Mission Control’s preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles Marineris. All the farm team was assigned to the base, and a majority of the engineers and medical people – altogether, around sixty of the hundred. The rest would be scattered on subsidiary missions, returning to the base camp from time to time. The largest subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space station. Another smaller mission would leave the base camp and travel north to the polar cap, to build a mining system which would transport blocks of ice back to the base. A third mission was to make a series of geological surveys, traveling all over the planet; a glamor assignment for sure. All the smaller groups would become semi-autonomous for periods of up to a year, so selecting them was no trivial matter; they knew well, now, how long a year could be.
Arkady and a group of his friends – Alex, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Tatiana, Elena – requested all the jobs on Phobos. When Phyllis and Mary heard about it, they came to Maya and Frank to protest. “They’re obviously trying to take over Phobos, and who knows what they’ll do with it?”
Maya nodded, and she could see Frank didn’t like it either. The problem was, no one else wanted to stay on Phobos; even Phyllis and Mary weren’t clamoring to replace Arkady’s crew, so it wasn’t clear how to oppose him.
Louder arguments broke out when Ann Clayborne passed around her crew list for the geological survey. A lot of people wanted to join that one, and several of those left off her list said they were going on surveys whether Ann wanted them or not.
Arguments became frequent, and vehement. Almost everyone aboard declared themselves for one mission or another, positioning themselves for the final decisions. Maya felt that she was losing all control of the Russian contingent; she was getting furious at Arkady. In a general meeting she suggested sarcastically that they let the computer make the assignments. The idea was rejected with no regard for her authority. She threw up her hands. “Then what do we do?”
No one knew.
She and Frank conferred in private. “Let’s try giving them the illusion of making the decision,” he said to her with a brief smile; she realized that he was not displeased to have seen her fail in the general meeting. Their encounter was coming back to haunt her, and she cursed herself for a fool. Little politburos were dangerous …
Frank polled everyone concerning their wishes, and then displayed the results on the bridge, listing everyone’s first, second and third choices. The geological surveys were popular, while staying on Phobos was not. Everyone already knew this, and the posted lists proved that there were fewer conflicts than it had seemed. “There are complaints about Arkady taking over Phobos,” Frank said at the next public meeting. “But no one but him and his friends want that job. Everyone else wants to get down to the surface.”
Arkady said, “In fact we should get hardship compensation.”
“It’s not like you to talk about compensation, Arkady,” Frank said smoothly.
Arkady grinned and sat back down.
Phyllis wasn’t amused. “Phobos will be a link between Earth and Mars, like the space stations in Earth orbit. You can’t get from one planet to the other without them, they’re what naval strategists call choke points.”
“I promise to keep my hands off your neck,” Arkady said to her.
Frank snapped, “We’re all going to be part of the same village! Anything we do affects all of us! And judging by the way you’re acting, dividing up from time to time will be good for us. I for one wouldn’t mind having Arkady out of my sight for a few months.”
Arkady bowed. “Phobos here we come!”
But Phyllis and Mary and their crowd still were not happy. They spent a lot of time conferring with Houston, and whenever Maya went into Torus B, conversations seemed to cease, eyes followed her suspiciously – as if being Russian would automatically put her in Arkady’s camp! She damned them for fools, and damned Arkady even more. He had started all this.
But in the end it was hard to tell what was going on, with a hundred people scattered in what suddenly felt like such a large ship. Interest groups, micropolitics; they really were fragmenting. One hundred people only, and yet they were too large a community to cohere! And there was nothing she or Frank could do about it.
One night she dreamed again of the face in the farm. She woke shaken, and was unable to fall back asleep; and suddenly everything seemed out of control. They flew through the vacuum of space inside a small knot of linked cans, and she was supposed to be in charge of this mad argosy! It was absurd!
She left her room, climbed D’s spoke tunnel to the central shaft. She pulled herself to the bubble dome, forgetting the tunneljump game.
It was four a.m. The inside of the bubble dome was like a planetarium after the audience has gone: silent, empty, with thousands of stars packed into the black hemisphere of the dome. Mars hung directly overhead, gibbous and quite distinctly spherical, as if a stone orange had been tossed among the stars. The four great volcanoes were visible pockmarks, and it was possible to make out the long rifts of Marineris. She floated under it, spreadeagled and spinning very slightly, trying to comprehend it, trying to feel something specific in the dense interference pattern of her emotions. When she blinked, little spherical teardrops floated out and away among the stars.
The lock door opened. John Boone floated in, saw her, grabbed the door handle to stop himself. “Oh, sorry. Mind if I join you?”
“No.” Maya sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “What gets you up at this hour?”
“I’m often up early. And you?”
“Bad dreams.”
“Of what?”
“I can’t remember,” she said, seeing the face in her mind.
He pushed off, floated past her to the dome. “I can never remember my dreams.”
“Never?”
“Well, rarely. If something wakes me up in the middle of one, and I have time to think about it, then I might remember it, for a little while anyway.”
“That’s normal. But it’s a bad sign if you never remember your dreams at all.”
“Really? What’s it a symptom of?”
“Of extreme repression, I seem to recall.” She had drifted to the side of the dome; she pushed off through the air, stopped herself against the dome next to him. “But that may be Freudianism.”
“In other words something like the theory of phlogiston.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”
They looked out at Mars, pointed out features to each other. Talked. Maya glanced at him as he spoke. Such bland, happy good looks; he really was not her type. In fact she had taken his cheeriness for a kind of stupidity back at the beginning. But over the course of the voyage she had seen that he was not stupid.
“What do you think of all the arguments about what we should do up there?” she asked, gesturing at the red stone ahead of them.
“I don’t know.”
“I think Phyllis makes a lot of good points.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think that matters.”
“What do you mean?”
“The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing. X claims a, Y claims b. They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of points. But when their listeners