Blue Mars (46 page)

“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”

“As equilibrium?”

“Yes. It may be a matter of. . . .” He waved his hands about like
gulls. “Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium.”

“Punctuated change?”

“Perpetual change. Braided change—sometimes surging change—”

“Like cascading recombinance?”

“Perhaps.”

“I’ve heard that’s a mathematics only a dozen people can really
understand.”

Sax looked surprised. “That’s never true. Or else, true of every
math. Depends on what you mean by understand. But I know a bit of that one. You
can use it to model some of this stuff. But not predict. And I don’t know how
to use it to suggest any—reactions on our part. I’m not sure it can be used
that way.” He talked for a while about Vlad’s notion of holons, which were
organic units that had subunits and also were subunits of greater holons, each
level combining to create the next one up in emergent fashion, all the way up
and down the great chain of being. Vlad had worked out mathematical
descriptions of these emergences, which turned out to come in more than one
kind, with different families of properties for each kind; so if they could get
enough information about the behavior of a level of holons and the next level
up, they could try to fit them into these mathematical formulae, and see what
kind of emergence they had; then perhaps find ways to disrupt it. “That’s the
best approach we can take for things this little.” “ The next day they called
up greenhouses in Xanthe, to ask for shipments of new starts, and flats of a
new strain of Himalayan-based grass. By the time they arrived, Nirgal had
pulled out all the grass in the basin, and much of the moss. The work made him
sick, he couldn’t help it; once, seeing a concerned marmot patriarch chattering
at him, he sat down and burst into tears. Sax had retreated into his customary
silence, which only made things worse, as it always reminded Nirgal of Simon,
and of death generally. He needed Maya or some other courageous expressive
speaker of the inner life, of anguish and fortitude; but here was Sax, lost in
thoughts that seemed to happen in some kind of foreign language, in a private
idiolect he was now unwilling to translate.

They went to work planting new starts of Himalayan grasses
throughout the basin, concentrating on the stream banks and their veinlike
tracery under the trickles and ice. A hard freeze actually helped, as it killed
the infected plants faster than the ones free of infection. They incinerated
the infected plants in a kiln down the massif. People came from the surrounding
basins to help, bringing replacement starts for planting later.

Two months passed, and the invasion surge weakened.

The plants that remained seemed to be more resistant. Newly
planted plants did not get infected or die. The basin looked like it was
autumn, though it was midsummer; but the dying had stopped. The marmots looked
thin, and more concerned than ever; they were a worrying species. And Nir-gal
could see their point. The basin looked ravaged. But it seemed the biome would
survive. The yiroid was subsiding, eventually they could hardiy even find it, no
matter how hard and long they centrifuged samples. It seemed to have left the
basin, as mysterious in departure as in arrival.

Sax shook his head. “If the viroids that infect animals ever get
more robust....” He sighed. “I wish I could talk to Hi-roko about it.”

“I’ve heard them say she’s at the north pole,” Nirgal said sourly.

“Yes.”

“But?”

“I don’t think she’s there. And—I don’t think she wants to talk to
me. But I’m still. . . I’m waiting.”

“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.

Sax nodded.

They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko— mother,
lover—she had abandoned them both.

But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave,
Nirgal gave him a bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”

“What will you do now?”

“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”

“Ah! Good luck.”

Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off,
waving once before putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the
rib and gone.

So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what
he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an
indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the
insects and mi-crobial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He
seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch,
planted a different kind of potato.

Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm
began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na— at their latitude, but all the
way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it
over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east,
kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of
them; but at the last minute it veered north.

They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south.
And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the
static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread
didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was
only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.

But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might
as well have been night—a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and
rattling the outer window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked
pensively. Then the howl lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt
more and more sick the less the wind howled—until the air was still, and he was
so nauseated he could scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms
sometimes did this; they ended abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind,
or a particular landform. And then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines.
It was raining dust now, in fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash
were settling over the world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even
the biggest dust storms would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at
the end of their runs. But with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds
so much more powerful, great quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and
if they came down all at once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much
deeper than a few millimeters.

As near suspension as some fines were, in an hour all but the very
finest had fallen out of the air and onto them. After that it was only a hazy
afternoon, windless, the air filled with something like a thin smoke, so that
they could see the whole of the basin; which was covered with a lumpy blanket
of dust.

Nirgal went out with his mask on as always, and dug desperately
with a shovel, then with his bare hands. Sax came out, staggering through the
soft drifts, to put a hand to Nirgal’s shoulder. “I don’t believe there’s
anything that can be done.” The layer of dust was about a meter deep, or
deeper. In time, other winds would blow some of this dust away. Snow would fall
on the rest of it, and when the snow melted, the resulting mud would run over
the spillways, and a new leaf-vein system of channels would cut a new fractal
pattern, much like the old one. Water would carry the dust and fines away, down
the massif and into the world. But by the time that happened, every plant and
an-irnal in the basin would be dead.

PART
NINE

              
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---Natural
History

              
----------

Afterward Nirgal went with Sax up to Da Vinci, and stayed with the
old man in his apartment. One night Coyote dropped by, after the timeslip when
no one else would have thought to visit.

Briefly Nirgal told him what had happened to the high basin.

“Yeah, so?” Coyote said.

Nirgal looked away.

Coyote went to the kitchen and started scrabbling through Sax’s
refrigerator, shouting back into the living room through a full mouth. “What
did you expect on a windy hillside like that? This world is not a garden, man.
Some of it going to get buried every year, that’s just the way it is. Another
wind come in a year or ten and blow all that dust off your hill.”

“Everything will be dead by then.”

“That’s life. Now it’s time to do something else. What were you
doing before you set in there?”

“Looking for Hiroko.”

“Shit.” Coyote appeared in the doorway, pointing a big kitchen
knife right at Nirgal. “Not you too.”

“Yes me too.”

“Oh come on. When you going to grow up. Hiroko is dead. You might
as well get used to it.”

Sax came in from his office, blinking hard. “Hiroko is alive,” he
said.

“Not you too!” Coyote cried. “You two are like children!”

“I saw her on the south flank ofArsia Mows, in a storm.”

“Join the fucking party, man.”

Sax blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Fuck.”

Coyote went back into the kitchen.

“There have been other sightings,” Nirgal said to Sax. “Reports
are fairly common.”

“I know that—”

“Reports are daily!” Coyote shouted from the kitchen. He charged
back into the living room. “People see her every day! There’s a spot on the
wrist to report sightings! Last week I see she appeared in two different places
on the same night, in Noachis and on Olympus! Opposite sides of the world!”

“I don’t see that that proves anything,” Sax said stubbornly.
“They say the same sort of thing about you, and I see you’re still alive.”

Coyote shook his head violently. “No. I am the exception that
proves the rule. Anyone else, when they are reported in two places at once,
that means they are dead. A sure sign.” He made a stop thrust to forestall
Sax’s next remark, shouted “She’s dead! Face it! She died in the attack on
Sabishii! Those UNTA storm troopers caught her and Iwao and Gene and Rya and
all the rest of them, and they took them to some room and sucked the air or
pulled the trigger. That’s what happens! Do you think it never happens? Do you
think that secret police haven’t killed dissidents and then disappeared the
bodies so that no one ever finds out? It happens! Fuck yes it happens, even on
your precious Mars it happens, yes and more than once! You know it’s true! It
happened. That’s how people are. They’ll do anything, they’ll kill people and
figure they’re just earning their keep or feeding their children or making the
world safe. And that’s what happened. They killed Hiroko and all the rest of
them too.”

Nirgal and Sax stared. Coyote was quivering, he looked like he was
going to stab the wall.

Sax cleared his throat. “Desmond—what makes you so sure?”

“Because I looked! I looked. I looked like no one else could look.
She’s not in any of her places. She’s not anywhere. She didn’t get out. No one
has really seen her since Sabishii. That’s why you’ve never heard from her.
She’s not so inhuman she would let us go all this time without ever letting us
know.”

“But I saw her,” Sax insisted.

“In a storm, you said. In a bit of trouble, I suppose. Saw her for
a little while, just long enough to get you out of trouble. Then gone for
good.”

Sax blinked.

Coyote laughed harshly. “So I thought. No, that’s fine. Dream
about her all you want. Just don’t get that confused with reality. Hiroko is
dead.”

Nirgal looked back and forth between the two silent men. “I’ve
looked for her too,” he said. And then, seeing the blasted look on Sax’s face:
“Anything’spossible.”

Coyote shook his head. He went back into the kitchen, muttering to
himself. Sax looked at Nirgal, stared right through him.

“Maybe I’ll try looking for her again,” Nirgal told him.

Sax nodded.

“Beats farming,” Coyote said from the kitchen.

Recently Harry Whitebook had found a method
for increasing animal tolerance to CO2,
by introducing into mammals a gene which coded for certain characteristics of
crocodile hemoglobin. Crocodiles could hold their breath for a very long time
underwater, and the CO2 that should have built up in their blood actually
dissolved there into bicarbonate ions, bound to amino acids in the hemoglobin,
in a complex that caused the hemoglobin to release oxygen molecules. High CO2
tolerance was thus combined with increased oxygen-ation efficiency, a very
elegant adaptation, and as it turned out fairly easy (once Whitebook showed the
way) to introduce into mammals by utilizing the latest trait transcription
technology: designed strands of the DNA repair enzyme photolyase were
assembled, and these would patch the descriptions for the trait into the genome
during the geron-tological treatments, changing slightly the hemoglobin
properties of the subject.

Sax was one of the first people to have this trait administered to
him. He liked the idea because it would obviate the need for a face mask in the
outdoors, and he was spending a lot of his time outdoors. Carbon-dioxide levels
in the atmosphere were still at about 40 millibars of the 500 total at sea
level, the rest consisting of 260 millibars nitrogen, 170 millibars oxygen, and
30 of miscellaneous noble gases.

So there was still too much CO2 for humans to tolerate without
filter masks. But after trait transcription he could walk free in the air, observing
the wide array of animals with similar trait transcriptions already out there.
All of them monsters together, settling into their ecological niches, in a very
confusing flux of surges, die-offs, invasions and retreats—everything vainly
seeking a balance that could not, given the changing climate, exist. No
different than life on Earth had ever been, in other words; but here all
happening at a much faster rate, pushed by the human-driven changes,
modifications, introductions, transcriptions, translations— the interventions
that worked, the interventions that backfired—the effects unintended,
unforeseen, unnoticed—to the point where many thoughtful scientists were giving
up any pretense of control. “Let happen what may,” as Spencer would say when he
was in his cups. This offended Michel’s sense of meaning, but there was nothing
to be done about that, except to alter Michel’s sense of what was meaningful.
Contingency, the flux of life: in a word, evolution. From the Latin, meaning
the unrolling of a book. And not directed evolution either, not by a long shot.
Influenced evolution perhaps, accelerated evolution certainly (in some aspects,
anyway), But not managed, nor directed. They didn’t know what they were doing.
It took some getting used to.

So Sax wandered around on Da Vinci Peninsula, a rectangular chunk
of land surrounding the round rim hill of Da Vinci Crater, and bounded by the
Simud, Shalbatana, and Ravi fjords, all of which debouched onto the southern
end of Chryse Gulf. Two islands, Copernicus and Galileo, lay to the west, in
the mouths of the Ares and Tiu fjords. A very rich braiding of sea and land,
perfect for the burgeoning of life—the Da Vinci lab techs could not have chosen
a better site, although Sax was quite sure they had had no sense at all of
their surroundings when they chose the crater for the underground’s hidden
aerospace labs. The crater had had a thick rim and was located a good distance
from Burroughs and Sabishii, and that had been that. Stumbled into paradise.
More than a lifetime’s observations to be made, without ever leaving home.

Hydrology, invasion biology, areology, ecology, materials science,
particle physics, cosmology: all these fields interested Sax extremely, but
most of his daily work in these years concerned the weather. Da Vinci Peninsula
got a lot of dramatic weather; wet storms swept south down the gulf, dry
katabatic winds dropped off the southern highland and out the fjord canyons,
initiating big northward waves at sea. Because they were so close to the equator,
the perihelion-aphelion cycle affected them much more than the ordinary
inclination seasons. Aphelion brought cold weather twenty degrees north of the
equator at least, while perihelion cooked the equator as much as the south. In
the Januaries and Februaries, sun-warmed southern air lofted into the
stratosphere, turned east at the tropopause and joined the jet streams in their
circumnavigations. The jet streams were difluent around the Tharsis Bulge; the
southern stream carried moisture from Amazonis Bay, and dumped it on Dae-dalia
and Icaria, sometimes even on the western wall of the Argyre Basin mountains,
where glaciers were forming. The northern jet stream ran over the
Tempe-Mareotis highlands, then blew over the North Sea, picking up the moisture
for storm after storm. North of that, over the polar cap, air cooled and fell
on the rotating planet, causing surface winds from the northeast. These cold
dry winds sometimes shot underneath the warmer wetter air of the temperate
westerlies, causing fronts of huge thunderheads to rise over the North Sea,
thunderheads twenty kilometers high.

The southern hemisphere, being more uniform than the north, had
winds that followed even more clearly the physics of air over a rotating
sphere: southeast trades from the equator to latitude thirty; prevailing
westerlies from latitude thirty down to latitude sixty; polar easterlies from
there to the pole. There were vast deserts in the south, especially between
latitudes fifteen and thirty, where the air that rose at the equator sank
again, causing high air pressure and hot air that held a lot of water vapor
without condensing; it hardly ever rained in this band, which included the
hyperarid provinces of Solis, Noachis, and Hesperia. In these regions the winds
picked up dust off the dry land, and the dust storms, while more localized than
before, were also thicker, as Sax had witnessed himself, unfortunately, while
up on Tyrrhena with Nirgal.

Those were the major patterns in Martian weather: violent around
aphelion, gentle during the helionequinoxes; the south the hemisphere of
extremes, the north of moderation. Or so some models suggested. Sax liked
generating the simulations that created such models, but he was aware that
their match with reality was approximate at best; every year on record was an
exception of some kind, with conditions changing at each stage of the
terraforming. And the future of their climate was impossible to predict, even
if one froze the variables and pretended terraformation had stabilized, which
it certainly had not. Over and over Sax watched a thousand years of weather,
altering variables in the models, and every time a completely different
millennium flitted past. Fascinating. The light gravity and the resulting scale
height of the atmosphere, the vast vertical relief of the surface, the presence
of the North Sea that might or might not ice over, the thickening air, the
perihelion-aphelion cycle, which was an eccentricity that was slowly precessing
through the inclination seasons; these had predictable effects, perhaps, but in
combination they made Martian weather a very hard thing to understand, and the
more he watched, the less Sax felt they knew. But it was fascinating, and he
could watch the iterations play out all day long.

Or else just sit out on Simshal Point, watching clouds flow across
hyacinth skies. Kasei Fjord, off to the northwest, was a wind tunnel for the
strongest katabatic blows on the planet, winds pouring out of it onto Chryse
Gulf at speeds that occasionally reached five hundred kilometers an hour. When
these howlers struck Sax could see the cinnamon clouds marking them, over the
horizon to the north. Ten or twelve hours later big swells would roll in from
the north, and rise up and hammer the sea cliffs, fifty-meter-high wedges of water
blasting to spray against the rock, until the air all over the peninsula was a
thick white mist. It was dangerous to be at sea during a howler, as he had
found out once while sailing the coastal waters of the southern gulf, in a
little catamaran he had learned to operate.

Nicer by far to observe storms from the sea cliffs. No howler
today; just a steady stiff wind, and the distant black broom of a squall on the
water north of Copernicus, and the heat of sun on skin. Global average
temperature changed every year, up and down, mostly up. With time as the
horizontal axis, a rising mountain range. The Year Without Summer, now an old
chasm; actually it had lasted three years, but people would not disturb such a
name for a mere fact. Three Unusually Cold Years—no. It didn’t have what people
wanted, some kind of compression of the truth, to create a strong trace in the
memory, perhaps. Symbolic thinking; people needed things thrown together. Sax
knew this because he spent a lot of time in Sabishii visiting Michel and Maya.
People loved drama. Maya more than most, perhaps, but it served to show.
Limit-case demonstration of the norm. He worried about her effect on Michel.
Michel seemed not to be enjoying life. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, “a
return home,” and algos, “pain.” Pain of the return home. A very accurate
description; despite their blurs, words could sometimes be so exact. It was a
paradox until you looked into how the brain worked, then it became less
surprising. A model of the mind’s interaction with physical reality, blurred at
the edges. Even science had to admit it. Not that this meant giving up trying
to explain things!

“Come out and do some field studies with me,” he would urge
Michel.

“Soon.”

“Concentrate on the moment,” Sax suggested. “Each moment is its
own reality. It has its particular thisness. You can’t predict, but you can
explain. Or try. If you are observant, and lucky, you can say, this is why this
is happening! It’s very interesting!”

“Sax. When did you become such a poet?”

Sax did not know how to answer that. Michel was still stuffed with
his immense nostalgia. Finally Sax said, “Make time to come out into the
field.”

In the mild winters when the winds were gentle, Sax took sailing
trips around the south end of Chryse Gulf. The golden gulf. The rest of the
year he stayed on the peninsula, and went out from Da Vinci Crater on foot, or
in a little car for overnighters. Mostly he did meteorology, though of course
he looked at everything. On the water he would sit and feel the wind in the sail
as he wandered into one little convolution of the coast after another. On the
land he would drive in the mornings, looking at the view until he saw a good
spot. Then he would stop the car and go outside.

Pants, shirt, windbreaker, hiking boots, his old hat; all he
needed on this day of m-year 65. A fact that never ceased to amaze him. Usually
it was in the 280s—bracing, but he liked it. Global averages were bouncing
around the mid-270s. A good average, he felt—above freezing—sending a thermal
pulse down into the permafrost. On its own this pulse would melt the permafrost
in about ten thousand years. But of course it was not on its own.

He wandered over tundra moss and samphire, kedge and grass. Life
on Mars. An odd business. Life anywhere, really. Not at all obvious why it
should appear. This was something Sax had been thinking about recently. Why was
there increasing order in any part of the cosmos, when one might expect nothing
but entropy everywhere? This puzzled him greatly. He had been intrigued when
Spencer had offered an offhand explanation, over beer one night on the Odessa
corniche—in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really
order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the
maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order.
Sax had been surprised to hear such an interesting cosmological notion from
Spencer, but Spencer was a surprising man. Although he drank too much alcohol.

Lying on the grass looking at tundra flowers, one couldn’t help
thinking about life. In the sunlight the little flowers stood on their stems
glowing with their anthracyins, dense with color. Ideograms of order. They did
not look like a mere difference in entropic levels. Such a fine texture to a
flower petal; drenched in light, it was almost as if it were visible molecule
by molecule: there a white molecule, there lavender, there clematis blue. These
pointillist dots were not molecules, of course, which were well below visible
resolution. And even if molecules had been visible, the ultimate building
blocks of the petal were so much smaller than that that they were hard to
imagine—finer than one’s conceptual resolution, one might say. Although
recently the theory group at Da Vinci had begun buzzing about developments in
superstring theory and quantum gravity they were making; it had even gotten to
the point of testable predictions, which historically had been string theory’s
great weakness. Intrigued by this reconnection with experiment, Sax had
recently started trying to understand what they were doing. It meant foregoing
sea cliffs for seminar rooms, but in the rainy seasons he had done it, sitting
in on the group’s afternoon meetings, listening to the presentations and the
discussions afterward, studying the scrawled math on the screens and spending
his mornings working on Riemann surfaces, Lie algebras, Euler numbers, the
topologies of compact six-dimensional spaces, differential geometries,
Grassmannian variables, Vlad’s emergence operators, and all the rest of the
mathematics necessary to follow what the current generation was talking about.

Some of this math concerning superstrings he had looked into
before. The theory had existed for almost two centuries now, but it had been
proposed speculatively long before there was either the math or the
experimental ability to properly investigate it. The theory described the
smallest particles of spacetime not as geometrical points but as
ul-tramicroscopic loops, vibrating in ten dimensions, six of which were compactified
around the loops, making them somewhat exotic mathematical objects. The space
they vibrated in had been quantized by twenty-first-century theorists, into
loop patterns called spin networks, in which lines of force in the finest grain
of the gravitational field acted somewhat like the lines of magnetic force
around a magnet, allowing the strings to vibrate only in certain harmonics.
These supersymmetrical strings, vibrating harmonically in ten-dimensional spin
networks, accounted very elegantly and plausibly for the various forces and
particles as perceived at the subatomic level, all the bosons and fer-mions,
and their gravitational effects as well. The fully elaborated theory therefore
claimed to mesh successfully quantum mechanics with gravity, which had been the
problem in physical theory for over two centuries.