Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  A distant wind-washed hum; perhaps the harping rocks, perhaps the buzz of insects. Black midges, bees … in this air they would only have to sustain about thirty millibars of CO2, because there was so little partial pressure driving it into them, and at some point internal saturation was enough to hold any more out. For mammals that might not work so well. But they might be able to sustain twenty millibars, and with plant life flourishing all over the planet’s lower elevations, CO2 levels might drop to twenty millibars fairly soon; and then they could dispense with the air tanks and the face masks. Set loose animals on Mars.

  In the faint hum of the air he seemed to hear their voices, immanent or emergent, coming in the next great surge of viriditas. The hum of distant voices; the wind; the peace of this little pool on its rocky moor; the Nirgalish pleasure he took in the sharp cold… “Ann should see this,” he murmured.

  Then again, with the space mirrors gone, presumably everything he saw here was doomed. This was the upper limit of the biosphere, and surely with the loss of light and heat the upper limit would drop, at least temporarily, perhaps for good. He didn’t like that; and it seemed possible there might be ways to compensate for the lost light. After all, the terraforming had been doing quite well before the mirrors’ arrival; they hadn’t been necessary. And it was good not to depend on something so fragile, and better to be rid of it now rather than later, when large animal populations might have died in the setback along with the plants.

  Even so it was a shame. But the dead plant matter would only be more fertilizer in the end, and without the same kind of suffering as animals. At least so he assumed. Who knew how plants felt? When you looked closely at them, glowing in all their detailed articulation like complex crystals, they were as mysterious as any other life. And now their presence here made the entire plain, everything he could see, into one great fellfield, spreading in a slow tapestry over the rock; breaking down the weathered minerals, melding with them to make the first soils. A very slow process. There was a vast complexity in every pinch of soil; and the look of this fellfield was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

  * * *

  To weather. This whole world was weathering. The first printed use of the word with that meaning had appeared in a book on Stonehenge, appropriately enough, in 1665. “The weathering of so many Centuries of Years.” On this stone world. Weathering. Language as the first science, exact yet vague, or multivalent. Throwing things together. The mind as weather. Or being weathered.

  There were clouds coming up over the nearby hillocks to the west, their bottoms resting on a thermal layer as levelly as if pressing down on glass. Streamers like spun wool led the way east.

  Sax stood up and climbed out of the pool’s depression. Out of the shelter of the hole, the wind was shockingly strong — in it the cold intensified as if an ice age had struck full force that very second. Windchill factor, of course; if the temperature was 262 K, and the wind was blowing at about seventy kilometers an hour, with gusts much stronger, then the windchill factor would create a temperature equivalent of about 250 K. Was that right? That was very cold indeed to be out without a helmet. And in fact his hands were going numb. His feet as well. And his face was already without feeling, like a thick mask at the front of his head. He was shivering, and his blinks tended to stick together; his tears were freezing. He needed to get back to his car.

  He plodded over the rockscape, amazed at the power of the wind to intensify cold. He had not experienced wind-chill like this since childhood, if then, and had forgotten how frigid one became. Staggering in the blasts, he climbed onto a low swell of the ancient lava and looked upslope. There was his rover — big, vivid green, gleaming like a spaceship — about two kilometers up the slope. A very welcome sight.

  But now snow began to fly horizontally past him, giving a dramatic demonstration of the wind’s great speed. Little granular pellets clicked against his goggles. He took off toward the rover, keeping his head down and watching the snow swirl over the rocks. There was so much snow in the air that he thought his goggles were fogging up, but after a painfully cold operation to wipe the insides, it became clear that the condensation was actually out in the air. Fine snow, mist, dust, it was hard to tell.

  He plodded on. The next time he looked up, the air was so thick with snow that he couldn’t see all the way to the rover. Nothing to do but press on. It was lucky the suit was well insulated and sewn through with heating elements, because even with the heat on at its highest power, the cold was cutting against his left side as if he were naked to the blast. Visibility extended now something like twenty meters, shifting rapidly depending on how much snow was passing by at the moment; he was in an amorphously expanding and contracting bubble of whiteness, which itself was shot through with flying snow, and what appeared to be a kind of frozen fog or mist. It seemed likely he was in the storm cloud itself. His legs were stiff. He wrapped his arms around his torso, his gloved hands trapped in his armpits. There was no obvious way of telling if he was still walking in the right direction. It seemed like he was on the same course he had been when visibility had collapsed, but it also seemed like he had gone a long way toward the rover.

  There were no compasses on Mars; there were, however, APS systems in his wristpad and back in the car. He could call up a detailed map on his wristpad and then locate himself and his car on it; then walk for a while and track his positions; then make his way directly toward the car. That seemed like a great deal of work — which brought it to him that his thinking, like his body, was being affected by the cold. It wasn’t that much work, after all…

  So he crouched down in the lee of a boulder and tried the method. The theory behind it was obviously sound, but the instrumentation left something to be desired; the wristpad’s screen was only five centimeters across, so small that he couldn’t see the dots on it at all well. Finally he spotted them, walked awhile, and took another fix. But unfortunately his results indicated that he should be hiking at about a right angle to the direction he had been going.

  This was unnerving to the point of paralysis. His body insisted that it had been going the right way; his mind (part of it, anyway) was pretty certain that it was better to trust the results on the wristpad, and assume that he had gotten off course somewhere. But it didn’t feel that way; the ground was still at a slope that supported the feeling in his body. The contradiction was so intense that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal torque twisting him until it actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his body was twisting to the side against the pressure of what the wristpad was telling him — the physiological effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was amazing. It almost made one believe in the existence of an internal magnet in the body, as in the pineal glands of migrating birds — but there was no magnetic field to speak of. Perhaps his skin was sensitive to solar radiation to the point of being able to pinpoint the sun’s location, even when the sky was a thick dark gray everywhere. It had to be something like that, because the feeling that he was properly oriented was so strong!

  Eventually the nausea of the disorientation passed, and in the end he stood and took off in the direction suggested by the wristpad, feeling horrible about it, listing a little uphill just to try to make himself feel better. But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science. And so he plodded on, traversing the slope, shading somewhat uphill, clumsier than ever. His nearly insensible feet ran into rocks that he did not see, even though they were directly beneath him; he stumbled time after time. It was surprising how thoroughly snow could obscure the vision.

  After a while he stopped, and tried again to locate the rover by APS; and his wristpad map suggested an entirely new direction, behind him and to the left.

  It was possible he had walked past the car. Was it? He did not want to walk back into the wind. But now that was the way to the rover, apparently. So he ducked his head down into the biting cold and persevered. His skin was in an odd state, itching under the heating elements crisscros
sing his suit, numb everywhere else. His feet were numb. It was hard to walk. There was no feeling in his face; clearly frostbite was in the offing. He needed shelter.

  He had a new idea. He called up Aonia, on Pavonis, and got her almost instantly.

  “Sax! Where are you?”

  “That’s what I’m calling about!” he said. “I’m in a storm on Daedalia! And I can’t find my car! I was wondering if you would look at my APS and my rover’s! And see if you can tell me which direction I should go!”

  He put the wristpad right against his ear. “Ka wow, Sax.” It sounded like Aonia was shouting too, bless her. Her voice was an odd addition to the scene. “Just a second, let me check!… Okay! There you are! And your car too! What are you doing so far south? I don’t think anyone can get to you very quickly! Especially if there’s a storm!”

  “There is a storm,” Sax said. “That’s why I called.”

  “Okay! You’re about three hundred and fifty meters to the west of your car.”

  “Directly west?”

  “ — and a little south! But how will you orient yourself?”

  Sax considered it. Mars’s lack of a magnetic field had never struck him as such a problem before, but there it was. He could assume the wind was directly out of the west, but that was just an assumption. “Can you check the nearest weather stations and tell me what direction the wind is coming from?” he said.

  “Sure, but it won’t be much good for local variations! Here, just a second, I’m getting some help here from the others.”

  A few long icy moments passed.

  “The wind is coming from west northwest, Sax! So you need to walk with the wind at your back and a touch to your left!”

  “I know. Be quiet now, until you see what course I’m making, and then correct it.”

  He walked again, fortunately almost downwind. After five or six painful minutes his wrist beeped.

  Aonia said, “You’re right on course!”

  This was encouraging, and he carried on with a bit more speed, though the wind was penetrating through his ribs right to his core.

  “Okay, Sax! Sax?”

  “Yes!”

  “You and your car are right on the same spot!”

  But there was no car in view.

  His heart thudded in his chest. Visibility was still some twenty meters; but no car. He had to get shelter fast. “Walk in an ever-increasing spiral from where you are,” the little voice on the wrist was suggesting. A good idea in theory, but he couldn’t bear to execute it; he couldn’t face the wind. He stared dully at his black plastic wristpad console. No more help to be had there.

  For a moment he could make out snowbanks, off to his left. He shuffled over to investigate, and found that the snow rested in the lee of a shoulder-high escarpment, a feature he did not remember seeing before, but there were some radial breaks in the rock caused by the Tharsis rise, and this must be one of them, protecting a snowbank. Snow was a tremendous insulator. Though it had little intrinsic appeal as shelter. But Sax knew mountaineers often dug into it to survive nights out. It got one out of the wind.

  He stepped to the bottom of the snowbank, and kicked it with one numb foot. It felt like kicking rock. Digging a snow cave seemed out of the question. But the effort itself would warm him a bit. And it was less windy at the foot of the bank. So he kicked and kicked, and found that underneath a thick cake of windslab there was the usual powder. A snow cave might be possible after all. He dug away at it.

  “Sax, Sax!” cried the voice from his wrist. “What are you doing!”

  “Making a snow cave,” he said. “A bivouac.”

  “Oh Sax — we’re flying in help! We’ll be able to get in next morning no matter what, so hang on! We’ll keep talking to you!”

  “Fine.”

  He kicked and dug. On his knees he scooped out hard granular snow, tossing it into the swirling flakes flying over him. It was hard to move, hard to think. He bitterly regretted walking so far from the rover, then getting so absorbed in the landscape around that ice pond. It was a shame to get killed when things were getting so interesting. Free but dead. There was a little hollow in the snow now, through an oblong hole in the windslab. Wearily he sat down and wedged himself back into the space, lying on his side and pushing back with his boots. The snow felt solid against the back of his suit, and warmer than the ferocious wind. He welcomed the shivering in his torso, felt a vague fear when it ceased. Being too cold to shiver was a bad sign.

  Very weary, very cold. He looked at his wristpad. It was four P.M. He had been walking in the storm for just over three hours. He would have to survive another fifteen or twenty hours before he could expect to be rescued. Or perhaps in the morning the storm would have abated, and the location of the rover become obvious. One way or another he had to survive the night by huddling in a snow cave. Or else venture out again and find the rover. Surely it couldn’t be far away. But until the wind lessened, he could not bear to be out looking for it.

  He had to wait in the snow cave. Theoretically he could survive a night out, though at the moment he was so cold it was hard to believe that. Night temperatures on Mars still plummeted drastically. Perhaps the storm might lessen in the next hour, so that he could find the rover and get to it before dark.

  He told Aonia and the others where he was. They sounded very concerned, but there was nothing they could do. He felt irritation at their voices.

  It seemed many minutes before he had another thought. When one was chilled, blood flow was greatly reduced to the limbs — perhaps that was true for the cortex as well, the blood going preferentially to the cerebellum where the necessary work would continue right to the end.

  More time passed. Near dark, it appeared. Should call out again. He was too cold — something seemed wrong. Advanced age, altitude, CO2 levels — some factor or combination of factors was making it worse than .it should be. He could die of exposure in a single night. Appeared in fact to be doing just that. Such a storm! Loss of the mirrors, perhaps. Instant ice age. Extinction event.

  The wind was making odd noises, like shouts. Powerful gusts no doubt. Like faint shouts, howling “Sax! Sax! Sax!”

  Had they flown someone in? He peered out into the dark storm, the snowflakes somehow catching the late light and tearing overhead like dim white static.

  Then between his ice-crusted eyelashes he saw a figure emerge out of the darkness. Short, round, helmeted. “Sax!” The sound was distorted, it was coming from a loudspeaker in the figure’s helmet. Those Da Vinci techs were very resourceful people. Sax tried to respond, and found he was too cold to speak. Just moving his boots out of the hole was a stupendous effort. But it appeared to catch this figure’s eye, because it turned and strode purposefully through the wind, moving like a skillful sailor on a bouncing deck, weaving this way and that through the slaps of the gusts. The figure reached him and bent down and grabbed Sax by the wrist, and he saw its face through the faceplate, as clear as through a window. It was Hiroko.

  She smiled her brief smile and hauled him up out of his cave, pulling so hard on his left wrist that his bones creaked painfully.

  “Ow!” he said.

  Out in the wind the cold was like death itself. Hiroko pulled his left arm over her shoulder, and, still holding hard to his wrist just above the wristpad, she led him past the low escarpment and right into the teeth of the gale.

  “My rover is near,” he mumbled, leaning hard on her and trying to move his legs fast enough to make steady plants of the foot. So good to see her again. A solid little person, very powerful as always.

  “It’s over here,” she said through her loudspeaker. “You were pretty close.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “We were tracking you as you came down Arsia. Then today when the storm hit I checked you out, and saw you were out of your rover. After that I came out to see how you were doing.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You have to be careful in storms.”

 
; Then they were standing before his rover. She let go of his wrist, and it throbbed painfully. She bonked her faceplate against his goggles. “Go on in,” she said.

  He climbed carefully up the steps to the rover’s lock door; opened it; fell inside. He turned clumsily to make room for Hiroko, but she wasn’t in the door. He leaned back out into the wind, looked around. No sight of her. It was dusk; the snow now looked black. “Hiroko!” he cried.

  No answer.

  He closed the lock door, suddenly frightened. Oxygen deprivation — He pumped the lock, fell through the inside door into the little changing room. It was shockingly warm, the air a steamy blast. He plucked ineffectively at his clothes, made no progress. He went at it more methodically. Goggles and face mask off. They were coated with ice. Ah — possibly his air supply had been restricted by ice in the tube between tank and mask. He sucked in several deep breaths, then sat still through another bout of nausea. Pulled off his hood, unzipped the suit. It was almost more than he could do to get his boots off. Then the suit. His underclothes were cold and clammy. His hands were burning as if on fire. It was a good sign, proof that he was not substantially frostbitten; nevertheless it was agony.

  His whole skin began to buzz with the same inflamed pain. What caused that, return of blood to capillaries? Return of sensation to chilled nerves? Whatever it was, it hurt almost unbearably. “Ow!”

  He was in excellent spirits. It was not just that he had been spared from death, which was nice; but that Hiroko was alive. Hiroko was alive! It was incredibly good news. Many of his friends had assumed all along that she and her group had slipped away from the assault on Sabishii, moving through that town’s mound maze back out into their system of hidden refuges; but Sax had never been sure. There was no evidence to support the idea. And there were elements in the security forces perfectly capable of murdering a group of dissidents and disposing of their bodies. This, Sax had thought, was probably what had happened. But he had kept this opinion to himself, and reserved judgment. There had been no way of knowing for sure.