The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Finally I was geared up and I clanked on out to him. Don't worry about throwing too hard, I said. Just put the curveball right in my glove. Ignore the batter. I'll give you the sign before every pitch; two fingers for curve, one for fastball.

  Fastball? he says.

  That's where you throw the ball fast. Don't worry about that. We're just going to throw curves anyway.

  And you said you weren't to coach, he said bitterly.

  I'm not coaching, I said, I'm catching.

  So I went back and got set behind the plate. Be looking for curveballs, I said to the ump. Curveball? he said.

  So we started up. Gregor stood crouched on the mound like a big praying mantis, red-faced and grim. He threw the first pitch right over our heads to the backstop. Two guys scored while I retrieved it, but I threw out the runner going from first to third. I went out to Gregor. Okay, I said, the bases are cleared and we got an out. Let's just throw now. Right into the glove. Just like last time, but lower.

  So he did. He threw the ball at the batter, and the batter bailed, and the ball cut right down into my glove. The umpire was speechless. I turned around and showed him the ball in my glove. That was a strike, I told him.

  Strike! he hollered. He grinned at me. That was a curveball, wasn't it.

  Damn right it was.

  Hey, the batter said. What was that?

  We'll show you again, I said.

  And after that Gregor began to mow them down. I kept putting down two fingers, and he kept throwing curveballs. By no means were they all strikes, but enough were to keep him from walking too many batters. All the balls were blue-dot. The ump began to get into it.

  And between two batters I looked behind me and saw that the entire crowd of spectators, and all the teams not playing at that moment, had congregated behind the backstop to watch Gregor pitch. No one on Mars had ever seen a curveball before, and now they were crammed back there to get the best view of it, gasping and chattering at every hook. The batter would bail or take a weak swing and then look back at the crowd with a big grin, as if to say, Did you see that? That was a curveball!

  So we came back and won that game, and we kept Gregor pitching, and we won the next three games as well. The third game he threw exactly twenty-seven pitches, striking out all nine batters with three pitches each. Walter Johnson once struck out all twenty-seven batters in a high-school game; it was like that.

  The crowd was loving it. Gregor's face was less red. He was standing straighter in the box. He still refused to look anywhere but at my glove, but his look of grim terror had shifted to one of ferocious concentration. He may have been skinny, but he was tall. Out there on the mound he began to look pretty damned formidable.

  So we climbed back up into the winner's bracket, then into a semifinal. Crowds of people were coming up to Gregor between games to get him to sign their baseballs. Mostly he looked dazed, but at one point I saw him glance up at his co-op family in the stands and wave at them, with a brief smile.

  How's your arm holding out? I asked him.

  What do you mean? he said.

  Okay, I said. Now look, I want to play outfield again this game. Can you pitch to Werner? Because there were a couple of Americans on the team we played next, Ernie and Caesar, who I suspected could hit a curve. I just had a hunch.

  Gregor nodded, and I could see that as long as there was a glove to throw at, nothing else mattered. So I arranged it with Werner, and in the semifinals I was back out in right-center field. We were playing under the lights by this time, the field like green velvet under a purple twilight sky. Looking in from center field it was all tiny, like something in a dream.

  And it must have been a good hunch I had, because I made one catch charging in on a liner from Ernie, sliding to snag it, and then another running across the middle for what seemed like thirty seconds, before I got under a towering Texas leaguer from Caesar. Gregor even came up and congratulated me between innings.

  And you know that old thing about how a good play in the field leads to a good at bat. Already in the day's games I had hit well, but now in this semifinal I came up and hit a high fastball so solid it felt like I didn't hit it at all, and off it flew. Home run over the center-field fence, out into the dusk. I lost sight of it before it came down.

  Then in the finals I did it again in the first inning, back-to-back with Thomas—his to left, mine again to center. That was two in a row for me, and we were winning, and Gregor was mowing them down. So when I came up again the next inning I was feeling good, and people were calling out for another homer, and the other team's pitcher had a real determined look. He was a really big guy, as tall as Gregor but massive-chested as so many Martians are, and he reared back and threw the first one right at my head. Not on purpose, he was out of control. Then I barely fouled several pitches off, swinging very late, and dodging his inside heat, until it was a full count, and I was thinking to myself, Well heck, it doesn't really matter if you strike out here, at least you hit two in a row.

  Then I heard Gregor shouting, Come on, coach, you can do it! Hang in there! Keep your focus! All doing a passable imitation of me, I guess, as the rest of the team was laughing their heads off. I suppose I had said all those things to them before, though of course it was just the stuff you always say automatically at a ball game, I never meant anything by it, I didn't even know people heard me. But I definitely heard Gregor, needling me, and I stepped back into the box thinking, Look I don't even like to coach, I played ten games at shortstop trying not to coach you guys, and I was so irritated I was barely aware of the pitch, but hammered it anyway out over the right-field fence, higher and deeper even than my first two. Knee-high fastball, inside. As Ernie said to me afterward, You drove that baby. My teammates rang the little ship's bell all the way around the bases, and I slapped hands with every one of them on the way from third to home, feeling the grin on my face. Afterward I sat on the bench and felt the hit in my hands. I can still see it flying out.

  So we were ahead 4-0 in the final inning, and the other team came up determined to catch us. Gregor was tiring at last, and he walked a couple, then hung a curve and their big pitcher got into it and clocked it far over my head. Now I do okay charging liners, but the minute a ball is hit over me I'm totally lost. So I turned my back on this one and ran for the fence, figuring either it goes out or I collect it against the fence, but that I'd never see it again in the air. But running on Mars is so weird. You get going too fast and then you're pinwheeling along trying to keep from doing a faceplant. That's what I was doing when I saw the warning track, and looked back up and spotted the ball coming down, so I jumped, trying to jump straight up, you know, but I had a lot of momentum, and had completely forgotten about the gravity, so I shot up and caught the ball, amazing, but found myself flying right over the fence.

  I came down and rolled in the dust and sand, and the ball stayed stuck in my glove. I hopped back over the fence holding the ball up to show everyone I had it. But they gave the other pitcher a home run anyway, because you have to stay inside the park when you catch one, it's a local rule. I didn't care. The whole point of playing games is to make you do things like that anyway. And it was good that that pitcher got one too.

  So we started up again and Gregor struck out the side, and we won the tournament. We were mobbed, Gregor especially. He was the hero of the hour. Everyone wanted him to sign something. He didn't say much, but he wasn't stooping either. He looked surprised. Afterward Werner took two balls and everyone signed them, to make kind-of trophies for Gregor and me. Later I saw half the names on my trophy were jokes, “Mickey Mantel” and other names like that. Gregor had written on it “Hi Coach Arthur, Regards Greg.” I have the ball still, on my desk at home.

  Salt and Fresh

  After the first water in the new streams was always silty, like liquid brick running down creases in the land. So many salts dissolved out of the dirt that the water became almost viscous, and the stream banks were often coated with fantastic
strips of white crystals. In certain watersheds it looked like streams of blood were running through banks of rock candy. And there was more truth to that than people suspected.

  You see, after the little red people became the nineteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, they became enlightened, and were faced with a dilemma. Before, the humans and all their claptrap on the surface had served as high entertainment; now they were the little red people's problem, or at least a matter of great concern. The little red people needed to save Mars from humans in a way that would not harm these charming bunglers, but help them.

  At the same time, they saw immediately what the resentful looks coming from their archaea crops had meant—it was obvious on the face of it. Just as the Dalai Lama would not eat cows on Earth, the little red people should not eat archaea on Mars.

  This created an instantaneous famine situation for the little red people. For the most part they considered it a fortunate rise in consciousness, though there was some dismay as they changed to a vegan diet which took no lives at all, based on seeds and bacterial fruit, milk, and honey equivalents. They went hungry for a long time setting up these new agricultures, foraging also up on the surface when they had to, in the scraps of the humans, to make ends meet. But humans tended to react to these kinds of activities with pesticides, so they were only pursued in desperation; dangerous times call for dangerous measures.

  Meanwhile, just as the humans were coming down on them from above, the ungrateful archaea were biting them from below. Many of the old ones were not appeased by their liberation; they wanted compensation, they wanted revenge, some of them were calling for a return to their original dominion over the Martian surface. It is an unfortunate fact that if you give archaea an inch they will take a mile; all the corners of my kitchen prove this. So cadres of disaffected archaea were plotting revolution from below, and though they were a minority at first, these malcontents managed to poison the minds of many other archaea, threatening to create results that would cascade upward through the larger levels of the planetary ecosystem.

  So the little red people were caught in the middle, as moderates so often are. We need a lot more compassion to appear very quickly, they said to each other, on all levels of the ecosphere. But though they were telepathic, and now united by a single spirit of bodhisattva grace, they found themselves divided on the question of policy in the face of this crisis. Some thought they should focus on the archaea, others on the humans; some on both, others on neither. More compassion, sure—but how?

  Finally the current stage of the terraforming, sometimes called the Great Rehydration, gave a group of them the idea that they could solve both problems at once.

  They would never be able to influence humans directly, this group of little red scientists argued. Setting up towns in the porches of their ears and singing a continuo of common sense had only put them at terrible risk in the offices of ear nose and throat specialists. At the same time, the archaea could no longer be confined against their will in the cryptoendolithic world. So what did they have to work with? They had lots of water, lots of salt, lots of archaea, and lots of humans. The proposal involved mixing them all.

  The evaporite salts on the surface were being dissolved back into the new hydrosphere. Carbonates, sulfates, and nitrates had all been left behind by the slow evaporation of the ancient Martian seas; there were huge deposits of them, now mixing with the water as it ran across the surface. The mechanics of saltification were still very poorly understood, but clearly the surface water on Mars was going to pick up salt for a long time to come. The archaea, meanwhile, were already hardy halophiles; one species, Haloferax, could live directly on and inside salt crystals. Human beings were not as salt tolerant as that, but their blood was about as salty as Earth's ocean water, and many of them heavily oversalted most of their food. So an opportunity might exist. Salt was common ground.

  A group of little red scientists advocated a subtle double intervention. Archaea would be released onto the surface, in salt containers that would look to them like ocean liners. These would get into the water, and would slip easily into the bloodstream when introduced into human hosts. Here even smaller vessels would carry some of these archaea across the blood-brain barrier—special varieties, genetically engineered by the little red scientists to create certain electrical fields, triggering the excretion of beneficial hormones and other brain chemicals.

  Some of the little red people decried this as no more than drug therapy. The group of little red scientists defended it as such. State of mind was in great part chemical condition, as all admitted. Chemical intervention could be defended on that score. This was an emergency; very possibly humans were in the process of overrunning Mars, devastating the planet for all its unseen indigenous life. Meanwhile the archaea were experiencing a population explosion, and spoiling for a fight. A solution that neutralized both sides would be very welcome. The archaea would see it as the freedom of the surface; the little people would see it as drug therapy; the humans would see it as a deliberate mutation in their values. If no one ever suspected otherwise, where was the harm? Why not let them think so?

  So all over Mars streams ran red with silt and salt, across the rain-soaked land. Eventually some of these streams combined to become rivers, and ran out estuaries into the burgeoning new ocean. Since the northern sea had been pumped up out of deep permafrost aquifers, its water at this point was still extremely pure. It was in effect an ocean of distilled water, while the streams and rivers were salty. Humans never failed to comment that this was the reverse of the situation on Earth.

  A fair number of the new streams fell off cliffs right into the sea; in these places it looked like someone was pouring red paint into a clear pristine pond, where it spread out on rings and dabs of foam. That looks awful, the humans said to each other, though they didn't know the half of it. Then they would take a swim in the ocean nearby, and get out and eat their lunches, and on their way home feel funny and resolve to be nicer to people that week.

  The Constitution of Mars

  We the people of Mars have gathered here on Pavonis Mons in the year 2128 to write a constitution which will serve as a legal framework for an independent planetary government. We intend this constitution to be a flexible document subject to change over time in the light of experience and changing historical conditions, but assert here that we hope to establish a government that will forever uphold the following principles: the rule of law; the equality of all before the law; individual freedom of movement, association, and expression; freedom from political or economic tyranny; control of one's work life and the value thereof; communal stewardship of the planet's natural resources; and respect for the planet's primal heritage.

  Article 1. Legislative Department

  Section 1. The Legislative Bodies

  1. The legislative body for Martian global issues will be a two-house congress, consisting of a duma and a senate.

  2. The duma will be composed of five hundred members, selected every m-year by a lottery drawn from a list of all Martian residents over ten m-years old. It will meet on Ls=0 and Ls=180, every m-year, and stay in session for as long as necessary to complete its business.

  3. The senate will be composed of one senator from each town or settlement on Mars with a population larger than five hundred people (changed by Amendment 22 to three thousand people), elected every two m-years, using an Australian ballot system. The senate will remain permanently in session, aside from breaks of no more than a month out of every twelve.

  Section 2. Powers Granted to the Congress

  1. The duma will elect the executive council's seven members, using an Australian ballot system.

  2. The senate will elect one-third of the members of the global environmental court, and one-half of the members of the constitutional court, using an Australian ballot system.

  3. The congress will pass laws enabling it: to lay and collect taxes equitably from the towns and settlements represented in the
senate; to provide for the common defense of Mars; to regulate commerce on Mars, and with other worlds; to regulate immigration to Mars; to print money and regulate its value; to form a criminal court system; and to form a standing police and security group to enforce the laws and defend the commonwealth.

  4. All laws passed by the congress shall be subject to review by the executive council; if the executive council vetoes a proposed law, the congress can override the veto with a two-thirds vote.

  5. All laws passed by the congress shall also be subject to review by the constitutional and environmental courts, and a veto by these courts cannot be overridden, but shall be grounds for rewriting the law if the congress sees fit, after which the process of passing the law shall begin again.

  Article 2. Executive Department

  Section 1. The Executive Council

  1. The executive council shall be formed of seven members, elected by the duma every two m-years. Executive council members must be Martian residents at the time of their election, and at least ten m-years old.

  2. The executive council shall elect one of its members as council president, using an Australian ballot system. It shall also elect or appoint a reasonable number of officers needed to help perform its various functions.

  Section 2. Powers of the Executive Council

  1. The executive council shall command the global police and security force in the defense of Mars, and in the upholding and enforcement of the constitution on Mars.

  2. The executive council shall have the power, subject to the review and approval of the congress, to make treaties with Terran political and economic bodies (and the other political entities in the solar system, as stated in Amendment 15).

  3. The executive council will elect or appoint one-third of the members of the environmental court, and one-half of the members of the constitutional court.

  Article 3. Judicial Department