Blue Mars (38 page)

But it seemed to Nadia that if the Red justices looked carefully
at the proposal, they would have to be amazed at Sax’s approach. Indeed it
represented a kind of road-to-Damascus conversion—inexplicable, given Sax’s
history. Unless you knew all of it. But Nadia understood: he was trying to
please Ann. Nadia doubted that was possible, but she liked to see Sax try. “A
man full of surprises,” she remarked to Art.

“Brain trauma will do that.”

In any case, when the conference was done they had designed an
entire hydrography, designating all the future major lakes and rivers and
streams of the southern hemisphere. The plan would eventually have to be
integrated with similar plans for the northern hemisphere, which were in
considerable disarray by comparison, because of the uncertainty about just how
big the northern sea was going to be. Water was no longer being actively pumped
up out of permafrost and aquifers—indeed many of the pumping stations had been
blown up in the last year by Red ecoteurs— but some water was still rising,
under the weight put on the land by the water already pumped. And summer runoff
was flowing into Vastitas, more every year, both from the northern polar cap
and the Great Escarpment; Vastitas was the catchment basin for huge watersheds
on all sides. So a lot of water was going to pour into it every summer. On the
other hand, a lot of water was always being stripped off by the arid winds,
eventually precipitating elsewhere. And water would evaporate much faster than
the ice currently there was subliming. So calculating how much was leaving and
how much coming back was a modeler’s field day, and estimates were still all
over the map, literally so in that differences in prediction led to putative
shorelines that were in some cases hundreds of kilometers apart.

That uncertainty would delay any GECO on the south, Nadia thought;
in essence the court had to try to correlate all the current data, and evaluate
the models, and then prescribe a sea level, and approve all watersheds
accordingly. The fate of Argyre Basin in particular seemed impossible to decide
at this point, before there was a northern plan; some plans called for pumping
water up into Argyre from the northern sea if the northern sea got too full, to
avoid flooding the Marineris canyons, South Fossa, and the new harbor towns
being built. Radical Reds were already threatening to build “west-bank
settlements” all over Argyre to forestall any such move.

So the GEC had yet another big issue to solve. Clearly it was
becoming the most important political body on Mars; with the constitution and
its own previous rulings to guide it, it was ruling on almost every aspect of
their future. Nadia thought that was probably as it should be; or at least that
there was nothing wrong with it. They needed decisions with global
ramifications reviewed globally, that was what it came down to.

But come what may in the courts, a provisional plan for the
southern hemisphere had at least been formulated. And to everyone’s surprise,
the GEC gave the plan a positive preliminary judgment very soon after it was
submitted—because, their ruling said, it could be activated in stages as water
fell on the south, and it proceeded in much the same fashion through its first
stages no matter what the eventual sea level in the north became. So there was
no reason to delay beginning.

Art came in beaming with the news. “We can begin plumbing,” he
said.

But of course Nadia couldn’t. There were meetings in Sheffield to
go back to, decisions to be made, people to be convinced or coerced. Doggedly
she did that work, stubbornly doing her duty whether she liked it or not, and
as time passed she got better and better at it. She saw how she could subtly
pressure other people to get her way; saw how people would do her bidding if
she asked or suggested in certain ways. The constant stream of decisions honed
some of her views; she found that it helped to have at least some consciously
held political principles, rather than judging each case by instinct. It also
helped to have reliable allies, on the council and elsewhere, rather than being
a supposedly neutral and independent person. And so by degrees she found
herself joining the Bogdanovists, who, to her surprise, conformed more closely
to her political philosophy than anything else on Mars. Of course her reading
of Bog-danovism was relatively simple: things should be just, Arkady had
insisted, and everyone free and equal; the past didn’t matter; they needed to
invent new forms whenever the old ones looked unfair or impractical, which was
often; Mars was the only reality that counted, at least to them. Using these as
her guiding principles, she found it easier to make up her mind about things,
to see a course and cut for it directly.

Also she became more and more ruthless. From time to time she felt
freshly how power could corrupt, felt it as a slight nausea within her. But she
was getting habituated. She clashed often with Ariadne, and when she recalled
the remorse she had felt after her first wrangle with the young Minoan, it
seemed to her ridiculously overfastidious; she was far tougher than that every
day now on people who crossed her, she showed the knives in meeting after
meeting, in calculated microbursts of brutality that put people in line very
effectively indeed. In fact the more she allowed herself to release little
outbursts of fury and scorn, the more certainly she could control them and put
them to some use. She was a power; and people knew it; and power was corrosive.
Power was powerful, in more ways than one. And now Nadia felt very little
remorse about that; they deserved a pop on the nose, generally; they had
thought they were going to get a harmless old babushka to sit in the big chair
while they worked their games on each other, but the big chair was the power
seat, and she was damned if she was going to go through all this shit and not
use some of that power to try to get what she wanted.

And so less and less often did she feel how ugly it was. Once when
she did, after a particularly hard-nosed day, she thumped down in a chair and
almost cried, sick with disgust. Only seven months of her three m-years had
passed. What would she become by the time her stint was done? Already she was
used to power; by then she might even like it.

Art, worried by all this, squinted at her over their breakfast
table. “Well,” he said once, after she explained what was bothering her, “power
is power.” He was thinking hard. “You’re the first president of Mars. So in a
way you define the office. Maybe you should declare you’re only going to work
the one month and not the two months, and delegate the two months to your
staff. Something like that.”

She stared at him, mouth full of toast.

Later that week she abandoned Sheffield and went south again,
joining a caravan of people working their way from crater to crater, installing
drainage systems. Every crater had variations, but essentially it was a matter
of picking the right angle to emerge from the crater apron, and then setting
the robots to work. Von Karman, Du Toit, Schmidt, Agassiz, Heaviside,
Bianchini, Lau, Chamberlin, Stoney, Dokuchaev, Trumpler, Keeler, Charlier,
Suess . . . they plumbed all of those craters, and many more unnamed ones,
although the craters were taking on names even faster than they drilled them:
85 South, Too Dark, Fool’s Hope, Shanghai, Hiroko Slept Here, Fourier, Cole,
Proudhon, Bellamy, Hudson, Kaif, 47 Ronin, Makoto, Kino Doku, Ka Ko, Mondragon.
The migration from one crater to the next reminded Nadia of her trips around
the south polar cap during the underground years; except now everything was out
in the open, and through the nearly nightless midsummer days the team
luxuriated in the sun, in the glary light off the crater lakes. They traveled
across rough frozen bogs brilliant with sunny meltwater and meadow grass, and
always of course they crossed the rust-and-black rockscape breaking out into
the light, ring after ring, ridge after ridge. They plumbed craters and laid
watershed pipes, and attached greenhouse-gas factories to the excavators
whenever the rock had any gas feedstocks in it.

But hardly any of that turned out to be work in the sense Nadia
meant. She missed the old days. Of course operating a bulldozer had not been
hand labor, but one’s touch with the blade had been a very physical skill, and
the repeated gearshifts physically taxing; and it was all around a higher level
of engagement than this “work,” which consisted of talking to AIs and then
walking around and watching humming and buzzing teams of waist-high robot
diggers, city-block-sized mobile factory units, tunnel moles with diamond teeth
that grew back like sharks’ teeth—everything made of bioceramic/metallic alloys
stronger than the elevator cable, all of it out there doing it all by itself.
It just wasn’t what she had in mind.

Try again
. She
went through another cycle; return to Sheffield, engagement in the council
work, increasing disgust, merging with despair; look around for anything to get
her out of it; notice some likely project and seize on it. Run off to check it
out. Like Art had said, she could call her own shots. There was that in power
too.

The next time out it was soil that drew her. “Air, water, earth,”
Art said. “Next it’ll be forest fires, eh?”

But she had heard that there were scientists in Bogdanov Vishniac
trying to manufacture soil, and this interested her. So off she went, flying
south to Vishniac, where she had not been for years. Art accompanied her.
“It’ll be interesting to see how the old underground cities adapt, now that
there’s no need to hide.”

“I don’t see why anyone stays down here, to tell you the truth,”
Nadia said as they flew down into the rugged southern polar region. “They’re so
far south their winters last forever. Six months with no sun at all. Who would
stay?”

“Siberians.”

“No Siberian in his right mind would move here. They know better.”

“Laplanders, then. Inuit. People who like the poles.”

“I suppose.”

As it turned out, no one in Bogdanov Vishniac seemed to mind the
winters. They had redistributed their mohole mound in a ring around the mohole
itself, creating an immense circular amphitheater facing down into the hole.
This terraced amphitheater was to be the surface Vishniac. In the summers it
would be a green oasis, and in the dark winters a white oasis; they planned to
illuminate it with hundreds of brilliant streetlights, giving themselves a
stage set day, in a town contemplating itself across a round gap in things, or
from the upper wall looking out at the frosted chaos of the polar highlands.
No, they were going to stay, no question of it. It was their place.

Nadia was greeted at the airport as a special guest, as always
when she stayed with Bogdanovists. Before joining them this had struck her as
ridiculous, and even a bit offensive: girlfriend of The Founder! But now she
accepted their offer of a guest suite located on the lip of the mohole, with a
slightly overhanging window that gave one a view straight down for eighteen
kilometers. The lights on the mohole’s bottom looked like stars seen through
the planet.

Art was petrified, not at the sight but at the very thought of the
sight, and he would not go near that half of the room. Nadia laughed at him,
and then when she was done looking, closed the drapes.

The next day she went out to visit the soil scientists, who were
happy at her interest. They wanted to be able to feed themselves, and as more
and more settlers moved south, this was going to be impossible without more
soil. But they were finding that manufacturing soil was one of the most
difficult technical feats they had ever undertaken. Nadia was surprised to hear
this—these were the Vishniac labs, after all, world leaders in technologically
supported ecologies, having lived for decades hidden in a mohole. And top-soil
was, well, soil. Dirt with additives, presumably, and additives one could add.

No doubt she conveyed some of this impression to the soil
scientists, and the man named Arne leading her around told her with some
exasperation that soil was in fact very complex. About five percent of it by
weight was made of living things, and this critical five percent consisted of
dense populations of nematodes, worms, mollusks, arthropods, insects,
arachnids, small mammals, fungi, protozoa, algae, and bacteria. The bacteria
alone included several thousand different species, and could number as high as
a hundred million individuals per gram of soil. And the other members of the
microcommunity were almost as plentiful, in both number and variety.

Such complex ecologies could not be manufactured in the way Nadia
had been imagining, which was basically to grow the ingredients separately and
then mix them in a hopper, like a cake. But they didn’t know all the
ingredients, and they couldn’t grow some of the ingredients, and some that they
could grow died on mixing. “Worms in particular are sensitive. Nematodes have
trouble too. The whole system tends to crash, leaving us with minerals and dead
organic material. That’s called humus. We’re very good at making humus.
Topsoil, however, has to grow.”

“Which is what happens naturally?”

“Right. We can only try to grow it faster than it grows in nature.
We can’t assemble it, or manufacture it in bulk. And many of the living
components grow best in soil itself, so there’s a problem providing feedstock
organisms at any faster rate than natural soil formation would provide them.”

“Hmm,” Nadia said.

Arne took her through their labs and greenhouses, which were
filled with hundreds of pedons, tall cylindrical vats or tubes, in racks, all
holding soil or its components. This was experimental agronomy, and from her
experience with Hi-roko Nadia was prepared to understand very little of it. The
esoterica of science could go right off her scale. But she did understand that
they were doing factorial trials, altering the conditions in each pedon and
tracking what happened. There was a simple formula Arne showed her to describe
the most general aspects of the problem:

5
=
f
(P
_M
,C,R,B,T),

meaning
that any soil property 5 was a factor (
f
) of the semi-independent
variables, parent material (P
_M
), climate (C), topography or relief
(R), biota (B), and time (T).
Time, of course, was the factor they were trying to speed up; and
the parent material in most of their trials was the ubiquitous Martian surface
clay. Climate and topography were altered in some trials, to imitate various
field conditions; but mostly they were altering the biotic and organic
elements. This meant microecology of the most sophisticated kind, and the more
Nadia learned about it the more difficult their task seemed—not so much
construction as alchemy. Many elements had to cycle through soil to make it a
growth medium for plants, and each element had its own particular cycle, driven
by a different collection of agents. There were the macronutrients—carbon,
oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, calcium, and
magnesium— then the micronutrients, including iron, manganese, zinc, copper,
molybdenum, boron, and chlorine. None of these nutrient cycles was closed, as
there were losses due to leaching, erosion, harvesting, and outgassing; inputs
were just as various, including absorption, weathering, microbial action, and
application of fertilizers. The conditions that allowed the cycling of all
these elements to proceed were varied enough that different soils encouraged or
discouraged each cycle to different degrees; each kind of soil had particular
pH levels, salinities, compaction, and so forth; thus there were hundreds of
named soils in these labs alone, and thousands more back on Earth.

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; smectite clays, similar to Terra’s
montmorillonite and nontronite, with the addition of materials like talc, quartz,
hematite, anhydrite, dieserite, cla-cite, beidellite, rutile, gypsum, maghemite
and magnetite. And everything had been coated by amorphous iron oxy-hydroxides,
and other more crystallized iron oxides, which accounted for the reddish
colors.

So this was their universal parent material: iron-rich smectite
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 masked a whole world of troubles. “My
God, 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
quantity of soil in greenhouses was minuscule compared to what they wanted to
put out on the surface. Mass 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 analog 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
constituents 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 smectites 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 smectites 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 smectite
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
constitutents 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 apatite 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 space, 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.