Green Mars

“How many are there?”

“Fifty.”

Coyote saw her expression, and nodded briefly. He was eating voraciously, and it occurred to her that he had arrived at the cache empty. “They’re putting a lot of money into these big projects. The new elevator, these water rigs, nitrogen from Titan … a big mirror out there between us and the sun, to put more light on us. Have you heard of that?”

She tried to collect herself. Fifty. Ah, God …

It made her mad. She had been angry at the planet, for not giving her her release. For frightening her, but not backing it up with action. But this was different, a different kind of anger. And now as she sat watching Coyote eat, thinking about the inundation of Vastitas Borealis, she could feel that anger contracting inside her, like a pre-stellar dustcloud, contracting until it collapsed and ignited. Hot fury—it was painful to feel it. And yet it was the same old thing, anger at the terraforming. That old burnt emotion that had gone nova in the early years, now coalescing and going off again; she didn’t want it, she really didn’t. But damn it, the planet was melting under her feet. Disintegrating. Reduced to mush in some Terran cartel’s mining venture.

Something ought to be done.

And really she had to do something, if only just to fill the hours that she had to fill before some accident had mercy on her. Something to occupy the preposthumous hours. Zombie vengeance—well, why not? Prone to violence, prone to despair …

“Who’s building them?” she asked.

“Mostly Consolidated. There’s factories building them at Mareotis and Bradbury Point.” Coyote wolfed down food for a while more, then eyed her. “You don’t like it.”

“No.”

“Would you like to stop it?”

She didn’t reply.

Coyote seemed to understand. “I don’t mean stop the whole terraforming effort. But there are things that can be done. Blow up the factories.”

“They’ll just rebuild them.”

“You never can tell. It would slow them down. It might buy enough time for something to happen on a more global scale.”

“Reds, you mean.”

“Yes. I think people would call them Reds.”

Ann shook her head. “They don’t need me.”

“No. But maybe you need them, eh? And you’re a hero to them, you know. You would mean more to them than just another body.”

Ann’s mind had gone blank again. Reds—she had never believed in them, never believed that mode of resistance would work. But now—well, even if it wouldn’t work, it might be better than doing nothing. Poke them in the eye with a stick!

And if it did work …

“Let me think about it.”

They talked about other things. Suddenly Ann was hit by a wall of fatigue, which was strange as she had spent so much time doing nothing. But there it was. Talking was exhausting work, she wasn’t used to it. And Coyote was a hard man to talk to.

“You should go to bed,” he said, breaking off his monologue. “You look tired. Your hands—” He helped her up. She lay down on a bed, in her clothes. Coyote pulled a blanket over her. “You’re tired. I wonder if it isn’t time for another longevity treatment for you, old girl.”

“I’m not going to take them any more.”

“No! Well, you surprise me. But sleep, now. Sleep.”

She caravanned with Coyote back south, and in the evenings they ate together, and he told her about the Reds. It was a loose grouping, rather than any rigidly organised movement. Like the underground itself. She knew several of the founders: Ivana, and Gene and Raul from the farm team, who had ended up disagreeing with Hiroko’s areophany and its insistence on viriditas; Kasei and Dao and several of the Zygote ectogenes; a lot of Arkady’s followers, who had come down from Phobos and then clashed with Arkady over the use value of terraforming to the revolution. A good many Bogdanovists, including Steve and Marian, had become Reds in the years since 2061, as had followers of the biologist Schnelling, and some radical Japanese nisei and sansei from Sabishii, and Arabs who wanted Mars to stay Arabian forever, and escaped prisoners from Korolyov, and so on. A bunch of radicals. Not really her type, Ann thought, feeling a residual sensation that her objection to terraforming was a rational scientific thing. Or at least a defensible ethical or aesthetic position. But then the anger burned through her again in a flash, and she shook her head, disgusted at herself. Who was she to judge the ethics of the Reds? At least they had expressed their anger, they had lashed out. Probably they felt better, even if they hadn’t accomplished anything. And maybe they had accomplished something, at least in years past, before the terraforming had entered this new phase of transnat gigantism.

Coyote maintained that the Reds had considerably slowed terraforming. Some of them had even kept records to try to quantify the difference they had made. There was also, he said, a growing movement among some of the Reds to acknowledge reality, and admit that terraforming was going to happen, but to work up policy papers advocating various kinds of least-impact terraforming. “There are some very detailed proposals for a largely carbon dioxide atmosphere, warm but water-poor, which would support plant life, and people with facemasks, but not wrench the world into a Terran model. It’s very interesting. There are also several proposals for what they call ecopoesis, or areobiospheres. Worlds in which the low altitudes are arctic, and just barely liveable for us, while the higher altitudes remain above the bulk of the atmosphere, and thus in a natural state, or close to it. The calderas of the four big volcanoes would stay especially pure in such a world, or so they say.”

Ann doubted most of these proposals were achievable, or would have the effects predicted. But Coyote’s accounts intrigued her nevertheless. He was a strong supporter of all Red efforts, apparently, and he had been a big help to them from the start, giving them aid from the underground refuges, connecting them up with each other, and helping them to build their own refuges, which were chiefly in the mesas and fretted terrain of the Great Escarpment, where they remained close to the terraforming action, and could therefore interfere with it more easily. Yes—Coyote was a Red, or at least a sympathiser. “Really I’m nothing. An old anarchist. I suppose you could call me a Boonean, now, in that I believe in incorporating anything and everything that will help make a free Mars. Sometimes I think the argument that a human-viable surface helps the revolution is a good one. Other times not. And the Reds are such a great guerrilla pool. And I take their point that we’re not here to, you know, reproduce Canada for God’s sake! So I help. I’m good at hiding, and I like it.”

Ann nodded.

“So do you want to join them? Or at least meet them?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Her focus on rock was shattered. Now she could not help but notice how many signs of life there were on the land. In the southern tens and twenties, ice from the outbreak glaciers was melting during summer afternoons, and the cold water was flowing downhill, cutting the land in new primitive watersheds, and turning talus slopes into what ecologists called fellfields, those rocky patches that were the first living communities after ice receded, their living component made of algae and lichens and moss. Sandy regolith, infected by water and nitrobacteria flowing through it, became fellfield with shocking speed, she found, and the fragile landforms were quickly destroyed. Much of the regolith on Mars had been superarid, so arid that when water touched it there were powerful chemical reactions—lots of hydrogen peroxide release, and salt crystallisations—in essence the ground disintegrated, flowing away in sandy muds that only set downstream, in solifluction rims, and frosty new proto-fellfields. Features were disappearing. The land was melting. After one long day’s drive through terrain altered like this, Ann said to Coyote, “Maybe I will talk to them.”

But first they returned to Zygote, or Gamete, where Coyote had some business. Ann stayed in Peter’s room, as he was gone, and the room she had shared with Simon had been put to other uses. She wouldn’t have stayed in it anyway. Peter’s room was under Dao’s, a round bamboo segment containing a desk, a chair, a crescent mattress on the floor, and a window looking out at the lake. Everything was the same but different in Gamete, and despite the years she had spent visiting Zygote regularly, she felt no connection with any of it. It was hard, in fact, to remember what Zygote had been like. She didn’t want to remember, she practised forgetting assiduously; any time some image from the past came to her, she would jump up and do something that required concentration, studying rock samples or seismograph read-outs, or cooking complex meals, or going out to play with the kids—until the image had faded, and the past was banished. With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely.

One evening Coyote stuck his head in the door of Peter’s room. “Did you know Peter is a Red too?”

“What?”

“He is. But he works on his own, in space mostly. I think that his ride down from the elevator gave him a taste for it.”

“My God,” she said, disgusted. That was another random accident; by all rights Peter should have died when the elevator fell. What were the chances of a spaceship floating by and spotting him, alone in areosynchronous orbit? No, it was ridiculous. Nothing existed but contingency.

But she was still angry.

She went to sleep upset by these thoughts, and sometime in her uneasy slumber she had a dream in which she and Simon were walking through the most spectacular part of Candor Chasma, on that first trip they had taken together, when everything was immaculate, and nothing had changed for a billion years—the first humans to walk in that vast gorge of layered terrain and immense walls. Simon had loved it just as much as she had, and he was so silent, so absorbed in the reality of rock and sky—there was no better companion for such glorious contemplation. Then in the dream one of the giant canyon walls had started to collapse, and Simon said, “Long runout,” and she woke up instantly, sweating.

She dressed and left Peter’s rooms and went out into the little mesocosm under the dome, the white lake, the krummholz on the low dunes. Hiroko was such a strange genius, to conceive such a place and then convince so many others to join her in it. To conceive so many children, without the fathers’ permission, without controls over the genetic manipulations; it was a form of insanity, really, divine or not.

There along the icy strand of their little lake came a group of Hiroko’s brood. They couldn’t be called kids any more: the youngest were fifteen or sixteen Terran years old, the oldest—well, the oldest were out scattered over the world, Kasei was probably fifty by now, and his daughter Jackie nearly twenty-five, a graduate of the new university in Sabishii, active in demi-monde politics. That group of ectogenes were back in Gamete on a visit, like Ann herself. There they were, coming along the beach. Jackie was leading the group, a tall graceful black-haired young woman, quite beautiful and imperious, the leader of her generation no doubt. Unless it might be the cheery Nirgal, or the brooding Dao. But Jackie led them—Dao followed her with doggy loyalty, and even Nirgal kept an eye on her. Simon had loved Nirgal, and Peter did too, and Ann could see why; he was the only one among Hiroko’s gang of ectogenes that did not put her off. The rest cavorted in their self-absorption, kings and queens of their little world, but Nirgal had left Zygote soon after Simon’s death, and had hardly ever come back. He had studied in Sabishii, which is what had given Jackie the idea, and now spent most of his time in Sabishii, or out with Coyote or Peter, or visiting the cities of the north. So was he too a Red? Impossible to say. But he was interested in everything, aware of everything, running around everywhere, a kind of young male Hiroko if such a creature was possible, but less strange than Hiroko, more engaged with other people; more human. Ann had never in her life managed to have a normal conversation with Hiroko, who seemed to her an alien consciousness, with entirely different meanings for all the words in the language, and, despite her brilliance at ecosystem design, not really a scientist at all, but rather some kind of prophet. Nirgal on the other hand seemed intuitively to strike right to the heart of whatever was most important to the person he was talking to—and he focused on that, and asked question after question, curious, assimilative, sympathetic. As Ann watched him trailing Jackie down the strand, running here and there, she recalled how slowly and carefully he had walked at Simon’s side. How he had looked so frightened that last night, when Hiroko in her peculiar way had brought him in to say goodbye. All that business had been a cruel thing to subject a boy to, but she hadn’t objected at the time; she had been desperate, ready to try anything. Another mistake she could never repair.

She stared at the blond sand underfoot, upset, until the ectogenes had passed. It was a shame Nirgal was so hooked by Jackie, who cared so little for him. Jackie was a remarkable woman in her way, but much too much like Maya—moody and manipulative, fixated on no man, except, perhaps, for Peter—who luckily (although it had not seemed so at the time) had had an affair with Jackie’s mother, and was not the least bit interested in Jackie herself. A messy business that, and Peter and Kasei were still estranged by it, and Esther had never been back. Not Peter’s finest hour. And its effects on Jackie … oh yes, there would be effects (there, watch out—some black blank, there in her own deep past) yes, on and on and on it went, all their sordid little lives, repeating themselves in their meaningless rounds …

She tried to concentrate on the composition of the sand grains. Blond was not really a usual colour for sand on Mars. A very rare granitic stuff. She wondered if Hiroko had hunted for it, or else got lucky.

The ectogenes were gone, down by the other side of the lake. She was alone on the beach. Simon somewhere underneath her. It was hard to keep from connecting with any of that.

A man came walking over the dunes toward her. He was short, and at first she thought it was Sax, then Coyote, but he wasn’t either of these. He hesitated when he saw her, and by that motion she saw that it was indeed Sax. But a Sax greatly altered in appearance. Vlad and Ursula had been doing some cosmetic surgery on his face, enough so that he didn’t look like the old Sax. He was going to move to Burroughs, and join a biotech company there, using a Swiss passport and one of Coyote’s viral identities. Getting back into the terraforming effort. She looked out at the water. He came over and tried to talk to her, strangely un-Saxlike, nicer-looking now, a handsome old coot; but it was still the old Sax, and her anger filled her up so much that she could hardly think, hardly remember what they were talking about from one second to the next. “You really do look different,” was all she could recall. Inanities like that. Looking at him she thought, He will never change. But there was something frightening about the stricken look on his new face, something deadly that it would evoke, if she did not stop it … and so she argued with him until he grimaced one last time, and went away.

She sat there for a long time, getting colder and more distraught. Finally she put her head on her knees, and fell into a kind of sleep.

She had a dream. All the First Hundred were standing around her, the living and the dead, Sax at their centre with his old face, and that dangerous new look of distress. He said, “Net gain in complexity.”

Vlad and Ursula said, “Net gain in health.”

Hiroko said, “Net gain in beauty.”