Blue Mars (48 page)

“Like weather.”

“Yes. We already understand atoms better than weather. The
interactions of the elements are too complex to follow.”

“There’s holonomy. Study of whole systems.”

“But it’s just a bunch of speculation at this point. The start of
a science, if it turns out to work.”

“And so plasmas, though?”

“Those are very homogeneous. There’s only a very few factors
involved, so it might be amenable to spin-network analysis.”

“You should talk to the fusion group about that.”

“Yes?” She looked surprised.

“Yes.”

Then a hard gust hit, and they spent a few minutes watching the
boat respond, the mast sucking in sails with a bit of humming until they were
reset, and running across the strengthening breeze, into the sun. Light flaked
off the fine black hair gathered at the back of Bao’s neck; beyond that, the
sea cliffs of Da Vinci. Networks, trembling at the touch of the sun—no. He
could not see it, with eyes open or closed.

Cautiously he said, “Do you ever wonder about being, you know.
Being one of the first great women mathematicians?”

She looked startled, then turned her head away. She had thought
about it, he saw. “The atoms in a plasma move in patterns that are big fractals
of the spin-network patterns,” she said.

Sax nodded, asked more questions about that. It seemed possible to
him that she would be able to help Da Vinci’s fusion group with the problems
they were having engineering a lightweight fusion apparatus. “Have you ever
done any engineering? Or physics?”

Affronted: “I am a physicist.”

“Well, a mathematical physicist. I was thinking of the engineering
side.”

“Physics is physics.”

“True.”

Only once more did he push, and this time indirectly. “When did
you first learn math?”

“My mom gave me quadratic equations at four, and all kinds of math
games. She was a statistician, very keen about it all.”

“And the Dorsa Brevia schools... .”

She shrugged. “They were fair. Math was mostly something I did by
reading, and correspondence with the department in Sabishii.”

“I see.”

And they went back to talking about the new results from CERN;
about weather; about the sailboat’s ability to point to within a few degrees of
the wind. And then the following week she went out with him again, on one of his
walks on the peninsula’s sea cliffs. It was a great pleasure to show her a bit
of the tundra. And over time, taking him through it step-by-step, she managed
to convince him that they were perhaps coming close to understanding what was
happening at the Planck level. A truly amazing thing, he thought, to intuit
this level, and then make the speculations and deductions necessary to flesh it
out and understand it, creating a very complex powerful physics, for a realm
that was so very small, so very far beyond the senses. Awe-inspiring, really.
The fabric of reality. Although both of them agreed that just as with all
earlier theories, many fundamental questions were left unanswered. It was
inevitable. So that they could lie side by side in the grass in the sun,
staring as deeply into the petals of a tundra flower as ever one could, and no
matter what was happening at the Planck level, in the here and now the petals
glowed blue in the light with a quite mysterious power to catch the eye.

Actually, lying on the grass made it clear how much the permafrost
was melting. And the melt lay on a hardpan of still-frozen ground, so that the
surface became saturated and boggy. When Sax stood up, his ventral side chilled
instantly in the breeze. He spread his arms to the sunlight. Photon rain,
vibrating across the spin networks. In many regions heat exhaust from nuclear
power plants was being directed down into capillary galleries in the
permafrost, he told Bao as they walked back to the rover. This was causing
trouble in some wet areas, which were tending to saturate at the surface. The
land melting, so to speak. Instant wetlands. A very active biome, in fact.
Though the Reds objected. But most of the land that would have been affected by
permafrost melt was now under the North Sea anyway. What little remained above
the sea was to be treasured as swamps and marshes.

The rest of the hydrosphere was almost equally transformative of
the surface. It couldn’t be helped; water was a very effective carver of rock,
hard though it was to believe when watching a gossamer waterfall drift down a
sea cliff, turning to white mist long before it hit the ocean. Then again there
was the sight of the massive giant howler waves, battering the cliffs so hard
that the ground shook underfoot. A few million years of that and those cliffs
would be significantly eroded.

“Have you seen the riverine canyons?” she asked.

“Yes, I saw Nirgal Vallis. Remarkable how satisfying it was to see
water down at its bottom. So apt.”

“I didn’t know there was so much tundra out here.”

Tundra was the dominant ecology for much of the southern
highlands, he told her. Tundra and desert. In the tundra, fines were fixed very
effectively to the ground; no wind could lift mud, or quicksand, of which there
was a good quantity, making it dangerous to travel in certain regions. But in
the deserts the powerful winds ripped great quantities of dust into the sky,
cooling temperatures while they darkened the day, and causing problems where
they landed, as they had for Nirgal. Suddenly curious, he said, “Have you ever
met Nirgal?”

The sandstorms these days were nothing like the long-forgotten
Great Storm of course, but still a factor that had to be considered. Desert
pavement formed by microbacteria was one very promising solution, though it
tended to fix only the top centimeter of deposits, and if the wind tore the
edge of the pavement, what was underneath was then free to be borne away. Not
an easy problem. Dust storms would be with them for centuries.

Still, an active hydrosphere. Meaning life everywhere.

Bao’s mother died in a small plane crash, and Bao as the youngest
daughter had to go home and take care of things, including possession of the
family home. Ultimogeniture in action, modeled on the Hopi matriarchy, he was
told. Bao wasn’t sure when she would be back; there was even a chance she
wouldn’t be. She was matter-of-fact about it, it was just something that had to
be done. Withdrawn already into an internal world. Sax could only wave good-bye
to her and walk back to his room, shaking his head. They would understand the
fundamental laws of the universe before they had even the slightest handle on
society. A particularly obdurate subject of study. He called Michel on screen
and expressed something like this, and Michel said, “It’s because culture keeps
progressing.”

Sax thought he could see what Michel meant—there were rapid
changes in attitudes to many things. Werteswandel, as Bela called it, mutation
of values. But they still lived in a society struggling with archaisms of all
sorts. Primates banding into tribes, guarding a territory, praying to a god
like a cartoon parent. . .. “Sometimes I don’t think there’s been any progress
at all,” he said, feeling strangely disconsolate.

“But Sax,” Michel protested, “right here on Mars we have seen both
patriarchy and property brought to an end. It’s one of the greatest
achievements in human history.”

“If true.”

“Don’t you think women have as much power as men now?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“Perhaps even more, when it comes to reproduction.”

“That would make sense.”

“And the land is in the shared stewardship of everyone.

We still own personal items as property, but land as property has
never happened here. That’s a new social reality, we struggle with it every
day.”

So they did. And Sax remembered how bitter the conflicts had been
in the old days, when property and capital had been the order of the day. Yes,
perhaps it was true: patriarchy and property were in the process of being
dismantled. At least on Mars, at least for now. As with string theory, it might
take a long time to work it into any proper state. After all Sax himself, who
had no prejudices whatsoever, had been amazed to see a woman mathematician at
work. Or, to be more precise, a woman genius. By whom he had been promptly
hypnotized, so to speak, along with every other man in the theory group—to the
point of being rendered quite distraught by her departure. Uneasily he said,
“On Earth people seem to be fighting just as much as before.”

Even Michel had to admit it. “Population pressures,” he said,
trying to wave them away. “There are too many people down there, and more all
the time. You saw what it was like during our visit. As long as Earth is in
that situation, Mars is under threat. And so we fight up here too.”

Sax took the point. In a way it was comforting; human behavior not
as irreducibly evil or stupid, but as responding, semirationally, to a given
historical situation, a danger. Seizing what one could, with the notion that
there might not be enough for all; doing everything possible to protect one’s
offspring; which of course endangered all offspring, by the aggregate of
individual selfish actions. But at least it could be called an attempt at
reason, a first approximation.

“It’s not as bad as it was, anyway,” Michel was saying. “Even on
Earth people are having far fewer children. And they’re reorganizing into
collectives pretty well, considering the flood and all the trouble that
preceded it. A lot of new social movements down there, a lot of them inspired
by what we’re doing here. And by what Nirgal does. They’re still watching him
and listening to him, even when Tie doesn’t speak. What he said during our
visit there is still having a big effect.”

“I believe it.”

“Well, there you are! It’s getting better, you have to admit it. And
when the longevity treatments stop working, there will come a balance of births
and deaths.”

“We’ll hit that time soon,” Sax predicted glumly.

“Why do you say so?”

“Signs of it cropping up. People dying from one thing or other.
Senescence is not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have
kicked in—it’s a wonder we’ve done as much as we have. There’s probably a
purpose in senescence. Avoiding overpopulation, perhaps. Making room for new
genetic material.”

“That bodes poorly for us.”

“We’re already over two hundred percent the old average lifetime.”

“Granted, but even so. One doesn’t want it to end just because of
that.”

“No. But we have to focus on the moment. Speaking of which, why
don’t you come out into the field with me? I’ll be as upbeat as you want out
there. It’s very interesting.”

“I’ll try to free up some time. I’ve got a lot of clients.”

“You’ve got a lot of free time. You’ll see.”

In this particular moment, the sun was high. Rounded white clouds
were piling up in the air overhead, forming great masses that would never come
again, though at the moment they were as solid as marble, and darkening at
their bottoms. Cumulonimbus. He was standing on Da Vinci Peninsula’s western
cliff again, looking across Shalbatana Fjord to the cliff edging the east side
of Lunae Planum. Behind him rose the flat-topped hill that was the rim of Da
Vinci Crater. Home base. He had lived there a long time now. These days their
co-op was making many of the satellites being put up into orbit, and the boosters
as well, in collaboration with Spencer’s lab in Odessa, and a great number of
other places. A Mondragon-style cooperative, operating the ring of labs and
homes in the rim, and the fields and lake filling the crater floor. Some of
them chafed at restrictions imposed by the courts on projects they had in mind,
involving new power plants that would put out too much heat. In the last few
years the GEC had been issuing K rations, as they were called, giving
communities the right to add some fraction of a degree Kelvin to the global
warming. Some Red communities were doing their best to get assigned K rations
and then not use them. This action, along with ongoing incidences of ecotage,
kept the global temperature from rising very fast no matter what other communities
did. Or so the other communities argued. But the ecocourts were still
parsimonious with the K rations. Cases were judged by a provincial ecocourt,
then the judgment was approved by the GEC, and that was it: no appeals, unless
you could get a petition signed by fifty other communities, and even then the
appeal was only dropped into the morass of the global legislature, where its
fate was up to the undisciplined crowd in the duma.

Slow progress. Just as well. With the global average temperatures
above freezing, Sax was content. Without the constraint of the GEC, things
could easily get too warm. No, he was in no further hurry. He had become an
advocate of stabilization.

Now, out in the sun of a perihelion day, it was an invigorating
281 K, and he was walking along the sea-cliff edge of Da Vinci, looking at
alpine flowers in the cracks of the rubble, then past them to the distant
quantum sheen of the fjord’s sunny surface, when down the cliff edge walking
his way came a tall woman, wearing a face mask and jumper, and big hiking
boots: Ann. He recognized her instantly— that stride, no doubt about it—Ann
Clayborne, in the flesh.