The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I've always maintained that,” Maya said. “But not for the same reason.”

  "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.” Sax read that in one of the feral rhapsodies, and went outdoors for a walk.

  Down on the corniche he saw that a front had passed. Across the sky black clouds pulled east. The evening sun broke underneath them, dull silver at the storm's west edge; the air over the city was still and dim, dark air between dark planes of sea and cloud. Looking at reflections of the city across the harbor he noticed that the sea's surface was rippled in some places, flat in others, and the boundaries between the two were delineated with amazing sharpness, though presumably the wind was the same over both. This was puzzling, until it occurred to him that there could be a thin film of oil damping the ripples in the flat patches. Someone's boat engine must be leaking. If he could get a sample from the water, and from everyone's boats, he could probably ascertain which one it was.

  In preparation for his sea trip with Ann, Sax did research on the various psychological studies of the personality of the scientist. He discovered that Maslow had divided scientists into cool and warm types, which he characterized as green and red in color—to avoid assigning any unwanted value judgments, he said, which made Sax smile. Green scientists were reductive, lovers of lawful explanation, tough-minded, looking for regularity, explanation, parsimony, simplicity. Red scientists on the other hand were expansive, warm, intuitive, mystical, soft-minded, and in search of peak moments of “suchness understanding."

  “Dear me,” Sax said. He went out for a walk. Up the alleyways above Paradeplatz a row of red roses was in bloom, and he stopped to inspect the perfect petals of one young rose, nose a centimeter from it. Such velvet dark reds, there against a stucco wall. Okay, he said, here I am. I wonder what makes that red.

  Cosmology and particle physics had become a single science before Sax was born, and in all the time since the hope of both sides was for the grand unified theory which would reconcile quantum mechanics and gravity, and even time itself. And yet his whole life physics had been getting more and more complicated, with postulated microdimensions taken as fact, and symmetries of fairly simple but scarily small strings invoked as explanations even though they were many magnitudes of size smaller than could ever be observed—the unobservability was itself mathematically provable. Thus the search for a final unifying theory was, as Lindley noted, a kind of religious quest; or the messianic movement in the religion that the scientific worldview had become. Then he met Bao Shuyo.

  Over a winter in Da Vinci Bao took him through the latest in superstring theory, step by step. The idea of extra microdimensions was straightforward. There were seven extra dimensions but all very small, and arranged in a thing called the “seven sphere.” Then to describe a point in our conventional four dimensions one had to add coordinates in all of the extra seven dimensions, and various combinations determined what kind of particle it was, muon, top quark, etc. But these points are just the ends of strings, and the basic quantummechanical unit is a vibration in the whole string. Trying to do calculations of these produced many faster-than-light problems unless twenty-six dimensions were invoked, and so they were. But that stage of the theory yielded only bosons and not fermions. A derivative of the twenty-six-dimensional string was invoked which existed in ten dimensions, the other sixteen having become properties of the string itself, and part of the geometry of supersymmetry. But the sixteen string dimensions could be combined in a huge variety of ways, all equally possible, none preferred. Then mathematical considerations had shown that of all the possibilities, only two of them, SO(32) and E8XE8, exhibited handedness rather than mirror symmetry. And the universe is right-handed. That only two possibilities remained out of the myriad possibilities was startling. But there matters rested, until this winter, when Bao had shown that E8×E8 was the preferred formulation, and that if you pursued the implications and advanced this formulation, you had quantum mechanics, gravity, and time all explained in a single theory, complex but clear, and powerful throughout.

  “So beautiful it must be true,” Bao concluded.

  Sax nodded. “But that beauty is its only proof.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is otherwise unconfirmable by experiment. It is the beauty of the mathematics that confirms it.”

  “As well as matching all physical observations we can make! That's more than just math, Sax. That's everything we've ever seen, all conformable to this single theory!”

  “True.” He nodded uneasily. It was a good point. And yet. . . . “I think it needs to predict something we have not yet seen, that happens because it and not any other explanation is the right one.”

  She shook her head, dismayed by his stubbornness.

  “Otherwise it's just a myth,” he said.

  “The Planck realm will never be observable,” she said.

  “Well. A very beautiful myth. And valuable, believe me I am quite convinced of that. Perhaps we now say we have reached the end of what physics can explain. And so . . .”

  “And so?”

  “What next?”

  Imbibition is the tendency of granular rock to imbibe a fluid under the force of capillary attraction, in the absence of any pressure. Sax became convinced that this was a quality of mind as well. He would say of someone, “She has great imbibition” and people would say, “Ambition?” and he would reply, “No, imbibition.” “Inhibition?” “No, imbibition.” And because of his stroke people would assume he was just having speech trouble again.

  Long walks around Odessa at the end of the day. Aimless, without destination, except perhaps for an evening rendezvous with Maya, down on the corniche. Sauntering through the streets and alleyways. Sax liked Thoreau's explanation for the word saunter: from à la Saint Terre, describing pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. There goes a Saint Terrer, a saunterer, a Holy Lander. But it was a false etymology, apparently spread from a book called Country Words, by S. and E. Ray, 1691. Although since the origins of the word were obscure, it might in fact be the true story.

  Sax would have liked to be sure about that, one way or the other. It made the word itself a problem to mull over. But as he sauntered Odessa thinking about it, he did not see how the matter could be investigated any further, the etymologists having been thorough. The past was resistant to research.

  Automorphism; idiomorphism. These were qualities Sax found underconsidered in Michel's personality theories. He said to Michel, “We make ourselves."

  Altruistic behavior will tend to be chosen when k> 1/r, where k is the ratio of recipient benefit to altruist's cost, and r is the coefficient of relationship between altruist and recipient, summed for all recipients. In the classical version of the theory r is the proportion of genes in two individuals that are identical because of common descent. But what if common descent is taken to mean the same phylum or order? What if r is not a function of common descent but of common interest? Sax found the social sciences very interesting.

  For a time after he had mostly recovered from his stroke, Sax read quite a lot about strokes and brain damage, trying to learn more about what had happened to him. One case, famous in the literature, concerned a brilliant student at the polytechnic in Moscow, wounded in the head during World War Two. This young Russian, Zasetsky by name, had suffered gross trauma to the left parietal-occipital area (like Sax), and could no longer perceive his right visual field, could not add, knew not the order of the seasons, and so on; his symbolic and conceptual faculties had been crippled. But his frontal lobes had remained intact (as had Sax's), leaving him his will, his desires, his sensitivity to experience. And so he had spent the rest of his days struggling to write down an account of his mentation, for the benefit of science, also for something to do; it was his life project, at first titled “The Story of a Terrible Injury,” later changed to “I'll Fight On.” He wrote every day for twenty-five years.

  Sax read this journal with imm
ense feeling for Zasetsky, the sentences sometimes causing a terrible stab to the heart, the perceptions in them were so familiar: “I'm in a kind of fog all the time, like a heavy half-sleep. . . . Whatever I do remember is scattered, broken down into disconnected bits and pieces. That is why I react so abnormally to every word and idea, every attempt to understand the meaning of words. . . . I was killed March 2, 1943, but because of some vital power of my organism, I miraculously remained alive.”

  That hand on his wrist, how to tell it!

  As Ann and Sax were being blown around in the storm, Sax felt an updraft in the thunderhead drawing them up and concluded they had escaped drowning at sea only to be thrown right up out of the sky. The cockpit dome would probably hold even against the vacuum of space, but the cold would kill them. It was too loud to remember anything, but he wanted to remember to say to Ann, We ask Why all our lives and never get past Because. We stop after that word, in disarray. I wish I had spent more time with you.

  The Names of the Canals

  Lestrygon, Antaeus, Cimmeria, Hyblaeus, Scamander, Pandoraea, Fretum, Hiddekel. Phison, Protonius, Python, Argaeus.

  Mostly Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Some names refer to real features, visible from Earth through early telescopes: the big volcanoes, Hellas and Argyre, the great canyons, the dark land on Syrtis, the shifting polar caps.

  Idalius, Heliconius, Oxus, Hydroates.

  But the lines. Lines connecting everything. Even at the time illusory lines were known to occur between dark dots in a telescope, a matter of optics and vision. And the minimal width of any line that could be visible on Mars through those telescopes was known to be hundred kilometers. And yet the names. We want life. We want to live.

  Cadmus, Erigone, Hebrus, Ilisus.

  So silly. But I too I live in a world I love.

  Pyriphlegeton, Memnonia, Eumenides, Ortygia.

  I live in a big valley, on its flat floor, the mountains on both sides visible on most days, the smaller range closer to the west, the larger one farther away to the east. To north and south, as far as the eye can see, a valley. A valley about as wide as a Martian canal.

  The Soundtrack

  Before work every morning, espresso and Steve Howe's “Turbulence.” For Red Mars, Glass's Satyagraha. For Green, Ahknaten. For Blue, Mishima and The Screens. For Maya, Astor Piazzolla, especially “Tango: Zero Hour.” For Ann, Gorecki's Third Symphony, Paul Winter's “Sun Singer,” and the Japanese folk song “Sakura.” For Sax, Beethoven's late string quartets and piano sonatas. For Nadia, Louis Armstrong 194656, also Clifford Brown and Charles Mingus. For Michel, Keith Jarrett's “Köln Concert.” For Nirgal, Najma. And always Van Morrison, Pete Townshend, and Yes.

  Van when I'm happy

  Pete when I'm mad

  Steve when I'm energetic

  Astor when I'm sad

  A Martian Romance

  Eileen Monday hauls her backpack off the train's steps and watches the train glide down the piste and around the headland. Out the empty station and she's into the streets of Firewater, north Elysium. It's deserted and dark, a ghost town, everything shut down and boarded up, the residents moved out and moved on. The only signs of life come from the westernmost dock: a small globular cluster of yellow streetlights and lit windows, streaking the ice of the bay between her and it. She walks around the bay on the empty corniche, the sky all purple in the early dusk. Four days until the start of spring, but there will be no spring this year.

  She steps into the steamy clangor of the hotel restaurant. Workers in the kitchen are passing full dishes through the broad open window to diners milling around the long tables in the dining room. They're mostly young, either iceboat sailors or the few people left in town. No doubt a few still coming out of the hills, out of habit. A wild-looking bunch. Eileen spots Hans and Arthur; they look like a pair of big puppets, discoursing to the crowd at the end of one table—elderly Pinocchios, eyes lost in wrinkles as they tell their lies and laugh at each other, and at the young behemoths passing around plates and devouring their pasta while still listening to the two. The old as entertainment. Not such a bad way to end up.

  It isn't Roger's kind of thing, however, and indeed when Eileen looks around she sees him standing in the corner next to the jukebox, pretending to make selections but actually eating his meal right there. That's Roger for you. Eileen grins as she makes her way through the crowd to him.

  “Hey,” he says as he sees her, and gives her a quick hug with one arm.

  She leans over and kisses his cheek. “You were right, it's not very hard to find this place.”

  “No.” He glances at her. “I'm glad you decided to come.”

  “Oh, the work will always be there, I'm happy to get out. Bless you for thinking of it. Is everyone else already here?”

  “Yeah, all but Frances and Stephan, who just called and said they'd be here soon. We can leave tomorrow.”

  “Great. Come sit down with the others, I want some food, and I want to say hi to the others.”

  Roger wrinkles his nose, gestures at the dense loud crowd. This solitary quality in him has been the cause of some long separations in their relationship, and so now Eileen shoves his arm and says, “Yeah yeah, all these people. Such a crowded place, Elysium.”

  Roger grins crookedly. “That's why I like it.”

  “Oh of course. Far from the madding crowd.”

  “Still the English major I see.”

  “And you're still the canyon hermit,” she says, laughing and pulling him toward the crowd; it is good to see him again, it has been three months. For many years now they have been a steady couple, Roger returning to their rooms in the co-op in Burroughs after every trip away; but his work is still in the backcountry, so they still spend quite a lot of time apart.

  Just as they join Hans and Arthur, who are wrapping up their history of the world, Stephan and Frances come in the door, and they hold a cheery reunion over a late dinner. There's a lot of catching up to do; this many members of their Olympus Mons climb haven't been together in a long time. Hours after the other diners have gone upstairs to bed, or off to their homes, the little group of old ones sits at the end of one table talking. A bunch of antique insomniacs, Eileen thinks, none anxious to go to bed and toss and turn through the night. She finds herself the first to stand up and stretch and declare herself off. The others rise on cue, except for Roger and Arthur; they've done a lot of climbing together through the years, and Roger was a notorious insomniac even when young; now he sleeps very poorly indeed. And Arthur will talk for as long as anyone else is willing, or longer. “See you tomorrow,” Arthur says to her. “Bright and early for the crossing of the Amazonian Sea!”

  The next morning the iceboat runs over ice that is mostly white, but in some patches clear and transparent right down to the shallow sea floor. Other patches are the color of brick, with the texture of brick, and the boat's runners clatter over little dunes of gravel and dust. If they hit meltponds the boat slows abruptly and shoots great wings of water to the sides. At the other side of these ponds the runners scritch again like ice skates as they accelerate back up to speed. Roger's iceboat is a scooter, he explains to them; not like the spidery skeletal thing that Eileen was expecting, having seen some of that kind down in Chryse—those Roger calls DNs. This is more like an ordinary boat, long, broad, and low, with several parallel runners nailed fore and aft to its hull. “Better over rough ice,” Roger explains, “and it floats if you happen to hit water.” The sail is like a big bird's wing extended over them, sail and mast all melded together into one object, shifting shape with every gust to catch as much wind as it can.

  “What keeps us from tipping over?” Arthur asks, looking over the lee rail at the flashing ice just feet below him.

  “Nothing.” The deck is at a good cant, and Roger is grinning.

  “Nothing?”

  “The laws of physics.”

  “Come on.”

  “When the boat tips the sail catches less wind, both beca
use it's tilted and because it reads the tilt, and reefs in. Also we have a lot of ballast. And there are weights in the deck that are held magnetically on the windward side. It's like having a heavy crew sitting on the windward rail.”

  “That's not nothing,” Eileen protests. “That's three things.”

  “True. And we may still tip over. But if we do we can always get out and pull it back upright.”

  They sit in the cockpit and look up at the sail, or ahead at the ice. The iceboat's navigation steers them away from the rottenest patches, spotted from satellites, and so the automatic pilot changes their course frequently, and they shift around the cockpit when necessary. Floury patches slow them the most, and over those the boat sometimes decelerates pretty quickly, throwing the unprepared forward into the shoulder of the person sitting next to them. Eileen is banged into by Hans and Frances more than once; like her they have never been on iceboats before, and their eyes are round at the speeds it achieves during strong gusts over smooth ice. Hans speculates that the sandy patches mark old pressure ridges, which stood like long stegosaur backs until the winds ablated them entirely away, leaving their load of sand and silt behind on the flattened ice. Roger nods. In truth the whole ocean surface is blowing away on the wind, with whatever sticks up going the fastest; and the ocean is now frozen to the bottom, so that no new pressure ridges are being raised. Soon the whole ocean will be as flat as a tabletop.

  This first day out is clear, the royal blue sky crinkling in a gusty west wind. Under the clear dome of the cockpit it's warm, their air at a slightly higher pressure than outside. Sea level is now around three hundred millibars, and lowering year by year, as for a great storm that never quite comes. They skate at speed around the majestic promontory of the Phlegra Peninsula, its great prow topped by a white-pillared Doric temple. Staring up at it Eileen listens to Hans and Frances discuss the odd phenomenon of the Phlegra Montes, seaming the north coast of Elysium like a long ship capsized on the land; unusually straight for a Martian mountain range, as are the Erebus Montes to the west. As if they were not, like all the rest of the mountain ranges on Mars, the remnants of crater rims. Hans argues for their being two concentric rings of a really big impact basin, almost the size of the Big Hit itself but older than the Big Hit, and so mostly obliterated by the later impact, with only Isidis Bay and much of the Utopian and Elysian Seas left to indicate where the basin had been. “Then the ranges could have been somewhat straightened out in the deformation of the Elysium bulge."