Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Have you identified the triggering mechanism that causes it?”

  “No.”

  Another mystery. Sax stared into the microscope, vexed by this rather astonishing gap in the bizarrely rent fabric of biological science. But there was nothing to be done about it; he had looked into the matter himself in his Echus Overlook labs in the 2050s, and it had appeared that polyploidy was indeed stimulated by more UV radiation than the organism was used to, but how cells read this difference, and then actually doubled or tripled or quadrupled their chromosome count. . .

  “I must say, I’m surprised at how much everything is flourishing.”

  Claire smiled happily. “I was afraid that after Earth you might think this was pretty barren.”

  “Well, no.” He cleared his throat. “I guess I expected nothing. Or just algae and lichen. But those feilfields seem to be thriving. I thought it would lake longer.”

  “It would on Earth. But you have to remember, we’re not just throwing seeds out there and waiting to see what happens. Every single species has been augmented to increase hardiness and speed of growth.”

  “And we’ve been reseeding every spring,” Berkina said, “and fertilizing with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.”

  “I thought it was denitrifying bacteria that were all the rage.”

  “Those are distributed specifically in thick deposits of sodium nitrate, to transpire the nitrogen into the atmosphere. But where we’re gardening we need more nitrogen in the soil, so we spread nitrogen-fixers.”

  “It still seems to be going very fast to me. And all of this must have happened before the soletta.”

  “The thing is,” Jessica said from her desk across the room, “there isn’t any competition at this point. Conditions are harsh, but these are very hardy plants, and when we put them out there, there isn’t any competition to slow them down.”

  “It’s an empty niche,” Claire said.

  “And conditions here are better than most places on Mars,” Berkina added. “In the south you’ve got the aphelion winter, and the high altitude. The stations down there report that the winterkill is just devastating. But here the perihelion winter is a lot milder, and we’re only a kilometer high. It’s pretty benign, really. Better than Antarctica in many ways.”

  “Especially in the CO2 level,” Berkina said. “I wonder if that doesn’t account for some of that speed you’re talking about. It’s like the plants are being supercharged.”

  “Ah,” Sax said, nodding.

  So the feilfields were gardens. Aided growth rather than natural growth. He had known that, of course—it was a given everywhere on Mars—but the feilfields, so rocky and diffuse, had looked spontaneous and wild enough to momentarily confuse him. And even remembering they were gardens, he was still surprised that they were so vigorous.

  “Well, and now with this soletta pouring sunlight onto the surface!” Jessica exclaimed. She shook her head, as if disapproving. “Natural insolation averaged forty-five percent of Earth’s, and with the soletta it’s supposed to be up to fifty-four.”

  “Tell me more about the soletta,” Sax said carefully.

  They told him in a kind of round. A group of transnationals, led by Subarashii, had built a circular slatted array of solar sail mirrors, placed between the sun and Mars and aligned to focus inward sunlight that would have just missed the planet. An annular support mirror, rotating in a polar orbit, reflected light back to the soletta to counterbalance the pressure of the sunlight, and that light was bounced back onto Mars as well. Both these mirror systems were truly huge compared to the early freighter sails Sax had enlisted to reflect light onto the surface, and the reflected light they were adding to the system was really significant. “It must have cost a fortune to build them,” Sax murmured.

  “Oh, it did. The big transnats are investing like you can’t believe.”

  “And they’re not done yet,” Berkina said. “They’re planning to fly an aerial lens just a few hundred kilometers above the surface, and this lens will focus some of the incoming light from the soletta, until it heats the surface up to fantastic temperatures, like five thousand degrees—”

  “Five thousand!”

  “Yes, I think that’s what I heard. They plan to melt the sand and the regolith underneath, which will release all the volátiles into the atmosphere.”

  “But what about the surface?”

  “They plan to do it in remote areas.”

  “In lines,” Claire said. “So that they end up with ditches?”

  “Canals,” Sax said.

  “Yes, that’s right.” They laughed.

  “Glass-sided canals,” Sax said, troubled by the thought of all those volátiles. Carbon dioxide would be prominent among them, perhaps chief among them.

  But he did not want to show too much interest in the larger terraforming issues. He let it go, and soon enough the talk returned to their work. “Well,” Sax said, “I guess some of the feilfields will turn into alpine meadows pretty soon.”

  “Oh, they’re already there,” Claire said.

  “Really!”

  “Yes, well, they’re small. But hike down the western edge about three kilometers, have you done that yet? You’ll see. Alpine meadows and krummholz too. It hasn’t been that difficult. We planted trees without even altering them very much, because a lot of spruce and pine species turned out to have temperature tolerances much lower than they needed in their Terran habitats.”

  “That’s peculiar.”

  “A holdover from the Ice Ages, I guess. But now it’s coming in handy.”

  “Interesting,” Sax said.

  And he spent the rest of that day staring into the microscopes without seeing a thing, lost in thought. Life is so much spirit, Hiroko used to say. It was a very strange business, the vigor of living things, their tendency to proliferate, what Hiroko called their green surge, their viriditas. A striving toward pattern: it made him so curious.

  When dawn arrived the next day he woke up in Phyllis’s bed, with Phyllis tangled in the sheets beside him. After dinner the whole group had retired to the observation room, as was becoming habitual, and Sax had continued the conversation with Claire and Jessica and Berkina, and Jessica had been very friendly to him, as was her wont, and Phyllis had seen this, and had followed him to the bathrooms by the elevator, and pounced on him with that shocking seductive embrace of hers, and they had ended up going down to the dorm floor, and to her room. And although Sax had felt uncomfortable about disappearing without saying good-night to the others, he had made love to her passionately enough.

  Now, looking at her, he remembered their precipitate departure with distaste. It did not take any more than the most simple-minded sociobiology to explain such behavior: competition for mates, a very basic animal activity. Of course Sax had never been the subject of such competition before, but there was nothing to pride oneself on in this sudden manifestation; clearly it was happening because of Vlad’s cosmetic surgery, which through some chance had rearranged his face into a configuration appealing to women. Although why one arrangement of facial features should be more attractive than another was a total mystery to him. He had heard sociobiological explanations of sexual attractiveness before, and he could see that some of them might have some validity: a man would look for a mate with wide hips to be able safely to give birth to his children, with significant breasts in order to feed his children, etc.; a woman would look for a strong man to feed her children and to father strong children, etc., etc. That made a kind of sense; but none of it had anything to do with facial features. For them, sociobiological explanations got pretty tenuous: wide-set eyes for good eyesight, good teeth to aid health, a prominent nose to avoid getting colds—no. It just wasn’t as sensible as that. It was a matter of chance configurations, somehow appealing to the eye. An aesthetic judgment in which tiny nonfunctional features could make a great difference, which indicated that practical concerns were not a factor. A case in point was a pair of twin sisters with w
hom Sax had gone to high school—they had been identical twins, and had looked very much alike, and yet somehow one had been plain while the other had been beautiful. No, it was a matter of millimeters of flesh and bone and cartilage, accidentally falling into patterns that pleased or did not. So Vlad had made some alterations to his face, and now women were competing for his attentions, though he was the same person he had always been. A person Phyllis had never shown the slightest interest in before, when he had looked the way nature had made him. It was hard not to be somewhat cynical about it. To be wanted, yes; but wanted for trivialities. . . .

  He got out of bed and suited up in one of the latest lightweight suits, so much more comfortable than the old stretch-fabric walkers; one had to insulate against the subfreezing temperatures, and wear a helmet and airtank of course, but there was no longer any need to provide pressure to avoid bruising of the skin. Even 160 millibars was enough for that, and so now it was only a matter of warm clothing and boots, and the helmet. So it only took a few minutes to dress, and then he was out to the glacier again.

  He crunched over the hoarfrost on the main flagged trail across the river of ice, and then wound downstream on the western bank, passing the little millefleur feilfields, coated with frost that was already beginning to melt in the light. He came to a place where the glacier dropped down a small escarpment, in a short crazed icefall-it also took a few degrees’ turn to the left, following its bordering ribs. Suddenly a loud creak filled the air, followed by a low-frequency boom that vibrated in his stomach. The ice was moving. He stopped, listening. He heard the distant bell-sound of an under-ice stream. He hiked on, feeling lighter and happier with every step. The morning light was very clear, the steam on the ice like white smoke.

  And then, in the shelter of some huge boulders, he came upon an amphitheater of fellfieid, dotted with flowers like flecks of paint; and at the bottom of the field was a little alpine meadow, south-facing and shockingly green, the mats of grass and sedge all cut with ice-coated watercourses. And around the edges of the amphitheater, sheltered in cracks and under rocks, hunched a number of dwarf trees.

  It was krummholz, then, which in the evolution of mountain landscapes was the next stage after alpine meadows. The dwarf trees he had spotted were actually members of ordinary species, mostly white spruce, Picea glauca, which in these harsh conditions miniaturized on their own, contouring into the protected spaces they sprouted in. Or had been planted in, more likely. Sax saw some lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta, joining the more numerous white spruce. These were the most cold-tolerant trees on Earth, and apparently the Biotique team had added salt tolerance from trees like the tamarisks. All kinds of engineering had been done to aid them, and yet still the extreme conditions stunted their growth, until trees that might have grown thirty meters high crouched in little knee-high pockets of protection, sheered off by winds and winter snowpacks as if by hedge clippers. Thus the name krummholz, German for “crooked wood” or perhaps “elfin wood”—the zone where trees first managed to take advantage of the soil-building work of feilfields and alpine meadows. Treelimit.

  Sax wandered slowly around the amphitheater, stepping on rocks, inspecting the mosses, the sedges, the grasses, and every single individual tree. The gnarly little things were twisted as if cultivated by deranged bonsai gardeners. “Oh how nice,” he said out loud more than once, inspecting a branch or a trunk, or a pattern of laminate bark, peeling away like phyllo dough. “Oh how nice. Oh for some moles. Some moles and voles, and marmots and minxes and foxes.”

  But the CO2 in the atmosphere was still nearly thirty percent of the air, perhaps fifty millibars all by itself. All mammals would die very quickly in such air. This was why he had always resisted the two-stage terraforming model, which called for a massive CO2 buildup to precede anything else. As if warming the planet were the only goal! But warming was not the goal. Animals on the surface was the goal. This was not only a good in itself, but good also for the plants, many of which needed animals. Most of these fellfieid plants propagated on their own, of course, and there were some altered insects that Biotique had released, out there bumbling around in stubborn insect survivalist mode, half alive and only just managing their work of pollination. But there were many other symbiotic ecological functions that needed animals, like the soil aeration accomplished by moles and voles, or the spread of seeds by birds, and without them plants could not thrive, and some would not live at all. No, they needed to reduce the CO2 in the air, probably right back to the ten millibars it had been when they arrived, when it had been the only air there was. Which was why the plan his colleagues had mentioned, to melt the regolith with an aerial lens, was so troubling. It would only increase their problem.

  Meanwhile, this unexpected beauty. Hours passed as he inspected specimens one by one, admiring in particular the spiraling trunk and branches, the flaking bark and sprays of needles, of one hide lodgepole pine—like a piece of flamboyant sculpture, really. And he was down on his knees, with his face in a sedge and his butt in the air, when Phyllis and Claire and a whole group came trooping down into the meadow, laughing at him and trampling carelessly on the living grass.

  Phyllis stayed with him that afternoon, as she had one or two times before, and they walked back together, Sax trying at first to play the role of native guide, pointing out plants he had just learned the previous week. But Phyllis asked no questions about them, and did not appear even to listen when he spoke. It seemed she only wanted him to be an audience to her, a witness to her life. So he gave up on the plants and asked questions, and listened and then asked more. It was a good opportunity to learn more about the current Martian power structure, after all. Even if she exaggerated her own role in it, it was still informative. “I was amazed how fast Subarashii got the new elevator built and into position,” she said.

  “Subarashii?”

  “They were the principal contractor.”

  “Who awarded the contract, UNOMA?”

  “Oh no. UNOMA has been replaced by the UN Transitional Authority.”

  “So when you were president of the Transitional Authority, you were in effect president of Mars.”

  “Well, the presidency just rotates among the members, it doesn’t confer much more power than any other members have. It’s just for media consumption, and to run the meetings. Scut work.”

  “Still. . .”

  “Oh, I know.” She laughed. “It’s a position a lot of my old colleagues wanted but never got. Chalmers, Bogdanov, Boone, Toitovna—I wonder what they would have thought if they had seen it. But they backed the wrong horse.”

  Sax looked away from her. “So why did Subarashii get the new elevator?”

  “The steering committee of the TA voted that way. Praxis had mack a bid for it, and no one likes Praxis.”

  “Now that the elevator is back, do you think things will change again?”

  “Oh certainly! Certainly! A lot of things have been on hold since the unrest. Emigration, building, terraforming, commerce—they’ve all been slowed down. We’ve barely managed to rebuild some of the damaged towns. It’s been a kind of martial law, necessary of course, given what happened.”

  “Of course.”

  “But now! All the stockpiled metals from the last forty years are ready to enter the Terran market, and that’s going to stimulate the entire two-world economy unbelievably. We’ll see more production out of Earth now, and more investment here, more emigration too. We’re finally ready to get on with things.”

  “Like the soletta?”

  “Exactly! That’s a perfect example of what I mean. There’s all kinds of plans for major investment here.”

  “Glass-sided canals,” Sax said. It would make the moholes look trivial.

  Phyllis was saying something about how bright things looked for Earth, and he shook his head to clear it of joules per square centimeter. He said, “But I thought Earth had some serious difficulties.”

  “Oh, Earth always has serious difficulties. We’
re going to have to get used to that. No, I’m very optimistic. I mean this recession has hit them hard down there, especially the little tigers and the baby tigers, and of course the less developed countries. But the influx of industrial metals from here will stimulate the economy for everyone, including the environment-control industries. And, unfortunately, it looks like the diebacks will solve a lot of their other problems for them.”

  Sax focused on the section of moraine they were climbing. Here solifluction, the daily melting of ground ice on a tilt, had caused the loose regolith to slide down in a series of dips and rims, and although it all looked gray and lifeless, a faint pattern like minuscule tiling revealed that it was actually covered with blue-gray flake lichen. In the dips there were clumps of what looked like gray ash, and Sax stooped to pluck a small sample. “Look,” he said brusquely to Phyllis, “snow liverwort.”

  “It looks like dirt.”

  “That’s a parasitic fungus that grows on it. The plant is actually green, see those little leaves? That’s new growth that the fungus hasn’t covered yet.” Under magnification the new leaves looked like green glass.

  But Phyllis didn’t bother to look. “Who designed that one?” she asked, her tone of voice implying that the designer had poor taste.

  “I don’t know. Could be no one. Quite a few of the new species out here weren’t designed.”

  “Can evolution be working so fast?”

  “Well, you know—is polyploidy evolution?”

  “No.”

  Phyllis moved on, not much interested in the gray little specimen. Snow liverwort. Probably very lightly engineered, or even undesigned. Test specimens, cast out here among the rest to see how they would do. And thus very interesting, in Sax’s opinion.

  But somewhere along the way Phyllis had lost interest. She had been a first-rate biologist once, and Sax found it hard to imagine losing the curiosity which lay at the core of science, that urge to figure things out. But they were getting old. In the course of their now unnatural lives it was likely they would all change, perhaps profoundly. Sax didn’t like the idea, but there it was. Like all the rest of the new centenarians, he was having more and more trouble remembering specifics from his past, especially the middle years, things that had happened between the ages of around twenty-five to ninety. Thus the years before ’61, and most of his years on Earth, were getting dim. And without fully functioning memories, they were certain to change.