Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Coyote went to the samovars, and began handing out tiny cups from a freestanding cabinet. Nirgal sat next to Vijjika, an arm around her waist, soaking in her warmth and buzzing with the long contact of her leg against his. Art sat down on her other side, his broad face thrust into the conversation like a dog’s. Vijjika introduced herself to him, and shook his hand; he clasped her long delicate fingers in his big paw as if he wanted to kiss them. “These are Bogdanovists,” Nirgal explained to Art, laughing at his expression and handing him one of the little ceramic cups from Coyote. “Their parents were prisoners in Korolyov before the war.”

  “Ah,” Art said. “We’re a long way from there, right?”

  Vijjika said, “Yes, well, our parents took the Transmarineris Highway north, just before it was flooded, and eventually they came here. Here, take that tray from Coyote and go pass out cups, and introduce yourself to everyone.”

  So Art made the rounds, and Nirgal caught up on news with Vijjika. “You won’t believe what we’ve found in one of these tuff tunnels,” she told him. “We’ve become most fantastically rich.” Everyone had their cup, so they all paused for a moment and took their first sips together, then after some whoops and a general smacking of the lips they went back to their conversations. Art returned to Nirgal’s side.

  “Here, have some yourself,” Nirgal told him. “Everyone needs to join the toast, that’s the way they do it.”

  Art took a sip from his cup, looking dubious at the liquid, which was blacker than coffee, and foul-smelling. He shuddered. “It’s like coffee with licorice mixed into it. Poisoned licorice.”

  Vijjika laughed. “It’s kavajava,” she said, “a mixture of kava and coffee. Very strong, and it tastes like hell. And hard to come by. But don’t give up on it. If you can get a cup down you’ll find it’s worth it.”

  “If you say so.” Manfully he downed another swallow, shuddering again. “Horrible!”

  “Yes. But we like it. Some people just extract the kavain from the kava, but I don’t think that’s right. Rituals should have some unpleasantness, or you don’t appreciate them properly.”

  “Hmm,” Art said. Nirgal and Vijjika watched him. “I’m in a refuge of the Martian underground,” he said after a while. “Getting high on some weird awful drug, in the company of some of the most famous lost members of the First Hundred. As well as young natives never known to Earth.”

  “It’s working,” Vijjika observed.

  Coyote was talking to a woman, who, though sitting in the lotus position on one of the pillows, was just below his eye level as he stood before her. “Sure I’d like to have romaine lettuce seeds,” the woman said. “But you have to take fair for something so valuable.”

  “They’re not that valuable,” Coyote said in his plausible style. “You’re already giving us more nitrogen than we can burn.”

  “Sure, but you have to get nitrogen before you can give it.”

  “I know that.”

  “Get before you give, and give before you burn. And here we’ve found this enormous vein of sodium nitrate, it’s pure caliche bianco, and these badlands are stuffed with it. It looks like there’s a band of it between the tuff and the lava, about three meters thick and extending, well, we don’t even know how far yet. It’s a huge amount of nitrogen, and we’ve got to get rid of it.”

  “Fine, fine,” Coyote said, “but that’s no reason to start potlatching on us.”

  “We’re not potlatching. You’re going to burn eighty percent of what we give you—”

  “Seventy.”

  “Oh yeah, seventy, and then well have these seeds, and we’ll finally be able to eat decent salads with our meals.”

  “If you can get them to grow. Lettuce is delicate.”

  “Well have all the fertilizer we need.”

  Coyote laughed. “I guess so. But it’s still out of whack. Tell you what, well give you the coordinates for one of those trucks of uranium we sent off into Ceraunius.”

  “Talk about potlatching!”

  “No no, because there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to recover the stuff. But you’ll know where it is, and if you do recover it, then you can just burn another picobar of nitrogen, and well be even. How about that?”

  “It still seems like too much to me.”

  “You’re going to be feeling like that all the time with this caliche bianco you’ve found. There’s really that much of it?”

  “Tons of it. Millions of tons of it. These badlands are layered through and through with it.”

  “All right, maybe we can get some hydrogen peroxide from you too. We’re going to need the fuel for the trip south.”

  Art leaned toward them as if pulled by a magnet. “What’s caliche blanco?”

  “It’s nearly pure sodium nitrate,” the woman said. She described the areology of the region. Rhyolitic tuff—the light-colored rock surrounding them—had been overlaid by the dark andesite lava that roofed the tableland. Erosion had carved the tuff wherever cracks in the andesite exposed it, forming the tunnel-bottomed ravines, and also revealing great seams of caliche, trapped between the two layers. “The caliche is loose rock and dust, cemented together with salts and the sodium nitrates.”

  “Microorganisms must have laid that layer down,” a man beyond the woman said, but she instantly disagreed:

  “It could have been areothermal, or lightning attracted by the quartz in the tuff.”

  They argued in the way people do when they are repeating a debate for the thousandth time. Art interrupted to ask again about the caliche bianco. The woman explained that bianco was a very pure caliche, up to eighty percent pure sodium nitrate, and thus, on this nitrogen-poor world, extremely valuable. A block of it sat on the table, and she passed it over to Art and went back to arguing with her friend, while Coyote bartered on with another man, talking about teeter-totters and pots, kilograms and calories, equivalence and overburden, cubic meters per second and picobars, haggling expertly and getting a lot of laughs from the people listening.

  At one point the woman interrupted Coyote with a cry: “Look, we can’t just take an unknown pot of uranium that we can’t be sure we’ll get or not! That’s either gross potlatching or else ripping us off, depending on whether we can find the truck or not! What kind of a deal is that, I mean it’s a lousy deal either way!”

  Coyote wagged his head mischievously. “I had to bring it in, or else otherwise you were going to bury me in caliche bianco, weren’t you. We’re out here on the road, we’ve got some seeds but not much else—certainly not millions of tons of new caliche deposits! And we actually need the hydrogen peroxide and the pasta too, it’s not just a luxury like lettuce seeds. Tell you what, if you find the truck you can burn its equivalent, and you’ll still have given us fair. If you don’t find it, then you’ll owe us one, I admit it, but in that case you can burn a gift, and then we’ll have given you fair!”

  “It’ll take us a week’s work and a bunch of fuel to recover the truck.”

  “All right, we’ll take another ten picobars, and burn six of it.”

  “Done.” The woman shook her head, baffled. “You’re a hard bastard.”

  Coyote nodded and got up to go refill their cups.

  Art swung his head around and stared at Nirgal, his mouth hanging open. “Explain to me what just went on there.”

  “Well,” said Nirgal, feeling the benevolence of the kava flowing through him, “they were trading. We need food and fuel, so we were at a disadvantage, but Coyote did pretty well.”

  Art hefted the white block. “But what’s this get nitrogen, and give nitrogen, and burn nitrogen? What, do you torch your money when you get it?”

  “Well, some of it, yeah.”

  “So both of them were trying to lose?”

  “To lose?”

  “To come out short in the deal?”

  “Short?”

  “To give more than they got?”

  “Well, sure. Of course.”

  “Oh, of
course!” Art rolled his eyes. “But you . . . you can’t give too much more than you get, did I understand that?”

  “Right. That would be potlatching.”

  Nirgal watched his new friend mull this over.

  “But if you always give more than you get, how do you get anything to give, if you see what I mean?”

  Nirgal shrugged, glanced at Vijjika, hugged her waist suggestively. “You have to fold it, I guess. Or make it.”

  “Ah”

  “It’s the gift economy,” Vijjika told him.

  “The gift economy?”

  “It’s part of how we run things out here. There’s a money economy for the old buy-and-pay system, using units of hydrogen peroxide as the money. But most people try to do as much as they can by the nitrogen standard, which is the gift economy. The Sufis started that, and the people in Nirgal’s home.”

  “And Coyote,” Nirgal added. Although, as he glanced over at his father, he could see that Art might find it hard to envision Coyote as any sort of economic theorist. At the moment Coyote was tapping madly at a keyboard beside another man, and when he lost the game they were playing he shoved the man off his pillow, explaining to everyone that his hand had slipped. “I’ll arm wrestle you double or nothing,” he said, and he and the man plonked their elbows on the table and tensed their forearms, and went at it.

  “Arm wrestling!” Art said. “Now that’s something I can understand.”

  Coyote lost in seconds, and Art sat down to challenge the winner. He won in seconds, and it quickly became obvious that no one could resist him; the Bogdanovists even clustered across from him, and got three and then four hands clasping his hand and wrist, but he smacked every combination of them down onto the table. “Okay I win,” he said at last, and flopped back on his pillow. “How much do I owe you?”

  To avoid the aureoles of shattered terrain clustered north of Olympus Mons, they had to circle far to the north. They drove by night, and slept by day.

  Art and Nirgal spent many hours of these nights driving the car and talking. Art asked questions by the hundred, and Nirgal asked just as many back, as fascinated by Earth as Art was by Mars. They were a matched pair, each very interested in the other, which as always made a fertile ground for friendship.

  Nirgal had been frightened by the idea of contacting Terrans on his own, when it first occurred to him in his student years. It was clearly a dangerous notion, which had come to him one night in Sabishii and never let go. He had spent many hours over many months thinking about the idea, and doing research to figure out who he should contact, if he decided to act on the thought. The more he learned, the stronger grew his sense that it was a good idea, that having an alliance with a Terran power was critical to their hopes. And yet he was sure that all the members of the First Hundred he knew would not want to risk contact. If he did it, he would have to do it on his own. The risk, the stakes. . .

  He tried Praxis because of what he had read about it. It was a shot in the dark, as most critical acts are. An instinctive act: the trip to Burroughs, the walk into the Praxis offices in Hunt Mesa, the repeated requests for a line to William Fort.

  He got the line, although that in itself meant nothing. But later, in the first moment he had approached Art on the street in Sheffield, he knew that he had done well. That Praxis had done well. There had been, just in the look of the big man, some quality that Nirgal had found instantly reassuring—some openness, an easy, friendly ability. To use his childhood vocabulary, a balance of the two worlds. A man he trusted.

  One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable. Now, as the long rolling nights of their journey passed in the light of the IR imagers, the two men spoke to each other as if they too saw each other in the infrared. Their dialogue went on and on and on, and they got to know each other—to become friends. Nirgal’s impulsive reach to Earth was going to work out, he could see it right there in front of him hour after hour, just in the look on Art’s face, the curiosity, the interest.

  They talked about everything, in the way people will. Their pasts, their opinions, their hopes. Nirgal spent most of his time trying to explain Zygote, and Sabishii. “I spent some years in Sabishii. The issei there run an open university. There’s no records kept. You just attend the classes you want, and deal with your teacher and no one else. A lot of Sabishii operates off the record. It’s the capital of the demimonde, like Tharsis Tholus only much bigger. A great city. I met a lot of people there, from all over Mars.”

  The romance of Sabishii poured through his mind, memories flooding speech in all their profusion of incident, of feeling—all the individual emotions of that time, contradictory and incompatible though they were, experienced again simultaneously, in a dense polyphonic chord.

  “That must have been quite an experience,” Art remarked, “after growing up in a place like Zygote.”

  “Oh it was. It was wonderful.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Nirgal crouched forward in his chair, shivering a bit, and tried to convey some of what it had been like.

  At first it had been so strange. The issei had done incredible things; while the First Hundred had squabbled, fought, fissioned all over the planet, started a war, and were now dead or in hiding, the first group of Japanese settlers, the 240 who had founded Sabishii just seven years after the First Hundred had arrived, had stayed right next to their landing site, and built a city. They had absorbed all the changes that had followed, including the location of a mohole right next to their town; they had simply taken over the dig, and used the tailings for construction materials. When the thickening atmsophere made it possible they had gardened the surrounding terrain, which was rocky and high, not at all easy land, until they lived in the midst of a diffuse dwarfish forest, a bonsai krummholz, with alpine basins in the highlands above it. In the catastrophes of 2061 they had never moved, and, considered neutral, had been left alone by the transnats. In that solitude they had taken the excavated rock from their mohole and built it into long snaking mounds, all shot through with tunnels and rooms, ready to hide people from the south.

  Thus they had invented the demimonde, the most sophisticated and complex society on Mars, full of people who passed each other on the street like strangers but met at night in rooms, to talk, and make music, and make love. And even the people not part of the underworld were interesting, because the issei had started a university, the University of Mars, where many of the students, perhaps a third of the total, were young and Martian-born. And whether these young natives were surface-world or underground in origin, they recognized each other without the slightest difficulty, as people at home in a million subtle ways, in ways no Terran-born ever could be. And so they talked, and made music, and made love, and naturally quite a few of the surface natives were thus initiated into knowledge of the underground, until it began to seem as if all the natives knew all, and were natural allies.

  The professors included many of the Sabishiian issei and nisei, as well as distinguished visitors from all over Mars, and even from Terra. The students came from everywhere as well. There in the large handsome town they lived and studied and played, in streets and gardens and open pavilions, by ponds and in cafés, and on broad streetgrass boulevards, in a kind of Martian Kyoto.

  Nirgal had first seen the city on a brief visit with Coyote. He had found it too big, too crowded, too many strangers. But months later, tired of wandering the south with Coyote, so solitary for so much of the time, he had recalled the place as if it were the only destination possible. Sabishii!

  He had gone there and moved into a room under a roof, smaller than his bamboo room in Zygote, barely bigger than his bed. He joined classes, runs, calypso bands, café groups. He learned just how much his lectern held. He found out just how incredibly provincial and ignorant he was. Coyote gave him blocks of hydrogen peroxide, which he sold to the issei for what money he needed. Every day was an adventure, almost entirely unscheduled, just a tumble of encounters from h
our to hour, on and on until he dropped, often wherever he was. During the days he studied areology and ecological engineering, giving these disciplines he had begun to learn in Zygote a mathematical underpinning, and finding in the tutorials with Etsu, and in the work itself, that he had inherited some of his mother’s gift for seeing clearly the interplay of all the components of a system. The days were devoted to this extraordinarily fascinating work. So many human lives, given over to the gaining of this body of knowledge! So varied, the powers this knowledge gave them in the world!

  Then at night he might crash on the floor at a friend’s, after talking to a 140-year-old Bedouin about the Transcaucasus War, and the next night be playing bass steel drum or marimbas till dawn with twenty other kavajavaed Latin Americans and Polynesians, the next after that be in bed with one of the dusky beauties from the band, women as cheerful as Jackie at her best, and much less complicated. The following night he might go with friends to a performance of Shakespeare’s King John, and observe the great × that the play’s structure made, with John’s fortunes starting high and ending low, and the bastard’s starting low and ending high—and sit shaking as he watched the critical scene at the crossing of the X, in which John orders the death of young Arthur. And afterward walk with his friends all through the night city, talking about the play and what it said about the fortunes of certain of the issei, or about the various forces on Mars, or the Mars-Earth situation itself. And then the night after that, after some of them had spent the day out fell running, exploring high basins in his quest to see as much of the land as he could, they might stay out to sleep in a little survival tent, camping in one of the high cirques east of the city, heating a meal in the dusk as stars popped out everywhere in the purple sky, and the alpine flowers faded away into the basin of rock that held them all, as if in the palm of a giant hand.