Blue Mars (20 page)

PART
FOUR

              
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---Green
Earth

              
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On Earth,
meanwhile, the great flood dominated everything.

The flood had been caused by a cluster of violent volcanic
eruptions under the west Antarctic ice sheet. The land underneath the ice
sheet, resembling North America’s basin and range country, had been depressed
by the weight of the ice until it lay below sea level. So when the eruptions
began the lava and gases had melted the ice over the volcanoes, causing vast
slippages overhead; at the same time, ocean water had started to pour in under
the ice, at various points around the swiftly eroding grounding line.
Destabilized and shattering, enormous islands of ice had broken off all around
the edges of the Ross Sea and the Ronne Sea. As these islands of ice floated
away on the ocean currents, the breakup continued to move inland, and the
turbulence caused the process to accelerate. In the months following the first
big breaks, the Antarctic Sea filled with immense tabular icebergs, which
displaced so much water that sea level all over the world rose. Water continued
to rush into the depressed basin in west Antarctica that the ice had once
filled, floating out the rest of it berg by berg, until the ice sheet was
entirely gone, replaced by a shallow new sea roiled by the continuing
underwater eruptions, which were being compared in their severity to the Deccan
Traps eruptions of the late Cretaceous.

And so, a year after the eruptions began, Antarctica was only a
bit over half as big as it had been—east Antarctic like a half-moon, the
Antarctic peninsula like an iced-over New Zealand— in between them, a
berg-clotted bubbling shallow sea. And around the rest of the world, sea level
was seven meters higher than it had been before.

Not since the last ice age, ten thousand years before, had
humanity experienced a natural catastrophe of such magnitude. And this time it
affected not just a few million hunter-gatherers in nomadic tribes, but fifteen
billion civilized citizens, living atop a precarious sociotechnological edifice
which had already been in great danger of collapse. All the big coastal cities
were inundated, whole countries like Bangladesh and Holland and Belize were
awash. Most of the unfortunates who lived in such low-lying regions had time to
move to higher ground, for the surge was more like a tide than a tidal wave;
and then there they all were, somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the
world’s population—refugees.

It goes without saying that human society was not equipped to
handle such a situation. Even in the best of times it would not have been easy,
and the early twenty-second century had not been the best of times. Populations
were still rising, resources were more and more depleted, conflicts between
rich and poor, governments and metanats, had been sharpening everywhere: the
catastrophe had struck in the midst of a crisis.

To a certain extent, the catastrophe canceled the crisis. In the
face of worldwide desperation, power struggles of all kinds were
recontextualized, many rendered phantasmagorical;. there were whole populations
in need, and legalities of ownership and profit paled in comparison to the
problem. The United Nations rose like some aquatic phoenix out of the chaos,
and became the clearinghouse for the vast number of emergency relief efforts:
migrations inland across national borders, construction of emergency
accommodations, distribution of emergency food and supplies. Because of the
nature of this work, with its emphasis on rescue and relief, Switzerland and
Praxis were in the forefront of helping the UN. UNESCO returned from the dead,
along with the World Health Organization. India and China, as the largest of
the badly devastated countries, were also extremely influential in the current
situation, because how they chose to cope made a big difference everywhere.
They made alliances with each other, and with the UN and its new allies; they
refused all help from the Group of Eleven, and the metanationals that were now
fully intertwined into the affairs of most of the Gl 1 governments.

In other ways-, however, the catastrophe only exacerbated the
crisis. The metanationals themselves were cast into a very curious position by
the flood. Before its onset they had been absorbed in what commentators had
been calling the metanatricide, fighting among themselves for final control of
the world economy. A few big metanational superclusters had been jockeying for
ultimate control of the largest industrial countries, and attempting to subsume
the few entities still out of their control: Switzerland, India, China, Praxis,
the so-called World Court countries, and so on. Now, with much of the
population of Earth occupied in dealing with the flood, the metanats were
mostly struggling to regain what control they had had of affairs. In the
popular mind they were often linked to the flood, as cause, or as punished
sinners—a very convenient bit of magical thinking for Mars and the other
antimetanational forces, all of whom were doing their best to seize this chance
to beat the metanats to pieces while they were down. The Group of Eleven and
the other industrial governments previously associated with the metanats were
scrambling to keep their own populations alive, and so could spare little
effort to help the great conglomerates. And people everywhere were abandoning
their previous jobs to join the various relief efforts; Praxis-style
employee-owned enterprises were gaining in popularity as they took on the
emergency, at the same time offering all their members the longevity treatment.
Some of the metanats held on to their workforce by reconfiguring along these
same lines. And so the struggle for power continued on many levels, but
everywhere rearranged by the catastrophe.

In that context, Mars to most Terrans was completely irrelevant.
Oh it made for an interesting story, of course, and many cursed the Martians as
ungrateful children, abandoning their parents in the parents’ hour of need; it
was one example among many of bad responses to the flood, to be contrasted to
the equally plentiful good responses. There were heroes and villains all over
these days, and most regarded the Martians as villains, rats escaping a sinking
ship. Others regarded them as potential saviors, in some ill-defined way:
another bit of magical thinking, by and large; but there was something hopeful
in the notion of a new society forming on the next world out.

Meanwhile, no matter what happened on Mars, the people of Earth
struggled to cope with the flood. The damage now began to include rapid
climactic changes: more cloud cover, reflecting more sunlight and causing
temperatures to drop, also creating torrential rainstorms, which often wrecked
much-needed crops, and sometimes fell where rain had seldom fallen before, in
the Sahara, theMojave, northern Chile—bringing the great flood far inland, in
effect, bringing its impact everywhere. And with agriculture hammered by these
new severe storms, hunger itself became an issue; any general sense of
cooperation was therefore threatened, as it seemed that perhaps not everyone
could be fed, and the cowardly spoke of triage. And so every part of Terra was
in turmoil, like an anthill stirred by a stick.

So that was Earth in the summer of 2128: an unprecedented
catastrophe, an ongoing universal crisis. The antediluvian world already seemed
like no more than a bad dream from which they had all been rudely awakened,
cast into an even more dangerous reality. From the frying pan into the fire,
yes; and some people tried to get them back into the frying pan, while others
struggled to get them off the stove; and no one could say what would happen
next.

An invisible vise
clamped down on Nirgal, each day more crushing than the last.
Maya moaned and groaned about it, Michel and Sax did not seem to care; Michel
was very happy to be making this trip, and Sax was absorbed in watching reports
from the congress on Pavonis Mons. They lived in the rotating chamber of the
spaceship Atlantis, and over the five months of the trip the chamber would
accelerate until the centrifugal force shifted from Mars equivalent to Earth
equivalent, remaining there for almost half the voyage. This was a method that
had been worked out over the years, to accommodate emigrants who decided they
wanted to return home, diplomats traveling back and forth, and the few Martian
natives who had made the voyage to Earth. For everyone it was hard. Quite a few
of the natives had gotten sick on Earth; some had died. It was important to
stay in the gravity chamber, do one’s exercises, take one’s inoculations.

Sax and Michel worked out on exercise machines; Nirgal and Maya
sat in the blessed baths, commiserating. Of course Maya enjoyed her misery, as
she seemed to enjoy all her emotions, including rage and melancholy; while
Nirgal was truly miserable, spacetime bending him in an ever more tortuous torque,
until every cell of him cried out with the pain of it. It frightened him—the
effort it took just to breathe, the idea of a planet so massive. Hard to
believe!

He tried to talk to Michel about it, but Michel was distracted by
his anticipation, his preparation. Sax by the events on Mars. Nirgal didn’t
care about the meeting back on Pavonis, it would not matter much in the long
run, he judged. The natives in the outback had lived the way they wanted to
under UNTA, and they would do the same under the new government. Jackie might
succeed in making a presidency for herself, and that would be too bad; but no
matter what happened, their relationship had gone strange, become a kind of
telepathy which sometimes resembled the old passionate love affair but just as
often felt like a vicious sibling rivalry, or even the internal arguments of a
schizoid self. Perhaps they were twins, who knew what kind of alchemy Hiroko
had performed in the ectogene tanks—but no—Jackie had been born of Esther. He
knew that. If it proved anything. For to his dismay, she felt like his other
self; he did not want that, he did not want the sudden speeding of his heart
whenever he saw her. It was one of the reasons he had decided to join the
expedition to Earth. And now he was getting away from her at the rate of fifty
thousand kilometers an hour, but there she still was on the screen, happy at
the ongoing work of the congress, and her part in it. And she would be one of
the seven on the new executive council, no doubt about it.

“She is counting on history to take its usual course,” May a said
as they sat in the baths watching the news. “Power is like matter, it has
gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself. This local power,
spread out through the tents—” She shrugged cynically.

“Perhaps it’s a nova,” Nirgal suggested.

She laughed. “Yes, perhaps. But then it starts clumping again.
That’s the gravity of history—power drawn into centers, until there is an
occasional nova. Then a new drawing in. We’ll see it on Mars too, you mark my
words. And Jackie will be right at the middle of it—” She stopped before adding
the bitch, in respect for Nirgal’s feelings. Regarding him with a curious
hooded gaze, as if wondering what she might do with Nirgal that would advance
her never-ending war with Jackie. Little novas of the heart.

The last weeks of one g passed, and never did Nirgal begin to feel
comfortable. It was frightening to feel the clamping pressure on his breath and
his thinking. His joints hurt. On the screens he saw images of the little
blue-and-white marble that was the Earth, with the bone button of Luna looking
peculiarly flat and dead beside it. But they were just more screen images, they
meant nothing to him compared to his sore feet, his beating heart. Then the
blue world suddenly blossomed and filled the screens entirely, its curved limb
a white line, the blue water all patterned by white cloud swirls, the
continents peaking out from cloud patterns like little rebuses of
half-remembered myth: Asia. Africa. Europe. America.

For the final descent and aerobraking the gravity chamber’s
rotation was stopped. Nirgal, floating, feeling disembodied and balloonlike,
pulled to a window to see it all with his own eyes. Despite the window glass
and the thousands of kilometers of distance, the detail was startling in its
sharp-edged clarity. “The eye has such power,” he said to Sax.

“Hmm,” Sax said, and came to the window to look.

They watched the Earth, blue before them.

“Are you ever afraid?” Nirgal asked.

“Afraid?”

“You know.” Sax on this voyage had not been in one of his more
coherent phases; many things had to be explained to him. “Fear. Apprehension.
Fright.”

“Yes. I think so. I was afraid, yes. Recently. When I found I
was... disoriented.”

“I’m afraid now.”

Sax looked at him curiously. Then he floated over and put a hand
to Nirgal’s arm, in a gentle gesture quite unlike him. “We’re here,” he said.

Dropping dropping. There were ten space elevators stranding out
from Earth now. Several of them were what they called split cables, dividing
into two branching strands that touched down north and south of the equator,
which was woefully short of decent socket locations. One split cable Y-ed down
to Virac in the Philippines and Oobagooma in western Australia, another to
Cairo and Durban. The one they were descending split some ten thousand
kilometers above the Earth, the north line touching down near Port of Spain,
Trinidad, while the southern one dropped into Brazil near Aripuana, a boomtown
on a tributary of the Amazon called the Theodore Roosevelt River.

They were taking the north fork, down to Trinidad. From their
elevator car they looked down on most of the Western Hemisphere, centered over
the Amazon basin, where brown water veined through the green lungs of Earth.
Down and down; in the five days of their descent the world approached until it
eventually filled everything below them, and the crushing gravity of the
previous month and a half once again slowly took them in its grasp and
squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. What little tolerance Nirgal had developed for
the weight seemed to have disappeared during the brief return to microgravity,
and now he gasped. Every breath an effort. Standing foursquare before the
windows, hands clenched to the rails, he looked down through clouds on the brilliant
blue of the Caribbean, the intense greens of Venezuela. The Orinoco’s discharge
into the sea was a leafy stain. The limb of the sky was composed of curved
bands of white and turquoise, with the black of space above. All so glossy. The
clouds were the same as on Mars but thicker, whiter, more stuffed with
themselves. The intense gravity was perhaps exerting an extra pressure on his
retina or optic nerve, to make the colors push and pulse so hard. Sounds were
noisier.

In the elevator with them were UN diplomats, Praxis aides, media
representatives, all hoping for the Martians to give them some time, to talk to
them. Nirgal found it difficult to focus on them, to listen to them. Everyone
seemed so strangely unaware of their position in space, there five hundred
kilometers over the surface of the Earth, and falling fast.

A long last day. Then they were in the atmosphere, and then the
cable led their car down onto the green square of Trinidad, into a huge socket
complex next to an abandoned airport, its runways like gray runes. The elevator
car slid down into the concrete mass. It decelerated; it came to a stop.

Nirgal detached his hands from the rail, and walked carefully
after all the others, plod, plod, the weight all through him, plod, plod. They
plodded down a jetway. He stepped onto the floor of a building on Earth. The
interior of the socket resembled the one on Pavonis Mons, an incongruous
familiarity, for the air was salty, thick, hot, clangorous, heavy. Nirgal
hurried as much as he could through the halls, wanting to get outside and see
things at last. A whole crowd trailed him, surrounded him, but the Praxis aides
understood, they made a way for him through a growing crowd. The building was
huge, apparently he had missed a chance to take a subway out of it. But there
was a doorway glowing with light. Slightly dizzy with the effort, he walked out
into a blinding glare. Pure whiteness. It reeked of salt, fish, leaves, tar,
shit, spices: like a greenhouse gone mad.

Now his eyes were adjusting. The sky was blue, a turquoise blue
like the middle band of the limb as seen from space, but lighter; whiter over
the hills, magnesium around the sun. Black spots swam this way and that. The
cable threaded up into the sky. It was too bright to look up. Green hills in
the distance.

He stumbled as they led him to an open car—an antique, small and
rounded, with rubber tires. A convertible. He stood up in the backseat between
Sax and Maya, just to see better. In the glare of light there were hundreds of
people, thousands, dressed in astonishing costumes, neon silks, pink purple
teal gold aquamarine, jewels, feathers, headdresses—”Carnival,” someone in the
front seat of the car said up to him, “we dress in costumes for Carnival, also
for Discovery Day, when Columbus arrived on the island. That was just a week
ago, so we’ve continued the festival for your arrival too.”

“What’s the date?” Sax asked.

“Nirgal day! August eleven.”

They drove slowly, down streets lined with cheering people. One
group was dressed like the natives before the Europeans arrived, shouting
wildly. Mouths pink and white in brown faces. Voices like music, everyone
singing. The people in the car sounded like Coyote. There were people in the
crowd wearing Coyote masks, Desmond Hawkins’s cracked face twisted into rubbery
expressions beyond what even he could achieve. And words—Nirgal had thought
that on Mars he had encountered every possible distortion of English, but it
was hard to follow what the Trinidadians said: accent, diction, intonation, he
couldn’t tell why. He was sweating freely but still felt hot.

The car, bumpy and slow, ran between the walls of people to a
short bluff. Beyond it lay a harbor district, now immersed in shallow water.
Buildings swamped in the water stood in patches of dirty foam, rocking on
unseen waves. A whole neighborhood now a tide pool, the houses giant exposed
mussels, some broken open, water sloshing in and out their windows, rowboats
bobbing between them. Bigger boats were tied to streetlights and power-line
poles out where the buildings stopped. Farther out sailboats tilted on the
sun-beaten blue, each boat with two or three taut fore-and-aft sails. Green
hills rising to the right, forming a big open bay. “Fishing boats still coming
in through the streets, but the big ships use the bauxite docks down at Point
T, see out there?”

Fifty different shades of green on the hills. Palm trees in the
shallows were dead, their fronds drooping yellow. These marked the tidal zone;
above it green burst out everywhere. Streets and buildings were hacked out of a
vegetable world. Green and white, as in his childhood vision, but here the two
primal colors were separated out, held in a blue egg of sea and sky. They were
just above the waves and yet the horizon was so far away! Instant evidence of
the size of this world. No wonder they had thought the Earth was flat. The
white water sloshing through the streets below made a continuous krmr sound, as
loud as the cheers of the crowd.

The rank stench was suddenly cut by the smell of tar on the wind.
“Pitch Lake down by La Brea all dug out and shipped away, nothing left but a
black hole in the ground, and a little pond we use locally. See that’s what you
smell, new road here by the water.” Asphalt road, sweating mirages. People
jammed the black roadside; they all had black hair. A young woman climbed the
car to put a necklace of flowers around his neck. Their sweet scent clashed
with the stinging salt haze. Perfume and incense, chased by the hot vegetable
wind, tarred and spiced. Steel drums, so familiar in all the hard noise,
pinging and panging, they played Martian music here! The rooftops in the
drowned district to their left now supported ramshackle patios. The stench was
of a greenhouse gone bad, things rotting, a hot wet press of air and everything
blazing in a talcum of light. Sweat ran freely down his skin. People cheered
from the flooded rooftops, from boats, the water coated with flowers floating
up and down on the foam. Black hair gleaming like chitin or jewels. A floating
wood dock piled with several bands, playing different tunes all at once. Fish
scales and flower petals strewn underfoot, silver and red and black dots
swimming.

Flung flowers flashed by on the wind, streaks of pure color,
yellow pink and red. The driver of their car turned around to talk, ignoring
the road, “Hear the duglas play soaka music, pan music, listen that cuttin
contest, the best five bands in Port a Spain.”

They passed through an old neighborhood, visibly ancient, the
buildings made of small crumbling bricks, capped by corrugated metal roofs, or
even thatch—all ancient, tiny, the people tiny too, brown-skinned, “The
countryside Hindu, the cities black. T ‘n T mix them, that’s dugla.” Grass
covered the ground, burst out of every crack in the walls, out of roofs, out of
potholes, out of everything not recently paved by tarry asphalt—an explosive
surge of green, pouring out of every surface of the world. The thick air
reeked! Then they emerged from the ancient district onto a broad asphalt
boulevard, flanked by big trees and large marble buildings. “Metanat grabhighs,
looked big when they first built, but nothing grab as high as the cable.” Sour
sweat, sweet smoke, everything blazing green, he had to shut his eyes so that
he wouldn’t be sick. “You okay?” Insects whirred, the air was so hot he
couldn’t guess its temperature, it had gone off his personal scale. He sat down
heavily between Maya and Sax.