Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  But she came and sat beside him. Ate her meal (a Provencal stew that Michel used to make) beside him. In her customary silence. Still, people stared. Nadia watched them with tears in her eyes. Permanent sentimentality: it could be a problem.

  Later, under the clatter of dishes and voices, everyone seemingly talking at once — and sometimes it seemed possible also to understand everyone all at once, even while speaking — under that noise, Ann leaned into him and said:

  “Where are you going after this?”

  “Well,” he said, suddenly nervous again, “some Da Vinci colleagues invited me to, to, to — to sail. To try out a new boat they’ve designed for me, for my, my sailing trips. A sailboat. On Chryse — on Chryse Gulf.”

  “Ah.”

  Terrible silence, despite all the noise.

  “Can I come with you?”

  Burning sensation in the skin of the face; capillary engorgement; very odd. But he must remember to speak! “Oh yes.”

  And then everyone sitting around, thinking, talking, remembering. Sipping Maya’s tea. Maya looked content, taking care of them. Much later, well into the middle of the night, with almost everyone still slumped in a chair, or hunched over the heater, Sax decided he would go over to the trailer park, where they had spent their first few months. Just to see.

  Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses. Sax pulled down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya was there, and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one had to say fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering around him, some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers filling the empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now gone. A single trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the depth of the night they all lay down, and slid down the slow uneven glide into sleep. All around the room, people falling to sleep in their beds — and that too was a memory, drowsy and warm, this was how it had always felt, to drift off in a bath of one’s friends, weary with the day’s work, the oh-so-interesting work of building a town and a world. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.

  They sailed out of the Florentineon a windy cloudless day, Ann at the rudder and Sax up in the starboard bow of the sleek new catamaran, making sure the anchor cat had secured the anchor; which reeked of anaerobic bottom mud, so much so that Sax got distracted and spent some time hanging over the rail looking at samples of the mud through his wristpad magnifying lens: a great quantity of dead algae and other bottom organisms. An interesting question whether or not this was typical of the North Sea’s bottom, or was restricted for some reason to the Chryse Gulf environs, or to the Florentine, or shallows more generally —

  “Sax, get back here,” Ann called. “You’re the one who knows how to sail.”

  “So I am.”

  Though in truth the boat’s AI would do everything at the most general command; he could say for instance “Go to Rhodes,” and there would be nothing more to be done for the rest of the week. But he had grown fond of the feeling of a tiller under his hand. So he abandoned the anchor’s muck to another time, and made his way to the wide shallow cockpit suspended between the two narrow hulls.

  “Da Vinci is about to go under the horizon, look.”

  “So it is.”

  The outer points of the crater rim were the only parts of Da Vinci Island still visible over the water, though they weren’t more than twenty kilometers away. There was an intimacy to a small globe. And the boat was very fast; it hydroplaned in any wind over fifty kilometers an hour, and the hulls had underwater outriggerkeels that extended and set in various dolphinlike shapes, which along with sliding counterbalance weights in the cross struts kept the windward hull in contact with the water, and the leeward hull from driving too far under. So in even moderate winds, like the one striking their unfurled mast sail now, the boat shoved up onto the water and skated over it like an iceboat over ice, moving at a speed just a few percent slower than the wind itself. Looking over the stern Sax could see that a very small percentage of the hulls were actually in contact with the water; it looked like the rudder and the outrigger-keels were the only things that kept them from taking flight. He saw the last bits of Da Vinci Island disappear, under a bouncing serrated horizon no more than four kilometers away from them. He glanced at Ann; she was clutching the rail, looking back at the brilliant white V-tapestries of their wake. Sax said, “Have you been at sea before?” meaning, entirely out of the sight of land.

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  They sailed on north, out into Chryse Gulf. Copernicus Island appeared over the water to their right, then Galileo Island behind it. Then both receded under the blue horizon again. The swells on the horizon were individually distinct, so that the horizon was not a straight blue line against the sky, but rather a shifting array of swell tops, one after another in swift succession. The groundswell was coming out of the north, almost directly ahead of them, so that looking to port or starboard the horizon line was particularly jagged, a wavy line of blue water against the blue sky, in a too-small circle surrounding the ship — as if the proper Terran distance to the horizon were stubbornly embedded in the brain’s optics, so that when they saw things clearly here, they would always appear to stand on a planet too small for them. Certainly there was a look of the most extreme discomfort on Ann’s face; she glared at the waves, groundswell after groundswell lifting the bow and then the stern. There was a cross chop nearly at right angles to the groundswell, pushed by the west wind and ruffling the bigger broader swells. Wavetank physics; one could see it all laid out; it reminded Sax of the physics lab on the second story of the northeasternmost building in his high school, where hours had passed like minutes, the flat little wavetank full of marvels. Here the groundswell originated in the North Sea’s perpetual eastward motion around the globe; the swell was greater or smaller depending on whether local winds reinforced it or interfered with it. The light gravity made for big broad waves, quickly generated by strong winds; if today’s wind got very much stronger, for instance, then the wind-chop from the west would quickly grow bigger than the groundswell from the north, and obscure it completely. Waves on the North Sea were notorious for their size and mutability, their recombinant surprises, though it was also true that they moved fairly slowly through the water; big slow hills, like the giant dunes of Vastitas far underneath them, migrating around the planet. Sometimes they could get very big indeed; in the aftermath of the typhoons that blew over the North Sea, waves seventy meters high had been reported.

  This lively cross chop seemed enough for Ann, who was looking a bit distressed. Sax could not think what to say to her. He doubted that his thoughts on wave mechanics would be appropriate, though it was very interesting of course, and would be to anyone interested in the physical sciences. As Ann was. But perhaps not now. Now the sheer sensory array of water, wind, sky — it looked like it was enough for her. Perhaps silence was in order.

  Whitecaps began to roll down the faces of some of the cross-chop waves, and Sax immediately checked into the ship’s weather system to see what the wind speed was. The ship had it at thirty-two kilometers per hour. So this was about the speed at which the crests of waves were first knocked over. A simple matter of surface tension against wind speed, calculable, in fact… yes, the appropriate equation in fluid dynamics suggested they should start to collapse at a wind speed cr thirty-five kilometers per hour, and here they were: whitecaps, startlingly white against the water, which was a dark blue, Prussian blue Sax thought it might be. The sky today was almost sky blue, slightly empurpled at the zenith, and somewhat whitened around the sun, with a metallic sheen between sun and the horizon under it.

  “What are you doing?” Ann said, sounding annoyed.

  Sax explained, and she listened in stony silence. He didn’t know what she might be thinking. That the world was somewhat explicable — he always found that a comfort. Bu
t Ann… well, it could be as simple as seasickness. Or something from her past, distracting her; Sax had found in the weeks since the experiment at Underhill that he was often distracted by some past incident, rising unbidden from a great bulk of them in his mind. Involuntary memory. And for Ann, that might include negative incidents of one kind or another; Michel had said she had been mistreated as a child. It still seemed to Sax too shocking to believe. On Earth men had abused women; on Mars, never. Was that true? Sax did not know for sure, but he felt it was true. This was what it meant to live in a just and rational society, this was one of the main reasons it was a good thing, a value. Possibly Ann would know more about the reality of the situation these days. But he did not feel comfortable asking her. It was clearly contraindicated.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” she said.

  “Enjoying the view,” he said quickly. Perhaps he had better talk about wave mechanics after all. He explained the groundswell, the cross chop, the negative and positive interference patterns that could result. But then he said, “Did you remember much about Earth, during the Underhill experiment?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  This was probably some kind of repression, and exactly the opposite of the psychotherapeutic method that Michel would probably have recommended. But they were not steam engines. And some things were no doubt better forgotten. He would have to work on once again forgetting John’s death, for instance; also on remembering better those parts of his life when he had been most social, as during the years of work for Biotique in Burroughs. So that across the cockpit from him sat Counter-Ann, or that third woman she had mentioned — while he was, at least in part, Stephen Lindholm. Strangers, despite that startling encounter at Underhill. Or because of it. Hello; nice to meet you.

  * * *

  Once they got out from among the fjords and islands at the bottom of Chryse Gulf, Sax turned the tiller and the boat swooped northeast, rushing across the wind and the whitecaps. Then the wind was behind them, and with a • following wind the mast sail bloomed into its own splayed-wing version of a spinnaker, and the hulls surfed on the mushy crests of the waves before losing to their superior speed. The eastern shore of the Chryse Gulf appeared before them; it was less spectacular than the western shore, but in many ways prettier. Buildings, towers, bridges: it was a well-populated coast, as were most of them these days. Coming off Olympus all the towns must be a bit of a shock.

  After they passed the broad mouth of the Ares Fjord, Soo-chow Point emerged over the horizon, and then beyond it the Oxia Islands, one by one. Before the water’s arrival these had been the Oxia Colles, an array of round hills that stood at just the height to become an archipelago. Sax sailed into the narrow waterways between these islands, each a low round brown hump, standing forty or fifty meters out of the sea. By far the larger percentage of them were uninhabited, except perhaps by goats, but on the largest ones, especially kidney-shaped ones with bays, the stones covering the hills had been gathered up into walls, which split the slopes into fields and pastures; these islands were irrigated, green with orchards laden with fruit, or pastures dotted with white sheep or miniature cows. The ship’s maritime chart named these islands — Kipini, Wahoo, Wabash, Nau-kan, Libertad — and reading the map Ann snorted. “These are the names of the craters out in the middle of the gulf, underwater.”

  “Ah.”

  Still, they were pretty islands. The fishing villages on the bays were whitewashed, with blue shutters and doors: the Aegean model again. Indeed, on one high point bluff there stood a little Doric temple, square and proud. The boats down below in the bays were small sloops, or simply row-boats and dories. As they sailed past Sax pointed out a hilltop windmill here, a pasture of llamas there. “It seems a nice life.”

  They talked about the natives then, easily and without hidden tension. About Zo; about the ferals and their strange hunter-gatherer city-shopper lifestyle; about the ag nomads, moving from crop to crop like migrant laborers who owned the farms; about the cross-fertilization of all these styles; about the new Terran settlements elbowing into the landscape; about the increasing number of harbor towns. Off in the middle of the bay, they spotted one of the new big townships, a floating island of a seacraft, with a population in the thousands; it was too big to enter the Oxia archipelago, and looked to be headed across the gulf to Ni-lokeras, or down to the southern fjords. As the land all over Mars was becoming more crowded, and the possibility of settling on it more and more restricted by the courts, more and more people were moving onto the North Sea, making townships like these their permanent home.

  “Let’s go visit it,” Ann said. “Can we?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Sax said, surprised at the request. “We can certainly catch it.”

  He brought the catamaran about and tacked south and west toward the township, pushing the cat as much as he could, to impress the seafarers. In less than an hour they had reached its broad side, a rounded scarp about two kilometers long and fifty meters tall. A dock just above the waterline had a section against the township that would rise, as an open elevator, and when they had stepped across from the cat to the dock and tied their boat on, they got into this railed-off section and were lifted up to the deck of the township.

  The deck was almost as broad as it was long, its central area a farm with many small trees scattered on it, so it was hard to see the other side. But it was clear from what they could see that the circumference of the deck was a kind of rectangular street or arcade, with buildings on both sides that were two to four stories high, the outer buildings topped by masts and windmills, the inner ones opening into broad breaks where parks and plazas led inward to the crops and groves of the farm, and a big freshwater pond. A floating town, somewhat like a walled city in Renaissance Tuscany in appearance, except that everything was extraordinarily neat and orderly, shipshape as one might say. A small group of the ship’s citizens greeted them on the plaza overlooking the dock, and when they found out who their visitors were they were thrilled — they insisted the travelers stay for a meal, and a few of them guided them on a walk around the perimeter of the ship, “or for as far as you care to go, it’s a good fair walk.”

  This was a small township, they were told. Population, five thousand. Since its launch it had been almost entirely self-sufficient. “We grow most of our food, and fish for the rest. There are arguments now with other townships about overfishing certain species. We’re doing perennial polycul-ture, growing new strains of corn, sunflower, soybean, sand plum and so on, all intermixed and harvested by robot, because harvesting is backbreaking work. We’ve finally got the technology to go home to gathering, that’s what it comes down to. There are a lot of onboard cottage industries. We’ve got wineries, see the vineyards out there, and there are vintners and brandy distillers. That we do by hand. Also special-function semiconductors, and a famous bike shop.”

  “Most of the time we sail around the North Sea. There are some really violent storms sometimes, but we’re so big that we ride them out pretty easily. Most of us have lived here for all ten years the ship has existed. It’s a great life. The ship is all you need. Although it’s great fun to make landfall from time to time. We come down to Nilokeras every Ls zero for the spring festival. We sell what we’ve made and resupply, and party all night long. Then back out to sea.”

  “We don’t use anything but wind and sunlight, and some fish. The environmental courts like us, they agree we’re minimum impact. The population of the North Sea’s area might be even higher now than if it had stayed land. There are hundreds of townships now.”

  “Thousands. And the harbor towns with the shipyards, and the seaports we visit to do business, they’re doing very well indeed.”

  Ann said, “And you think this is one way we can take on some of Earth’s surplus population.”

  “Yes, we do. One of the best ways. It’s a big ocean, it could take a lot more ships like this.”

  “As long as they didn’t rely too much o
n fishing.”

  As they walked on, Sax said to Ann, “That’s another reason that it just isn’t worth it to force a crisis over the immigration issue.”

  Ann didn’t reply. She was staring down at the sun-burnished water, then up at one of the couple dozen masts, each with its single schooner sail. The town looked like a tabular iceberg with its surface entirely claimed by earth. A floating island.

  “So many different kinds of nomads,” Sax commented.

  “It seems that very few of the natives feel impelled to settle in a single place.”

  “Unlike us.”

  “Point taken. But I wonder if this tendency means they are inclined to a certain redness. If you know what I mean.”

  “I do not.”

  Sax tried to explain. “It seems to me that nomads in general tend to make use of the land as they find it. They move around with the seasons, and live off what they find growing at that time. And seafaring nomads of course even more so, given that the sea is impervious to most human attempts to change it.”

  “Except for the people trying to regulate sea level, or salt content. Have you heard about them?”

  “Yes. But they’re not going to have much luck with that, I would guess. The mechanics of saltification are still very poorly understood.”

  “If they succeed it will kill a lot of freshwater species.”

  “True. But the saltwater species will be happy.”