Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The rover rolled up the last concentric terraces of lava, working less strenuously now as it curved over the asymptotic flattening of the broad circular rim. Only slightly uphill, and less so every meter; and then onto the rim itself. Then to the inner edge of the rim.

  Overlooking the caldera. She got out of the car, her thoughts flicking about like skuas.

  Ascraeus’s nested caldera complex consisted of eight overlapping craters, the newer ones collapsing down across the circumferences of the older ones. The largest and youngest caldera lay out near the center of the complex, and the older higher-floored calderas embayed its circumference like the petals of a flower design. Each caldera floor was at a slightly different elevation, and marked by a pattern of circular fractures. Walking along the rim changed perspective so that distances shifted, and the floors’ heights seemed to change, as if they were floating in a dream. Taken all in all, a beautiful thing to witness. And eighty kilometers across.

  Like a lesson in volcano throat mechanics. Eruptions down on the outer flanks of the volcano had emptied the magma from the active throat of the caldera, and so the caldera floor had slumped; thus all the circular shapes, as the active throat moved around over the eons. Arcing cliffs: few places on Mars exhibited such vertical slopes, they were almost true verticals. Basalt ring worlds. It should have been a climbers’ mecca, but as far as she knew it was not. Someday they would come.

  The complexity of Ascraeus was so unlike the single great hole of Pavonis. Why had Pavonis’s caldera collapsed in the same circumference every time? Could its last drop have erased and leveled all the other rings? Had its magma chamber been smaller, or vented to the sides less? Had Ascraeus’s throat wandered more? She picked up loose rocks on the rim’s edge, stared at them. Lava bombs, late meteor ejecta, ventifacts in the ceaseless winds… These were all questions that could still be studied. Nothing they did would ever disturb the vulcanology up here, not enough to impede the study. Indeed the Journal ofAreological Studies published many articles on these topics, as she had seen and still occasionally saw. It was as Michel had said to her; the high places would look like this forever. Climbing the great slopes would be like travel into the prehuman past, into pure areology, into the areophany itself perhaps, with Hi-roko or not. With the lichen or not. People had talked of securing a dome or a tent over these calderas, to keep them completely sterile; but that would only make them zoos, wilderness parks, garden spaces with their walls and their roofs. Empty greenhouses. No. She straightened up, looked out over the vast round landscape, held up and offering itself to space. To the chasmoendolithic life that might be struggling up here, she waved a hand. Live, thing. She said the word and it sounded odd: “Live.”

  Mars forever, stony in the sunlight. But then she glimpsed the white bear in the corner of her eye, slipping behind a jagged rim boulder. She jumped; nothing there. She returned to the rover, feeling that she needed its protection. She climbed inside; but then all afternoon on the screen of the rover’s AI, the vague spectacled eyes seemed to be looking out at her, about to call any second. A kind bear of a man, though he would eat her if he could catch her. If he could catch her — but then none of them could catch her, she could hide in these high rock fastnesses forever — free she was and free she would be, to be or not to be if she chose that, for as long as this rock held. But there again, right at the lock door, that white flash in the corner of her eye. Ah so hard.

  PART SEVEN

  Making Things Work

  An ice-choked sea now covered much of the north. Vastitas Borealis had lain a kilometer or two below the datum, in some places three; now with sea level stabilizing at the minus-one contour, most of it was underwater. If an ocean of similar shape had existed on Earth, it would have been a bigger Arctic Ocean, covering most of Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Scandinavia, and then making two deeper incursions farther south, narrow seas that extended all the way to the equator; on Earth these would have made for a narrow North Atlantic, and a North Pacific occupied in its center by a big squarish island.

  This Oceanus Borealis was dotted by several large icy islands, and a long low peninsula that broke its circumnavigation of the globe, connecting the mainland north ofSyrtis with the tail of a polar island. The north pole was actually on the ice ofOlympia Gulf, some kilometers offshore from this polar island.

  And that was it. On Mars there would be no equivalent of the South Pacific or the South Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean, or the Antarctic Ocean. In its south there was only desert, except for the Hellas Sea, a circular body of water about the size of the Caribbean. So while ocean covered seventy percent of the Earth, it covered about twenty-five percent of Mars.

  In the year 2130, most of Oceanus Borealis was covered by ice. There were large pods of liquid water under the surface, however, and in the summer, melt lakes scattered on top of the surface; there were also many polynyaps, leads and cracks. Because most of the water had been pumped or otherwise driven out of the permafrost, it had deep groundwater’s purity, meaning it was nearly distilled: the Borealis was a freshwater ocean. It was expected to become salty fairly soon, however, as rivers ran through the very salty regolith and carried their loads into the sea, then evaporated, precipitated, and repeated the process — moving salts from the regolith into the water until a balance was reached — a process which had the oceanographers transfixed with interest, for the saltiness of Earth’s oceans, stable for many millions of years, was not well understood.

  The coastlines were wild. The polar island, formally nameless, was called variously the polar peninsula, or the polar island, or the Seahorse, for its shape on maps. In actuality its coastline was still overrun in many places by the ice of the old polar cap, and everywhere it was blanketed by snow, blown into patterns of giant sastrugi. This corrugated white surface extended out over the sea for many kilometers, until underwater currents fractured it and one came on a “coastline” of leads and pressure ridges and the chaotic edges of big tabular bergs, as well as larger and larger stretches of open water. Several large volcanic or meteoric islands rose up out of the shatter of this ice coast, including a few pedestal craters, sticking up out of the whiteness like great black tabular bergs.

  The southern shores of the Borealis were much more exposed and various. Where the ice lapped against the foot of the Great Escarpment there were several mensae and colles regions that had become offshore archipelagoes, and these, as well as the mainland coastline proper, sported many beetling sea cliffs, bluffs, crater bays, fossa fjords, and long stretches of low smooth strand. The water in the two big southern gulfs was extensively melted below the surface, and, in the summers, on the surface as well. Chryse Gulf had perhaps the most dramatic coastline of all: eight big outbreak channels dropping into Chryse had partly filled with ice, and as it melted they were becoming steep-sided fjords. At the southern end of the gulf four of these fjords braided, weaving together several big cliff-walled islands to make the most spectacular seascapes of all.

  Over all this water great flocks of birds flew daily. Clouds bloomed in the air and rushed off on the wind, dappling the white and red with their shadows. Icebergs floated across the melted seas, and crashed against the shore. Storms dropped off the Great Escarpment with terrifying force, dashing hail and lightning onto the rock. There were now approximately forty thousand kilometers of coastline on Mars. And in the rapid freeze and thaw of the days and the seasons, under the brush of the constant wind every part of it was coming alive.

  When the congress endedNadia made plans to get off Pavonis Mons immediately. She was sick of the bickering in the warehouse, of arguments, of politics; sick of violence and the threat of violence; sick of revolution, sabotage, the constitution, the elevator, Earth, and the threat of war. Earth and death, that was Pavonis Mons — Peacock Mountain, with all the peacocks preening and strutting and crying Me Me Me. It was the last place on Mars Nadia wanted to be.

  She wanted to get off the mountain and breathe the open air. She wan
ted to work on tangible things; she wanted to build, with her nine fingers and her back and her mind, build anything and everything, not just structures, although those would be wonderful of course, but also things like air or dirt, parts of a construction project new to her, which was simply terraforming itself. Ever since her first walk in the open air down at DuMartheray Crater, free of everything but a little CO2 filter mask, Sax’s obsession had finally made sense to her. She was ready to join him and the rest of them in that project, and more than ever now, as the removal of the orbiting mirrors had kicked off a long winter and threatened a full ice age. Build air, build dirt, move water, introduce plants and animals: all that kind of work sounded fascinating to her now. And of course the more conventional construction projects beckoned as well.

  When the new North Sea melted and its shoreline stabilized, there would be harbor towns to be inlaid everywhere, scores of them no doubt, each with jetties and seafronts, channels, wharves and docks, and the towns behind them rising into the hills. At the higher altitudes there would be more tent towns to be erected, and covered canyons. There was even talk of covering some of the big calderas, and of running cable cars between the three prince volcanoes, or bridging the narrows south of Elysium; there was talk of inhabiting the polar island continent; there were new concepts in biohousing, plans to grow homes and buildings directly out of engineered trees, as Hiroko has used bamboo, but on a bigger scale. Yes, a builder ready to learn some of the latest techniques had a thousand years of lovely projects ahead of her. It was a dream come true.

  Then a small group came to her and said they were exploring possibilities for the first executive council of the new global government.

  Nadia stared at them. She could see their import like a big slow-moving trap, and she tried her best to run out of it before it snapped shut. “There are lots of possibilities,” she said. “About ten times more good people than council positions.”

  Yes, they said, looking thoughtful. But we were wondering if you had ever thought about it.

  “No,” she said.

  Art was grinning, and seeing that she began to get worried. “I plan to build things,” she said firmly.

  “You could do that too,” Art said. “The council is a part-time job.”

  “The hell it is.”

  “No, really.”

  It was true that the concept of citizen government was written everywhere into the new constitution, from the global legislature to the courts to the tents. People would presumably do a good deal of this work part-time. Nadia was quite sure, however, that the executive council was not going to be in that category. “Don’t executive council members have to be elected out of the legislature?” she asked.

  Elected by the legislature, they told her happily. Usually fellow legislators would be elected, but not necessarily.

  “Well there’s a mistake in the constitution for you!” Nadia said. “Good thing that you caught it so soon. Restrict it to elected legislators and you’ll cut your pool way down — ” Way down —

  “And still have lots of good people,” she backpedaled.

  But they were persistent. They kept coming back, in different combinations, and Nadia kept running toward that narrowing gap between the teeth of the trap. In the end they begged. A whole little delegation of them. This was the crucial time for the new government, they needed an executive council trusted by all, it would be the one to get things started, etc. etc. The senate had been elected, the duma had been drafted. Now the two houses were electing the seven executive council members. People mentioned as candidates included Mikhail, Zeyk, Peter, Marina, Etsu, Na-nao, Ariadne, Marion, Irishka, Antar, Rashid, Jackie, Charlotte, the four ambassadors to Earth, and several others Nadia had first met in the warehouse. “Lots of good people,” Nadia reminded them. This was the polycephalous revolution.

  But people were uneasy at the list, they told Nadia repeatedly. They had become used to her providing a balanced center, both during the congress and during the revolution, and before that at Dorsa Brevia, and for that matter throughout the underground years, and right back to the beginning. People wanted her on the council as a moderating influence, a calm head, a neutral party, etc. etc.

  “Get out,” she said, suddenly angry, though she did not know why. They were concerned to see her anger, upset by it. “I’ll think about it,” she said as she shooed them out, to keep them moving.

  Eventually only Charlotte and Art were left, looking serious, looking as if they had not conspired to bring all this about.

  “They seem to want you on the executive council,” Art said.

  “Oh shut up.”

  “But they do. They want someone they can trust.”

  “They want someone they’re not afraid of, you mean. They want an old babushka who won’t try to do anything, so they can keep their opponents off the council and pursue their own agendas.”

  Art frowned; he had not considered this, he was too naive.

  “You know a constitution is kind of like a blueprint,” Charlotte said thoughtfully. “Getting a real working government out of it is the true act of construction.”

  “Out,” Nadia said.

  But in the end she agreed to stand. They were relentless, there were a surprisingly large number of them, and they would not give up. She didn’t want to seem like a shirker. And so she let the trap close down on her leg.

  The legislatures met, the ballots were cast. Nadia was elected one of the seven, along with Zeyk, Ariadne, Marion, Peter, Mikhail, and Jackie. That same day Irishka was elected the first chief justice of the Global Environmental Court, a real coup for her personally and the Reds generally; this was part of the “grand gesture” Art had brokered at the congress’s end, to gain the Reds’ support. About half the new justices were Reds of one shade or another, making for a gesture just a bit too grand, in Nadia’s opinion.

  Immediately after these elections another delegation came to her, led this time by her fellow councillors. She had gotten the highest ballot total in the two houses, they told her, and so the others wanted to elect her president of the council.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  They nodded gravely. The president was just another member of the council, they told her, one among equals. A ceremonial position only. This arm of the government was modeled on Switzerland’s, and the Swiss didn’t usually even know who their president was. And so on. Though of course they would need her permission (Jackie’s eyes glittered slightly at this), her acceptance of the post.

  “Out,” she said.

  After they had left Nadia sat slumped in her chair, feeling stunned.

  “You’re the only one on Mars that everyone trusts,” Art said gently. He shrugged, as if to say he hadn’t been involved, which she knew was a lie. “What can you do?” he said, rolling his eyes with a child’s exaggerated theatricality. “Give it three years and then things’ll be on track, and you can say you did your part and retire. Besides, the first president of Mars! How could you resist?”

  “Easy.”

  Art waited. Nadia glared at him.

  Finally he said, “But you’ll do it anyway, right?”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “Oh yes.” He put a hand on her clenched fist. “All you want. I mean — I’m at your disposal.”

  “Is that an official Praxis position?”

  “Why yes, I’m sure it could be. Praxis adviser to the Martian president? You bet.”

  So possibly she could make him do it.

  She heaved a big sigh. Tried to feel less tight in her stomach. She could take the job, and then turn most of the work over to Art, and to whatever staff they gave her. She wouldn’t be the first president to do that, nor the last.

  “Praxis adviser to the Martian president,” Art was announcing, looking pleased.

  “Oh shut up!” she said.

  “Of course.”

  He left her alone to get used to it, came back with a steaming pot of kava and two little cups. He poured;
she took one from him, and sipped the bitter fluid.

  He said, “Anyway I’m yours, Nadia. You know that.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  She regarded him as he slurped his kava. He meant it more than politically, she knew. He was fond of her. All that time working together, living together, traveling together; sharing space. And she liked him. A bear of a man, graceful on his feet, full of high spirits. Fond of kava, as was obvious in his slurping, in his squinched face. He had carried the whole congress, she felt, on the strength of those high spirits, spreading like an epidemic — the feeling that there was nothing so fun as writing a constitution — absurd! But it had worked. And during the congress they had become a kind of couple. Yes, she had to admit it.

  But she was now 159 years old. Another absurdity, but it was true. And Art was, she wasn’t sure, somewhere in his seventies or eighties, although he looked fifty, as they often did when they got the treatment early. “I’m old enough to be your great-grandmother,” she said.

  Art shrugged, embarrassed. He knew what she was talking about. “I’m old enough to be that woman’s great-grandfather,” he said, pointing at a tall native girl passing by their office door. “And she’s old enough to have kids. So, you know. At some point it just doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe not to you.”

  “Well, yeah. But that’s half of the opinions that count.”

  Nadia said nothing.

  “Look,” Art said, “we’re going to live a long time. At some point the numbers have to stop mattering. I mean, I wasn’t with you in the first years, but we’ve been together a long time now, and gone through a lot.”

  “I know.” Nadia looked down at the table, remembering some of those times. There was the stump of her long-lost finger. All that life was gone. Now she was president of Mars. “Shit.”