Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So when they returned to the station he went to the lab, disturbed. Perhaps, he thought, they had gone polyploidal, not as individuals but culturally—an international array, arriving here and effectively quadrupling the meme strands, providing the adaptability to survive in this alien terrain despite all the stress-induced mutations. . . .

  But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.

  So, okay, there was no such thing as cultural polyploidy. There was just a determinate historical situation, the consequence of all that had come before—the decisions made, the results spreading out over the planet in complete disarray, evolving, or one should say developing, without a plan. Planless. In that regard there was a similarity between history and evolution, both of them being matters of contingency and accident, as well as patterns of development. But the differences, particularly in time scales, were so gross as to make that similarity nothing more than analogy again.

  No, better to concentrate on homologies, those structural similarities that indicated actual physical relationships, that really explained something. This of course took one back into science. But after an encounter with Phyllis, that was just what he wanted.

  So he dove back into studying plants. Many of the fellfieid organisms he was finding had hairy leaves, and very thick leaf surfaces; which helped protect the plants from the harsh UV blast of Martian sunlight. These adaptations could very well be examples of homologies, in which species with the same ancestors had all kept family traits. Or they could be examples of convergence, in which species from separate phyla had come to the same forms through functional necessity. And these days they could also be simply the result of bioengineering, the breeders adding the same traits to different plants in order to provide the same advantages. Finding out which it was required identifying the plant, and then checking the records to see if it had been designed by one of the terraforming teams. There was a Biotique lab in Elysium, led by a Harry Whitebook, designing many of the most successful surface plants, especially the sedges and grasses, and a check in the Whitebook catalog often showed that his hand had been at work, in which case the similarities were often a matter of artificial convergence, Whitebook inserting traits like hairy leaves into almost every leaved plant he bred.

  An interesting case of history imitating evolution. And certainly, since they wanted to create a biosphere on Mars in a short time, perhaps 107 times quicker than it had taken on Earth, they would have to intervene continuously in the act of evolution itself. So the Martian biosphere would not be a case of phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny, a discredited notion in any case, but of history recapitulating evolution. Or rather imitating it, to the extent possible given the Martian environment. Or even directing it. History directing evolution. It was a daunting thought.

  Whitebook was going about the task with a lot of flair; he had bred phreatophytic lichen reefs, for instance, which built the salts they incorporated into a kind of millepore coral structure, so that the resulting plants were olive or dark green masses of semicrystalline blocks. Walking through a patch of them was like walking through a Lilliputian garden maze which had been crushed, abandoned, and half covered with sand. The individual blocks of the plant were fractured or fissured in a crackle pattern, and they were so lumpish they looked diseased, with a disease that appeared to petrify plants while they were still living, leaving them struggling to exist inside broken sheaths of malachite and jade. Strange-looking, but very successful; Sax found quite a few of these lichen reefs growing on the crest of the western moraine rib, and in the more arid regolith beyond.

  He spent a few mornings studying them there, and one morning crossing the ridge he looked back over the glacier, and saw a sandy whirlwind spinning over the ice, a sparkling rust-colored little tornado that rushed downstream. Immediately afterward he was struck by a high wind, with gusts of at least a hundred kilometers an hour, and then a hundred and fifty; he ended up crouching behind a lichen reef, lifting a hand to try to estimate the wind speed. It was hard to make an accurate guess, because the thickening atmosphere had increased the force of winds, making them seem faster than they really were. All estimates based on the instincts from the Underhill days were now badly off. The gusts striking him now might have been as slow as eighty kilometers an hour. But full of sand, ticking against his faceplate and reducing visibility to a hundred meters or so. After an hour of waiting for the sandstorm to decrease he gave up and returned to the station, crossing the glacier by moving very carefully from flag to flag, careful not to lose the trail they made—important, if one wanted to stay out of dangerous crevasse zones.

  Once across the ice Sax made his way back to the station quickly, pondering the little tornado that had announced the arrival of the wind. Weather was strange. Inside he called up the meteorology channel, and ran through all its information on the day’s weather, and then stared at a satellite photo of their region. A cyclonic cell was bearing down on them from Tharsis. With the air thickening, the winds coming off Tharsis were powerful indeed. The bulge would forever remain an anchoring point in Martian climatology, Sax suspected. Most of the time the northern hemisphere jet stream would circle up and around its northern end, like Terra’s northern jet stream did around the Rockies. But every once in a while, air masses would shove over the Tharsis crest between volcanoes, dropping their moisture on west Tharsis as they rose. Then these dehydrated air masses would roar down the eastern slope, Big Man’s mistral or sirocco or foehn, with winds so fast and forceful that as the atmosphere thickened they were getting to be a problem; some tent towns on the open surface were, endangered to the point where it looked like they might have to retreat into craters or canyons, or at least greatly strengthen their tenting.

  As Sax considered it the whole issue of weather became so exciting that he wanted to drop his botanical studies, and go after it full-time. In the old days he would have done that, and dived into climatology for a month or a year until his curiosity was satisfied, and he had managed to think of some contribution to policy regarding any problems that were arising.

  But that had been a rather undisciplined approach, as he now saw, leading to a kind of scattershot method, even to a certain dilettantism. Now, as Stephen Lindholm, working for Claire and Biotique, he had to abandon climatology with a longing glance at the satellite photos and their suggestively swirling new cloud systems, and merely tell the others about the whirlwind, and talk about weather in a recreational way in the lab or over dinner—while his main effort returned to their little ecosystem and its plants, and how to help them along. And as he was just beginning to feel he was learning the particularities of Arena, these restrictions imposed by his new identity were not a bad thing. They meant he was forced to concentrate on a single discipline in a way he hadn’t since his postdoc work. And the rewards of concentration were becoming more and more evident to him. They could make him a better scientist.

  The next day, for instance, with the winds merely brisk, he went back out and located the coral lichen patch he had been investigating when the sandstorm had hit. All the structure’s fissures were filled with sand, which must have been true most of the time. So he brushed one of the fissures clean, and looked inside through the 20x magnifi
ers on his faceplate. The walls of the fissures were coated with very fine cilia, somewhat like the tiny versions of the hairs on exposed leaves of alpine cinquefoil. Clearly there was no need for protection of these already well-hidden surfaces. Perhaps they were there to release excess oxygen from the tissues of the semicrystalline outside mass. Spontaneous or planned? He read through descriptions on his wrist, and added a new one of this specimen, which because of the cilia appeared to be nondescript. He took out a little camera from his thigh pocket and took a picture, put a sample of the cilia in a bag, and put both camera and bag in his thigh pocket, and moved on.

  He went down to look at the glacier, stepping onto it at one oí the many junctures where its side came down and met smoothly the rising slope of the moraine rib. It was bright on the glacier at midday, as if bits of broken mirror were reflecting sunlight everywhere on it. Chunks of ice crunched underfoot. Little watersheds gathered to deep-channeled streams, which abruptly disappeared down holes in the ice. These holes, like the crevasses, were various shades of blue. The moraine ribs gleamed like gold, and seemed to bounce in the rising heat. Something in the sight reminded Sax of the soletta plan, and he whistled through his teeth.

  He straightened up and stretched his lower back, feeling very alive and curious, absolutely in his element. The scientist at work. He was learning to like the ever-fresh primary effort of “natural history,” its close observation of things in nature; description, categorization, taxonomy—the primal attempt to explain, or rather its first step, simply to describe. How happy the natural historians had always seemed to him in their writings, Linnaeus and his wild Latin, Lyell and his rocks, Wallace and Darwin and their great step from category to theory, from observation to paradigm. Sax could feel it, right there on Arena Glacier in the year 2101, with all these new species, this flourishing process of speciation that was half human and half Martian—a process that would need its own theories eventually, some kind of evohistory, or historico-evolution, or ecopoesis, or simply areology. Or Hiroko’s viriditas, perhaps. Theories of the terraforming project—not only in what it intended, but how it was actually working. A natural history, precisely. Very little of what was happening could be studied with experimental lab science, so natural history was going to return to its proper place among the sciences, as one among equals. Here on Mars all kinds of hierarchies were destined to fall, and that was no meaningless analogy, but simply a precise observation of what all could see.

  What all could see. Would he have understood, before his time out here? Would Ann understand? Looking down the wild cracked surface of the glacier, he found himself thinking of her. Every little berg and crevasse stood out as if he still had the 20x magnification on in his faceplate, but with an infinite depth of field—every tint of ivory and pink in the pocked surfaces, every mirror gleam of meltwater, the bumpy hillocks of the far horizon—everything was, for the moment, surgically clear and focused. And it occurred to him that this vision was not a matter of accident (the lensing of tears over his cornea, for instance) but the result of a new and growing conceptual understanding of the landscape. It was a kind of cognitive vision, and he could not help but remember Ann saying angrily to him, Mars is the place you have never seen.

  He had taken it as a figure of speech. But now he recalled Kuhn, asserting that scientists who used different paradigms existed in literally different worlds, epistemology being such an integral component of reality. Thus Aristoteleans simply did not see the Galilean pendulum, which to them was a body falling with some difficulty; and in general, scientists debating the relative merits of competing paradigms simply talked right through each other, using the same words to discuss different realities.

  He had considered that too to be a figure of speech. But thinking of it now, absorbing the hallucinatory clarity of the ice, he had to admit that it certainly described what his conversations with Ann had always felt like. It had been a frustration to both of them, and when Ann had cried out that he had never seen Mars, a statement that was obviously false on some levels, she had perhaps meant only to say that he hadn’t seen her Mars, the Mars created by her paradigm. And that was no doubt true.

  Now, however, he was seeing a Mars he had never seen before. But the transformation had come by focusing for a matter of weeks on just those parts of the Martian landscape that Ann despised, the new life-forms. So he doubted that the Mars he was seeing, with its snow algae and ice lichen, and the enchanting little patches of Persian carpet fringing the glacier, was Ann’s Mars. Nor was it the Mars of his colleagues in terraforming. It was a function of what he believed, and what he wanted—it was his Mars, evolving right before his very eyes, always in the process of becoming something new. Like a stab to the heart he felt the wish that he could seize Ann at that very moment, and pull her by the arm down the western moraine crying, See? See? See?

  Instead he had Phyllis, perhaps the least philosophical person he had ever known. He avoided her when he could do it without appearing to, and passed his days on the ice, in the wind under the vast northern sky, or on the moraines, crawling around studying plants. Back in the station he talked over dinner with Claire and Berkina and the rest about what they were finding out there, and what it meant. After dinner they retired to the observation room and talked some more, dancing on some nights, especially Fridays and Saturdays. The music they played was always nuevo calypso, guitars and steel drums in fast simultaneous melodies, creating complex rhythms that Sax had great difficulty analyzing. There were often measures of 5/4 time alternating or even coexisting with 4/4, a pattern seemingly designed to throw him out of step. Luckily the current dance style was a kind of free-form movement that had little relation to the beat anyway, so when he failed in his attempts to stay in rhythm, he was pretty sure he was the only one who noticed. In fact it made a pretty good entertainment just trying to keep time, off on his own, hopping around with a little jig added to the 5/4 measures. When he returned to the tables and Jessica said to him, “You’re really a good dancer, Stephen,” he burst out laughing, pleased even though he knew all it revealed was Jessica’s incompetence to judge dance, or her attempt to please him. Although perhaps the daily boulder-walking in the field was improving his balance and timing. Any physical action, properly studied and practiced, could no doubt be accomplished with a reasonable amount of skill, if not flair.

  He and Phyllis talked or danced together only as much as they did with everyone else; and only in the secrecy of their rooms did they embrace, kiss, make love. It was the old pattern of the hidden affair, and one morning around four A.M., returning to his room from hers, a flash of fear shook him; it seemed to him suddenly that his immediate undiscussed complicity in this behavior must tag him to Phyllis as suspiciously like one of the First Hundred. Who else would fall into such a bizarre pattern so readily, as if it were the natural thing to do?

  But on consideration it did not seem that Phyllis was attentive to nuances of that kind. Sax had almost given up trying to understand her thinking and her motivations, as the data were contradictory and, despite the fact that they were spending nights together on a fairly regular basis, rather sparse. She seemed interested mostly in the intertransnational maneuvering that was going on in Sheffield, and back on Earth—shifts in executive personnel and subsidiaries and stock prices that were clearly ephemeral and meaningless, but to her utterly absorbing. As Stephen he remained brightly interested in all this, and asked her questions about it to show his interest when she brought it up, but when he asked about what the daily changes meant in any larger strategic sense, she was either unable or unwilling to give him good answers. Apparently it was interesting to her more for the personal fortunes of those she knew than for the system that their careers revealed. An ex-Consolidated executive now with Subarashii had been made head of elevator operations, a Praxis executive had disappeared in the outback, Armscor was going to explode scores of hydrogen bombs in the megaregolith under the north polar cap, to stimulate growth and warming of the norther
n sea; and this last fact was no more interesting to her than the two previous ones.

  And perhaps it made sense to pay attention to the individual careers of the people running the biggest transnationals, and the micropolitics of the jockeying for power among them. These were the current rulers of the world, after all. So Sax lay next to Phyllis, listening to her and making Stephen’s comments, trying to sort out all the names, wondering if the founder of Praxis really was a senile surfer, wondering if Shellalco would be taken over by Amexx, wondering why the transnat executive teams were so fiercely competitive, given that they already ruled the world, and had everything they could conceivably want in their personal lives. Perhaps socio-biology indeed had the answer, and it was all primate dominance dynamics, a matter of increasing one’s reproductive success in the corporate realm—which might not be a mere analogy, if one considered one’s company as one’s kin. And then again, in a world where one might live indefinitely, it could be simple self-protection. “Survival of the fittest,” which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order. . . .

  And then Phyllis would roll over onto him and kiss him, and he would enter the realm of sex, where different rules seemed to obtain. For instance, though he liked Phyllis less and less as he got to know her better, his attraction to her did not correlate to this, but fluctuated according to mysterious principles of its own, no doubt pheromone-driven and hormonally based; so that sometimes he had to steel himself to accept her touches, while other times he felt alive with a lust that seemed all the stronger because it was so unmixed with affection. Or more senseless still, a lust actually heightened by dislike. This last reaction was rare, however, and as the stay at Arena went on, and the novelty of their affair wore off, Sax more and more frequently found himself distanced from their lovemaking, and inclined to fantasize during it, and fall very deeply into Stephen Lindholm, who appeared to be thinking about caressing women Sax did not know or had scarcely heard of, like Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe.