He went down to the path by the outlet stream to greet her. Little high basin… there were a million craters like it in the south. Little old impact. Nothing the slightest bit distinguished about it. He remembered Shining Mesa, the stupendous yellow view at dawn.
They came up in three cars, bouncing wildly over the terrain, like kids. Jackie was driving the first car, Antar the second. They were laughing hard as they got out. Antar didn’t seem to mind losing the race. They had a whole group of young Arabs with them. Jackie and Antar looked young themselves, amazingly so; it had been a long time since Nirgal had seen them, but they had not changed at all. The treatments; current folk wisdom was to get it done early and often, ensuring perpetual youth and balking any of the rare diseases that still killed people from time to time. Balking death entirely, perhaps. Early, often. They still looked like they were fifteen m-years old. But Jackie was a year older than Nirgal, and he was almost thirty-three m-years old now, and feeling older. Looking at their laughing faces, he thought, I’ll have to get the treatment myself someday.
So they wandered around, stepping on the grass and ooh-ing and ahhing at the flowers, and the basin seemed smaller and smaller with every exclamation they made. Near the end of their visit Jackie took him to one side, looking serious.
She said, “We’re having trouble holding off the Terrans, Nirgal. They’re sending up almost a million a year, just like you said they never could. And these new arrivals aren’t joining Free Mars like they used to. They’re still supporting their home governments. Mars isn’t changing them fast enough. If this goes on, then the whole idea of a free Mars will be a joke. I sometimes wonder if it was a mistake to leave the cable up.”
She frowned and twenty years jumped onto her face all at once. Nirgal suppressed a little shudder.
“It would help if you weren’t hiding here,” she exclaimed with sudden anger, dismissing the basin with a wave of her hand. “We need everyone we can get to help. People still remember you now, but in a few years…”
So he only had to wait a few more years, he thought. He watched her. She was beautiful, yes. But beauty was a matter of the spirit, of intelligence, vivacity, empathy. So that while Jackie grew ever more beautiful, at the same time she grew less beautiful. Another mysterious infolding. And Nirgal was not pleased by this internal loss in Jackie, not in any way; it was only one more note in the chord of his Jackie pain, really. He didn’t want it to be true.
“We can’t really help them by taking more immigrants,” she said. “That was wrong, when you said that on Earth. They know it too. They can see it better than we can, no doubt. But they send people anyway. And you know why? You know why? Just to wreck things here. Just to make sure there isn’t someplace where people are doing it right. That’s their only reason.”
Nirgal shrugged. He didn’t know what to say; probably there was some truth to what she had said, but it was just one of a million different reasons for people to come; there was no reason to fix on it.
“So you won’t come back,” she said at last. “You don’t care.”
Nirgal shook his head. How to say to her that she was not worried about Mars, but about her own power? He wasn’t the one who could tell her that. She wouldn’t believe him. And maybe it was only true to him anyway.
Abruptly she stopped trying to reach him. A regal glance at Antar, and Antar did the work of gathering their coterie into the cars. A final questioning look; a kiss, full on the mouth, no doubt to bother Antar, or him, or both of them; like an electric shock to the soul; and she was off.
He spent the afternoon and the next day wandering, sitting on flat rocks and watching the little rivulets bounce downstream. Once he remembered how fast water had fallen on Earth. Unnatural. No. But this was his place, known and loved, every dyad and every clump of campion, even the speed of water as it lofted off stone and plashed down in its smooth silver shapes. The way moss felt under the finger pads. His visitors were people for whom Mars was forever an idea, a nascent state, a political situation. They lived in the tents and they might as well have been in a city anywhere, and their devotion, while real, was given to some cause or idea, some Mars of the mind. Which was fine. But for Nirgal now it was the land that mattered, the places where water arrived just so, trickling over the billion-year-old rock onto pads of new moss. Leave politics to the young, he had done his part. He didn’t want to do anymore. Or at least he wanted to wait until Jackie was gone. Power was like Hiroko, after all — it always slipped away. Didn’t it? Meanwhile, the cirque like an open hand.
But then one morning when he went out for a dawn walk, there was something different. The sky was clear, its purest morning purple, but a juniper’s needles had a yellowish tinge to them, and so did the moss, and the potato leaves on their mounds.
He plucked the yellowest samples of needles and sprigs and leaves, and took them back to the workbench in his greenhouse. Two hours’ work with microscope and AI did not find any problem, and he went back out and pulled up some root samples, and bagged some more needles and leaves and blades and flowers. Much of the grass had a wilted look, though it wasn’t a hot day.
Heart thudding, stomach taut, he worked all day and into the night. He could discover nothing. No insects, no pathogens. But the potato leaves in particular looked yellow. That night he called Sax and explained the situation. By coincidence Sax was visiting the university in Sabishii, and he drove up the next morning in a little rover, the latest from Spencer’s co-op.
“Nice,” Sax said as he got out and looked around. He checked Nirgal’s samples in the greenhouse. “Hmm,” he said. “I wonder.”
He had brought some instruments in his car, and they lugged them into the boulder and he went to work. At the end of a long day he said, “I can’t find anything. We’ll have to take some samples down to Sabishii.”
“You can’t find anything?”
“No pathogen. No bacteria, no virus.” He shrugged. “Let’s take several potatoes.”
They went out and dug potatoes from the field. Some of them were gnarled, elongated, cracked. “What is it?” Nirgal exclaimed.
Sax was frowning a little. “Looks like spindle tuber disease.”
“What causes it?”
“A viroid.”
“What’s that?”
“A bare RNA fragment. Smallest known infectious agent. Strange.”
“Ka.” Nirgal felt his stomach clamping inward. “How did it get here?”
“On a parasite, probably. This kind seems to be infecting grass. We need to find out.”
So they gathered samples, and drove back down to Sabishii.
Nirgal sat on a futon on the floor of Tariki’s living room, feeling sick. Tariki and Sax talked long after dinner, discussing the situation. Other viroids had been appearing in a rapid dispersal from Tharsis; apparently they had made it across the cordon sanitaire of space, arriving on a world that had been previously innocent of them. They were smaller than viruses, much smaller, and quite a bit simpler. Nothing but strands of RNA, Tariki said, about fifty nanometers long. Individuals had a molecular weight of about 130,000, while the smallest known viruses had molecular weights of over a million. They were so small that they had to be centrifuged at over 100,000 g in order to be pulled out of suspension.
The potato-spindle-tuber viroid was well understood, Tariki told them, tapping around on his screen and pointing at the schematics called up. A chain of merely 359 nucleo-tides, lined out in a closed single strand with short double-strand regions braiding it. Viroids like this one caused several plant diseases, including pale cucumber disease, chrysanthemum stunt, chlorotic mottle, cadang-cadang, citrus exocortis. Viroids had also been confirmed as the agent in some animal brain diseases, like scrapie, and kuru, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The viroids used host enzymes to reproduce, and then were taken to be-regulatory molecules in the nuclei of infected cells, disturbing growth-hormone production in particular.
The particular viroid in Nirgal’s
basin, Tariki said, had mutated from potato spindle tuber. They were still identifying it in the labs at the university, but the sick grass made him sure they were going to find something different, something new.
Nirgal felt sick. The names of the diseases alone were enough to do it. He stared at his hands, which had been plunged thick in infected plants. Through the skin, into the brain, some kind of spongiform encephalopathy, mushroom growths of brain blooming everywhere.
“Is there anything we can do to fight it?” he said.
Sax and Tariki looked at him.
“First,” Sax said, “we have to find out what it is.”
That turned out to be no simple matter. After a few days, Nirgal returned to his basin. There he could at least do something; Sax had suggested removing all the potatoes from the potato fields. This was a long dirty task, a kind of negative treasure hunt, as he turned up diseased tuber after tuber. Presumably the soil itself would still hold the viroid. It was possible he would have to abandon the field, or even the basin. At best, plant something else. No one yet understood how viroids reproduced; and the word from Sabishii was that this might not even be a viroid as previously understood.
“It’s a shorter strand than usual,” Sax said. “Either a new viroid, or something like a viroid but smaller still.” In the Sabishii labs they were calling it “the virid.”
A long week later, Sax came back up to the basin. “We can try to remove it physically,” he said over dinner. “Then plant different species, ones that are resistant to viroids. That’s the best we can do.”
“But will that work?”
“The plants susceptible to infection are fairly specific. You got hit by a new one, but if you change grasses, and types of potatoes — perhaps cycle out some of your potato-patch soil…” Sax shrugged.
Nirgal ate with more appetite than he *had had for the previous week. Even the suggestion of a possible solution was a great relief. He drank some wine, felt better and better. “These things are strange, eh?” he said over an after-dinner brandy. “What life will come up with!”
“If you call it life.”
“Well, of course.”
Sax didn’t reply.
“I’ve been looking at the news on the net,” Nirgal said. “There are a lot of infestations. I had never noticed before. Parasites, viruses…”
“Yes. Sometimes I worry about a global plague. Something we can’t stop.”
“Ka! Could that happen?”
“There’s all kinds of invasions going on. Population surges, sudden die-offs. All over. Things in disequilibrium. Upsetting balances we didn’t even know existed. Things we don’t understand.” As always this thought made Sax unhappy.
“Biomes will eventually come into equilibrium,” Nirgal suggested.
“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”
“As equilibrium?”
“Yes. It may be a matter of…” He waved his hands about like gulls. “Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium.”
“Punctuated change?”
“Perpetual change. Braided change — sometimes surging change — ”
“Like cascading recombinance?”
“Perhaps.”
“I’ve heard that’s a mathematics only a dozen people can really understand.”
Sax looked surprised. “That’s never true. Or else, true of every math. Depends on what you mean by understand. But I know a bit of that one. You can use it to model some of this stuff. But not predict. And I don’t know how to use it to suggest any — reactions on our part. I’m not sure it can be used that way.” He talked for a while about Vlad’s notion of holons, which were organic units that had subunits and also were subunits of greater holons, each level combining to create the next one up in emergent fashion, all the way up and down the great chain of being. Vlad had worked out mathematical descriptions of these emergences, which turned out to come in more than one kind, with different families of properties for each kind; so if they could get enough information about the behavior of a level of holons and the next level up, they could try to fit them into these mathematical formulae, and see what kind of emergence they had; then perhaps find ways to disrupt it. “That’s the best approach we can take for things this little.” “ The next day they called up greenhouses in Xanthe, to ask for shipments of new starts, and flats of a new strain of Himalayan-based grass. By the time they arrived, Nirgal had pulled out all the grass in the basin, and much of the moss. The work made him sick, he couldn’t help it; once, seeing a concerned marmot patriarch chattering at him, he sat down and burst into tears. Sax had retreated into his customary silence, which only made things worse, as it always reminded Nirgal of Simon, and of death generally. He needed Maya or some other courageous expressive speaker of the inner life, of anguish and fortitude; but here was Sax, lost in thoughts that seemed to happen in some kind of foreign language, in a private idiolect he was now unwilling to translate.
They went to work planting new starts of Himalayan grasses throughout the basin, concentrating on the stream banks and their veinlike tracery under the trickles and ice. A hard freeze actually helped, as it killed the infected plants faster than the ones free of infection. They incinerated the infected plants in a kiln down the massif. People came from the surrounding basins to help, bringing replacement starts for planting later.
Two months passed, and the invasion surge weakened.
The plants that remained seemed to be more resistant. Newly planted plants did not get infected or die. The basin looked like it was autumn, though it was midsummer; but the dying had stopped. The marmots looked thin, and more concerned than ever; they were a worrying species. And Nir-gal could see their point. The basin looked ravaged. But it seemed the biome would survive. The yiroid was subsiding, eventually they could hardiy even find it, no matter how hard and long they centrifuged samples. It seemed to have left the basin, as mysterious in departure as in arrival.
Sax shook his head. “If the viroids that infect animals ever get more robust…” He sighed. “I wish I could talk to Hi-roko about it.”
“I’ve heard them say she’s at the north pole,” Nirgal said sourly.
“Yes.”
“But?”
“I don’t think she’s there. And — I don’t think she wants to talk to me. But I’m still… I’m waiting.”
“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.
Sax nodded.
They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko — mother, lover — she had abandoned them both.
But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave, Nirgal gave him a bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”
“What will you do now?”
“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”
“Ah! Good luck.”
Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off, waving once before putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the rib and gone.
So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and mi-crobial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind of potato.
Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na — at their latitude, but all the way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the last minute it veered north.
They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he tou
ched things. The dread didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.
But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might as well have been night — a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and rattling the outer window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked pensively. Then the howl lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt more and more sick the less the wind howled — until the air was still, and he was so nauseated he could scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms sometimes did this; they ended abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind, or a particular landform. And then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines. It was raining dust now, in fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash were settling over the world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even the biggest dust storms would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at the end of their runs. But with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds so much more powerful, great quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and if they came down all at once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much deeper than a few millimeters.
As near suspension as some fines were, in an hour all but the very finest had fallen out of the air and onto them. After that it was only a hazy afternoon, windless, the air filled with something like a thin smoke, so that they could see the whole of the basin; which was covered with a lumpy blanket of dust.
Nirgal went out with his mask on as always, and dug desperately with a shovel, then with his bare hands. Sax came out, staggering through the soft drifts, to put a hand to Nirgal’s shoulder. “I don’t believe there’s anything that can be done.” The layer of dust was about a meter deep, or deeper. In time, other winds would blow some of this dust away. Snow would fall on the rest of it, and when the snow melted, the resulting mud would run over the spillways, and a new leaf-vein system of channels would cut a new fractal pattern, much like the old one. Water would carry the dust and fines away, down the massif and into the world. But by the time that happened, every plant and an-irnal in the basin would be dead.
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