A Final Letter from Mars - Being the Transcript of Ross Ellenson's Last Broadcast to Earth

The other day I was walking down Armstrong Boulevard, stopping every now and again to pass the time of day with friends and acquaintances. It was the first warm and clear day for some time, warm enough for the café owners to have started putting tables out on the sidewalks again. The familiar dust buggies were busy clearing the deep red drifts piled-up by the week-long storm that had blown itself out only twenty-four hours earlier. These, often violent, dust storms have been a limiting factor for the development of our Colonies on Mars ever since we first set foot on the place and geoengineered our atmosphere over two and a half centuries ago. Until recently, folks here have put up with what is at best an inconvenience and at worst, as with this last storm, a disruptive, damaging and enormously debilitating experience. This time, thank goodness, there was no loss of life, no repetition of the terrible events of thirty years ago when close to two hundred and fifty souls on the then prosaically named Exploration Base 9, were buried alive. It set me to thinking as I sat outside Minerva’s Lodge enjoying one of her matchless chocolate coffee specials with the early morning edition of the 'Martian Orbit' which bore the headline: 'ELEVENTH HOUR NEGOTIATIONS WITH EARTH LOOK SET TO STALL'.

My memory of the EB9 tragedy is vivid; I was Earthside at the time working as a sub for Pan Earth Network. We were the first to break the news, and the apathy with which the people of Earth greeted it left us dismayed. Not only was it the single biggest loss of life in the entire history of space colonisation, exceeding the Argo Spacebus disaster by a factor of five, but it was also another in the long line of accidents that could have been avoided. The Earth administration had been warned many times over the years by Ama Rice, the long-serving Martian Governor, about the contributing deficiencies, but they had paid no heed to her whatsoever.

It should have been obvious at the time, but to our shame none of us had figured it out, or if we had, we were as guilty of the same indifference as the people we were writing for. I guess we were all too busy grabbing at the next story to think too hard about the last one. It wasn’t until several months later, after I had left Earth to take on the job of editing the Martian Orbit, that I began to realise the significance of the disaster in the minds of the Martian people, as well as the depth of indifference of the people on the Old World. Deep down I suppose that those of us who had thought about it at all had already realised that to the overcrowded Earthies life had become so cheap as to be almost worthless, particularly if those lives were Martian lives. But it was the importance of the event as a shaper of our present destiny that escaped me. That is, it did until the day when my younger brother, then a mining engineer with Mars Imico, said quite bluntly, ‘Ross, the attitude of your government to the Colonies here on Mars will eventually lead to a Martian declaration of independence and as surely as night follows day, to war between us.’ It was like being hit by lightning. The attitude of ‘my’ government would lead to war between us.

It came as a shocking revelation that the people of Mars had developed such a radically independent sense of identity, one that separated them in their own minds even from their families Earthside. It had two immediate effects. It sent me scurrying to the archives, both government and news agency, in search of the roots of the growing estrangement between our two worlds. And it led directly to my starting this weekly letter to my old home and which for the best part of thirty years now has been my contribution, my attempt to keep the family talking.

We have to go back a long way, back to the months, years even, before that dramatic landing of the first fleet of self-sustaining colony ships in the Bay of the Dawn as the terminator, that line between day and night here on Mars, receded to the East. Earth had become impossibly overpopulated. Millions were unable to feed themselves and were reliant on daily handouts from the nutrient stockpiles of the Global Market Authority. They were living every waking moment on a knife-edge. It was just what those in power wanted and had planned for.

There was government of a sort, but in reality power lay, as it still does despite the many and much vaunted clean-ups of recent years, with the banks and industrial giants. For years now, we Martians have watched with growing incredulity the way in which those organisations have maintained their front of legitimacy when we know that they are owned lock, stock and barrel by the organised crime syndicates. To most of us here it only goes to prove the truth of that ancient observation that people get the government they deserve. It saddens us deeply to see our own flesh and blood so lacking in power, so full of fear. It’s not for us.

The promised energy revolution had never happened due, largely, to the intransigence of the power companies over the provision of plant and infrastructure to ensure fair distribution. Those areas that were not Fast Waste Destruction Facilities, or Recycling Parks, were either beleaguered Residential Fesses that had never known peaceful lawfulness, or they were Mineral Extraction Arenas for those increasingly rare and unimaginably expensive raw materials for industry.

I suppose the miracle is that there was enough vision and effective organisation left on Earth all those years ago to put together what was undoubtedly the biggest and most complex interplanetary colonial expedition ever attempted. I don’t suppose there’s a single Martian who doesn’t in some way say a daily ‘thank you’ to those early engineers and technologists. They had the wisdom and courage to make that first perilous crossing of intraorbital space in the cosmic equivalent of covered wagons, in order to find the freedom and dignity to live and work as human beings.

Not for them the paying of oppressive taxation, nor compliance with the vicious mix of social and genetic engineering. The guiding force in human evolution had become the dollar-driven manipulation of the human genome rather than socio-sexual selection. The gentler forces of genetic drift and assortative sexual selection had been all but expunged by centuries of germ-line genetic levelling. Worse still was the deliberate destruction of bio-equivalence between peoples.

The move to Mars was a revolutionary movement in its truest sense. Admittedly, those involved were looking back to an idealised golden age where the qualities of hard work, honesty, love for your fellow human beings and excellence in all things were the currency of daily life. But it wasn’t the escape from reality that it was put down as, nor as the Cassandras prophesied, was it doomed to failure. They were a canny lot those first Martians; they calculated the risks and dealt with them all using proven technology, ingenuity and plain old mother common-sense.

So where, I hear you asking, were the hardships? Read their diaries. The catalogue of legal and financial persecution they suffered beggars belief. Bank accounts were confiscated. There was imprisonment for months on end without trial under the laws of sedition. Thirteen were summarily executed for ‘Factionism’, a crime dreamed up by that animal of a World President, Usborne Sears, because they could be charged with nothing else. And the evidence against them? It came from cowed and terrorised friends and relatives. They endured contempt from their neighbours, hostility and isolation at work. I guess if you’re looking for the point at which a sense of Martian identity came into being, it happened even before the first settlers left Earth.

It comes as no surprise then, to discover resentment right from the start over the Old World’s exploitation of the Martians’ hard work and resulting successes. The pittance paid for mineral shipments to Earth; the conscription of the brightest and best of the younger generation for Earth service; the demands for taxation, but the refusal to allow Martian representatives into either House of the World Legislature.

And so, five years ago we had the riots and the destruction of a cargo of goods from Earth by the so-called ‘Little Green Men’. This group of about a hundred high-spirited students, led by Martha Spelling who would later become the third Martian President, were protesting against the dumping of subsidised staple foods and other commodities on Mars, thus threatening the livelihood of Martian producers and traders. Painted and dressed as cartoon caricatures of Martians, they carried out their act of resistance in a good-natured, even humorous way. Little of any real value was damaged and no one was injured, or even offended by their actions. But it was an unbearable humiliation for the Earthies. Sanctions were imposed on us and heels were dug in on both sides. Exploration Base 9 was renamed Martyrs’ Hill in memory of both the personnel who died there and the thirteen would-be settlers who never made it because they had been put to death on Earth. Martyrs’ Hill quickly became the focus for an unstoppable Independence Movement and last year, as we all know, the inevitable and long-desired Declaration of Martian Independence was proclaimed. The battle lines were drawn.

Now, it seems, we are nearing the final act in this drama, one that has been played out many times in human history and always with the same result. It looks as though my brother was right all those years ago, for as your battle fleet draws close we here are as prepared as we’ll ever be to repel it. Make no mistake, we will meet force with force. And although we do not want to fight, if we have to, we will finish it. This war will not be of our making. It will be long and bloody and there will be no winners. At the end we will still be here and you, our kith and kin, will have lost many sons and daughters. And for what? For dominion over a people who no longer recognise any authority over them but their own. I ask you, is it worth it?

If there is any sense left among members of the World Legislature, I appeal to them, as my last act in what is almost certainly my last despatch to you all, recall that fleet now. I have to say that I am not optimistic.

Goodnight.

Publisher’s Note: This broadcast was banned by Earth authorities, but copies of the transcript were circulated among Martian sympathisers there. The Martian War of Independence lasted seven years and cost 12 million lives. It ended as Ross Baker predicted it would in a bankrupt Earth recognising Martian sovereignty over its own affairs. Ross Ellenson died during the Earth Forces’ bombardment of Gagarinville during the second year of the war.