Green mars (50 page)

Peter came out of the lock and walked in his direction, and Jackie followed. Peter was the only man Sax had ever seen Jackie really attracted to, in that intense helpless manner of the orbiting object, the lovelorn, yearning for orbital decay. Peter was also the only man Sax had ever seen who did not respond to Jackie’s amorous attentions in any way. The perversity of the heart. As in his attraction to Phyllis, a woman he had not liked. Or as in his desire for the approval of Ann, a woman who had not liked him. A woman with crazy views. But perhaps there was a rationality to it. If someone moons over you, you have to wonder at their judgment. Something like that.

Now Jackie trailed Peter like a dog, and though their faceplates were a copper color, Sax could tell just by her movements that she was talking to him, cajoling him somehow. Sax turned to the common band and came in on their conversation.

“—why they’re named Swift and Voltaire,” Jackie said.

“Both of them predicted the existence of the Martian moons,” Peter said, “in books they wrote a century before the moons were seen. In Gulliver’s Travels Swift even gives their distances from the planet and their orbit times, and he wasn’t that far off.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No.”

“How in the world did he do that?”

“I don’t know. Blind luck, I guess.”

Sax cleared his throat. “Sequence.”

“What?” they said.

“Venus had no moon, Earth one, Jupiter four. Mars should have had two. Since they couldn’t see them, they were probably small. And-close. Therefore fast.”

Peter laughed. “Swift must have been a smart man.”

“Or his source. But it was still blind luck. The sequence being a coincidence.”

They stopped on another spallation ridge, from which they could see the rim of Swift Crater, as a nearly buried ridge on the next horizon. A small gray rocket plane stood on the black dust like a miracle. Above them Mars filled most of the sky, a vast orange world. Night was falling across the eastern crescent. Isidis was directly above them, and though he could not make out Burroughs, the plains to the north of it were patched with great white splotches. Glaciers meeting up to become ice lakes, and the beginnings of an ice sea. Oceanus Borealis. A corrugated layer of clouds lay pasted right against the land, reminding him suddenly of what Earth had looked like from the Ares. That was a cold front, coming down Syrtis Major. The pattern of white clouds was just what it would have been on Terra. Spiraling waves of condensation particles.

He left the ridge, walked back toward the planes. The tall stiff boots were the only things that kept him upright, and his ankles hurt. Like walking on the sea bottom, only with no resistances. Universe ocean. He reached down and dug in the dust; no bedrock for ten centimeters, then twenty; it could have been five or ten meters deep, or even more. The dustclouds he had kicked up dropped back to the surface in about fifteen seconds. The dust was so fine that in any kind of atmosphere they might have stayed in suspension indefinitely. But in the vacuum they fell like anything else. Ejecta. There simply wasn’t much to pull them back. One might be able to kick dust into space. He crossed a low ridge and abruptly could see over the sloping plain of the next facet. It was so obvious that the moonlet was shaped like some paleolithic hand tool, with facets knapped off by ancient strikes. Triaxial ellipsoid. Curious that it had such a circular orbit, one of the most circular in all the solar system. Not what you would expect of a captured asteroid, nor of ejecta flung up from Mars in one of the big impacts. Leaving what? Very old capture. With other bodies in other orbits, to regularize it. Knapp, knapp. Spall. Spallation. Language was so beautiful. Rocks striking rocks, in the ocean of space. Knocking bits off and flying away. Until they all either fell into the planet or skittered off. All but two. Two out of billions. Moon bomb. Gun stand. Rotating just faster than Mars above, so that any point on the Martian surface had it in the sky for sixty hours at a time. Convenient. The known was more dangerous than the unknown. No matter what Michel said. Clomp, clomp, on the virgin rock, of a virgin moon, with a virgin mind. The Little Prince. The planes rising over the horizon looked absurd, like insects from a dream, chitinous, articulated, colorful, tiny in the starry black, on the dust-blanketed rock. He climbed back into the lock.

It was months later, and he was alone in Echus Chasma, when the robots on Deimos finished their construction, and the starter deuterium ignited the drive engine. One thousand tons of crushed rock were thrown out by the engine every second, at a speed of 200 kilometers per second. All flying out tangent to the orbit and in the orbit plane. In four months, when about a half percent of the moon’s mass had been ejected, the engine would cut off. Deimos would then be 614,287 kilometers away from Mars, according to Sax’s calculations, and on its way completely out of Mars’s influence, to become a free asteroid again.

Now it flew in his night sky, an irregular gray potato, less luminous than Venus or Terra, except that there was a new comet blazing out of its side. Quite a sight. News all over both worlds. Scandalous! Controversial even in the resistance, where people argued pro and con. All that squabbling. Hiroko was going to get tired of it and light out for the territory, he could feel the shape of it. Yes, no, what, where. Who did it? Why?

Ann came on the wrist to ask the same questions, looking furious.

“It was a perfect weapons platform,” Sax said. “If they made it into a military base, like they did Phobos. We would have been helpless under it.”

“So you did this on the off chance it might get turned into a military base?”

“If Arkady and his crew hadn’t fixed Phobos on the off chance, we couldn’t have dealt with it. We would have been killed. Anyway, the Swiss heard it was going to happen.”

Ann was shaking her head, staring at him as if he were mad. A crazed saboteur. Rather a case of the pot calling the kettle black, in his opinion. Resolutely he met the look. When she cut the connection he shrugged and called the Bogdanovists. “The Reds have a catalog of—all the objects in orbit around Mars. Then we need surface-to-space delivery systems. Spencer will help. Equatorial silos. Inactive moholes. Do you understand?”

They said they did. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist. And so if it ever came to it again, they would not be pounded from space.

Sometime later, he could not be sure how long, Peter appeared on the little screen of the boulder car Sax had borrowed from Desmond. “Sax, I’m in contact with some friends who work on the elevator, and with Deimos accelerating, the cable oscillations to dodge it have been thrown off in their timing. It looks like the next pass in its orbit might collide with the elevator, but my friends can’t get the cable’s navigation AI to respond to them. Apparently it’s really hardened to outside input, to prevent sabotage you know, and the idea of Deimos changing speed is something they can’t get it to accept. Do you have any suggestions?”

“Let it see for itself.”

“What?”

“Feed the data on Deimos into it. It must get that anyway. And it’s programmed to avoid it. Direct its attention to the data. Explain what happened. Trust it.”

“Trust it?”

“Well, talk to it.”

“We’re trying, Sax. But the antisabotage programming is real strong.”

“It’s running the oscillations to avoid Deimos. As long as that’s in its list of goals, you should be okay. Just give it the data.”

“Okay. We’ll try.”

It was night, and Sax went outside. Wandering in the darkness, under the immense cliff of the Great Escarpment, in the region just north of where Kasei Vallis broke through the wall. Sei meant star in Japanese, ka fire. Fire star. It was the same in Chinese, in which huo was the syllable the Japanese pronounced as ka, and hsing, sei. A Chinese word to start with, Huo Hsing: fire star, burning in the sky. They said Ka was what the little red men called it. We live on fire. Sax was distributing seeds in the ground, the hard little nuts pushed just under the surface of the sand flooring the chasm. Johnny Fireseed. There in the southern sky Deimos burned, slowly losing way through the stars, rolling westward at its own slow pace. Now pushed by the pinpoint comet burst on its eastern edge. The elevator rising over Tharsis was invisible, the new Clarke perhaps one of the dimmer stars in the southwest sky, it was impossible to say. He kicked a rock by accident, bent down and planted another seed. After the seeds were all out, there were starter packets of a new lichen to distribute. A chasmoendolithic strain, very hardy, very fast to propagate, very quick to pump out oxygen. Very high surface-to-volume ratio. Very dry.

A bip on the wrist. He switched the voice into his helmet intercom as he continued to take the little nuts out of his thigh pocket and shove them into the sand, careful to avoid damaging the roots of any of the sedges or other ground cover that dotted the ground like furry black rocks.

It was Peter, sounding excited. “Sax, Deimos is coming up on them now, and the AI seems to have acknowledged that it’s not in its usual spot in its orbit. It’s been mulling it over, they say. The attitude jets all through their sector have started a bit early, so we’re hopeful that the system is responding.”

“Can’t you calculate the oscillation?”

“Yes, but the AI is proving recalcitrant. It’s a stubborn bastard, the security programs are pretty watertight. We can just figure out enough from independent calculations to see that it’s going to be a pretty close pass.”

Sax straightened up and tapped out calculations of his own on his wristpad. Orbital period of Deimos had started at approximately 109,077 seconds. The drive engine had been on for some, he wasn’t sure, say a million seconds, speeding the moonlet by a significant amount already, but also expanding the radius of its orbit... . He tapped away in the great silence. Usually when Dei-’ mos passed by the elevator cable, the cable was at the full extension of its oscillation in that sector, some fifty kilometers or more away, far enough away that the gravitational perturbation was so small it did not have to be factored into the adjustments of the cable jets. This time the acceleration and movement outward of Deimos would throw the timing off; the cable would be moving back in toward Deimos’s orbital plane too soon. So it was a matter of slowing the Clarke oscillation, and adjusting for that all up and down the cable. Complicated stuff, and no wonder the AI was not able to display what it was doing in much detail. It was likely to be busy linking up to other AIs to gain the calculating capacity necessary to perform the operation. The shapes of the situation—Mars, the cable, Clarke, Deimos—were beautiful to contemplate.

“Okay, here it comes at them,” Peter said.

“Are your friends at the elevation of the orbit?” Sax asked, surprised.

“They’re a couple hundred kilometers below it, but their elevator car is on its way up. They’ve linked me up to their cameras, and hey, here it comes ... Yes! Oh! Ka wow, Sax, it must have missed the cable by about three kilometers! It just flashed right by their camera!”

“A miss is as good as a mile.”

“What’s that?”

“At least in a vacuum it is.” But now it was more than just a passing rock. “What about the tail of ejecta from the drive engine?”

“I’ll ask... . They ended up crossing in front of Deimos, they say.”

“Good.” Sax clicked off. Good foresight on the AI’s part. A few more passes and Deimos would be above Clarke, and the cable would no longer have to dodge it. Meanwhile, as long as the navigational AI believed in the danger, as obviously it did now, they would be okay.

Sax was of two minds about this. Desmond had said he would be happy to see the cable come down again. But there were few who seemed to agree with him. Sax had decided against taking unilateral action on the matter, since he was not sure what he felt about that tie to Earth. Best to limit unilateral action to things he was sure about. And so he bent over and planted another seed.

PART 9

The Spur of

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the Moment

               
  
 
  
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Inhabiting new country is always a challenge. As soon as the tenting of Nirgal Vallis was done, Separation de L’Atmosphere set up some of their largest mesocosm aerators, and soon the tent was filled with 500 millibars of a nitrogen-oxygen-argon mix that had been pulled and filtered out of the ambient air, now at 240 millibars. And the settlers started moving in, from Cairo and Senzeni Na, and everywhere else on the two worlds.

First people lived in mobile trailers, next to small portable greenhouses, and while they worked on the soils of the canyon with bacteria and plows, they used the greenhouses to grow their starter crops, and the trees and bamboo they would use to build their houses, and the desert plants they would spread outside the farms. The smectite clays on the canyon floor were a very good base for a soil, though they had to add biota, nitrogen, potassium—there was plenty of phosphorus, and more salts than they wanted, as usual.

So they spent their days augmenting the soil, and growing greenhouse crops, and planting hardy salt-desert plants. They traded all up and down the valley, and little market hamlets sprang up almost the day people moved in, as well as trails between homesteads, and a trunk road running down the middle of the valley, next to the stream. Nirgal Vallis had no aquifer at its head, and so a pipeline from Marineris pumped enough water to the head to start a small stream running. Its waters were collected at the Uzboi Gate and piped back up to the top of the tent again.

The homesteads were about half a hectare each, and almost everyone was trying to grow the bulk of their food on that space. Most divided their land up into six miniature fields, rotating crops and pasturage each season. Everyone had their own theories of cropping and soil augmentation. Most people grew a small cash crop, nuts or fruits or lumber trees. Many kept chickens, some kept sheep, goats, pigs, cows. The cows were almost all miniatures, no bigger than pigs.

They tried to keep the farms down on the canyon floor by the stream, leaving the higher rougher ground under the canyon walls to wild land. They introduced an American Southwest community of desert animals, so that lizards and turtles and jackrabbits began to live nearby, and coyotes, bobcats, and hawks to make depredations among their chickens and sheep. They had an infestation of alligator lizards, then one of toads. Populations slowly settled into their sizes, but there were frequent sharp fluctuations. The plants began to spread on their own. The land began to look as if its life belonged there. The redrock walls stood unchanged, sheer and craggy over the new riverine world.

Saturday morning was market day, and people drove down to the market hamlets in full pickups. One morning in the early winter of ‘42 they gathered in Playa Blanco under dark cloudy skies, to sell late vegetables, and dairy products, and eggs. “You know how you can tell which eggs have live chicks in them—you take them all, and put them in a tub of water, and wait until it’s all gone completely still. Then the eggs that tremble just a little bit are the ones with live chicks in them. You can put those back under the hens, and eat the rest.”

“A cubic meter of hydrogen peroxide is like twelve hundred kilowatt-hours! And besides it weighs a ton and a half. No way you’ll need that much.”

“We’re trying to get it into the parts per billion range, but no luck yet.”

“Centra de Educaciony Tecnologia in Chile, they’ve really done some great work on rotation, you won’t believe it. Come over and see.”

“Storm coming.”

“We keep bees too.”

“Maja is Nepali, Bahram is Farsi, Mawrth is Welsh. Yeah, it does sound like a lisp, but I’m probably not pronouncing it right. Welsh spelling is bizarre. They probably pronounce it Moth, or Mart, or Mars.”

Then word spread through the marketplace, leaping from group to group like a fire. “Nirgal is here! Nirgal is here! He’s going to talk at the pavilion—”

And there he was, walking fast at the head of a growing crowd, greeting old friends and shaking hands with people who approached him. Everyone in the hamlet followed him, jamming into the pavilion and volleyball court at the western end of the market. Wild howls rang out over the crowd buzz.

Nirgal stood on a bench and began to speak. He talked about their valley, and the other new tented land on Mars, and what it meant. But as he was getting to the larger situation of the two worlds, the storm overhead broke big-time. Lightning began to stab all the lightning rods, and in quick succession they saw rain, snow, sleet, and then mud.

The tenting over the valley was pitched as steep as a church roof, and dust and fines were repelled by the static charge of its piezoelectric outer layer; rain ran right off it, and snow slid down and piled up against the bottom of the sides, forming drifts that were blown away by huge robotic snowplows with long angled blower extensions, which rolled up and down the foundation road during snowstorms. Mud, however, was a problem. Mixed with the snow it formed cold, concrete-hard packs on the tenting just above the foundation, and this dense pack could get heavy enough’to cause tent failure—it had happened once before in the north.’

So when this storm turned ugly, and the light in the canyon was like the color of a branch, Nirgal said, “We’d better get up there,” and they all piled into the trucks and drove to the nearest elevator that ran up inside the canyon wall to the rim. Up on top the people who knew how took over the snowplows and drove them by hand, with the great blowers now spraying steam over the drifts to wash them off the tenting. Everyone else teamed up and took hand-pulled steam carts out, and worked on moving the piles of sludge brought down by the snowplows away from the foundation. This was what Nirgal helped with, running around with a steam hose like he was placing some strenuous new sport. No one could keep up his pace, but quickly they were all thigh-deep in cold swirling mud, with winds over J50, and solid low black clouds spitting more mud down on them all the time. The winds surged to 180 kilometers an hour, but no one minded; it helped clear the tent of the mud. They made sweep after sweep, moving east with the wind, pushing rivers of mud over the drop into uncovered Uzboi Vallis.

When the storm ended, the tenting was fairly clear, but the land on both sides of Nirgal Vallis was deep in frozen mud, and the crews were soaked. They piled back into elevators and dropped to the canyon floor,exhausted and cold, and when they got out at the bottom they looked at each other, entirely black figures except for their faceplates. Nirgal pulled off his helmet and there he was, laughing hard, irrepressible, and when he scooped mud off his helmet and threw it at them, the fight was on. Most found it prudent to keep their helmets on, and it was a strange sight there on the dark floor of that canyon, blind muddy figures throwing clumps of mud at each other and running out into the stream, slipping around as they wrestled and dove.