Blue Mars (56 page)

They got into a rhythm, hopping west after the receding Dawn Wall,
still incandescent across the top of its tall bell curve. It was receding from
them, there was no time to be lost. But they kept falling. The third time,
sprawled in the dust, the landscape a blinding mix of pure white and pure
black, Miguel screamed in pain and then panted out, “Go on, Zo, go save
yourself! No reason both of us should die out here!”

“Oh fuck that,” Zo said, picking herself up.

“Go!”

“I won’t! Shut up now, let me try carrying you.”

He weighed about what he would on Mars, seventy kilos with the
suit, she guessed, more a matter of balance than anything else, so while he
babbled on hysterically, “Let me go, Zo, truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is
all you know and all you need to know,” she leaned over and put her arms under
his back and knees, which caused him to shriek. “Shut up!” she cried. “Right
now this is the truth, and therefore beautiful.” And she laughed as she started
to run with him in her arms.

He blocked her view of the ground directly before them, so she had
to look forward in the blaze-and-black, with sweat in her eyes. It was hard
going, and twice more she fell; but while running she thumped along at a good
speed back toward the city.

Then she felt sunlight on her back. It was like the pricking of
needles, even through her insulated suit. Massive surge of adrenaline; blinded
by the light; some kind of valley aligned to the dawn; then back into the
patchy zone of light-shot shadows, a crazy chiaroscuro; then, slowly, back into
the terminator proper, everything shadowed and dim except for the fiery city
wall, blazing far above. She was gasping hard for air, sweating heavily, hot
from exertion now rather than sunlight. And yet still the sight of the
incandescent arc at the top of the city was enough to make one into a
Mithraist.

Of course even when the city was directly over them, there was no
immediate way of getting back up into it. She had to run past it, on to the
next underground station. Complete focus on running, for minute after minute.
Lactic-acid pain. And there it was, up ahead on the horizon, a door in a hill
beside the tracks; pound and pound over the smoothed regolith. Violent
hammering on the door got the two of them let into the lock and inside, where
they were arrested; but Zo just laughed at the spasspolizei, and got her helmet
off, and Miguel’s, and kissed the sobbing Miguel repeatedly for his clumsiness.
In his pain he didn’t notice, he was latched onto her as a drowning man to a
lifesaver. She only succeeded in disengaging herself from his grasp by banging
him gently on his hurt knee. She laughed out loud at his howl, feeling a rush
pour through her; such adrenaline, so beautiful, rarer by far than any sexual
orgasm, thus more precious. So she kissed Miguel again and again, kisses that
he did not notice, and then she barged through the spasspolizei, claiming
diplomatic status and a need for haste. “Get him some drugs, you fools,” she said.
“A shuttle for Mars is leaving tonight, I have to go.”

“Thank you, Zo!” Miguel cried. “Thank you! You saved my life!”

“I saved my trip home,” she said, and laughed at his expression.
She returned to kiss him some more. “It’s me should be thanking you! Such an
opportunity! Thank you, thank you.”

“No, thank you!”

“No, thank you!”

And even in his agony he laughed. “I love you, Zo.”

“And I love you.”

But if she didn’t hurry she would miss her shuttle.

The shuttle was a pulsed fusion rocket
. and they would reach Earth the day after
tomorrow. And in a decent gravity the whole time, except for during the
somersault.

All manner of things were changing because of this sudden
shrinkage of the solar system. One small result was that Venus was no longer
needed as a gravity handle for rocket travel, and so it was coincidence only
that had Zo’s shuttle, the Nike of Samothrace, passing fairly near to the
shaded planet. Zo joined the rest of the passengers in the big skylight
ballroom to look at it as they passed. The clouds of the planet’s superheated
atmosphere were dark; the planet appeared as a gray circle against the black of
space. The ter-raforming of Venus was proceeding apace, the whole planet in the
shade of a parasol, which was Mars’s old soletta with its mirrors repositioned
so that they did just the opposite of what they had done in front of Mars;
rather than redirect light onto the planet, they reflected it all away. Venus
rolled in darkness.

This was the first step of a terraforming project that many people
deemed mad. Venus had no water, a stupendously thick superheated carbon-dioxide
atmosphere, a day longer than its year, and surface temperatures that would
melt lead and zinc. Not a promising set of initial conditions, it was true, but
people had begun to try anyway, humanity’s reach continuing to exceed its
grasp, even as its grasp became godlike; Zo thought it was wonderful. The
people who had initiated the project were even claiming it could happen faster
than the terraforming of Mars. This was because the complete removal of
sunlight had profound effects; the temperature in the thick carbon-dioxide
atmosphere (ninety-five bar at the surface!) had been dropping by five K a year
for the last half century. Soon the “Big Rain” would begin to fall, and in just
a couple hundred years the carbon dioxide would all be on the planet, in
dry-ice glaciers covering the low parts of the surface. At that point the dry
ice was to be covered by an insulating layer of diamond coating or foamed rock,
and once sealed off, water oceans would be introduced. The water was going to
come from somewhere else, as Venus’s natural inventory would cover it to a
depth of a centimeter or less. The Venusian terraformers, mystics of a new kind
of viriditas, were currently negotiating with the Saturnian League for the
rights to the ice moon Ence-ledus, which they hoped to drive down into Venusian
orbit and break up in successive passes through the atmosphere. This moon’s
water once rained onto Venus would create shallow oceans over about seventy
percent of the planet, entirely covering the wrapped carbon-dioxide glaciers.
An atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen would be left in place, some light would
be let through the parasol, and at that point human settlements would become
possible, on the two high continents Ishtar and Aphrodite. After that, they
would have all the remaining problems of terraforming that Mars had been
dealing with, and they would also have the very long-term, specifically
Venusian projects of removing the CO2 ice sheets from the planet somehow, and
also imparting enough spin to the planet to give it a reasonable diurnal cycle;
for the short term, days and nights could be established using the parasol as a
giant circular Venetian blind, but in the long run they did not want to rely on
something so fragile. With a quiver she imagined it: some centuries hence, a
biosphere and civilization established on Venus, the two continents inhabited,
the beautiful Diana Rift a fair valley, billions of people and animals—and then
one day the parasol knocked awry, and ssssss, a whole world roasted. Not a
happy prospect. And so now, even before the massive flooding and scouring of
the Big Rain, they were trying to lay metallic windings as physicalized
latitude lines around the planet, windings that would, when a fleet of
solar-powered generators were placed in fluctuating orbits around the planet,
make the planet in effect the armature of a giant electric motor, the magnetic
forces of which would create the torque that would increase the planet’s spin.
The system’s designers claimed that, in about the same time it would take to
freeze out the atmosphere and drop an ocean, the impetus of this “Dyson motor”
could speed Venus’s rotation enough to give the planet a weeklong day; so there
they would be, in perhaps three hundred years, down on the transmogrified
world, planting crops. The surface would be massively eroded of course, and
still very volcanic, with carbon dioxide trapped under the seas ready to burst
out and poison them, and weeklong days cooking and freezing them; but there
they would be nevertheless, everything stripped, raw, new.

The plan was insane. It was beautiful. Zo stared up through the
ballroom ceiling at the gibbous gray globe, hopping from foot to foot in her
excitement, in her horror and admiration, hoping to catch a glimpse of the
little dots of the new asteroid moons that were home to the terraform-ing
mystics, or perhaps the coronal arc of a reflection from the annular mirror
that used to be Mars’s. No luck there— only the gray disk of the shaded evening
star, the signet of people who had taken on a task that recontextualized
humanity as a kind of god bacteria, chewing away at worlds, dying to prepare
the ground for later life—dwarfed most grandiosely in the cosmic scheme of
things, in an almost Calvinistic masochist-heroism—a parodic travesty of the
Mars project—and yet just as magnificent. They were specks in this universe,
specks! But what ideas they had. People would do anything for the sake of an
idea, anything.

Even visit Earth. Steaming, clotted, infectious, a human anthill
stuck with a stick; the panic pullulation ongoing in the dreadful mash of
history; the hypermalthusian nightmare at its worst; hot, humid, and heavy; and
yet still, or perhaps because of all that, a great place to visit. And Jackie
wanted her to check in with a couple of people in India anyway. So Zo had taken
the Nike, and would later catch a Mars shuttle from Earth. Before she went to
India to talk to Jackie’s contacts, however, she made her regular pilgrimage to
Crete, to see the ruins that here were still called Minoan, although in Dorsa
Brevia she had been taught to call them Ariadnean. Minos had been the one to
wreck the ancient matriarchy, after all, so it was one of the many travesties of
Terran history that the destroyed civilization should now be named after the
destroyer. But names could be changed.

She wore a rented exoskeleton, made for off-world visitors
oppressed by the g. Gravity was destiny, as they said, and Earth had a lot of
destiny. The suits were like birdsuits without wings, conformable bodysuits
that moved with one’s muscles while providing some undersupport; body bras.
They did not entirely ease the effect of the planet’s pull, for breathing was
still an effort, and Zo’s limbs felt heavy within the suit, so to speak,
pressed down uncomfortably against the fabric. She had gotten used to walking
around in the suits on previous trips, and it was a fascinating exercise, like
weight lifting, but not one that she liked very much. Better than the
alternative, however. She had tried that too, but it was a terrible
distraction, it kept one from really seeing, really being there.

So she walked around the ancient site of Gournia, in the peculiar,
somewhat submarine flow of the suit. Gournia was her favorite of all the
Ariadnean ruins, the only ordinary village of that civilization to have been
found and excavated; the other sites were all palaces. This village had
probably been a satellite of the palace at Malia: now a warren of waist-high
walls made of stacked stones, covering a hilltop overlooking the Aegean. All
the rooms were very small, often one meter by two, with alleys running between
shared walls; little labyrinths, yes, and very much like the whitewashed
villages that still dotted the countryside. People said that Crete had been
hard hit by the great flood, as the Ar-iadneans had been by theirs following
the explosion of Thera; and it was true that all the pretty little fishing
harbors were flooded to one extent or another, and the Ariadnean ruins at
Zakros and Malia entirely drowned. But what Zo saw on Crete was an everlasting
vitality. There was no other place on Earth she had seen that had handled the
population surge as well; everywhere small whitewashed villages clung to the land,
like beehives, covering hilltops, filling valleys, and surrounded by crops and
orchards, with the dry knobby hills still sticking out of the cultivated land,
in sculptured ridges rising to the central spine of the island. The island’s
population had risen to over forty million, she had heard, and yet the island
still looked much the same; there were just more villages, built to match the
pattern not only of the existing ones but of the ancient ones like Gour-nia and
Itanos as well. Town planning with a continuity five thousand years old,
continuity with that first peak of civilization or final peak of prehistory, so
tall as to be glimpsed even by classical Greece a thousand years later,
enduring by oral transmission alone as the myth of Atlantis—and then also in
the shapes of all their subsequent lives, not only on Crete, but now on her
Mars as well. Because of the names used in Dorsa Brevia, and that culture’s
valorization of the Ariadnean matriarchy, the two places had developed a
relationship; many Martians came to Crete to visit the ancient sites, and there
were new hotels near all of them now, built on a slightly larger scale to
accommodate the tall young pilgrims, visiting the holy places station to
station—Phaistos, Gournia, Itanos, Malia and Zakros under the water, even the
ridiculous “reconstruction” at Knossos. They came and saw how it had all begun,
back in the morning of the world. Zo too—standing in the brilliant blue Aegean
light, straddling a stone alleyway five thousand years old, she felt pouring
into her the reverberations of that greatness, up through the spongy red stones
underfoot and into her own heart. Nobility that would never end.

The rest of Earth, however, was Calcutta. Well, that wasn’t really
fair. But Calcutta itself was definitely Calcutta. Fetid humanity at its most
compacted; whenever she went out of her room Zo had at least five hundred
people in her field of vision, and often a few thousand. There was a frightful
exhilaration in the sight of all this life in the streets, a world of dwarfs
and midgets and other assorted small people, all of whom saw her and clumped
like baby birds to a parent who could feed them. Although Zo had to admit that
the clumping was friendlier than that, composed more of curiosity than
hunger—indeed they seemed more interested in her exoskeleton than her. And they
seemed happy enough, thin but not emaciated, even when they were clearly
permanently camped on the streets. The streets themselves were co-ops now,
people had tenure, swept them, regulated the millions of little markets, grew
crops in every plaza, and slept among them too. That was life on Earth in the
late Holocene. After Ariadne it had been downhill all the way.

Zo went up to Prahapore, an enclave in the hills to the north of
the city. This was where one of Jackie’s Terran spies lived, in the midst of a
jammed dorm of harried civil servants, all living at their screens and sleeping
under their desks. Jackie’s contact was a translator programmer, a woman who
understood Mandarin, Urdu, Dravidian and Vietnamese, as well as her Hindu and
English; she also was important in an extensive eavesdropping network, and
could keep Jackie informed concerning some of the Indian-Chinese conversations
about Mars.

“Of course they both will send more people to Mars,” the heavyset
woman said to Zo, after they were out in the compound’s little herb garden.
“That’s a given. But it does look like both governments feel they have their
populations in a long-term solution. No one expects to have more than one child
anymore. It’s not only the law, it’s the tradition.”

“The uterine law,” Zo said.

The woman shrugged. “Possibly so. A very strong tradition, in any
case. People look around, they see the problem. They expect to get the
longevity treatment, and they expect to have a sterility implant at that time.
And in India, anyway, they feel lucky if they get the permits to remove the
implants. And after having one child, people expect to be sterilized for good.
Even the Hindu fundamentalists have changed on this, the social pressure on
them was so great. And the Chinese have been doing this for centuries. The
longevity treatment only reinforced what they had already been doing.”

“So Mars has le^ss to fear from them than Jackie thinks.”

“Well, they still want to send up emigrants, that’s part of the
overall strategy. And resistance to the one-child rule has been stronger in
some Catholic and Muslim countries, and several of those nations would like to
colonize Mars as if it were empty. The threat shifts now, from India and China
to the Philippines, Brazil, Pakistan.”

“Hmm,” Zo said. Talk of immigration always made her feel
oppressed. Threatened by lemmings. “What about the exmetas?”

“The old Group of Eleven is rebanding in support of the strongest
of the old metanats. They will be looking for places to develop. They’re much
weaker than before the flood, but they still have a lot of influence in
America, Russia, Europe, South America. Tell Jackie to watch what Japan does in
the next few months, she’ll see what I mean.” They connected up wristpads so
that the woman could make a secure transfer of detailed information for Jackie.

“Okay,” Zo said. Suddenly she was tired, as if a heavy man had
crawled into the exoskeleton with her and were dragging her down. Earth, what a
drag. Some people said they liked the weight, as if they needed that pressure
to be convinced of their own reality. Zo wasn’t like that. Earth was the very
definition of exoticism, which was fine, but suddenly she longed to be home.
She unplugged her wristpad from the translator’s, imagining all the while that
perfect middle way, that perfect test of will and flesh: the exquisite gravity
of Mars.