“The world?” Herbert turned his head quizzically, looking at him with mild reproach. “Think big, Max, think big. That’s what this has been all about, hasn’t it? We’re going to reshape the Solar System!”
2
The last time Kieran Thane was on Mars, he had come posing as a green arrival from Earth, interested in land parcels in the Elysium region that an aggressive marketing company was pushing to young immigrants flush with hard-earned savings. Some suspicious relatives had engaged him to look into the claims of mineral rights potential that would pay back the investment many times over in years to come. The values had turned out to be artificially inflated, based on fraudulent reports by a geological consultant who was in on the deal. Kieran had contrived to salt some of the company’s more recent drilling samples with platinum, hence bringing things to the satisfying conclusion of watching the marketeers pursue their customers in order to buy back the tracts at several times what had been paid.
That had been a little over half a year ago (mean standard year, equal to one Terran year). The surface had sprouted visible changes, even since then. Kieran studied them in the view being presented on the cabin display screen of the shuttle descending from Phobos, the inner of Mars’s two moons—itself transformed from the cratered knob of rock that astronomers had once described as a “diseased potato” into a gleaming composition of domes, berthing structures, and metallic geometry as the main transfer port for long-range vessels from Earth, the various Belt habitats, the Jovian system, and beyond. The area creeping onto the screen as the planetary outline expanded off the edges was the Tharsis end of the vast system of gorges and canyons flanking the three-thousand-mile equatorial rift of Valles Marineris—three hundred miles wide in places and up to four miles deep. Domes had appeared over more of the craters, enclosing circular cities or orchard farms, with their tiers of housing climbing inner walls reminiscent of steep Mediterranean shorelines; more vehicles dotted the highway west to the mine workings below 50,000-foot-high Arsia Mons; and what looked like a new rail link, already flanked by new excavations and greenhouse constructions, extended southeastward in the direction of Syria Planum and Solis Planum. In the canyon complex itself, a frost of silver and white beads was spreading between the roofed-over parts of the shadowy depths and across the ramparts of crumbling orange rock separating them.
In a seat opposite, Ibrahim, one of the Iranian couple that Kieran had met in the transfer port on Phobos, squeezed his young wife’s hand as they gazed down at the scene. They had just arrived from Earth, he a plant geneticist, she a teacher. Kieran shifted his eyes from the screen and grinned across at them. “I suppose all the sand down there could make it feel something like home. A bit short on beaches, though, I’m afraid.”
“Give us time, Mr. Thane. Give us time,” Ibrahim answered.
“And in any case, this is home now,” Khalia said.
Such were the kind of spirits that Mars was drawing away from Earth. That was what new worlds and new visions were built from, Kieran told himself.
The shuttle came out of its aerobraking trajectory to enter the final, vertical phase of its descent, and the view stabilized on the jumble of interconnecting domes, roofs, and terraces that formed Lowell, filling the intersection of two canyons and resurfacing on the overlooking heights as clusters of buildings and roadways that looked from altitude like lichen mottling the pink-orange landscape. As these surroundings in turn expanded beyond the edges of the screen, the view centered on the spaceport of Cherbourg, perched on the open plateau north of the main valley. The scene gradually resolved into domes, service gantries, and turrets bristling with antenna arrays, and then closed on the landing bay, its covering doors open. There was a glimpse of metal-railed access levels bright with lights, umbilical booms and hoses swung back to admit the shuttle, and then the rest was blotted out by braking exhaust. The ship bounced mildly as the landing-leg shock absorbers disposed of the remaining momentum, and the engines cut. They were on Mars.