Blue Mars Part 21

Naturally in the Vishniac labs the Martian parent material formed the basis for most of the experiments. Eons of dust storms had recycled this material all over the planet, until it had everywhere much the same content: the typical Martian soil unit was made up of fine particles of mostly silicon and iron. At its top it was often loose drift. Below that, varying degrees of interparticle cementation had produced crusty cloddy material, becoming blocky the lower one dug.

Clays, in other words; smect.i.te clays, similar to Terra's montmorillonite and nontronite, with the addition of materials like talc, quartz, hemat.i.te, anhydrite, dieserite, clacite, beidellite, rutile, gypsum, maghemite and magnet.i.te. And everything had been coated by amorphous iron oxyhydroxides, and other more crystallized iron oxides, which accounted for the reddish colors.

So this was their universal parent material: iron-rich smect.i.te clay. Its loosely packed and porous structure meant it would support roots while still giving them room to grow. But there were no living things in it, and too many salts, and too little nitrogen. So in essence their task was to gather parent material, and leach out salt and aluminum, while introducing nitrogen and the biotic community, all as fast as possible. Simple, when put like that; but that phrase biotic community biotic community masked a whole world of troubles. "My G.o.d, it's like trying to get this government to work," Nadia exclaimed to Art one evening. "They're in big trouble!" masked a whole world of troubles. "My G.o.d, it's like trying to get this government to work," Nadia exclaimed to Art one evening. "They're in big trouble!"

Out in the countryside people were simply introducing bacteria to the clay, and then algae and other microorganisms, then lichen, and then halophyllic plants. Then they had waited for these biocommunities to transform the clay into soils, through many generations of living and dying in it. This worked, and was working even now, all over the planet; but it was very slow. A group in Sabishii had estimated that when averaged over the planet's surface, about a centimeter of topsoil was being generated every century. And this had been achieved using genetically engineered populations designed to maximize speed.

In the greenhouse farms, on the other hand, the soils used had been heavily amended by nutrients and fertilizers and inoculants of all kinds; the result was something like what these scientists were trying for, but the quant.i.ty of soil in greenhouses was minuscule compared to what they wanted to put out on the surface. Ma.s.s producing soil was their goal. But they had gotten into something deeper than they had expected, Nadia could tell; they had the vexed absorbed air of a dog gnawing on a bone too big for its mouth.

The biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and ecology involved in these problems were far beyond Nadia's expertise, and there was nothing she could do to make suggestions there. In many cases she couldn't even understand the processes involved. It was not construction, nor even an a.n.a.log of construction.

But they did have to incorporate some construction into whatever production methods they tried, and there Nadia was at least able to understand the issues. She began to concentrate on that aspect of things, looking at the mechanical design of the pedons, and also the holding tanks for the living const.i.tuents of the soil. She also studied the molecular structure of the parent clays, to see if it suggested anything to her about working with them. Martian smect.i.tes were aluminosilicates, she found, meaning each unit of the clay had a sheet of aluminum octahedrals sandwiched between two sheets of silicon tetrahedrals; the different kinds of smect.i.tes had different amounts of variation in this general pattern, and the more variation there was, the easier it was for water to seep into the interlayer surfaces. The most common smect.i.te clay on Mars, montmorillonite, had a lot of variety, and so was very open to water, expanding when wet, and shrinking when dry to the point of cracking.

Nadia found this interesting. "Look," she said to Arne, "what about a pedon filled with a matrix of feeder veins, which would introduce the biota all through the parent material." Take a batch of parent material, she went on, and get it wet, then let it dry. Insert into the crack systems the feeder vein matrix. Then pour in whatever important bacteria and other const.i.tutents they could grow. Then if the bacteria and other creatures could eat their way out of their feeder veins, digesting that material as they emerged, they would all suddenly be there together in the clay, interacting. That would be a tricky time, no doubt many trials would be necessary to calibrate the initial amounts of the various biota needed to avoid population booms and crashes- but if they could get them to settle into their usual communities, then they would suddenly have living soil. "There are feeder-vein systems like this used for certain quick-setting construction materials, and now I hear that doctors feed apat.i.te paste into broken bones the same way. The feeder veins are made of protein gels appropriate to whatever substance they're going to contain, molded into the appropriate tubular structures."

A matrix for growth. Worth looking into, Arne said. Which made Nadia smile. She went around that afternoon feeling happy, and that evening when she joined Art she said, "Hey! I did some work today."

"Well!" Art said. "Let's go out and celebrate."

Easy to do, in Bogdanov Vishniac. It was a Bogdanovist city, all right, as buoyant as Arkady himself. A party every night. They had often joined the evening promenade, and Nadia loved walking along the railing of the highest terrace, feeling that Arkady was somehow there, had somehow persisted. And never more so than on this night, celebrating a bit of work done. She held Art's hand, looked down and across at the crowded lower terraces and their crops, orchards, pools, sports fields, lines of trees, arcuate plazas occupied by cafes, bars, dance pavilions- bands battling for sonic s.p.a.ce, the crowds chugging around them, some dancing but many more simply making the night's promenade, like Nadia herself. All this still under a tent, with tenting that they hoped to remove someday; meanwhile it was warm, and the young natives wore an outlandish array of pantaloons, headdresses, sashes, vests, necklaces, so that Nadia was reminded of the video footage of Nirgal and Maya's reception in Trinidad. Was this coincidence, or was there some supraplanetary culture coming into being among the young? And if there was, did that mean that their Coyote, the Trinidadian, had invisibly conquered the two worlds? Or her Arkady, posthumously? Arkady and Coyote, culture kings. It made her grin to think of it, and she took sips of Art's cup of scalding kavajava, the drink of choice in this cold town, and watched all the young people moving like angels, always dancing no matter what they did, flowing in graceful arcs from terrace to terrace. "What a great little town," Art said.

Then they came upon an old photo of Arkady himself, framed and hung on a wall next to a door. Nadia stopped and clutched Art's arm: "That's him! That's him to the life!"

The photo had caught him talking with someone, standing just inside a tent wall and gesturing, his hair and beard lofting away from his head and blending into a landscape exactly the color of his wild curls. A face coming out of a hillside, it seemed, blue eyes squinting in the glare of all that red glee. "I've never seen a photo that looked so much like him. If he saw a camera pointed at him he didn't like it, and the picture came out wrong."

She stared at the photo, feeling flushed, and strangely happy; such a lifelike encounter! Like running into someone again after years of not seeing them. "You're like him, in some ways, I think. But more relaxed."

"It looks like it would be hard to get much more relaxed than that," Art said, peering closely at the photo.

Nadia smiled. "It was easy for him. He was always sure he was right."

"None of the rest of us have that problem."

She laughed. "You're cheerful like he was."

"And why not."

They walked on. Nadia kept thinking of her old companion, seeing the photo in her mind's eye. There was still so much she remembered. The feelings connected to the memories were fading, however, the pain blunted- the fixative leached out, all that flesh and trauma now only a pattern of a certain kind, like a fossil. And very unlike the present moment, which, looking around, feeling her hand in Art's, was real, vivid, brief, perpetually changing- alive. Anything could happen, everything was felt.

"Shall we go back to our room?"

The four travelers to Earth returned at last, coming down the cable to Sheffield. Nirgal and Maya and Michel went their ways, but Sax flew down and joined Nadia and Art in the south, a move which pleased Nadia no end. She had come to have the feeling that wherever Sax went was the heart of the action.

He looked just as he had before the trip to Earth, and was if anything even more silent and enigmatic. He wanted to see the labs, he said. They took him through them.

"Interesting, yes," he said. Then after a while: "But I'm wondering what else we might do."

"To terraform?" Art asked.

"Well..."

To please Ann, Nadia thought. That was what he meant. She gave him a hug, which surprised him, and she kept her hand on his bony shoulder as they talked. So good to have him there in the flesh! When had she gotten so fond of Sax Russell, when had she come to rely on him so much?

Art too had figured out what he meant. He said, "You've done quite a bit already, haven't you? I mean, at this point you've dismantled all the metanats' monster methods, right? The hydrogen bombs under the permafrost, the soletta and aerial lens, the nitrogen shuttles from t.i.tan-"

"Those are still coming," Sax said. "I don't even know how we could stop them. Shoot them down I guess. But we can always use nitrogen. I'm not sure I'd be happy if they were stopped."

"But Ann?" Nadia said. "What would Ann like?"

Sax squinted again. When uncertainty squinched his face, it reverted to precisely its old ratlike expression.

"What would you both like?" Art rephrased it.

"Hard to say." And his face twisted into a grimace of uncertainty, indecision, split motives.

"You want wilderness," Art suggested.

"Wilderness is a, an idea. Or an ethical position. It can't be everywhere, it's not that kind of idea. But..." Sax waggled a hand, fell back into his own thoughts. For the first time in the century she had known him, Nadia had the sense that Sax did not know what to do. He solved the problem by sitting down before a screen and typing instructions into it. He appeared to forget their presence.

Nadia squeezed Art's arm. He enfolded her hand, and squeezed the little finger gently. It was almost three quarters size now, but slowing down as it got closer to full size. A nail had been started, and on the pad, the delicate whorled ridges of a fingerprint. It felt good when it was squeezed. She met Art's eye briefly, then looked down. He squeezed her whole hand before letting go. After a while, when it was clear Sax was fully distracted, and going to be off in his own world for a long time, they tiptoed off to their room, to the bed.

They worked by day, went out at night. Sax was blinking around as in his lab-rat days, anxious because there was no news of Ann. Nadia and Art comforted him as best they could, which wasn't much. In the evenings they went out and joined the promenade. There was a park where parents congregated with their kids, and people walked by as if pa.s.sing a little open zoo enclosure, grinning at the sight of the little primates at play. Sax spent hours in this park talking to kids and parents, and then he would wander off to the dance floors, where he danced by himself for hours. Art and Nadia held hands. Her finger got stronger. It was almost full size now, and given that it was the littlest finger anyway, it looked full grown unless she held it against its opposite number. Art nibbled it gently sometimes when they were making love, and the sensation drove her wild. "You'd better not tell people about this effect," he muttered, "else it could get grisly- people hacking off body parts to grow them back, you know, more sensitive."

"Sicko."

"You know how people are. Anything for a thrill."

"Don't even talk about it."

"Okay."

But then it was time to get back to a council meeting. Sax left, to find Ann or hide from her, they couldn't be sure; they flew back up to Sheffield, and then Nadia was back into it again, every day pa.r.s.ed into its thirty-minute units of trivia. Except some of it was important. The Chinese application for another s.p.a.ce elevator near Schiaparelli had come up for action, and it was only one of many immigration issues that were facing them. The UN-Mars agreement worked out in Bern stated explicitly that Mars was to take at least ten percent of its population in immigrants every year, with the hope expressed that they would take even more- as many as possible- for as long as the hypermalthusian conditions obtained. Nirgal had made this a kind of promise, had spoken very enthusiastically (and Nadia felt unrealistically) about Mars coming to the rescue, saving Earth from overpopulation with the gift of empty land. But how many people could Mars really hold, when they couldn't even manufacture topsoil? What was the carrying capacity of Mars, anyway?

No one knew, and there was no good way to calculate it scientifically. Estimates of Terra's human carrying capacity had ranged from one hundred million to two hundred trillion, and even the seriously defensible estimates ranged from two to thirty billion. In truth carrying capacity was a very fuzzy abstract concept, depending on an entire recombinant host of complexities such as soil biochemistry, ecology, human culture. So it was almost impossible to say how many people Mars could handle. Meanwhile Earth's population was over fifteen billion, while Mars, with almost as much land surface, had a population a thousand times as small, at right around fifteen million. The disparity was clear. Something would have to be done.

Ma.s.s transfer of people from Earth to Mars was certainly one possibility; but the speed of the transfer was limited by the size of the transport system, and the ability of Mars to absorb the immigrants. Now the Chinese, and indeed the UN generally, were arguing that as a beginning step in a process of intensified immigration, they could build up the transport system very substantially. A second s.p.a.ce elevator on Mars would be the first step in this multistage project.

Reaction on Mars to this plan was mostly negative. The Reds of course opposed further immigration, and while conceding that some would have to happen, they opposed any specific development of the transfer system just to try to keep the process slowed down as much as possible. That position fit their overall philosphy, and made sense to Nadia. The Free Mars position, however, while more important, was not so clear. Nirgal had come out of Free Mars, and had gone to Earth and issued a general invitation to Terrans to shift as many people over as they could. And historically Free Mars had always argued for strong ties with Earth, to attempt the so-called tail-wagging-dog strategy. The current party leadership, however, no longer seemed very fond of this position. And Jackie was in the middle of this new group. They had been shifting toward a more isolationist stance even during the const.i.tutional congress, Nadia recalled, arguing always for more independence from Earth. On the other hand, they had been apparently cutting deals in private with certain Terran countries. So the Free Mars position was ambiguous, perhaps hypocritical; and seemed designed mainly to increase its own power on the Martian scene.

Even setting aside Free Mars, though, there was a lot of isolationist sentiment out there besides the Reds- anarchists, some Bogdanovists, the Dorsa Brevian matriarchs, the MarsFirsters- all tended to side with the Reds on this issue. If millions and millions of Terrans began to pour up onto Mars, they all argued, what then of Mars- not just of the landscape itself, but of the Martian culture that had been forming over the m-years? Wouldn't that be drowned in the old ways brought up by the new influx, which might quickly outnumber the native population? Birth rates were dropping everywhere, after all, and childlessness and one-child families were as common on Mars as on Earth- so there wouldn't be any great multiplication in the native population to look forward to. They would soon be overwhelmed.

So Jackie argued, at least in public, and the Dorsa Brevians and many others agreed with her. Nirgal, just back from Earth, seemed not to be having much effect on that stance. And while Nadia could see the point of her opponents' arguments, she also felt that given the situation on Earth, they were being unrealistic to think they could close Mars down. Mars could not save Earth, as Nirgal had sometimes seemed to say during his visit there; but an agreement with the UN had been made and ratified, and they were committed to letting up at least as many Terrans as the treaty specified. So the bridge between the worlds had to be expanded if they were to meet that obligation, and keep the treaty viable. If they didn't stick to the treaty, Nadia thought, anything might happen.

So in the debate over allowing a second cable, Nadia argued for it. It increased the capacity of the transport system, as they had promised to do, if only indirectly. And it would also take some of the pressure off the towns on Tharsis, and that side of Mars generally; population density maps showed that Pavonis was like the bull's-eye of a target, with people radiating outward from it and settling as near to it as was convenient. Having a cable on the other side of the world would help to equalize things.

But this was a dubious value to the cable's opponents. They wanted the population localized, contained, slowed. The treaty didn't matter to them. So when it came to a council vote, which was only an advisory to the legislature in any case, only Zeyk voted with Nadia. It was Jackie's biggest victory so far, and put her in a temporary alliance with Irishka and the rest of the environmental courts, which were on principle resistant to all forms of swift development.

Nadia went home to her apartment that day, discouraged and worried. "We've promised Earth we'll take lots of immigrants, then pulled up the drawbridge. It's going to lead to trouble."

Art nodded. "We'll have to work something out."

Nadia blew out her breath in disgust. "Work. We won't work work anything out. Work isn't the word for it. We will bicker and d.i.c.ker and argue and natter." She sighed a big sigh. "It will go on and on. I thought Nirgal being back would help, but it won't if he doesn't join in." anything out. Work isn't the word for it. We will bicker and d.i.c.ker and argue and natter." She sighed a big sigh. "It will go on and on. I thought Nirgal being back would help, but it won't if he doesn't join in."

"He doesn't have a position," Art said.

"He could if he wanted one, though."

"True."

Nadia thought about it, her mind wandering as her spirits dropped. "You know I've only gotten through ten months of my term. There's over two and a half m-years to go."

"I know."

"M-years are so d.a.m.ned long."

"Yes. But the months are short."

She made a noise at him. Stared out the window of her apartment, down into Pavonis caldera. "The trouble is that work isn't work anymore. You know, we go out there and join these projects, and the work on them still isn't work. I mean I never get to go out and do do things. I remember when I was young, in Siberia, work was really work." things. I remember when I was young, in Siberia, work was really work."

"You might be romanticizing that a bit."

"Yeah, sure, but even on Mars. I remember putting together Underhill. That was really fun. And one day on our trip to the north pole, installing a permafrost gallery...." She sighed. "What I wouldn't give for work like that again."

"There's still a lot of construction going on," Art pointed out.

"By robots."

"Maybe you could go back to something more human. Build something yourself. A house in the country, or a development. Or one of the new harbor towns, hand-built to try out different things, designs, methods, whatever. It would slow the construction process down, the GEC would go for that."

"Maybe. After my term is over, you mean."

"Or even before. On breaks, like these other trips. They've all been a.n.a.logs to construction, they haven't been construction itself. Building actual things. You have to try that, then go back and forth between the two."

"Conflict of interest."

"Not if it was a public-works project. What about that proposal to build a global capital down at sea level?"

"Hmm," Nadia said. She got out a map, and they pored over it. At the zero-longitude line, the south sh.o.r.e of the northern sea bent out in a little round peninsula, with a crater bay at its center. It was about halfway between Tharsis and Elysium. "We'll have to go take a look."

"Yes. Here, come to bed. We'll talk about it more later. Right now I have another idea."

Some months later they were flying back from Bradbury Point to Sheffield, and Nadia remembered that conversation with Art. She asked the pilot to land at a little station north of Sklodowska Crater, on the slope of Crater Zm, called Zoom. As they descended on the airstrip they saw to the east a big bay, now covered with ice. Across the bay was the rough mountainous country of Mamers Vallis, and the Deuteronilus Mensae. The bay was an incursion into the Great Escarpment, which was here fairly gentle. Longitude zero. Lat.i.tude forty-six degrees north, fairly far north; but the northern winters were mild compared to the south. They could see a lot of the icy sea, lying off a long sh.o.r.eline. The rounded peninsula surrounding Zoom was high and smooth. The little station on the sh.o.r.e was home to about five hundred people, who were out there building with bulldozer and cranes and dredges and draglines. Nadia and Art got out and sent the plane on, and took a boardinghouse room and spent about a week with the people there, talking about the new settlement. The locals had heard of the proposal to build a new capital city here on the bay; some of them liked the idea, some didn't. They had thought of calling their settlement Greenwich because of its longitude, but they had heard the British didn't p.r.o.nounce it "Green Witch," and they didn't know how they felt about spelling the town to sound that way and then calling it "Grenich." Maybe just London, they said. We'll think of something, they said. The bay itself, they said, had long been called Chalmers Bay.

"Really?" Nadia exclaimed. She laughed. "How perfect."

She was already very attracted to the landscape: Zoom's smooth conic ap.r.o.n, the incurve of the big bay; red rock over white ice, and presumably over blue sea, someday. On the days of their visit clouds flowed by constantly, riding the west wind and dappling both land and ice with their shadows- sometimes puffy white c.u.mulus clouds, like galleons, other times scrolled herringbone patterns unrolling overhead, defining the dark dome of sky above them, and the curving rocky land under them. It could be a small handsome city, encircling a bay like San Francisco or Sydney, as beautiful as those two but smaller, human scale- Bogdanovist architecture- hand-built. Well, not exactly hand-built, of course. But they could design it at a human scale. And work on it as a kind of work of art. Walking with Art on the sh.o.r.es of the ice bay, Nadia talked through her CO2 mask about these ideas, while watching the parade of clouds gallop by in the low-rushing air.

"Sure," Art said. "It would work. It's going to be a city anyway, that's the important thing. It's one of the best bays on this stretch of the coast, so it's bound to be used as a harbor. So you wouldn't get the kind of capital city that just sits in the middle of nowhere, like Canberra or Brasilia, or Washington, D.C. It'll have a whole other life as a seaport."

"That's right. That would be great." Nadia walked on, excited as she thought about it, feeling better than she had in months. The movement to establish a capital somewhere else than Sheffield was strong, supported by almost every party up there. This bay had already been proposed as a site by the Sabishiians, so it would be a matter of supporting an already-existing idea, rather than forcing a new one on people. The support would be there. And as a public-works project, building it would be something she could take full part in. Part of the gift economy. She might even be able to have an influence on the plan of it. The more she thought about it, the more pleased she got.

They had walked far down the sh.o.r.e of the bay; they turned around and began to walk back to the little settlement. Clouds tumbled over them on a stiff wind. The curve of red land made its greeting to the sea. Just under the cloud layer, a ragged V of honking geese fletched the wind, heading north.

Later that day, as they flew back to Sheffield, Art picked up her hand and held it, inspecting her new finger. He said slowly, "You know, building a family would also be a very hands-on kind of construction."

"What?"

"And they've got reproduction pretty much figured out."

"What?"

"I said, as long as you're alive, you can pretty much have children, one way or another."

"What?"

"That's what they say. If you wanted to, you could do it."

"No."

"That's what they say."

"No."

"It's a good idea."

"No."

"Well, you know, even building... it's great, sure, but you can only go on plumbing for so long. Plumbing, hammering nails, bulldozing- it's all interesting enough, of course, I guess, but still. We have a lot of time to fill. And the only work really interesting enough to pursue over the long haul would be raising a kid, don't you think?"

"No I do not!"

"But did you ever have a kid?"

"No."