Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Thirty: Call Us Anytime

We were at five hundred kilometers of track when Bennet called Klara again. He contacted her by standard radio and asked us to disinter the magic radios we had sequestered in sackcloth at the back of our warehouse.

Our Nobel prize had continued to elude us. None of our methane sources had panned out. We were still waiting for the parts for our deep drilling rig. We couldn’t decide where to drill first, so we just chose the site that released the most methane among the ones we had surveyed and expectantly awaited our equipment from LEO.

We hadn’t had a peep from Earth about the secrecy issue. Our universities were coming along well. We had part of the faculty and the buildings by that time. Not a lot, but a start. And the displaced scientists of Earth were still applying to us in droves. We were starting to get students from our own residents and even some inquiries from students in Earthspace.Mars, largely unexplored, was a great place to do original research. We had some very good people by then and we were starting to look planet-wide to explore and catalogue Mars’ resources. We had even landed some missions in the Southern highlands.

We had been collecting more and more data from the Cthaw, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to build the magic radios. We acquired a lot more respect for our colleagues on Earth. The technology even to follow the simplified directions of the Cthaw took more than we had then. Too bad we couldn’t have accessed the group that had made the radio. Eventually, we probably would. Principally, because we would be their only market. We kept asking around. We still had a lot to learn before we were able to build them on our own. In the meantime, we sent a few messages out to Barnard’s Star the old-fashioned way. We didn’t have any expectation of hearing back anytime soon, though. It would be a minimum of twelve years for a round trip signal.

Would they bother to answer us when they were already signaling us? They were sending us different stuff than they had sent to Earth. They were sending us art and music as well. They must have thought we were the sensitive ones. It must have been that: don’t you think? No literature, of course. Direct sensual material would be the only creations we could hope to understand, and we hadn’t done that yet. We had tried to send them to artists on Earth, the only ones us dweebs had available, and we hadn’t heard from them yet. They were our best guess. It wasn’t science, so it must have been art. Maybe their sensory equipment was so different that we couldn’t connect.

When he appeared again on a disinterred radio one morning in spring, it became apparent that Theobald Bennet was in the striptease business the same way Klara was in the dress up business. Forget the prestige of his profession. He was a manipulator, and he used all the tools. Each time he appeared before us his clothing was stripped to the essentials. At the trial it was the robes of office, and at the conference following, it was the jacket. This time, he was in folksy and adorable mode, and he didn’t wear a jacket. This time, the magic radio screened an image in red suspenders, and elaborately pleated striped trousers that draped over his weedy legs. His face, craggy and smiling, was set off by those watery blue eyes, translucent like tropical water might have been. The bright yellow hair was the only color counterpoint.

We had gathered again in the cafeteria. We had had experience with him and his connections with the rulers of Earth, and we knew that the meeting would be another seminal event. Nobody needed the benches that had separated the parties in our incarnation of a law court, so we just sat in front of the podium. This time everybody would be on the same side, and they would want to hear every word and see every sight. To allow that, they had set up one of the two magic radios on the stage atop the shroud for the autochefs.

There was no forgetting the last time we had configured the cafeteria like that. It was when Alex had set the explosions that had driven the stampede that had killed all those people. One of those had created the obscene stain that had marked the Briar and Rose. No society seems to be able to avoid events like that. The scars of such catastrophes mark us all. It was the same way that the Conquistadors marked my own people. We may not learn anything from the failures that trigger them, but we do remember them. So, when we gathered there, the mood was somber, with no trace of merriment in the those assembled. I don’t think the ebullient Mr. Bennet was even aware of the implications of that configuration of those simple tables and chairs. How could he be? He would probably have been pleased with the extra heft our thoughtful mood gave his words if he had known, though.

The magic radios, depending on the limited ambit of the headsup capabilities of our fons, could only see straight ahead with very little peripheral capability.You couldn’t hope to see to your left and right. Dear old Theo, presuming that Klara was on the same stage as him, motioned right to Klara in his introduction, again introducing himself and thanking Klara for allowing him to speak to our congregation. The only problem with his presumption was that Klara was actually on the left, and his greeting on the wrong side only emphasized how unconnected he was.It started the cracker barrel discussion on the wrong note and increased our concern rather than calming it.

“I am pleased to see you again, Director Nilsson. Thank you for allowing me to address you and the inhabitants of Mars. You could not have missed that momentous events are taking place on Earth, and the character of the decisions we have been making must have made you wonder whether we have lost our minds.

“Since our last meeting, when you were kind enough to be entirely frank with us about your intentions, we have gained an understanding that the best way with your people is to lay out the truth with none of the dissembling that is customary for state-to-state communications. That is why I have been authorized to share the unvarnished facts with you.

“May I proceed Ma’am, or do you wish to make some introduction to my remarks?”

“How can I, Mr. Bennet? I have no idea what you are going to say. I am content to give you an audience because I know that what you say will be given the credence that it deserves. So, what do you have to say to us?”

“When you promise the reception that I deserve, Ma’am, I am fearful. Who of us really deserves the blessings that we receive? Certainly not a privileged and pampered creature like me. The only way for such as me is to cast aside all the gifts I have been heir to. I will just, then, tell you what I know to be true as plainly as I can, and leave it to you to decide.

“We on Earth are suddenly approaching a great reversal of fortune that can do nothing but delight our people. Yet that same fate strikes fear into the hearts of our leaders. Very shortly, the climate on the Earth will begin to change rapidly. This is not something our experts have prepared us for. On the contrary, they have been telling us all along that we must wait decades and perhaps centuries until the pervasive gloom that shrouds the Earth clears.

“Yet now they tell us that the Sulfur Dioxide in the upper atmosphere is beginning rapidly to dissociate. The aerosols that form it naturally break down into Sulfuric Acid and water under the action of the Sun’s rays. But, until recently, the quantity of the gases in the atmosphere, constantly augmented by residual volcanic activity from the Impact, has made any such changes so infinitesimal in their effect that they were universally discounted as a significant factor.

“It is impossible to blame anyone, even if that would do any good, because humankind has never witnessed such events and the geological record does not reveal whether similar past events took decades, centuries, or millennia to resolve. It now appears that, considering the influence of cascading interlocking reactions, the atmosphere will see significant clearance within ten years or so. This is far too short a time for us to do any of the intensive planning and preparation that resumption of life on the surface, even in isolated and limited locations, would necessitate.

“I hardly need add that creating the financial resources for the reconstruction is entirely out of our power in the foreseeable future. Yet we, as the government, will be called to account for our failure to provide for the rebuilding of the world notwithstanding the reality that, in our present economic doldrums, we are unable to raise the funds needed. We have spent any excess we had in creating the vast edifice of space colonies of which you occupy a part. We felt compelled by necessity to do that. All along, though, we have had to pull along the anchor of providing the resources to generate every breath our citizens take and grow every mouthful of food they ate. We are well and truly strapped, ladies and gentlemen. Yet we must replace the money we need.

“We have been keeping our population quiescent for decades telling them that their privations must be endured to provide for the day that mankind can again occupy what was formerly a world beautiful beyond description. What will they do when that world appears? We all know. And when they go out unprepared, who will be blamed? To avert great suffering, we must somehow accomplish the impossible and allow for at least some to return to life.

“The surface has been moldering under a toxic atmosphere for almost a hundred years. Nothing but junk exists out there. Only the most resilient of creatures have been able to survive in the oceans and only extremophiles have survived on the land.

“So, now you know why we have done what we have. We need the money urgently. That is why we have effectively transferred the responsibility for scientific research to you.That was two percent of our GNP. That is also why we have promoted the mind bath we got from the Cthaw. We need the license fees. It yields huge amounts of lucre. I will admit to you that it puts us into the category of drug dealers. It is shameful exploitation, true, but it will give us some of the money we need. It will produce revenues and enforce savings, no matter how unwillingly. We commit great evils to avoid even greater ones. We have also taken many other measures that will harden the lives of our citizens. That cannot be helped if we are to make even the nominal gains we need to avoid wholesale revolution. That strife would cause incalculable suffering yet another time. We must somehow contain that. You can see this does not impart a wholly admirable picture of us.

“We had not publicized the Cthaw’s outreach because we were afraid it would raise a general premonition of improvement that we did not feel warranted under the circumstances. Strangely, your disclosures about the Cthaw, while celebrated, have not had much practical effect. Probably our efforts to curtail our science expenses had the unintended effect of diverting the attention of the principal audience of such matters, the technical community. They must now focus on their own futures.

“If that indicates that we are in a bad way on Earth, I think it is accurate. The future does hold great promise. It is great news that we are in prospect of being able to live on the surface of our beautiful world again. The path from here to there, however, is fraught with the danger of destructive civil strife. And those armies I referred to in our last meeting are not really in existence anymore, even on Earth. We cannot rely on them to suppress dissent. That leaves us in the unenviable position of being required to produce results. What government wants that?”

Klara was listening carefully to Bennet’s exposé. She knew, as well as we did what the implications were for the people of space.

“That makes us orphans, does it not, Mr. Bennet? Child societies ripped from the bosom of family at too young an age. Am I right in assuming that the investment you had planned to make in us has been made impossible by your sudden penury?

“You have it precisely, Ma’am. Now, there is nothing more we can do for you. We are compelled to tend the fires in our own hearths. We cannot venture afield. Moreover, we will be compelled to ask for help from you. Your populations are small, but your average wealth is already higher than the citizens of Earth.”

“I cannot speak for the other settlements, but, insofar as I speak for my fellows here, you will have all the support we can give you. You will get credit for the sums you have invested so far. As I had told you earlier, it was never our intention to deprive you of that.”

“There is one benefit you will get that we thought you were angling for all along, Ma’am. Maybe you will replace it unwelcome so early, but you have it now. Independence. In a trice. You could easily mistake our reaction for panic, and you may be right to call it that. Yet we feel that this news must be handled as expeditiously as possible if we are to avoid disaster. It would be supremely ironic if the prospect of return to normalcy precipitated another catastrophe. You know of your own experience how powerful the emotions are. So, we must cut you loose now and prepare for that profound change in our own circumstances.

“We have given some thought to sufficiency. Perhaps not enough consideration, but some, and we have concluded that you are far along enough to make it on your own. All we can say is good luck. You may think our decision premature since we have at least then years to our first exposure, but, considering the scale of work ahead of us, it is not, I assure you.

“We offer another last benefit to you. We are shipping several circuit boards for magic radios left over from our own development program to you, along with the technical instructions we have developed from the Cthaw treatises. The scientists and technicians involved in their development will be made available to you. The obligatory navel-gazing we will be doing from now on will preclude any need for additional interplanetary communications. We have enough facilities for that already. The interstellar component is up to you now. Thank you for your attention. Again, we wish you the best of luck, and we hope we have your good wishes as well.”

Klara replied for all of us.

“Thank you for taking us into your confidence, Mr. Bennet. If the leaders of the Earth are listening, we extend our thanks to them. And good luck to you as well.”

“Oh, they are listening, Director Nilsson. Do you imagine that they would permit me to make these disclosures on my own? I am their servant, after all.”

Then he disappeared. But the default image, flickering and insubstantial, continued to glow above the instrument to show it was still active. Virtual Linus and Solomon had returned, floating above our radios. This time they had brought something we could use.

In the minutes following, Klara set us on the path. She put everything into perspective for us. Not in so many words, of course, but in her attitude.

“Don’t think they have left us alone. I think they’ve gone over the deep end, but it’s their decision. So be it. Our perspective isn’t going to change their minds. Who would have thought that, as our fellows approach reentry to the natural world we all have pined for almost a hundred years, they should fear the prospect? What should have been the cause for joy has now become the focus of a global anxiety. They are afraid of the surface. It must be, because they would otherwise be shouting it from the rooftops and exhorting the people of Earth to join them in the great crusade.

“We won’t follow them. We have become different people. We will reach for the planets. Life will be different out here. We have been freed to follow our own path. It won’t be easy, but there is boundless opportunity for us all. In the next decade, many thousands of people will be settling in space. Twenty thousand in Rubin, and more in an expanded Einstein. The LEO colonies will be expanded and tens of thousands will want to settle there.

“Bennet says the skies will start to clear in a decade, but it will be a lot longer until their sky clears enough so that large numbers of people can live on the surface. As the liberation from underground looms closer, more will lose patience and grab what opportunities exist. For the first time, there will be families in space and households. All those people will arrive without any domestic goods or possessions. It is ruinously expensive to ship anything else up but people. They will need everything. And they will remake our population demographics. We are going to have lots more men here, ladies. Some good things about that, some bad. Get used to it.”

Then she changed her tone. Strictly business from speculative.

“I want to meet with all the production people. We are going to need to make a living now as well as develop our planet. Two very hard jobs, but we are up to it. We’ll start tomorrow morning at nine in the cafeteria. I will be asking some people to attend, but everyone is welcome. I will announce it. I think it will be a very interesting meeting.”

We met the next morning. Klara put the production people in the front row. Morgana, from the gardens, Hana from the fabrication plant, Sydney, and Dini, from Medical, Yusup from biology, and Manjit Gupta from geology. Also Bee and me, of course, from metal production and construction.

Bee, with the best vantage of what was to come, responded first.

“When I lived on the Moon, the style of life was the same as it is here. On LEO, it has started to change in a few instances, but it is mostly the same there. No children and few teenagers. There are no households in the traditional sense. People ate in the cafeteria, like we do here. As Klara pointed out, there are few items available that could be used in separate households. Each unit has a small eating area with a warming oven, but there is no real food preparation done there.

“If there are going to be families living in space, they will need everything. You know yourselves what you can bring up with you. Damn little. Apartments will need to be constructed for different requirements. They are already starting that on LEO where they are building little houses with kitchens and dining rooms and separate bedrooms. We will need to do that too.

“They will need knives and kitchen tools and appliances and all the household things we had to leave on Earth. They will need to make plenty of everything for themselves down there when they resettle the surface, but none of it can come up here. Too expensive. Whoever can supply those markets will have a monopoly for decades, at least. The last time this happened was to America after the second war two centuries ago. All the other countries were devastated by the war, and the US was the only place that could make them. They had the raw materials and the experience with consumer products. They took off and it was the making of them. On a much smaller scale, it could be the same for us. There will be hundreds of thousands of people living in space, and no supply. We could help them live a normal life. We have raw materials aplenty here, and we have access to universal patents.”

He turned to me.

“What do you say, Mo? Do you think we could make toasters? What about Teflon melon ballers? The shipping insystem would be easy. No more trouble than what we are already doing. And we could establish agency relationships with people living there to distribute them. My daughter is setting up with Miriam Altschuler there. If you can sell real estate, you can sell something else too. It’s a natural. All we need to figure out is where we could start first. Lots of work for our new immigrants too. Before we have the market to build great factories, there’s going to be a lot of small-scale work. You need people for that. With a virtual monopoly, we can make a living.”

I had a few sharp words about that.

“Are you looking to retire from construction work, you lazy thing? Just when I’ve convinced you to do some honest work, you start looking for a cushy job.”

“Why say that? How did you ever get the impression that I was energetic, Mo? Except for unconnected bursts of effort, when have I ever shown any innate desire for work? The only time I move is when I need to get something done. Otherwise I am content to laze in the sun. You remember that time I met Alex sunbathing? It was the illogical impulse to do something that got me into trouble in the first place. Dedication to endless work is overrated Mo. Your compulsion ought to be recognized for the disorder it is.”

“Don’t twist your drawers, Bee. I merely asked whether you wanted to make toasters yourself, perhaps in terms too subtle for you. I think that Klara’s idea is a very good one. You have connections down there and I think you are the natural one to reach out to people to get this going. If you wind up being a housewares tycoon, I am sure you will be the most surprised person here.”

“Then my short answer is yeah. I am in. I will start calling on this. The easiest place for us to start is kitchen tools. We are already making metal pieces anyway. And we have bamboo for the handles. That is great stuff.”

Morgana was next. She had ideas too.

“We are already growing natural fibres for local consumption and weaving them on a small scale. We could easily make much more fabric from the cotton and bamboo we are already growing. We would need some mills to weave them. We should see if we can recruit some people with experience in the weaving business and some millwrights to help us set up the factories. That’s a business that we could almost completely automate. People need to sleep on something, and we have only the bare minimum of household furnishings. It wasn’t a priority here, so I doubt it is different anywhere else.”

Lou joined in as well. Suggestions were starting to come thick and fast. He had been a potter at one time, and he proposed that we could easily make porcelain with the abundant supplies of kaolin that lined the ancient watercourses. He reminded us, too, of Mars Organics, which could make any kind of plastic we could need. That would be perfect for household gadgets.

Then it was Dini’s turn. She surprised me again.

“In my student days, I was a feminist activist. One of my idols was Patricia McGinnis, an early advocate for reproductive freedom. That is an old fight. No-one knows about her. She wouldn’t care, but I do. We are going to have women give birth in low gravity and we know nothing about it. This is the perfect place to study the implications of that. I would like to start a medical school in her name, the McGinnis School of Medicine, to continue the work she started. She was not a family woman, but she understood the importance of healthy families and the need for children to feel loved and wanted. Since the theme here is profit, I need hardly point out that universities make money and provide many other tangible benefits.”

Everybody was starting to remember how life was when things were more normal. It was a flood of nostalgia. It was mixed with the fantasy of winning a prize. It made for a way to soften a scar that had thickened and hardened over the decades. It was a therapy that had not yet been administered. Yes, there had been promise. That offering of hope was valuable in itself, but it had none of the satisfaction of actual attainment. These mundane things we were doing seemed to be small steps to that.

Watching all that, tears came to Klara’s eyes. She said “You know what we’re doing, don’t you? We are planning a future. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Yes, it was.