Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  She smiled, strolling to her right as Viktor panned the camera. She had to remember her marks and turns, and to keep out of camera view the crowd of camp staff watching nearby.

  Viktor called, “Cut, got sun reflecting in the lens.”

  “Whew! Good. Let me memorize a few lines . . .”

  She was glad for the break. It was getting harder to sound perky. The Consortium people had been grousing about that lately. But then, they had done so periodically, over the two decades she and Viktor had been doing their little shows. Media mavens had some respect for The Mars Couple (the title of the Broadway musical about them), but the long shadow of the Consortium, which had backed the 2018 First Landing (the movie title), wanted to keep them on the air for the worldwide subscriber base—and always pumping the numbers higher, of course. Axelrod, still the head of the Consortium, The Man Who Sold Mars (the miniseries title), and now probably the wealthiest man in the solar system, played diplomat between them and the execs Earthside. Exploration? Discovery—yes, they still got to do some. But a safari that turned up nothing new—like the Olympus Mons fiasco—could drive down Consortium shares, send heads rolling at high corporate levels, and make headlines. So she and Viktor tried not to think too much about the eternal media issues. It never really helped.

  Viktor was fiddling, changing the camera angle, and here came Andy Lang, trotting over with his studied grin. “Julia, got an idea for a last shot.”

  “What is it?” She looked beyond him and saw the two arm wings Andy had brought from Earth the year before, bright blue monolayer on a carbon strut. “Oh—well, look, we’ve done your flying stunt three times already.”

  “I’m thinking just a closing shot.” He gestured up to the top of the dome, over a hundred meters above. “I come off the top platform, swing around the eucalyptus clump, into Viktor’s field of view—after you do your last line.”

  “Ummm.” She had to admit they had no good finishing image, and Earthside was always carping about that. “You can do it?”

  “Been practicing. I’ve got the timing down.” He was a big, muscular guy, an engineering wizard who had improved their geothermal system enormously. And a looker. Axelrod made sure to send them lookers. After all, thousands volunteered to work here every year. Why take the ugly ones when the worldwide audience liked eye candy?

  Julia looked up at the ledge platform near the dome peak. His earlier flights had flown around the dome’s outer curve, pleasantly graceful. The eucalyptus stand at the dome’s center was her pet project. She insisted on some blue gum trees from her Australian home, the forests north of Adelaide. Earthside dutifully responded with a funded contest among plant biologists to find a eucalyptus that could withstand the sleeting ultraviolet here. Of course the dome helped a lot; chemists had developed a miracle polymer that could billow into a broad dome, holding in nearly a full Earth atmosphere, and yet also subtract a lot of the UV from sunlight—all without editing away the middle spectrum needed for plant growth.

  The blue gums were a darker hue, but they grew rapidly in the Martian regolith. Of course she had to prepare the soil—joyful days spent spading in the humus they had processed from their own wastes. The French called it eau de fumier or spirit of manure and chronicled every centimeter of blue gum growth. She’d sprouted the seeds and nurtured the tiny seedlings fiercely. Once planted, their white flanks had grown astonishingly fast. Their leaves hung down, minimizing their exposure to the residual hard ultraviolet that got through the dome’s filtering skin. But their trunks were spindly, with odd limbs sticking out like awkward elbows—yet more evidence that bringing life to Mars was not going to be easy.

  She considered Andy’s idea. Andy was a media hit with the ladies Earthside, if perhaps a bit of a camera hog. She had been giving him all the air time he wanted lately, glad to offload the work. “Okay, get on up there.”

  She checked the timing with Viktor while Andy shimmied up the climbing rope to the peak of the dome and its platform, the big arm wings strapped to his back making him look like a gigantic moth. They moved location so that Andy would be shielded from Viktor’s view, until he came around the clump of whitebark eucalyptus trunks as Viktor panned upward from her concluding shot.

  In a few minutes more they were ready to go. Julia wondered if she could ease out of this job altogether, letting Andy the Hunk take most of it. She made a mental note to tactfully broach the subject with Axelrod.

  “Positions!” Viktor called. Andy nodded from the platform, wings in place. “On,” Viktor said.

  Without thinking about it Julia hit the same marker where she had left off and started. “You can’t imagine how thrilling it is to walk on Martian grass, without a space suit, breathing air that smells . . . well, I won’t lie, still pretty dusty. But better, yes. To think that we used to test the rocks here for signs of water deposition! Once the raw frontier, now a park. Progress.”

  Of course the hard part was turning regolith rocks and sand into topsoil, but that’s booooring, yes. Earthside had developed some fierce strains of bacteria that could break down all comers—old running shoes, hardbound books, insulation, packing buffers—into rich black loam almost as you watched.

  She ducked as a white shape hurtled by, narrowly missing her head. “Chicken alert!” she said lightly, gesturing toward it with her head. It squawked and flapped, turning like a feathered blimp with wings. “Who would have thought chickens could have so much fun up here, in the low gravity? They find it far easier to fly here than on Earth. Of course we brought them here so we could have fresh eggs, and they do lay, so we predicted that part correctly. But we don’t always know everything that’s going to happen in a biological experiment. This is the Mars version of the chicken and egg problem.”

  Viktor smiled dutifully; they’d shared this little joke before. The Earthside producer would more probably wince. Okay, back to the script.

  She waved a hand to her right and Viktor followed the gesture with the camera, bringing in the view of the slopes and hills in the distance, beyond the green lances of the eucalyptus limbs. The slopes were still rusty red in the afternoon light, of course, far beyond the curved dome that sloped down to its curved tie-down wall eighty meters away. They stood out nicely with the green eucalyptus foreground. The other trees—ranging from drought and cold-resistant shrubs from Tasmania, to hearty high-altitude species—almost made a convincing forest. The “grass” was really a mixture of mosses, lichens and small tundra species, too. A big favorite of the staff was vegetable sheep, soft, pale clumps from New Zealand’s high country. Convincing to the visual audience—a golf course on Mars!—but also able to survive a cold Martian night and even a sudden pressure drop. The toughest stuff from Earth, made still more rugged with bioengineering.

  Axelrod had insisted on the visuals. Make it look Earthy, yes. She had worked for years to make the inflated domes support life and there was still plenty to do. Making the raw regolith swarm with microbes to build soil, coaxing lichens onto the boulders used to help anchor the dome floors in place, being sure the roots of the first shrubs could survive the cold and prickly alkaline dirt. Years, yes, grubbing and figuring and trying everything she could muster. For a beginning.

  Pay attention! You’re on camera, and Viktor hates to reshoot.

  “Ah, one of my faves . . .” She altered course to pass by a baobab—a tall, fat, tubular tree from western Australia, with only a few thin spidery limbs sprouting from its top, like a nearly bald man. Early settlers had used them to store food, take shelter, even as jail cells. On Mars they grew spectacularly fast, like eucalyptus, and nobody knew why. Aussie plants generally did better here, from the early greenhouse days of the first landing, onward. Maybe, the biologist in her said, this came from the low-energy biology of Australia. The continent had skated across the Pacific, its mountains getting worn down, minerals depleted, rainfall lessening, and life had been forced to adapt. A hundred million years of life getting by with less and less . . . much like Mars
.

  “For those of you who’ve loyally stuck with us through these—wow, twenty-two years!—I say thanks. Sometimes I think that this is all a dream, and days like this prove it. Grass on Mars! Or”—she grinned, tilting her head up a bit to let the filtered sunlight play on her still dark hair, using the only line she had prepared for this ’cast—“another way to say it, I started out with nothing and still have most of it left. Out there—in wild Mars.”

  Not that this little patch is so domesticated. It’s how we find out if raw regolith can become true soil, and what will grow well here.

  “Already there are environmental groups trying to preserve original, ancient Mars from us invaders.” She chuckled. “If Mars were just bare stone and dust, I’d laugh—I never did believe that rocks have rights. But since there’s life here, they have a point.”

  This was just editorial patter, of course, while Viktor followed her on the walk toward the fountain. It tinkled and splashed in the foreground while she approached, Viktor shooting from behind her, so the camera looked through the trees, on through the clear dome walls to the dusty red landscape beyond. “I like to gaze out, so that I can imagine what Mars was like in its early days, a hospitable planet.” She turned, spread her hands in self-mockery. “Okay, we now know from fossils that there were no really big trees—nothing larger than a bush, in fact. But I can dream . . .”

  She smiled and tried to not make it look calculated. After a quarter century of peering into camera snouts, she had some media savvy. Still, she and Viktor thought in terms of, If we do this, people will like it. That had been a steadier guide through the decades than taking the advice about exploring Mars from the Earthside media execs of the Consortium, whose sole idea was, If we do this, we’ll maximize our global audience share, get ideas for new product lines, and/or optimize near-term profitability.

  She paused beside the splashing fountain. She plucked up a cup they had planted there and drank some of the water. “On Earth, you can drink all the water you want and leave the tap on between cupfuls. Here, nobody does.” She smiled and walked on. “You’ve seen this before, of course, but imagine if it were the only fountain you’d seen in a quarter century. That’s why I come here to read, meditate, think. That—and our newest wonder . . .”

  Let them wait. She had learned that trick early on. Mars couldn’t be chopped up into five-second image-bites and have any lasting impression. She circled around the constant-cam that fed a view to Earthside for the market that wanted to have the Martian day as a wall or window in their homes. She knew this view sold especially well in the cramped rooms of China and India. It was a solid but subtle advertisement.

  Crowded? Here’s a whole world, only a few dozen people on it, well, actually about ten dozen, and it has the same land area as the Earth. A different world entirely.

  Things were different, all right. The dome was great, the biggest of several, a full hundred and fifty meters tall. It would have been far more useful in the first years, when they still lived in apartment-sized habs. Now her pressure suit was supple, moving fluidly over her body as she walked and stooped. The first expedition suits had been the best of their era, but they’d still made you as flexible as a barely oiled Tin Man, as dextrous as a bear in mittens. The old helmets had misted over unless you remembered to swab the inside with ordinary dish soap. And the catheters had been always irksome, especially for women; now they fit beautifully.

  Outside, the wind whistled softly around the dome walls. Another reason she enjoyed the big dome—the sighing winds. Sounds didn’t carry well in Mars’s thin atmosphere, and the habs were so insulated they were cut off from any outdoor noise.

  The grass ended and she crunched over slightly processed regolith. Lichens could break the rock down, but they took time—lots of it. So they’d taken shortcuts to make an ersatz soil. They mixed Martian dust and small gravel-sized rock bits with a lot of their organic waste, spaded in over decades—everything from kitchen leftovers to lightly cleaned excrement. Add compost starter bacteria, keep moist, and wait. And hope. Microbes like free carbon, using it with water to frame elaborate molecules. She and Viktor had doled it out for years under the first, small dome before even trying to grow anything. The Book of Genesis got it all done in six days, but mere humans took longer.

  She hit the marker they had laid out—a rock—and turned, pointing off-camera. “And now—ta-daah!—we have a surprise. The first Martian swimming pool.”

  Okay, no swimming pools in Genesis—but it’s a step.

  “I’m going for my first swim—now.” She shucked off her blue jumpsuit to reveal a red bikini. Her arms and legs were muscular, breasts midsized, skin pale, not too many wrinkles. Not really a babe, no, but she still got mash notes from middle-aged guys, somehow leaking through the e-mail filters.

  Hey, we’re looking for market share here! She grinned, turned and dived into the lapping clear water. Surfaced, gasped—she wasn’t faking, this really was her first swim in a quarter century—and laughed with sheer pleasure (not in the script). Went into a breast stroke, feeling the tug and flex of muscle, and something inexpressible and simple burst in her. Fun, yes—not nearly enough fun on Mars.

  Or water. They had moved from the original base camp about eighteen years before. Once Earthside shipped enough gear to build a real water retrieval system, and a big nuke generator to run it, there seemed no point in not moving the hab and other structures—mostly light and portable—to the ice hills.

  Mars was in some ways an upside-down world. On Earth, one would look for water in the low spots, stream channels. Here in Gusev, water lay waiting in the hilly hummocks, termed by geologists “pingos.” When water froze beneath blown dust, it thrust up as it expanded, making low hills of a few hundred meters. She recalled how Marc and Raoul had found the first ice, their drill bit steaming as ice sublimed into fog. Now Marc was a big vid star and Raoul ran Axelrod’s solar energy grid on the Moon. Time . . .

  She stopped at the pool edge, flipped out and sprang to her feet—thanks, 0.38 g! “The first swim on Mars, and you saw it.” Planned this shot a year ago, when I ordered the bikini . . . She donned a blue terry cloth bathrobe; the dryness made the air feel decidedly chilly. “In case you’re wondering, swimming doesn’t feel any different here. That’s because the water you displace makes you float—we’re mostly made of water, so the effect compensates. It doesn’t matter much what the local gravity is.”

  Okay, slipped in some science while their guard was down.

  “Behind all this is our improved water-harvesting system.” She pointed out the dome walls, where pipes stretched away toward a squat inflated building. “Robotic, nuclear powered. It warms up the giant ice sheets below us, pumps water to the surface. Took nine years to build—whoosh! Thank you, engineers.”

  What did the water mean? She envisioned life on a tiny fraction of Mars with plentiful water—no longer a cold, dusty desert. Under a pressurized dome the greenhouse effect raised the temperature to something livable. Link domes, blow up bigger ones, and you have a colony. They could grow crops big time. Red Kansas . . .

  A gout of steam hissed from a release value, wreathing her in a moist, rotten-eggs smell. Andy had put the finishing touches on the deep thermal system, spreading the upwelling steam and hot water into a pipe system two meters below the dome floor. Their nuke generators ran the system, but most of the energy came for free from the magma lode kilometers below. Once the geologists—“areologists” when on Mars, the purists said—had drilled clean through the pingos and reached the magma, the upwelling heat melted the ice layers. Ducted upward, it made possible the eight domes they now ran, rich in moist air. Soon they would start linking them all. She smiled as she thought about strolling along tree-lined walkways from dome to dome, across windblown ripe wheat fields, no helmet or suit. Birds warbling, rabbits scurrying in the bushes . . .

  In the first years their diet had been vegetarian. It made sense to eat plant protein directly, rather than
lose 90 percent of the energy by passing it through an animal first. But from the first four rabbits shipped out they now had hundreds, and relished dinner on “meat nights.” They’d have one tonight, after this media show.

  “So that’s it—life on Mars gets a bit better. We’re still spending most of our research effort on the Marsmat—the biggest conceptual problem in biology, we think. We just got a new crew to help. And pretty soon, on the big nuke rocket due in a week, we’ll get a lot more gear and supplies. Onward!”

  She grinned, waved, and Viktor called, “Is done.”

  She had waited long enough. She shucked off the bathrobe and tossed the wireless mike on top of the heap.

  “Am still running.”

  “Check it for editing,” she said quickly. “I’m going to splash.” She dived into the pool again. Grinning, Viktor caught it in slow-mo.

  Julia rolled over onto her back and took a few luxurious strokes. She caught Andy’s kick off the platform and watched him swoop gracefully around the dome. It was still a bit of a thrill to see. They kept the dome at high pressure to support it, which added more lift for Andy. He kept his wings canted against the thermals that rose from the warm floor, camera-savvy, grinning relentlessly.

  Even with the lower gravity and higher air density, Viktor and Julia had been skeptical that it could work. But Axelrod and the Consortium board had loved the idea, seeing tourism as a long-term potential market.

  And Andy did look great, obviously having a lot of fun, his handsome legs forming a neat line as he arced above her. He rotated his arms, mimicking the motion birds made in flight, pumping thrust into his orbit. His turn sharpened into a smaller circle, coming swiftly around the steepled bulk of the big eucalyptus. His wings pitched to drive him inward and wind rippled his hair. She watched Viktor follow the accelerating curve with the camera, bright winds sharp against the dark sky. Good stuff.