Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Sax was agreeable. He saw the need, and his face had never meant anything to him. And these days the face in the mirror didn’t much resemble what he thought he looked like anyway. So he got Vlad to do the work on him, emphasizing the potential usefulness of his presence in Burroughs. Vlad had become one of the leading theoreticians of the resistance to the Transitional Authority, and he was quick to see Sax’s point. “Most of us should just live in the demimonde,” he said, “but a few people hidden in Burroughs would be a good thing. So I might as well practice my cosmetic surgery on a no-lose situation like yours.”

  “A no-lose situation!” Sax said. “And verbal contracts are binding. I expect to come out handsomer.”

  And for a wonder he did, although it was impossible to tell until the spectacular bruising went away. They capped his teeth, puffed his thin lower lip, and gave his button nose a prominent bridge, and a little bit of a bend. They thinned his cheeks and gave him more of a chin. They even cut some muscles in his eyelids so that he didn’t blink so often. When the bruises went away he looked like a real movie star, as Desmond said. Like an ex-jockey, Nadia said. Or an ex-dance instructor, said Maya, who had faithfully attended Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. Sax, who had never liked the effects of alcohol, waved her off.

  Desmond took photos of him and put them in the new persona, then inserted this construct successfully into the Biotique files, along with a transfer order from San Francisco to Burroughs. The persona appeared in the Swiss passport listings a week later, and Desmond chuckled when he saw it. “Look at that,” he said, pointing at Sax’s new name. “Stephen Lindholm, Swiss citizen! Those folks are covering for us, there’s no doubt about it. I’ll bet you anything they put a stopper on the persona, and checked your genome with old print records, and even with my alterations I bet they figured out who you really are.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. They aren’t saying, are they? But I’m pretty sure.”

  “Is it a good thing?”

  “In theory, no. But in practice, if someone is on to you, it’s nice to see them behaving as a friend. And the Swiss are good friends to have. This is the fifth time they’ve issued a passport to one of my personas. I even have one myself, and I doubt they were able to find out who I really am, because I was never ID’d like you folks in the First Hundred. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Indeed.”

  “They are interesting people. They have their own plans, and I don’t know what they are, but I like the look of them. I think they’ve made a decision to cover for us. Maybe they just want to know where we are. We’ll never know for sure, because the Swiss dearly love their secrets. But it doesn’t matter why when you’ve got the how.”

  Sax winced at the sentiment, but was happy to think that he would be safe under Swiss patronage. They were his kind of people—rational, cautious, methodical.

  A few days before he was going to fly with Peter north to Burroughs, he took a walk around Gamete’s lake, something he had rarely done in his years there. The lake was certainly a neat bit of work. Hiroko was a fine systems designer. When she and her team had disappeared from Underhill so long ago, Sax had been quite mystified; he hadn’t seen the point, and had worried that they would begin to fight the terraforming somehow. When he had managed to coax a response out of Hiroko on the net, he had been partly reassured; she seemed sympathetic to the basic goal of terraforming, and indeed her own concept of viriditas seemed just another version of the same idea. But Hiroko appeared to enjoy being cryptic, which was very unscientific of her; and during her years of hiding she had indulged herself to the point of information damage. Even in person she was none too easy to understand, and it was only after some years of coexistence that Sax had become confident that she too desired a Martian biosphere that would support humans. That was all the agreement he asked for. And he could not think of a better single ally to have in that particular project, unless it was the chairperson of this new Transitional Authority committee. And probably the chair was an ally too. There were not too many opposed, in fact.

  But there on the beach sat one, as gaunt as a heron. Ann Clay-borne. Sax hesitated, but she had already seen him. And so he walked on, until he stood by her side. She glanced up at him, and then stared out again at the white lake. “You really look different,” she said.

  “Yes.” He could still feel the sore spots in his face and mouth, though the bruises had cleared up. It felt a bit like wearing a mask, and suddenly that made him uncomfortable. “Same me,” he added.

  “Of course.” She did not look up at him. “So you’re off to the overworld?”

  “Yes.”

  “To get back to your work?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked up at him. “What do you think science is for?”

  Sax shrugged. It was their did argument, again and always, no matter what kind of beginning it had. To terraform or not to terraform, that is the question. . . . He had answered the question long ago, and so had she, and he wished they could just agree to disagree, and get on with it. But Ann was indefatigable.

  “To figure things out,” he said.

  “But terraforming is not figuring, things out.”

  “Terraforming isn’t science. I never said it was. It’s what people do with science. Applied science, or technology. What have you. The choice of what to do with what you learn from science. Whatever you call that.”

  “So it’s a matter of values.”

  “I suppose so.” Sax thought about it, trying to marshal his thoughts concerning this murky topic. “I suppose our . . . our disagreement is another facet of what people call the fact-value problem. Science concerns itself with facts, and with theories that turn facts into examples. Values are another kind of system, a human construct.”

  “Science is also a human construct.”

  “Yes. But the connection between the two systems isn’t clear. Beginning from the same facts, we can arrive at different values.”

  “But science itself is full of values,” Ann insisted. “We talk about theories with power and elegance, we talk about clean results, or a beautiful experiment. And the desire for knowledge is itself a kind of value, saying that knowledge is better than ignorance, or mystery. Right?”

  “I suppose,” Sax said, thinking it over.

  “Your science is a set of values,” Ann said. “The goal of your kind of science is the establishment of laws, of regularities, of exactness and certainty. You want things explained. You want to answer the whys, all the way back to the big bang. You’re a reductionist. Parsimony and elegance and economy are values for you, and if you can make things simpler that’s a real achievement, right?”

  “But that’s the scientific method itself,” Sax objected. “It’s not just me, it’s how nature itself works. Physics. You do it yourself.”

  “There are human values imbedded in physics.”

  “I’m not so sure.” He held out a hand to stop her for a second. “I’m not saying there are no values in science. But matter and energy do what they do. If you want to talk about values, better just to talk about them. They arise out of facts somehow, sure. But that’s a different issue, some kind of sociobiology, or bioethics. Perhaps it would be better just to talk about values directly. The greatest good for the greatest number, something like that.”

  “There are ecologists who would say that’s a scientific description of a healthy ecosystem. Another way of saying climax ecosystem.”

  “That’s a value judgment, I think. Some kind of bioethics. Interesting, but. . .” Sax squinted at her curiously, decided to change tack. “Why not try for a climax ecosystem here, Ann? You can’t speak of ecosystems without living things. What was here on Mars before us wasn’t an ecology. It was geology only. You could even say there was a start at an ecology here, long ago, that somehow went wrong and froze out, and now we’re starting it up again.”

  She growled at that, and he stopped. He knew she believed in some kind of i
ntrinsic worth for the mineral reality of Mars; it was a version of what people called the land ethic, but without the land’s biota. The rock ethic, one might say. Ecology without life. An intrinsic worth indeed!

  He sighed. “Perhaps that’s just a value speaking. Favoring living systems over nonliving systems. I suppose we can’t escape values, like you say. It’s strange . . . I mostly feel like I just want to figure things out. Why they work the way they do. But if you ask me why I want that—or what I would want to have happen, what I work toward. . .” He shrugged, struggling to understand himself. “It’s hard to express. Something like a net gain in information. A net gain in order.” For Sax this was a good functional description of life itself, of its holding action against entropy. He held out a hand to Ann, hoping to get her to understand that, to agree at least to the paradigm of their debate, to a definition of science’s ultimate goal. They were both scientists after all, it was their shared enterprise. . . .

  But she only said, “So you destroy the face of an entire planet. A planet with a clear record nearly four billion years old. It’s not science. It’s making a theme park.”

  “It’s using science for a particular value. One I believe in.”

  “As do the transnationals.”

  “I guess.”

  “It certainly helps them.”

  “It helps everything, alive.”

  “Unless it kills them. The terrain is destabilized; there are landslides every day.”

  “True.”

  “And they kill. Plants, people. It’s happened already.”

  Sax waggled a hand, and Ann jerked her head up to glare at him.

  “What’s this, the necessary murder? What kind of value is that?”

  “No, no. They’re accidents, Ann. People need to stay on bedrock, out of the slide zones, that kind of thing. For a while.”

  “But vast regions will turn to mud, or be drowned entirely. We’re talking about half the planet.”

  “The water will drain downhill. Create watersheds.”

  “Drowned land, you mean. And a completely different planet. Oh, that’s a value all right! And the people who hold the value of Mars as it is . . . we will fight you, every step of the way.”

  He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t. At this point a biosphere would help us more than the transnationals. The transnats can operate from the tent cities, and mine the surface robotically, while we hide and concentrate most of our efforts on concealment and survival. If we could live everywhere on the surface, it would be a lot easier for all kinds of resistance.”

  “All but Red resistance.”

  “Yes, but what’s the point of that, now?”

  “Mars. Just Mars. The place you’ve never known.”

  Sax looked up at the white dome over them, feeling distress like a sudden attack of arthritis. It was useless to argue with her.

  But something in him made him keep trying. “Look, Ann, I’m an advocate of what people call the minimum viable model. It’s a model that calls for a breathable atmosphere only up to about the two-or three-kilometer contour. Above that the air would be kept too thin for humans, and there wouldn’t be much life of any kind—some high-altitude plants, and above that nothing, or nothing visible. The vertical relief on Mars is so extreme that there can be vast regions that will remain above the bulk of the atmosphere. It’s a plan that makes sense to me. It expresses a comprehensible set of values.”

  She did not reply. It was distressing, it really was. Once, in an attempt to understand Ann, to be able to talk to her, he had done research in the philosophy of science. He had read a fair amount of material, concentrating particularly on the land ethic, and the fact-value interface. Alas, it had never proved to be of much help; in conversation with her, he had never seemed able to apply what he had learned in any useful manner. Now, looking down at her, feeling the ache in his joints, he recalled something that Kuhn had written about Priestley—that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist. It seemed that something like this had happened to Ann, but what then was she now? A counterrevolutionary? A prophet?

  She certainly looked like a prophet—harsh, gaunt, angry, unforgiving. She would never change, and she would never forgive him. And all that he would have liked to say to her, about Mars, about Gamete, about Peter—about Simon’s death, which seemed to haunt Ursula more than her . . . all that was impossible. This was why he had more than once resolved to give up talking to Ann: it was so frustrating never to get anywhere, to be faced with the dislike of someone he had known for over sixty years. He won every argument but never got anywhere. Some people were like that; but that didn’t make it any less distressing. In fact it was quite remarkable how much physiological discomfort could be generated by a merely emotional response.

  Ann left with Desmond the next day. Soon after that Sax got a ride north with Peter, in one of the small stealthed planes that Peter used to fly all over Mars.

  Peter’s route to Burroughs led them over the Hellespontus Montes, and Sax gazed down into the big basin of Hellas curiously. They caught a glimpse of the edge of the icefield that had covered Low Point, a white mass on the dark night surface, but Low Point itself stayed over the horizon. That was too bad, as Sax was curious to see what had happened over the Low Point mohole. It had been thirteen kilometers deep when the flood had filled it, and that deep it was likely that the water had remained liquid at the bottom, and probably warm enough to rise quite a distance; it was possible that the icefield was in that region an ice-covered sea, with telltale differences at the surface.

  But Peter would not change his route to get a better view. “You can look into it when you’re Stephen Lindholm,” he said with a grin. “You can make it part of your work for Biotique.”

  And so they flew on. And the next night they landed in the broken hills south of Isidis, still on the high side of the Great Escarpment. Sax then walked to a tunnel entrance, and went down into the tunnel and followed it into the back of a closet in the service basement of Libya Station, which was a little train station complex at the intersection of the Burroughs-Hellas piste and the newly rerouted Burroughs-Elysium piste. When the next train to Burroughs came in, Sax emerged from a service door and joined the crowd getting on the train. He rode into Burroughs’ main station, where he was met by a man from Biotique. And then he was Stephen Lindholm, newcomer to Burroughs and to Mars.

  The man from Biotique, a personnel secretary, complimented him on his skillful walking, and took him to a studio apartment high in Hunt Mesa, near the center of the old town. The labs and offices of Biotique were also in Hunt, just under the mesa’s plateau, with window walls looking down on the canal park. A high-rent district, as only befitted the company leading the terraforming project’s bioengineering efforts.

  Out the Biotique office’s windows he could see most of the old city, looking about the same as he remembered it, except that the mesa walls were even more extensively lined by glass windows, colorful horizontal bands of copper or gold or metallic green or blue, as if the mesas were stratified by some truly wonderful mineral layers. Also the tents that had topped the mesas were gone, their buildings now standing free under the much larger tent that now covered all nine mesas, and everything in between and around them. Tenting technology had reached the point where they could enclose vast mesocosms, and Sax had heard that one of the transnats was going to cover Hebes Chasma, a project that Ann had once suggested as an alternative to terraforming—a suggestion that Sax himself had scoffed at. And now they were doing it. One should never underestimate the potential of materials science, that was clear.

  Burroughs, C. 2100 A.D.

  Burroughs’ old canal park, and the broad grass boulevards that climbed away from the park and between the mesas, were now strips of green, cutting through orange tile rooftops. The old double row of salt columns still stood beside the blue canal.
There had been a lot of building, to be sure; but the configuration of the city was still the same. It was only on the outskirts that one could see clearly how much things had changed, and how much larger the city really was; the city wall lay well beyond the nine mesas, so that quite a bit of surrounding land was sheltered, and much of it built upon already.

  The personnel secretary gave Sax a quick tour of Biotique, making introductions to more people than he could remember. Then Sax was asked to report to his lab the next morning, and given the rest of the day to get settled in.

  As Stephen Lindholm he planned to exhibit signs of intellectual energy, sociability, curiosity, and high spirits; and so he very plausibly spent that afternoon exploring Burroughs, wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood. He strolled up and down the wide swards of streetgrass, considering as he did the mysterious phenomenon of the growth of cities. It was a cultural process with no very good physical or biological analogy. He could see no obvious reason why this low end of Isidis Planitia should have become home to the largest city on Mars. None of the original reasons for siting the city here were at all adequate to explain it; so far as he knew, it had begun as an ordinary way station on the piste route from Elysium to Tharsis. Perhaps it was precisely because of its lack of strategic location that it had prospered, for it had been the only major city not damaged or destroyed in 2061, and thus perhaps it simply had had a head start on growth in the postwar years. By analogy to the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution, one might say that this particular species had accidentally survived an impact that had devastated most other species, giving it an open ecosphere to expand in.