Green mars (30 page)

Biogenesis is in the first place psychogenesis. This truth was never more manifest than on Mars, where noosphere preceded biosphere—the layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stones and plans and dreams, until the moment when John stepped out and said Here we are—from which point of ignition the green force spread like wildfire, until the whole planet was pulsing with viriditas. It was as if the planet itself had felt something missing, and at the tap of mind against rock, noosphere against lithosphere, the absent biosphere had sprung into the gap with the startling suddenness of a magician’s paper flower.

Or so it seemed to Michel Duval, who was passionately devoted to every sign of life in the rust waste; who had seized Hiroko’s areophany with the fervor of a drowning man thrown a buoy. It had given him a new way of seeing. To practice this sight he had taken on Ann’s habit of walking outside in the hour before sunset, and in the long-shadowed landscapes he found every patch of grass a piercing delight. In each little tangle of sedge and lichen he saw a miniature Provence.

This was his task, as he now conceived it: the hard work of reconciling the centrifugal antinomy of Provence and Mars. He felt that in this project he was part of a long tradition, for recently in his studies he had noticed that the history of French thought was dominated by attempts to resolve extreme antinomies. For Descartes it had been mind and body, for Sartre, Freudianism and Marxism, for Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and evolution—the list could be extended, and it seemed to him that the particular quality of French philosophy, its heroic tension and its tendency to be a long march of magnificent failures, came from this repeated attempt to yoke together impossible opposites. Perhaps they were all, including his, attacks on the same problem, the struggle to knit together spirit and matter. And perhaps this was why French thought had so often welcomed complex rhetorical apparatuses such as the semantic rectangle, structures which might bind these centrifugal oppositions in nets strong enough to hold them.

So now it was Michel’s work patiently to knit green spirit and rust matter, to discover the Provence in Mars. Crustose lichen, for instance, made parts of the red plain look as if they were being plated with apple jade. And now, in the lucid indigo evenings (the old pink skies had made grass look brown), the sky’s color allowed every blade of grass to radiate such pure greens that the little meadow lawns seemed to vibrate. The intense pressure of color on the retina ... such delight.

And it was awesome as well, to see how fast this primitive biosphere had taken root, and flowered, and spread. There was an inherent surge toward life, a green electric snap between the poles of rock and mind. An incredible power, which here had reached in and touched the genetic chains, inserted sequences, created new hybrids, helped them to spread, changed their environments to help them grow. The natural enthusiasm of life for life was everywhere clear, how it struggled and so often prevailed; but now there were guiding hands as well, a noosphere bathing all from the start. The green force, bolting into the landscape with every touch of their fingertips.

So that human beings were miraculous indeed—conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom.

The American rescued
by Coyote and Maya was no more or less remarkable on first acquaintance than any other person Michel had met on Mars; more inquisitive perhaps, more ingenuous it seemed; a bulky shambling man with a swarthy face and a quizzical expression. But Michel was used to looking past that kind of surface to the transformative spirit within, and quickly he concluded that they had a mysterious man on their hands.

His name was Art Randolph, he said, and he had been salvaging useful materials from the fallen elevator. “Carbon?” Maya had asked. But he had missed or ignored her sarcastic tone and replied, “Yes, but also—” and he had rattled off a whole list of exotic brec-ciated minerals. Maya had only glared at him, but he had not appeared to notice. He only had questions. Who were they? What were they doing out there? Where were they taking him? What kind of cars were these? Were they really invisible from space? How did they get rid of their thermal signals? Why did they need to be invisible from space? Could they be part of the legendary lost colony? Were they part of the Mars underground? Who were they, anyway?

No one was quick to answer these questions, and it was Michel

who finally said to him, “We are Martians. We live out here on our own.”

“The underground. Incredible. I would have said you guys were a myth, to tell you the truth. This is great.”

Maya only rolled her eyes, and when their guest asked to be dropped off at Echus Overlook, she laughed nastily and said, “Get serious.”

“What do you mean?”

Michel explained to him that as they could not release him without revealing their presence, they might not be able to release him at all.

“Oh, I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Maya laughed again.

Michel said, “It’s a matter that is too important for us to trust a stranger. And you might not be able to keep it a secret. You would have to explain.how you had gotten so far from your vehicle.”

“You could take me back to it.”

“We don’t like to spend time around things like that. We wouldn’t have come close to it if we hadn’t noticed you were in trouble.”

“Well, I appreciate it, but I must say this isn’t much of a rescue.”

“Better than the alternative,” Maya told him sharply,

“Very true. And I do appreciate it, really. But I promise I won’t tell anyone. And you know it isn’t as if people don’t know you’re out here. TV back home has shows about you all the time.”

Even Maya was silenced by that. They drove on, Maya got on their intercom and had a brief rapid exchange with Coyote, who was traveling in the rover ahead of them, with Kasei and Nirgal. Coyote was adamant; as they had saved the man’s life, they could certainly rearrange it for a time to keep themselves out of danger. Michel reported the gist of the exchange to their prisoner.

Randolph frowned briefly, then shrugged. Michel had never seen a faster adjustment to the rerouting of a life; the man’s sangfroid was impressive. Michel regarded him attentively, while also keeping one eye on the front camera screen. Randolph was already asking questions again, about the rover’s controls. He only made one more reference to his situation, after looking at the radio and intercom controls. “I hope you’ll let me send some kind of message to my company, so they’ll know I’m safe. I worked for Dumpmines, a part of Praxis. You and Praxis have a lot in common, really. They can be very secretive too. You ought to contact them just for your own sake, I swear. You must have some coded bands that you use, right?”

No response from Maya or Michel. And later, when Randolph had gone into the rover’s little toilet chamber, Maya hissed, “He’s obviously a spy. He was out there deliberately so we would pick him up.”

That was Maya. Michel did not try to argue with her, but only shrugged. “We’re certainly treating him like one.”

And then he was back out among them, and asking more questions. Where did they live? What was it like hiding all the time? Michel began to be amused at what seemed more and more like a performance, or even a test; Randolph appeared perfectly open, ingenuous, friendly, his swarthy face almost that of a moon-calf simpleton—and yet his eyes watched them very carefully, and with every unanswered question he looked more interested and more pleased, as if their answers were coming to him by telepathy. Every human was a great power, every human on Mars an alchemist; and though Michel had given up psychiatry a long time ago, he could still recognize the touch of a master at work. He almost laughed at the growing urge he felt in himself, to confess everything to this hulking quizzical man, still clumsy in the Martian g.

Then their radio beeped, and a compresed message lasting no more than two seconds buzzed over the speakers. “See,” Randolph said helpfully, “you could get a message out to Praxis just like that.”

But when the AI finished running the message through the decryption sequence, there was no more joking. Sax had been arrested in Burroughs.

At dawn they drew up with Coyote’s car, and spent the day conferring about what to do. They sat in a cramped circle in the living compartment, their faces all lined and etched with worry— all except their prisoner, who sat between Nirgal and Maya. Nirgal had shaken hands with him and nodded as if they were old friends, although neither had said a word. But the language of friendship was not in words.

The news about Sax had come from Spencer, by way of Nadia. Spencer was working in Kasei Vallis, which was a kind of new Korolyov, a security town, very sophisticated and at the same time very low-profile. Sax had been taken to one of the compounds

there, and Spencer had found out about it and made the call out to Nadia.

“We have to get him out,” Maya said, “and fast. They’ve only had him a couple days.”

“The Sax Russell?” Randolph was saying. “Wow. I can’t believe it. Who are you all, anyway? Hey, are you Maya Toitovna?”

Maya cursed him in livid Russian. Coyote ignored them all; he hadn’t said anything since the message had arrived, and was busy at his AI screen, looking at what appeared to be weather satellite photos.

“You might as well let me go,” Randolph said into the silence. “I couldn’t tell them anything they won’t get out of Russell.”

“He won’t tell them anything!” Kasei said hotly.

Randolph waggled a hand. “Scare him, maybe hurt him a little, put him under, plug him in, dope him up and zap his brain in the right places—they’ll get answers to whatever they ask. They’ve got it down to a science, as I understand it.” He was staring at Kasei. “You look familiar too. Never mind! Anyway, if they can’t tweak it out, they can usually do it more crudely.”

“How do you know all this?” Maya demanded.

“Common knowledge,” Randolph said. “So maybe it’s all wrong, but...”

“I want to go get him,” Coyote said.

“But they’ll know we’re out here,” Kasei said.

“They know that anyway. What they don’t know is where we are.”

“Besides,” Michel said, “it’s our Sax.”

Coyote said, “Hiroko won’t object.”

“If she does, tell her to fuck off!” Maya exclaimed. “Tell her shikata ga nai!”

“It would be my pleasure,” Coyote said.

The western and northern slopes of the Tharsis bulge were unpopulated relative to the eastern drop to Noctis Labyrinthus; there were a few areothermal stations and aquifer wells, but much of the region was covered in a year-round blanket of snow and fim and young glaciers. Winds out of the south collided with the strong northwest winds coming around Olympus Mons, and the blizzards could be fierce. The protoglacial zone extended up from the six-or seven-kilometer contour nearly to the base of the great volcanoes; it was not a good place to build, nor was it a good place for stealth cars to hide. They drove hard over the sastrugi and along ropy lava mounds that served as roads, north past the bulk of Tharsis Tholus, a volcano that was about the size of Mauna Loa, though under the rise of Ascraeus it looked like a cinder cone. The next night they made it off the snow and northeast across Echus Chasma, and hid for the day under the stupendous eastern wall of Echus, just a few kilometers north of Sax’s old headquarters at the top of the cliff.

The east wall of Echus Chasma was the Great Escarpment at its absolute greatest—a cliff three kilometers tall, running in a straight line north and south for a thousand kilometers. The areologists were still arguing over its origin, as no ordinary force of landscape formation seemed adequate to have created it. It was simply a break in the fabric of things, separating the floor of Echus Chasma from the high plateau of Lunae Planum. Michel had visited Yosemite Valley in his youth, and he still recalled those towering granite cliffs; but this wall standing before them was as long as the whole state of California, and three kilometers high for most of that length: a vertical world, its massive planes of redrock staring out blankly to the west, glowing in each empty sunset like the side of a continent.

At its northern end this incredible cliff finally became less tall, and less steep, and just above 20° North it was cut by a deep broad channel, which ran east through Lunae plateau, down onto the Chryse basin. This big canyon was Kasei Vallis, one of the clearest manifestations of ancient flooding anywhere on Mars. A single glance at a satellite photo and it was obvious that a very large flood had run down Echus Chasma once upon a time, until it reached a break in its great eastern wall, perhaps a graben. The water had turned right down this valley and smashed through it with fantastic force, eroding the entrance until it was a smooth curve, slopping over the outside bank of the turn and ripping at joints in the rock until they were a complex gridwork of narrow canyons. A central ridge in the main valley had been shaped into a long lemniscate or tear-shaped island, the shape as hydrodynamic as a fishback. The inner bank of the fossil watercourse was incised by two canyons that had been mostly untouched by water, ordinary fossae that showed what the main channel had probably looked like before the flood. Two late meteor strikes on the highest part of the inner bank had completed the shaping of the terrain, leaving fresh steep craters.

From the ground, driving slowly onto the rise of the outer bank, it was a rounded elbow of a valley, with the lemniscate ridge, and the round ramparts of the craters on the rise of the inner bank, the most prominent features. It was an attractive landscape, reminiscent of the Burroughs region in its spatial majesty, the great sweep of the main channel just begging to be filled with running water, which no doubt would be a shallow braided stream, coursing over pebbles and cutting new beds and islands every week... .

But now it was the site for the transnationals’ security compound. The two craters on the inner bank had been tented, as had big sections of the gridwork terrain on the outer bank, and part of the main channel on both sides of the lemniscate island; but none of this work was ever shown on the video, or mentioned in the news. It was not even on the maps.

Spencer had been there since the beginning of construction, however, and his infrequent reports out had told them what the new town was for. These days almost all the people found guilty of crimes on Mars were sent out to the asteroid belt, to work off their sentences in mining ships. But there were people in the Transitional Authority who wanted a jail on Mars itself, and Kasei Vallis was it.

Outside the valley entrance they hid their boulder cars in a knot of boulders, and Coyote studied weather reports. Maya fumed at the delay, but Coyote shrugged her off. “This isn’t going to be easy,” he told her sternly, “and it isn’t possible at all except in certain circumstances. We need to wait for some reinforcements to arrive, and we need to wait on the weather. This is something Spencer and Sax himself helped me to set up, and it is very clever, but the initial conditions have to be right.”

He returned to his screens, ignoring them all, talking to himself or to the screens, his dark thin face flickering in their light. Alchemist indeed, Michel thought, muttering as if over alembic or crucible, working his transmutations on the planet... a great power. And now focused on the weather. Apparently he had discovered some prevailing patterns in the jet stream, tied to certain anchoring points in the landscape. “It’s a question of the vertical scale,” he said brusquely to Maya, who with all her questions was beginning to sound like Art Randolph. “This planet has a thirty-k span top to bottom. Thirty thousand meters! So there are strong winds.”

“Like the mistral,” Michel offered.

“Yes. Katabatic winds. And one of the strongest of them drops off the Great Escarpment here.”

The prevailing winds in the region, however, were westerlies. When these hit the Echus cliff, towering updrafts resulted, and flyers living in Echus Overlook took advantage of them for sport, flying all day in gliders or birdsuits. But fairly frequently cyclonic systems came by, bringing winds from the east, and when that happened cold air ran over the snow-covered Lunae plateau, scouring snow and becoming denser and colder, until the entire drainage area was funneled out through notches in the great cliffs edge, and the winds then fell like an avalanche.

Coyote had studied these katabatic winds for some time, and his calculations had led him to believe that when conditions were right—sharp temperature contrasts, a developed storm track east to west across the plateau—then very slight interventions in certain places would cause the downdrafts to turn into vertical typhoons, smashing down into Echus Chasma and blasting north and south with immense power. When Spencer had identified for them the nature and purpose of the new settlement in Kasei Vallis, Coyote had immediately decided to try to create the means to effect these interventions.