Green Mars m-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  There were parts of his inner speech which were composed entirely of old cliches, coming no doubt from what Michel called “overlearned” activities in his past, which had so permeated his mind that they had survived the damage. Clean design, good data, parts per billion, bad results. Then cutting through these comfortable formulations, as if from a separate language entirely, were the new perceptions, and the new phrases groping to express them. Synaptic synergies. Actual speech from either realm was still welcome. The exhilaration of normality. How he had taken it for granted. Michel came by to talk every day, helping him to build this new brain. Michel harbored some very alarming beliefs for a man of science. The four elements, the four temperaments, alchemical formulations of all kinds, philosophical positions parading as science… “Didn’t you once ask me if I could change lead to gold?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why do you spend so much time talking to me, Michel?” “I like talking to you, Sax. You say something new every day.” “I like this throwing things with my left hand.” “I can see that. It’s possible you may end up a left-hander. Or ambidextrous, because your left brain is so powerful, I can’t imagine it will lag much, no matter the lesion.”

  “Mars looks like an iron-cored ball of old planetesimals.”

  Desmond flew him to the Red sanctuary in Wallace Crater, where Peter often stayed. And Peter was there, Peter son of Mars, tall fast and strong, graceful, friendly although impersonal, distant, absorbed in his own work and his own life. Simonlike. Sax told him what he wanted to do, and why. He still stumbled in his speech occasionally. But it was so much better than it had been before that he hardly minded when he did. Forge on! Like talking in a foreign language. All languages were foreign languages to him now. Except his idiolect of shapes. But it was no aggravation — on the contrary, such a relief to do even so well. To have the fog clearing away from the names, have the mind-mouth connections restored. Even if in a new and chancy way. A chance to learn. Sometimes he liked the new way. One’s reality might indeed depend on one’s scientific paradigm, but it mostly definitely depended on one’s brain structure. Change that and your paradigms might as well follow. You can’t fight progress. Nor progressive differentiation. “Do you understand?”

  “Oh, I understand,” Peter said, grinning widely. “I think it’s a very good idea. Very important. It will take me a few days to get the plane ready.”

  - - Ann arrived at the shelter, looking tired and old. She greeted Sax curtly, her old antipathy as strong as ever. Sax did not know what to say to her. Was this a new problem?

  He decided to wait until Peter had talked to her, and see if that made any difference. He waited. Nowadays if he didn’t talk no one bothered him. Advantages everywhere.

  She came back from a talk with Peter, to eat a meal with the other Reds in their little commons, and yes she stared at him curiously. Looking over the heads of the others at him as if inspecting a new cliff on the Martian landscape. Intent and objective. Evaluative. A status change in a dynamic system is a data point that speaks to a theory. Supporting or troubling. What are you? Why are you doing this?

  He met her stare calmly, tried to field it, to turn it around. Yes I am still Sax. I have changed. Who are you? Why haven’t you changed? Why do you still look at me like that? I have experienced an injury. The premorbid individual is not there anymore, not quite. I have been given an experimental treatment, I feel fine, I am not the man you knew. And why haven’t you changed?

  If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.

  She sat down to eat. It was doubtful she had read his mind in, that much detail. But a great pleasure nevertheless, to be able to meet her eye!

  He got in the little cockpit with Peter and just after the timeslip they bounced down the bedrock runway, accelerating hard and tilting up at the black sky, the big streamlined space plane vibrating under them. Sax lay back, crushed into his seat, and waited for the plane to curve over that asymptotic hill at the top of its course, slowing as it rose less steeply, until it was in a gentle rise through the high stratosphere, making the transition from plane to rocket as the atmosphere thinned to its last attenuated level, a hundred kilometers high, where the gases of the Russell cocktail were annihilated daily by incoming UV rays. The plane’s skin was glowing with heat. Through the filtered glass of the cockpit it was the color of the sun at sunset. No doubt it was affecting their night vision. Below the planet was all dark, except for very faint patches of starlit glaciers in Hellas Basin. They were rising still. A widening gyre. Stars packed the blackness of what looked like an enormous black hemisphere, standing on an enormous black plane. Night sky, night Mars. They rose and rose again. The incandescent rocket was translucent yellow, hallucinatorily bright and sleek. The latest thing from Vishniac, designed in part by Spencer, and made of an inter-metallic compound, chiefly gamma titanium aluminum, rendered superplastic for the manufacture of heat-resistant engine parts as well as the exterior skin, which dimmed a bit as they rose higher and it cooled. He could imagine the beautiful latticework of the gamma titanium aluminum, patterned in a tapestry of nodoids and catenoids like hooks and eyes, vibrating madly with the heat. They were building such things these days. Ground-to-space planes. Walk out into your backyard and fly to Mars in an aluminum can.

  Sax described what he wanted to do next after this. Peter laughed.

  “Do you think Vishniac can do it?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “There are some design problems.”

  “I know, I know. But they’ll solve them. I mean you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist.”

  “That’s very true.”

  Peter sang to pass the hours. Sax joined in when he knew the words — as in “Sixteen Tons,” a satisfying song. Peter told the story of how he had escaped from the falling elevator. What it had been like to float in an,EVA suit, alone for two days. “Somehow it gave me a taste for it, that’s all. I know that sounds strange.”

  “I understand.” The shapes out here were so big and pure. The color of things.

  “What was it like to learn to talk again?”

  “I have to concentrate to do it. I have to think hard. Things surprise me all the time. Things I used to know and forgot. Things I never knew. Things I learned just before the injury. That period is usually occluded forever. But it was so important. When I was working around the glacier. I have to talk to your mom about that. It isn’t like she thinks. You know, the land. The new plants out there. The yellow butterfly sun. It doesn’t have to be …”

  “You should talk to her.”

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  “Talk to her when we get back.”

  The altimeter indicated 250 kilometers above the surface. The plane plowed up toward Cassiopeia. Every star had a distinct color, different from any other. Or there were at least fifty of them. Below them, on the eastern edge of the black disk, the terminator appeared, zebra-banded sandy ochre and shadowy black. The thin crescent of sunlit Mars gave him the sudden clear perception of the disk as a great spheroid. A ball spinning through the galaxy of stars. The great huge continent-mountain of Elysium bulked over the horizon, its shape perfectly delineated by the horizontal’ shadows. They were looking down the length of its long saddleback, Hecates Tholus almost hidden behind the cone of Elysium Mons, Albor Tholus off to the side.

  “There it is,” Peter said, and pointed up through the clear cockpit. Above them, to the east, the eastern edge of the aerial lens was silver in the morning light, the rest of it still in the planet’s shadow.

  “Are we close enough yet?” Sax asked.

  “Almost.”

  Sax looked down again at the thickening crescent of the morning. There on the dark rough highlands of Hesperia, a cloud of smoke was billowing up from the dark surface just beyond the terminator, into the morning light. Even at their height they were in that cloud still, in the
part that was no longer visible. The lens itself was surfing on that invisible thermal, using its lift and the pressure of sunlight to hold its position over the burn zone.

  Now the entire lens was in the sunlight, looking like an enormous silver parachute with nothing underneath it. Its silver was also violet, sky-colored. The cup was a section of a sphere, a thousand kilometers across, its center some fifty kilometers above its rim. Spinning like a Frisbee. There was a hole at the peak, where the sunlight poured straight through. Everywhere else the circular mirror strips that made up the cup were reflecting the light from the sun and the soletta, inward and down onto a moving point on the surface below, bringing to bear so much light that it was igniting basalt. The lens mirrors heated up to almost 900°K, and the liquefied rock down there was reaching 5,000°K. Degassing vola-tiles.

  Into Sax’s mind, as he considered the great object flying over them, came the image of a magnifying glass, held over dry weeds and an aspen branch. Smoke, flame, fire. The concentrated rays of the sun. Photon assault. “Aren’t we close enough yet? It looks like it’s right over us.”

  “No, we’re well out from under the edge. It wouldn’t do to get under that thing, although I suppose the focus wouldn’t be right to fry us. Anyway it’s moving over the burn zone at almost a thousand kilometers an hour.”

  “Like jets when I was young.”

  “Uh.” Green lights blinked on one of his consoles. “Okay, here we go.”

  He pulled back on the stick and the plane stood on its tail, rising straight at the lens, which was still another hundred kilometers higher than they were, and well to the west of them. Peter pushed a button on the console. The whole plane jerked as a bank of fletched missiles appeared from under the plane’s stubby wings, lofting with them and then igniting like magnesium flares and shooting up and away, toward the lens. Pinpricks of yellow fire against that huge silvery UFO, eventually disappearing from sight. Sax waited, lips pursed, and tried to stop his blinking.

  The front edge of the lens began to unravel. It was a flimsy thing, nothing but a great spinning cup of solar sail bands, and it came apart with startling rapidity, its front edge rolling under it until it was tumbling forward and down, trailing long looping streamers which looked like the tangled tails of several broken kites, all falling together. A billion and a half kilograms of solar sail material, in fact, all unraveling as it fluttered down in its long trajectory, looking slow because it was so big, though probably the great mass of material was still moving at well above terminal velocity. A good portion of it would burn up before it hit the surface. Silica rain.

  Peter turned and followed it in its descent, keeping well to the east of it. And so they could still see it below them, there in the violet morning sky, as the main mass of it heated to an incandescent glare and caught fire, like a great yellow comet with a hairy tangled silver tail, dropping down to the tawny planet. All fall down.

  “Good shot,” Sax said.

  Back in Wallace Crater they were welcomed as heroes. Peter deflected all congratulations: “It was Sax’s idea, the flight itself was no big deal, just another reconnaissance except for the firing, I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.”

  “They’ll just drop another one into position,” Ann said from the edge of the crowd, staring at Sax with a very curious expression.

  “But they’re so vulnerable,” Peter said.

  “Surface-to-space missiles,” Sax said, feeling nervous. “Can you invent — can you inventory all orbiting objects?”

  “We already have,” Peter said. “Some of them we don’t have ID’d, but most are obvious.”

  “I’d like to see the list.”

  “I’d like to talk to you,” Ann told him darkly.

  And the rest quickly left the room, wagging their eyebrows at each other like a bunch of Art Randolphs.

  Sax sat down in a bamboo chair. It was a little room, without a window. It could have been one of the barrel vaults in Underbill, back in the beginning. The shape was right. The textures. Brick was such a stable staple. Ann pulled a chair over and sat across from him, leaning forward to stare in his face. She looked older. The vaunted Red leader, vaunted, gaunted, haunted. He smiled. “Are you about due for a gerontological treatment?” his mouth said, surprising them both.

  Ann brushed the question off as an impertinence. “Why did you want to bring down the lens?” she said, her gaze boring into him.

  “I didn’t like it.”

  “I know that,” she said. “But why?”

  “It wasn’t necessary. Things are warming up fast enough. There’s no reason to go faster. We don’t even need much more heat. And it was releasing very large amounts of carbon dioxide. That will be hard to scrub. And it was very nicely stuck — it’s hard to get CO2 out of carbonates. As long as one doesn’t melt the rock, it stays.” He shook his head. “It was stupid. They were just doing it because they could. Canals. I don’t believe in canals.”

  “So it just wasn’t the right kind of terraforming for you.”

  “That’s right.” He met her stare calmly. “I believe in the terra-forming outlined in Dorsa Brevia. You signed off too. As I recall.”

  She shook her head.

  “No? But the Reds signed?”

  She nodded.

  “Well… it makes sense to me. I said this to you before. Human-viable to a certain elevation. Above that, air too thin and cold. Go slow. Ecopoesis. I don’t like any of the big new heavy-industry methods. Maybe some nitrogen from Titan. But not any of the rest.”

  “What about the oceans?”

  “I don’t know. See what happens without pumping?”

  “What about the soletta?”

  “I don’t know. The extra insolation means less warming needed from industrial gassing. Or other methods. But — we could have done without it. I thought the dawn mirrors were enough.”

  “But it’s not in your hands anymore.”

  “No.”.

  They sat in silence for a while. Ann appeared to be thinking. Sax watched her weathered face, wondering when she had last had the treatment. Ursula recommended repeating it every forty years, at a minimum.

  “I was wrong,” his mouth said. As she stared at him, he tried to follow the thought. It was a matter of shapes, geometries, mathematical elegance. Cascading recombinant chaos. Beauty is the creation of a strange attractor. “We should have waited before we started. A few decades of study of the primal state. It would have told us how to proceed. I didn’t think things would change so fast. My original idea was something more like ecopoesis.”

  She pursed her lips. “But now it’s too late.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.” He turned a palm up, inspected it. All the lines there were the same as always. “You ought to get the treatment.”

  “I’m not taking the treatment anymore.”

  “Oh, Ann. Don’t say that. Does Peter know? We need you. I mean — we need you.”

  She got up and left the room.

  His next project was more complex. Although Peter was confident, the Vishniac people were dubious. Sax explained as best he could. Peter helped. Their objections turned to practicalities. Too large? Enlist more Bogdanovists. Impossible to stealth? Interrupt the surveillance network. Science is creation, he told them. This isn’t science, Peter replied. It’s engineering. Mikhail agreed, but liked that part of it. Ecotage, a branch of ecological engineering. But very difficult to arrange. Enlist the Swiss, Sax told them. Or at least let them know. They don’t like surveillance anyway. Tell Praxis.

  Things began to shape up. But it was a long time before he and Peter took off in a space plane again. This time they rocketed out of the stratosphere entirely, and then far above it. Twenty thousand kilometers above it, until they were closing on Deimos. And then making a rendezvous with it.

  The gravity of the little moon was so slight that it was more a docking than a touchdown. Jackie Boone, who had helped on the project, mostly to be close to Peter (the shape was clear)
, guided the plane in. As they approached, Sax had an excellent view through the cockpit window. Deimos’s black surface looked to be covered by a thick coat of dusty regolith — all the craters were nearly buried in it, their rims soft round dimples in the blanket of dust. The little oblong moon was not regular, but was rather composed of several rounded facets. A triaxial ellipsoid, almost. An old robot lander sat near the middle of Voltaire Crater, its landing pads buried, its coppery articulated struts and boxes dimmed by a fine dark dust.

  They had chosen their own landing site on one of the ridges between facets, where lighter bare rock protruded from the blanket of dust. The ridges were old spallation scars, marking where early impacts had knapped pieces of the moonlet away. Jackie brought them down gently toward a ridge to the west of Swift and Voltaire craters. Deimos was tidally fixed, as Phobos had been, which was convenient for their project. The sub-Mars point served as 0° for both longitude and latitude, a most sensible plan. Their touchdown ridge was near the equator, at 90° longitude. About a ten-kilometer walk from the sub-Mars point.

  As they approached the ridge, the rim of Voltaire disappeared under the black curved horizon. Dust blew away from the ridge as the plane’s rockets shot exhaust over it. There was only a few centimeters of dust covering the bedrock. Carbonaceous chondrite, five billion years old. They docked with a hard thump, bounced away, slowly drifted down again. He could feel the pull toward the floor of the plane, but it was very slight. Probably he didn’t weigh more than a couple of kilograms, if that.