Blue Mars (7 page)

Michel shrugged again. “I have wondered that for years. I think
Mars has helped her. I think Simon helped her, and Peter. But they have all
been at some kind of distance. They don’t change that fundamental no in her.”

“But she—she loves all this,” Sax said, waving at the cal-dera.
“She truly does.” He thought over Michel’s analysis. “It’s not just a no.
There’s a yes in there as well. A love of Mars.”

“But if you love stones and not people,” Michel said, “it’s
somehow a little ... unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know—”

“I know—”

“—and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content
with it.”

“She doesn’t like what’s happening to her world.”

“No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most?
I’m not so sure. It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.”

Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider
psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing
together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy
most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always
done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological
changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth
century, AIs for the twenty-first. .. and for the Freudian traditionalists,
steam engines. Application of heat, pressure buildup, pressure displacement,
venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed.
Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human
mind. The mind was more like—what?—an ecology—a fell-field—or else a jungle,
populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and
quasars and black holes. Well—a bit grandiose, that—really it was more like a
complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and
yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better—weather—storm fronts of
thought, high-pressure zones, low-pressure cells, hurricanes—the jet streams of
biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds ... life in the
wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

“What are you thinking?” Michel asked.

“Sometimes I worry,” Sax admitted, “about the theoretical basis of
these diagnoses of yours.”

“Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very
precise, very accurate.”

“Both precise and accurate?”

“Well, what, they’re the same, no?”

“No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are
from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A
hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a
hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite
accurate, while still being not very precise. Often true values aren’t really
determinable, of course.”

Michel had a curious expression on his face. “You’re a very
accurate person, Sax.”

“It’s just statistics,” Sax said defensively. “Every once in a while
language allows you to say things precisely.”

“And accurately.”

“Sometimes.”

They looked down into the country of the caldera.

“I want to help her,” Sax said.

Michel nodded. “You said that. I said I didn’t know how. For her,
you are the terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help
her. Do you think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?”

Sax thought about it for a while. “It could get her outdoors.
Outdoors without helmets, eventually without even masks.”

“You think she wants that?”

“I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum.
The animal, you know. It feels right.”

“I don’t know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.”

Sax considered it.

Then the whole landscape darkened.

They looked up. The sun was black. Stars shone in the sky around
it. There was a faint glow around the black disk, perhaps the sun’s corona.

Then a sudden crescent of fire forced them to look away. That was
the corona; what they had seen before had probably been the lit exosphere.

The darkened landscape lightened again, as the artificial eclipse
came to an end. But the whole sun that returned was distinctly smaller than
what had shone just moments before. The old bronze button of the Martian sun!
It was like a friend come back for a visit. The world was dimmer, all the
colors of the caldera one shade darker, as if invisible clouds obscured the
sunlight. A very familiar sight, in fact— Mars’s natural light, shining on them
again for the first time in twenty-eight years.

“I hope Ann saw that,” Sax said. He felt chilled, although he knew
there had not been enough time for the air to have cooled, and he was suited up
in any case. But there would be a chill. He thought grimly of the fellfields
scattered all over the planet, up at the four- or five-kilometer elevation, and
lower in the mid and high latitudes. Up at the edge of the possible, whole
ecosystems would now start dying. Twenty percent drop in insolation: it was
worse than any Terran ice age, more like the darkness after the great
extinction events—the KT event, the Ordovician; the Devonian, or the worst one
of all, the Permian event 250 million years ago, which killed up to ninety-five
percent of all the species alive at the time. Punctuated equilibrium; and very
few species survived the punctuations. The ones that did were tough, or just
lucky.

Michel said, “I doubt it will satisfy her.”

This Sax fully believed. But for the moment he was distracted by
thinking how best to compensate for the loss of the soletta’s light. It would
be better not to have any biomes suffering great losses. If he had his way,
those fellfields were just something Ann was going to have to get used to.

*
     
*
       
*

It was Ls 123, right in the middle of the northern summer/southern
winter, near aphelion, which along with higher elevation caused the south’s
winter to be much colder than the north’s; temperatures regularly dipped to 230
K, not much warmer than the primal colds that had existed before their arrival.
Now, with the soletta and annular mirror gone, temperatures would drop further
still. No doubt the southern highlands were headed for a record winterkill.

On the other hand, a lot of snow had already fallen in the south,
and Sax had gained a great respect for snow’s ability to protect living things
from cold and wind. The sub-nivean environment was quite stable. It could be
that a drop in light, and subsequently in surface temperature, would not do
that much harm to snowed-over plants, already shut down by their winter
hardening. It was hard to say. He wanted to get into the field and see for
himself. Of course it would be months or perhaps years before any difference
would be quantifiable. Except in the weather itself, perhaps. And weather could
be tracked merely by watching the meteorological data, which he was already
doing, spending many hours in front of satellite pictures and weather maps,
watching for signs. It made for a useful diversion when people came by to
remonstrate with him for removing the mirrors, an event so common in the week
following the event that it became tiresome.

Unfortunately weather on Mars was so variable that it was
difficult to tell if the removal of the big mirrors was affecting it or not. A
very sad admission of the state of their understanding of the atmosphere, in
Sax’s opinion. But there it was. Martian weather was a violent semichaotic
system. In some ways it resembled Earth’s, not surprising given that it was a
matter of air and water moving around the surface of a spinning sphere:
Coriolis forces were the same everywhere, and so here as on Earth there were
tropical easterlies, temperate westerlies, polar easterlies, jet-stream anchor
points and so on; but that was almost all one could say for sure about Martian
weather. Well—you could say that it was colder and drier in the south than in
the north. That there were rain shadows downwind of high volcanoes or mountain
chains. That it was warmer near the equator, colder at the poles. But this sort
of obvious generalization was all that they could assert with confidence, except
for some local patterns, although most of those were subject to lots of
variation—more a matter of highly analyzed statistics than lived experience.
And with only fifty-two m-years on record, with the atmosphere thickening
radically all the while, with water being pumped onto the surface, etc., etc.,
it was actually fairly difficult to say what normal or average conditions might
be.

Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on east Pavonis.
People kept interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile
political situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weather’s.
Already it was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds;
there were sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent
fights in defense of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced
himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were
trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict
with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the
Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a
springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not
going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the
day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-meter rise in
sea level was going to push them off stage.

Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and
joined Michel for supper out in his rover.

“There’s no such thing as a fresh start,” he said as he put water
on to boil.

“The Big Bang?” Michel suggested.

“As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the—the
dumpiness of the early universe was caused by the earlier—dumpiness of the
previous universe, collapsing down into its Big Crunch.”

“I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.”

“Singularities are strange—outside their event horizons, quantum
effects allow some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting
those particles out apparently caused small clumps to start and become big
ones.” Sax frowned; he was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. “But I was
referring to the flood on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of
conditions as a singularity, by any means. In fact there must be people down
there who don’t think of it as a break at all.”

“True.” For some reason Michel was laughing. “We should go there
and see, eh?”

As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, “I want to get
out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors
going away.”

“You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out
on the rim.. ..” Michel shuddered.

“Yes, but that only makes me more curious.”

“Well—we’ll hold down the fort for you.”

As if one had to physically occupy any given space in order to be
there. “The cerebellum never gives up,” Sax said.

Michel grinned. “Which is why you want to go out and see it in
person.”

Sax frowned.

Before he left, he called Ann.

“Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to south Tharsis,
to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the ar-eobiosphere, together?”

She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she
thought it over—the cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her
conscious verbal response: “No.” And then she cut the connection, looking
somewhat frightened.

Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for
going into the field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the
rocky first biomes of the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they
were. Talking to her. Something like that. His mental image of what he would
say to her if he actually got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her.
Make her see it.

Well, one couldn’t make people see things.

He went to say good-bye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make
people see things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when
he talked about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now
and still she hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made
Sax smile a little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who
obviously loved Ann.

As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was
in the nature of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it—to fall in
love with all the objects of his “scientific study.” Every astronomer loves the
stars. Well, who knew. Sax reached out and clasped Michel’s upper arm, who
smiled happily at this un-Sax-like behavior, this “change in thinking.” Love,
yes; and how much more so when the object of study consisted of women known for
years and years, studied with the intensity of pure science—yes, that would be
a feeling. A great intimacy, whether they cooperated in the study or not. In
fact they might even be more beguiling if they didn’t cooperate, if they
refused to answer any questions at all. After all if Michel wanted questions
answered, answered at great length even when they weren’t asked, he always had
Maya, Maya the all-too-human, who led Michel on a hard steeplechase across the
limbic array, including throwing things at him, if Spencer was to be believed.
After that kind of symbolism, the silence of Ann might prove to be very
endearing. “Be careful,” Michel said: the happy scientist, with one of his
areas of study standing before him, loved like a brother.