Blue Mars (44 page)

Now she regarded him fondly—a woman his age, her face a map of
laugh lines, cheery and bold. She may have recalled their early encounter as
little as he did—hard to say what his siblings remembered of their shared
bizarre childhood—but she looked like she remembered. She had always been
friendly, and she was again now. He told her about his flights around the
world, carried by the ceaseless winds, diving slowly against the blimp’s buoyancy
down to one little habitation after another, asking after Hiroko.

Rachel shook her head, smiling ironically. “If she’s out there,
she’s out there. But you could look forever and never find her.”

Nirgal heaved a troubled sigh, and she laughed and tousled his
hair.

“Don’t look for her.”

That evening he walked along the strand, just uphill from the
devastated berg-strewn shoreline of the northern sea. He felt in his body that
he needed to walk, to run. Flying was too easy, it was a dissociation from the
world—things were small and distant—again, it was the wrong end of the
telescope. He needed to walk.

Still he flew. As he flew, however, he looked more closely at the
land. Heath, moor, streamside meadows. A creek falling directly into the sea
over a short drop, another one crossing a beach. Salt creeks into a fresh
ocean. In some places they had planted forests, to try to cut down on dust
storms that originated in this area. There were still dust storms, but the
trees of the forest were saplings still. Hiroko might be able to sort it out.
Don’t look for her. Look at the land.

He flew back to Sabishii. There was still a lot of work to be done
there, clearing away burned buildings and then building new ones. Some
construction co-ops were still accepting new members. One was doing
reconstruction but was also building blimps and other fliers, including some
experimental birdsuits. He talked with them about joining.

He left his blimpglider in town with them, and took long runs out
onto the high moors east of Sabishii. He had run these uplands during his
student years. A lot of the ridge runs were familiar still; beyond them, new
ground. A high land, with its moorish life. Big kami boulders stood here and
there on the rumpled land, like sentinels.

One afternoon, running an unfamiliar ridge, he looked down into a
small high basin like a shallow bowl, with a break opening to lower land to the
west. Like a glacial cirque, though more likely it was an eroded crater with a
break in its rim, making a horseshoe ridge. About a kilometer across—quite
shallow. Just a rumple among the many rumples on the Tyrrhena massif. From the
encircling ridge the horizons were far away, the land below lumpy and
irregular.

It seemed familiar. Possibly he had visited it on an over-nighter
in his student years. He hiked slowly down into the basin, and still felt like
he was on top of the massif; something about the dark clean indigo of the sky,
the spacious long view out the gap to the west. Clouds rolled overhead like
great rounded icebergs, dropping dry granular snow, which was chased into
cracks or out of the basin entirely by the hard wind. On the circling ridge,
near the northwest point of the horseshoe, there was a boulder sitting like a
stone hut. It stood on four points on the ridge, a dolmen worn to the
smoothness of an old tooth. The sky over it lapis lazuli.

Nirgal walked back down to Sabishii and looked into the matter.
The basin was untended, according to the maps and records of the Tyrrhena
Massif Areography and Ecopoesis Council. They were pleased he was interested.
“The high basins are hard,” they told him. “Very little grows. It’s a long
project.”

“Good.”

“You’ll have to grow most of your food in greenhouses. Potatoes,
however—once you get enough soil, of course—”

Nirgal nodded.

They asked him to drop by the village of Dingboche, the one
nearest the basin, and make sure no one there had plans for it.

So he drove back up, in a little caravan with Tariki and Rachel
and Tiu and some other friends who had gathered to help. They drove over a low
ridge and found Dingboche, set on a little wadi that was now being farmed,
mostly in hardscrabble potato fields. There had been a snowstorm, and all the
fields were white rectangles, divided by low black walls of stacked stones. A
number of long low stone houses, with plate-rock roofs and thick square
chimneys, were scattered among the fields, with several more clustered at the
village’s upper end. The longest building in this cluster was a two-storied
teahouse, with a big mattress-filled room to accommodate visitors.

In Dingboche as in much of the southern highlands the gift economy
still predominated, and Nirgal and his companions had to endure a near
potlatching when they stayed for the night. The locals were very happy when he
inquired about the high basin, which they called variously the little
horseshoe, or the upper hand. “It needs looking after.” They offered to help
him get started.

So they went up to the high cirque in a little caravan, and dumped
a load of gear on the ridge near the house boulder, and stuck around long
enough to clear a first little field of stones, walling it with what they
cleared. A couple of them experienced in construction helped him to make the
first incisions into the ridge boulder. During this noisy drilling some of the
Dingboche locals cut away at the exterior of the rock, carving in Sanskrit
lettering Om Mani Padme Hum, as seen on innumerable mani stones in the
Himalayas, and now all over the southern highlands. The locals chipped away the
rock between the fat cursive letters, so that the letters stood out in raised
relief against a rougher, lighter background. As for the boulder house itself,
eventually he would have four rooms hacked out of the boulder, with
triple-paned windows, solar panels for heat and power, water from a snowmelt
pumped up to a tank placed higher on the ridge, and a composting toilet and
graywater facility.

Then they were off. Nirgal had the basin to himself.

He walked around on it for many days without doing anything but
looking. Only the tiniest part of the basin would be his farm—just some small
fields inside low stone walls, and a greenhouse for vegetables. And a cottage
industry, he wasn’t sure what. It wouldn’t be self-sufficient, but it would be
settling in. A project.

And then there was the basin itself. A small channel already ran
down the opening out to the west, as if to suggest a watershed. The cupped hand
of rock was already a microclimate, tilted to the sun, slightly sheltered from
the winds. He would be an ecopoet.

First he had to learn the land
, with that as his project it was amazing how busy every day
became, there was an endless number of things to do; but no structure, no
schedule, no rush; no one to consult; and every day, in the last hours of
summer light, he would walk around the ridge, and inspect the basin in the
failing light. It was already colonized by lichen and the other first settlers;
fellfields filled the hollows, and there were small mosaics of arctic ground
cover in the sunny exposures, mounds of green moss humped on red soil less than
a centimeter thick. Snowmelt coursed down a number of rivulet channels, pooling
and dropping through any number of potential meadow terraces, little diatom
oases, falling down the basin to meet in the gravel wadi at the gate to the
land below, a flat meadow-to-be behind the residual rim. Ribs higher in the
basin were natural dams, and after some consideration, Nirgal carried some
ventifacts to these low ribs, and assembled them with their facets touching so
that the ribs were heightened by just one or two rocks’ height. Snowmelt would
collect in meadow ponds, banked by moss. The moors just east of Sabishii
resembled what he had in mind, and he called up ecopoets who lived on those
moors, and asked about species compatibility, growth rates, soil amendment and
the like. In his mind developed a vision of the basin; then in second March the
autumn came, the year heading toward aphelion, and he began to see how much of
the landscaping would be done by wind and winter. He would have to wait and
see.

He spread seeds and spores by hand, casting them away from bags or
growth media dishes latched to his belt, feeling like a figure from Van Gogh or
the Old Testament; it was a peculiar sensation of mixed power and helplessness,
action and fate. He arranged for loads of topsoil to be trucked up and dumped
on some of the little fields, and then he spread it out by hand, thinly. He
brought in worms from the university farm at Sabishii. Worms in a bottle,
Coyote had always called people in cities; observing the writhing mass of moist
naked tubules, Nirgal shuddered. He released the worms onto his new little
plots. Go, little worm, prosper on the land. He himself, walking around on the
sunny mornings after a shower, was no more than moist linked naked tubules.
Sentient worms, that’s what they were, in bottles or on the land.

After the worms it would be moles and voles. Then mice. Then snow
rabbits, and ermine, and marmots; perhaps then some of the snow cats wandering
the moors would drop by. Foxes. The basin was high, but the pressure they were
hoping for at this altitude was four hundred millibars, with forty percent of
that oxygen; they were already most of the way there. Conditions were somewhat
as in the Himalayas. Presumably all of Earth’s high-altitude flora and fauna
would be viable here, and all the new engineered variants; and with so many
ecopoets stewarding small patches of the upland, the problem would be mostly a
matter of prepping the ground, introducing the basic ecosystem desired, and then
supporting it, and watching what came in on the wind, or walked in, or flew.
These arrivals could be problematic of course, and there was a lot of talk on
the wrist about invasion biology, and integrated microcline management;
figuring out one’s locality’s connections to the larger region was a big part
of the ongoing work of ecopoesis.

Nirgal got even more interested in this matter of dispersal the
next spring, in first November when the snows melted, and poking out of the
late slush on the flat terraces of the northern side of the basin were sprigs
of snow alumroot. He hadn’t planted them, he had never heard of them, indeed he
wasn’t even sure of his identification, until his neighbor Yoshi dropped by one
week and confirmed it: Heuchera nivalis. Blown in on the wind, Yoshi said.
There was a lot of it in Escalante Crater to the north. Not much of it in
between; but that was jump dispersal for you.

Jump dispersal, spread dispersal, stream dispersal: all three were
common on Mars. Mosses and bacteria were spread dispersing; hydrophilic plants
were stream-dispersing along the sides of glaciers, and the new coastlines; and
lichen and any number of other plants were jump-dispersing on the strong winds.
Human dispersion showed all three patterns, Yoshi remarked as they wandered
over the basin discussing the concept—spreading through Europe and Asia and
Africa, streaming down the Americas and along the Australian coasts, jumping
out to the Pacific Islands (or to Mars). It was common to see all three methods
used by highly adaptable species. And the Tyrrhena massif was up in the wind,
catching the westerlies and also the summer trade winds, so that both sides of
the massif got precipitation; nowhere more than twenty centimeters a year,
which would have made it desert on Earth, but in the southern hemisphere of
Mars, that was a precipitation island. In that way too a dispersion catchment,
and so very invasible.

So. High barren rocky land, dusted with snow wherever shade
predominated, so that the shadows tended to be white. Little sign of life
except in basins, where the ecopoets helped along their little collections.
Clouds surged in from west in the winter, east in the summer. The southern
hemisphere had the seasons reinforced by the perihelion-aphelion cycle, so that
they really meant something. On Tyrrhena the winters were hard.

Nirgal wandered the basin after storms, looking to see what had
blown in. Usually it was only a load of icy dust, but once he found an
unplanted clutch of pale blue Jacob’s ladders, tucked between the splits in a
breadloaf rock. Check the botanicals to see how it might interact with what was
already there. Ten percent of introduced species survived, then ten percent of
those became pests; that was invasion biology’s ten-ten rule, Yoshi said, almost
the first rule of the discipline. “Ten meaning five to twenty, of course.” Once
Nirgal weeded out a springtime arrival of common street-grass, fearing it would
take over everything. Same with tundra thistle. Another time a heavy dust load
fell on an autumn wind. These dust storms were small compared to the old global
southern-summer storms, but occasionally a hard wind would tear up the desert
pavement somewhere and send the dust below flying. The atmosphere was
thickening rapidly these days, fifteen millibars a year on average. Each year
the winds had more force, and so thicker areas of pavement were at risk of
being torn away. The dust that fell was usually a very thin layer, however, and
often high in nitrates; so it was like a fertilizer, to be washed into the soil
by the next rain.

Nirgal bought a position in the Sabishii construction coop he had
looked into. He went in often to work on the town’s buildings. Up in the basin
he did some assembly and testing of solo blimpgliders. His work cottage was a
small building made of stone-stacked walls, with plates of sandstone for
shingles. Between that work and the farming in the greenhouse and his potato
patch, and the ecopoesis in the basin, his days were full.

He flew the completed blimpgliders down to Sabishii, and stayed in
a little studio above in his old teacher Tariki’s rebuilt house in the old
city, living there among ancient issei who looked and sounded very much like
Hiroko. Art and Nadia lived there too, raising their daughter Nikki. Also in town
were Vijjika, and Reull, and Annette, all old friends from his student days—and
there was the university itself, no longer called the University of Mars, but
simply Sabishii College—a small school that still ran in the amorphous style of
the demimonde years, so that the more ambitious students went to Elysium or
Sheffield or Cairo; those who came to Sabishii were those fascinated by the
mystique of the demimonde years, or interested in the work of one of the issei
professors.

All these people and activities made Nirgal feel strangely, even
uncomfortably, at home. He put in long days as a plasterer and general laborer
on various construction jobs his co-op had around town. He ate in rice bars and
pubs. He slept in the loft in Tariki’s garage, and looked forward to the days
he returned to the basin.

One night he was walking home late from a pub, asleep on his feet,
when he passed a small man sleeping on a park bench: Coyote.

Nirgal stopped short. He walked over to the bench. He stared and
stared. Some nights he heard coyotes howling up in the basin. This was his
father. He remembered all those days hunting for Hiroko, without a clue where
to look. But here his father slept on a city park bench. Nirgal could call him
anytime, and always that bright cracked grin, Trinidad itself. Tears started to
his eyes; he shook his head, composed himself. Old man lying on a park bench.
One saw it fairly frequently. A lot of the issei had gotten here and gone off
somehow, into the back country for good, so that when they came into a city
they slept in the parks.

Nirgal went over and sat on the end of the bench, just beyond his
father’s head. Gray tatty dreadlocks. Like a drunk. Nirgal just sat with him,
looking at the undersides of the linden trees around the bench. It was a quiet
night. Stars ticked through the leaves.

Coyote stirred, twisted his head and glanced up. “Who dat.”

“Hey,” Nirgal said.

“Hey!” Coyote said, and sat up. He rubbed at his eyes. “Nirgal,
man. You startle me there.”

“Sorry. I was walking by and saw you. What are you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Well, I was. Far as I know that was all I was doing.”

“Coyote, don’t you have a home?”

“Why no.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No.” Coyote bleared a grin at him. “I’m like that awful vid
program. The world is my home.”

Nirgal only shook his head. Coyote squinted as he saw that Nirgal
was not amused. He stared at him for a long time from under half-mast eyelids,
breathing deeply. “My boy,” he said at last, dreamily. The whole city was
quiet. Coyote muttered as if falling asleep. “What does the hero do when the
tale is over? Swim over the waterfall. Drift out on the tide.”

“What?”

Coyote opened his eyes fully, leaned toward Nirgal. “Do you
remember when we brought Sax into Tharsis Tholus and you sat with him, and
afterward they said you brought him back to life? That kind of thing—think
about that.” He shook his head, leaned back on the bench. “It’s not right. It’s
just a story. Why worry about that story when it’s not yours anyway. What
you’re doing right now is better. You can walk away from that kind of story.
Sit in a park at night like any ordinary person. Go anywhere you please.”

Nirgal nodded, uncertain.

“What I like to do,” Coyote said sleepily, “is go to a sidewalk
cafe and toss down some kava and watch all the faces. Go for a walk around the
streets and look at people’s faces. I like to look at women’s faces. So
beautiful. And some of them so ... so something. I don’t know. I love them.” He
was falling asleep again. “You’ll find your way to live.”

Guests who occasionally visited him in the basin included Sax,
Coyote, Art and Nadia and Nikki, who got taller every year; she was taller than
Nadia already, and seemed to regard Nadia like a nanny or a
great-grandmother—much as Nirgal himself had regarded her, in Zygote. Nikki had
inherited Art’s sense of fun, and Art himself encouraged this, egging her on,
conspiring with her against Nadia, watching her with the most radiant pleasure
Nirgal had ever seen on an adult face. Once Nirgal saw the three of them
sitting on the stone wall by his potato patch, laughing helplessly at something
Art had said, and he felt a pang even as he too laughed; his old friends were
now married, with a kid. Living in that most ancient pattern. Faced with that,
his life on the land did not seem so substantial after all. But what could he
do? Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true
partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize
it, and the courage to act. Few could be expected to have all that, and then to
have things go well. The rest had to make do.

So he lived in his high basin, grew some of his food, worked on
co-op projects to pay for the rest. He flew down to Sabishii once a month in a
new aircraft, enjoyed his stay of a week or two, and went back home. Art and
Nadia and Sax came up frequently, and much less often he hosted Maya and
Michel, or Spencer, all of whom lived in Odessa— or Zeyk and Nazik, who brought
news of Cairo and Mangala that he tried not to hear. When they left he went out
onto the arcing ridge and sat on one of his sitting boulders, and looked at the
meadows stringing through the talus, concentrating on what he had, on this
world of the senses, rock and lichen and moss campion.

The basin was evolving. There were moles in the meadows, marmots
in the talus. At the end of the long winters the marmots came out of
hibernation early, nearly starving, their internal clocks still set to Earth.
Nirgal set out food for them in the snow, and watched from his house’s upper windows
as they ate it. They needed help to get through the long winters to spring.
They regarded his house as a source of food and warmth, and two marmot families
lived in the rocks under it, whistling their warning whistle when anyone
approached. Once they warned him of people from the Tyrrhena committee on the
introduction of new species, asking him for a species list, and a rough census;
they were beginning to formulate a local “native inhabitant” list, which, once
formed, would allow them to make judgments on any subsequent introductions of
fast-spreading species. Nirgal was happy to join this effort, and apparently so
was everyone else doing ecopoesis on the massif; as a precipitation island,
hundreds of kilometers from the nearest others, they were developing their own
mix of high-altitude fauna and flora, and there was a growing sentiment to
regard this mix as “natural” to Tyrrhena, to be altered only by consensus.