Blue Mars (12 page)

“Nice,” Sax said, looking around. For the adepts, the walk from
Sabishii up onto the massif must have been an aesthetic journey, filled with
allusions and subtle variants of tradition that were invisible to him. Hiroko
would have called it areoformation, or the areophany. “I’d like to visit your
soil labs.”

“Of course.”

They returned to the rover, drove on. Late in the day, under dark
threatening clouds, they came to the very top of the massif, which turned out
to be a kind of broad undulating moor. Small ravines were filled with pine
needles, sheered off by winds so that they looked like the blades of grass on a
well-mowed yard. Sax and Tariki and Nanao again got out of the car, walked
around. The wind cut through their suits, and the late-afternoon sun broke out from
under the dark cloud cover, casting their shadows all the way out to the
horizon. Up here on the moors there were many big masses of smooth bare
bedrock; looking around, the landscape had the red primal look Sax remembered
from the earliest years; but then they would walk to the edge of a small
ravine, and suddenly be looking down into green.

Tariki and Nanao talked about ecopoesis, which for them was
terraforming redefined, subtilized, localized. Transmuted into something like
Hiroko’s areoformation. No longer powered by heavy industrial global methods,
but by the slow, steady, and intensely local process of working on individual
patches of land. “Mars is all a garden. Earth too for that matter. This is what
humans have become. So we have to think about gardening, about that level of
responsibility to the land. A human-Mars interface that does justice to both.”

Sax waggled a hand uncertainly. “I’m used to thinking of Mars as a
kind of wilderness,” he said, as he looked up the etymology of the word garden.
French, Teutonic, Old Norse, gard, enclosure. Seemed to share origins with
guard, or keeping. But who knew what the supposedly equivalent word in Japanese
meant. Etymology was hard enough without translation thrown into the mix. “You
know—get things started, let loose the seeds, then watch it all develop on its
own. Self-organizing ecologies, you know.”

“Yes,” Tariki said, “but wilderness too is a garden now. A kind of
garden. That’s what it means to be what we are.” He shrugged, his forehead
wrinkled; he believed the idea was true, but did not seem to like it. “Anyway,
ecopoesis is closer to your vision of wilderness than industrial terra-forming
ever was.”

“Maybe,” Sax said. “Maybe they’re just two stages of a process.
Both necessary.”

Tariki nodded, willing to consider it. “And now?”

“It depends on how we want to deal with the possibility of an ice
age,” Sax said. “If it’s bad enough, kills off enough plants, then ecopoesis
won’t have a chance. The atmosphere could freeze back onto the surface, the
whole process crash. Without the mirrors, I’m not confident that the biosphere
is robust enough to continue growing. That’s why I want to see those soil labs
you have. It may be that industrial work on the atmosphere remains to be done.
We’ll have to try some modeling and see.”

Tariki nodded, and Nanao too. Their ecologies were being snowed
under, right before their eyes; flakes drifted down through the transient
bronze sunlight at this very moment, tumbling in the wind. They were open to
suggestion.

Meanwhile, as throughout these drives, their young associates from
Da Vinci and Sabishii were running over the massif together, and returning to
Sabishii’s mound maze babbling through the night about geomancy and areo-mancy,
ecopoetics, heat exchange, the five elements, greenhouse gases, and so on. A
creative ferment that looked to Sax very promising. “Michel should be here,” he
said to Nanao. “John should be here. How he would love a group like this.”

And then it occurred to him: “Ann should be here.”

So he went back to Pavonis,
leaving the group in Sabishii talking things over.

Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people,
spurred on by Art Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional
congress. Write an at least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then
establish the government described.

“Good idea,” Sax said. “Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.”

Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout,
others wouldn’t.

He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis—gone,
people said, to a Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went
there but Reds, they said.

After some thought Sax asked for Steve’s help, and looked up the
outpost’s location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and
flew north, past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past
his old headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.

Ann too had no doubt flown this route, and thus gone by the first
headquarters of the terraforming effort. Terraform-ing . . . there was
evolution in everything, even in ideas. Had Ann noticed Echus Overlook, had she
even remembered that small beginning? No way of telling. That was how humans
knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any
way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was
strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing
rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate;
but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo
through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a book that
had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the
conclusion occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a
shore, shared a meal—then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their
lives; for every world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as
empty as Mars had been in the beginning.

He flew past the blackened curve of Kasei Vallis without noting it
at all.

The Reds had long ago hollowed out a rock the size of a city
block, in a promontory that served as the last dividing wedge in the
intersection of two of the Tempe Fossa, just south of Perepelkin Crater.
Windows under overhangs gave them a view over both of the bare straight
canyons, and the larger canyon they made after their confluence. Now all these
fossae cut down what had become a coastal plateau; Mareotis and Tempe together
formed a huge peninsula of ancient highlands, sticking far into the new ice
sea.

Sax landed his little plane on the sandy strip on top of the
promontory. From here the ice plains were not visible; nor could he spot any
vegetation—not a tree, not a flower, not even a patch of lichen. He wondered if
they had somehow sterilized the canyons. Just primal rock, with a dusting of
frost. And nothing they could do about frost, unless they wanted to tent these
canyons, to keep air out rather than in. “Hmm,” Sax said, startled at the idea.

Two Reds let him in the lock door on the top of the promontory,
and he descended stairs with them. The shelter appeared to be nearly empty.
Just as well. It was nice only to have to withstand the cold gazes of two young
women leading him through the rough-hewn rock galleries of the refuge, rather
than a whole gang. Interesting to see Red aesthetics. Very spare, as might be
expected—not a plant to be seen—just different textures of rock: rough walls,
rougher ceilings, contrasted to a polished basalt floor, and the glistening
windows overlooking the canyons.

They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave,
no straighter than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were
mosaics inlaid into the back wall, made of bits of colored stone, polished and
set against each other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed
almost to represent something, if only he could focus properly on them. The
floor was a stone parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The
gallery went on and on—big, dusty—the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps.
Reds preferred their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as
unfortunate necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have
walked down the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and
Sax felt that this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be
unobtrusive before the land itself, to melt into it.

As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window seat.
Sax stopped abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as
an ignorant traveler might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting
there. He looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didn’t see that much
anymore, and the longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had
told him, once, that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had
been some years before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame.
Now, with the Red rebellion quelled, she was ash. Gray flesh. It was an awful
sight. She was somewhere around 150 years old, like all the First Hundred left
alive, and without the treatments .. . she would soon die.

Well. Strictly speaking, she was at the physiological equivalent
of being seventy or so, depending on when she had last had the treatments. So
not that bad. Perhaps Peter would know. But the longer one went between
treatments, he had heard, the more problems cropped up, statistically speaking.
It made sense. It was only wise to be prudent.

But he couldn’t say that to her. In fact, it was hard to think
what he could say to her.

Eventually her gaze lifted. She recognized him and shuddered, her
lip lifting like a trapped animal’s. Then she looked away from him, grim,
stone-faced. Beyond anger, beyond hope.

“I wanted to show you some of the Tyrrhena massif,” he said
lamely.

She got up like a statue rising, and left the room.

Sax, feeling his joints creak with the pseudo-arthritic pain that
so often accompanied his dealings with Ann, followed her.

He was trailed in his turn by the two stern-looking young women.
“I don’t think she wants to talk to you,” the taller one informed him.

“Very astute of you,” Sax said.

Far down the gallery, Ann was standing before another window:
spellbound, or else too exhausted to move. Or part of her did want to talk.

Sax stopped before her.

“I want to get your impressions of it,” he said. “Your suggestions
for what we might do next. And I have some, some, some areological questions.
Of course it could be that strictly scientific questions aren’t of interest to
you anymore—”

She took a step toward him and struck him on the side of the face.
He found himself slumped against the gallery wall, sitting on his butt. Ann was
nowhere to be seen. He was being helped to his feet by the two young women, who
clearly didn’t know whether to cheer or groan. His whole body hurt, more even
than his face, and his eyes were very hot, stinging slightly. It seemed he
might cry before these two young idiots, who by trailing him were complicating
everything enormously; with them around he could not yell or plead, he could
not go on his knees and say Ann, please, forgive me. He couldn’t.

“Where did she go?” he managed to say.

“She really, really doesn’t want to talk to you,” the tall one
declared.

“Maybe you should wait and try later,” the other advised.

“Oh shut up!” Sax said, suddenly feeling an irritation so vehement
that it was like rage. “I suppose you would just let her stop taking the
treatment and kill herself!”

“It’s her right,”‘the tall one pontificated.

“Of course it is. I wasn’t speaking of rights. I was speaking of
how a friend should behave when someone is suicidal.

Not a subject you are likely to know anything about. Now help me
find her.”

“You’re no friend of hers.”

“I most certainly am.” He was on his feet. He staggered a little
as he tried to walk in the direction he thought she had gone. One of the young
women tried to take his elbow. He avoided the help and went on. There Ann was,
in the distance, collapsed in a chair, in some kind of dining chamber, it
seemed. He approached her, slowing like Apollo in Zeno’s paradox.

She swiveled and glared at him.

“It’s you who abandoned science, right from the start,” she
snarled. “So don’t you give me that shit about not being interested in science!”

“True,” Sax said. “It’s true.” He held out both hands. “But now I
need advice. Scientific advice. I want to learn. And I want to show you some
things as well.”

But after a moment’s consideration she was up and off again, right
past him, so that he flinched despite himself. He hurried after her; her gait
was much longer than his, and she was moving fast, so that he had to almost
jog. His bones hurt.

“Perhaps we could go out here,” Sax suggested. “It doesn’t matter
where we go out.”

“Because the whole planet is wrecked,” she muttered.

“You must still go out for sunsets occasionally,” Sax persisted.
“I could join you for that, perhaps.”

“No.”

“Please, Ann.” She was a fast walker, and enough taller than him
that it was hard to keep up with her and talk as well. He was huffing and
puffing, and his cheek still hurt. “Please, Ann.”

She did not answer, she did not slow down. Now they were walking
down a hall between suites of living quarters, and Ann sped up to go through a
doorway and slam the door behind her. Sax tried it; it was locked.

Not, on the whole, a promising beginning.

Hound and hind. Somehow he had to change things so that it was not
a hunt, a pursuit. Nevertheless: “I huff, I puff, I blow your house down,” he
muttered. He blew at the door. But then the two young women were there, staring
hard at him.

*
     
*
       
*

One evening later that week, near sunset, he went down to the
changing room and suited up. When Ann came in he jumped several centimeters. “I
was just going out?” he stammered. “Is that okay with you?”

“It’s a free country,” she said heavily.

And they went out the lock together, into the land. The young
women would have been amazed.

He had to be very careful. Naturally, although he was out there
with her to show to her the beauty of the new biosphere, it would not do to
mention plants, or snow, or clouds. One had to let things speak for themselves.
This was perhaps true of all phenomena. Nothing could be spoken for. One could
only walk over the land, and let it speak for itself.

Ann was not gregarious. She barely spoke to him. It was her usual
route, he suspected as he followed her. He was being allowed to come along.

It was perhaps permissible to ask questions: this was science. And
Ann stopped often enough, to look at rock formations up close. It made sense at
those times to crouch beside her, and with a gesture or a word ask what she was
finding. They wore suits and helmets, even though the altitude was low enough
to have allowed breathing with only the aid of a CO2 filter mask. Thus conversations
consisted of voices in the ear, as of old. Asking questions.

So he asked. And Ann would answer, sometimes in some detail. Tempe
Terra was indeed the Land of Time, its basement material a surviving piece of
the southern highlands, one of those lobes of it that stuck far into the
northern plains—a survivor of the Big Hit. Then later Tempe had fractured
extensively, as the lithosphere was pushed up from below by the Tharsis Bulge
to the south. These fractures included both the Mareotis Fossae and the Tempe
Fossa surrounding them now.

The spreading land had cracked enough to allow some latecomer
volcanoes to emerge, spilling over the canyons. From one high ridge they saw a
distant volcano like a black cone dropped from the sky; then another, looking
just like a meteor crater as far as Sax could see. Ann shook her head at this
observation, and pointed out lava flows and vents, features all visible once
they were pointed out, but not at all obvious under a scree of later ejecta
rubble and (one had to admit it) a dusting of dirty snow, collecting like sand
drifts in wind shelters, turning sand-colored in the sunset light.

To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text,
written by its own long past; that was Ann’s vision, achieved by a century’s
close observation and study, and by her own native gift, her love for it.
Something to behold, really—something to marvel at. A kind of resource, or
treasure—a love beyond science, or something into the realm of Michel’s
mystical science. Alchemy. But alchemists wanted to change things. A kind of
oracle, rather. A visionary, with a vision just as powerful as Hiroko’s,
really. Less obviously visionary, perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an
acceptance of what was there; love of rock, for rock’s sake. For Mars’s sake.
The primal planet, in all its sublime glory, red and rust, still as death;
dead; altered through the years only by matter’s chemical permutations, the
immense slow life of geophysics. It was an odd concept—abiologic life— but
there it was, if one cared to see it, a kind of living, out there spinning,
moving through the stars that burned, moving through the universe in its great
systolic/diastolic movement, its one big breath, one might say. Sunset somehow
made it easier to see that.