“I must admit you surprise me.”
“Do I? But think about how you all have been working together here, this last year.”
“Half a year.”
He laughed. “Half a year. And for all that time we have had no leaders, really. Those nightly meetings when everyone has their say, and the group decides what needs doing most; that’s how it should be. And no one is wasting time buying or selling, because there is no market. Everything here belongs to all equally. And yet none of us can exploit anything that we own, for there’s no one outside us to sell it to. It’s been a very communal society, a democratic group. All for one and one for all.”
Nadia sighed. “Things have changed, Arkady. It’s not like that anymore. And it’s changing more all the time. So it won’t last.”
“Why do you say that?” he cried. “It will last if we decide that it will.”
She glanced at him skeptically. “You know it isn’t so simple.”
“Well, no. Not simple. But within our power!”
“Maybe.” She sighed, thinking of Maya and Frank, of Phyllis and Sax and Ann. “There’s an awful lot of fighting going on.”
“That’s all right, as long as we agree on certain basic things.”
She shook her head, rubbed her scar with the fingers of her other hand. Her absent finger was itching, and suddenly she felt depressed. Overhead the long bamboo leaves were defined by occluded stars; they looked like sprays of a giant bacillus. They walked along the path between crop trays. Arkady picked up her maimed hand and peered at the scar, until it made her uncomfortable and she tried to pull it back. He drew it up, gave the newly exposed knuckle at the base of the ring finger a kiss. “You’ve got strong hands, Ms. Nine Fingers.”
“I did before this,” she said, making a fist and holding it up.
“Someday Vlad will grow you a new finger,” he said, and took the fist and opened it, then held the hand as they continued to walk. “This reminds me of the arboretum in Sebastopol,” he said.
“Mmm,” Nadia said, not really listening, intent on the warm heft of his hand in hers, in the tight intermingling of their fingers. He had strong hands too. She was fifty-one years old, a round little Russian woman with gray hair, a construction worker with a missing finger. So nice to feel the warmth of another body; it had been too long, and her hand soaked up the feeling like a sponge, until the poor thing tingled, full and warm. It must feel odd to him, she thought, then gave up on it. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
• • •
Having Arkady at Underhill made it like the hour before a thunderstorm. He made people think about what they were doing; habits that they had fallen into without thought came under scrutiny, and under this new pressure some became defensive, others aggressive. All the standing arguments got a bit more intense. Naturally this included the terraforming debate.
Now this debate was in no sense a single event but was rather an ongoing process, a topic that kept coming up, a matter of casual exchanges between individuals, out working, eating meals, falling asleep. Any number of things could bring it up: the sight of the white frost plume over Chernobyl; the arrival of a robot-driven rover, laden with water ice from the polar station; clouds in the dawn sky. Seeing these or many other phenomena someone would say, “That’ll add some BTUs to the system,” or “Isn’t that hexafluoroethane a good greenhouse gas,” and perhaps a discussion of the technical aspects of the problem would follow. Sometimes the subject would come back up in the evenings back in Underhill, leading from the technical to the philosophical, and sometimes this led to long and heated arguments.
The debate was not, of course, confined to Mars. Position papers were being churned out by policy centers in Houston, Baikonur, Moscow, Washington, and the U.N. Office for Martian Affairs in New York, as well as in government bureaus, newspaper editorial offices, corporate board rooms, university campuses, and bars and homes all over the world. In the arguments on Earth, many people began to use the colonists’ names as a kind of shorthand for the various positions, so that watching the Terran news the colonists themselves would see people saying that they backed the Clayborne position, or were in favor of the Russell program. This reminder of their enormous fame on Earth, their existence as characters in an ongoing TV drama, was always peculiar and unsettling; after the flurry of TV specials and interviews following touchdown, they had tended to forget the ongoing video transmissions, absorbed in the daily reality of their lives. But the video cameras were still shooting tape to send back home; and there were a lot of people on Earth who were fans of the show.
So nearly everyone had an opinion. Polls showed that most supported the Russell program, an informal name for Sax’s plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as they could. But the minority who backed Ann’s hands-off attitude tended to be more vehement in their belief, insisting that it had immediate applications to the Antarctic policy, and indeed to all Terran environmental policy. Meanwhile different poll questions made it clear that many people were fascinated by Hiroko and the farming project, while others called themselves Bogdanovists; Arkady had been sending back lots of video from Phobos, and Phobos was good video, a real spectacle of architecture and engineering. New Terran hotels and commercial complexes were already imitating some of its features, there was an architectural movement called Bogdanovism, as well as other movements interested in him that were more concentrated on social and economic reforms in the world order.
But terraforming was near the center of all these debates, and the colonists’ disagreements about it were played out on the largest possible public stage. Some of them reacted by avoiding the cameras and requests for interviews; “It’s just what I came to get away from,” Hiroko’s assistant Iwao said, and quite a few agreed with him. Most of the rest didn’t care one way or the other; a few seemed actually to like it. Phyllis’s weekly program, for instance, was carried by both Christian cable stations and business-analysis programs all over the world. But no matter how they dealt with it, it was becoming clear that most people on Earth and on Mars assumed that terraforming would take place. It was not a question of whether but of when, and how much. Among the colonists themselves this was nearly the universal view. Very few sided with Ann: Simon of course; perhaps Ursula and Sasha; perhaps Hiroko; in his way John, and now in her way Nadia. There were more of these “reds” back on Earth, but they necessarily held the position as a theory, an aesthetic judgment. The strongest point to their arguments, and thus the one that Ann emphasized most often in her communiqués back to Earth, was the possibility of indigenous life. “If there is Martian life here,” Ann would say, “the radical alteration of the climate might kill it off. We cannot intrude on the situation while the status of life on Mars is unknown; it’s unscientific, and worse, it’s immoral.”
Many agreed with that, including a lot of the Terran scientific community, which influenced the UNOMA committee charged with overseeing the colony. But every time Sax heard the argument he blinked rapidly. “There’s no sign of life on the surface,” he would say mildly. “If it does exist it has to be underground, near volcanic vents I suppose. But even if there is life down there, we could search for ten thousand years and never find it, nor eliminate the possibility it isn’t down there somewhere else, somewhere we haven’t looked. So waiting until we know for sure that there is no life—” which was a fairly common position among moderates—”effectively means waiting forever. For a remote possibility which terraforming wouldn’t immediately endanger anyway.”
“Of course it would,” Ann would retort. “Maybe not immediately, but eventually the permafrost would melt, there would be movement through the hydrosphere, and contamination of all of it by warmer water and Terran lifeforms, bacteria, viruses, algae. It might take a while, but it would surely happen. And we can’t risk that.”
Sax would shrug. “First, it’s postulated life, very low probability. Second, it wouldn’t be endangered for centuries. We could presumably lo
cate it and protect it in that time.”
“But we may not be able to find it.”
“So we stop for low-probability life we can never actually find?”
Ann shrugged. “We have to, unless you want to argue that it’s okay to destroy life on other planets, as long as we can’t find it. And don’t forget, indigenous life on Mars would be the biggest story of all time. It would have implications for the galactic frequency of life that are impossible to exaggerate. Looking for life is one of the main reasons we’re here!”
“Well,” Sax would say, “in the meantime, life that we are quite sure exists is being exposed to an extraordinarily high amount of radiation. If we don’t do something to lessen it, we may not be able to stay here. We need a thicker atmosphere to cut down on radiation.”
This was not a reply to Ann’s point but the substitution of another one, and it was an argument that was very influential. Millions on Earth wanted to come to Mars, to the “new frontier,” where life was an adventure again; waiting lists for emigration both real and fake were massively oversubscribed. But no one wanted to live in a bath of mutagenic radiation, and the practical desire to make the planet safe for humans was stronger in most people than the desire to preserve the lifeless landscape already there, or to protect a postulated indigenous life that many scientists assured them did not exist.
So it did seem, even among those urging caution, that terraforming was going to happen. A subcommittee of UNOMA had been convened to study the issue, and on Earth it was now in the nature of a given, an unavoidable part of progress, a natural part of the order of things. A manifest destiny.
On Mars, however, the issue was both more open and more pressing, not so much a matter of philosophy as of daily life, of frigid poisonous air and the radiation being taken; and among those in favor of terraforming, a significant group was clustering around Sax— a group that not only wanted to do it, but to do it as fast as possible. What this meant in practice no one was sure; estimates of the time it would take to get to a “human-viable surface” ranged from a century to 10,000 years, with extreme opinions on either end, from thirty years (Phyllis) to 100,000 years (Iwao). Phyllis would say, “God gave us this planet to make in our image, to create a new Eden.” Simon would say, “If the permafrost melts we’d be living on a collapsing landscape, and a lot of us would be killed.” Arguments wandered over a wide range of issues: salt levels, peroxide levels, radiation levels, the look of the land, possibly lethal mutations of genetically engineered microorganisms, and so on.
“We can try to model it,” Sax said, “but the truth is we’ll never be able to model it adequately. It’s too big, and there are too many factors, many of them unknown. But what we will learn from it will be useful in controlling Earth’s climate, in avoiding global warming or a future ice age. It’s an experiment, a big one, and it will always be an ongoing experiment, with nothing guaranteed or known for sure. But that’s what science is.”
People would nod at this.
Arkady as always was thinking of the political point of view. “We can never be self-sufficient unless we do terraforming,” he pointed out. “We need to terraform in order to make the planet ours, so that we will have the material basis for independence.”
People would roll their eyes at this. But it meant that Sax and Arkady were allies of a sort, and that was a powerful combination. And so the arguments would go around, again and again and again, endlessly.
And now Underhill was nearly complete, a functioning and in most ways a self-sufficient village. Now it was possible to act further; now they had to decide what to do next. And most of them wanted to terraform. Any number of projects had been proposed to begin the process, with advocates for each, usually those who would be responsible for doing it. This was an important part of terraforming’s attraction; every discipline could contribute to the enterprise in one way or another, so it had broad-based support. The alchemists talked about physical and mechanical means to add heat to the system; the climatologists debated influencing the weather; the biosphere team talked about ecological systems theories to be tested. The bioengineers were already working on new microorganisms: shifting, clipping and recombining genes from algae, methanogens, cyanobacteria, and lichens, trying to come up with organisms that would survive on the present Martian surface, or under it. One day they invited Arkady to take a look at what they were doing, and Nadia went along with him.
They had some of their prototype GEMs in Mars jars, the largest of which was one of the old habitats in the trailer park. They had opened it up, shoveled regolith onto the floor, and sealed it again. They worked inside it by teleoperation, and viewed the results from the next trailer over, where instrument gauges took readings, and video screens showed what the various dishes were producing. Arkady looked at every screen closely, but there wasn’t that much to see: their old quarters, covered with plastic cubicles filled with red dirt, robot arms extending from their bases against the walls. There were visible growths on part of the soil, a bluish furze.
“That’s our champion so far,” Vlad said. “But still only slightly areophylic.” They were selecting for a number of extreme characteristics, including resistance to cold and dehydration and UV radiation, tolerance for salts, little need for oxygen, a habitat of rock or soil. No single Terran organism had all these traits, and those that had them individually were usually very slow growers, but the engineers had started what Vlad called a mix-and-match program, and recently they had come up with a variant of the cyanophyte that was sometimes called bluegreen algae. “It is not precisely thriving, but it does not die so fast, let us put it that way.” They had named it areophyte primares, its common name becoming Underhill algae. They wanted to make a field trial with it, and had prepared a proposal to send down to UNOMA.
Arkady left the trailer park excited by the visit, Nadia could see, and that night he said to the dinner group, “We should make the decision on our own, and if we decide in favor, act.”
Maya and Frank were outraged by this, and clearly most of the rest were uncomfortable as well. Maya insisted on a change of subject, and awkwardly the dinner conversation shifted. The next morning Maya and Frank came to Nadia, to talk about Arkady. The two leaders had already tried to reason with him, late the night before. “He laughs in our face!” Maya exclaimed. “It’s useless to try to reason with him!”
“What he proposes could be very dangerous,” Frank said. “If we explicitly disregard a directive from the U.N., they could conceivably come here and round us up and ship us home, and replace us with people who will pay attention to the law. I mean, biological contamination of this environment is simply illegal at this point, and we don’t have the right to ignore that. It’s international treaty. It’s how humanity in general wants to treat this planet at this time.”
“Can’t you talk to him?” Maya asked.
“I can talk to him,” Nadia said. “But I can’t say that it will do any good.”
“Please, Nadia. Just try. We’ve got enough problems as it is.”
“I’ll try, sure.”
So that afternoon she talked to Arkady. They were out on Chernobyl Road, walking back toward Underhill. She brought it up, and suggested that patience was in order. “It will only be a matter of time before the U.N. comes around to your view anyway.”
He stopped and lifted her maimed hand. “How long do you think we have?” he said. He pointed at the setting sun. “How long do you suggest we wait? For our grandchildren? Our great-grandchildren? Our great-great-grandchildren, blind as cave fish?”
“Come on,” Nadia said, pulling her hand free. “Cave fish.”
Arkady laughed. “Still, it’s a serious question. We don’t have forever, and it would be nice to see things start to change.”
“Even so, why not wait a year?”
“A Terran year or a Martian year?”
“A Martian year. Get readings on all the seasons, give the U.N. time to come around.”
“We do
n’t need the readings, they’ve been taken now for years.”
“Have you talked to Ann about that?”
“No. Well, sort of. But she doesn’t agree.”
“A lot of people don’t agree. I mean maybe they will eventually, but you have to convince them. You can’t just run roughshod over opposing opinions, otherwise you’re just as bad as the people back home that you’re always criticizing.”
Arkady sighed. “Yeah yeah.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“You damned liberals.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”
But they were now within sight of the low mound of Underhill, looking like a fresh squarish crater, its ejecta scattered around it. Nadia pointed at it. “I did that. You damned radicals—” she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard—”you hate liberalism because it works.”
He snorted.
“It does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works.”
“Ah, Nadia.” He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again toward base. “Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”
• • •
Still, Nadia seemed to have affected him. He quit calling for a unilateral decision to release the new GEMs onto the surface, and he confined the agitprop to his beautification program, spending much of his time in the Quarter, trying to make colored bricks and glass. Nadia joined him for a swim before breakfast on most days, and along with John and Maya they took over a lane in the shallow pool that filled all of one of the vaulted chambers, and swam a brisk workout of one or two thousand meters. John led the sprint sets, Maya led the distance sets, Nadia followed in everything, hampered by her bad hand, and they churned through the extra-splashy water like a line of dolphins, staring through their goggles down at the sky-blue concrete of the pool bottom. “The butterfly was made for this g,” John would say, grinning at the way they could practically fly out of the water. Breakfasts afterward were pleasant if brief, and the rest of the days were the usual round of work; Nadia seldom saw Arkady again till evenings at dinner, or afterward.
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