Blue Mars (30 page)

PART
SIX

              
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---Ann
in the Outback

              
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Look, not choosing to take the longevity treatment is suicide.

So?

Well. Suicide is usually considered to be a sign ofpsychological
dysfunction.

Usually.

I think you’ll find it’s true more often than not. You’re unhappy
at least.

At least.

And yet why? What now is lacking?

The world.

Every day you still walk out to see the sunset.

Habit.

You claim the destruction of the primal Mars is the source of your
depression. I think the philosophical reasons cited by people suffering
depression are masks protecting them from harder, more personal hurts.

It can all be real.

You mean all the reasons?

Yes. What did you accuse Sax of? Monocausotaxophilia?

Touche. But there’s usually a start to these things, among all the
real reasons—the first one that started you down your road. Often you have to
go back to that point in your journey in order to start off in a new way.

Time is not space. The metaphor of space lies about what is really
possible in time. You can never go back.

No no. You can go back, metaphorically. In your mental traveling
you can journey back into the past, retrace your steps, see where you turned
and why, then proceed onward in a direction that is different because it
includes these loops of understanding. Increased understanding increases
meaning. When you continue to insist that it is the fate of Mars that concerns
you most, I think it is a displacement so strong that it has confused you. It
too is a metaphor. Perhaps a true one, yes. But both terms of the metaphor
should be recognized.

I see what I see.

But the way it is, you are not even seeing. There is so much of
red Mars that remains. You should go out and look! Go out and empty your mind
and just see what is out there. Go out at low altitude and walk free in the
air, a simple dust mask only. It would be good for you, good at the
physiological level. Also it would be reaping a benefit of the terraforming. To
experience the freedom it gives us, the bond with this world—that we can walk
on its surface naked and survive. It’s amazing! It makes us part of an ecology.
It deserves to be rethought, this process. You should go out to consider it, to
study the process as areoformation.

That’s just a word. We took this planet and plowed it under. It’s
melting under our feet.

Melting in native water. Not imported from Saturn or the like,
it’s been there from the beginning, part of the original accretion, right?
Outgassed from the first lump that was Mars. Now part of our bodies. Our very
bodies are patterns in Martian water. Without the trace minerals we would be
transparent. We are Martian water. And water that has been on the surface of
Mars before, yes? Rupturing out in artesian apocalypse. Those channels are so
big!

It was permafrost for two billion years.

Then we helped it back onto the surface. The majesty of the great
outbreak floods. We were there, we saw one with our own eyes, we nearly died in
it—

Yes yes—

You felt the car as that water swept it away, you were driving—

Yes! But it swept Frank away instead.

Yes.

It swept the world away. And left us on the beach.

The world is still here. You could go out and see.

I don’t want to see. I’ve seen it already!

Not you. Some previous you. Now you’re the you living now.

Yes yes.

I think you’re afraid. Afraid of attempting a transmutation—a
metamorphosis into something new. The alembic stands out there, all around you.
The fire is hot. You’ll be melted, you’ll be reborn, who knows if you’ll still
be there afterward?

I don’t want to change.

You don’t want to stop loving Mars.

Yes. No.

You will never stop loving Mars. After metamorphosis the rock
still exists. It’s usually harder than the parent rock, yes? You will always
love Mars. Your task becomes seeing the Mars that always endures, under thick
or thin, hot or cold, wet or dry. Those are ephemeral, but M.ars endures. These
floods happened before, isn’t it true?

Yes.

Mars’s own water. All these volatiles are Mars’s own volatiles.

Except the nitrogen from Titan.

Yes yes. You sound like Sax.

Come on.

You two are more alike than you think. And all we volatiles are
Mars’s own.

But the destruction of the surface. It’s wrecked. Everything’s
changed.

That’s areology. Or the areophany.

It’s destruction. We should have tried living here as it was.

But we didn’t. And so now being red means working to keep
conditions as much like the primal conditions as possible, within the framework
of the areophany—the project of biosphere creation that allows humans the
freedom of the surface, below a certain altitude. That’s all being a Red can
mean now. And there are a lot of Reds like that. I think you worry that if you
ever change in even the slightest degree, then that will be the end of redness
everywhere. But redness is bigger than you. You helped start it and define it,
but you were never the only one. If you had been no one would ever have
listened to you.

They didn’t!

Some did. Many did. Redness will go on no matter what you do. You
could retire, you could become someone entirely different, you could become
lime green, and redness would always go on. It might even become something more
red than you ever imagined.

I’ve imagined it as red as it can get.

All those alternatives. We’ll live one of them and then go on. The
process of coadaptation with this planet will go on for thousands of years. But
here we are now. At every moment you should ask, what now is lacking? and work
at some acceptance of your current reality. This is sanity, this is life. You
have to imagine your life from here on out.

I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t.

You should go have a look around, really. A walkabout. Look very
closely. Take a look even at the ice seas, a close look. But not just that.
That is in the nature of a confrontation. Confrontation is not necessarily bad,
but first just a look, eh? A recognition. Then you should think about going up
into the hills. Tharsis, Elysium. A rise in altitude is a voyage into the past.
Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. It’s wonderful, really.
So many people don’t have such a wonderful task as that, you can’t imagine.
You’re lucky to have it.

And you?

What?

What is your task?

My task?

Yes. Your task.

. . . I’m not sure. I told you, I envy you having that My tasks
are . .. confused. To help Maya, and me. And the rest of us. Reconciliation ..
.I would like to find Hiroko....

You’ve been our shrink for a long time.

Yes.

Over a hundred years.

Yes.

And never any results at all.

Well. I like to think I have helped a little.

But it doesn’t come naturally to you.

Perhaps not.

Do you think people get interested in studying psychology because
they’re troubled in the mind?

It’s a common theory.

But no one has ever been shrink to you.

Oh I’ve had my therapists.

Helpful?

Yes! Quite helpful. Fairly helpful. I mean—they did what they
could.

But you don’t know your task.

No. Or, I... I want to go home.

What home?

That’s the problem. Hard when you don’t know where home is, eh?

Yes. I thought you would stay in Provence.

No no. I mean, Provence is my home, but. . . .

But now you’re on your way back to Mars.

Yes.

You decided to come back.

... Yes.

You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?

No. But you do. You know where your home is. You have that, and
it’s precious! You should remember that, you shouldn’t be throwing away such a
gift, or thinking it’s a burden! You’re a fool to think that! It’s a gift, damn
you, a precious precious gift, do you understand me?

I’ll have to think about that.

She left the refuge
in a meteorological rover from the previous century, a high
square thing with a luxurious window-box driver’s compartment up top. It was
not unlike the front half of the expedition rover in which she had first
traveled to the North Pole, with Nadia and Phyllis and Edmund and George. And
because she had spent thousands of days since then in such machines, she at
first had the impression that what she was doing was ordinary, contiguous with
the rest of her life.

But she drove northeast, downcanyon, until she was in the bed of
the little unnamed channel at sixty degrees longitude, fifty-three degrees
north. This valley had been carved by a small aquifer outbreak during the late
Amazonian, running in an earlier graben fault, down the lower slopes of the
Great Escarpment. The scoring effects of the flood were still visible on the
rims of the canyon walls, and in the lenticular islands of bedrock on the floor
of the channel.

Which now ran north into a sea of ice.

She got out of the car wearing a fiberfilled windsuit, a CO2 mask,
goggles, and heated boots. The air was thin and cold, though it was spring now
in the north—Ls 10, m-53. Cold and windy, ragged lines of low puffy clouds
racing east. It was either going to be an ice age or, if the greens’
manipulations forestalled it, then a year-without-summer, like 1810 on Earth,
when the explosion of the volcano Tambori had chilled the world.

She walked the shore of the new sea. It was at the foot of the
Great Escarpment, in Tempe Terra, a lobe of ancient highlands extending into the
north. Tempe had probably escaped the general stripping of the northern
hemisphere by being roughly opposite the impact point of the Big Hit, which
most areologists now agreed had struck near Hrad Vallis, above Elysium. So;
battered hills, overlooking an ice-covered sea. The rock looked like a red
sea’s surface in a wild cross chop; the ice looked like a prairie in the depths
of winter. Native water, as Michel had said—there from the beginning, on the
surface before. It was a hard thing to grasp. Her thoughts were scattered and
confused, darting this way and that, all at the same time—it was like madness,
but not. She knew the difference. The hum and keen of the wind did not speak to
her in the tones of the MIT lecturer; she suffered no choking sensations when
she tried to breathe. It was not like that. Rather her thinking was
accelerated, fractured, unpredictable—like that flock of birds over the ice,
zigzagging across the sky in a hard wind from the west. Ah the feel of that
same wind against her body, shoving at it, the new thick air like a great
animal paw. ...

The birds struggled in it with reckless skill. She stood for a
while and watched: they were skuas, out hunting over dark streaks of open
water. These polynyas were just the surface signs of immense pods of liquid
water under the ice; she had heard that a continuous channel of under-ice water
now wrapped the globe, winding east over old Vastitas, tearing frequent
polynyas in the surface, gaps which then stayed liquid for an hour or a week.
Even with the air so cold, the underwater temperatures were warmed by the
drowned Vastitas moholes, and rising heat from the thousands of thermonuclear
explosions set off by the meta-nats around the turn of the century. These bombs
had been placed deep enough in the megaregolith to trap their radioactive
fallout, supposedly, but not their heat, which rose in a thermal pulse through
the rock, a pulse that would continue for years and years. No; Michel could
talk about it being Mars’s water, but there was little else that was natural
about this new sea.

Ann hiked up a ridge to get a wider view. There it lay: ice,
mostly flat, sometimes shattered. All as still as a butterfly on a twig, as if
the whiteness might suddenly lift off and fly away. The birds’ wheeling and the
clouds’ scudding showed how hard the wind blew, everything in the air pouring
east; but the ice remained still. The wind’s voice was deep and huge, scraping
over a billion cold edges. A strip of gray water was striated by windchop, the
strength of each gust precisely registered by the flayed cat’s paws, each brush
of harder wind feathering the larger waves with exquisite sensitivity. Water.
And below that brushed surface, plankton, krill, fish, squid; she had heard
they were producing in hatcheries all the creatures of the extremely short
Antarctic food chain, and then releasing them to the sea. Teeming water.

The skuas wheeled overhead. One cloud of them whirl-pooled down
onto something along on the shore, behind some rocks. Ann hiked toward them.
Suddenly she saw the birds’ target, lying in a cleft at the edge of the ice:
the mostly eaten remains of a seal. Seals! The corpse lay on tundra grass, in
the lee of a patch of sand dunes, sheltered by another rocky ridge running down
into the ice. The white skeleton emerged from dark red flesh, ringed by white
blubber, black fur. All torn open to the sky. Eyes pecked out.

She hiked on past the corpse, up another little ridge. The ridge
made a kind of cape extending into the ice, and beyond it was a bay. A round bay—a
crater, infilled by ice. It had happened to lie at sea level, had happened to
have a breach in its rim on its seaward side, so that water and ice had poured
in and filled it. Now a round bay, perfect for a harbor. One day it would be a
harbor. About three kilometers across.

Ann sat down on a boulder on the cape, and looked out at the new
bay. Her breath heaved in and out of her in an involuntary motion, her rib cage
moving violently, as during labor contractions. Sobs, yes. She pulled aside her
face mask, blew her nose using her finger, wiped her eyes, all the while still
weeping furiously. This was her body. She recalled the first time she had
stumbled onto the flooding of Vastitas, in a solo trip ages ago. That time she
had not cried, but Michel had said that was only shock, the numbness of shock,
as in any injury—withdrawal from her body and her feelings. Michel would call
this response healthier, no doubt, but why? It hurt—her body, spasming in a
seismic trembling. But when it was over, Michel would say, she would feel
better. Drained. A tension gone—the tectonics of the limbic system—she scorned
such simplistic analogies as Michel offered, the woman as planet, it was
absurd. Nevertheless there she sat, sniffling, looking out at the ice bay under
scudding clouds, feeling drained.

Nothing moved except for clouds overhead, and cat’s paws on a
patch of open water, gust after gust, shimmering gray, mauve, gray. Water moved
but the land was still.

Finally Ann stood and walked down a rib of hard old shishovite,
now forming a narrow divide between two long beaches. To tell the truth, above
the ice there was not that much that had changed from the primal state. Down at
the waterline it was a different story. Here the daily trade winds over the
open water of the summer bay had created waves large enough to break the
remaining chunks of ice into what they called brash ice. Lines of this flotsam
were now beached above the current ice level, like ice sculptures depicting
driftwood. But in the summer this ice had helped to rip up the sand of the new
beaches, tearing it into a slurry of ice and mud and sand, now frozen in place
like brown cake frosting.

Ann walked slowly across this mess. Beyond it there was a little
inlet, crowded with ice boulders that had grounded in the shallows and then
been frozen into the sea surface. Exposure to sun and wind had rendered these
boulders into baroque fantasias of clear blue ice and opaque red ice, like
aggregates of sapphire and bloodstone. The south sides of the blocks had melted
preferentially, the meltwater frozen in icicles, ice beards, ice sheets, ice
columns.

Looking back at the shore she saw again how the sand was furrowed
and torn; the damage was terrific, the gouges sometimes two meters
deep—incredible force, to plow such trenches! The sand drifts must have been
loess, made of loose light aeolian deposits. Now a no-man’s-land of frozen mud
and dirty ice, as if bombs had devastated some sad army’s trenches.

She continued outward, stepping on opaque ice. On the surface of the
bay. Like a world covered in semen. Once the ice cracked under her boot.

When she was well out on the bay she stopped and had a look
around. Tight horizons indeed; she climbed a flat-topped berg, which gave her a
larger view over the expanse of ice, out to the circle of the crater rim, just
under the running clouds. Though cracked and jumbled and lined by pressure
ridges, the ice nevertheless clearly conveyed the flatness of the water beneath
it. To the north the gap to the sea was obvious. Tabular bergs stuck out from
the ice like deformed castles. A white waste.

After struggling to come to grips with the scene, and failing, she
clambered off the berg and hiked back to the shore, then back toward her car.
As she was crossing the little ridge cape, movement down at the edge of the ice
caught her eye.

A white thing moved—a person in a white walker, on all fours—no. A
bear. A polar bear. Walking along the edge of the ice.

It spotted the dust devil of skuas over the dead seal. Ann
crouched behind a boulder, went prone on a patch of frosty sand. Cold all along
the front of her body. She looked over the boulder.

The bear’s ivory fur yellowed on its flanks and legs. It raised a
heavy head, sniffed like a dog, looked around curiously. It shambled to the
corpse of the seal, ignoring the column of squealing birds. It ate from the
seal like a dog from a bowl. It raised its head, muzzle dark red. Ann’s heart
pounded. The bear sat on its haunches and licked a paw, rubbed its face until
it was clean, catlike in its fastidiousness. Then without warning it dropped to
all fours and started up the slope of rock and sand, toward Ann’s hiding place
behind the boulder. It trotted, moving both the legs on one side of its body in
the same motion, left, right, left.

Ann rolled down the other side of the little cape and got up and
ran up the trough of a shallow fracture, leading her southwest. Her rover was
almost directly west of her, she reckoned, but the bear was coming from the
northwest. She clambered up the short steep side of the southwest-trending
canyon, ran over a strip of high ground to another little fracture canyon,
trending a bit more to the west than the previous one. Up again, onto the next
strip of high ground between these shallow fossae. She looked back. Already she
was panting, and her rover was still at least two kilometers away, to the west
and a little south. It was still out of sight, behind ragged hillocks. The bear
was north and east of her; if it made directly for the rover it would be almost
as close to it now as she was. Did it hunt by sight or by smell? Could it plot
the course of its prey, and move to cut it off?

No doubt it could. She was sweating inside her windsuit. She
hustled down into the next canyon and ran in it for a while, west southwest.
Then she saw an easy ramp and ran up to the next intercanyon strip, a kind of
wide high road between the shallow canyons on both sides. Looking back she
found herself staring at the polar bear. It stood on all fours, behind and two
canyons over, looking like a very big dog, or a cross between a dog and a
person, draped in straw-white fur. It amazed her to see such a creature out
there, the food chain couldn’t possibly support such a large predator, could
it? They must surely be feeding it at feed stations. Hopefully so, or else it
would be very hungry. Now it dropped into the canyon two over, out of sight,
and Ann started to run down the strip toward her rover. Despite her running
around, and the tight rugged horizon, she was confident of her sense of the
car’s location.

She kept to a pace she thought she could sustain for the whole
distance. It was hard not to let loose and sprint at full speed, but no, no,
that would lead to a collapse eventually. Pace yourself, she thought, gasping
in short pants. Get down off the high ground into a graben so you’re out of
sight. Keep oriented, are you passing south of the rover? Back up to the higher
ground, for just a moment to look. There behind that low flat-topped hill,
which was a small crater, with a hump on the south end of the rim—she was
certain—though the rover was still out of sight, and the jumbled land was easy
to get confused in. A thousand times she had gotten briefly semilost, unsure of
her exact location in relation to some fixed point, usually her parked rover— not
a big deal usually, as her wrist’s APS could always lead her back. As it could
now too, but she was sure it was over there behind that bump of a crater.

The cold air burned in her lungs. She recalled the emergency face
mask in her backpack, and stopped and yanked off the backpack and dug, pulled
off the CO2 mask and put on the air mask; it contained a short supply of
compressed oxygen in its frame, and with it pulled over her mouth and nose and
turned on, she was suddenly stronger, faster, could hold a better pace. She ran
along a strip of high ground between canyons, hoping to get a sighting of the
rover round the slope of the crater apron. Ah, there it was! Panting
triumphantly she sucked down the cool oxygen; it tasted lovely, but was not
enough to stop her gasping. If she went down into the trough to her right it
looked like it would run straight to the rover.

She glanced back and saw the polar bear running too, legs now in a
shambling kind of gallop—lumbering—but it ate up the ground with that run, and
the shallow canyon walls seemed no impediment to it, it flowed over them like a
white nightmare, a thing beautiful and terrifying, the liquid flow of its
muscles loose under thick yellow-tipped white fur. All this she saw in a single
moment of the utmost clarity, everything in her field of vision distinct and
acute and luminous, as if lit from within. Even running as hard as she could,
focusing on the ground to make sure she didn’t trip over anything, she still
saw the bear flowing over the red slope, like an afterimage. Pounding, running
hard, boulder ballet; the bear was fast and the terrain nothing to it, but she
too was an animal, she too had spent years in the back country of Mars, many
more years in fact than this young bear, and she could run like an ibex over
the terrain, from bedrock to boulder to sand to rubble, pushing hard but
perfectly balanced, in control of the dash and running for her life. And
besides the rover was near. Just up one last canyon side, and the slope of the
apron, and there it was, she almost ran into it, stopped, reared up and pounded
the curved metal side with a hard triumphant wham, as if it were the bear’s
snout, and then with a second more controlled punch to the lock door console
she was inside, inside, and the outer-lock door closed behind her.