The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

When he got back to the guest rooms Maya was already there, looking as shocked as he felt, wandering nervously from dresser to sink to window, touching things and looking around as if she had never seen such a room before. Vlad had told her about it after her physical, just as Ursula had with John. “Immortality plague!” she exclaimed, and laughed strangely. “Can you believe it?”

“Longevity plague,” he corrected her. “And no, I can’t. Not really.” He felt a little dizzy, and he could see she hadn’t heard him. Her agitation made him nervous. They heated soup, ate in a daze. Vlad had told Maya to come to Acheron, and intimated what it was all about; that was why she had insisted that John accompany her to Acheron. When she told him that, he felt a shiver of fondness for her. Standing next to her washing the dishes, observing her hands shake as she spoke, he felt exceptionally close to her; it was as if they knew each other’s thoughts, as if, after all the years, in the face of this bizarre development, there were no need for words, only for each other’s presence. That night in the warm dark of their bed she whispered hoarsely, “We’d better do it twice tonight. While it’s still us.”

Three days later they both got the treatment. John lay back on a medical couch in a small room, and stared at an intravenous plug in the back of his hand. An IV feed shot, just like all those he’d had before. Except this time he could feel a strange heat rising up his arm, flushing his chest, pouring down his legs. Was it real? Was he imagining it? For a second he felt extremely odd all over, as if his ghost had walked through him. Then he was just very hot. “Should I be this hot?” he asked Ursula anxiously.

“It’s like a fever at first,” she said. “Then we put a small shock through you to push the plasmids into your cells. After that it’s more chills than fever, as the new strands bond to the old. People often feel quite cold, actually.”

An hour later a big IV bag had drained into him. He was still hot, and his bladder was full. They let him get up and go to the bathroom, then when he returned he was strapped into what looked like a cross between a couch and an electric chair. That didn’t bother him; astronaut training had inured him to all devices. The shock when it came lasted about ten seconds, and felt like a disagreeable tickling everywhere in him. Ursula and the others detached him from the apparatus; Ursula, her eyes twinkling, gave him a kiss full on the mouth. She warned him again that in a while he would start to feel chilled, and that it would last for a couple of days. It was okay to sit in the saunas or whirlpool baths; in fact they recommended it.

So he and Maya sat in the corner of a sauna together, huddled in the penetrating warmth, watching the bodies of the other visitors, who came in white and went out pink. It seemed to John an image of what was happening to the two of them; come in sixty-five, go out ten. He really couldn’t believe it. It was still very hard for him to think, he found his thoughts simply blanked, his mind stunned. If brain cells were reinforced too, had his clogged unexpectedly? He had always been a ragged slow thinker. In fact this was probably no more than his usual obtuseness, brought to his attention because he was trying so hard to come to grips with the thing, to think what it meant. Could it really be true? Could they really be sidestepping death for some years, perhaps some … decades …?

They left the sauna to eat, and after their meals they took short walks in the crest greenhouse, looking out at the dunes to the north, the chaotic lava to the south. The view north reminded Maya of early Underhill, with the random litter of stones on Lunae replaced by Arcadia’s windswept quilt pattern of dunes; as if her memory had cleaned up her recollections of that time, making them more patterned, tinting their faded ochres and reds to rich lemon yellows. Patination of the past. He stared at her curiously. It had been M-11 years since those first days in the trailer park, and in most of the years since, the two of them had been lovers, with a number of (blessed) interruptions and separations, of course, caused by circumstances or, more usually, their inability to get along. But they had always started again when the opportunities came, and the upshot was that now they knew each other just about as well as any old married couple with a less interrupted history; perhaps even better, because any completely constant couple was likely to have stopped paying attention to each other at some point, while the two of them, with all their separations and reunions, fights and rapprochements, had had to relearn each other countless times. John said some of this to her, and they talked about it; it was a pleasure to talk about it; “We have had to keep paying attention,” Maya said intently, nodding with a look of solemn satisfaction, sure that this was mostly her doing. Yes, they had paid attention, they had never fallen into the mindless rut of habit. Surely, they both agreed as they sat in the baths, or walked the crest, this compensated for the time they had spent apart, more than compensated for it. Yes; no doubt they knew each other even better than any old married couple.

And so they talked, trying to stitch their pasts to this strange new future, in the anxious hope that it would not prove to be an unbridgeable rupture. And late the following evening, two days after the inoculation, sitting alone naked in the sauna, their flesh still cold, their skin all rosy with sweat, John looked at Maya’s body sitting there beside him, as real as a rock, and he felt a glow like the IV injection running all through him. He had not eaten much since the treatment, and the beige and yellow tiles they sat on had started to throb, as if lit from within; light gleamed on every water droplet covering the tiles, like tiny chips of lightning scattered everywhere, and Maya’s body sprawled over these sparkling tiles pulsing before him like a pink candle. The intense thereness of it – haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs – I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That’s why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax’s odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment. The tiles and the thick hot air were pulsing around him as if he were dying and being reborn, and sure, that was really the case if what Ursula and Vlad said were true. And there beside him in the process of being reborn was the pink body of Maya Toitovna, Maya’s body which he knew better than his own. And not only in this moment, but through time; he could recall vividly his first sight of her naked, floating toward him in the bubble chamber on the Ares, surrounded by a nimbus of stars and the black velvet of space. And every change in her since then was perfectly visible to him, the shift from the image in his memory to the body beside him was a hallucinatory time-dissolve, her flesh and skin shifting, dropping, lining – ageing. They were both older, creakier, heavier. That was the way it went. But really the amazing thing was how much had remained, how much they were still themselves. Lines from a poem came to him, the epitaph of the Scott expedition near Ross Station in Antarctica, they had all climbed the hill to see the big wooden cross together, and carved on it had been lines: much has gone yet much remains … something like that. He couldn’t remember – much had gone; it had been a long time ago, after all. But they had worked hard, and eaten well, and perhaps Mars’s gravity had been kinder than Earth’s would have been; because the obvious glowing truth was that Maya Toitovna was still a very beautiful woman, strong and muscly, her imperial face and gray wet hair still commanding his gaze, her breasts still magnets to his eye, completely different in appearance if she so much as shifted an elbow, and yet in every position completely familiar to him … his breasts, his arms, ribs, flanks. She was, for better and worse, the person he was closest to, a beautiful pink animal and also an avatar for him, of sex, of life itself on this bare rocky world. If this was what they were at sixty-six, and if the treatment did no more than hold them at this point, for even a few added years, or (the shock of it still) for decades? For decades! Well, it was astonishing. Absolutely too much to grasp, he had to stop trying or he would strip all the gears of his mind. But could it be? Could it really be? The aching desire of all true lovers through all the ages, to have a bit more time together, to be able to stretch out and live the love fully … Similar feelings seemed to be stirring Maya. She was in a great mood, she watched him from hooded eyes, with that come-hither half-smile he knew so well, one knee up and tucked in her armpit, not flaunting her sex at him but just comfortable, relaxing as she would if she were alone … yes, there was nothing like Maya in a good mood, no one could infect other people with it so much and so surely. He felt a rush of affection for that aspect of her character, an IV of sentiment, and he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, eros just a spice in a feast of agape, and suddenly as usual the words just burst out of him, he said things to her that he had never said before, “Let’s get married!” he said, and when she laughed he did too, and said, “No, no, I mean it, let’s get married.” Get married and grow really, really old together, seize whatever gift years brought and make them a shared adventure, have kids, watch the kids have kids, watch the grandkids have kids, watch the great-grandkids have kids, my Lord who knew how long it might last? They might watch a whole nation of descendants flourish, become patriarch and matriarch, a kind of mini Martian Adam and Eve! And Maya laughed at each declaration, her eyes vivacious and sparkling with affection, windows to a soul in a very, very good mood, watching him and soaking him up, he could feel the blotter tug of her gaze watching him and laughing delightedly at each new absurd hilarious phrase that burst out of him, and saying to him “Something like that, yes, something like that,” and then hugging him hard. “Oh John,” she said. “You know how to make me happy. You are the best man I ever had.” She kissed him and he found that despite the sauna’s heat it was going to be easy to shift the emphasis from agape to eros; but now the two were one, indistinguishable, a great mingled flood of love. “So you’ll marry me and all?” he said as he locked the sauna door and they began to fall into it. “Something like that,” she said, eyes flashing, face ablaze with an absolutely ravishing smile.

When you expect to live another two hundred years, you behave differently than when you expect to live only twenty.

This they proved almost immediately. John spent the winter there at Acheron, on the edge of the CO

fog cap that still descended over the north pole every winter, studying areobotany with Marina Tokareva and her lab group. He did this on Sax’s instruction, and because he felt in no hurry to leave. Sax seemed to have forgotten about the search to find out who the saboteurs were, which made John a little suspicious; in his spare time he still made efforts through Pauline, concentrating on the areas he had been working on before Acheron; travel records mostly, and then employment records of all the people that had traveled to the areas where the sabotages had taken place. Presumably there were a lot of people involved, so individual travel records might not tell him much. But everyone on Mars had been sent there by an organization, and by checking which organizations had sent people to the relevant places, he hoped to get some indications. It was a messy business, and he had to rely on Pauline not only for statistics but advice, which was worrying.

The rest of the time he studied a branch of areobotany in which all the payoffs were at least decades away. Why not? He had the time, and might very well see the fruits of the work. So he watched Marina’s group design a new tree, studying with them and doing their lab work, washing glassware and the like. The tree was designed to serve as the canopy of a multi-layered forest which they hoped to grow on the dunes of Vastitas Borealis. It was based on a sequoia genome, but they wanted trees even bigger than sequoias, perhaps two hundred meters tall, with a trunk fifty meters in diameter at the base. Their bark would stay frozen most of the time, and their broad leaves, which would probably look as if they had tobacco leaf disease, were going to be able to absorb the baseline dose of UV radiation without damage to their purplish undersides. At first John thought the trees’ size was excessive, but Marina pointed out that they would be capable of taking in great quantities of carbon dioxide, fixing the carbon and transpiring the oxygen back into the air. And they were going to be quite a sight, or so they supposed; the actual shoots of the competing test prototypes were only ten meters tall, and it would be twenty years before the winners of the competition reached their mature heights. And right now all the prototypes still died in Mars jars; atmospheric conditions would have to change considerably before they would survive outdoors. Marina’s lab was getting ahead of the game.

But so was everyone else. This seemed to be a result of the treatment, it made sense on the face of it. Longer experiments. Longer (John groaned) investigations. Longer thoughts.

In many respects, however, nothing changed. John felt about the same as before, except it didn’t take omegendorph to get an occasional buzz humming through him, as if he had recently finished swimming a couple of kilometers, or cross-country skied for an afternoon, or, yes, taken a dose of omegendorph. Which now would have been carrying coals to Newcastle. Because things glowed. When he took the crest walk, the whole visible world glowed: stilled bulldozers, a crane like a gallows – he could watch anything for minutes on end. Maya left for Hellas, and it didn’t matter; their relations were back on the old rollercoaster ride, a lot of bickering and fits of temper on her part, but all that seemed unimportant, floating inside the glow, changing nothing in the way he felt toward her, or in the way she had, from time to time, turned on him that look of hers. He would see her in a few months, and talk to her on screen; meanwhile this was a separation he was not entirely unhappy to see.

It was a good winter. He learned a lot about areobotany and bioengineering, and in many of the evenings, after dinner, he would ask the Acheron people both individually and severally what they thought the eventual Martian society should be like, and how it should be run. At Acheron this usually led directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics; these to them were much more critical than politics, or what Marina called “the supposed decision-making apparatus”. Marina and Vlad were particularly interesting on this topic, as they had worked out a system of equations for what they called “eco-economics", which always sounded to John like “echo economics.” He liked listening to them explain the equations, and he asked them a lot of questions, learning about concepts like carrying capacity, coexistence, counteradaptation, legitimacy mechanisms, ecologic efficiency. “That’s the only real measure of our contribution to the system,” Vlad would say. “If you burn our bodies in a microbomb calorimeter you’ll find we contain about six or seven kilocalories per gram of weight, and of course we take in a lot of calories to sustain that through our lives. Our output is harder to measure, because it’s not a matter of predators feeding on us, as in the classic efficiency equations – it’s more a matter of how many calories we create by our efforts, or send on to future generations, something like that. And most of that is very indirect, naturally, and it involves a lot of speculation and subjective judgement. If you don’t go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all.”

“Sounds about right to me,” John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him.

“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is – people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”

“Better just to concentrate on what we’re doing here,” Marina put in. “The basic equation is simple, efficiency merely equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in, times one hundred to put it in the form of a percentage. In the classic sense of passing along calories to one’s predator, ten percent was average, and twenty percent doing really well. Most predators at the tops of food chains did more like five percent.”

“This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers,” Vlad said. “Robber barons are not really very efficient.”

“So tigers don’t have predators not because they’re so tough, but because it’s not worth the effort,” John said.

“Exactly!”

“The problem is in calculating the values,” Marina said. “We have had to simply assign certain calorie-equivalent numerical values to all kinds of activities, and then go on from there.”

“But we were talking about economics?” John said.

“But this is economics, don’t you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use – this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South.”

“They were predators on the South,” John said.

“Yes, and they will become predators on us too, if we let them. And like all predators their efficiency is low. But here, you see – in this theoretical state of independence that you speak of—” she grinned at John’s look of consternation — “you do, you have to admit that that is ultimately what you talk about all the time, John – well, there it should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the system.”

Dmitri, coming in the lab, said, “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs!”

“No, that’s not the same,” Vlad said. “What it means is, You get what you pay for!”

“But that’s already true,” John said. “How is this different from the economics that already exist?”

They all scoffed at once, Marina most persistently: “There’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money – that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.

“Well,” Vlad said, “we can say that their efficiency is very low, and that they predate on the system without having any predators, so that they are either the top of the chain or parasitical, depending on how you define it. Advertising, money brokering, some types of manipulation of the law, some politics …”

“But all of these are subjective judgements!” John exclaimed. “How have you actually assigned calorific values to such a variety of activities?”

“Well, we have done our best to calculate what they contribute back to the system in terms of well-being measured as a physical thing. What does the activity equal in terms of food, or water, or shelter, or clothing, or medical aid, or education, or free time? We’ve talked it over, and usually everyone at Acheron has offered a number, and we have taken the mean. Here, let me show you …”

And they would talk through the evening about it before the computer screen, and John would ask questions, and plug Pauline in to record the screens and tape the discussions, and they would go through the equations and jab their fingers at the flow charts, and then stop for coffee and perhaps take it up to the crest, to pace the length of the greenhouse arguing vehemently about the human value in kilocalories of plumbing, opera, simulation programming and the like. They were up on the crest, in fact, one afternoon near sunset, when John looked up from the equation on his wristpad, and stared up the long slope toward Olympus Mons.

The sky had darkened. It occurred to him that it might be just another double eclipse: Phobos was so close overhead that it blocked a third of the sun when it crossed in front of it, and Deimos about a ninth, and a couple times a month they crossed at the same time, causing a shadow to be cast across the land, as if a film had got in your eye, or you had had a bad thought.

But this wasn’t an eclipse; Olympus Mons was hidden from view, and the high southern horizon was a fuzzy bronze bar. “Look at that,” he said to the others, and pointed. “A dust storm.” They hadn’t had a global dust storm in over ten years. John called up the weather satellite photos on his wristpad. The origin of the storm had been near the Thaumasia mohole, Senzeni Na. He called up Sax and found him blinking philosophically, stating his surprise in mild tones.

“Winds at the edge of the storm were up to six hundred and sixty kilometers an hour,” Sax said. “A new planetary record. It looks like this is going to be a big one. I thought the cryptogamic soils in the storm start-up zones would have dampened them, or even stopped them. Obviously that model had something wrong with it.”

“Okay, Sax, too bad about that, but it’ll be okay, I gotta go now because it’s rolling right down on us now and I want to watch.”

“Have fun,” Sax said, deadpan, before John clicked him off. Vlad and Ursula were scoffing at Sax’s model; temperature gradients between biotically-defrosted soil and the remaining frosted areas would be greater than ever, and the winds between the two regions correspondingly fiercer; so that when they finally hit loose fines, off they would go. Totally obvious.

“Now that it’s happened,” John said. He laughed and moved down the greenhouse to watch the storm’s approach by himself. Scientists could be so catty.

The wall of dust rolled down the long lava slopes of Olympus Mons’s northern aureole. It had already halved the land visible since John first saw it, and now it approached like a giant breaking wave, a billowy chocolate milk wave ten thousand meters high, with a bronze filigree foaming up and off it, leaving great curved streamers in the pink sky above. “Wow!” John cried. “Here it comes! Here it comes!” Suddenly the crest of the Acheron fin seemed located a great distance above the long narrow canyons of the fossae below them, and lower fin ridges reared like dragon backs out of the cracked lava: a wild place from which to face the onrush of such a storm, too high, too exposed; John laughed again, and pressed himself against the southern windows of the greenhouse, looking down, out, around, shouting, “Wow! Wow! Look at it go! Wow!”

And then suddenly they were overwhelmed, dust flying over them, darkness, a high whooshing shriek. The first impact against Acheron ridge caused a wild flurry of turbulence, quick cyclonic twisters that appeared and disappeared, horizontal, vertical, at angles up the few steep gullies in the ridge; and the general shriek was punctuated by booms as these disturbances hit the ridge and collapsed. Then with dreamlike rapidity the wind settled into a smooth standing wave, and the dust rushed up past John’s face; the pit of his stomach lifted, as if the greenhouse were suddenly dropping with violent speed. Certainly that’s what it looked like; the ridge had caused a ferocious updraft. Stepping back, however, he saw the dust streaming overhead and then off to the north. On that side of the greenhouse he could see for a few kilometers, before the wind smashed into the ground again and cut off the view in continual explosions of dust. “Wow!”

His eyes were dry, and his mouth felt a bit caked. Lots of the fines were less than a micron across; was that a faint sheen of them, there already across the bamboo leaves? No. Only the weird light of the storm. But there would be dust on everything, eventually. No seal system could keep it out.

Vlad and Ursula were not completely confident of the greenhouse’s ability to withstand the wind, and they encouraged everyone up there to go downstairs. On the way down John re-established contact with Sax. Sax’s mouth was bunched into a tighter knot than usual. They would lose a lot of insolation with this storm, he said evenly. Equatorial surface temperatures had been averaging eighteen degrees higher than the baseline figures, but temperatures near Thaumasia were already down six degrees, and they would continue to plummet for the duration of the storm. And, he added with what seemed to John an almost masochistic completeness, the mohole thermals would loft the dust higher than ever before, so that it was all too possible that the storm might last for a long time.

“Buck up, Sax,” John advised. “I think it’ll be shorter than ever before. Don’t be so pessimistic.”

Later on, when the storm was going into its second M-year, Sax would remind John of this prediction with a little laugh.

Traveling during the storm was officially restricted to the trains and to certain heavily used double-transponder roads, but when it became obvious that it wasn’t going to die back down that summer, John ignored the restrictions and resumed his wanderings. He made sure that his rover was well-stocked, he had a backup rover follow him, and he had an extra-powerful radio transmitter installed. That and Pauline in the driver’s seat would be enough to get him around most of the northern hemisphere, he figured; rover breakdowns were rare, because of the really comprehensive internal monitoring systems hooked into their control computers; two rover breakdowns at once was almost unheard of, there had been only a single recorded fatality as a result of that happening. So he said good-bye to the Acheron group, and took off again.

Driving in the storm was like driving at night, except more interesting. The dust rocketed by in gusts, leaving little pockets of visibility that gave him quick dim sepia snatches of a view, the landscape rolling, everything seeming to be moving south. Then blank rushing tempests of dust would return again, flush against the windows. The rover rocked hard on its shock absorbers during the worst gusts, and the dust did indeed get into everything.

On the fourth day of his drive he turned straight south, and began to drive up the northwest slope of the Tharsis bulge. This was the great escarpment again, but here it was not a cliff, only a slope imperceptible in the storm’s dark, lasting for more than a day, until he was high on the side of Tharsis, five vertical kilometers higher than he had been in Acheron.

He stopped at another mine, located near crater Pt (called Pete), located in the upper end of the Tantalus Fossae. Apparently the Tharsis bulge had initiated the great lava flood covering Alba Patera, and later bulging had then cracked the lava shield; these were the Tantalus canyons. Some of them had cracked over a platinoid-rich mafic igneous intrusion that the miners had named the Merensky Reeflets. The miners were real Azanians this time, but Azanians who called themselves Afrikaners, and spoke Afrikaans among themselves; white men who welcomed John with heavy doses of God, volk, and trek. They had named the canyons they worked in Neuw Orange Free State and Neuw Pretoria. And they, like the miners at Bradbury Point, worked for Armscor. “Yes,” the operations head said happily, with an accent like a New Zealander’s. He had a heavily-jowled face, a ski-jump nose and a big crooked smile, and a very intense manner. “We’ve found iron, copper, silver, manganese, aluminum, gold, platinum, titanium, chromium, you name it. Sulfides, oxides, silicates, native metals, you name it. The Great Escarpment has them all.” The mine had been running for about an M-year; it consisted of strip mines on the canyon floors, with a habitat half buried in the mesa between two of the largest canyons, looking like a clear eggshell, packed with a meat of green trees and orange tile roofs.