Moving Mars (61 page)

I met Casseia Majumdar once in her garden, twenty years agowhen she was fifty by the old way of measuring Martian years, and I was twelve by the new. My mother had just become President of Mars, under the New Republic Constitution, and she, my father, and I were making the pilgrimage across Cyane Sulci to Casseias home, as had become traditional in the past few administrations.

Casseia Majumdar was a straight, proud, stocky woman with wispy gray and black hair and deeply lined brown skin. Beneath her pressure suit, her arms seemed thin but strong, and her legs moved swiftly and with youthful confidence. She met us in a tractor that had once belonged to her husband. She smiled, shook our hands, and invited us into her house, perched on the edge of the Cyane Sulci Preserve, where we removed our suits and showered and became comfortable.

She introduced us to her longtime housemate, Charles Franklin. Franklin greeted us with a pleasant but separated expression. Tall, very thin, with white hair growing thickly above a face marked by peculiar lines, neither laughing nor sad, Franklin said little, walking around the house doing various small tasks that seemed to have no real purpose, but which amused him. He smiled to himself, sometimes laughed, and this bothered me. I didnt connect this odd, shell-like person with the Charles Franklin who had figured so prominently in my history lessons. I asked my mother, Is he all right? My father nudged me in the ribs, bent down, and said, Thats him. Now behave!

I stared at the man with even more unease. He glanced at me, nodded as if we were in deep agreement, and sat beside Casseia Majumdar.

Mother, always straightforward, asked Majumdar how Franklin was faring lately.

As well as ever, she answered. Dont mind him, she told me. Hes having his own kind of fun, and sometimes hes very lively. But he doesnt think the same way you and I do.

She prepared dinner for us with Franklins help. I remember she said to me, Martian vegetables taste better prepared by human hands, I think youll agree.

We sat at her table, made from a single dried bridge leaf, near a window that overlooked a broad russet-colored valley. We ate bridge fruit, the first time I had tasted such a delicacy, prohibitively expensive on the open market. Majumdar spoke to us enthusiastically about the mother cysts and how, in the last twenty years, they had finally shown us more of their varied offspring. Some of those offspring lumbered and grew in the gardens outside: rotifer-sheep, pipeworms, dustdogs.

Franklin listened to this conversation with a pleased expression, then added his own contribution. He pulled a drafting wand from a shirt pocket full of paper scraps and scribers and used it to sketch in the air, with thin orange lines, a number of mother ecos organisms, known only by their fossils: glider bees, sandpuffs, drift-tangles. Then, with equal enthusiasm, he sketched a series of involved squiggles that had no shape whatsoever.

Sometimes I see what Charles is getting at, Majumdar said, following the squiggles in the air with her finger. These are tracks of genetic diversity, I think. Only the least demanding creatures are being produced by the mothers now. They seem to be holding their best offspring in reservein case Mars decides to go back to its old dead days. Very intriguing, Charles.

Franklin smiled and replaced the wand in his pocket.

As we ate, my mother told Majumdar that the Council of Governors had approved the erection of a monument to her, the first President Ti Sandra Erzul, and the Olympians. There would be a group of bronze and steel statues and a plaque.

Casseia appeared sad, then irritated. I dont want recognition, she said. They gave me the gardens. The gardens are enough. I dont blame anybody now.

They took away your freedom for ten years, Mother said. We owe you so much more.

We took them away from all that they knew, and couldnt even ask permission. I refused to let any votes be taken.

We have a different view of these things now, my father said.

I dont need a statue, Majumdar insisted. I do wish you Presidents would stop coming here to apologize. You know what Id really like? Id enjoy taking your lovely daughter on a tour of the garden.

All of it? Father asked. The preserve stretched across a million hectares of the Sulci, impossible terrain for a tractor.

Just the part I watch over, Casseia explained with a laugh.

And she gave me her own special tour, treating me like a granddaughter. There was such a gleam in her eyes when she stopped the tractor beneath an aqueduct bridge. We sealed our helmets and got out, looking up at the huge deep-red petals of the flowers, as wide as I was tall, clustered the length of a pier which stretched thirty meters into the blue-black sky. The great glassy liquid-filled vines stretched across the ridges and hummocks and deep valleys like cables on a bridge. A full-grown man could walk through these vines, if they were emptied of their slow sugary sap.

My husband and I saw the first signs of old Martian life returning, Majumdar said.

I know, I answered, too smart. They told us about it in school.

How gratifying. Have you read my book?

Of course!

She looked away, shaking her head slowly. Lovely flowers, but mostly futile. They miss the services of glider bees but they are pretty, arent they?

I said I thought they were beautiful.

Well, the arbeiters pollinate a few of them each year, and Im allowed to harvest the fruit, and sell them, and eat what I want myself. One does me for a year.

She took me up to a broad pier and placed my gloved hand on the solid deep green surface. Heres something for keeps, she said, Theyre half a billion years old, you know, and these are little more than babies.

Years after Casseia Majumdar died, I visited the statues and the plaque placed on a flat rocky plain, open to the sky, near the University of Mars Sinai.

The plaque rests at the feet of statues of Ti Sandra Erzul and Casseia Majumdar (who steps forward with an intense expression, as if alarmed or puzzled, hand out) and Charles Franklin and the rest of the Olympians.

The plaque lists their names, and says:

To all who helped bring us here, that we might grow

as the flowers in the sky, in freedom,

under the New Sun.

While I read the plaque, the ground shivered with a small marsquake. The statues did not sway, though I did. And the sky was bluer still.