The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They drank beer, talked small talk. Two were vets; their lane leader, the one who had been pregnant, was a bit older, a chemist in a pharmaceutical lab near the pool. Her baby was being watched by her co-op that night. They all looked up to her, Smith saw, even here. These days she brought the baby to the pool and swam just as powerfully as ever, parking the baby-carrier just beyond the splash line. Smith's muscles melted in the hot water, he sipped his beer while listening to them.

  One of the women looked down at her breasts in the water and laughed. “They float like pull buoys.”

  Smith had already noticed that.

  “No wonder women swim better than men.”

  “As long as they aren't so big they interfere with the hydrodynamics.”

  Their leader looked down through her fogged glasses, pink-faced, hair tied up, misted, demure. “I wonder if mine float less because I'm nursing.”

  “But all that milk.”

  “Yes but the water in the milk is neutral density, it's the fat that floats. It could be that empty breasts float even more than full ones.”

  “Whichever has more fat, yuck.”

  “I could run an experiment, nurse him from just one side and then get in and see—” But they were laughing too hard for her to complete this scenario. “It would work! Why are you laughing!”

  They only laughed more. Frank was cracking up, looking blissed, blessed. These women friends trusted them. But Smith still felt set apart. He looked at their lane leader: a pink bespectacled goddess, serenely vague and unaware; the scientist as heroine; the first full human being.

  But later when he tried to explain this feeling to Frank, or even just to describe it, Frank shook his head. “It's a bad mistake to worship women,” he warned. “A category error. Women and men are so much the same it isn't worth discussing the difference. The genes are identical almost entirely, you know that. A couple hormonal expressions and that's it. So they're just like you and me."

  “More than a couple.”

  “Not much more. We all start out female, right? So you're better off thinking that nothing major ever really changes that. Penis just an oversize clitoris. Men are women. Women are men. Two parts of a reproductive system, completely equivalent.”

  Smith stared at him. “You're kidding.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—I've never seen a man swell up and give birth to a new human being, let me put it that way.”

  “So what? It happens, it's a specialized function. You never see women ejaculating either. But we all go back to being the same afterward. Details of reproduction only matter a tiny fraction of the time. No, we're all the same. We're all in it together. There are no differences.”

  Smith shook his head. It would be comforting to think so. But the data did not support the hypothesis. Ninety-five percent of all the murders in history had been committed by men. This was a difference.

  He said as much, but Frank was not impressed. The murder ratio was becoming more nearly equal on Mars, he replied, and much less frequent for everybody, thus demonstrating very nicely that the matter was culturally conditioned, an artifact of Terran patriarchy no longer relevant on Mars. Nurture rather than nature. Although it was a false dichotomy. Nature could prove anything you wanted, Frank insisted. Female hyenas were vicious killers, male bonobos and muriquis were gentle cooperators. It meant nothing, Frank said. It told them nothing.

  But Frank had not hit a woman in the face without ever planning to.

  Patterns in the fossil Inia data sets became clearer and clearer. Stochastic-resonance programs highlighted what had been preserved.

  “Look here,” Smith said to Frank one afternoon when Frank leaned in to say good-bye for the day. He pointed at his computer screen. “Here's a sequence from my boto, part of the GX three-oh-four, near the juncture, see?”

  “You've got a female then?”

  “I don't know. I think this here means I do. But look, see how it matches with this part of the human genome. It's in Hillis eighty-fifty. . . .”

  Frank came into his nook and stared at the screen. “Comparing junk to junk . . . I don't know. . . .”

  “But it's a match for more than a hundred units in a row, see? Leading right into the gene for progesterone initiation.”

  Frank squinted at the screen. “Um, well.” He glanced quickly at Smith.

  Smith said, “I'm wondering if there's some really long-term persistence in junk DNA, all the way back to earlier mammal precursors to both these.”

  “But dolphins are not our ancestors,” Frank said.

  “There's a common ancestor back there somewhere.”

  “Is there?” Frank straightened up. “Well, whatever. I'm not so sure about the pattern congruence itself. It's sort of similar, but, you know.”

  “What do you mean, don't you see that? Look right there!”

  Frank glanced down at him, startled, then noncommittal. Seeing this Smith became inexplicably frightened.

  “Sort of,” Frank said. “Sort of. You should run hybridization tests, maybe, see how good the fit really is. Or check with Acheron about repeats in nongene DNA.”

  “But the congruence is perfect! It goes on for hundreds of pairs, how could that be a coincidence?”

  Frank looked even more noncommittal than before. He glanced out the door of the nook. Finally he said, “I don't see it that congruent. Sorry, I just don't see it. Look, Andy. You've been working awfully hard for a long time. And you've been depressed too, right? Since Selena left?”

  Smith nodded, feeling his stomach tighten. He had admitted as much a few months before. Frank was one of the very few people these days who would look him in the eye.

  “Well, you know. Depression has chemical impacts in the brain, you know that. Sometimes it means you begin seeing patterns that others can't see as well. It doesn't mean they aren't there, no doubt they are there. But whether they mean anything significant, whether they're more than just a kind of analogy, or similarity—” He looked down at Smith and stopped. “Look, it's not my field. You should show this to Amos, or go up to Acheron and talk to the old man.”

  “Uh-huh. Thanks, Frank.”

  “Oh no, no, no need. Sorry, Andy. I probably shouldn't have said anything. It's just, you know. You've been spending a hell of a lot of time here.”

  “Yeah.”

  Frank left.

  Sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. He got some of his work done in dreams. Sometimes he found he could sleep down on the beach, wrapped in a greatcoat on the fine sand, lulled by the sound of the waves rolling in. At work he stared at the lined dots and letters on the screens, constructing the schematics of the sequences, nucleotide by nucleotide. Most were completely unambiguous. The correlation between the two main schematics was excellent, far beyond the possibility of chance. X chromosomes in humans clearly exhibited nongene DNA traces of a distant aquatic ancestor, a kind of dolphin. Y chromosomes in humans lacked these passages, and they also matched with chimpanzees more completely than X chromosomes did. Frank had appeared not to believe it, but there it was, right on the screen. But how could it be? What did it mean? Where did any of them get what they were? They had natures from birth. Just under five million years ago, chimps and humans separated out as two different species from a common ancestor, a woodland ape. The Inis geoffrensis fossil Smith was working on had been precisely dated to about 5.1 million years old. About half of all orangutan sexual encounters are rape.

  One night after quitting work alone in the lab, he took a tram in the wrong direction, downtown, without ever admitting to himself what he was doing, until he was standing outside Mark's apartment complex, under the steep rise of the dorsum ridge. Walking up a staircased alleyway ascending the ridge gave him a view right into Mark's windows. And there was Selena, washing dishes at the kitchen window and looking back over her shoulder to talk with someone. The tendon in her neck stood out in the light. She laughed.

  Smith walked home. It took an hour. Many
trams passed him.

  He couldn't sleep that night. He went down to the beach and lay rolled in his greatcoat. Finally he fell asleep.

  He had a dream. A small hairy bipedal primate, chimpfaced, walked like a hunchback down a beach in east Africa, in the late-afternoon sun. The warm water of the shallows lay greenish and translucent. Dolphins rode inside the waves. The ape waded out into the shallows. Long powerful arms, evolved for hitting; a quick grab and he had one by the tail, by the dorsal fin. Surely it could escape, but it didn't try. Female; the ape turned her over, mated with her, released her. He left and came back to find the dolphin in the shallows, giving birth to twins, one male one female. The ape's troop swarmed into the shallows, killed and ate them both. Farther offshore the dolphin birthed two more.

  The dawn woke Smith. He stood and walked out into the shallows. He saw dolphins inside the transparent indigo waves. He waded out into the surf. The water was only a little colder than the workout pool. The dawn sun was low. The dolphins were only a little longer than he was, small and lithe. He bodysurfed with them. They were faster than he in the waves, but flowed around him when they had to. One leaped over him and splashed back into the curl of the wave ahead of him. Then one flashed under him, and on an impulse he grabbed at its dorsal fin and caught it, and was suddenly moving faster in the wave, as it rose with both of them inside it—by far the greatest bodysurfing ride of his life. He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

  Enough Is As Good As a Feast

  We built our house on the apron of Jones Crater, latitude 19 degrees south, longitude 20 degrees. The apron was pretty well populated, some two thousand farms like ours scattered around it, but we could not see any other homesteads from ours, even though we built most of it on the top of a broad-backed low ridge raying down the southwest flank of the crater. We could see the vineyards of the Namibians' village to the north of us, and the tops of the line of cypresses that bordered their pond. And down the apron the bare rock in our prospect was patched with light green squares, marking young orchards like ours.

  Craters turned out to be one of the places that people homed in on when they moved out into the backcountry, especially in the southern highlands. For one thing there were a million of them, so it was easy to find empty ones. At first people sheltered inside them, in the early years often doming the craters over and establishing little central crater lakes. By the time the ambient air had become livable, people had learned that settling inside a crater is like moving into a hole. Short days, no view, problems with flooding, and so on. So the new open-air settlements moved out over the rims onto the aprons, to have a look around. The interiors became full crater lakes, or lakes and rice terraces, depending on their climate, water allotment, pan integrity, and the like. Meanwhile the aprons were developed into crops, orchards, and pasturage, wherever there were the right conditions for soil creation. Fissures raying down the aprons served as the streambeds for rapid tumultuous creeks, the water pumped to their tops, or drawn down from rim water tanks that were pump-filled. Irrigation systems were always elaborate. Meanwhile the rims themselves tended to turn into the downtowns, as they had the longest views, and access both back in to the old towns in the crater interiors, and out to the many new settlements stretching down the apron. Rim roads called High Street became common, with fully developed urbanization all the way around. For small craters, the thousands that are around one kilometer in diameter, the densely populated rim was like a large village, very homey and comfortable; everyone known by sight, that kind of thing. Perhaps a thousand people; then the apron would typically have a population of half that, or less. With bigger craters the rim towns got bigger, of course, and a town of fifty thousand people on the rim of a ten-kilometer crater was a common sight, something like the hilltop city-states of the Italian Renaissance, or American Midwestern college towns, in their characters—and there were hundreds of them. Some prospered and became bustling little cities, spilling down into their interiors, which were like central parks, with round lakes or sculptured wetlands. The aprons almost always stayed agricultural, often supplying most of the food for the city up top. All these aspects of crater culture grew up spontaneously as the pattern language of the landscape, so to speak, combined with the emerging co-op culture, and, most simply, the needs of the people in the region being met in a rational way. Of course there was some planning. People would arrive at an unoccupied crater (among the some twenty thousand still listed by the environmental court for the southern highlands alone) with permits and programs, and set to work, and the first decade's economic activity in the town was primarily the building of it, often by people who had an idea what they wanted; sometimes with people holding tattered copies of A Pattern Language or some other design primer in their hands, or surfing the Web for things they liked. But soon enough every crater had people moving in who were out of the original group's control, and then it was a matter of spontaneous group self-organization, a process which works extremely well when the group is socially healthy.

  Jones Crater was a big one, fifty kilometers in diameter, and its rim town was a beautiful new thing of transparent mushroom buildings and water tanks, and stone-faced skyscrapers clustered at the four points of the compass. Most of our farm group had been working up in town for some time, and eventually twenty families working on various ag projects decided to try moving downslope together, establishing a homestead and entering it into one of the ag travel loops. So we asked the regional environmental court for tenant rights to unclaimed land on the ray ridge, some forty kilometers down the south-south-west slope of the rim, and when we got the stewardship permits we moved on down and lived in tents that first winter. We had nothing, really, but the tents were big house tents from an earlier era, for the most part transparent and very pleasant to live in, as we could see so much of the world and its weather. So even though we were short on many things, that winter was so nice that we decided to build diskhouses as our permanent structures, so that we would continue to “live outdoors when indoors.”

  These diskhouses were based on a design by a Paul Sattelmeier, from Minnesota. They were very simple, functional, and open places to live in, and easy to build. We got on the list for a mobile mold, and when it rolled by we punched in the commands and watched it throw big pottery: round roofs and slightly larger round floors, and then the walls, which were all interior straight segments; in effect the roof rested on a kind of double M made of interior walls, located under one semicircle of the roof only; the other side was the living room, a kind of big semicircular verandah, the roof freestanding over it. The several short walls extended from the central cross-wall into the other half of the house, dividing that semicircle into three bedrooms, two interior bathrooms, and part of a kitchen. The living rooms we faced downslope to give us the long view to the southwest, and the exterior circular “wall” on that side was only a clear tenting drape, which could be left open, which is what we did most of the time, living out in the wind; or else closed if it was cold or rainy. Same with the bedrooms on the upslope side, except their drape walls were white or colored or polarized to make them opaque. But those too were usually left open.

  So we threw the parts for sixteen of these diskhouses, and then put them together. If you're willing to do the labor the whole operation is not that expensive, although admittedly we were in hock to our town co-op right to the ears. For the most part the assembly of the diskhouses was straightforward, indeed a great pleasure. Some parts just grew into place after we set the right cultures to work: Our toilets and sinks and bathtubs and tile floors, for instance, were all bioceramic and grew right into their places, essentially as a kind of templated coral. Really lovely to see.

  Long before we had even started on the houses, however, we were out laying soil and planting our orchards and vineyards. We grew as much of our own fo
od as we could in truck gardens around the tents, using complete soils trucked in, but our money crop, our contribution to the Jones economy, was to be almonds and wine grapes, both proven growers on that flank of the apron. The wines being made up to that point had a volcanic tang to them that I didn't like, almost a sulfur touch, but that was okay; it left room for improvement. And the almonds were great. We prepped soil and planted three hundred hectares of almonds and five hundred of wine grapes, in broad terraces concentric to the rim far above us, the ag zones broken by ponds and swamps, and all of them widening as they dropped downslope, so that they made a kind of giant quilt, pendant on our little farm which lay at the top of the land in our care. It was our work of art, and we were very devoted to it. I imagine we were like first-generation kibbutzim in many respects. About twenty couples, four of them same-sex; eleven single adults; thirty-odd kids, later fifty-three. Lots of travel by all of us on the local cog rail line up to Jones, and also laterally to other farms on the apron, to socialize and see what other people were doing agriculturally, and in their settlement design. They were all artists too.

  I was involved throughout with our enology, and we made a good fumé blanc eventually, but my field work ended up being mostly in the almond orchards, strangely enough. It happened because I got caught up in the nutsedge problem. Early on we found some sedge creeping out of a radial-strip swamp into the vineyards, and I had gotten rid of it by direct removal. So when the almond orchards were infested I was called on to do it again there. But this time it wasn't so easy. Nutsedge is one of several plants I wish they had never introduced to Mars, but it's good in wet sandy areas, so at first people seeded it to help build meadows. It's a very ancient plant, coevolved with dinosaurs, I suspect, making it very hardy; and impervious to most attempts at eradication. In fact I've come to believe it regards such efforts as friendly stimulation, like a massage. But I only found that out the hard way.