Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (9 page)

              Prof. Crane said the ISS was a step backward in relation to Skylab, suffering from what he called the Leningrad Syndrome that he attributed to NASA’s distant military origins: astronauts were chosen from among people who would have been able to survive the siege of Leningrad, so dehumanizing was the environment in which they fulfilled their six month missions. There had even been occasions in which the Americans and the Russians strangely competed, each trying to prove that they could live more uncomfortably than the other, in a station whose final objective was not supposed to be unbearable.

              “The Leningrad Syndrome is less rare than you think,” Crane explained. “There are innumerous situations in which people are willing to or even seek unnecessary discomfort, to prove that they’re there to dedicate themselves to a mission or a job and not to look for the easiest route. During my time as a hospital architect, I came across this disease frequently, principally among surgeons,” Anthony Crane said. “It’s a variant,” he continued, “of our workaholic culture, stemming from the obsolete Catholic expiation of our sins via penitence. The Popes have pulled the rug out from under those rituals, but we are still hesitant to do so.”

              Crane created a novel paradigm in the new space station’s modules—the invisible engineering. Instead of the Spartan, tough astronaut who distinguished himself by being able to accomplish his tasks in an artificially hostile environment, they now wanted a creative astronaut, productive but humanized, and, thus Crane’s famous invisible engineering—everything had to be there but nothing could be visible. The professor saw an opportunity to apply it in everything. He insisted that it never meant “not being able to see the engineering” but, rather, in “being able to not see the engineering.”
The secret panels in medieval libraries, where a door disguised as a piece of furniture full of books that, upon opening, gave way to a hidden area, were his inspiration. But, if in ancestral times the idea was to not see the camouflaged compartment, now the idea was to be able to maintain the beauty of the entire library, when one did not need access to the accessary compartment while working. Invisible engineering was the cortex’s rational counterproposal to the Leningrad Syndrome advanced by the atavistic hypothalamus.

              Now, the rest of the Dexters’ friends, Sofia thought, were only just curious variations of normal. They deserved to be observed, but not actually cited. Sofia always wound up knowing a lot about Mariah’s life. There were times when the house seemed like a television series with an endless number of episodes, but most of the time it felt as if she had always been a true part of that family.

              Mariah’s father was someone who was never cited. Philip Dexter, also fifty-eight, was an evolutionist dedicated to field work. A man of open spaces, not a lab rat. The lab rats in that house were Mariah and Sofia, if you considered Sofia part of the house. He had a tanned face that contrasted with his blue eyes when he was serious or with the whiteness of his teeth when he smiled. He looked like the captain of a large sailing ship. He was the glue holding all of those people together. If he did not have more than ninety seconds to listen to someone, he didn’t let his haste contaminate those precious seconds. He stopped as if he had all the time in the world. He bestowed not merely ninety seconds that sped by but a good ninety seconds as from someone who was there to stay for two hours. At times it seemed like, all by himself, he was an auditorium; at others, the most private of audiences. Everything he heard reverberated in him: his posture and his face gave as much value to what he was told as music gives to a movie. People felt that any conversation they’d had went well and almost no one realized that it had been him.

              “How do you manage that, Dad?” Mariah once asked him.

              “It’s free,” her father confided. “You can do it, too, if you try.”

* * *

Sofia walked over to the prototype Crane had been given and spied inside. It was simultaneously sophisticated and comfortable. It must not be bad to have friends like that.

              “How does your uncle know the makers?”

              “From NASA itself. It’s an aerospace company to which he proposed a project to sell to the government. Remember our conversation a while back about junk in orbit?” Mariah reminded her.

              “Yes.”

              “Listen,” Mariah lowered her voice, almost to an inaudible level. “There have been collisions. With satellites, manned vessels and with the old space station. Once, the Chinese got furious; they got it in their heads that it had been us. Later, the Air Force developed a scheme for launching small swarms of titanium pieces to eliminate unwanted satellites, making it look like a collision with fragments.”

              “If we thought that, it’s obvious that others did too,” Sofia guessed.

              “Exactly. Uncle Crane wants to map all fragments above three hundred kilometers and eliminate the junk larger than three centimeters using a photo incineration laser. If he can sell the idea, it will be a big business deal. He’s trying to convince private aerospace businesses to present it with him.”

              “That’s outstanding,” Sofia said, who, before leaving the car—pulled away by Mariah—used her sleeve to clean the marks left by her fingers and her face, which she had stuck against the window. They reached the mansion’s door and Kiara opened it. She was a black woman, from Alabama, with a smile that could light up the sun.

              “Hello, girls. Holding hands like little kids?”

              “Hello, Kiara,” Sofia greeted her, smiling at her smile.

              “It this any time to go work?” Kiara asked as they shrugged their shoulders. They descended, crossed Mariah’s room, passed the personal training pool and, in the back, opened a door that gave access to a bridge entering the upper floor of a greenhouse. She didn’t understand why Mariah’s room led to a greenhouse by way of a bridge, but it did and both of them preferred that route.

              The greenhouse had several distinct zones. There was one with subtropical flowers where yellow proteas, lilac birds-of-paradise, white orchids with lipstick red spots, and other flowering plants inundated everything with color but there were also ivies, exotic fruit trees, bonsais and, in the back, the greenhouse’s crown jewel: plants from the planet Mars. It was a space financed by the Earth Two Foundation that promoted the idea of colonizing the fourth planet from the sun and had been brought to the Dexter’s house because of Uncle Crane’s influence. The Foundation had a program called five hundred independent biologists for Mars, and they had been the first ones chosen.

              In the first chamber of the Martian greenhouse, the atmospheric pressure was equal to eight thousand meters, with ten percent oxygen and two percent carbon dioxide. The temperature varied between forty degrees centigrade below zero to five degrees above. Next came another chamber with the pressure equal to twenty-five thousand meters’ altitude, moderate background radiation, temperature between seventy degrees below zero and fifteen degrees above, with three percent oxygen and much more carbon dioxide, but where lower pulses were made in the order of two per thousand oxygen, also having much lower pressure.

             
Mars is such an inhospitable planet that, at its feet, the worst catastrophe we can imagine for Earth is only child’s play,
Sofia thought. In the worst case of global warming, in the worst times of the most drastic hypothesis for the extinction of the dinosaurs, in the ultimate “day-after” of a devastating thermonuclear war, to imagine Earth was to show an ugly face to frighten children in comparison to the red planet tragedy. On Mars, opening a window is to let death in and agonize in minutes. But the Earth Two Foundation had taken on the intangible objective of transforming that dry planet, without oxygen, burnt by cosmic radiation, into a countryside oasis in a little more than two hundred years because of the simple fact that all the alternatives in the solar system were worse for constructing a New Earth.

              That idea had seduced Sofia and Mariah as it had many others for decades. These friends studied exobiology in Columbia. Both were convinced that life was jumping about the Universe and that mankind would enter into contact with that life, not because it would come to us, but because we would contact it. Mars was a step along the road that would take us from our protective nest and send us to the great beyond.

              In the beginning, the two friends were opposed to the idea of tinkering with other planets, even if it were just, so to speak, with one single finger. Their concern was opposite: how to avoid contamination of other worlds with microorganism originating on the Earth. But one day, Anthony Crane spoke with them for two hours and changed everything: they went over to the other side.

             
“We have to meditate on the position we attribute to Man in the World. If we put him in a place above the rest of known nature, as seems more sensible, then nature’s interests will, within the limits of reason, take second place if not to our interests at least to human values. If we take man as an integral part of nature,”
he continued,
‘as equal to the rest of living or inanimate beings, then we cannot ask more of him than of other elements of nature. Everything man does was done by nature, right?’ All of the alterations we introduce in the world will be part and parcel of nature’s processes. We can never, in this case, mean for man to destroy nature because man is part of it and it has clastic, destructive, and blastic, constructive expansion processes. If a volcano destroys an island, with its ecosystems, it is on an equal footing with man who destroys another island with a nuclear device—both are clastic phenomena of nature.

              “The temptation to radicalize the division of nature into the material and immaterial in order to defend taking sides with the material nature of the volcano against the immaterial nature of human genius has no value. If we divide nature in two, so that one has primacy over the other and with our mind being part of immaterial nature, we will wind up, all the more so, considering the immaterial that has free will as superior to the material. That is exactly the same as taking man out of nature. The terms can be changed, but the equation remains. There will still be one or another masochist and one or another who is suicidal attempting, as a minority, to entice the primacy of the rest of the world against us. Nevertheless, pruning the excesses of those who are more drastic than lucid, the question returns: if man is part of nature and if it ends in him, we cannot judge him just because he is the king of the jungle, like we did not judge the predator that we dethroned, the lion. To say that man is part of nature is to give him a free ride to do whatever he wants.

              “But if we give humanity a special place, above all other beings, then the colonization of other planets is indispensable in Homo Sapiens Sapiens’ pursuit of expansion since he left Africa. Mars is just one more continent,”
Crane reduced.
“Remember that old publicity phrase ‘buy land, they don’t make it any longer?’ Well, man is preparing to make more—more land, more lakes and rivers, snow-capped mountains, white beaches and oceans of many colors. Mars will serve to prove a concept: the concept that planetary engineering that will permit terraforming. After Mars, other planets in the solar system will follow and what our children call home will not be Earth. It will be the Solar System. The Solar System is Man’s home,”
Crane emphasized.

              This uncle was very tall and did not make the least effort to bend over when speaking to people of normal height. On the contrary, it seemed that he even grew by a palm. He was tall and reveled in it. His hair had turned from brown to all white and his large eyes, as warm as they were colorful and penetrating, were what remained of the color of spring. His round wire-rimmed glasses let the hazel of his iris through. The left side one had a double rim. To read small print, he carried a lense for the second rim on his belt, which reinforced his esoteric air. He habitually began conversations looking fixedly at his interlocutor, and then continued speaking with his eyes elsewhere, to return and fix them on another person, putting on the reading lense, to then remain silent. He was not lacking in élan.

* * *

Entering the first greenhouse chamber without a mask was very dangerous because of the low oxygen level and the high concentration of carbon dioxide. In the second chamber, there was an even greater problem: depressurization. They had to wear a pressure suit in that advanced chamber. The pressure was very low and the temperature was extremely cold. The suits had been offered by NASA and looked like light spacesuits. They were white, a relatively tight fit, and had an astronaut helmet. The United States flag adorned one shoulder, the NASA symbol the other, and they felt like adventurous space travelers despite remaining on Violet Street.

              That evening, Sofia went into the second chamber while Mariah checked the spectrophotometer. She had barely entered when she saw that the lichens, having languished slowly for months, were different. It was not an illusion; they had really grown since the previous week’s genetic transfer. They were flourishing, exuberant.
What am I seeing? What’s this?
she thought.
Fantastic,
she realized.
We got it right, my God,”
she said out loud, trembling. They had produced the first viable form of extraterrestrial life and it was multicellular or almost.