The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  I can't tell you how many days I spent out in our orchards weeding nutsedge. We had decided to be an organic farm, no chemical pesticides, so it was a matter of either biological control or hand-to-hand combat. I tried both, so what I was doing was integrated pest management. But ineffective no matter what you called it. For many hours I sat on the low ground at the southern end of the young almond trees, in what was in effect a ragged lawn of purple nutsedge. Cyperus rotundus. If it had been yellow nutsedge there would have been people in my group encouraging us to harvest it and eat the nuts. But purple nuts are hard brown gnarled oblong fibrous tubules, white inside and ghastly bitter to the tongue. They lie about half a meter below the ground, connected to the surface blades of grass by thin shoots that break at the slightest tug, and connected to each other underground by wiry rhizomes that also break easily, leaving the nuts behind. At first I thought I was succeeding when I loosened the soil and sifted through it to get all the nuts out of it. It was slow but not unpleasant work, sitting on the dirt in the sun, getting dirt under my fingernails, looking at the friable soil for the dirt clods that were actually living pebbles. The blades above, stacked in triplet tassels, V-shaped in cross section and stiffer than grass blades, I pulled and composted. The nuts I ground up and tossed in the supercooker compost, feeling superstitious. Which turned out to be not inappropriate given what happened.

  A careful sifting of soil to a depth of half a meter, throughout the entire region of its growth—and the next spring the precise region I had weeded sprang forth in a thick lawn of young nutsedge. I couldn't believe my eyes. That was when I got serious about my research, and found out about the Sedge Grass Support Group, and learned from them that fragments of the rhizomes only five hundred nanometers long had been observed to regenerate the full plant in a single growing season.

  Some other method was called for. And around that time I got to take a break to regroup as well, as our farm began full participation in one of the ag labor rings of the River League, which meant we went out on the road as nomad farm labor for two months of the fall harvests, moving from farm to farm in the ring as the various crops came ready. Other groups passed through our place while we were gone, with Elke and Rachel left behind to supervise their work. I saw nutsedge in many other places around Jones Crater, and began to exchange stories and theories with the people who had tried to combat it. It was a nice way to meet people. I noticed that quite a few of them had become fanatical on the sedge issue without actually conquering their infestation, which struck me as a bad sign. But I got home that 2 November and tried cover-cropping, on the suggestion of someone who had said, “It's a long-term project,” in a way that made me think this was not a bad thing to have in one's life. So it was clover in the fall and winter and cowpeas in the spring and summer, always thickly matted over the sedge, which as a result sometimes did not appear for years at a time. But then if I was late planting a new spring cover crop by even a week, a carpet of tasseled green little pagodas would shove through the dying old cover crop, and it was back to square one. Once when a cowpea crop got beat to the punch I solarized the ground with clear plastic sheets, and recorded temperatures near boiling underneath it. Some IPM folks looked at it and estimated that everything had to have been killed down to twenty centimeters; but others said two; and though the plant matter on the surface was indeed toasted by the end of the summer, the moment I took the plastic off the green carpet came shooting back.

  Tilling and drying the soil for four years was my next option. But then someone visiting the farm innocently suggested a new chemical pesticide that had gotten good results for the Namibians to the north.

  That provoked a controversy. Some were content to continue pursuing the various fruitless strategies of the organic battle. Others suggested we give up and let the area become a sedge swamp. But because sedge seed-disperses as well as spreading by underground growth of the rhizomes, little patches of it were springing up everywhere downwind of my orchard lawn. And the wind blows in all directions eventually. So leaving it alone was not really acceptable. Meanwhile, eight years of combat had only made the lawn more luxuriant. You could have played croquet on my patch at that point.

  So a majority of our group finally talked a small minority into a one-time exception to our organic policy, in order to make an application of some methyl 5-{[(4, dimethoxy-2-pyrimidinyl)amino]carbyonylaminosulfonyl}-3-chloro-1-methyl-1-H-pyrazole-4-carboxylate. When we did it we turned it into a kind of Balinese mask dance ceremony, and the people against the idea dressed as demons and cursed us, and we sprayed the stuff and left for an extended work trip. We harvested grapes in riverside vineyards and built stone drywall terracing, and saw parts of Her Desher Vallis, Nirgal Vallis, Uxboi Vallis, Clota Vallis, Ruda Vallis, Arda Vallis, Ladon Vallis, Oltis Vallis, Himera Vallis, and the Samara Valles. All these are little riverine canyons to the immediate southwest of Jones—beautiful country, reminiscent of the Four Corners area of North America, though our neighbors assure us it is also very like parts of central Namibia. Whatever; when we returned home, the land downslope to the southwest now seemed to suggest the beautiful little canyons that we knew broke the plateau even though we could not see them, canyons held now in our minds' eye, sunken meandering gardens floored with streams and cottonwood islands. And the nutsedge was gone. Not all of it, but everything that we had sprayed. And if you catch it early enough new sedges do not have the regenerative ability of an established bed, because the nuts are not yet down there.

  So we planted new ground cover under the blossoming almond trees, and life went on, the farm growing more luxuriant all the time. Of course things changed; Elke and Rachel moved to Burroughs, and later Matthew and Jan did too, complaining that among other things it was not an organic farm anymore, which made me feel bad. But the others in their house assured me that pesticide policy was the last thing they had been thinking of when they left; and I was shocked to hear what some of the other things were. Apparently I had been oblivious; and in fact, they all went on to tell me, no one else but me on the farm had considered the nutsedge problem to have been of much importance. What I had thought was a crisis and a knotty problem in invasion biology, they considered a matter of housekeeping, a mere irritant among more important issues, and, more than anything else, the bee in my bonnet.

  Of course compared to the big climate shift that came later, this was probably the right way to regard it. But at the time it had mattered. Or I enjoyed it, whatever. Those were the years when everything mattered, really. We had nothing but each other. We were on our own, growing most of our food, making a lot of our tools, even our clothes, with all the kids growing up. We all grew up together. It matters, in a time like that, whether you can make your agriculture work or not.

  Then things changed, as they will, and the kids went off to school, people moved; the whole feeling changed. It always happens that way. Now of course it's still a beautiful place to live, but the feeling from those years is hard to recapture, especially given the cold, and the kids gone. I now think that kibbutz is a name for a certain time, a time in the life of a settlement, early on, when it is as much an adventure as it is a home. Later you have to reconceptualize it as a different kind of experience, as home ground or something, the whole shape of a life. But I remember the first time we had a big party and invited the neighbors, and fed everybody with only the food we had been able to grow there in our new gardens, there in our new homes. It was a good feeling. It was a good place to live.

  What Matters

  For a long time Peter Clayborne worked in hydrology. His co-op was called Noachian Aquifer Redistribution, or NAR. He joined because he got interested as an ecologist in the work, and because he was deeply involved at the time with a woman who had been in the co-op since her teens. Her seniority was one of the things that led to problems in their relationship later, though clearly that was only a symptom rather than a cause. Seniority in their co-op created some of the usual advantages in “pay, say, and time
away,” but the interests of everyone in the organization were substantially the same. Potential members were chosen for invitation by selection committees, and sometimes had to join a waiting list if the co-op was stable in size. Peter had waited for four years before resignations, retirements, and a few accidental deaths opened up a spot. After that he was a member and, like everyone else, working twenty hours a week, voting on all membership policy issues, and receiving an income share and insurances. The pay scale ran the full legal magnitude, based on work time, contributions to efficiency and productivity, and seniority. He started at twenty percent max, like everyone, and found his needs were satisfied. Some years he sank to the minimum recompense, which supported him both while working and in his time off, which was six months every m-year. It was a good life.

  But he and his partner slowly drifted apart, and then broke up. It wasn't Peter's idea. After that he took a series of sabbaticals and did various things on them, all away from Argyre and the membership of NAR. He staffed for the duma in Mangala; he lived on a township in the northern sea; he planted orchards on Lunae Planitia. Everywhere he was haunted by the memory of his partner from NAR.

  Eventually time passed and had its way with him; not so much a matter of forgetting as of bleaching, or numbing. We look at the past through the wrong end of the telescope, he thought one day; eventually the things we can see in there become simply too small to hurt us.

  It was a cold northern spring, orchards budding and blossoming all around him for as far as the eye could see, and all of a sudden he felt free of his past, launched on a new life. He decided to take a tour he had long been contemplating along the south rims of the great Marineris canyons—Ius, Melas, Coprates, and Eos. This famous long walk was to be a mark for him, a celebration of his transition to a new existence. When he finished it he would return to Argyre and NAR, and decide then whether he could continue living and working there or not.

  Near the end of this trek which turned out to be a hard slog through many deep drifts of snow, though the views down into the canyons were superb, of course—he came on a Swiss alpine hut, set right on the rim overlooking Coprates Chasma, at the Dover Gate. Like most Swiss huts it was actually a very extensive stone hotel and restaurant, with a rimside terrace that would seat hundreds, but located all by itself in the wilderness, away from any roads or pistes. Nevertheless on that evening there were a lot of people there—walkers, climbers, fliers—and the terrace café tables were full.

  Peter passed through the crowd and went directly to the rail of the flagged terrace, to have a look down. Directly below the hut great canyon narrowed, and the scar of the old flood marked the whole floor of it, from wall to wall. A gray remnant glacier still lay in the lowest trough of the canyon, all covered with gravel and pocked with potholes and meltponds and fallen seracs. The cliff of the canyon's opposing wall stood massive and stratified, and the stupendous gulf of empty air shimmered and glittered insubstantially in the late-afternoon light, with the hut standing over it isolate and small. Perched on the edge of a world.

  In the hut's restaurant it was even more crowded than the terrace, and so Peter went back outside. He was content to wait; the late sun was illuminating clouds passing just over their heads, turning them to swirling masses of pink spun glass. No one noticed or cared about a solitary observer standing at the rail; indeed there were others along it doing the same thing.

  Near sunset it began to get cold, but the hikers who passed by there were used to cold, and dressed for it, and all the tables on the terrace remained full. Finally Peter went to the headwaiter to get on a waiting list, and the waiter pointed to one of the two-person tables right on the railing, down near the end of the terrace, occupied by a single man. “Shall I see if he'll share?”

  “Sure,” Peter said. “If he doesn't mind.”

  The waiter went and asked the man, then waved Peter over.

  “Thanks,” Peter said as he approached, and the man nodded as he sat across from him.

  “No problem.” He appeared to be nursing a beer. Then his meal came, and he gestured at it.

  “Please go ahead,” Peter said, looking at the day's menu. Stew, bread, salad; he nodded at the passing waiter, pointing at the menu, and ordered also a glass of wine, the local zinfandel.

  The man had not been reading anything, and now Peter wasn't either. They looked at clouds tumbling by, the canyon below, and the great shattered wall opposite them, shadows stretching long to the east, emphasizing the depth of every little embayment, the sharpness of every spur.

  “What textures,” Peter ventured. He had not made conversation for a long time.

  “You can see how deep the Brighton Gully really is from here,” the man agreed. “That's rare from any other angle.”

  “Have you climbed it?”

  The man nodded. “It's mostly a hike, though. All of it, now, if you take the ladder trail, which most people do.”

  “I'll bet that's fun.”

  A squint. “It is if you're with a fun group.”

  “You've done it often then?”

  Swallow. “Guide.” Another swallow. “I guide groups in the canyonlands. Treks, climbs, boating.”

  “Oh I see. How nice.”

  “It is. And you?”

  “Noachian Aquatic Redistribution. A co-op in Argyre. On leave now, but going back.”

  The man nodded and stuck out a hand, mouth full. Peter took it and shook. “Peter Clayborne.”

  The man's eyes rounded, and he swallowed. “Roger Clayborne.”

  “Hey. Nice name. Nice to meet you.”

  “You too. I don't often meet other Claybornes.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Are you related to Ann Clayborne?”

  “She's my mom.”

  “Oh! I didn't know she had kids.”

  “Just me. Do you know her?”

  “No no. Just stories, you know. Not related, I don't think. My folks came on the second wave, from England.”

  “Oh I see. Well—cousins, no doubt, somewhere back there.”

  “Sure. From the first Clayborne.”

  “Some kind of potter.”

  “Maybe so. Do you spell yours with an i or a y?”

  “Y.”

  “Oh yeah. Me too. I have a friend spells his with an i.”

  “Not a cousin then.”

  “Or a French cousin.”

  “Yeah sure.”

  “E on the end?”

  “Yeah sure.”

  “Me too.”

  The waiter dropped off Peter's meal. Peter ate, and as Roger had finished, and was nursing a grappa, Peter asked him about himself.

  “I'm a guide,” he said with a shrug.

  He had gotten into it in his youth, he said, when the planet was raw, and had stayed with it ever since. “I liked showing people my favorite places. Showing them how beautiful it was.” That had gotten him into various red groups, though he did not seem to mind the terraforming in the way Peter's mom did. He shrugged when Peter asked. “It makes it safer, having an atmosphere. And water around. Safer in some ways, anyway. Cliffs fall on people. I've tried to keep the canyons free of reservoirs, because they saturate the sidewalls and cause collapses. We had some successes early on. The dam down there at Ganges, keeping the north sea out of the canyons, that was our doing. And the removal of the Noctis Dam.”

  “I didn't know it was gone.”

  “Yeah. Anyway that's about all I've done for the red cause. I thought about getting more into it, but . . . I never did. You?”

  Peter pushed his stew bowl away, drank some water. “I guess I'm what you'd call a green.”

  Roger's eyebrows went up, but he made no comment.

  “Ann doesn't approve, of course. It's caused problems between us. But I spent my whole childhood indoors. I'll never be outdoors enough.”

  “The suits didn't suit you.”

  “No they didn't. Could you stand them?”

  Roger shrugged. “I was willing to put up
with them. I felt like I was still out there. Although now that I can get my face in the wind, I like that quite a bit. But the primal landscape—it had a quality. . . .” He shook his head to show he was unable to express it. “That's gone now.”

  “Really? I find it just as wild as ever.” Gesturing over the side of the railing, where they could now see sheets of sunlit snow falling from the bottom of one dark cloud.

  “Well, wild. It's a tricky word. When I was first guiding, that's when I would have said things were wild. But ever since the air came, and the great lakes, it doesn't seem so wild to me. It's a park. That's what the Burroughs Protocol means, as far as I'm concerned.”

  “I don't know about that.”

  “You know—the big land-use thing.”

  Peter shook his head. “Must have been a while ago.”

  Roger shook his. “Not so long.”

  “But Burroughs was flooded, back when . . .”

  “Sure. Every spring, like clockwork. But I worry how it's been starting later, and running harder. I think there's something we're not catching that's causing these long cold winters.”

  “I thought this winter was pretty warm, myself.”

  Then the members of a band crowded by their table, carrying their instruments and equipment. While they set up their amps and music stands on a little platform at the terrace's railing right by the two Claybornes, a great number of masked people poured onto the terrace, as if the band had led in some kind of parade. Roger stopped their waiter as he rushed by. “What's this?”

  “Oh it's Fassnacht, didn't you know? It'll start getting crowded now that the train is in. Everyone will be here tonight, you're lucky you got here early.” From one of his vest pockets he pulled two small white domino masks out of a nestled stack and tossed them onto their table. “Enjoy.”