9
The Lie
The city is one of spires, parks, rivers, gardens, and fountains. It is a
city of dreams, a city of blue water and green life on a red planet
that is supposed to be as barren as the cruelest desert. This is not the
Mars they show us on the HC. This is not a place unt for man. It is
a place of lies, wealth, and immense abundance.
I gasp at the grotesquerie.
Men and women y. They shimmer Gold and Silver. Those are the
only Colors I see in the sky. Their gravBoots carry them about like
gods, the technology so much more graceful than the clumsy
gravBoots our keepers wear in the mines. A young man soars past
my window, his skin burnished, his hair uttering loosely behind
him as he carries two bottles of wine toward a nearby garden spire;
he’s drunk and his wobbling through the air reminds me of a time I
saw a drillBoy’s air system break down in his frysuit; he gasped for
oxygen as he died, twitching and dancing. This Gold laughs like a
fool and does a mirthful spin. Four girls, not at all older than me, y
after him in a merry hunt, giddy and giggling. Their tight dresses
seem to be made of liquid and drip around their young curves. They
look my age, in a way, but seem so bloody foolish.
I do not understand.
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Beyond them, ships it through the air along beacon-lit avenues.
Small ships, ripWings, as Dancer calls them, escort the most
intricate of air yachts. On the ground, I see men and women moving
through wide avenues. There are automobiles, Color-coded lamps
along the lower levels—Yellow, Blue, Orange, Green, Pink, a
hundred shades of a dozen Colors to form a hierarchy so complex,
so alien, I scarcely think it a human concept. The buildings through
which the paths wind are huge, some of glass, some of stone. But
many remind me of those I’ve seen on the HC, those buildings of the
Romans, made this time for gods instead of man.
Beyond the city, which stretches nearly as far as I can see, Mars’s
red and barren surface is scarred with the green of grass and
struggling woods. A queer bubble envelopes the city. It shimmers
like some sort of magical barrier. The sky above is blue, stained
with stars. The terraforming is complete.
This is the future. It should not be this way for generations.
My life is a lie.
So many times has Octavia au Lune told us of Lykos that we are
the pioneers of Mars, that we are the brave souls who sacrice for
the race, that soon our toils for humanity will be over. Soon the
softer Colors will join us, once Mars is habitable. But they have
already joined us. Earth has come to Mars and we pioneers were left
below, slaving, toiling, suering to create and maintain the
foundation of this … this empire. We are as Eo always said—the
Society’s slaves.
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Dancer sits in a chair behind me and waits till I can speak. He
says a word and the windows darken. I can still see the city, but the
sun no longer blinds my eyes. Beside us, the squat instrument, called
a piano, whispers a dreary melody.
“They told us we were man’s only hope,” I say quietly. “That
Earth was overcrowded, that all the pain, all the sacrice, was for
mankind. Sacrice is good. Obedience the highest virtue …”
The laughing Gold has reached the nearby spire; he surrenders to
the girls and their kisses. Soon they will drink their wine and have
their amusement.
Dancer tells me how it is.
“Earth ain’t overcrowded, Darrow. Seven hundred years back,
they expanded to their moon, Luna. Because it is so dicult to
launch spacecraft through Earth’s gravity and atmosphere, Luna
became Earth’s port through which it colonized the moons and
planets of the Solar System.”
“Seven hundred years?” I gasp, feeling suddenly very stupid.
“On Luna, eciency and order became the chief concern. In
space, every set of lungs must have a purpose. So the rst Colors
were gradually instituted and the Reds were sent to Mars to gather
the fuel for mankind. The mining colonies were established there
since Mars has the highest concentration of helium-3, which is used
to terraform the other worlds and moons.”
At least that wasn’t a lie.
“Are they terraformed, the other moons and worlds?”
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“The small moons, yes. Most of the planets. Obviously not the gas
giants.” He sits in a chair. “It was in the early stages of the
Colonization when the wealthy of Luna began to realize Earth was
nothing more than a drain on their prots. Even as Luna colonized
the Solar System, they were taxed and owned by corporations and
countries on Earth, but those same entities could not enforce their
ownership. So Luna rebelled—the Golds and their Society against
the countries of Earth. Earth fought back and Earth lost. That was
the Conquering. Economics turned Luna into the power and port of
the Solar System. And the Society began to change into what it is
today—an empire built on Red backs.”
I watch the Colors move about below. They are small, hard to
distinguish from our height—and my eyes are not used to seeing so
far or seeing so much light.
“Reds were sent to Mars ve hundred years ago. The other Colors
came to Mars about three hundred years back, while our ancestors
still toiled beneath the surface. They lived in these paraterraformed
cities—cities with bubbles of atmosphere over them—while the rest
of the world terraformed slowly. Now the bubbles are coming down
and the world is t for any man.
“HighReds live as maintenance workers, sanitation, grain
harvesters, assembly workers. LowReds are those of us born beneath
the surface—the truest slaves. In the cities, the Reds who dance
disappear. Those who voice their thoughts vanish. Those who bow
their heads and accept the rule of the Society and their place in
Society, as all Colors do, live on with relative freedom.”
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He exhales a cloud of smoke. I didn’t even see the burner in his
hand.
I feel outside my body, as though I’m watching the colonization of
worlds, the transformation of the human species, through eyes that
are not my own. The gravity of history drew my people into slavery.
We are the bottom of the Society, the dirt. Eo always preached
something of the like, though she never knew the truth. If she had
known this, how much more passionately would she have spoken?
This existence is worse than she ever could have imagined. It is not
hard to understand the conviction with which the Sons of Ares ght.
“Five hundred years.” I shake my head. “This is our bloodydamn
planet.”
“Through sweat and toil it was made so,” he agrees.
“Then what will it take to take it back?”
“Blood.” Dancer smiles at me like a township alleycat. There’s a
beast behind this man’s fatherly smiles.
Eo was right. It comes to violence.
She was the voice, like my father. So what am I to be? The
avenging hand? I cannot grasp that someone so pure, so full of love,
would want me to play this part. But she did. I think of my father’s
last dance. I think of my mum, Leanna, Kieran, Loran, Eo’s parents,
Uncle Narol, Barlow, everyone I love. I know hard how they will
live and how quickly they will die. And I now know why.
I look down at my hands. They are what Dancer called them—cut,
scarred, burned things. When Eo kissed them, they grew gentle for
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love. Now that she is gone, they grow hard for hate. I clench them
into sts till my knuckles are white as icecaps.
“What is my mission?”
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