Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It was a little group of Red ecoteurs. They had recognized her rover, they said after she let them inside, from the description given by the people at the Tempe refuge. They had been hoping they might run into her, and so they were happy; laughing, chattering, moving around the cabin to touch her, young tall natives with stone eyeteeth and gleaming young eyes, some of them Orientals, some white, some black. All happy. She recognized them from Pavonis Mons, not individually, but as a group; the young fanatics. Again she felt a chill.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To Botany Bay,” a young woman replied. “We’re going to take out the Whitebook labs.”

  “And Boone Station,” another added.

  “Ah no,” Ann said.

  They went still, looked at her carefully. Like Kasei and Dao in Lastflow.

  “What do you mean?” the young woman said.

  Ann took a breath, tried to figure that out. They were watching her closely.

  “Were you there in Sheffield?” she asked.

  They nodded; they knew what she meant.

  “Then you should know already,” she said slowly. “It’s pointless to achieve a red Mars by pouring blood over the planet. We have to find another way. We can’t do it by killing people. Not even by killing animals or plants, or blowing up machines. It won’t work. It’s destructive. It doesn’t appeal to people, do you understand? No one is won over. In fact they’re put off. The more we do things like that, the more green they become. So we defeat our purpose. If we know that and do it anyway, then we’re betraying the purpose. Do you understand? We aren’t doing it for anything but our own feelings. Because we’re angry. Or for thrills. We have to find another way.”

  They stared at her, uncomprehending, annoyed, shocked, contemptuous. But riveted. This was Ann Clayborne, after all.

  “I don’t know for sure what that other way is,” she went on. “I can’t tell you that. I think … that’s what I think we have to start working on. It has to be something like a red areophany. The areophany has always been understood as a green thing, right from the start. I suppose because of Hi-roko, because she took the lead in defining it. And in bringing it into being. So the areophany has always been mixed up with viriditas. But there’s no reason that should be. We have to change that, or we’ll never accomplish anything. There has to be a red worship of this place that people can learn to feel. The redness of the primal planet has to become a counterforce to viriditas. We have to stain that green until it turns some other color. Some color like you see in certain stones, like jasper, or ferric serpentine. You see what I mean. It will mean taking people out onto the land, maybe, up into the highlands, so they can see what it is. It will mean moving there, all over the place, and establishing tenure and stewardship rights, so that we can speak for the land and they will have to listen. Wanderers’ rights as well, areologists’ rights, nomads’ rights. That’s what areoformation might mean. Do you understand?”

  She stopped. The young natives were still attentive, now looking perhaps concerned for her, or concerned at what she had said.

  “We’ve talked about this kind of thing before,” one young man said. “And there are people doing it. Sometimes we do it. But we think an active resistance is a necessary part of the struggle. Otherwise we’ll just get steamrolled. They’ll green everything.”

  “Not if we stain it all. Right from the inside, right from their hearts too. But sabotage, murder; it’s green that springs out of all that, believe me I’ve seen it. I’ve been fighting just as long as you and I’ve seen it. You stomp on life and it just comes back stronger.”

  The young man wasn’t convinced. “They gave us the six-kilometer limit because they were scared of us, because we were the driving force behind the revolution. If it weren’t for us fighting, the metanats would still rule everything here.”

  “That was a different opponent. When we fought the Terrans, then the Martian greens were impressed. When we fight the Martian greens they’re not impressed, they’re angry. And they get more green than ever.”

  The group sat in silence, thoughtful, perhaps disheartened.

  “But what do we do?” a gray-haired woman said.

  “Go to some land that’s endangered,” Ann suggested. She gestured out the window. “Right here wouldn’t be bad. Or somewhere near the six-k border. Settle, incorporate a town, make it a primal refuge, make it a wonderful place. We’ll creep back down from the highlands.”

  They considered this glumly.

  “Or go into the cities and start a tour group, and a legal fund. Show people the land. Sue every change they propose.”

  “Shit,” the young man said, shaking his head. “That sounds awful.”

  “Yes it does,” Ann said. “There’s ugly work to be done. But we have to get them from the inside too. And that’s where they live.”

  Long faces. They sat around and talked about it some more; the way they lived now, the way they wanted to live. What they might do to get from one to the other. The impossibility of the guerrilla life after the war was over. And so on. There were lots of big sighs, some tears, recriminations, encouragements.

  “Come with me tomorrow and take a straight look at this ice sea,” Ann suggested.

  The next day the guerrilla group traveled south with her along the sixtieth longitude, kilometer by difficult kilometer. Khala, the Arabs called it; the empty land. On the one hand it was beautiful, a Noachian desolation of rockscapes, and their hearts were full. On the other hand the ecoteurs were quiet, subdued, as if on a pilgrimage in some uncertain funereal mode. Together they came to the big canyon called Nilokeras Scopulus, and dropped into it on a broad rough natural ramp. To the east lay Chryse Planitia, covered by ice: another arm of the northern sea. They had not escaped it. Ahead to the south lay the Nilokeras Fossae, the terminal end of a canyon complex that began far to the south, in the enormous pit of Hebes Chasma. Hebes Chasma had no exit, but its subsidence was now understood to have been caused by the aquifer outbreak just to the west, at the top of Echus Chasma. A very great amount of water had gushed down Echus against the hard western side of Lunae Planum, carving the steep high cliff at Echus Overlook; then it had come to a. break in that stupendous cliff, and had rushed down and through, tearing the big bend of Kasei Vallis, and cutting a deep channel out onto the lowlands of Chryse. It had been one of the biggest aquifer outbreaks in Martian history.

  Now the northern sea had flowed back into Chryse, and water was filling back into the lower end of Nilokeras and Kasei. The flat-topped hill that was Sharanov Crater stood like a giant castle keep on the high promontory over the mouth of this new fjord. Out in the middle of the fjord lay a long narrow island, one of the lemniscate islands of the ancient flood, now islanded again, stubbornly red in the sea of white ice. Eventually this fjord would make an even better harbor than Botany Bay: it was steep-walled, but there were benches tucked here and there that could become harbor towns. There would of course be the west wind funneling down Kasei to worry about, katabatic onslaughts holding the sailing ships out in the Chryse Gulf…

  So strange. She led the group of silent Reds to a ramp that got them down onto a broad bench to the west of the ice fjord. By then it was evening, and she led them out of the rovers and down to the shore for a suhset walk.

  At the moment of sunset itself, they found themselves standing in a tight unhappy cluster before a solitary ice block some four meters tall, its melted convexities as smooth as muscle. They stood so that the sun was behind the ice block and shining through it. To both sides of the block brilliant light gleamed off the glassy wet sand. An admonition of light. Undeniable, blazingly real; what were they to make of it? They stood and stared in silence.

  When the sun blinked out over the black horizon, Ann walked away from the group and went alone up to her rover. She looked back down the slope; the Reds were still there by the beached iceberg. It looked like a white god among them, tinted orange like the crumpled white sheet of the ice bay.
White god, bear, bay, a dolmen of Martian ice: the ocean would be there with them forever, as real as the rock.

  The next day she drove up Kasei Vallisto the west, toward Echus Chasma. Up and up she drove, on broad bench after bench, making easy progress, until she came to where Kasei curved left and up onto the floor of Echus. The curve was one of the biggest, most obvious water-carved features on the planet. But now she found that the flat arroyo floor was covered by dwarf trees, so small they were almost shrubs: black-barked, thorny, the dark green leaves as glossy and razor-edged as holly leaves. Moss blanketed the ground underneath these black trees, but very little else; it was a single-species forest, covering Kasei Vallis from canyon wall to canyon wall, filling the great curve like some oversized smut.

  By necessity Ann drove right over top of the low forest, and the rover tilted this way and that as the branches, tough as manzanita, stubbornly gave under its wheels and then whipped back into place when they were freed. It would be nearly impossible to walk through this canyon anymore, Ann thought, this deep-walled canyon so narrow and rounded, a kind of Utah of the imagination — or so it had been — now like the black forest of a fairy tale, inescapable, filled with flying black things, and a white shape seen scuttling in the dusk… There was no sign of the UNTA security complex that had once occupied the turn of the valley.

  A curse on your house to the seventh generation, a curse on the innocent land as well. Sax had been tortured here, and so he had sown fireseed in the ground and torched the place, causing a thorn forest to sprout and cover it. And they called scientists rational creatures! A curse on their house too, Ann thought with teeth clenched, to the seventh generation and seven after that.

  She hissed and drove on, up Echus, toward the steep volcanic cone of Tharsis Tholis. There was a town there, tucked on the side of the volcano where the slope leveled off. The bear had told her Peter was headed there, and so she avoided it. Peter, the land drowned; Sax, the land burned. Once he had been hers. On this rock I will build. Peter Tempe Terra, the Rock of the Land of Time. The new man, Homo martial. Who had betrayed them. Remember.

  On she drove south, up the slope of the Tharsis Bulge, until the cone of Ascraeus hove into view. A mountain continent, puncturing the horizon. Pavonis had been infested and overgrown because of its equatorial position, and the little advantage that that gave the elevator cable. But Ascraeus, just five hundred kilometers northeast of Pavonis, had been left alone. No one lived there; very few people had ever even ascended it. Just a few areologists now and then, to study its lava and occasional pyroclastic ash flows, which were both colored the red nearest black.

  She drove onto its lower slopes, gentle and wavy. Ascraeus had been one of the classic albedo feature names, as it was a mountain so big it was easily visible from Earth. Ascraeus Lacus. This was during the canal mania, and so they had decided it was a lake. Pavonis in that era had been called Phoenicus Lacus, Phoenix Lake. Ascra, she read, was the birthplace of Hesiod, “situated on the right of Mount Helicon, on a high and rugged place.” So though they had thought it a lake, they had named it after a mountain place. Perhaps their subconscious minds had understood the telescope images after all. Ascraeus was in general a poetic name for the pastoral, Helicon being the Boetian mountain sacred to Apollo and the Muses. Hesiod had looked up from his plow one day and seen the mountain, and found he had a story to tell. Strange the birth of myths, strange the old names that they lived among and ignored, while they continued to tell the old stories over and over again with their lives.

  It was the steepest of the big four volcanoes, but there was no encircling escarpment, as around Olympus Mons; so she could put the rover in low gear and grind on up, as if taking off into space, in slow motion. Lean back in her seat and take a nap. Head on the headrest; relax. Wake up on arrival, up at twenty-seven kilometers above sea level, the same height as all the other three big ones; that was as high as a mountain could get on Mars, basically, it was the isostatic limit, at which point the lithosphere began to sag under the weight of all that rock; all of the big four had maxed out, they could grow no higher. A sign of their size and their great age.

  Very old, yes, but at the same time the surface lava of Ascraeus was among the youngest igneous rock on Mars, weathered only slightly by wind and sun. As the lava sheets had cooled they had stiffened in their descent, leaving low curved bulges to ascend or bypass. A distinct trail of rover tracks zigzagged up the slope, avoiding steep sections at the bottoms of these flows, taking advantage of a big loose network of ramps and flowbacks. In any permanent shade, spindrift had settled into banks of dirty hard-packed snow; shadows were now a filmy blackened white, as if she drove through a photographic negative, her spirits plummeting inexplicably as she drove ever higher. Behind her she could see more and more of the conical northern flank of the volcano, and north Tharsis beyond that, all the way to the Echus wall, a low line over a hundred kilometers away. Much of what she could see was patchy with snowdrifts, windslab, firn. Freckled white. The shady sides of volcanic cones often became heavily glaciated.

  There on a rockface, bright emerald moss. Everything was turning green.

  But as she continued to ascend, day after day, up and up beyond all imagining, the snow patches became thinner, less frequent. Eventually she was twenty kilometers above the datum — twenty-one above sea level — nearly seventy thousand feet above the ice! — more than twice as high as Everest was above Earth’s oceans; and still the cone of the volcano rose above her, a full seven thousand meters more! Right up into the darkening sky, right up into space.

  Far below scrolled a smooth flat layer of cloud, obscuring Tharsis. As if the white sea were chasing her up the slope. Up at this level there were no clouds, at least on this day; sometimes thunderheads would tower up beside the mountain, other days cirrus clouds could be seen overhead, slashing the sky with a dozen thin sickles. Today the sky above was a clear purple indigo suffused with black, pricked with a few daytime stars at the zenith, Orion standing faint and alone. Out to the east of the volcano’s summit streamed a thin cloud, a peak banner, so faint she could see the dark sky through it. There wasn’t much moisture up here, nor much atmosphere either. There would always be a tenfold difference between the air pressure at sea level and up here on the big volcanoes; pressure up here must therefore be about thirty-five millibars, very little more than what had existed when they had arrived.

  Nevertheless she spotted tiny flecks of lichen in hollows on the tops of rocks, in pits that caught some snow and then a lot of sun. They were almost too small to see. Lichen: a symbiotic team of algae and fungus, working together to survive, even in thirty millibars. It was hard to believe what life would endure. So strange.

  So strange, in fact, that she suited up and went out to look at them. Up here one had to employ all the old careful habits: secure walker, lock doors; out into the bright glare of low space.

  The rocks that harbored the lichen were the kind of flat sunporches on which marmots would have sunbathed, if they could have lived so high. Instead, only little pinheads of yellow green, or battleship gray. Flake lichen, the wrist-pad guide said. Bits of it torn away in storms, blown up here, falling on rocks, sticking like little vegetable limpets. The kind of thing only Hiroko could explain.

  Living things. Michel had said that she loved stones and not men because she had been mistreated, her mind damaged. Hippocampus significantly smaller, strong startle reaction, a tendency toward dissociation. And so she had found a man as much like a stone as she could. Michel too had loved that quality in Simon, he told her — such a relief in the Underbill years to have even one such charge, a man you could trust, quiet and solid, that you could heft in your hand and feel the weight of.

  But Simon wasn’t the only one in the world like that, j Michel had pointed out. That quality rested in the others as well, intermixed and less pure, but still there. Why could she not love that quality of obdurate endurance in other people, in every living thing? They were only trying
to exist, like any rock or planet. There was a mineral stubbornness in all of them.

  Wind keened past her helmet and over the shards of lava, humming in her air hose, drowning out the sound of her breath. The sky more black than indigo here, except low on the horizon, where it was a hazy purple violet, topped by a band of clear dark blue … oh who could believe it would ever change, up here on the slope of Ascraeus Mons, why hadn’t they settled up here to remind themselves of what they had come to, of what they had been given by Mars and then so profligately thrown away.

  Back to the rover. She continued on up.

  She was above silver cirrus clouds, just west of the volcano’s diaphanous summit banner. In the lee of the jet stream. To ascend was to travel into the past, above all lichen and bacteria. Though she had no doubt they were still there, hiding inside the first layers of the rock. Chasmoendolithic life, like the mythic little red people, the microscopic gods who had spoken to John Boone, their own local Hesiod. So people said.

  Life everywhere. The world was turning green. But if you couldn’t see the greenness — if it made no difference to the land — surely it was welcome to the task? Living creatures. Michel had said to her, you love stones because of the stony quality that life has! It all comes back to life. Simon, Peter; on this rock I will build my church. Why could she not love that stony quality in every thing?