Blue Mars (23 page)

Someone in the crowd stood and asked him about the possibility of
a population explosion, and he nodded. “Yes of course. This is a real problem.
You don’t have to be a demographer to see that if new ones continue being born
while the elderly are not dying, population will quickly soar to incredible
levels. Unsustainable levels, until there will be a crash. So. This has to be
faced now. The birth rate simply has to be cut, at least for a while. It isn’t a
situation that has to last forever. The longevity treatments are not
immortality treatments. Eventually the first generations given the treatment
will die. And therein lies the solution to the problem. Say the current
population on the two worlds is fifteen billion. That means we’re already
starting from a bad spot. Given the severity of the problem, as long as you get
to be a parent at all, there is no reason to complain; it’s your own longevity
causing the problem after all, and parenthood is parenthood, one child or ten.
So say that each person partners, and the two parents have only a single child,
so that there is one child for every two people in the previous generation. Say
that means seven and a half billion children out of this present generation. And
they are all given the longevity treatment too, of course, and cosseted until
they are no doubt the insufferable royalty of the world. And they go on to have
four billion children, the new royalty, and that generation has two, and so on.
All of them are alive at once, and the population is rising all the time, but
at a lower rate as time passes. And then at some point, maybe a hundred years
from now, maybe a thousand years from now, that first generation will die. It
may happen over a fairly short period of time, but fast or slow, when the
process is done, the overall population will be almost halved. At that point
people can look at the situation, the infrastructure, the environments of the
two worlds—the carrying capacity of the entire solar system, whatever that
might be. After the biggest generations are gone, people can start having two
children each, perhaps, so that there is replacement, and a steady state. Or
whatever. When they have that kind of choice, the population crisis will be
over. It could take a thousand years.”

Nirgal stopped to look outside of himself, to stare around at the
audience; people watching him rapt, silent. He gestured with a hand, to draw
them all together. “In the meantime, we have to help each other. We have to
regulate ourselves, we have to take care of the land. And it’s here, in this
part of the project, that Mars can help Earth. First, we are an experiment in
taking care of the land. Everyone learns from that, and some lessons can be
applied here. Then, more importantly, though most of the population will always
be located here on Earth, a goodly fraction of it can move to Mars. It will
help ease the situation, and we’ll be happy to take them. We have an obligation
to take on as many people as we possibly can, because we on Mars are Terrans
still, and we are all in this together. Earth and Mars—and there are other
habitable worlds in the solar system as well, none as big as our two, but there
are a lot of them. And by using them all, and cooperating, we can get through the
populated years. And walk out into a golden age.”

That day’s talk made quite an impression, as far as one could tell
from within the eye of the media storm. Nirgal conversed for hours every day
after that, with group after group, elaborating the ideas he had first
expressed in that meeting. It was exhausting work, and after a few weeks of it
without any letup, he looked out his bedroom window one cloudless morning, and
went out and talked to his escort about making an expedition. And the escort
agreed to tell the people in Bern he was touring privately; and they took a
train up into the Alps.

The train ran south from Bern, past a long blue lake called the
Thuner See, which was flanked by steep grassy alps, and ramparts and spires of
gray granite. The lakeside towns were topped by slate roof tiles, dominated by
ancient trees and an occasional castle, everything in perfect repair. The vast
green pastures between the towns were dotted by big wooden farmhouses, with red
carnations in flower boxes at every window and balcony. It was a style that had
not changed in five hundred years, the escorts told him. Settling into the
land, as if natural to it. The green alps had been cleared of trees and
stones—in their original state they had been forests. So they were terraformed
spaces, huge hilly lawns that had been created to provide forage for cattle.
Such an agriculture had not made economic sense as capitalism denned it, but
the Swiss had supported the high farms anyway, because they thought it was
important, or beautiful, or both at once. It was Swiss. “There are values
higher than economic values,” Vlad had insisted back in the congress on Mars,
and Nirgal saw now how there were people on Earth who had always believed that,
at least in part. Werteswandel, they were saying down in Bern, mutation of
values; but it could as well be evolution of values, return of values; gradual
change, rather than punctuated equilibrium; benevolent residual archaisms,
which endured and endured, until slowly these high isolated mountain valleys
had taught the world how to live, their big farmhouses floating by on green
waves. A shaft of yellow sun split the clouds and struck the hill behind one
such farm, and the alp gleamed in an emerald mass, so intensely green that
Nirgal felt disoriented, then actually dizzy; it was hard to focus on such a
radiant green!

The heraldic hill disappeared. Others appeared in the window, wave
after green wave, luminous with their own reality. At the town of Interlaken
the train turned and began to ascend a valley so steep that in places the
tracks entered tunnels into the rocky sides of the valley, and spiraled a full
360 degrees inside the mountain before coming back out into the sun, the head
of the train right above the tail. The train ran on tracks rather than pistes
because the Swiss had not been convinced that the new technology was enough of
an improvement to justify replacing what they already had. And so the train
vibrated, and even rocked side to side, as it rumbled and squealed uphill,
steel on steel.

They stopped in Grindelwald, and in the station Nirgal followed
his escort onto a much smaller train, which led them up and under the immense
north wall of the Eiger. Underneath this wall of stone it appeared only a few
hundred meters tall; Nirgal had gotten a better sense of its great height fifty
kilometers away, in Bern’s Monster. Now, here, he waited patiently as the
little train hummed into a tunnel in the mountain itself, and began to make its
spirals and switchbacks in the darkness, punctuated only by the interior lights
of the train, and the brief light from a single side tunnel. His escort, about
ten men strong, spoke among themselves in low guttural Swiss German.

When they emerged into the light again they were in a little
station called the Jungfraujoch, “the highest train station in Europe” as a
sign in six languages said—and no wonder, as it was located in an icy pass
between the two great peaks the Monch and the Jungfrau, at 3,454 meters above
sea level, with no point or destination but its own.

Nirgal got off the train, trailed by his escort, and went out of
the station onto a narrow terrace outside the building. The air was thin,
clean, crisp, about 270 K—the best air Nirgal had breathed since he left Mars,
it brought tears to his eyes it felt so familiar! Ah, now this was a place!

Even with sunglasses on the light was extremely bright. The sky
was a dark cobalt. Snow covered most of the mountainsides, but granite thrust
through the snow everywhere, especially on the north sides of the great masses,
where the cliffs were too steep to hold snow. Up here the Alps no longer
resembled an escarpment at all; each mass of rock had its own look and
presence, separated from the rest by deep expanses of empty air, including
glacial valleys that were enormously deep U gaps. To the north these
macro-trenches were very far below, and green, or even filled with lakes. To
the south, however, they were high, and filled only with snow and ice and rock.
On this day the wind was pouring up from this south side, bringing the chill of
the ice with it.

Down the ice valley directly south of the pass, Nirgal could see a
huge crumpled white plateau, where glaciers poured in from the surrounding high
basins to meet in a great confluence. This was Concordiaplatz, they told him.
Four big glaciers met, then poured south in the Grosser Al-etschgletscher, the
longest glacier in Switzerland.

Nirgal moved down the terrace to its end, to see farther into this
wilderness of ice. At the far end he found that there was a staircase trail,
hacked into the hard snow of the south wall where it rose to the pass. It was a
path down to the glacier below them, and from there to Concordiaplatz.

Nirgal asked his escorts to stay in the station and wait for him;
he wanted to hike alone. They protested, but the glacier in summer was free of
snow, the crevasses all obvious, and the trail well clear of them. And no one
else was down there on this cold summer day. Nevertheless the members of the
escort were uncertain, and two insisted on coming with him, at least part way,
and at a distance behind—”just in case.”

Finally Nirgal nodded at the compromise, and pulled on his hood,
and hiked down the ice stairs, thumping down painfully until he was on the
flatter expanse of the Jung-fraufirn. The ridges that walled this snow valley
ran south from the Jungfrau and the Monch respectively, then after a few high
kilometers dropped abruptly to Concordiaplatz. From the trail their rock looked
black, perhaps in contrast to the whiteness of the snow. Here and there were
patches of faint pinkness in the white snow—algae. Life even here— but barely.
It was for the most part a pure expanse of white and black, and the overarching
dome of Prussian blue, with a cold wind funneling up the canyon from
Concordiaplatz. He wanted to make it down to Concordiaplatz and have a look
around, but he couldn’t tell whether the day would give him enough time or not;
it was very difficult to judge how far away things were, it could easily have
been farther than it looked. But he could go until the sun was halfway to the
western horizon, and then turn back; and so he hiked swiftly downhill over the
firn, from orange wand to orange wand, feeling the extra person inside him,
feeling also the two members of the escort who were tagging along some two
hundred meters behind.

For a long time he just walked. It wasn’t so hard. The crenellated
ice surface crunched under his brown boots. The sun had softened the top layer,
despite the cool wind. The surface was too bright to see properly, even with sunglasses;
the ice joggled as he walked, and glowed blackly.

The ridges to left and right began their drop. He came out into
Concordiaplatz. He could see up glaciers into other high canyons, as if up ice
fingers of a hand held up to the sun. The wrist ran down to the south, the
Grosser Aletsch-gletscher. He was standing in the white palm, offered to the
sun, next to a lifeline of rubble. The ice out here was pitted and gnarly and
bluish in tone.

A wind picked at him, and swirled through his heart; he turned
around slowly, like a little planet, like a top about to fall, trying to take
it in, to face it. So big, so bright, so windy and vast, so crushingly
heavy—the sheer mass of the white world!—and yet with a kind of darkness behind
it, as of space’s vacuum, there visible behind the sky. He took off his
sunglasses to see what it really looked like, and the glare was so immediate
and violent that he had to close his eyes, to cover his face in the crook of
his arm; still great white bars pulsed in his vision, and even the afterimage
hurt in its blinding intensity. “Wow!” he shouted, and laughed, determined to
try it again as soon as the afterimages lessened, but before his pupils had
again expanded. So he did, but the second attempt was as bad as the first. How
dare you try to look on me as I really am! the world shouted silently. “My
God.” With feeling. “Ka wow.”

He put his sunglasses back on his closed eyes, looked out through
the bounding afterimages; gradually the primeval landscape of ice and rock
restabilized out of the pulsing bars of black and white and neon green. The
white and the green; and this was the white. The blank world of the inanimate
universe. This place had precisely the same import as the primal Martian
landscape. Just as big as it was on Mars, yes, and even bigger, because of the
distant horizons, and the crushing gravity; and steeper; and whiter; and
windier, ka, it pierced so chill through his parka, even windier, even
colder—ah God, like a wind lancing through his heart: the sudden knowledge that
Earth was so vast that in its variety it had regions that even out-Marsed Mars
itself—that among all the ways that it was greater, it was greater even at
being Martian.

He was brought still by this thought. He only stood and stared,
tried to face it. The wind died for the moment. The world too was still. No
movement, no sound.

When he noticed the silence he began paying attention to it,
listening for something, hearing nothing, so that the silence itself somehow
became more and more palpable. It was unlike anything he had ever heard before.
He thought about it; on Mars he had always been in tents or in suits— always in
machinery, except for during the rare walks on the surface he had made in
recent years. But then there had always been the wind, or machines nearby. Or
he simply hadn’t noticed. Now there was only the great silence, the silence of
the universe itself. No dream could imagine it.