Green mars (20 page)

But all that was hypothetical. In reality he could settle into the life of Lindholm. ‘

As he did, he discovered that he enjoyed his new work very much. In the old days, as head of the entire terraforming project, it had been impossible not to get bogged down in administration^ or diffused across the whole range of topics, trying to do enough of everything to be able to make informed policy decisions. Naturally this had led to a lack of depth in any one discipline, with a resulting loss of understanding. Now, however, his whole attention was focused on creating new plants to add to the simple ecosystem that had been propagated in the glacial regions. For several weeks he worked on a new lichen, designed to extend the borders of the new bioregions, based on a chasmdendolith from the Wright Valleys in Antarctica. The base lichen had lived in the cracks in the Antarctic rock, and here Sax wanted it to do the same, but he was trying to replace the algal part of the lichen with a faster algae, so that the resulting new symbiote would grow more quickly than its template organism, which was notoriously slow. At the same time he was trying to introduce into the lichen’s fungus some phreato-phytic genes from salt-tolerant plants like tamarisk and pickleweed. These could live in salt levels three times as salty as sea water, and the mechanisms, which had to do with the permeability of cell walls, were somewhat transferable. If he managed it, then the result would be a very hardy and fast-growing new salt lichen. Very encouraging, to see the progress that had been made in this area since their first crude attempts to make an organism that would survive on the surface, back in Underbill. Of course the surface had been more difficult then. But their knowledge of genetics and their range of methods were also greatly advanced.

One problem that was proving very obdurate was adjusting the plants to the paucity of nitrogen on Mars. Most large concentrations of nitrites were being mined upon discovery and released as nitrogen into the atmosphere, a process Sax had initiated in the 2040s and thoroughly approved of, as the atmosphere was desperately in need of nitrogen. But so was the soil, and with so much of it being put into the air, the plant life was coming up short. This was a problem that no Terran plant had ever faced, at least not to this degree, so there were no obvious adaptive traits to clip into the genes of their areoflora.

The nitrogen problem was a recurrent topic of conversation in their after-work sessions at the Cafe Lowen, up on the mesa plateau’s edge. “Nitrogen is so valuable that it’s the medium of exchange among the members of the underground,” Berkina told Sax, who nodded uncomfortably at this misinformation.

Their cafe group made its own homage to the importance of nitrogen by inhaling N2O from little canisters, passed from person to person around the table. It was claimed, with marginal accuracy but very high spirits, that their exhalation of this gas would help the terraforming effort. When the canister came around to Sax for the first time, he regarded it dubiously. He had noticed that one could purchase the canisters in restrooms—there was an entire pharmacology inside every men’s room now, wall units that dispensed canisters of nitrous oxide, omegendorph, pandorph, and other drug-laced gases. Apparently respiration was the current method of choice for drug ingestion. It was not something that interested him, but now he took the canister from Jessica, who was leaning against his shoulder. This was an area in which Stephen’s and Sax’s behaviors diverged, apparently. So he breathed out and then put the little facemask over his mouth and nose, feeling Stephen’s slim face under the plastic.

He breathed in a cold rush of the gas, held it briefly, exhaled, and felt all the weight go out of him—that was the subjective impression. It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one’s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself. Not on the face of it a pleasant realization. But at the moment, not a problem. In fact it made him grin. He looked over the rail at the rooftops of Burroughs, and noticed for the first time that the new neighborhoods to the west and north we’re shifting to blue tile roofs and white walls, so that they were taking on a Greek look, while the old parts of town were more Spanish. Jessica was definitely making an effort to keep their upper arms in contact. It was possible her balance was impaired by mirth.

“But it’s time to get beyond the alpine zone!” Claire was saying. “I’m sick of lichen, and I’m sick of mosses and grasses. Our equatorial fellfields are becoming meadows, we’ve even got krummholz, and they’re all getting lots of sunlight year-round, and the atmospheric pressure at the foot of the escarpment is as high as in the Himalayas.”

“Top of the Himalayas,” Sax pointed out, then checked himself mentally; that had been a Saxlike qualification, he could feel it. As Lindholm he said, “But there are high Himalayan forests.”

“Exactly. Stephen, you’ve done wonders since you arrived on that lichen, why don’t you and Berkina and Jessica and C.J. start working on subalpine plants. See if we can’t make some little forests.”

They toasted the idea with another hit of nitrous oxide, and the idea of the briny frozen borders of the aquifer outbreaks becoming meadows and forests suddenly struck them all as extremely funny. “We need moles,” Sax said, trying to wipe the grin from his face. “Moles and voles are crucial in changing fellfields to meadow, I wonder if we can make some kind of CO2-tolerant arctic moles.”

His companions thought this was hilarious, but he was lost in thought for a while, and didn’t notice.

“Listen, Claire, do you think we could go out and have a look at one of the glaciers? Do some of the work on-site?”

Claire stopped giggling and nodded. “Sure. In fact that reminds me. We’ve got a permanent experimental station out at Arena Glacier, with a good lab. And we’ve been contacted by a biotech group from Armscor, one with a lot of clout with the Transitional Authority. They want to be taken out to see the station and the ice. I guess they’re planning to build a similar station in Marineris. We can go out with that group and show them around, and do some fieldwork, and kill two birds with one stone.”

Plans to make this trip actually made it from the Lowen into the lab, and then the front office. Approval came swiftly, as was usual in Biotique. So Sax worked hard for a couple of weeks, preparing for the fieldwork, and at the end of that intensive period he packed his bag, and one morning took the subway out to West Gate. There in the Swiss garage he spotted some people from the office, gathered with several strangers. Introductions were still being made. Sax approached, and Claire saw him and drew him into the crowd, looking excited. “Here, Stephen, I want to introduce you to our guest for the trip.” A woman wearing some kind of prisming fabric turned around, and Claire said, “Stephen, I’d like you to meet Phyllis Boyle. Phyllis, this is Stephen Lindholm.”

“How do you do?” Phyllis said, extending a hand.

Sax took her hand and shook
. “I do fine,” he said.

Vlad had nicked his vocal cords to give him a different vocal print if he was ever tested, but everyone in Gamete had agreed that he sounded just the same. And now Phyllis cocked her head curiously at him, alerted by something. “I’m looking forward to the trip,” he said, and glanced at Claire. “I hope I haven’t held you up?”

“No no, we’re still waiting for the drivers.”

“Ah.” Sax backed away. “Good to meet you,” he said to Phyllis politely. She nodded, and with a final curious glance turned back to the people she had been talking to. Sax tried to concentrate on what Claire was saying about the drivers. Apparently driving a rover across open terrain was a specialized occupation now.

That was fairly cool, he thought. Of course coolness was a Sax-trait. Probably he ought to have gushed all over her, said he knew her from the old vids and had admired her for years, etc. Although how someone could admire Phyllis he had no idea. Surely she had come out of the war fairly compromised; on the winning side, but the only one of the First Hundred to have chosen it. A quisling, did they call that? Something like that. Well, she hadn’t been the only one of the First Hundred; Vasili had stayed in Burroughs throughout, and George and Edvard had been on Clarke with Phyl-lis when it detached from the cable and catapulted out of the plane of the ecliptic. A neat bit of work to survive that, actually. He wouldn’t have thought it possible—but there she was, chattering with her host of admirers. Luckily he had heard of her survival a few years before; otherwise it would have been a shock to see her.

She still looked about sixty years old, although she had been born the same year as Sax, and so was now 115. Silver-haired, blue-eyed, her jewelry made of gold and bloodstone, her blouse made of a material that shone through all the colors of the spectrum—right now her back was a vibrant blue, but as she turned tr glance over her shoulder at him it went emerald green. He pretended not to notice the look.

Then the drivers came, and they were into the rovers and off, and fcr a blessing Phyllis was in one of the other cars. The rovers were big hydrazine-powered things, and they followed a concrete road north, so that Sax could not see the necessity for specialist drivers, unless it was to handle .the rovers’ speed; they were rolling along at about a hundred and sixty kilometers an hour, and to Sax, who was used to rover speeds about a quarter that, it felt fast and smooth. The other passengers complained at how bumpy and slow the ride was—apparently express trains now floated over the pistes at about six hundred kilometers per hour.

The Arena Glacier was some eight hundred kilometers northwest of Burroughs, spilling from the highlands of Syrtis Major north onto Utopia Planitia. It ran in one of the Arena Fossae for a distance of some three hundred fifty kilometers. Claire and Berkina and the others in the car told Sax the glacier’s history, and he did his best to indicate absorbed interest; indeed it was interesting, for they were aware that Nadia had rerouted the outbreak of the Arena aquifer. Some of the people who had been with Nadia when she did it had ended up in South Fossa after the war, and the story had been told there, and had spread into the public domain.

In fact these people seemed to think they knew a lot about Nadia. “She was against the war,” Claire told him confidently, “and she did everything she could to stop it and then to repair the damage, even while it was happening. People who saw her on Elysium say she never slept at all, just took stimulants to keep going. They say she saved ten thousand lives in the week she was active around South Fossa.”

“What happened to her?” Sax asked.

“No one knows. She dis?.ppeared from South Fossa.”

“She was headed for Low Point,” Berkina said. “If she got there in time for that flood, she was probably killed.”

“Ah.” Sax nodded solemnly. “That was a bad time.”

“Very bad,” Claire said vehemently. “So destructive. It set the terraforming back decades, I’m sure.”

“Although the aquifer outbreaks have been useful,” Sax murmured.

“Yes, but those could have been done anyway, in a controlled manner.”

“True.” Sax shrugged and let the conversation go on without him. After the encounter with Phyllis it was a bit much to get into a discussion of ‘61.

He still couldn’t quite believe she hadn’t recognized him. The passenger compartment they were in had shiny magnesium panels over the windows, and there, among the faces of his new colleagues, was the little face of Stephen Lindholm. A bald old man with a slightly hooked nose, which made the eyes somewhat hawkish rather than just birdlike. Visible lips, strong jaw, a chin—no, it didn’t look like him at all. No reason why she should have recognized him.

But looks weren’t everything.

He tried not to think about that as they hummed north over the road. He concentrated on the view. The passenger compartment had a domed skylight, as. well as windows on all four sides, so he could see a lot. They were driving up the slope of west Isidis, a section of the Great Escarpment that was like a great shaved berm. The jagged dark hills of Syrtis Major rose over the northwest horizon, sharp as the edge of a saw. The air was clearer than it had been in the old days, even though it was fifteen times thicker. But there was less dust in it, as snowstorms were knocking the fines down and then fixing them on the surface in a crust. Of course this crust was often broken by strong winds, and the trapped fines rein-troduced to the air. But these breaks were localized, and the sky-cleaning storms were slowly getting the upper hand.

And so the sky was changing color. Overhead it was a rich violet, and above the western hills it was whitish, shading up into lavender, and some color between lavender and violet that Sax didn’t have a name for. The eye could distinguish differences in light frequency of only a few wavelengths, so the few names for the colors between red and blue were totally inadequate to describe the phenomena. But whatever you called them, or didn’t, they were sky colors very unlike the tans and pinks of the early years. Of course a dust storm would always temporarily return the sky to that primeval ochre tone; but when the atmosphere washed out, its color would be a function of its thickness and chemical composition. Curious as to what they could expect to see in the future, Sax took his lectern from his pocket to try some calculations.

He stared at the little box, suddenly realizing that it was Sax Russell’s lectern—that if checked, it would give him away. It was like-carrying around a genuine passport.

He dismissed the thought, as there was nothing to be done about it now. He concentrated on the color of the sky. In clean air, sky color was caused by preferential light scattering in the air molecules themselves. Thus the thickness of the atmosphere was critical. Air pressure when they had arrived had been about 10 millibars, and now it averaged about 160. But since air pressure was created by the weight of the air, creating 160 millibars on Mars had taken about three times as much air over any given spot than would have created such a pressure on Earth. So the 160 millibars here ought to scatter light about as much as 480 millibars on Earth; meaning the sky overhead ought to have something like the dark blue color seen in photos taken in mountains about 4,000 meters high.

But the actual color filling the windows and skylight of their rover was much more reddish than that, and even on clear mornings after heavy storms, Sax had never seen it look anywhere near as blue as a Terran sky. He thought about it more. Another effect of Mars’s light gravity was that the air column lofted taller than Earth’s. It was possible that the smallest fines were effectively in suspension, and had been blown above the altitude of most clouds, where they escaped being scrubbed out by storms. He recalled that haze layers had been photographed that were as much as fifty kilometers high, well above the clouds. Another factor might be the composition of the atmosphere; carbon dioxide molecules were more efficient light scatterers than oxygen and nitrogen, and Mars, despite Sax’s best efforts, still had much more CO2 in its atmosphere than Earth did. The effects of that difference would be calculable. He typed up the equation for Rayleigh’s law of scattering, which states that the light energy scattered per unit volume of air is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength of the illuminating radiation. Then he scribbled away on his lectern screen, altering the variables, checking handbooks, or filling in quantities by memory, or guesswork.

He concluded that if the atmosphere was thickened to one bar, then the sky would probably turn milk white. He also confirmed that in theory the present-day Martian sky ought to be a lot bluer than it was, with its scattered blue light about sixteen times the intensity of the red. This suggested that fines very high in the atmosphere were probably reddening the sky. If that was the correct explanation, one could infer that the color and opacity of the Martian sky would for many years be subject to very wide variation, depending on weather and other influences on the cleanness of the air... .

And so he worked on, trying to incorporate into the calculation skylight radiance intensities, Chandrasekhar’s radiative transfer equation, chromaticity scales, aerosol chemical compositions, Le-gendre polynomials to evaluate the angular scattering intensities, Riccati-Bessel functions to evaluate the scattering cross sections, and so on—occupying the better part of the drive to Arena Glacier, concentrating hard and steadfastly ignoring the world around him and the situation in which he now found himself.

Early that afternoon they came to a small town called Bradbury, which under its Nicosia-class tent looked like something out of Illinois: treelined blacktop streets, screened-in porches fronting two-story brick houses with shingle roofs, a main street with shops and parking meters, a central park with a white gazebo under giant maples... .

They headed west on a smaller road, across the top of Syrtis Major. The road was made of black sand that had been cleared of rocks and sprayed with a fixative. This whole region was very dark—Syrtis Major had been the first Martian surface feature spotted through Earth telescopes, by Christiaan Huygens on November 28, 1659, and it was this dark rock that had allowed him to see it. The ground was almost black, sometimes a kind of eggplant purple; the hills and grabens and escarpments that the road twisted through were black; the fretted mesas were black, the thulleya or little ribs were black, ridge after ridge after ridge of them; the giant ejecta erratics, on the other hand, were often rust-colored, reminding them forcibly of the color from which they had temporarily escaped.

Then they drove over a black bedrock rib and the glacier lay before them, crossing the world from left to right like a lightning bolt inlaid into the landscape. A bedrock rib on the far side of the glacier paralleled the one they were on, and the two ribs together looked like old lateral moraines, although really they were just parallel ridges that had channelized the outbreak flood.

The glacier was about two kilometers across. It appeared to be no more than five or six meters thick, but apparently it had run down a canyon, so there were hidden depths.

Parts of its surface were like ordinary regolith, just as rocky and dusty, with a kind of gravel surface that revealed no sign of the ice below. Other parts looked like chaotic terrain, except clearly made of ice, with knots of white seracs sticking up out of what looked like boulders. Some of the seracs were broken plates, bunched like the back of a stegosaurus, translucent yellow with the setting sun behind them.

All was motionless, to every horizon—not a movement to be seen anywhere. Of course not; Arena Glacier had been here for forty years. But Sax could not help remembering the last time he had seen such a sight, and he glanced involuntarily to the south, as if a new flood might burst out at any moment.

The Biotique station was located a few kilometers upstream, on the rim and apron of a small crater, so that it had an excellent view over the glacier. In the last part of sunset, as some of the regulars got the station activated, Sax went with Claire and the visitors from Armscor, including Phyllis, up to a big observation room on the top floor of the station, to look at the broken mass of ice in the waning moments of the day.

Even on a relatively clear afternoon like this one, the horizontal rays of the sun turned the air a burnished dark red, and the surface of the glacier sparked in a thousand places, the recently broken ice reflecting the light like mirrors. The majority of these scarlet gleams lay in a rough line between them and the sun, but there were a few elsewhere on the ice, where the reflecting surfaces stood at odd angles. Phyllis pointed out how much larger the sun looked, now that the soletta was in position. “Isn’t it wonderful? You can almost see the mirrors, can’t you?”

“It looks like blood.”

“It looks positively Jurassic.”

To Sax it looked like a G-type star about one astronomical unit away. Of course this was significant, as they were 1.5 astronomical units away. As for the talk of rubies, or dinosaur’s eyes ...

The sun slipped over the horizon and all the points of red light disappeared at once. A great fan of crepuscular rays stretched across the sky, the pinkish beams cutting a dark purple sky. Phyllis exclaimed over the colors, which were indeed very clear and pure. She said, “I wonder what makes those magnificent rays,” and automatically Sax opened his mouth to explain about the shadows of hills or clouds over the horizon, when it occurred to him that a, it was a rhetorical question (perhaps), and b, to give a technical answer would be a very Sax Russell thing to do. So he shut his mouth, and considered what Stephen Lindholm would say in such a situation. This kind of self-consciousness was new to him, and distinctly uncomfortable, but he was going to have to say things, at least some of the time, because long silences were also fairly Sax Russellish, and not at all like Lindholm as he had been playing him so far. So he tried his best.