Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They asked him what he thought of the debate between the reds and the greens, and he shrugged and summarized what he could of Ann and Sax’s positions.

  “I don’t think they are either right,” one of them said. His name was Jürgen and he was one of their leaders, an engineer who seemed some kind of cross between a burgermeister and a gypsy king, dark-haired and sharp-faced and serious. “Both sides say they are in favor of nature, of course. One has to say this. The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture. A garden, you know. An artwork. So neither way gets nature. There isn’t such a thing as nature possible on Mars.”

  “Interesting!” John said. “I’ll have to tell Ann that, and see what she says. But. . . .” He thought about it. “Then what do you call this? What do you call what you’re doing?”

  Jürgen shrugged, grinned. “We don’t call it anything. It is just Mars.”

  Perhaps that was being Swiss, John thought. He had been meeting them more and more in his travels, and they all seemed like that. Do things, and don’t worry too much about theory. Whatever seemed right.

  Later still, after they had drunk another few bottles of wine, he asked them if they had ever heard of the coyote. They laughed and one said, “He’s the one who came here before you, right?” They laughed again at his expression. “A story only,” one explained. “Like the canals, or Big Man. Or Sami Claus.”

  Driving north the next day across Melas Chasma, John wished (as he had before) that everyone on the planet was Swiss, or at least like the Swiss. Or more like the Swiss in certain ways, anyway. Their love of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind of life: rational, just, prosperous, scientific. They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch of land they owned on Earth. The Swiss road-building crew back there was Martian already, having brought the life and left the baggage behind.

  He sighed, and ate lunch as his rover rolled past transponders north. It was not that simple, of course. The road-building crew were traveling Swiss, gypsies of a sort, the kind of Swiss who spent most of their life out of Switzerland. There were a lot of those, but they were selected out by that choice, they were different. The Swiss who stayed at home were pretty intense about Swissness; still armed to the teeth, still willing to be the bagman for whoever brought them cash; still not a member of the U.N. Although that fact, given the power UNOMA currently had over the local situation, made them even more interesting to John, as a model. That ability to be part of the world but to stand away from it at the same time; to use it, but hold it off; to be small but in control, to be armed to the teeth but never go to war; wasn’t that one way of defining what he wanted for Mars? It seemed to him there were some lessons there, for any hypothetical Martian state.

  He spent a fair amount of his time alone thinking about that hypothetical state; it was a kind of obsession with him, and he found it very frustrating that he could not seem to come up with anything more than vague desires. And so now he thought hard about Switzerland and what it might tell him, he tried to be organized about it: “Pauline, please call up an encyclopedia article on the Swiss government.”

  The rover passed transponder after transponder as he read the article that came up on the screen. He was disappointed to find that there was nothing obviously unique about the Swiss system of government. Executive authority was given to a council of seven, elected by the assembly. No charismatic president, which some part of Boone did not like very much. The assembly, aside from selecting the federal council, appeared to do little; it was caught between the power of the executive council and the power of the people, as exercised in direct initiatives and referendums, an idea they had gotten in the nineteenth century from California of all places. And then there was the federal system; the cantons in all their diversity were supposed to have a great deal of independence, which also weakened the assembly. But cantonal power had been eroding for generations, the federal government wresting away more and more. What did it add up to? “Pauline, please call up my constitution file.” He added a few notes to the file he had just recently begun: Federal council, direct initiatives, weak assembly, local independence, particularly in cultural matters. Something to think over, anyway. More data to add to the stew of his ideas. It helped somehow to write it down.

  He drove on, remembering the road-builders’ calmness, their strange mixture of engineering and mysticism. The warmth of their welcome, which wasn’t something Boone took for granted; it didn’t always happen. In the Arab and Israeli settlements, for instance, he was received very stiffly, perhaps because he was seen as being antireligion, perhaps because Frank had been spreading tales against him. He had been amazed to discover an Arabic caravan whose members believed he had forbidden the building of a mosque on Phobos, and they had only stared at him when he denied even hearing about such a plan. He was pretty sure that was Frank’s doing, word got back to him through Janet and others that Frank was prone to undercutting him in that way. So yes, there were definitely groups that greeted him coolly: the Arabs, the Israelis, the nuclear reactor teams, some of the transnational executives . . . groups with their own intense and parochial programs, people who objected to his larger perspective. Unfortunately there were a lot of them.

  He came out of his reverie and looked around, and was surprised to discover that out in the middle of Melas it looked exactly as if he were out on the northern plains somewhere. The great canyon was 200 kilometers wide at this point, and the curvature of the planet was so sharp that the north and south canyon walls, all three vertical kilometers of them, were completely under the horizons. Not until the following morning did the northern horizon double, and then separate out into the canyon floor and the great northern wall, which was cut in two by the gap of a short north-south canyon connecting Melas and Candor. It was only when he drove into that wide slot that he had the kind of view people thought of when they imagined being down in Marineris: truly giant walls flanked him on both sides, dark brown slabs riven by a fractal infinity of gullies and ridges. At the foot of the walls lay the huge spills of ancient rockfall, or the broken terracing of fossil beaches.

  In this gap the Swiss road was a line of green transponders, snaking past mesas and arroyos, so that it looked as if Monument Valley had been relocated at the bottom of a canyon twice as deep and five times as wide as the Grand Canyon. The sight was too astonishing for John to be able to concentrate on anything else, and for the first time in his journey he drove all day with Pauline off.

  North of the transverse gap, he drove into the huge sink of Candor Chasma, and now it was as if he were in a gigantic replica of the Painted Desert, with great deposition layers everywhere, bands of purple and yellow sediment, orange dunes, red erratics, pink sands, indigo gullies— truly a fantastic, extravagant landscape, disorienting to the eye because all the wild colors made it hard to figure out what was what, and how big it was, and how far away. Giant plateaus that seemed about to block his way would turn out to be curving strata on a distant cliff; small boulders next to the transponders would turn out to be enormous mesas half a day’s drive away. And in the sunset light all the colors blazed, the whole Martian spectrum revealed and blazing as if color was bursting out of the rock, everything from pale yellow to dark bruised purple. Candor Chasma! He was going to have to come back some time and explore it.

  The day after that, he drove up the steady slope of the north Ophir road, which the Swiss crew had completed the previous year. Up and up and up, and then, without ever seeing a distinct rim, he was out of the canyons, rolling past the domed holes of Ganges Catena, and then over the old familiar plain, following a wide road, over the tight horizon past Chernobyl and Underhill; then on for another day west to Echus Overlook, Sax’s ne
w terraforming headquarters. His journey had taken a week, and crossed 2,500 kilometers.

  • • •

  Sax Russell was back from Acheron, in his own place. He was a power now and no doubt about it, having been named by UNOMA a decade before as scientific head of the terraforming effort. And of course that decade of power had had its effect on him. He had solicited U.N. and transnational aid to build a whole town to serve as headquarters for the terraforming effort, and he had placed this town about 500 kilometers due west of Underhill, on the edge of the cliff that formed the eastern wall of Echus Chasma. Echus was one of the narrowest and deepest canyons on the planet, and its eastern wall was even taller than south Melas; the section they had chosen to build the town into was a vertical basalt cliff four thousand meters high.

  At the top of the cliff there was very little sign of the new town; the land behind the rim was almost unmarked, only a concrete pillbox here and there, and to the north the plume of a Rickover. But when John climbed out of his rover into one of the rim pillboxes, and got in one of the big elevators inside it, the extent of the town began to come clear; the elevators went down fifty floors. And when he descended fifty stories, he got out and found other elevators that would take him even lower, a whole series of them, descending right down to the floor of Echus Chasma. Say a story was ten meters; that meant there was room in the cliff for 400 stories. Actually not that much of the room had been used yet, and most of the rooms built so far were clustered up in the highest twenty floors. Sax’s offices, for instance, were very near the top.

  His meeting room was a big open chamber, with a continuous floor-to-ceiling window as its western wall. When John walked into the room looking for Sax, it was still mid-morning, and the window was almost clear; far, far below lay the chasm floor, still half in shadow, and there out in the sunlight stood the much lower western wall of Echus, and beyond that the great slope of the Tharsis Bulge, rising higher and higher to the south. Out in the middle distance was the low bump of Tharsis Tholus, and to the left of it, just poking over the horizon, lay the purple flat-topped cone of Ascraeus Mons, the northernmost of the great prince volcanoes.

  But Sax was not in the meeting room, and he never looked out this window as far as John could tell. He was next door in a lab, more lab rat than ever, hunch-shouldered and twitch-whiskered, gazing around at the floor, speaking in a voice that sounded like an AI. He led John through a whole sequence of labs, leaning forward to peer into screens or at inching graph paper, talking to John over a shoulder, in a state of distraction. The rooms they passed through were jammed with computers, printers, screens, books, rolls and stacks of paper, disks, GC-mass specs, incubators, fume hoods, long apparatus-filled lab tables, whole libraries; and placed on every precarious surface were potted plants, most of them unrecognizable bulges, armored succulents and the like, so that at a glance it looked like a virulent mold had sprung up and covered everything. “Your labs are getting kind of messy,” John said.

  “The planet is the lab,” Sax replied.

  John laughed, moved a bright yellow surarctic cactus from a countertop and sat down. It was said Sax never left these rooms anymore. “What are you simming today?”

  “Atmospheres.”

  Of course. It was a problem that gave Sax a serious case of the blinks. All the heat they were releasing or applying to the planet was thickening the atmosphere, but all their CO2-fixing strategies were thinning it; and as the chemical composition of the air slowly shifted to something less poisonous it became less greenhouse-gassed as well, so that things cooled back down and the process slowed. Negative feedback countering positive feedback, all over the place. Juggling all these factors into any meaningful extrapolative program was more than anyone had yet accomplished to Sax’s satisfaction, so he had resorted to his usual solution; he was trying to do it himself.

  He paced the narrow aisles left between equipment, moving chairs out of his way. “There’s just too much carbon dioxide. In the old days the modelers swept that under the rug. I think I’m going to have to have robots feed the southern polar cap into Sabatier factories. What we can process won’t sublime, and we can release the oxygen and make bricks of the carbon, I guess. We’ll have more carbon blocks than we’ll know what to do with. Black pyramids to go along with the white.”

  “Pretty.”

  “Uhn.” The Crays and the two new Schillers hummed away behind him, providing his monotonal recitative with a ground bass. These computers spent all their time running through one set of conditions after another, Sax said; but the results, while never the same, were seldom encouraging. The air was going to be cold and poisonous for a good while yet.

  Sax wandered down the hall, and John followed him into what looked like another lab, although there was a bed and a refrigerator in one corner. Violently disarranged bookscapes were overgrown with potted plants, bizarre Pleistocene growths that looked as deadly as the air outside. John sat in the lone empty chair. Sax stood and looked down at a seashell shrub as John described his meeting with Ann.

  “Do you think she’s involved?” Sax said.

  “I think she may know who is. She mentioned someone called the coyote.”

  “Ah yes.” Sax glanced briefly at John— at his feet, to be precise. “She’s siccing us onto a legendary character. He’s supposed to have been on the Ares with us, you know. Hidden by Hiroko.”

  John was so surprised that Sax had heard of the coyote that it took him a while to figure out what else was disturbing about what he had said. But then it came to him. One night Maya had told him that she had seen a face, the face of a stranger. The voyage out had been hard on Maya, and he had discounted the tale. But now . . .

  Sax was wandering around turning on lights, peering at screens, muttering about security measures. He opened the refrigerator door briefly and John caught a glimpse of more spiky growths; either he kept experiments in there, or else his snack food had suffered a truly virulent eruption of mold. John said, “You can see why most of the attacks have been on the moholes. They’re the easiest project to attack.”

  Sax tilted his head to the side. “Are they?”

  “Think about it. Your little windmills are everywhere, there’s nothing to be done about them.”

  “People are disabling them. We’ve had reports.”

  “What, a dozen? And how many are out there, a hundred thousand? They’re junk, Sax. Litter. Your worst idea.” And nearly fatal to his project, in fact, because of the algae dishes Sax had hidden in some of them. All of that algae had died, apparently— but if it hadn’t, and if anyone had been able to prove Sax had been responsible for its dissemination, he could have lost his job. It was yet another indication that Sax’s logical manner was a front.

  Now his nose was wrinkled. “They add up to a terawatt a year.”

  “And knocking a few apart won’t do anything to that. As for the other physical operations, the black snow algae is on the northern polar cap, and can’t be removed. The dawn and dusk mirrors are in orbit, and it’s not so easy to knock them out.”

  “Someone did it to Pythagoras.”

  “True, but we know who it was, and there’s a security team following her.”

  “She may never lead them to anyone else. They may be able to afford to expend a person per act, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Yeah, but some simple changes in screening personnel would make it impossible for anyone to smuggle any tools aboard.”

  “They could use what’s out there.” Sax shook his head. “The mirrors are vulnerable.”

  “Okay. More than some projects, anyway.”

  “Those mirrors are adding thirty calories per square centimeter per sol,” Sax said. “And more all the time.” Almost all the freighters from Earth were sunsailers now, and when they arrived in the Martian system they were linked to large collections of earlier arrivals parked in areosynchronous orbit, and programmed to swivel so that they reflected their light onto the terminators, adding a little bit of e
nergy to each day’s dawn and dusk. The whole arrangement had been coordinated by Sax’s office, and he was proud of it.

  “We’ll increase security for all the maintenance crews,” John said.

  “So. Increased security on the mirrors and at the moholes.”

  “Yes. But that’s not all.”

  Sax sniffed. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the problem is that it isn’t just the terraforming projects per se that are potential targets. I mean, the nuclear reactors are part of the project too in their way; they provide a lot of your power, and they’re pumping out heat like the furnaces they are. If one of them were to go, it would cause all kinds of fallout, more political even than physical.”

  The vertical lines between Sax’s eyes reached up nearly to his hairline. John held out his palms. “Not my fault. That’s just the way it is.”

  Sax said, “AI, take a note. Look into reactor security.”

  “Note taken,” one of the Schillers said, sounding just like Sax.

  “And that’s not the worst,” John said. Sax twitched, glared furiously at the floor. “The bioengineering labs.”

  Sax’s mouth became a tight line.

  “New organisms are being cooked up daily,” John went on, “and it might be possible to create something that would kill everything else on the planet.”

  Sax blinked. “Let’s hope none of these people think like you.”

  “I’m just trying to think like them.”

  “AI, take a note. Biolab security.”

  “Of course Vlad and Ursula and their group have stuck suicide genes into everything they’ve made,” John said. “But those are meant to stop oversuccess, or mutational accidents. If someone were to deliberately circumvent them, and concoct something that fed on oversuccess, we could be in trouble.”

  “I see that.”

  “So. The labs, the reactors, the moholes, the mirrors. It could be worse.”

  Sax rolled his eyes. “I’m glad you think so. I’ll talk to Helmut about it. I’ll be seeing him soon anyway. It looks like they’re going to approve Phyllis’s elevator at the next UNOMA session. That will cut the costs of terraforming tremendously.”