Edge of Infinity

OBELISK

Stephen Baxter

WEI BINGLIN FIRST saw the cairn of Cao Xi, as it happened, during his earliest moments on Mars.

It came at the end of a long and difficult voyage. Through the last few days of the Sunflower’s approach to Mars, Wei Binglin had been content for the automated systems to bring his ship home. Why not? Since the accident, most of the Sunflower’smanual controls had been inactive anyhow. And besides, Wei no longer regarded himself as deserving the rank of captain at all; in a ship become a drifting field hospital, he was reduced to the role of caretaker, his only remaining duty to bring those who had survived this, his last flight, into a proper harbour.

So, for the first time in his many approaches to the planet, he let Mars swim out of the darkness before him. In the light of a distant sun, it struck him from afar as a malformed, lopsided, murky world, oddly unfinished, like a piece of pottery by an inadequate student. And yet as the ship entered its parking orbit high above the planet and skimmed around the night side, he saw the colourful layers of a thin but tall atmosphere, a scattering of white in the deeper craters – clouds, fog? – and brilliant pinpricks of light in the night, human settlements, mostly Chinese, a few UN outposts. A world where people were already being born, living, dying. A world where he too, he decided, had come to die.

The surviving crew and passengers of the Sunflower had to wait a day in orbit while a small flotilla of vessels came out to meet them, from Mars’s outer moon Deimos, a resource-rich rock itself which served as a centre for orbital operations. Many of the craft brought paramedics and automated medical equipment; some of the injured passengers and crew would be taken to the low-gravity hospital on Deimos for treatment before facing the rigours of a descent from orbit. There were only a handful of bodies to process. Most of the relatives of the dead had been content for the remains of their loved ones to be ejected into interplanetary space. Wei had officiated over these services himself, supported by the faithful of relevant creeds and cultures.

He may no longer have regarded himself as a captain, but the crew of the Deimos station paid him a certain honour. When the last passengers and crew had been lifted off, they sent out a final shuttle just for him, so he could be the last of the crew to leave his ship. But of course the Sunflower was not left empty; it already swarmed with repair crews, human and robotic, as it was towed gently by tugs to an orbital rendezvous with Deimos. An interplanetary ship was too valuable to scuttle, even one so grievously injured.

The shuttle itself was a small, fat-bodied glider coated with battered-looking heatshield tiles. In orbit, driven by powerful attitude thrusters, it was a nimble, nippy craft. The pilot, a young woman, allowed Wei to sit beside her in the co-pilot’s seat as she took a quick final tour around the drifting hulk of the Sunflower.

He pointed out a great gash in the hull. “There. That is the wound that killed her.”

“I see. The fusion containment failed, I read from the report.”

“We lost our ion drive immediately, and many of the tethers to the lightsail were severed...”

Ships like the Sunflower, dedicated to long-haul interplanetary spaceflight, were roomy lightweight hulls driven by the gentle but persistent thrust of ion-drive engines, and by the push of sunlight on their huge sails. A journey from Earth to Mars on such a ship still took months, but months less than an unpowered trajectory, a Hohmann ellipse.

The pilot was watching his face. “The incident was a news headline on Earth and Mars, and elsewhere. The heroic efforts to stabilise the environment systems and save the passengers –”

“That was the achievement of my crew, not of myself.”

“While you, Captain, manipulated your surviving propulsion system, a lightsail like a bird’s broken wing, to put the ship on the Hohmann orbit that eventually brought you to Mars. It was an achievement of courage and improvisation to compare with the rescue of Apollo 13, some commentators have remarked.”

He glanced at her. It was unusual in his experience for such young people to have knowledge of pioneering space exploits a hundred and forty years gone; to many of them it was as if the age of space had begun in 2003, when Yang Liwei became the first Chinese to reach Earth orbit aboard the Shenzhou 5.

But he didn’t feel like being congratulated. “I lost my ship, and many of my passengers. And such a slow crawl out to sanctuary, on a ship full of the injured, was agonising.” He had made daily visits from the bridge to the huddled remains of the passenger compartments. There were broken families back there, families who had lost a father or mother or children, and now were forced to endure more months of confinement, deprivation and suffering, unable even to escape from the scene of their loss. There were even orphans. He remembered one little girl in particular, no more than five years old; her name was Xue Ling, he had learned, and her father, mother and brother were all gone, an optimistic pioneer family wiped out in an instant. She had looked lost, bewildered, even as she rested her head against the stiff fabric of a kindly ship’s officer’s tunic.

“I am sure it was terrible,” said the pilot. “But you brought your ship home.” She tapped her control panels and the shuttle turned its nose to the planet. Soon the craft bit into the air. The atmosphere of Mars was thin, tall; the ride was surprisingly gentle compared with a re-entry at Earth, and the shuttle, shedding its orbital energy in frictional heat, made big swooping turns over a ruddy landscape. “We will be down shortly, Captain –”

“I am no longer a captain. I have resigned, formally. Please do not use that honorific.”

“So I understand. You have decided to give up your career, to commit yourself to Mars.”

“People trusted me to bring them here safely; I failed. The least I can do is honour their memory by –”

She grunted. “By doing what? Becoming a lichen farmer? I suppose to become a living monument is a noble impulse. But somewhat self-destructive, and a waste of your expertise, if you want my opinion, sir.”

He didn’t want it particularly, but he bit back a reprimand. He no longer held rank over this woman.

“You have no family on Earth?”

“No wife, no.”

“Perhaps that will be your destiny on Mars. To help raise the first generation of pioneers, who will –”

“That will not be possible. During the accident – the failure of the shielding around the fusion reactor, and then a loss of shielding fluids from the ship as a whole...” He could see she understood. “I was baked for many months by the radiation of interplanetary space. The doctors tell me I have a high propensity for cancers in the future. And if I am not sterile, I should be.”

“How old are you, sir?”

“Only a little over thirty.”

She did not speak again.

The shuttle came down at a small, young settlement in a terrain in the southern hemisphere called the Terra Cimmeria. This was a landscape peculiarly shaped by sprawling crater walls and steep-sided river valleys; from the high air it reminded Wei of scar tissue, like a badly healed burn. The settlement, called Fire City, nestled on the floor of a crater called Mendel, itself nearly eighty kilometres across, its floor incised by dry channels and pocked by smaller, younger craters. From the air he glimpsed domes half-covered by heaped-up Martian dirt, the gleaming tanks and pipes of what looked like a sprawling chemical manufacturing plant, and a few drilling derricks, angular frames like rocket gantries.

The shuttle swept down smoothly onto a long runway blasted across the crater floor. When it had come to rest, the pilot briskly helped Wei pull on a pressure suit. They clambered into an airlock, where they were briefly bathed in sterilizing ultraviolet. Then the hatch popped, and they climbed down a short stair.

Wei Binglin took a step on the surface of Mars, and another, exploring the generously low gravity, considering the clear impressions his boots made in the ubiquitous, clinging, rust-coloured dust. He could not see the walls of Mendel from here, or anything of the geologically complicated landscape beyond. The crater floor itself was a plain littered with rocks, like a high desert, and a small sun hung in a sky of washed-out brown. A few domes nestled nearby, and a single derrick was visible at the horizon, gaunt, still, like a dead tree. Wei had visited Mars four times before, but each time he had stayed in orbit with his interplanetary craft, or had visited the moon Deimos for work and recreation. He had never walked on Mars before. And now, he realised, he would never walk on any other world, ever again.

That was when he spotted the cairn.

It stood near the runway, a roughly pyramidal heap of rocks. He walked over. The cairn was taller than he was, and evidently purposefully constructed. “What is this?”

The pilot followed him. “This is the landing site of Cao Xi.” The first to reach Mars, who had survived no more than an hour on the surface after his one-man lander crashed. “His body has been returned to his family on Earth.”

“I once saw the mausoleum.”

“But still, this place, where he walked, is remembered. The runway was built here as an appropriate gesture, it was thought; a link between ground and sky, space and Mars. This is a young place still, and everything is rather rough and ready.”

Wei looked around. He selected a rock about the size of his head; it was sharp-edged, but easy to lift in the low gravity, if resistant to be moved through inertia. He hauled the rock up and settled it on the upper slope of the cairn.

“Everybody does that, on arrival,” said the pilot.

“Why was I brought here, to this particular settlement?”

The pilot shrugged.

But the answer was obvious. Knowing nothing of the colonising of Mars, he had asked his former superiors to nominate a suitable destination, a new home. They had been drawn by the symbolism of this place. But Cao Xi had been a hero; Wei was not.

The cairn struck Wei as oddly steep-sloped. “You could not build such a structure on Earth.”

“Perhaps not.”

“I wonder how tall you could make such a mound, here in this partial gravity?”

“I do not know.” She pointed at a rooster-tail of dust behind a gleaming speck, coming from one of the domes. “Your hosts. A family, husband and wife, themselves former interplanetary crew. They have volunteered to be your guides as you find your feet, here on Mars.”

Wei felt a peculiar reluctance to meet these people, these Martians. He did not belong here. Yet he felt no impulse, either, to climb back on the shuttle and return to orbit. He belonged nowhere, he thought, as if he was dead himself. Yet he lived, breathed, was capable of curiosity, such as about this cairn. “Perhaps I will find purpose here.”

“I am sure you will.” The shuttle pilot touched his arm. He could feel the pressure through the suit layers, a kind gesture. “Perhaps you will be keeper of the cairn.”

That made him laugh. “Perhaps so.” It struck him that he did not even know her name. He turned to face the approaching rover.


AS XUE LING got up to leave his office, Wei checked the schedule on the slate built into his desk. He looked for his next appointment, not for the time. This office was in a privileged position, built into the dome wall so he had an exterior view, and he could judge the time pretty well by the way the afternoon sun slid around the flanks of the cairn.

He was dismayed to see that his next appointment was Bill Kendrick. Trouble for him again, with this American, who had been more or less dumped on him from the UN colony at Eden.

Kendrick was waiting when Xue Ling opened the door. He was tall, taller than most Chinese, wiry. His file said he was forty-five years old, only a little older than Wei; he looked younger save for a shock of prematurely grey hair, which was probably as much an engineered affectation as his apple-smooth cheeks, the taut flesh at his neck.

As he entered Wei’s office, he carried a heavy-looking satchel. He held the door open for Xue Ling as she departed, and he looked after her with an odd wistfulness. “Pretty girl, Mr Mayor.”

Wei winced. After four years here, Kendrick’s Standard Chinese was pretty good, but when he addressed Wei he always stuck to the English form of that inappropriate appellation. A subtle form of rebellion, Wei supposed. He wanted to deter any interest Kendrick might have in Xue Ling, before it even started. “She is sixteen years old. She is my daughter. My adopted daughter.”

“Oh.” Kendrick glanced around the uncluttered office, and settled on one of the two empty chairs facing Wei’s desk. “Your daughter? I didn’t know you had one, adopted or otherwise. She looks kind of sad, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Wei shrugged. “She is an orphan. She lost her family, in fact, during the flight of the Sunflower, the ship which –”

“Your ship. I see. And now you’ve adopted her?”

“It is a formality. She needs a legal guardian. Since being brought to Mars a decade ago, she has failed to settle with foster or adoptive parents, though many attempts were made. She ended up in the school at Phlegra Montes.”

Kendrick frowned. “I heard of that place. Where they send all the broken kids.”

Wei winced again. But the man was substantially right. Childbirth and child-rearing were chancy processes here on Mars. Because of the low gravity, the sleet of solar radiation, intermittent accidents like pressure losses or eco collapses, there were many stillbirths, many young born unhealthy one way or another. Even a healthy child might not grow well, simply because of the pressure of confinement in the domes; there was something of a plague of mental disorder, or autism. Hence Phlegra Montes. But the school also served as a last-resort refuge for children like Ling who simply didn’t fit in. “In fact, the UN and the Chinese run the school together. One of our few cooperative acts on Mars.”

Kendrick nodded. “Admirable. And good for you for giving her a home now. I can see why you’d feel responsible.”

You could say this for Kendrick, Wei thought. He was prepared to express things bluntly, things that others danced around. Perhaps this was a relic of his own past. He had, after all, pursued a successful career of his own before falling foul of Heroic-Generation legislation on Earth, and being banished to Mars; no doubt plain speaking had served him well.

“We are here to discuss you, Mr Kendrick, not my daughter.” He tapped his slate. “Once again I have to read reports about your indiscipline –”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Kendrick said. “Call it inappropriately applied energy. Or the generation of inappropriate ideas, which the dead-heads you put me under can’t recognise as potentially valuable contributions.”

Wei felt hugely weary, even as they began this exchange. Kendrick was learning the language, but consciously or otherwise he was not fitting into the local culture. A big noisy American here in a Chinese outpost, he was too vivid, too loud. “Once again, Mr Kendrick, I am using up valuable time on your antics, which –”

“You volunteered for the job, Mr Mayor.”

That term again. In fact Wei had nothing like the autonomy of the ‘mayors’ of western cities to which Kendrick alluded. Wei was actually the chair of the colony’s council, with only local responsibilities; he reported up to a whole hierarchy of officials above him that extended across Mars and even back to Earth. Nevertheless, it was a burden of responsibility. And it was a role he had drifted into, almost naturally, given his experience and background, despite his own reluctance. Once again it was as if he was a captain, of this colony-ship grounded on Mars, sailing through interplanetary space. It was a burden he accepted as gladly as he could. Perhaps it was atonement.

But if not for this role, he thought, he would not have to confront issues like the management of this man, Bill Kendrick.

“You are not here for ideas,” he said, exasperated. “Or for ‘energy.’ You are to work on the new derrick.” The latest plunge into the rocky ground of Mars, to bring up precious water from the deep-lying aquifers beneath.

“Oh, I can do the roughneck stuff in my sleep.”

“And what is it you do when awake, then?”

Kendrick seemed to take that as a cue. “I make these.” He opened his satchel now, and produced two rust-red squared-off blocks, each maybe thirty centimetres long, five to ten centimetres in cross-section. He set these on the desk, scattering a little dust.

Wei picked one up; on Mars, like everything else, it was lighter than it looked. “What’s this? Cut stone?”

“No. Bricks. I made bricks, out of Martian dust.”

“Bricks?”

He half-listened as Kendrick briskly ran through the steps in his brick-making process: taking fine Martian dust, wetting it, adding a little straw from the domed gardens or shreds of waste cloth, then baking it in a solar-reflector furnace he had improvised from scrap parts. “It’s a process that’s as old as civilisation.”

Wei smiled. “Whose civilisation do you mean?”

“So simple a child could run it.”

“You say you need water –”

“Which is precious here, I know that, I’m breaking my own back drilling for it. But most of what I use can be recovered from the steam that comes off during baking.”

“Tell me why anybody would want to make bricks.”

Kendrick leaned forward. “Because it’s a quick and dirty way for this township to expand. Think about it. Most of your people are still living crammed into these domes, and most of them are still shipped from Earth. Your plastics industry here is in its infancy, along with everything else.”

Wei piled the two bricks one on top of the other. “How could I build a useful dwelling of brick? Our buildings have to be pressurised. A brick structure would be blown apart by the internal pressure; remember that Martian air is at only a fraction of –”

Kendrick rummaged in his satchel again. “I’ve got plans for two kinds of structure you can build from Martian brick. The first is dwelling spaces.” He showed Wei hand-drawn plans of domes and vaults, half-buried in the Martian ground. “See? Pile it up with dirt, which you need for radiation shielding anyhow.” Which was true. On Mars, there was no ozone layer, and the sun’s ultraviolet reached all the way to the ground. “And the weight of the dirt will maintain the compression you need. This is only a short-term solution, but it could be an effective one. There’s no shortage of dust on Mars, God knows; you could make as many bricks as you like, build as wide and deep as you can manage. It would give you room to grow your population fast, even before longer-term industries like plastics and steel kick in at production scales, and you can begin to achieve your strategic goals.”

Wei held up his hand. “As always, you over-reach yourself, Mr Kendrick. Remember, you have no rank here, no formal role. You were sent here from the UN base at Eden because of the trouble you caused there; it is better that you are used as a labourer here at Fire City than to rot in some prison at Eden, breathing the expensive air –”

“I always think big,” Kendrick said, grinning, unabashed. “What got me in trouble in the first place. Even if I did achieve great things when I had a chance.”

“‘Great things’ which earned you banishment to Mars.” Wei was over-familiar with Kendrick’s file. He was one of the youngest of a generation of entrepreneurs and engineers who had used the Jolts, a succession of climate-collapse shocks on Earth, as an opportunity; they had produced huge, usually flawed schemes to stabilise aspects of the climate, from sun-deflecting mirrors in space to gigantic carbon-sequestration plants in the deep oceans – schemes that, as had been revealed when the prosecutions started, had made their originators hugely wealthy, no matter how well they worked, or not. Even now, Wei thought, Kendrick probably carried around much of that wealth embedded in the very fabric of his body, in genetic therapies, cybernetic implants.

“Can you not see, Mr Kendrick, that if I allow you a role in influencing the ‘strategic goals’ of this community, as you call them, suspicions will inevitably arise that you are simply reverting to type?”

Kendrick shrugged. “I’m more interested in the common benefit than my own personal gain. Believe that or not, as you like. Sell this under your own authority if it makes you feel better.” Then he shut up.

In the lengthening silence, Wei was aware of a seed of curiosity growing in his own mind, a seed planted by Kendrick. He suppressed a sigh. The man was a good salesman, if nothing else. “Tell me, then. What is the second kind of structure that could be built with your bricks?”

Kendrick glanced out of the window. “The monument.”

“The cairn?”

“Look at it. It’s kind of impressive, in its way. Everybody adds to it. I’ve seen the school kids climbing the ladders to add on another couple of rocks.”

Wei shrugged. It had been one of his initiatives to build up the cairn of Cao Xi as a cheap way to unite the community, and to remember a great hero.

“But how tall is it?” Kendrick asked now. “A hundred metres? Listen – there were pyramids on Earth taller than that. And this is Mars, Mr Mayor. Low gravity, right? We ought to be able to build a pyramid three or four hundred metres tall, if we felt like it. Or...” Another expertly timed pause.

Wei felt himself being drawn in. This must have been how the Heroic Generation made their plays, he thought. The sheer ambition of the visions, the scale – the chutzpah, to use one of Kendrick’s own words – it was all dazzling. “Or what?”

“Or we use my bricks. There were cathedral spires on Earth over a hundred and fifty metres tall. Here on Mars –”

“Spires?”

“Just imagine it, Mr Mayor.” Kendrick could clearly see he had Wei’s interest. “If nothing else, you need something to keep me busy, and maybe a few other miscreants. You can’t send me back to Earth, can you?”

Wei could not; that was no longer an option. A post-Jolt redistribution was shaping the home planet now; in China and around the rest of the world, whole populations were being displaced north and south from the desiccating mid-latitudes, and the central government had told the Martian colonists that they needed to find their own solutions to their problems. Yes, this would use up spare labour.

And meanwhile Wei had long had an instinct that the first humans living on Mars should be doing more than merely surviving.

“A spire, you say?”

Kendrick grinned, and produced a slate with more diagrams. “You’d start by digging foundations. Even on Mars, a tree would need roots as deep as it is tall...”


KENDRICK’S ROVER WAS waiting for Wei outside the lock from the Summertime Vault. It was mid-morning and a break in the school timetable; at this time of day, as usual, most of the colony’s hundred children were running around the big public space that dominated the Vault, many of them low-gravity tall, oddly graceful. They were full of energy and life, and Wei, feeling old at forty-seven, regretted having to turn his back on them.

But Kendrick was waiting for him, his oddly youthful face full of calculation, eager as ever to draw Wei into his latest schemes.

To Wei’s surprise, he and Kendrick were alone in the rover when it pulled away from the lock. “I didn’t know you were permitted to pilot one of these.”

Kendrick just grinned. “There’s a lot of stuff in this town that goes on under your personal radar, Mr Mayor. Don’t sweat it. I’ve made a lot of friends here, a lot of contacts, and I call in favours every now and then.”

Wei glanced back at the heavy brick shoulders of the Summertime Vault, under its mound of rock and dust. “You have accumulated these favours ever since we let you become so influential in the colony’s destiny.”

“I’m doing no harm – you’ve got to admit that. Everybody benefits in the end. Xue Ling helped fix me up with this, actually.”

“She isn’t your personal assistant. She merely volunteered to –”

“I know, I know.” Kendrick looked away, hastily, as if seeking to close down the subject. “It’s the way the world works. Don’t sweat about it.”

Wei was sure Kendrick knew he disapproved of his relationship with Xue Ling, such as it was. The spurious glamour of the man seemed to draw in Xue Ling, as it drew in others. Wei didn’t believe that Kendrick intended to push this too far. Nor did he suspect that Kendrick would succeed if he tried; Xue Ling, twenty-two years old now, was engaged to be married. But still, something about Kendrick’s interest in Xue Ling didn’t feel right, to the paternal instincts Wei hoped he had developed over the last six years as the girl’s foster parent.

Heading out of town, they drove past the new Cao Xi monument. The old heap of rubble had long been demolished to make way for Kendrick’s spire, a lofty cone nearly four hundred metres tall – nearly three times the height of the tallest cathedral spires of medieval Europe, though constructed with much the same materials and techniques, of brick and mortar over a frame of tall Martian-grown oak trunks. The usual gaggle of protestors was gathered here, at the foot of the unfinished monument. Kendrick let the rover nose through their thin line, and Wei peered out, forcing an official smile for the benefit of any imagers present. Some were protesting because of the diversion of materials into what they called “Wei’s Folly,” and it did Wei no good to point out that the building of the spire had kick-started the development of whole industries in the colony. Others protested because of the spire’s echoes of the Christian west. And still others protested simply because they had liked the old cairn, the mound of stones they and their children had worked together to build up.

Kendrick, typically, ignored the people and peered up at the spire: slim, tall, already a monument impossible on Earth, at least with such basic raw materials. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

“Magnificent for you,” Wei murmured. “Is this how it was for the Heroic Generation? You build your monuments, overriding protests. You persuade the rest of us they are essential. And you grow fat on the profits, of one kind or another.”

“Binglin, my friend –”

“Don’t speak to me like that.”

“Sorry. Look – maybe I push my luck at times. But the reason I get away with it is, you’re right, because you need what I do. You have the Vaults now, a huge expansion of space above what would have been possible. And that helps everybody, right? I’ve heard you talk of the Triangle. I read the news in the slates. I do pay attention, you know...”

The Triangle was the latest economic theory, of how Earth, Mars and asteroids could be linked in a mutually supportive, positive-feedback trade loop. The asteroids were a vital source of raw materials, mined cleanly for a starving Earth. So Earth, or rather the Chinese Greater Economic Framework down on Earth, exported expertise and high-tech goods out into space, and got asteroid resources back in return. Mars, with its rapidly expanding colonies, served as a source of labour and living space for the asteroid development agencies, and in return received the raw materials it needed, particularly the volatiles of which the planet was starved.

But Mars’s local administrators, Wei among them, were concerned that Mars should not be a mere construction shack on the edge of the asteroid belt. So a deliberate effort was being made to turn Mars’s new communities, including Fire City, into hotbeds of communications, information technology, and top-class education. The dream was to start exporting high-quality software and other digital material both to the asteroids and to Earth – a dream that was already, after a half-decade of intensive development and salesmanship, beginning to pay off.

Kendrick was right. To achieve these goals, Mars needed room, human space, to grow its populations. Kendrick had managed to spot a kind of gap in the resource development cycle, and to fill it with his brick constructions. But that didn’t make him necessary, in any sense. Not as far as Wei was concerned.

Soon the centre of Fire City was far behind, and they passed the last colony buildings, the big translucent domes that sheltered the artificial marshland that was the hub of the city’s recycling system. Then they drove through fields covered with clear plastic, where scientists were experimenting with gen-enged wheat and potatoes and rice, growing in Martian soil. Further out still the fields were open, and here banks of lichen stained the rocks, green and purple: the most advanced life forms on Mars, before humans arrived. Some of these lichen, which were some kind of relation to Earth life, were being gen-enged too, more experiments to find a way to farm Mars.

Beyond the lichen beds, at last they were out in the open, in undeveloped country. Even so, they were still well within the walls of Mendel crater. And as the humming rover bounced over the roughly made track, Wei began to make out a slim form, dead ahead. It was a kind of tower, skeletal, with a splayed base. He peered forward, squinting through the dusty air. “What is that?”

Kendrick grinned. “What I brought you out here to see, Mr Mayor. You ever heard of the Eiffel Tower? In Paris, France. It was pulled down during a food riot in the 2060s, but –”

“Stop the rover.” As the vehicle rolled to a halt, Wei leaned forward, peering out of the blister window. Already they were so close that he had to tip back his head to see the peak. “What is its purpose?”

Kendrick shrugged. “It’s a test. A demonstration, of what’s possible to build with steel on Mars. Just as the spire –”

“Steel? Where did you get the steel from?...” But of course Wei knew that; the city’s new metallurgy plant, already up to industrially useful capacity, was pumping out iron and steel produced from hematite ore, the primary commercial source of iron on Earth, and an ore so ubiquitous on Mars it was what made the planet red. “You diverted the plant’s production for this?”

“Diverted – yeah, okay, that’s the right word. Look, this is just a trial run. The steelworkers were keen too, to learn welding techniques in the Martian air, and so on... When it’s proved its point, we will tear it down and put the materials to better use.”

“And that point is?”

“To see how high we can build, of course. We’re still far from the tower, you don’t get a sense of scale from here. Listen: that thing is almost eight hundred metres tall. Nearly three times the height of Eiffel, on Earth. That good old Martian gravity. This thing is already taller than any building on Earth until the late twentieth century. Think of that! Can you feel how it draws up the eye? That’s the magical thing about Martian architecture. It baffles the Earthbound instinct.”

“You erected this without my knowledge.”

“Well, people live in holes in the ground here. You could get away with building almost anything you like, out in that big open Mars desert.”

“You are showing this to me now. Why?”

“I told you, this is a trial run. Just like the spire.”

“For what?”

“The monument of Cao Xi, Mark III. You need to keep expanding, Mr Mayor. My brick has filled a gap, but in future, Martian steel, Martian glass, and Martian concrete are going to be the way to do it. But why keep burrowing into the ground? What way is that to bring up a new generation? Oh, I know we need to think about shielding, but...”

“What are you saying?”

“Tell me you can’t guess. Tell me you aren’t inspired. I know you by now, Wei Binglin.” Kendrick pointed to the brownish sky. “No more cairns or spires, no more non-functional monuments. I’m telling you we should build a place for people to live. I’m telling you that we should build, not down – up.”


THE CHAIRMAN OF the review committee, appointed directly by New Beijing on far-off Earth, was called Chang Kuo, and as the meeting came to order for its second day he regarded Wei and Kendrick solemnly. This conference room was deep underground, buried in the floor of the Hellas basin, which was itself eight kilometres beneath the Mars datum. Wei reflected that it would have been impossible for this place, the Chinese administrative capital, buried at the deepest point on Mars, to have been further away in spirit from what he and Kendrick were trying to build at Fire City.

Yet the room was dominated by a hologram, sitting in the centre of this circular room, a real-time relayed image of the Obelisk, as people were calling it, an image itself as tall as a human being. The real thing was already more than a kilometre tall, a great rectangular arm of steel and glass reaching to the Martian sky. And the damage done by the meteorite strike was clearly visible, a neat circular puncture somewhere above the three-hundredth level: the disaster was the reason for this review.

The room shuddered, and Wei thought he heard a boom, deep and distant.

“What the hell was that?” Kendrick had lapsed into his native English. “Sorry, I meant –”

He looked alarmed, to Wei’s unkind satisfaction. “It was a nuclear weapon, detonated far beneath the fragmented floor of the Hellas crater. I would not have thought that a Heroic-Generation engineer like you would have been frightened by a mere firecracker.”

“Why are they setting off nukes?... Oh. The terraforming experiments.”

“You heard about that. Well, of course you would.”

“Xue Ling showed me some of the documentation. Don’t blame her. I pushed her to leak me the stuff. Blame her pregnancy; it’s making her easier to handle.” But his smile was secretive, reluctant.

Wei thought he understood. Xue Ling, now twenty-eight years old, married and with child, had been campaigning to be allowed to leave Fire City – to come here, in fact, to Hellas, where she felt she could carve out a more meaningful career in administration than was possible back home. Her husband too, now a senior terraforming engineer, was having to commute to Hellas and back. It made sense in every way to Wei to allow her to go.

Every way but one: Kendrick.

There were other communities who were after Kendrick now, other opportunities, clandestine or otherwise, he might be tempted to pursue. Probably part of his long-term game plan had always been to manoeuvre himself into a position where such opportunities would turn up. But it would be disastrous for Fire City if he were allowed to leave before the tower was finished – and disastrous, too, for Wei himself, of course, who had become so closely identified with the project, even in the eyes of these mandarins at Hellas. So Kendrick could not be allowed to leave. How, though, to keep him?

Xue Ling still seemed to be important to Kendrick, and therefore was a hold on him. Conversely she was a conduit of information to Wei, about his difficult, unpredictable, rogue of an ally. Regretfully, then, if Kendrick must be kept here, Wei could not allow Xue Ling to leave. He assured himself that greater concerns, the good of the community as a whole, were paramount over her wishes. Besides, he told himself, it was better for Xue Ling herself, whether she knew it or not, after the chaotic start to life she had endured, to stay close to what had become the nearest thing to home: close to her father, to himself...

The chairman, Chang Kuo, had spoken to him.

“I’m sorry, sir. Could you repeat that?”

“I said that this is the second day of our review of the project, of this Obelisk, as the popular media are calling it – or Wei’s Folly, as I believe your own people refer to it. We must come to a verdict soon as to whether to allow the project to continue.”

Wei said carefully, “Yesterday we reviewed the practical value of the tower. The living space it will afford. The stimulus it has given to local industries, to the development of skills and technologies specialised to Martian conditions. It is a great challenge, and as a people we are at our best when we rise to challenges.”

“Citizens have died. Its absurd vulnerability to meteorite strikes –”

Just as Mars’s thin air was no barrier to solar ultraviolet, so it did not screen the ground from medium-sized meteorite impacts, as Earth’s thick atmosphere shielded the mother lands.

Kendrick said confidently, “That is a problem that can be solved, with warning systems, orbital deflection, laser batteries –”

“Ha! A typical Heroic-Generation answer. All at great expense, no doubt. Already the Obelisk project is distorting the whole of the regional economy. There are those who say it is a mere grandiose folly.”

Kendrick stood up, eliciting gasps of shock at his ill manners. “Grandiose? Is that what you think this is, grandiose, a mere gesture? Mr Chairman, the point of the Cao Xi Tower is to give this current generation a dream of their own. To give them something more to do than fulfil the dreams of their parents...” He looked at Wei.

Wei knew how the argument should go now. They’d rehearsed it often enough. He even agreed with it, up to a point: Everybody wants to be a pioneer. The first on Mars, like Cao Xi! Either that, or an inhabitant of the settled world of the future, living on a terraformed Mars, or at least under a dome big enough to cover Taiwan – big enough to allow children to grow without visible walls around them. Nobody wants to be in one of the middle generations, you see. Nobody wants to be a settler. It is this cadre’s tragedy to be that settler generation. But settlers need dreams too. We aren’t building this tower because it’s sensible. We do it precisely because it’s a grand gesture – even grandiose, yes. For children who can’t dream of journeying to Mars, for they were born on Mars, this is their goal, their monument. Their chance to leave a legacy for history...

He was silent. They all looked at him, even Kendrick, who had sat down beside him.

“Pan Gu,” he said at last.

“What was that, Wei Binglin?”

“I am Pan Gu. Or my colleague is. Pan Gu, who was born in the primordial egg, and grew for eighteen thousand years, and stood up...” He looked around at their blank faces. He wondered how many of them even knew what he was talking about; the culture of Chinese Mars was fast diverging from the old country. He felt old himself. He was only fifty-three. He had already spent a decade of his life working with this man, this monster, Kendrick, and still he was not done.

One of the mandarins spoke into the silence. “It was always a mistake to allow a pilot to assume a position of administrative power. The hero of the Sunflower! He was always liable to make some such gesture as this. Once a hero, always a hero – eh, Captain Wei?”

Chang Kuo nodded, stern. “You have certainly bound yourself up to this monument, Wei Binglin. This monument, or folly.”

“Of course he has,” said Kendrick dryly. “But he can’t stop. We can’t stop...”

Wei collected himself. “None of us can stop,” he said now, firmly. “The Obelisk is known across the planet, and at home, across the Framework – even in the UN-allied nations, thanks to satellites which image it from orbit. We cannot stop. The loss of face would be too great. That is the foundation of our argument for continuing, and it runs as deep and solid as the foundations we built for the tower itself. Now. Shall we discuss how best to proceed from here?” And he glared at them, one by one, as if daring them to contradict him.


THE WORD CAME to the two of them as they were having another long, wrangling meeting in Wei’s office, in the old Summertime Vault.

The call came from her estranged husband, who was in Hellas, and who had in turn received a panicky call from a friend. She was heading for the top of the Obelisk. She had looked desperate as she left her apartment, on the prestigious fiftieth floor.

So they ran, the two of them, through the underground way to the base levels of the Obelisk, chambers carved into the tower’s massive foundations. Wei was in his late fifties now, Kendrick in his early sixties, and neither was as healthy as he once had been, Wei knew, he himself with an obscure cancer eating at his bones, and Kendrick limping along beside him, his oddly distorted face youthful yet slack, for his expensive implants were, after decades without replacement, beginning to fail.

At the Obelisk, Wei had a priority card that enabled him to gain access to one of the high status, fast-ascent external elevators. They were both breathless, and stayed silent as the elevator car climbed.

Soon they rose above ground level, and the car began to crawl its way up one glass-coated side of the building. They were afforded a tremendous view of the city, and of Mars, as they climbed. Yet it was the Obelisk itself that captured the attention, as ever. As he looked up through the elevator’s clear roof, Wei saw the glass face shining in the low, buttery morning sunlight of Mars, climbing on and on, a dead flat plane that narrowed to a fine line and seemed to pierce the sky itself. In a sense it did, for the Obelisk rose above the weather. The shell was complete now, a cage of Martian steel under tension, holding concrete piles in place, all of it glassed over. It was mostly pressurised, though the labour of fitting out its interior would likely go on for years yet. To the external walls were fixed a number of elevator channels, like the one they rode, and inside, a steep staircase wound up within the pressurised hull. That was the other way to ascend the building, to climb up, like ascending a mountain.

The tower itself reached an astounding ten kilometres into the sky, three times as tall as any conceivable building of the same materials on Earth – and over five times as tall as any building ever actually constructed there. Wei had seen simulations of the sight of it from orbit – he himself had never left the planet, since stepping off the shuttle from the Sunflower. From space it was an astonishing image, slim, perfect, an arm rising out of the chaotic landscape to claw at the sky.

Ten kilometres! Why, if you laid it flat out, it would take a reasonably healthy man two hours to walk its length. And the walk up the stairs, if you took it, was itself fourteen kilometres long. Mars was a small world, but built on a big scale, with tremendous craters and deep valleys; but only the great Tharsis volcanoes would have dwarfed the Obelisk. Even on the ground, you could see it from hundreds of kilometres away, a needle rising up from beyond the horizon. All of mankind seemed to agree it was a magnificent human achievement, especially to have been constructed so early in the era of the colonisation of Mars.

And the Obelisk had transformed the community from which it had sprung. Just as Kendrick had predicted, as a result of the forced development that had been required for the building of the tower, Fire City had become a global centre of industry, of the production of steel and glass, even Kendrick’s venerable bricks. There was even talk of moving the planet’s administrative capital here, from the gloomy dungeons at Hellas. Even the city’s name was changing; even that, to ‘Obelisk,’ simply.

Yet there was still controversy.

“I received another petition,” Wei said, breaking the silence.

“About what?”

“About the water you use up, making your concrete.”

He shrugged. “We have plenty of water coming up from the aquifer wells now. Besides, what of it? If civilisation falls on Mars, let future generations mine the wreck of the Obelisk for the water locked up in its fabric. Think of it as a long-term strategic reserve.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course.”

“I should not be astounded by you any more, but I am. To think on such timescales!”

“Pah. That is nothing. Order out of chaos,” Kendrick said now, glaring up.

“What?”

“Pan Gu. Remember you quoted that name when we were hauled over the coals by those stuffed shirts at Hellas, all those years ago? I looked him up. Pan Gu, a primal deity of very old Chinese myth. Right? Who clambered out of some kind of primordial egg, and stood up, and as he grew he forced earth and sky apart. And after eighteen thousand years, having created order out of chaos, he was allowed to lie down and rest. That’s you and me, buddy. We made this thing. We made order out of Martian chaos. We made Mars human.”

“Did we? Have we really made such a difference, despite all your arrogant bluster?” As they rose further, Wei looked out, to the Martian landscape opening up beyond the confines of the city, the horizon steadily widening. “Out there. What do you see?”

Kendrick turned to look.

Beyond the walls of Mendel, they could see more crater walls, on a tremendous scale but eroded, graven with gullies, and dry valleys snaking between. This was Terra Cimmeria, a very ancient landscape, and a ground that might have baffled even Pan Gu. It dated from the earliest days of the formation of the solar system, when the young worlds were battered with a late bombardment of huge rock fragments, some of them immature planets themselves. That was a beating whose scars had been washed away on Earth, but they had survived on the moon, and on Mars. And here the cratering process had competed with huge flooding episodes, as giant underground aquifers were broken open to release waters that washed away the new crater walls, and pooled on the still-red-hot floors of the impact basins. The relic of all that had endured for billions of years, a crazy geological scribble.

None of this, Wei thought, had anything to do with humanity. Nor had humanity even begun to touch this primal disorder. And yet there was beauty here. He spied one small crater where a dune field had gathered, Martian dust shaped by the thin winds, a fine sculpture, a variation of crescents. Maybe that was the role of humans here, he thought. To pick out fragments of beauty amid the violence. Beauty like the spirit of Xue Ling, perhaps, who was fleeing from him into the sky.

Kendrick said nothing. A mere planet, it seemed, did not impress him, save as raw material.

They passed through a layer of cloud, fine water-ice particles. Once they were higher, the cloud hid the ugly ground, and it was as if the Obelisk itself floated in the sky.

For the last few hundred floors, as the tower narrowed, they had to switch elevators to a central shaft. They hurried down a corridor inhabited only by patient robots, squat cylinders, that worked on a weld. There was no carpet here, and the walls were bare concrete panels; the very air was thin and cold. At the elevator shaft, they had to don pressure suits, provided in a store inside the car itself; pressurisation was not yet guaranteed at higher levels.

They rose now in darkness, excluded from the world.

Wei said carefully, “We have not even spoken of why we are here.”

“Xue Ling, you mean. Neither of us is surprised to find ourselves in this position. Be honest about that, Wei Binglin. You know, I could never...”

“What? Have her?”

“Not that,” Kendrick said angrily. “I knew I could never tell her how I felt. Mostly because I didn’t understand it myself. Did I love her? I suspect I don’t know what love is.” He laughed. “My parents didn’t provide me with that implant. But she was something so beautiful, in this ugly place. I would never have harmed her, you know. Even by loving her.”

“I knew that.”

Kendrick looked at him bleakly. “And yet you kept her close to me. That was to control me, was it?”

Wei shrugged. “Once the Obelisk was begun, you could not be allowed to leave.”

“How could I leave? I’m a criminal, remember. This is a chain gang, for me.”

“I’ve known you a long time, Bill Kendrick. If you had wished to leave, you would have found a way.”

“So you nailed me in place with her, did you? But at what cost, Wei? At what cost?”

The elevator slid to a halt. The doors peeled back to reveal a glass wall, a viewing gallery, as yet unfinished. They were near the very top of the tower now, Wei knew, nearly ten kilometres high, and the horizon of this small world was folded, a clear curve, with layers of the atmosphere visible as if seen from space. To the east, there was a brownish smudge: a dust storm brewing, possibly.

And there, on a ledge, outside the wall of glass, was Xue Ling. She was aware of their arrival, and she turned. Wei could easily make out her small, frightened face behind her pressure suit visor. She was still only thirty-three, Wei realised, only thirty-three.

The two men ran to the wall, fumbling with gloved hands at the glass. Wei slapped an override unit on his chest to ensure they could all hear each other.

“Now you come,” Xue Ling said bitterly. “Now you see me, as if for the first time in my life.”

Kendrick looked from left to right, desperately. “How do we get through this wall?”

“What was it you wanted? You, Bill Kendrick, creating a thing of stupendous ugliness to match the crimes you committed on Earth? You, Wei Binglin, building a tower to get back to the sky from which you fell? And what was I, a token in your relationship with each other? You call me your daughter. Would you have treated your blood daughter this way? You kept me here. Even when I lost my baby, even then, and my husband wanted to go back to Hellas, even then...”

Wei pressed his open palm to the glass. “Ling, please. Why are you doing this? Why now?”

“You never saw me. You never heard me. You never listened to me.”

Kendrick touched his arm. “She asked again to leave, to go to Hellas.”

“She asked you?”

“She wanted me to persuade you, this time. I said you would forbid it. It was one refusal too many, perhaps...”

“Your fault, then.”

Kendrick snorted. “Do you really believe that?”

“You never saw me! See me now!”

And she let herself fall backwards, away from the ledge. The men pressed forward, following her descent through the glass. The gentle Martian gravity, which had permitted the building of the Obelisk, drew her down gently at first, then gradually faster. Her breathing, in Wei’s ears, was as if she stood next to him, staying calm even as she fell away, drifting down the face of the tower. He lost sight of her as she passed through the cloud, long before she reached the distant ground.