by Eric Klein
What shall I swear by?
Bill:
Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I’ll believe thee.
Larry:
Then not by the sun, the moon, the planets;
Far more stable than Alderaan and more
Capable than the Magratheans,
Far more logical than Vulcan is my love.
So, by my own love do I swear to you. That thou art
Mine, and I am thine and together we shall grok each
Other; for as long as the Sun shines none
Shall part us.”
“Thank you, Larry and Bill. Next up is Chief Galloway, the ship’s Chief Engineer, with a piece called ‘Out, Out Brief Thruster.’”
“Out, out, brief thruster!
Life’s but a shuttle’s shadow, upon an asteroid
Who struts and frets his hour in an orbit,
And then is off again,
Searching for that one big haul,
That will pay for it all.
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told in a bar, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
And for all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. And to them, we lift this toast.”
“Thank you, Chief Galloway. Our next recitation is by Ms. Jean Wawatai, the contestant from Titan.”
“This piece is titled ‘Red Light.’”
“Yet here’s a spot. Out, damned LED! out, I say! - One: two: why, then, ‘tis time to do’t.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? - Yet who would have thought the old ship to have had so many red LEDs in him?”
“Thank you, Miss Wawatai. Our next presentation is by Ms. Hannah Washington, the contestant from Mars.”
“They make us learn this in school on Mars. It is titled simply ‘Mars.’
“Have glow’d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: his captain’s heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a Gypsys lust. “
“Thank you, Miss Washington. Our final piece is presented by Dodge Dunning.”
Floating down, lights glistening on her shimmering wings, she recites:
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended—
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
That planets did wax and wane,
And now slumbers shall cease to reign.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearnèd luck
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long.
Else the Puck a liar call.
So good night unto you all.
Give me your hands if we be friends.”
Everyone in the room jumped to their feet and started applauding.
After the show, we go to our table at Callahan’s for a discussion about what we want to do while on Mars. Fay mentions that the para-terraforming working group has a half-day trip scheduled to go out to a canyon farm just off of Nectar (both the city and the crater). We decide to participate and see what Martian farming is like. We can then go see ‘The Mars That Never Was’ exhibit on our second day.
Figure 6 Mars Poster Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Chapter 14
“That’s another small step for humans, and a giant leap for the human race.”
Commander Anna Persson of the Serenity on 2 October 2035 upon being first to step on Mars (following a three-week voyage).
Leaving the ship via a pressure tube, we enter the Martian immigration and customs area. There are armed men wearing the same TSA uniforms that we encountered on Luna. They seem a bit colder than their Lunar compatriots, and strongly discourage talking while waiting in line. The scans take slightly longer than on Luna, as if they are expecting to find something. The group takes almost an hour for everyone to clear. One or two people are scanned and checked multiple times after ambiguous results the first time through. But once we are cleared they completely ignore us, and we are waved through the door to the maglev station that will take us to Helium and then the transfer for the maglev to Nectar city on Utopia Planitia.
At the farm entrance, we meet a Nepalese man with the dubious name of MacDonald. He explains about how the farming is going, starting with the history of farming this particular crater, Pedestal Craters in Utopia.
“Now, understand that the first segment of this farm was started almost a hundred years ago. It was one of the original test farms. In the first year, all they did was to cover a crater and start hydroponic farming to feed the team and to build up some compost. They chose this crater because it is near the ice fields on Utopia Planitia. For the fields, they then started a ten-year program of phytoremediation using alfalfa to clean soil to safe levels of the arsenic, cadmium, copper, and lead. As alfalfa crops grow fast, it was possible to harvest a new crop every twelve weeks. The seeds from one harvest were used for the next, while we collected and freeze-dried the plants outside the dome. Each harvest was processed for the plants’ metal content, to be used in manufacturing.
“Over the next ten years, we had a mix of hydroponic farming with a variety of crop plants that don’t take up heavy metals, like tomato, rye, radish, pea, leek, spinach, garden rocket, cress, quinoa, chives, and potatoes. These were used to supplement the colony’s food options, while more alfalfa was grown to perform phytoremediation on the newer areas until their heavy metal levels were safe. Then we introduced pill bugs to help keep the levels down, should anything leach out of the surrounding stone walls. It is amazing what those little bugs can clean out.
“Along the sides of the fields, as dividers and to mask the walls, we added bamboo plants to help with air cleaning and O-two production while providing food and pulp for paper and clothes. We need to keep it carefully in check, or it will take over everything. But by aggressively harvesting it we can succeed.
“After twenty years, we introduced yaks to the dome. Originally there was a debate between yaks or mountain goats. Both offer milk, meat, and fur for us to use. Both can survive at lower air pressure, so we don’t need to bring the enclosed spaces up to a full one thousand thirteen point two five millibars to match Earth sea level as in most of the living space, but they are happy even if we don’t go all the way down to seven hundred millibars like that at an altitude of three thousand meters as found in the Himalayas. So far, we are doing fine at about nine hundred fifty millibars here in this dome.
“Now, the good thing about goats is they eat almost anything, but that can also be bad in a situation where eating part of a pressure suit or electric cable can be fatal. Also, they can be a little bit aggressive, especially around mating season.
“Yaks are bigger, and a bit pickier in terms of diet, but they are beasts of burden and they can help till the fields. Being nonaggressive is important – you don’t want an animal that could potentially head-butt your dome wall and cause a leak. Also, yaks have no smell. As for goats, the less said about their smells the better.”
Someone from the back asks, “But why not machinery to work the fields?”
“The decision was easy: yaks are able to work for their keep, provide fibers for clothin
g, meat and milk for food; their droppings are good for compost. Machinery takes the more time to set up the manufacturing and time to repair. Now, if a yak breaks down, it is lunch. Not to mention …” He smiles. “… you don’t want machines reproducing. Also, we find that a cup of gur gur made from tea leaves, yak butter, water, and salt does wonders to keep us warm.
“Over the past five years, we have been testing agave tequilana outside of the domes. The plant seems to be growing slowly, but the long sunny season plus lamps in the darker seasons, combined with moderate below-surface drip irrigation, has been having such good results that for the last few years we were able to have the first harvest with a high enough sugar content.
“Because the farm is located in a canyon, we can keep enclosing new sections and run through the process over and over, with each section nice and compartmentalized.” Pointing to a new section being enclosed, “Thus we will slowly grow our terraformed space, increase our food and air supply, all with local-made or -grown materials.” He points to the various teams of Andean, Ethiopian and Nepalese workers, each ethnicity showing distinctly in height and their various skin tones showing via their sleeveless shirts and shorts.
“If you brainy types want to know the real problem, maybe you can help us find an answer. Back when we started these projects, we had a problem with sandstorms and ultra-fine sand, called fines, getting into everything and blocking the light and solar panels. But those were solved by using hand blowers after the storm to clear everything. Eventually they worked out a variable electrostatic pulse that caused the fines to migrate to the bottom edges where we could clear them. But now, they keep adding water to thicken the atmosphere.
“They toss a chunk of Saturn’s rings into a deteriorating orbit. For each pass, we get a beautiful show as it burns up and leaves a long vapor trail. Then for a few weeks afterwards we have no fines as they catch on the moisture. But the downside is that it leaves what someone on Earth would call drops of mud on the domes and solar panels. Now, I understand that on Earth these happen in some areas and then it will rain to clean everything off. We have no rain yet. Can you come up with something to help us clear the dried mud? It is not like the fines or sand, where we could use a blower, and I hate to send someone to climb on the glass to hand wipe them down.”
The group leader thanks Mr. MacDonald and said, “We will discuss this during the next session and look for a safer solution to clearing the mud. But I don’t think we can get you rain anytime soon.”
We return to Helium for some free time. The group split. Some wanted to go shopping; some went looking for a local geologist that one of them went to school with; others just went looking for lunch.
I see Dodge walking down the street with a bunch of people. As they pass I can hear her say, “A person is defined by his actions, not their memory.”
Interested in lunch ourselves, we go down a street of food vendors. Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Moroccan, or Thai; each has a window of green herbs. Displays announce proudly and clearly the use of cilantro, fresh coriander, and Chinese or Mexican parsley in the dishes - all the same herb, but under different names. Stopping outside a Moroccan restaurant I ask the proprietor why such a fascination for this one herb.
“You must be tourists. Here on Mars, most people worry a little about the chance of the heavy metals in the soil getting into the food. We all know that the scientists say that the plants don’t absorb these metals and they are safe, but there were times when they told us that tobacco was harmless and salt was causing heart disease; then they ‘discovered’ they were wrong. So we eat cilantro. There was a study that showed it was found to remove mercury, lead and other heavy metals from the tissue of the body via chelating them out of the body. Even though each individual meal is safe, most of us try to prevent a buildup by eating a good amount of cilantro each day. Better to be safe than sorry when they revise their findings.”
Thanking him, we decide to enter his restaurant for lunch. As we sit down, he puts out lots of little plates of salads, including a tomato and cucumber one, and another made from radishes. The best is an artichoke salad with garlic, spices and preserved lemon. All are full of flavor – and cilantro.
The restaurateur says, “With the lower air pressure here, we have to modify some of the original recipes so that the flavor will come through.” The yak tangia is wonderful with dried fruit and a slightly sweet sauce. Fay has the fish balls, and the sauce is full of cilantro. After the meal we are offered sweet mint tea and Kaab el ghzal – crescent-shaped cookies filled with almond paste and cinnamon. Absolutely wonderful.
Taking the maglev back to the spaceport, we enter the security area and find two TSA agents hand-searching Dodge. While they are working, we are waved on to other agents, who quickly scan and pass us for returning to the ship. They are still working on Dodge and her day bag when we enter the transfer tube.
Letting out a deep breath, I release the tension I had not even realized I was feeling. It was comforting to be back on the ship. In only two weeks it had become ‘home’ and a safe refuge from edgy security teams.
Leaving the ship via the pressure tube, we enter Mars immigration and customs area. The same armed TSA agents are there. They seem a bit tenser, and separate us to discourage talking while in line. The scans take longer than the day before as though they are trying harder to find something. Where it was under five minutes to scan me the day before, today it took almost fifteen minutes.
Once we are cleared, we take a slideway to The Mars That Never Was exhibit. We find a holographic globe of Mars as it is today. We take our seats as the narration begins. “The Mars that we know and live on today is very different from what was envisioned before space travel gave us the ability to see images up close, and to realize that the Earth-like habitable world did not, in fact, exist. In the following presentations, we will show the history of human perception of Mars and how it has changed over time. As a new addition to the exhibit, we have included a brief history of the discovery of the real Mars and the exploration that was part of bringing us to live on Mars.
“First let’s look at Mars in ancient history. Originally, the name as we now know it was from the Greeks, who took the red color and named it for their god of war, Ares. Later, after the Romans came to prominence, they changed the name to that of their own god of war, Martius, or in English, ‘Mars.’ Currently, the common names for all the planets come from the names of Roman gods. The Egyptian astronomers knew about and were observing Mars as early as fifteen thirty-four BCE. They were able to define when it would be in the sky. It was known to the Babylonians and was included in the calculations of horoscopes. By the fourth century BCE, Aristotle had observed that Mars went behind the Moon and thus was farther away. Around the same time, Mars first appeared in Chinese literature.”
“Through the middle ages, various individuals took to looking at Mars, including Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. By the late nineteenth century there were established centers for astronomy that led to a more detailed investigation.” The hologram changes to an image of a bald man with a mustache that came to points. “One of the best known of these researchers was Percival Lowell. He had been inspired to study Mars by the drawings of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who was director of the Milan Observatory. Lowell was working at an observatory in what was then the Flagstaff, Arizona Territory, dedicated to the observation of Mars. There, he recorded maps of what he thought of as canals, starting in eighteen ninety-four. Lowell published his findings in three books: Mars, published in eighteen ninety-five, Mars and Its Canals, published in nineteen oh six, and Mars As the Abode of Life, published in nineteen oh eight. It was his theory that the variable dark lines were an attempt by the natives to channel the water at the poles down to their cities. We are pleased to have a holographic version of how his maps would look as projected onto a globe of the actual Martian surface.” The image of Lowell is replace
d with one of current-day Mars. “Here you can see the images of Lowell’s early maps as they progressed into his final view.” Dark lines faded in on the globe, showing the crawling of seasonal changes that he recorded. “It is important to note that the existence of canals was definitively disproved in the nineteen sixties by NASA’s Mariner missions.
“The next time Mars came into the main cultural sphere was with Herbert George Wells’ War of the Worlds, published in eighteen ninety-eight and made famous for the radio broadcast in nineteen thirty-eight. It was this broadcast that started a panic of those who missed the introductory warning that it was fiction.” The audio cuts to a slightly scratchy recording of the original radio broadcast, describing for about 5 minutes the first sighting of the invading Martians.
“In nineteen twelve Edgar Rice Burroughs published the first Barsoom tale that was later novelized as A Princess of Mars. In it John Carter found a very different place than that of H. G. Wells. Barsoom was a livable place where a man could walk around unprotected from the atmosphere and where the natives ranged from hostile to downright loveable.” The image changed to a man and a woman in ceremonial harnesses, with a tall, four-armed, green man standing behind them. “It is not clear if Burroughs used the Lowell maps of Mars in laying out Barsoom, but as you can see …” The image changes to Lowell’s two-dimensional map of Mars. “… in the original Lowell map there are many similarities of the lines and the design for Barsoom. In fact, as a tribute to his creation, the current capital of Mars is located in approximately the same location as the fictional Greater Helium as described by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And in the central square, you will find a statue of the Virginia Captain and his Martian Princess.
“Between Barsoom and the War of the Worlds, Mars was now ingrained in the public consciousness. Stories, movies and even cartoons would continue to depict life on or travel to Mars. This included the nineteen forty-eight cartoon Martian looking to blow up the Earth as it blocked his view. In this cartoon, Marvin the Martian was thwarted by Bugs Bunny.” The image changed to a two-dimensional cartoon showing two images from the Bugs Bunny on Mars cartoons. “In fact, the character would repeat in several Bugs Bunny cartoons, and later be incorporated in the Daffy Duck series Duck Dodgers and the Return of the Twenty-Four-and-a-Halfth Century, where Marvin would be a reoccurring nemesis for Duck Dodgers.
