Blue Mars (8 page)

Sax took a solo rover
and drove it down the steep bare southern slope of Pavonis Mons,
then across the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia Mons. He contoured around the
great cone of Arsia Mons on its dry eastern side. After that he drove down the
southern flank of Arsia, and.of the Tharsis Bulge itself, until he was on the
broken highlands of Dae-dalia Planitia. This plain was the remnant of a giant
ancient impact basin, now almost entirely erased by the uptilt of Tharsis, by
lava from Arsia Mons, and by the ceaseless winds, until nothing was left of the
impact basin except for a collection of areologists’ observations and
deductions, faint radial arrays of ejecta scrapes and the like, visible on maps
but not in the landscape.

To the eye as one traveled over it, it looked like much of the
rest of the southern highlands: rugged bumpy pitted cracked land. A wild
rockscape. The old lava flows were visible as smooth lobate curves of dark
rock, like tidal swells fanning out and down. Wind streaks both light and dark
marked the land, indicating dust of different weights and consistencies: there
were light long triangles on the southeast sides of craters and boulders, dark
chevrons to the northwest of them, and dark splotches inside the many rimless
craters. The next big dust storm would redesign all these patterns.

Sax drove over the low stone waves with great pleasure, down down
up, down down up, reading the sand paintings of the dust streaks like a wind
chart. He was traveling not in a boulder car, with its low dark room and its
cockroach scurry from one hiding place to the next, but rather in a big boxy
areologist’s camper, with windows on all four sides of the third-story driver’s
compartment. It was a very great pleasure indeed to roll along up there in the
thin bright daylight, down and up, down and up, down and up over the
sand-streaked plain, the horizons very distant for Mars. There was no one to
hide from; no one hunting for him. He was a free man on a free planet, and if
he wanted to he could drive this car right around the world. Or anywhere he
pleased.

The full impact of this feeling took him about two days’ drive to
realize. Even then he was not sure that he comprehended it. It was a sensation
of lightness, a strange lightness that caused little smiles to stretch his
mouth repeatedly for no obvious reason. He had not been consciously aware,
before, of any sense of oppression or fear—but it seemed it had been there—since
2061, perhaps, or the years right before it. Sixty-six years of fear, ignored
and forgotten but always there—a kind of tension in the musculature, a small
hidden dread at the core of things. “Sixty-six bottles of fear on the wall,
sixty-six bottles of fear! Take one down, pass it around, sixty-five bottles of
fear on the wall!”

Now gone. He was free, his world was free. He was driving down the
wind-etched tilted plain, and earlier that day snow had begun to appear in the
cracks, gleaming aquati-cally in a way dust never did; and then lichen; he was
driving down into the atmosphere. And no reason, now, why his life ought not to
continue this way, puttering about freely every day in his own world lab, and
everybody else just as free as that!

It was quite a feeling.

Oh they could argue on Pavonis, and they most certainly would.
Everywhere in fact. A most extraordinarily contentious lot they were. What was
the sociology that would explain that? Hard to say. And in any case they had
cooperated despite their bickering; it might have been only a temporary
confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now—with so many
traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to call the necessity of
creation; and creation was hard. Not everyone was as good at creation as they
were at complaining.

But they had certain capabilities now as a group, as a—a
civilization. The accumulated body of scientific knowledge was growing vast
indeed, and that knowledge was giving them an array of powers that could
scarcely be comprehended, even in outline, by any single individual. But powers
they were, understood or not. Godlike powers, as Michel called them, though it
was not necessary to exaggerate them or confuse the issue—they were powers in
the material world, real but constrained by reality. Which nevertheless might
allow—it looked to Sax as if these powers could— if rightly applied—make a
decent human civilization after all. After all the many centuries of trying.
And why not? Why not? Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level
possible? They could provide for everyone in an equitable way, they could cure
disease, they could delay senescence until they lived for a thousand years,
they could understand the universe from the Planck distance to the cosmic distance,
from the Big Bang to the eskaton—all this was possible, it was technically
achievable. And as for those who felt that humanity needed the spur of
suffering to make it great, well they could go out and find anew the tragedies
that Sax was sure would never go away, things like lost love, betrayal by
friends, death, bad results in the lab. Meanwhile the rest of them could
continue the work of making a decent civilization. They could do it! It was
amazing, really. They had reached that moment in history when one could say it
was possible. Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in
physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow
extraordinary or unique. The odds were against that, it suggested that it was an
artifact of perspective, one had to assume that things were more or less
constant and that one lived in average times—the so-called principle of
mediocrity. Never a particularly attractive principle, Sax had thought; perhaps
it only meant that justice had always been achievable; in any case, there it
was, an extraordinary moment, right there outside his four windows, burnished
under the light touch of the natural sun. Mars and its humans, free and
powerful.

It was too much to grasp. It kept slipping out of his mind, then
reoccurring to him, and surprised by joy he would exclaim, “Ha! Ha!” The taste
of tomato soup and bread; “Ha!”

The dusky purple of the twilight sky; “Ha!” The spectacle of the
dashboard instrumentation, glowing faintly, reflected in the black windows;
“Ha! Ha! Ha! My-oh-my.” He could drive anywhere he wanted to. No one told them
what to do. He said that aloud to his darkened AI screen: “No one tells us what
to do!” It was almost frightening. Vertiginous. Ka, the yonsei would say. Ka,
supposedly the little red people’s name for Mars, from the Japanese ka, meaning
fire. The same word existed in several other early languages as well, including
proto-Indo-European; or so the linguists said.

Carefully he got in the big bed at the back of the compartment, in
the hum of the rover’s heating and electrical system, and he lay humming to
himself under the thick coverlet that caught up his body’s heat so fast, and
put his head on the pillow and looked out at the stars.

The next morning a high-pressure system came in from the
northwest, and the temperature rose to 262 K. He had driven down to five
kilometers above the datum, and the exterior air pressure was 230 millibars.
Not quite enough to breathe freely, so he pulled on one of the heated surface
suits, then slipped a small air tank over his shoulders, and put its mask over
his nose and mouth, and a pair of goggles over his eyes.

Even so, when he climbed out of the outer-lock door and down the
steps to the sand, the intense cold caused him to sniffle and tear up, to the
point of impeding his vision. The whistle of the wind was loud, though his ears
were inside the hood of his suit. The suit’s heater was up to the task,
however, and with the rest of him warm, his face slowly got used to it.

He tightened the hood’s drawstring and walked over the land. He
stepped from flat stone to flat stone; here they were everywhere. He crouched
often to inspect cracks, finding lichen and widely scattered specimens of other
life: mosses, little tufts of sedge, grass. It was very windy. Exceptionally
hard gusts slapped him four or five times a minute, with a steady gale between.
This was a windy place much of the time, no doubt, with the atmosphere sliding
south around the bulk of Tharsis in massed quantities. High-pressure cells
would dump a lot of their moisture at the start of this rise, on the western
side; indeed at this moment the horizon to the west was obscured by a flat sea
of cloud, merging with the land in the far distance, out there two or three
kilometers lower in elevation, and perhaps sixty kilometers away.

Underfoot there were only bits of snow, filling some of the shaded
crack systems and hollows. These snowbanks were so hard that he could jump up
and down on them without leaving a mark. Windslab, partially melted and then
refrozen. One scalloped slab cracked under his boots, and he found it was
several centimeters thick. Under that it was powder, or granules. His fingers
were cold, despite his heated gloves.

He stood again and wandered, mapless over the rock. Some of the
deeper hollows contained ice pools. Around midday he descended into one of
these and ate his lunch by the ice pool, lifting the air mask to take bites out
of a grain-and-honey bar. Elevation 4.5 kilometers above the datum; air
pressure 267 millibars. A high-pressure system indeed. The sun was low in the
northern sky, a bright dot surrounded by pewter.

The ice of the pool was clear in places, like little windows
giving him a view of the black bottom. Elsewhere it was bubbled or cracked, or
white with rime. The bank he sat on was a curve of gravel, with patches of
brown soil and black dead vegetation lying on it in a miniature berm—the
high-water mark of the pond, apparently, a soil shore above the gravel one. The
whole beach was no more than four meters long, one wide. The fine gravel was an
umber color, piebald umber or.... He would have to consult a color chart. But
not now.

The soil berm was dotted by pale green rosettes of tiny grass
blades. Longer blades stood in clumps here and there. Most of the taller blades
were dead, and light gray. Right next to the pond were patches of dark green
succulent leaves, dark red at their edges. Where the green shaded into red was
a color he couldn’t name, a dark lustrous brown stuffed somehow with both its
constituent colors. He would have to call up a color chart soon, it seemed;
lately when looking around outdoors he found that a color chart came in handy
about once a minute. Waxy almost-white flowers were tucked under some of these
bicolored leaves. Farther on lay some tangles, red-stalked, green-needled, like
beached seaweed in miniature. Again that intermixture of red and green, right
there in nature staring at him.

A distant wind-washed hum; perhaps the harping rocks, perhaps the
buzz of insects. Black midges, bees ... in this air they would only have to
sustain about thirty millibars of CO2, because there was so little partial
pressure driving it into them, and at some point internal saturation was enough
to hold any more out. For mammals that might not work so well. But they might
be able to sustain twenty millibars, and with plant life flourishing all over
the planet’s lower elevations, CO2 levels might drop to twenty millibars fairly
soon; and then they could dispense with the air tanks and the face masks. Set
loose animals on Mars.

In the faint hum of the air he seemed to hear their voices,
immanent or emergent, coming in the next great surge of viriditas. The hum of
distant voices; the wind; the peace of this little pool on its rocky moor; the
Nirgalish pleasure he took in the sharp cold. . . . “Ann should see this,” he
murmured.

Then again, with the space mirrors gone, presumably everything he
saw here was doomed. This was the upper limit of the biosphere, and surely with
the loss of light and heat the upper limit would drop, at least temporarily,
perhaps for good. He didn’t like that; and it seemed possible there might be
ways to compensate for the lost light. After all, the terraforming had been
doing quite well before the mirrors’ arrival; they hadn’t been necessary. And
it was good not to depend on something so fragile, and better to be rid of it
now rather than later, when large animal populations might have died in the
setback along with the plants.

Even so it was a shame. But the dead plant matter would only be
more fertilizer in the end, and without the same kind of suffering as animals.
At least so he assumed. Who knew how plants felt? When you looked closely at
them, glowing in all their detailed articulation like complex crystals, they
were as mysterious as any other life. And now their presence here made the
entire plain, everything he could see, into one great fellfield, spreading in a
slow tapestry over the rock; breaking down the weathered minerals, melding with
them to make the first soils. A very slow process. There was a vast complexity
in every pinch of soil; and the look of this fellfield was the loveliest thing
he had ever seen.

*
     
*
       
*

To weather. This whole world was weathering. The first printed use
of the word with that meaning had appeared in a book on Stonehenge,
appropriately enough, in 1665. “The weathering of so many Centuries of Years.”
On this stone world. Weathering. Language as the first science, exact yet
vague, or multivalent. Throwing things together. The mind as weather. Or being
weathered.