Blue Mars (31 page)

She hurried upstairs to the driver’s aerie to look back. Through
the glass she saw the polar bear below, inspecting her vehicle from a
respectful distance. Out of dart-gun range, sniffing thoughtfully. Ann was
sweating hard, still gasping hard for air, in and out, in and out—what violent
paroxysms the rib cage could go through! And there she was, sitting safe in the
driver’s seat! She only had to close her eyes and she saw again that heraldic
image of the bear flowing over the rock; but open them and there the dashboard
gleamed, bright and artificial and familiar. Ah so strange!

She was still in a kind of shock a couple of days later, able to
see the polar bear if she closed her eyes and thought about it; distracted. By
night the ice in the bay boomed and groaned, sometimes cracked explosively, so
that she dreamed of the assault on Sheffield, groaning herself. By day she
drove so carelessly that she had to put the rover on automatic pilot,
instructing it to make its way along the shore of the crater bay.

While it rolled she wandered around the driver’s compartment, her
mind racing. Out of control. Nothing to be done but laugh and endure it. Strike
the walls, stare out the windows. The bear was gone but it wasn’t. She looked
it up: Ursus maritimus, ocean bear; the Inuit called it Tomassuk, “the one who
gives power.” It was like the landslide that had almost caught her in Melas
Chasma, now a part of her life forever. Facing the landslide she had not moved
a muscle; this time she had run like hell. Mars could kill her, no doubt it
would kill her, but no big zoo creature from Earth was going to kill her, not
if she could help it. Not that she was so enamored of life, far from it; but
one should be free to choose one’s death. As she had chosen in the past, twice
at least. But Simon and then Sax—like little brown bears— had snatched her
death away from her. She still didn’t know what to make of that, how to feel
about it. Her mind was racing so fast. She held on to the back of the driver’s
seat. Finally she reached forward and punched Sax’s old First Hundred number on
the rover’s screen keyboard, XY23, and waited for the AI to route the call to
the shuttle returning Sax and the others to Mars; and after a while there he
was, with his new face, staring into a screen.

“Why did you do it?” she shouted. “It’s my death to choose as I
please!”

She waited for the message to reach him. Then it did and he
jumped, the image of him jiggled. “Because—” he said, and stopped.

Ann felt a chill. That was just what Simon had said, after he had
pulled her back in out of the chaos. They never had a reason, only life’s idiot
because.

Sax went on: “I didn’t want—it seemed like such a waste—what a
surprise to hear from you. I’m glad.”

“To hell with that,” Ann said.

She was about to cut the connection when he started speaking
again—they were in simultaneous transmission now, alternating messages, “It was
so I could talk to you, Ann. I mean it was for myself—I didn’t want to be
missing you. I wanted you to forgive me. I wanted to argue with you more
and—and make you see why I’ve done what I’ve done.”

His chatter stopped as abruptly as it had started, and then he
looked confused, even frightened. Perhaps he had just heard “To hell with
that.” She could scare him, no doubt of that.

“What crap,” she said.

After a while: “Yes. Um—how are you doing? You look. . . .”

She cut the connection. I just outran a polar bear! She shouted in
her mind. I was almost eaten by your stupid games!

No. She wouldn’t tell him. The meddler. He had needed a good
referee for his submissions to The Metajournal of Martian History, that was
what it came down to. Making sure his science was properly peer-reviewed—for
that he would crash around in a person’s most inward desires, in her essential
freedom to choose life or death, to be a free human being!

At least he hadn’t tried to lie about it.

And—well—here she was. Rage; remorse without cause; inexplicable
anguish; a strangely painful exhilaration: all this filled her at once. The
limbic system, vibrating madly, spiking every thought with contradictory wild
emotions, disconnected from the thoughts’ content: Sax had saved her, she hated
him, she felt a fierce joy, Kasei was dead, Peter wasn’t, no bear could kill
her, etc.—on and on and on. Oh so strange!

She spotted a little green rover, perched on a bluff over the ice
bay. Impulsively she took over the wheel and drove up to it. A little face
peered out at her; she waved through the windshields at it. Black
eyes—spectacles—bald. Like her stepfather. She parked her rover next to his.
The man gestured for her to come over, holding up a wooden spoon. He looked
vague, only half pulled out of his own thoughts.

Ann put on a down jacket and went through the lock doors and
walked between the cars, feeling the shock of the frigid air like a dousing in
cold water. It was nice to be able to walk between one rover and another
without suiting up, or, to get to the crux of the matter, risking death.
Amazing that more people hadn’t been killed by carelessness or lock malfunction.
Some had been, of course. Scores, probably, if you added them all up. Now it
was just a dash of cold air.

The bald man opened his inner-lock door. “Hello,” he said, and
offered a hand. “Hello,” Ann said, and shook it. “I’m Ann.” “I’m Harry. Harry Whitebook.”
“Ah. I’ve heard of you. You design animals.” He smiled gently. “Yes.” No shame;
no defensiveness. “I was just chased by one of your polar bears.” “Were you!”
His eyes opened round. “Those are fast!”

“So they are. But they’re not just polar bears, are they.”

“They’ve got some grizzly genes, for altitude. But mostly it’s
just Ursus maritimus. They’re very tough creatures.”

“A lot of creatures are.”

“Yes, isn’t it marvelous? Oh excuse me, have you eaten? Would you
like some soup? I was just making soup, leek soup, I guess it must be obvious.”

It was. “Sure,” Ann said.

Over soup and bread she asked him questions about the polar bear.
“Surely there can’t be a whole food chain here for something that huge?”

“Oh yes. In this area there is. It’s well-known for that— the
first bioregion robust enough for bears. The bay is liquid to the bottom, you
see. The Ap mohole is at the center of the crater, so it’s like a bottomless
lake. Iced over in winter of course, but the bears are used to that from the
Arctic.”

“The winters are long.”

“Yes. The female bears make dens in the snow, near some caves in
dike outcroppings to the west. They don’t truly hibernate, their body
temperatures drop just a few degrees, and they can wake up in a minute or two,
if they need to adjust the den for heat. So they den for as much of the winters
as they can, then live in there and forage out till spring. Then in spring we
tow some of the ice plates through the mouth of the bay out to sea, and things
develop from there, bottom to top. The basic chains are Antarctic in the water,
Arctic on the land. Plankton, krill, fish and squid, Weddell seals, and on land
rabbits and h’ares, lemmings, marmots, mice, lynx, bobcat. And the bears. We’re
trying with caribou and reindeer and wolves, but there isn’t the forage for
ungulates yet. The bears have been out just a few years, the air pressure
hasn’t been adequate until recently. But it’s a four-thousand-meter equivalent
here now, and the bears do very well with that, we find. They adapt very quickly.”

“Humans too.”

“Well, we haven’t seen too much at the four-thousand-meter level
yet.” He meant four thousand meters above sea level on Earth. Higher than any
permanent human settlement, as she recalled.

He was going on: “... eventually see thoracic-cavity expansion,
bound to happen....” A man who talked to himself. Big, bulky; white fur in a
fringe around his bald pate. Black eyes swimming behind round spectacles.

“Did you ever meet Hiroko?” she said.

“Hiroko Ai? I did, once. Lovely woman. I hear she’s gone back to
Earth, to help them adapt to the flood. Did you know her?”

“Yes. I’m Ann Clayborne.”

“I thought so. Peter Clayborne’s mother, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“He’s been in Boone recently.”

“Boone?”

“That’s the little station across the bay. This is Botany Bay, and
the station is Boone Harbor. A kind of joke. Apparently there was a similar
pairing in Australia.”

“Indeed.” She shook her head. John would be with them forever. And
by no means the worst of the ghosts haunting them.

As for instance this man, the famous animal designer. He clattered
about the kitchen, pawing at things shortsightedly. He put the soup before her
and she ate, watching him furtively as she did. He knew who she was, but he did
not seem uncomfortable. He did not try to justify himself. She was a red
areologist, he designed new Martian animals. They worked on the same planet.
But that did not mean they were enemies, not to him. He would eat with her
without malice. There was something chilling in that, overbearing despite his
gentle manner. Obliviousness was so brutal. And yet she liked him; that
dispassionate power, vagueness—something. He bumbled around his kitchen, sat
and ate with her, quickly and noisily, his muzzle wet with the clear soup
stock. Afterward they broke pieces of bread from a long loaf. Ann asked
questions about Boone Harbor.

“It has a good bakery,” Whitebook said, indicating the loaf. “And
a good lab. The rest is just an ordinary outpost. But we took the tent down
last year, and now it is very cold, especially in the winter. Only forty-six
degrees latitude, but we feel it as a northern place. So much so that there is
some talk of putting the tent back up, in winter at least. And there are people
who say we should leave it on until things warm up.” “Till the ice age is
over?”

“I don’t think there will be an ice age. This first year without
the soletta was bad, of course, but various compensations ought to be possible.
A cold couple of years, that’s all it will be.”

He waggled a paw: it could go either way. Ann almost threw her
chunk of bread at him. But best not to startle him. She controlled herself with
a shudder.

“Is Peter still in Boone?” she asked.

“I think so. He was a few days ago.”

They talked some more about the Botany Bay ecosystem. Without a
fuller array of plant life, animal designers were sharply limited; it was still
more like the Antarctic than the Arctic in that respect. Possibly new
soil-enhancement methods could speed the arrival of higher plants. Right now it
was a land of lichen, for the most part. The tundra plants would follow.

“But this displeases you,” he observed.

“I liked it the way it was before. All Vastitas Borealis was
barchan dunes, made of black garnet sand.”

“Won’t some remain, up next to the polar cap?”

“The ice cap will go right down to the sea line in most places. As
you say, kind of like Antarctica. No, the dunes and the laminate terrain will
be underwater, one way or another. The whole northern hemisphere will be gone.”

“This is the northern hemisphere.”

“A highland peninsula. And it’s gone too, in a way. Botany Bay was
Arcadia Crater Ap.”

He looked at her through the spectacles, peering. “Perhaps if you
lived at high altitude, it might seem like the old days. The old days, with
air.”

“Perhaps,” she said cautiously. He was circling the chamber,
shambling about with heavy steps, cleaning big kitchen knifes at the sink. His
fingers ended in short blunt claws; even clipped they made it hard for him to
work with small objects.

She stood up carefully. “Thanks for dinner,” she said, backing toward
the lock door. She grabbed her jacket on the way out and slammed the door on
his look of surprise. Out into the hard cold slap of the night, into her
jacket. Never run away from a predator. She walked back to her car and climbed
in without looking back.

The ancient highland of Tempe Terra
was dotted by a number of small
volcanoes, so there were lava plains and channels everywhere; also viscous
creep features caused by ground ice, and the occasional small outflow channel
that had run down the side of the Great Escarpment; all this along with the
usual collection of Noachian impact and deformational features, so that on the
areological maps Tempe looked like an artist’s palette, colors splashed
everywhere to indicate the different aspects of the region’s long history. Too
many colors, in Ann’s opinion; for her the smallest divisions into different
areological units were artificial, remnants of sky areology, attempting to
distinguish between regions that were more cratered or more dissected or more etched
than the rest, when in the field it was all one, with all of the signature
features visible everywhere. It was simply rough country—the Noachian
landscape, none rougher.

Even the floors of the long straight canyons called the Tempe
Fossa were too broken to drive over, so Ann made her way indirectly, on higher
land. The most recent lava flows (a billion years old) were harder than the
disaggregated ejecta they had run over, and now they stood on the land as long
dikes or berms. On the softer land between there were a lot of splosh craters,
their aprons clearly the remnants of liquid flow, like drip castles at the
beach. Occasional islands of worn bedrock stuck up out of all this debris, but
by and large it was regolith, with signs everywhere of water in the land, of
the permafrost underfoot, causing slow slumps and creeps. And now, with the
increase in temperatures, and perhaps the heat coming up from the Vastitas
underground explosions, all that creep had speeded up. There were new
landslides all over the place: a well-known Red trail had been wiped out when a
ramp into Tempe 12 had been buried; the walls of Tempe 18 had collapsed on both
sides, making a U-shaped canyon into a V-shaped one; Tempe 21 was gone, covered
by the collapse of its high west wall. Everywhere the land was melting. She
even saw some taliks, which were liquified zones on top of permafrost,
basically icy swamps. And many of the oval pits of the great alases were filled
with ponds, which melted by day and froze by night, an action that tore the
land apart even faster.

She passed the lobate apron of Timushenko Crater, buried on its
northern flank by the southernmost waves of lava from Coriolanus Volcano, the
largest of the many little volcanoes in Tempe. Here the land was extensively
pitted, and snow had fallen, melted and then refrozen in myriad catchment
basins. The land was slumping in all the characteristic permafrost patterns:
polygonal pebble ridges, concentric crater fill, pingos, solifluction ridges on
hillsides. In every depression an ice-choked pond or puddle. The land was
melting.

On sunny south-facing slopes, wherever there was a bit of
protection from the wind, trees were growing, over un-derstories of moss and
grass and shrub. In the sun-filled hollows were krummholz dwarf trees, gnarled
over their matted needles; in the shaded hollows, dirty snow and firn. The
ruination of so much land. Broken land, empty but not empty, rock and ice and
boggy meadow all lined by shattered low ridges. Clouds puffed out of nothing in
the afternoon heat, and their shadows were another set of patches on things, a
crazy quilt of red and black, green and white. No one would ever complain of
homogeneity on Tempe Terra. Everything perfectly still under the rapidly moving
shadows of the clouds. And yet there, one evening in the dusk, a white bulk
slipping behind a boulder. Her heart jumped, but there was nothing further to
see. But she had seen something; because just before full darkness, there was a
knocking at the door. Her heart shuddered like the rover on its shock
absorbers, she ran to a window, looked out. Figures the color of the rock,
waving hands. Human beings.

It was a little group of Red ecoteurs. They had recognized her
rover, they said after she let them inside, from the description given by the
people at the Tempe refuge. They had been hoping they might run into her, and
so they were happy; laughing, chattering, moving around the cabin to touch her,
young tall natives with stone eyeteeth and gleaming young eyes, some of them
Orientals, some white, some black. All happy. She recognized them from Pavonis
Mons, not individually, but as a group; the young fanatics. Again she felt a
chill.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To Botany Bay,” a young woman replied. “We’re going to take out
the Whitebook labs.”

“And Boone Station,” another added.

“Ah no,” Ann said.

They went still, looked at her carefully. Like Kasei and Dao in
Lastflow.

“What do you mean?” the young woman said.

Ann took a breath, tried to figure that out. They were watching
her closely.

“Were you there in Sheffield?” she asked.

They nodded; they knew what she meant.

“Then you should know already,” she said slowly. “It’s pointless
to achieve a red Mars by pouring blood over the planet. We have to find another
way. We can’t do it by killing people. Not even by killing animals or plants,
or blowing up machines. It won’t work. It’s destructive. It doesn’t appeal to
people, do you understand? No one is won over. In fact they’re put off. The
more we do things like that, the more green they become. So we defeat our
purpose. If we know that and do it anyway, then we’re betraying the purpose. Do
you understand? We aren’t doing it for anything but our own feelings. Because
we’re angry. Or for thrills. We have to find another way.”

They stared at her, uncomprehending, annoyed, shocked,
contemptuous. But riveted. This was Ann Clayborne, after all.

“I don’t know for sure what that other way is,” she went on. “I
can’t tell you that. I think ... that’s what I think we have to start working
on. It has to be something like a red areophany. The areophany has always been
understood as a green thing, right from the start. I suppose because of
Hi-roko, because she took the lead in defining it. And in bringing it into
being. So the areophany has always been mixed up with viriditas. But there’s no
reason that should be. We have to change that, or we’ll never accomplish
anything. There has to be a red worship of this place that people can learn to
feel. The redness of the primal planet has to become a counterforce to
viriditas. We have to stain that green until it turns some other color. Some
color like you see in certain stones, like jasper, or ferric serpentine. You
see what I mean. It will mean taking people out onto the land, maybe, up into
the highlands, so they can see what it is. It will mean moving there, all over
the place, and establishing tenure and stewardship rights, so that we can speak
for the land and they will have to listen. Wanderers’ rights as well,
ar-eologists’ rights, nomads’ rights. That’s what areoformation might mean. Do
you understand?”

She stopped. The young natives were still attentive, now looking
perhaps concerned for her, or concerned at what she had said.

“We’ve talked about this kind of thing before,” one young man
said. “And there are people doing it. Sometimes we do it. But we think an
active resistance is a necessary part of the struggle. Otherwise we’ll just get
steamrolled. They’ll green everything.”

“Not if we stain it all. Right from the inside, right from their
hearts too. But sabotage, murder; it’s green that springs out of all that,
believe me I’ve seen it. I’ve been fighting just as long as you and I’ve seen
it. You stomp on life and it just comes back stronger.”

The young man wasn’t convinced. “They gave us the six-kilometer
limit because they were scared of us, because we were the driving force behind
the revolution. If it weren’t for us fighting, the metanats would still rule
everything here.”

“That was a different opponent. When we fought the Ter-rans, then
the Martian greens were impressed. When we fight the Martian greens they’re not
impressed, they’re angry. And they get more green than ever.”

The group sat in silence, thoughtful, perhaps disheartened.

“But what do we do?” a gray-haired woman said.

“Go to some land that’s endangered,” Ann suggested. She gestured
out the window. “Right here wouldn’t be bad. Or somewhere near the six-k
border. Settle, incorporate a town, make it a primal refuge, make it a
wonderful place. We’ll creep back down from the highlands.”

They considered this glumly.

“Or go into the cities and start a tour group, and a legal fund.
Show people the land. Sue every change they propose.”

“Shit,” the young man said, shaking his head. “That sounds awful.”

“Yes it does,” Ann said. “There’s ugly work to be done. But we
have to get them from the inside too. And that’s where they live.”

Long faces. They sat around and talked about it some more; the way
they lived now, the way they wanted to live. What they might do to get from one
to the other. The impossibility of the guerrilla life after the war was over.
And so on. There were lots of big sighs, some tears, recriminations,
encouragements.

“Come with me tomorrow and take a straight look at this ice sea,”
Ann suggested.

The next day the guerrilla group traveled south with her along the
sixtieth longitude, kilometer by difficult kilometer. Khala, the Arabs called
it; the empty land. On the one hand it was beautiful, a Noachian desolation of
rockscapes, and their hearts were full. On the other hand the ecoteurs were
quiet, subdued, as if on a pilgrimage in some uncertain funereal mode. Together
they came to the big canyon called Nilokeras Scopulus, and dropped into it on a
broad rough natural ramp. To the east lay Chryse Planitia, covered by ice:
another arm of the northern sea. They had not escaped it. Ahead to the south
lay the Nilokeras Fossae, the terminal end of a canyon complex that began far
to the south, in the enormous pit of Hebes Chasma. Hebes Chasma had no exit,
but its subsidence was now understood to have been caused by the aquifer
outbreak just to the west, at the top of Echus Chasma. A very great amount of
water had gushed down Echus against the hard western side of Lunae Planum,
carving the steep high cliff at Echus Overlook; then it had come to a. break in
that stupendous cliff, and had rushed down and through, tearing the big bend of
Kasei Vallis, and cutting a deep channel out onto the lowlands of Chryse. It
had been one of the biggest aquifer outbreaks in Martian history.

Now the northern sea had flowed back into Chryse, and water was
filling back into the lower end of Nilokeras and Kasei. The flat-topped hill
that was Sharanov Crater stood like a giant castle keep on the high promontory
over the mouth of this new fjord. Out in the middle of the fjord lay a long
narrow island, one of the lemniscate islands of the ancient flood, now islanded
again, stubbornly red in the sea of white ice. Eventually this fjord would make
an even better harbor than Botany Bay: it was steep-walled, but there were benches
tucked here and there that could become harbor towns. There would of course be
the west wind funnel-ing down Kasei to worry about, katabatic onslaughts
holding the sailing ships out in the Chryse Gulf. . . .

So strange. She led the group of silent Reds to a ramp that got
them down onto a broad bench to the west of the ice fjord. By then it was
evening, and she led them out of the rovers and down to the shore for a suhset
walk.

At the moment of sunset itself, they found themselves standing in
a tight unhappy cluster before a solitary ice block some four meters tall, its
melted convexities as smooth as muscle. They stood so that the sun was behind
the ice block and shining through it. To both sides of the block brilliant
light gleamed off the glassy wet sand. An admonition of light. Undeniable,
blazingly real; what were they to make of it? They stood and stared in silence.

When the sun blinked out over the black horizon, Ann walked away
from the group and went alone up to her rover. She looked back down the slope;
the Reds were still there by the beached iceberg. It looked like a white god
among them, tinted orange like the crumpled white sheet of the ice bay. White
god, bear, bay, a dolmen of Martian ice: the ocean would be there with them
forever, as real as the rock.