Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Then Sax and Spencer and Rya finished setting up the robot factory for making Sax’s windmill heaters, and they applied to UNOMA for permission to distribute a thousand of them around the equatorial regions, to test their warming effect. All of them together were only expected to add about twice the heat to the atmosphere that Chernobyl did, and there were even questions as to whether they would be able to distinguish the added heat from background seasonal fluctuations— but as Sax said, they wouldn’t know until they tried.

  And so the terraforming argument flared again. And suddenly Ann flew into violent action, taping long messages that she sent to the members of UNOMA’s executive committee, and to the national offices for Martian affairs for all the countries that were currently on the committee, and finally to the U.N. General Assembly. These appearances were given enormous amounts of attention, from the most serious policy-making levels all the way down to the tabloid press and TV, media that regarded it as the newest episode of the red soap opera. Ann had taped and sent her messages in private, so the colonists learned of them when excerpts were shown on Terran TV. The reaction in the days that followed included debates in government, a rally in Washington that drew 20,000, endless amounts of editorial space, and commentary in the scientific nets. It was a bit shocking to see the strength of these responses, and some colonists felt that Ann had gone behind their backs. Phyllis for one was outraged.

  “Besides, it doesn’t make sense,” Sax said, blinking rapidly. “Chernobyl is already releasing almost as much heat into the atmosphere as these windmills, and she never complained about that.”

  “Yes she did,” Nadia said. “She just lost the vote.”

  Hearings were held at UNOMA, and while they were going on a group of the materials scientists confronted Ann after dinner. A lot of the rest of them were there to witness this confrontation; Underhill’s main dining hall filled four chambers, whose dividing walls had been removed and replaced by load-bearing pillars; it was a big room, filled with chairs and potted plants and the descendants of the Ares‘ birds, and most recently lit by windows installed high across the northern wall, through which they saw the ground-level crops of the atrium. A big space; and at least half the colonists were in it eating when the meeting took place.

  “Why didn’t you discuss this with us?” Spencer asked her.

  Ann’s glare forced Spencer to look away. “Why should I discuss it with you?” she said, turning her gaze on Sax. “It’s clear what you all think about this, we’ve gone over it many times before, and nothing I’ve said makes any difference to you. Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it— we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There’s simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see— as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.”

  Her face had gone bright red during this tirade; Nadia had never seen her anywhere near as angry as this. The usual matter-of-fact facade that she placed over her bitter anger had shattered, and she was almost speechless with fury, she was shuddering. The whole room had gone deadly quiet. “It’s not science, I say! It’s just playing around. And for that game you’re going to wreck the historical record, destroy the polar caps, and the outflow channels, and the canyon bottoms— destroy a beautiful pure landscape, and for nothing at all.”

  The room was as still as a tableau, they were like stone statues of themselves. The ventilators hummed. People began to eye one another warily. Simon took a step toward Ann, his hand outstretched; she stopped him dead with a glance, he might as well have stepped outside in his underwear and frozen stiff. His face reddened, and he cracked his posture and sat back down.

  Sax Russell rose to his feet. He looked the same as ever, perhaps a bit more flushed than usual, but mild, small, blinking owlishly, his voice calm and dry, as if lecturing on some textbook point of thermodynamics, or enumerating the periodic table.

  “The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

  He paused to look around at them all. Nadia gulped; it was strange in the extreme to hear these words come out of the mouth of Sax Russell, in the same dry tone that he would use to analyze a graph. Too strange!

  “Now that we are here,” he went on, “it isn’t enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we’re on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it. So—” he held up a palm, as if satisfied that the analysis had been supported by the data in the graph— as if he had examined the periodic table, and found that it still held true—”we might as well start.”

  He looked at Ann, and all eyes followed her. Ann’s mouth was tight, her shoulders slumped. She knew she was beaten.

  She shrugged, as if she were shrugging a hooded cape back over her head and body, a heavy carapace that weighed her down, and covered her entirely from them. In the flat dead tone that she usually employed when she was upset, she said, “I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshiping it with our attention.” She met Sax’s mild gaze, and one final flare of her anger jetted out: “You’ve never even
seen Mars.”

  And she left the room.

  • • •

  Janet had had her camera specs on, and videotaped this exchange. Phyllis sent a copy back to Earth. A week later the UNOMA committee on environmental alterations approved the dissemination of the heater windmills.

  • • •

  The plan was to drop them from dirigibles. Arkady immediately claimed the right to pilot one, as a sort of reward for his work on Phobos. Maya and Frank were not unhappy at the thought of Arkady disappearing from Underhill for another month or two, so they immediately assigned him one of the craft. He would drift east in the prevailing winds, descending to place windmills in channel beds and on the outer flanks of craters, both places where winds tended to be strong. Nadia first heard of the expedition when Arkady skipped through the chambers to her and told her about it.

  “Sounds nice,” she said.

  “Want to come along?” he asked.

  “Why yes,” she said. Her ghost finger was tingling.

  Their dirigible was the biggest ever made, a planetary model built back in Germany by Friedrichshafen Noch Einmal, and shipped up in 2029, so that it had just recently arrived. It was called the Arrowhead, and it measured 120 meters across the wings, a hundred meters front to back, and forty meters tall. It had an internal ultralite frame, and turboprops at each wingtip and under the gondola; these were driven by small plastic engines whose batteries were powered by solar cells arrayed on the upper surface of the bag. The pencil-shaped gondola extended most of the length of the underside, but it was smaller inside than Nadia had expected, because much of it was temporarily filled with their cargo of windmills; at takeoff their clear space consisted of nothing more than the cockpit, two narrow beds, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet, and the crawlspace necessary to move among these. It was pretty tight, but happily both sides of the gondola were walled with windows, and though somewhat blocked by windmills these still gave them a lot of light, and good visibility.

  Takeoff was slow. Arkady released the lines extending from the three mooring masts with the flip of a cockpit toggle; the turboprops ran hard, but they were dealing with air that was only twelve millibars thick. The cockpit bounced up and down in slow motion, flexing with the internal frame: and every up bounce was a little higher off the ground. For someone used to rocket launches it was comical.

  “Let’s take a three-sixty and see Underhill before we go,” Arkady said when they were fifty meters high. He banked the ship and they made a slow wide turn, looking out Nadia’s window. Tracks, pits, mounds of regolith, all dark red against the dusty orange surface of the plain— it looked as if a dragon had reached down with a great taloned claw, and drawn blood time after time. Underhill sat at the center of the wounds, and by itself was a pretty sight, a square dark red setting for a shiny glass-and-silver jewel, with green just visible under the dome. Extending away from it were the roads east to Chernobyl and north to the spacepads. And over there were the long bulbs of the greenhouses, and there was the trailer park—

  “The Alchemists’ Quarter still looks like something out of the Urals,” Arkady said. “We really have to do something about that.” He brought the dirigible out of its turn and headed east, moving with the wind. “Should I run us over Chernobyl and catch the updraft?”

  “Why don’t we see what this thing can do unassisted,” Nadia said. She felt light, as if the hydrogen in the ballonets had filled her as well. The view was stupendous, the hazy horizon perhaps a hundred kilometers away, the contours of the land all clearly visible— the subtle bumps and hollows of Lunae, the more prominent hills and canyons of the channeled terrain to the east. “Oh, this is going to be wonderful!”

  “Yes.”

  It was remarkable, in fact, that they had not done anything like this before. But flying on Mars was no easy thing, because of the thin atmosphere. They were in the best solution: a dirigible as big and light as possible, filled with hydrogen, which in Martian air was not only not flammable, but also even lighter relative to its surroundings than it would have been on Earth. Hydrogen and the latest in superlight materials gave them the lift to carry a cargo like their windmills, but with such a cargo aboard they were ludicrously sluggish.

  And so they drifted along. All that day they crossed the rolling plain of Lunae Planum, pushed southeast by the wind. For an hour or two they could see Juventa Chasm on the southern horizon, a gash of a canyon that looked like a giant pit mine. Farther east the land turned yellowish; there was less surface rubble, and the underlying bedrock was more rumpled. There were also many more craters, craters big and small, crisp-rimmed or nearly buried. This was Xanthe Terra, a high region that was topographically similar to the southern uplands, here sticking into the north between the low plains of Chryse and Isidis. They would be over Xanthe for some days, if the prevailing westerlies held true.

  They were progressing at a leisurely ten kilometers per hour. Most of the time they flew at an altitude of about a hundred meters, which put the horizons about fifty kilometers away. They had time to look closely at anything they wanted to, although Xanthe was proving to be little more than a steady succession of craters.

  Late that afternoon Nadia tilted the nose of the dirigible down and circled into the wind, dropping until they were within ten meters of the ground and then releasing their anchor. The ship rose, jerked on its line, and settled downwind of the anchor, tugging at it like a fat kite. Nadia and Arkady twisted down the length of the gondola, to what Arkady called the bomb bay. Nadia lifted a windmill onto the bay’s winch hook. The windmill was a little thing, a magnesium box with four vertical vanes on a rod projecting from its top. It weighed about five kilos. They closed the bay door on it, sucked out the air, and opened the bottom doors. Arkady operated the winch, looking through a low window to see what he was doing. The windmill dropped like a plumb and bumped onto hardened sand, on the southern flank of a small unnamed crater. He released the winch hook and reeled it back into the bay, and closed the bomb doors.

  They returned to the cockpit, and looked down again to see if the windmill was working. There it stood, a small box on the outside slope of a crater, somewhat tilted, the four broad vertical blades spinning merrily. It looked like an anemometer from a kid’s meteorology kit. The heating element, an exposed metal coil that would radiate like a stovetop, was on one side of the base. In a good wind the element might get up to 200 degrees Centigrade, which wasn’t bad, especially in that ambient temperature. Still . . .”It’s going to take a lot of those to make any difference,” Nadia remarked.

  “Sure, but every little bit helps, and in a way it’s free heat. Not only the wind powering the heaters, but the sun powering the factories making the windmills. I think they’re a good idea.”

  They stopped once more that afternoon to set out another one, then anchored for the night in the lee of a crisp young crater. They microwaved a meal in the tiny kitchen, and then retired to their narrow bunks. It felt odd to rock on the wind, like a boat at its mooring: tug and float, tug and float. But it was very relaxing when you got used to it, and soon Nadia was asleep.

  The next morning they woke before dawn, cast off, and motored up into the sunlight. From a hundred meters’ height they could watch the shadowed landscape below turn to bronze as the terminator rolled by and clear daylight followed, illuminating a fantastic jumble of bright rocks and long shadows. The morning wind ran right to left across their bow, so they were pushed northeast toward Chryse, humming along with the props on full power. Then the land fell away below them, and they were over the first of the outflow channels they would pass, a sinuous unnamed valley west of Shalbatana Vallis. This little arroyo’s S shape was unmistakably water-cut. Later that day they lofted out over the deeper and much wider canyon of Shalbatana, and the signs were even more obvious: tear-shaped islands, curving channels, alluvial plains, scablands; there were signs everywhere of a massive flood, a flood that had created a canyon so huge that the Arrowhead suddenly looked like a
butterfly.

  The outflow canyons and the high land between them reminded Nadia of the landscape of American cowboy movies, with washes and mesas and isolated ship rocks, as in Monument Valley— except here it lasted for four days, as they passed in succession over the unnamed channel, Shalbatana, Simud, Tiu, and then Ares. And all of them had been caused by giant floods, which had burst onto the surface and flowed for months, at rates 10,000 times that of the Mississippi. Nadia and Arkady talked about that as they looked down into the canyons under them, but it was very hard to imagine floods so huge. Now the big empty canyons funneled nothing but wind. They did that quite well, however, so Arkady and Nadia descended into them a number of times per day, to drop more windmills.

  Then east of Ares Vallis they floated back over the densely cratered terrain of Xanthe. Again the land was everywhere marred by craters: big craters, little craters, old craters, new craters, craters with rims marred by newer craters, craters with floors punctured by three or five smaller craters; craters as fresh as if they had been struck yesterday, craters that just barely showed, at dawn and dusk, as buried arcs in the old plateau. They passed over Schiaparelli, a giant old crater a hundred kilometers across. When they floated over its central uplift knob, its crater walls formed their horizon, a perfect ring of hills around the edge of the world.