the limits because entangled particles are in some way linked, and changes in one are simultaneous changes in the other particle no matter how far apart it is. Researchers have been trying to concoct a reliable way to entangle particles for over a century, without any success.

“Somehow, Starward has come up with an appliance that can do something like that without any intervening development. And it couldn’t be an experimental one-off sketchy job. This is reporting on one of their key projects. Big money is at stake. How this was done is beyond me. I have looked everywhere I can think of, but I haven’t found any link to this thing beyond the usual speculative research still ebbing and flowing on what is a perennial unsolved problem. It would need to be some secret project. But it has been illegal for a long time to conduct secret research. The UN forbids it. Yet somehow this gadget has been developed without research.”

This triggered a response in me. My recent experience resonated with it.

“That reminds me of some research I just did on metal fatigue for my rails and pylons just yesterday. It was helpful. It had formulae that were of universal application. I could plug in Mars radiation figures that couldn’t have been based on any research I could replace. It gave me the precise mix data to use. We haven’t done any such research here yet. I did try to replace something because I am reluctant to accept results I can’t verify. There was nothing, yet the numbers looked very good, and I am sure they will work. The article I found it in was authored by an engineering group I have never heard of. Engineers use technology, we don’t do the basic science underlying it. But the science needs to come from someone. It doesn’t line up. And one more thing. The article read like a textbook. Like they knew everything for certain before they wrote it. That doesn’t seem like science.”

Klara summed up:

“So, if it didn’t come from us where did it come from? The rumors I have heard say something strange is happening on Earth. Boris’ observations should be very interesting, but he should keep everything innocuous. Mo, you send him a sisterly greeting. As his superior too, you can tell him to stick to basics and get home quickly. You need him and all that. He should still go to LEO, though. He will anyway, to see his family up close. It’s funny. It feels like Starward is getting very suspicious of us. I don’t know why. We haven’t done a thing yet but try to execute their orders in the most effective way we can. Maybe it’s the natural paranoia of the rich, but if so, where was it before?”

Linh, finished, drifted off her seat:

“I’ll try to see whether my impression is wrong. I may just be missing something. A lot of research is being done. Since it is all published, there’s a lot to go through. If it works, it could be a great boon to us. Imagine being able to reach EarthSpace continuously. All kinds of expertise on instant tap. Not to speak of the intangibles. For one thing, we could get a psychiatrist on remote. It’s not bad. We can probably deal with the reports. What’s the best way to deflect the boss, boss? Agree with her and then don’t do it. Have you never noticed?”

Klara looked genuinely irritated when Linh said that. I couldn’t tell if it was because she hadn’t said it herself or whether she was just realizing that she had been gamed. She didn’t say.