Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Dao River,” Diana said. “Also called the Ruby River by the people who live down there.”

  “How many are there?”

  “A few thousand. Most live pretty close to Hell’s Gate. Upstream there are family homesteads and the like. And of course then the aquifer station at the head of the canyon, where a few hundred of them work.”

  “It’s one of the biggest aquifers?”

  “Yes. About three million cubic meters of water. So we’re pumping it out at a flow rate—well, you see it there. About a hundred thousand cubic meters a year.”

  “So in thirty years, no more river?”

  “Right. Although they could pump some water back upstream in a pipe, and let it out again. Or who knows, if the atmosphere gets humid enough, the slopes of Hadriaca might collect a snow-pack big enough to serve as a watershed. Then the river would fluctuate with the seasons, but that’s what rivers do, don’t they.”

  Maya stared down at the scene, which looked so much like something from her youth, some river . . . the upper Rioni, in Georgia? The Colorado, seen once on a visit to America? She couldn’t recall. So fuzzy, all that life. “It’s beautiful. And so . . .” She shook her head; the sight had a quality she could not recall ever seeing before, as if it were out of time, a prophetic glimpse into a distant future.

  “Here, let’s go up the road a bit farther and see Hadriaca.”

  Maya nodded, and they returned to the car. Once or twice as they continued uphill, the road rose far enough above the foundation to give them another view down onto the canyon floor, and Maya saw that the little river continued to cut through rocks and vegetation. But Diana did not pause, and Maya saw no sign of settlements.

  At the upper end of the tented canyon there was a big concrete block of a physical plant, housing the gas exchange mechanisms, and the pumping station. A forest of windmills stood on the rising slope to the north of this station, the big props all facing west and slowly spinning. Above that array rose the broad low cone of Hadriaca Patera, a volcano whose sides were unusually furrowed by a dense crisscrossing network of lava channels, the later ones cutting over the earlier ones. Now the winter’s snow-pack had filled the channels, but not the exposed black rock between them, which had been blown clear by the strong winds accompanying the snowstorms. The result was an enormous black cone sticking into the bruised sky, festooned with hundreds of tangled white ribbons.

  “Very handsome,” Maya said. “Can they see it from the canyon floor?”

  “No. But a lot of them at this end work up on the rim anyway, at the well or the power station. So they see it every day.”

  “These settlers—who are they?”

  “Let’s go meet them and see,” Diana said. Maya nodded, enjoying Diana’s style, which still reminded her a bit of Ann. The sansei and yonsei were all strange to Maya, but Diana much less than most—a bit private perhaps, but compared to her more exotic contemporaries, and the Zygote kids, welcomely ordinary.

  While Maya observed Diana, thinking this, Diana drove their rover into the canyon, down a steep road laid over a giant ancient talus slope near the head of Dao. This was where the original aquifer outburst had occurred, but there was very little chaotic terrain—just titanic talus slopes, permanently settled at the angle of repose.

  The canyon floor itself was basically flat and unbroken. Soon they were driving down it, on a regolith track sprayed with a fixative. The track ran by the stream where it could. After about an hour’s driving they passed a green meadow, tucked into the lazy curve of a fat oxbow. In the center of this meadow, in a knot of piñon pine and aspen, huddled a gathering of low shingléd roofs, with faint smoke rising from a solitary chimney.

  Maya stared at the settlement (corral and pasture, truck garden, barn, bee boxes), marveling at its beauty, and its archaic wholeness, its seeming detachment from the great redrock desert plateau above the canyon—detachment from everything really, from history, from Time itself. A mesocosm. What did they think in those little buildings of Mars and Earth, and all their troubles? Why should they care?

  Diana stopped the car, and a few people came out and crossed the meadow to see who they were. Pressure under the tent was 500 millibars, which helped to support the weight of the tenting, as the atmosphere at large was averaging about 250 millibars now. So Maya popped the lock of the car, and got out without her helmet on, feeling undressed and uncomfortable.

  These settlers were all young natives. Most of them had come down in the last few years from Burroughs and Elysium. Some Terrans lived in the valley too, they said—not many, but there was a Praxis program that brought up groups from smaller countries, and here in the valley they had recently welcomed some Swiss, and Greeks, and Navajo. And there was a Russian settlement down near Hell’s Gate. So they heard some different languages in the valley, but English was the lingua franca, and the first tongue of almost all of the natives. They had accents to their English that Maya had not heard before, and made odd mistakes in grammar, at least to her ear; almost every verb after the first one was in present tense, for instance. “We went downstream and see some Swiss are working on the river. Stabilizing the banks in some places, with plants or rocks. They say in a few years the streambed is flushed enough for the water to clear.”

  Maya said, “It will still be the color of the cliffs, and the sky.”

  “Yeah, of course. But clear water looks better than silty water, somehow.”

  “How do you know?” Maya enquired.

  They squinted and frowned, thinking about it. “Just from the way it looks in your hand, eh?”

  Maya, smiled. “It’s wonderful you have so much room. Unbelievable what big spaces they can roof these days, isn’t it?”

  They shrugged, as if they hadn’t thought of it that way. One said, “We look forward to the day when we take the tenting off, actually. We miss the rain, and the wind.”

  “How do you know?”

  But they knew.

  She and Diana drove on, passing very small villages. Isolated farms. A pasture of sheep. Vineyards. Orchards. Cultivated fields. Big packed greenhouses, gleaming like labs. Once a coyote ran across the track ahead of their car. Then on a high little lawn under a talus slope Diana spotted a brown bear, and later some Dall sheep. In the little villages people were trading food and tools in open marketplaces, and talking over the day’s events. They did not monitor the news from Earth, and seemed to Maya astonishingly ignorant of it. All but a little community of Russians, who spoke a mongrel Russian which nevertheless brought tears to Maya’s eyes, and who told her that things on Earth were falling apart. As usual. They were happy to be in the canyon.

  In one of the small villages there was an outdoor market in full swing, and there in the middle of the crowd was Nirgal, chomping an apple and nodding vigorously as someone spoke to him. He saw Maya and Diana get out of the car and rushed over and hugged her, lifting her off the ground. “Maya, what are you doing here?”

  “On a tour from Odessa. This is Diana, Paul’s daughter. What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, visiting the valley. They’ve got some soil problems I’m trying to help with.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Nirgal was an ecological engineer, and seemed to have inherited some of Hiroko’s talent. The valley mesocosm was relatively new, they were still planting seedlings all up and down it, and though the soil had been prepped, nitrogen and potassium deficiencies were causing many plants not to thrive. As they walked around the marketplace Nirgal discussed this, and pointed out local crops and imported goods, describing the economics of the valley. “So they’re not self-sufficient?” Maya asked.

  “No no. Not even close. But they do grow a lot of their own food, and then trade other crops, or give them away.”

  He was working on eco-economics as well, it seemed. And he already had a lot of friends here; people kept coming up to hug him, and as he had his arm over Maya’s shoulders, she got pulled into these embraces and then introduced to on
e young native after another, all of them looking delighted to see Nirgal again. He remembered all their names, asked how they were doing, kept up the questions as they continued to circulate through the market, past tables of bread and vegetables, and bags of barley and fertilizer, and baskets of berries and plums, until there was a whole little crowd of them like a mobile party, which finally settled around long pine tables outside a tavern. Nirgal kept Maya at his side throughout the rest of the afternoon, and she watched all the young faces, relaxed and happy, observing how much Nirgal was like John—how people warmed to him, and then were warm to each other—every occasion like a festival, touched by his grace. They poured each other’s drinks, they fed Maya a big meal “all local, all local,” they talked with each other in their quick Martian English, detailing gossip and explaining their dreams. Oh, he was a special boy all right, as fey as Hiroko and yet utterly normal, at one and the same time. Diana for instance was simply latched to his other side, and a lot of the other young women there looked like they wished they were in her place, or Maya’s. Perhaps had been in the past. Well, there were some advantages to being an ancient babushka. She could mother him shamelessly and he only grinned, and nothing they could do. Yes, there was something charismatic about him: lean jaw, mobile humorous mouth, wide-set, brown, slightly Asiatic eyes, thick eyebrows, unruly black hair, long graceful body, though he was not as tall as most of them. Nothing exceptional. It was mostly his manner, friendly and curious and prone to hilarity.

  “What about politics?” she asked him late that night, as they walked together from the village down to the stream. “What do you say to them?”

  “I use the Dorsa Brevia document. My notion is that we should enact it immediately, in our daily lives. Most of the people in this valley have left the official network, you see, and are living in the alternative economy.”

  “I noticed. That’s one of the things that got me up here.”

  “Yeah, well, you see what’s happening. The sansei and yonsei like it. They think of it as a homegrown system.”

  “The question is, what does UNTA think of it.”

  “But what can they do? I don’t think they care, from what I can see.” He was constantly traveling, and had been now for years, and had seen a lot of Mars—much more than Maya had, she realized. “We’re hard to see, and we don’t appear to be challenging them. So they don’t bother with us. They’re not even aware how widespread we are.”

  Maya shook her head dubiously. They stood on the bank of the stream, which in this spot was noisily gurgling over shallows, the night-purple surface scarcely reflecting the starlight. “It’s so silty,” Nirgal said.

  “What do you call yourselves?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a kind of political party, Nirgal, or a social movement. You must call it something.”

  “Oh. Well, some say we’re Booneans, or a kind of Marsfirst wing. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t name it, myself. Maybe Ka. Or Free Mars. We say that, as a kind of greeting. Verb, noun, whatever. Free Mars.”

  “Hmm,” Maya said, feeling the chill humid wind on her cheek, Nirgal’s arm around her waist. An alternative economy, functioning without the rule of law, was intriguing but dangerous; it could turn into a black economy run by gangsters, and there was very little that any idealistic village could do about it. So that as a solution to the Transitional Authority it was somewhat illusory, she judged.

  But when she expressed these reservations to Nirgal, he agreed. “I don’t think of this as the final step. But I think it helps. It’s what we can do now. And then, when the time comes . . .”

  Maya nodded in the darkness. It was another Creche Crescent, she thought suddenly. They walked back up to the village together, where the party was still going on. There five young women at least began jockeying to be the last one at Nirgal’s side when the party ended, and with a laugh only slightly edged (if she were young they would not have had a chance) Maya left them to it and went to bed.

  After two days driving downstream from the market village, still forty kilometers from Hell’s Gate, they came around a bend in the canyon and could see down the length of it, to the towers of the piste’s suspension bridge. Like something out of a different world, Maya thought, with a different technology entirely. The towers were six hundred meters high, and ten kilometers apart—a truly immense bridge, dwarfing the town of Hell’s Gate itself, which did not roll over the horizon for another hour, and then came visible from the rim downward, its buildings spilling down the steep canyon walls like some dramatic seafront village in Spain or Portugal—but all in the shadow of the enormous bridge. Enormous, yes—and yet there were bridges twice as big as it in Chryse, and with the continual improvements in materials, there was no end in sight. The new elevator cable’s carbon nanotube filament had a tensile strength that was overkill even for the elevator’s needs, and using it you could build just about any surface bridge you could possibly imagine; people spoke of bridging Marineris, and there were jokes about running cable car lines between the prince volcanoes on Tharsis, to save people the fifteen-kilometer vertical drops between the three peaks.

  Back in Hell’s Gate Maya and Diana returned the car to the garage, and had a big dinner in a restaurant about halfway up the wall of the valley, under the bridge. After that Diana had friends she wanted to see, so Maya excused herself and went to the Deep Waters offices, and her room. But outside the glass doors of her room, above its little balcony, the great span of the bridge arched through the stars, and remembering Dao Canyon and its people, and black Hadriaca ribboned white with its snow-filled channels, she had great difficulty getting to sleep. She went out and sat curled in a blanket, on a chair on her balcony, for a good part of the night, watching the underside of the giant bridge and thinking about Nirgal and the young natives, and what they meant.

  The next morning they were supposed to take the next circumHellas train, but Maya asked Diana to drive her out onto the basin floor instead, to see in person what happened to the water running down the Dao River. Diana was happy to oblige.

  At the lower end of the town, the stream poured into a narrow reservoir, dammed by a thick concrete dam and pump, located right at the tent wall. Outside the tent, water was carried off across the basin in a fat insulated pipeline, set on three-meter pylons. The pipeline ran down the broad gentle eastern slope of the basin, and they followed it in another company rover, until the crumbled cliffs of Hell’s Gate disappeared over the low dunes of the horizon behind them. An hour later the towers of the bridge were still visible, poking up over the skyline.

  A few kilometers farther on, the pipeline ran out over a reddish plain of cracked ice—a kind of glacier, except that it fanned out right to left over the plain for as far as they could see. It was the current shore of their new sea, in fact, or at least one lobe of it, frozen in its place. The pipeline ran out over the ice, then descended into it, disappearing a couple of kilometers from shore.

  A small, nearly submerged crater ring stuck out into the ice like a curving double peninsula, and Diana followed tracks onto one peninsula and drove until they were as far out in the ice as they could get. The visible world before them was completely covered with ice; behind them lay the rising slope of sand. “This lobe extends out a long way now,” Diana said. “Look there—” She pointed at a silver twinkling on the western horizon.

  Maya took a pair of binoculars from the dash. On the horizon she could make out what appeared to be the northern edge of the lobe of ice, where it gave way again to rising sand dunes. As she watched, a mass of ice at this border toppled, looking like a Greenland glacier caving into the sea, except that when it hit the sand it shattered into hundreds of white pieces. Then there was a spill of water, running as dark as the Ruby River out over the sand. Dust dashed up and away from this stream, and blew south on the wind. The edges of the new flow began to whiten, but Maya saw that it was nothing like the frightening speed with which the flood in Mari
neris had frozen in ’61. it stayed liquid, with hardly any frost steam, for minute after minute, right out there in the open air! Oh the world was warmer, all right, and the atmosphere thicker; up to 260 millibars sometimes down here in the basin, and the temperature outside at the moment was 271°K. A very pleasant day! She surveyed the surface of the ice lobe through the binoculars, and saw that it was liberally dotted by the bright white sheens of meltwater ponds that had refrozen clean and flat.

  “Things are changing,” Maya said, although not to Diana; and Diana did not reply.

  Eventually the flood of new dark water whitened all over its surface, and stopped moving. “It’s coming out somewhere else now,” Diana said. “It works like sedimentation in a river delta. The main channel for this lobe is actually well to the south of here.”

  “I’m glad I saw this. Let’s get back.”

  They drove back to Hell’s Gate, and that night had supper together again, on the same restaurant terrace under the great bridge. Maya asked Diana a great number of questions about Paul and Esther and Kasei and Nirgal and Rachel and Emily and Reull and the rest of Hiroko’s brood, and their children and their children’s children. What were they doing now? What were they going to do? Did Nirgal have lots of followers?

  “Oh yes, of course. You saw how it is. He travels all the time, and there’s a whole network of natives in the northern cities who take care of him. Friends, and friends of friends, and so on.”

  “And you think these people will support a . . .”

  “Another revolution?”

  “I was going to say independence movement.”