Ecopoiesis. Part 1

Ecopoiesis.

Geoffrey A. Landis.

"I wonder why they call this the red planet?" I asked. The rebreather made my voice sound funny in my ears. "Looks like the brown planet to me."

"You got a problem with brown, boy?" Tally said. Her voice was m.u.f.fled by the rebreather she wore as well.

I turned, but Tally wasn't looking at me; she was watching the opposite direction, standing in a half crouch. That position surely couldn't be comfortable, but for her it looked completely easy and natural. Her head turned with a quick birdlike grace to glance now one way, now the other. Guarding our backs, I realized. Against what?

"Nothing wrong with brown, my opinion," she said.

The more my eyes got used to the terrain, the more colors came out. Brown, yes, barren rocky brown plains and brown b.u.t.tes and a brown stream frothing over a tiny waterfall. The hills were sharp-edged, looking as if they had been blasted out of bedrock the day before, barely touched by erosion. But in the brown was hints of other colors; a sheen of dark, almost purple, echoing the purple-grey of the cloudy sky, and even patches on the rocks where the amber shaded off to almost army green.

"It's beautiful, isn't it," said Leah Hamakawa. She was, as always, two steps ahead of us. She was down on one knee in the dirt, her nose right up against a rock. She'd taken both her gloves off and was sc.r.a.ping the surface of the rock inquisitively with her thumbnail.

I knelt down and scooped up a handful of rocks and dirt in my gloved hand. Close up, I could see that the brown was an illusion. The rocks themselves were the color of brick, but clinging to them were blotches of purple algae and tiny, dark amber specks of lichen. I pulled off one glove so I could feel the texture.

Cold, with a rough grittiness. When I rubbed it between my fingers, the blotches of purple had a slimy feel. I was tempted to try pulling off the rebreather for a moment so I could put it right up to my nose and smell it, but decided that, considering the absence of oxygen in the atmosphere, that would not be wise.

"Beautiful, yeah, right," Tally said. "You got rocks in your head, girl. Stinks.

I seen prettier stinking strip mines."

"It used to be red," Leah said. "Long ago. Before the Age of Confusion; before the ecopoiesis." She paused, then added "I bet it was beautiful then, too."

I looked at the handful of dirt in my palm. Mars. Yes, perhaps it was beautiful.

In its way.

My ears and the flesh of my face in the places not covered by the rebreather were getting cold. The temperature was above freezing, but it was still quite chilly. The air in the rebreather was stale, smelling slightly rotten and distinctly sulfurous. That indicated a problem with the rebreather; the micropore filters in the system should have removed any trace of odor from the recycled air. I thought again about taking the rebreather off and seeing what the air smelled like.

"s.h.i.t," said Tally. "Anyway, you and Tinkerman about done gawking the scenery?

We got a murder to solve. Two murders."

"They've been dead for well over a year," Leah said. "They can wait another day.

G.o.d, isn't this place magnificent?"

"Stinks," said Tally.

The lander was bulbous and squat, painted a pale green, with the name Albert Alligator in cursive script next to the airlock door. Leah and I cycled through the airlock together. Langevin, the pilot who had shuttled us down, was waiting for us in the suiting atrium when the inner lock opened. He opened his mouth to say something, and then abruptly shut it, gagged, and turned away, his hand going up to cover his mouth and nose. He scrambled out of the atrium abruptly. I looked at Leah. She shrugged, and reached up to unfasten the strap of the rebreather from behind her head.

"Let me get that," I said, and she turned around and bent her neck. Any excuse to touch her. Behind me, I could hear Tally cycling through the lock. The strap unfastened, and I gently took a finger and ran it along Leah's cheek, breaking the seal of the rebreather to the skin.

Suddenly she broke away from me. "Oh, G.o.d!"

"What?"

"Take off your rebreather."

Puzzled, I reached up, snapped the strap free, and pulled it forward over my head. The silicone made a soft "poik!" as the seal popped loose. I took a breath, and gagged on the sudden odor.

The smell was as if I'd been wading through a cesspool in the middle of a very rotten garbage dump. I looked down. My shoes were covered in brown. My hands were brown. One leg, where I'd knelt on the ground, had a brown spot on the knee. Leah was even dirtier.

s.h.i.t.

Tally popped through the lock, accompanied by a fresh burst of fecal odor. I held my nose and suppressed my instinct to gag.

"Of course," said Leah. "Anaerobic bacteria." She thought for a second. "We're going to have to find some boots, and maybe overalls. Leave them outside when we come in."

I started to giggle.

"What's so G.o.ddam funny?" Tally said.

"I've decided you're right," I told her. "Mars stinks. Take off your rebreather.

You'll see."

The utility landing platform was a hexagonal truss plate with small rocket engines mounted on three of the six corners. The hab-and-lab module that s.p.a.cewatch was delivering for our stay was strapped on the top. It hovered in the cloudy sky like a flying waffle-iron. Langevin guided it in by remote control, setting it down in the sandy valley a hundred meters from the ruins of the earlier habitat. His landing was as neat and as unconcerned as a man pa.s.sing a plate of potatoes. Still operating by remote control, he unstowed the power crane, lifted the habitat off of the landing platform and lowered it gently to the ground. The habitat itself was an unpainted aluminum cylinder, fixed with brackets onto a platform with an electromechanical jack at each corner to level it on uneven ground. It was a small dwelling for three people, but would be adequate for our stay.

"Man, I don't envy y'all," he said. He delicately pinched two fingers over his nose. "No surprise n.o.body comes here." He shook his head. "Anything else y'all need?"

"How about the rover?" Leah asked.

"It's still in transit from the Moon; won't arrive for a few more days. When it gets here, I'll send it right down."

Tally was first one inside the habitat, of course. Even though it had just come down from s.p.a.ce, like a cat, she had to sniff it out herself. After five minutes she waved us in.

The interior of the habitat was brand new, the fixtures molded to the interior.

Across from the airlock atrium was the air regeneration equipment, with three spherical pressure tanks painted blue to indicate oxygen, and three green-painted tanks of nitrogen to provide make-up gas. To the left was a combined conference room and kitchen area, and behind that the sleeping cubbies.

"Only two cubbies," Tally said, "and a mite cozy ones at that. Guess we girls bunk down in one; give you the other all to yourself, Tinkerman."

I couldn't breathe for a moment. Somehow I managed to sneak a quick glance up.

Tally wasn't looking at me. She hadn't yet realized that the silence was extending a bit too long. Leah glanced across at me. Her expression was neutral, curious, perhaps, as to what I would do. I couldn't read her intention. I never could.

In a very small voice, I said, "I volunteer to share a bunk with Leah."

Tally looked up sharply. Leah gazed back at her, her expression unreadable. But she didn't voice an objection.

"Huh," said Tally. I don't think I'd ever seen Tally at a loss for words. "Well.

Guess I get a cubby to myself." She paused, and then added, almost to herself, "lucky me."

Terraformed Mars had an atmosphere half as thick as Earth's. That was enough pressure for a human to survive, but with no oxygen to breathe. With rebreathers to recirculate exhaust carbon dioxide back into breathable oxygen, we could survive outside comfortably without a vacuum suit. For that matter, you could survive outside stark naked, as long as you had your rebreather, and didn't mind the cold.

Outside again, this time with boots and coveralls to keep the worst of the stinking dirt out of our habitat, we walked in silence across the rock-littered landscape the hundred meters to the place that the earlier habitat had been.

Ragged edges of aluminum stuck out from the platform like ribs. Pieces of the habitat had been scattered across the plain by the wind, a fan-tail of shining metal and shards of composite sheeting visible against the brown all the way to the horizon.

There were two bodies, one within the remains of the exploded habitat, one out on the plain. Not much was left of them. The bodies were barely more than piles of dirt with a rib-cage and part of a pelvis protruding, even the bones covered with the purple-brown of the Martian microbiota. I was glad for the filtering effect of the rebreather. I made videos of the bodies in position while Leah knelt down to examine them and take samples: clothing, hair, skin, tissue. After she examined the one in the habitat, she rose without speaking and went to the one outside. Unlike the other one, the clothing on this one was partly eaten away by bacteria.

Leah's long black hair blew around her face as she worked, but the carbon-dioxide breeze wasn't strong enough to move the pieces of aluminum framework. The wind must have been much stronger to have spread the wreckage so far.

Tally stood, as always, a dozen paces away, eyes restlessly scanning the horizon for enemies.

"We really should have had a doctor to do this a.n.a.lysis," Leah said, standing up. "But a few things are obvious. For example, the man in the habitat had a fractured skull."

"What?"

"But this one," she nodded down at the body she was standing over, "shows no apparent sign of trauma. No rebreather, either, so I'll hazard a guess that carbon dioxide poisoning was what did for him." Leah put the tissue samples into her sample-pack and took a step toward the habitat. "I'll have to let the computer a.n.a.lyze the samples to verify that, of course." She looked around. "Who could have killed them? Why?" She looked up the plain, following the trail of debris. "I think we've seen enough. Tinkerman, you have enough pictures? Does your checklist have anything else?"

I looked down at the list. "No, as far as forensics is concerned, we're done."

"Then, unless you have any further suggestions, do you think maybe we could get them decently buried?"

When there's a fatal incident in s.p.a.ce, of whatever kind, there needs to be an investigation. If it was an accident, the cause has to be found so that s.p.a.cewatch Authority can take appropriate measures to prevent its recurrence, and deliver warning to anybody else with similar equipment.

We were that incident investigation team, Leah and I. Tally, a freelance survival specialist, was our protection. If somebody had killed the two researchers, deliberately blown up their habitat for some as-yet undetermined motive, whoever it was that had killed them might come back.

But n.o.body cared about Mars. The exciting horizons were light-years away, where relativistic probes lasercast back terabits of images, giving the excitement of vistas that anybody could access on optical disk without the danger and discomfort of leaving Earth, and with far stranger life-forms than any mere microbes. Mars was such an uninteresting location that it took over a year before s.p.a.cewatch Authority noticed that a scientific team that had gone there to study microbes hadn't returned. They were the first researchers to bother with an on-site investigation of Mars in over a century.

"It doesn't make sense," I told Leah, back in the habitat. "Why would anybody want to murder two researchers on a stinky planet too close to Earth to even be interesting?"

She shrugged. "Kooks. Bacteria-worshipers. Or, maybe one of 'em had an angry ex."

"It's not as if the planet were exciting," I said. "They tried to terraform it.

They failed. End of story, go home."

"Failed? Tinkerman, you have it all wrong. You should go learn a little history before going on a trip." I could hear her switching into lecture mode. "They didn't try to terraform Mars. They never tried to terraform Mars. What they did was ecopoiesis, and they succeeded spectacularly, more than anybody had a right to expect."

"Ecopoiesis," I said, "terraforming, same thing."

"Not at all."

The way Leah told it, it was part epic, part farce.

It's hard for us, now, to imagine what it was like in the age of confusion, before the fusion renaissance and the second reformation, but the people of the twenty-first century had a technology of chemical rockets and nuclear reactors that, although primitive, had its own crude power. By the middle of the twenty-first century, Mars had been explored, cataloged, and abandoned. It was too cold to harbor life, even of the most primitive sort; the atmosphere was closer to vacuum than to air, and there were far more accessible resources in the asteroids. Mars was uninteresting.

It didn't even make good video. The largest canyon in the solar system-- so big that if you stand in the middle, the walls on both sides were out of sight over the horizon. The biggest mountain in the solar system--but the slope so gentle that it meant nothing on any human scale. Ancient fossil bacteria-- but not even a hint of anything that hadn't been dead and turned to rock a billion years before trilobites crawled the oceans. A hundred spots on Earth and across the solar system were more spectacular. Once somebody had climbed Olympus (and in the low gravity of Mars it wasn't a hard climb), and had placed flags at both poles of Mars, why go back?

The ecopoiesis of Mars was done by a band of malcontents from one of the very first s.p.a.ce settlements, Freehold Toynbee. Habitats--they called them "s.p.a.ce colonies" back then--were crowded, dangerous, undersupplied, constantly in need of repair, and smelly. They were haven to malcontents, ideologues, fanatics, and visionaries: the vanguard of humanity, the divine agents of the manifest destiny of mankind into the universe. More succinctly, the habitats were home to people who couldn't get along with their fellow humans on Earth. Arguments were their way of life.

It was an engineer named Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick who proposed that Toynbee could transform Mars. The people of Toynbee debated the question for a year, arguing every conceivable point of view with a riotous enthusiasm. At the beginning, the consensus of the colony seemed to be that since human destiny was in s.p.a.ce, even to consider living on planetary surfaces could only be idiocy, or some deviant plot to subvert that destiny. But Kirkpatrick was more than just a maverick engineer with wild dreams, he was a man with a divine mission. A year later, the quibble about living on a planetary surface wasn't even part of the argument. Toynbee decided that the right of Mars to remain unchanged was preempted by the imperative of life to spread into new niches. They had convinced themselves that they had not merely a right, but a divine duty to seed life on Mars.

Mars, back then, was completely inhospitable to life. The atmosphere was less than one percent of the Earth's, and the average temperature was far below freezing, even at the equator. But their a.n.a.lysis showed that the climate of Mars just might be unstable. The surface of Mars showed networks of canyons and run-off channels, dry lakes and the seash.o.r.es of ancient oceans. There had been water on Mars, once, a billion years or more ago, and plenty of it. All that water was still there, hidden away. The old scientific expeditions had proven that--frozen in the polar ice-caps, locked into kilometer-thick hills of permafrost in the highlands. They convinced themselves that there was, in fact, far more water on Mars than previously suspected, frozen into enormous buried glaciers under featureless fields of sand. Enough to form whole oceans-- if it could be melted. All that was needed was a trigger.

It's not easy to heat up a planet, even temporarily. They did it by setting off a volcano. There were a number of ancient volcanoes on Mars to choose from; after many geological soundings to determine magma depth, they picked a small one. Or rather, a volcano small by Mars standards, still a monster by the standards of any Earthly mountains. Hecates Tholus; the Witch's Teat. To set it off, they determined, required that they drill five kilometers deep into the crust of Mars.

Just because it was clearly impossible was no reason they wouldn't do it. Mars has no magnetic field, and so the solar wind impacts directly on the planetary exosphere. A thousand miles above Mars, currents of a billion amperes course around the planet, driven by the solar wind-derived ionization. Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick and his team of planetary engineers short-circuited this current with a laser beam, ionizing a discharge channel through the atmosphere, creating the solar system's largest lightning bolt. They discharged the ionosphere of Mars into the side of Hecate, instantly creating a meter-deep pool of molten rock. And then they did it again. And again, as soon as the ionospheric charge had a chance to renew. And again, a new lightning bolt every five minutes, day and night, for ten years.

One million lightning discharges, all on exactly on the same spot. They melted a channel through to the magma chamber below, and a volcano that had been sleeping for almost half a billion years awakened in a cataclysmic explosion. The eruption put carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere; more importantly, it shot a hundred billion tons of ash directly into the stratosphere. Over the course of several months, the ash settled down, blackening the surface.

The new, darker surface absorbed sunlight, warming the planet and releasing adsorbed carbon dioxide from the soil. The released carbon dioxide thickened the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect of the thicker atmosphere warmed the planet yet more. The resulting heat evaporated water from the polar ice caps into the atmosphere. Water in the atmosphere is an effective greenhouse gas, even more effective than carbon dioxide, and so the temperature rose a little more. Finally ice trapped underground for eons melted. A whole hemisphere of Mars was flooded, eventually to form the vast Boreal Ocean, as well as innumerable crater seas and ponds. But that was much later. In the beginning, in Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick's lifetime, only on a band around the equator was water actually liquid all year round. But that was enough for what they wanted to do.

Slowly, the eons-frozen permafrost of Mars was melting.

The atmosphere was still thin, and still almost entirely carbon dioxide, But Mars is a sulfur-rich planet. Sulfur dioxide frozen into the soil was also released, and rose into the atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from the sun photolyzed the sulfur dioxide into free radicals, which recombined to form sulfuric acid, which instantly dissolved into the new equatorial oceans . The new acid oceans attacked the ancient rocks of Mars, etching away calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, releasing carbon dioxide. In a few years, the acid oceans had been once more neutralized-- and the atmosphere was thick, fully half a bar of carbon dioxide, enough for a greenhouse effect warm enough to keep the new oceans liquid year round.

Mars had been triggered.

But how to keep this new atmosphere, to keep the planet warm? Not even Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick could keep a volcano erupting forever, and already the Witch's t.i.t was settling down from an untamed explosion of ash to a sedate mound of slowly-oozing lava.

Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick's answer was bacteria. Anaerobic bacteria, to live in the oxygen-free atmosphere of Mars.

"Sewer bacteria," I said.

"You got it, Tinkerman. Anaerobic bacteria-- modified sewer organisms. Yeasts, slime-molds, cyan.o.bacteria, methanogens and halophiles as well; but all in all, bacteria closer to gangrene than to higher life."

"No wonder it stinks." I shuddered. "They were crazy."

"Not so. They were, in fact, very clever. They engineered a whole anaerobic ecology. The bacterial ecology darkened the surface, taking over the job of the volcanic ash. It burrowed into the rocks and broke them apart into soil, releasing adsorbed carbon dioxide in the process. The methanogens added methane, a vitally important greenhouse gas, to that atmosphere, and raised the temperature another few degrees. They didn't dare establish too many photosynthetic forms, of course, because if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to be converted into oxygen, the greenhouse effect that kept the planet warm would vanish, and the planet would return to its lifeless, frozen state.

"But terraforming Mars hadn't been their goal in the first place; in fact, terraforming was the very ant.i.thesis of what they intended. Their goal was ecopoiesis, the establishment of an ecology. They were Darwinists, and diversity was their creed. They looked down in contempt on unimaginative humans who believed that humans were the pinnacle of creation; they saw humanity as only agents of life, spore-pods by which life could jump from one world to another.

They believed that once life, however primitive, could establish a toe-hold on Mars, it would adapt to its environment, and flourish, and someday evolve. Not to make a copy of Earth, but into something new, something indigenously Martian."

"So they wanted to be G.o.ds."