Blue Mars (11 page)

They were also paying attention to what was going on in space and
on Earth. A fast shuttle from Earth, contents unknown, had contacted them
requesting permission to make an orbital insertion without a keg of nails being
thrown in its way. So a Da Vinci team was now nervously working out security
protocols, in heavy consultation with the Swiss embassy, which had taken an
office in a suite of apartments at the northwest end of the arc. From rebels to
administrators; it was an awkward transition.

“What political parties do we support?” Sax asked.

“I don’t know. The usual array I guess.”

“No party gets much support. Whatever works, you know.”

Sax knew. That was the old tech position, held ever since
scientists had become a class in society, a priest caste almost, intervening
between the people and their power. They were apolitical, supposedly, like
civil servants—empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific
style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly
simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions,
governments, and other mass delusional systems of that sort.

The standard scientist politics, in other words. Sax had once
tried to explain this outlook to Desmond, causing his friend for some reason to
laugh prodigiously, even though it made perfect sense. Well, it was a bit
naive, therefore a bit comical, he supposed; and like a lot of funny things, it
could be that it was hilarious right up to the moment it turned horrible.
Because it was an attitude that had kept scientists from going at politics in
any useful way for centuries now; and dismal centuries they had been.

But now they were on a planet where political power came out of
the end of a mesocosm aerating fan. And the people in charge of that great gun
(holding the elements at bay) were at least partly in charge. If they cared to
exercise the power.

Gently Sax reminded people of this when he visited them in their
labs; and then to ease their discomfort with the idea of politics, he talked to
them about the terraforming problem. And when he finally got ready to leave for
Sabishii, about sixty of them were willing to come with him, to see how things were
going down there. “Sax’s alternative to Pavonis,” he heard one of the lab techs
describe the trip. Which was not a bad thought.

Sabishii was located on the western side of a five-kilometer-high
prominence called the Tyrrhena massif, south of Jarry-Desloges Crater, in the
ancient highlands between Isidis and Hellas, centered at longitude 275 degrees,
latitude 15 degrees south. A reasonable choice for a tent-town site, as it had
long views to the west, and low hills backing it to the east, like moors. But
when it came to living in the open air, or growing plants out in the rocky
countryside, it was a bit high; in fact it was, if you excluded the very much
larger bulges of Tharsis and Elysium, the highest region on Mars, a kind of
bioregion island, which the Sabi-shiians had been cultivating for decades.

They proved to be severely disappointed by the loss of the big
mirrors, one might even say thrown into emergency mode, an all-out effort to do
what they could to protect the plants of the biome; but it was precious little.
Sax’s old colleague Nanao Nakayama shook his head. “Winterkill will be very
bad. Like ice age.”

“I’m hoping we can compensate for the loss of light,” Sax said.
“Thicken the atmosphere, add greenhouse gases—it’s possible we could do some of
that with more bacteria and suralpine plants, right?”

“Some,” Nanao said dubiously. “A lot of niches are already full.
The niches are quite small.”

They settled in over a meal to talk about it. All the techs from
Da Vinci were there in the big dining hall of The Claw, and many Sabishiians
were there to greet them. It was a long, interesting, friendly talk. The
Sabishiians were living in the mound maze of their mohole, behind one talon of
the dragon figure it made, so that they didn’t have to look at the burned ruins
of their city when they weren’t working on it. The rebuilding was much reduced
now, as most of them were out dealing with the results of the mirror loss.
Nanao said to Tariki, in what was clearly the continuation of a long-standing
argument, “It makes no sense to rebuild it as a tent city anyway. We might as
well wait, and build it in open air.”

“That may be a long wait,” Tariki said, glancing at Sax. “We’re
near the top of the viability atmosphere named in the Dorsa Brevia document.”

Nanao looked at Sax. “We want Sabishii under any limit that is
set.”

Sax nodded, shrugged; he didn’t know what to say. The Reds would
not like it. But if the viable altitude limit was raised a kilometer or so, it
would give the Sabishiians this massif, and make little difference on the
larger bulges—so it seemed to make sense. But who knew what they would decide
on Pavonis? He said, “Maybe we should focus now on trying to keep atmospheric
pressures from dropping.”

They looked somber.

Sax said, “You’ll take us out and show us the massif?”

They cheered up. “Most happy.”

The land of the Tyrrhena massif was what the areologists in the
early years had called the “dissected unit” of the southern highlands, which
was much the same as the “cra-tered unit,” but further broken by small channel
networks. The lower and more typical highlands surrounding the massif also
contained areas of “ridged unit” and “hilly unit.” In fact, as quickly became
obvious the morning they drove out onto the land, all aspects of the rough
terrain of the southern highlands were on view, often all at once: cra-tered,
broken, uneven, ridged, dissected, and hilly land, the quintessential Noachian
landscape. Sax and Nanao and Tariki sat on the observation deck of one of the
Sabishii University rovers; they could see other cars carrying other
colleagues, and there were teams out walking ahead of them. On the last hills
before the horizon to the east, a few energetic people were fell-running. The
hollows of the land were all lightly dusted with dirty snow. The massif was
centered fifteen degrees south of the equator, and they got a fair bit of
precipitation around Sabishii, Nanao said. The southeast side of the massif was
drier, but here, the cloud masses pushed south over the ice in Isidis Planitia
and climbed the slope and dropped their loads.

Indeed, as they drove uphill great waves of dark cloud rolled in
from the northwest, pouring over them as if chasing the fell-runners. Sax
shuddered, remembering his recent exposure to the elements; he was happy to be in
a rover, and felt he would need only short walks away from it to be satisfied.

Eventually, however, they stopped on a high point in a low old
ridge, and got out. They made their way over a surface littered with boulders
and knobs, cracks, sand drifts, very small craters, breadloafed bedrock, scarps
and alases, and the old shallow channels that gave the dissected unit its name.
In truth there were deformational features of every kind to be seen, for the
land here was four billion years old. A lot had happened to it, but nothing had
ever happened to destroy it completely and clean the slate, so all four billion
years were still there to be seen, in a veritable museum of rockscapes. It had
been thoroughly pulverized in the Noachian, leaving regolith several kilometers
deep, and craters and deformities that no aeolian stripping could remove. And
during this early period the other side of the planet had had its lithosphere
to a depth of six kilometers blasted into space by the so-called Big Hit; a
fair amount of that ejecta had eventually landed in the south. That was the
explanation for the Great Escarpment, and the lack of ancient highlands in the
north; and one more factor in the extremely disordered look of this land.

Then also, at the end of the Hesperian had come the brief warm wet
period, when water had occasionally run on the surface. These days most
areologists thought that this period had been quite wet but not really very
warm, annual averages of well under 273° Kelvin still allowing for surface water
sometimes, replenished by hydrothermal convection rather than precipitation.
This period had lasted for only a hundred million years or so, according to
current estimates, and it had been followed by billions of years of winds, in
the arid cold Amazonian Age, which had lasted right up to the point of their
arrival. “Is there a name for the age starting with m-1?” Sax asked.

“The Holocene.”

And then lastly, everything had been scoured by two billion years
of ceaseless wind, scoured so hard that the older craters were completely
rimless, everything stripped at by the relentless winds strata by strata,
leaving behind a wilderness of rock. Not chaos, technically speaking, but wild,
speaking its unimaginable age in polyglot profusion, in rimless craters and etched
mesas, dips, hummocks, escarpments, and oh so many blocky pitted rocks.

Often they stopped the rover and walked around. Even small mesas
seemed to tower over them. Sax found himself staying near their rover, but
nevertheless he came upon all kinds of interesting features. Once he discovered
a rover-shaped rock, cracked vertically all the way through. To the left of the
block, off to the west, he had a view to a distant horizon, the rocky land out
there a smooth yellow glaze. To the right, the waist-high wall of some old
fault, pocked as if by cuneiform. Then a sand drift bordered by ankle-high
rocks, some of them pyramidal dark basaltic ventifacts, others lighter pitted
granulated rocks. There a balanced shat-tercone, big as any dolmen. There a
sand tail. There a crude circle of ejecta, like an almost completely weathered
Sto-nehenge. There a deep snake-shaped hollow—the fragment of a watercourse,
perhaps—behind it another gentle rise— then a distant prominence like a lion’s
head. The prominence next to it was like the lion’s body.

In the midst of all this stone and sand, plant life was
unobtrusive. At least at first. One had to look for it, to pay close attention
to color, above all else to green, green in all its shades, but especially its
desert shades—sage, olive, khaki, and so on. Nanao and Tariki kept pointing out
specimens he hadn’t seen. Closer he looked, and closer again. Once attuned to
the pale living colors, which blended so well with the ferric land, they began
to jump out from the rust and brown and umber and ocher and black of the
rock-scape. Hollows and cracks were likely places to see them, and near the
shaded patches of snow. The ctoser he looked, the more he saw; and then, in one
high basin, it seemed there were plants tucked everywhere. In that moment he
understood; it was all fellfield, the whole Tyrrhena massif.

Then, coating entire rockfaces, or covering the inside areas of
drip catchments, were the dayglow greens of certain lichens, and the emerald or
dark velvet greens of the mosses. Wet fur.

The diversicolored palette of the lichen array; the dark green of
pine needles. Bunched sprays of Hokkaido pines, foxtail pines, Sierra junipers.
Life’s colors. It was somewhat like walking from one great roofless room to
another, over ruined walls of stone. A small plaza; a kind of winding gallery;
a vast ballroom; a number of tiny interlocked chambers; a sitting room. Some
rooms held krummholz bansei against their low walls, the trees no higher than
their nooks, gnarled by wind, cut along the top at the snow level. Each branch,
each plant, each open room, as shaped as any bonsai—and yet effortless.

Actually, Nanao told him, most of the basins were intensively
cultivated. “This basin was planted by Abraham.” Each little region was the
responsibility of a certain gardener or gardening group.

“Ah!” Sax said. “And fertilized, then?”

Tariki laughed. “In a manner of speaking. The soil itself has been
imported, for the most part.”

“I see.”

This explained the diversity of plants. A little bit of
cultivation, he knew, had been done around Arena Glacier, where he had first
encountered the fellfields. But here they had gone far beyond those early
steps. Labs in Sabishii, Tariki told him, were trying their best to manufacture
topsoil. A good idea; soil in fellfields appeared naturally at a rate of only a
few centimeters a century. But there were reasons for this, and manufacturing
soil was proving to be extremely difficult.

Still, “We pick up a few million years at the start,” Nanao said.
“Evolve from there.” They hand-planted many of their specimens, it seemed, then
for the most part left them to their fate, and watched what developed.

“I see,” Sax said.

He looked more closely yet. The clear dim light: it was true that
each great open room displayed a slightly different array of species. “These
are gardens, then.”

“Yes ... or things like that. Depends.”

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the
precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others
still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy
called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or
to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly
forgotten biologist Oskar Schnell-ing; and so on.

These were influences only, Tariki added. As they did the work,
they developed visions of their own. They followed the inclination of the land,
as they saw that some plants prospered, and others died. Coevolution, a kind of
epige-netic development.