When she saw Michel still standing motionless, she exploded—”Oh come on, don’t be so theatrical about it! Just because we have to leave now doesn’t mean we won’t ever come back! We’re going to live a thousand years, you can come back all the time if you want, a hundred times, my God! Besides how is this place so much better than Mars? It looks just like Odessa to me, and you were happy there, weren’t you?”
Michel ignored that. He stumbled by her suitcases to the window. Outside, an ordinary Arlesian street, blue in the twilight: pastel stucco walls, cobblestones. Cypress trees. Tiles on the roof across the street were broken. Mars-colored. Voices below shouted in French, angry about something.
“Well?” Maya exclaimed. “Are you coming?”
“Yes.”
Part Six
Ann in the Outback
Look, not choosing to take the longevity treatment is suicide.
So?
Well. Suicide is usually considered to be a sign of psychological dysfunction.
Usually.
I think you’ll find it’s true more often than not. You’re unhappy at least.
At least.
And yet why? What now is lacking?
The world.
Every day you still walk out to see the sunset.
Habit.
You claim the destruction of the primal Mars is the source of your depression. I think the philosophical reasons cited by people suffering depression are masks protecting them from harder, more personal hurts.
It can all be real.
You mean all the reasons?
Yes. What did you accuse Sax of? Monocausotaxophilia?
Touché. But there’s usually a start to these things, among all the real reasons— the first one that started you down your road. Often you have to go back to that point in your journey in order to start off in a new way.
Time is not space. The metaphor of space lies about what is really possible in time. You can never go back.
No no. You can go back, metaphorically. In your mental traveling you can journey back into the past, retrace your steps, see where you turned and why, then proceed onward in a direction that is different because it includes these loops of understanding. Increased understanding increases meaning. When you continue to insist that it is the fate of Mars that concerns you most, I think it is a displacement so strong that it has confused you. It too is a metaphor. Perhaps a true one, yes. But both terms of the metaphor should be recognized.
I see what I see.
But the way it is, you are not even seeing. There is so much of red Mars that remains. You should go out and look! Go out and empty your mind and just see what is out there. Go out at low altitude and walk free in the air, a simple dust mask only. It would be good for you, good at the physiological level. Also it would be reaping a benefit of the terraforming. To experience the freedom it gives us, the bond with this world— that we can walk on its surface naked and survive. It’s amazing! It makes us part of an ecology. It deserves to be rethought, this process. You should go out to consider it, to study the process as areoformation.
That’s just a word. We took this planet and plowed it under. It’s melting under our feet.
Melting in native water. Not imported from Saturn or the like, it’s been there from the beginning, part of the original accretion, right? Outgassed from the first lump that was Mars. Now part of our bodies. Our very bodies are patterns in Martian water. Without the trace minerals we would be transparent. We are Martian water. And water that has been on the surface of Mars before, yes? Rupturing out in artesian apocalypse. Those channels are so big!
It was permafrost for two billion years.
Then we helped it back onto the surface. The majesty of the great outbreak floods. We were there, we saw one with our own eyes, we nearly died in it—
Yes yes—
You felt the car as that water swept it away, you were driving—
Yes! But it swept Frank away instead.
Yes.
It swept the world away. And left us on the beach.
The world is still here. You could go out and see.
I don’t want to see. I’ve seen it already!
Not you. Some previous you. Now you’re the you living now. Yes yes.
I think you’re afraid. Afraid of attempting a transmutation— a metamorphosis into something new. The alembic stands out there, all around you. The fire is hot. You’ll be melted, you’ll be reborn, who knows if you’ll still be there afterward?
I don’t want to change.
You don’t want to stop loving Mars.
Yes. No.
You will never stop loving Mars. After metamorphosis the rock still exists. It’s usually harder than the parent rock, yes? You will always love Mars. Your task becomes seeing the Mars that always endures, under thick or thin, hot or cold, wet or dry. Those are ephemeral, but Mars endures. These floods happened before, isn’t it true?
Yes.
Mars’s own water. All these volatiles are Mars’s own volatiles.
Except the nitrogen from Titan.
Yes yes. You sound like Sax.
Come on.
You two are more alike than you think. And all we volatiles are Mars’s own.
But the destruction of the surface. It’s wrecked. Everything’s changed.
That’s areology. Or the areophany.
It’s destruction. We should have tried living here as it was.
But we didn’t. And so now being red means working to keep conditions as much like the primal conditions as possible, within the framework of the areophany— the project of biosphere creation that allows humans the freedom of the surface, below a certain altitude. That’s all being a Red can mean now. And there are a lot of Reds like that. I think you worry that if you ever change in even the slightest degree, then that will be the end of redness everywhere. But redness is bigger than you. You helped start it and define it, but you were never the only one. If you had been no one would ever have listened to you.
They didn’t!
Some did. Many did. Redness will go on no matter what you do. You could retire, you could become someone entirely different, you could become lime green, and redness would always go on. It might even become something more red than you ever imagined.
I’ve imagined it as red as it can get.
All those alternatives. We’ll live one of them and then go on. The process of coadaptation with this planet will go on for thousands of years. But here we are now. At every moment you should ask, what now is lacking? and work at some acceptance of your current reality. This is sanity, this is life. You have to imagine your life from here on out.
I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t.
You should go have a look around, really. A walkabout. Look very closely. Take a look even at the ice seas, a close look. But not just that. That is in the nature of a confrontation. Confrontation is not necessarily bad, but first just a look, eh? A recognition. Then you should think about going up into the hills. Tharsis, Elysium. A rise in altitude is a voyage into the past. Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. It’s wonderful, really. So many people don’t have such a wonderful task as that, you can’t imagine. You’re lucky to have it.
And you?
What?
What is your task?
My task?
Yes. Your task
. . . I ‘m not sure. I told you, I envy you having that. My tasks are . . . confused. To help Maya, and me. And the rest of us. Reconciliation . . . I would like to find Hiroko . . .
You’ve been our shrink for a long time.
Yes.
Over a hundred years.
Yes.
And never any results at all.
Well. I like to think I have helped a little.
But it doesn’t come naturally to you.
Perhaps not.
Do you think people get interested in studying psychology because they’re troubled in the mind?
It’s a common t
heory.
But no one has ever been shrink to you.
Oh I’ve had my therapists.
Helpful?
Yes! Quite helpful. Fairly helpful. I mean— they did what they could.
But you don’t know your task.
No. Or, I . . . I want to go home.
What home?
That’s the problem. Hard when you don’t know where home is, eh?
Yes. I thought you would stay in Provence.
No no. I mean, Provence is my home, but . . .
But now you’re on your way back to Mars.
Yes.
You decided to come back.
. . .Yes.
You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?
No. But you do. You know where your home is. You have that, and it’s precious! You should remember that, you shouldn’t be throwing away such a gift, or thinking it’s a burden! You’re a fool to think that! It’s a gift, damn you, a precious precious gift, do you understand me?
I’ll have to think about that.
She left the refuge in a meteorological rover from the previous century, a high square thing with a luxurious window-box driver’s compartment up top. It was not unlike the front half of the expedition rover in which she had first traveled to the North Pole, with Nadia and Phyllis and Edmund and George. And because she had spent thousands of days since then in such machines, she at first had the impression that what she was doing was ordinary, contiguous with the rest of her life.
But she drove northeast, downcanyon, until she was in the bed of the little unnamed channel at sixty degrees longitude, fifty-three degrees north. This valley had been carved by a small aquifer outbreak during the late Amazonian, running in an earlier graben fault, down the lower slopes of the Great Escarpment. The scoring effects of the flood were still visible on the rims of the canyon walls, and in the lenticular islands of bedrock on the floor of the channel.
Which now ran north into a sea of ice.
• • •
She got out of the car wearing a fiberfilled windsuit, a CO2 mask, goggles, and heated boots. The air was thin and cold, though it was spring now in the north— Ls 10, m-53. Cold and windy, ragged lines of low puffy clouds racing east. It was either going to be an ice age or, if the greens’ manipulations forestalled it, then a year-without-summer, like 1810 on Earth, when the explosion of the volcano Tambori had chilled the world.
TEMPE TERRA
She walked the shore of the new sea. It was at the foot of the Great Escarpment, in Tempe Terra, a lobe of ancient highlands extending into the north. Tempe had probably escaped the general stripping of the northern hemisphere by being roughly opposite the impact point of the Big Hit, which most areologists now agreed had struck near Hrad Vallis, above Elysium. So; battered hills, overlooking an ice-covered sea. The rock looked like a red sea’s surface in a wild cross chop; the ice looked like a prairie in the depths of winter. Native water, as Michel had said— there from the beginning, on the surface before. It was a hard thing to grasp. Her thoughts were scattered and confused, darting this way and that, all at the same time— it was like madness, but not. She knew the difference. The hum and keen of the wind did not speak to her in the tones of the MIT lecturer; she suffered no choking sensations when she tried to breathe. It was not like that. Rather her thinking was accelerated, fractured, unpredictable— like that flock of birds over the ice, zigzagging across the sky in a hard wind from the west. Ah the feel of that same wind against her body, shoving at it, the new thick air like a great animal paw. . . .
The birds struggled in it with reckless skill. She stood for a while and watched: they were skuas, out hunting over dark streaks of open water. These polynyas were just the surface signs of immense pods of liquid water under the ice; she had heard that a continuous channel of under-ice water now wrapped the globe, winding east over old Vastitas, tearing frequent polynyas in the surface, gaps which then stayed liquid for an hour or a week. Even with the air so cold, the underwater temperatures were warmed by the drowned Vastitas moholes, and rising heat from the thousands of thermonuclear explosions set off by the metanats around the turn of the century. These bombs had been placed deep enough in the megaregolith to trap their radioactive fallout, supposedly, but not their heat, which rose in a thermal pulse through the rock, a pulse that would continue for years and years. No; Michel could talk about it being Mars’s water, but there was little else that was natural about this new sea.
Ann hiked up a ridge to get a wider view. There it lay: ice, mostly flat, sometimes shattered. All as still as a butterfly on a twig, as if the whiteness might suddenly lift off and fly away. The birds’ wheeling and the clouds’ scudding showed how hard the wind blew, everything in the air pouring east; but the ice remained still. The wind’s voice was deep and huge, scraping over a billion cold edges. A strip of gray water was striated by windchop, the strength of each gust precisely registered by the flayed cat’s paws, each brush of harder wind feathering the larger waves with exquisite sensitivity. Water. And below that brushed surface, plankton, krill, fish, squid; she had heard they were producing in hatcheries all the creatures of the extremely short Antarctic food chain, and then releasing them to the sea. Teeming water.
The skuas wheeled overhead. One cloud of them whirlpooled down onto something along on the shore, behind some rocks. Ann hiked toward them. Suddenly she saw the birds’ target, lying in a cleft at the edge of the ice: the mostly eaten remains of a seal. Seals! The corpse lay on tundra grass, in the lee of a patch of sand dunes, sheltered by another rocky ridge running down into the ice. The white skeleton emerged from dark red flesh, ringed by white blubber, black fur. All torn open to the sky. Eyes pecked out.
She hiked on past the corpse, up another little ridge. The ridge made a kind of cape extending into the ice, and beyond it was a bay. A round bay— a crater, infilled by ice. It had happened to lie at sea level, had happened to have a breach in its rim on its seaward side, so that water and ice had poured in and filled it. Now a round bay, perfect for a harbor. One day it would be a harbor. About three kilometers across.
Ann sat down on a boulder on the cape, and looked out at the new bay. Her breath heaved in and out of her in an involuntary motion, her rib cage moving violently, as during labor contractions. Sobs, yes. She pulled aside her face mask, blew her nose using her finger, wiped her eyes, all the while still weeping furiously. This was her body. She recalled the first time she had stumbled onto the flooding of Vastitas, in a solo trip ages ago. That time she had not cried, but Michel had said that was only shock, the numbness of shock, as in any injury— withdrawal from her body and her feelings. Michel would call this response healthier, no doubt, but why? It hurt— her body, spasming in a seismic trembling. But when it was over, Michel would say, she would feel better. Drained. A tension gone— the tectonics of the limbic system— she scorned such simplistic analogies as Michel offered, the woman as planet, it was absurd. Nevertheless there she sat, sniffling, looking out at the ice bay under scudding clouds, feeling drained.
• • •
Nothing moved except for clouds overhead, and cat’s paws on a patch of open water, gust after gust, shimmering gray, mauve, gray. Water moved but the land was still.
Finally Ann stood and walked down a rib of hard old shishovite, now forming a narrow divide between two long beaches. To tell the truth, above the ice there was not that much that had changed from the primal state. Down at the waterline it was a different story. Here the daily trade winds over the open water of the summer bay had created waves large enough to break the remaining chunks of ice into what they called brash ice. Lines of this flotsam were now beached above the current ice level, like ice sculptures depicting driftwood. But in the summer this ice had helped to rip up the sand of the new beaches, tearing it into a slurry of ice and mud and sand, now frozen in place like brown cake frosting.
Ann walked slowly across this mess. Beyond it there was a little inlet, crowded with ice boulders that had groun
ded in the shallows and then been frozen into the sea surface. Exposure to sun and wind had rendered these boulders into baroque fantasias of clear blue ice and opaque red ice, like aggregates of sapphire and bloodstone. The south sides of the blocks had melted preferentially, the meltwater frozen in icicles, ice beards, ice sheets, ice columns.
Looking back at the shore she saw again how the sand was furrowed and torn; the damage was terrific, the gouges sometimes two meters deep— incredible force, to plow such trenches! The sand drifts must have been loess, made of loose light aeolian deposits. Now a no-man’s-land of frozen mud and dirty ice, as if bombs had devastated some sad army’s trenches.
She continued outward, stepping on opaque ice. On the surface of the bay. Like a world covered in semen. Once the ice cracked under her boot.
When she was well out on the bay she stopped and had a look around. Tight horizons indeed; she climbed a flat-topped berg, which gave her a larger view over the expanse of ice, out to the circle of the crater rim, just under the running clouds. Though cracked and jumbled and lined by pressure ridges, the ice nevertheless clearly conveyed the flatness of the water beneath it. To the north the gap to the sea was obvious. Tabular bergs stuck out from the ice like deformed castles. A white waste.
After struggling to come to grips with the scene, and failing, she clambered off the berg and hiked back to the shore, then back toward her car. As she was crossing the little ridge cape, movement down at the edge of the ice caught her eye. A white thing moved— a person in a white walker, on all fours— no. A bear. A polar bear. Walking along the edge of the ice.
It spotted the dust devil of skuas over the dead seal. Ann crouched behind a boulder, went prone on a patch of frosty sand. Cold all along the front of her body. She looked over the boulder.
The bear’s ivory fur yellowed on its flanks and legs. It raised a heavy head, sniffed like a dog, looked around curiously. It shambled to the corpse of the seal, ignoring the column of squealing birds. It ate from the seal like a dog from a bowl. It raised its head, muzzle dark red. Ann’s heart pounded. The bear sat on its haunches and licked a paw, rubbed its face until it was clean, catlike in its fastidiousness. Then without warning it dropped to all fours and started up the slope of rock and sand, toward Ann’s hiding place behind the boulder. It trotted, moving both the legs on one side of its body in the same motion, left, right, left.