So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and microbial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind of potato.
Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na— at their latitude, but all the way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the last minute it veered north.
They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.
But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might as well have been night— a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and rattling the outer window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked pensively. Then the howl lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt more and more sick the less the wind howled— until the air was still, and he was so nauseated he could scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms sometimes did this; they ended abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind, or a particular landform. And then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines. It was raining dust now, in fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash were settling over the world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even the biggest dust storms would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at the end of their runs. But with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds so much more powerful, great quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and if they came down all at once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much deeper than a few millimeters.
As near suspension as some fines were, in an hour all but the very finest had fallen out of the air and onto them. After that it was only a hazy afternoon, windless, the air filled with something like a thin smoke, so that they could see the whole of the basin; which was covered with a lumpy blanket of dust.
Nirgal went out with his mask on as always, and dug desperately with a shovel, then with his bare hands. Sax came out, staggering through the soft drifts, to put a hand to Nirgal’s shoulder. “I don’t believe there’s anything that can be done.” The layer of dust was about a meter deep, or deeper.
In time, other winds would blow some of this dust away. Snow would fall on the rest of it, and when the snow melted, the resulting mud would run over the spillways, and a new leaf-vein system of channels would cut a new fractal pattern, much like the old one. Water would carry the dust and fines away, down the massif and into the world. But by the time that happened, every plant and animal in the basin would be dead.
Part Nine
Natural History
Afterward Nirgal went with Sax up to Da Vinci, and stayed with the old man in his apartment. One night Coyote dropped by, after the timeslip when no one else would have thought to visit.
Briefly Nirgal told him what had happened to the high basin.
“Yeah, so?” Coyote said.
Nirgal looked away.
Coyote went to the kitchen and started scrabbling through Sax’s refrigerator, shouting back into the living room through a full mouth. “What did you expect on a windy hillside like that? This world is not a garden, man. Some of it going to get buried every year, that’s just the way it is. Another wind come in a year or ten and blow all that dust off your hill.”
“Everything will be dead by then.”
“That’s life. Now it’s time to do something else. What were you doing before you set in there?”
“Looking for Hiroko.”
“Shit.” Coyote appeared in the doorway, pointing a big kitchen knife right at Nirgal. “Not you too.”
“Yes me too.”
“Oh come on. When you going to grow up. Hiroko is dead. You might as well get used to it.”
Sax came in from his office, blinking hard. “Hiroko is alive,” he said.
“Not you too!” Coyote cried. “You two are like children!”
“I saw her on the south flank of Arsia Mons, in a storm.”
“Join the fucking party, man.”
Sax blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Fuck.”
Coyote went back into the kitchen.
“There have been other sightings,” Nirgal said to Sax. “Reports are fairly common.”
“I know that—”
“Reports are daily!” Coyote shouted from the kitchen. He charged back into the living room. “People see her every day! There’s a spot on the wrist to report sightings! Last week I see she appeared in two different places on the same night, in Noachis and on Olympus! Opposite sides of the world!”
“I don’t see that that proves anything,” Sax said stubbornly. “They say the same sort of thing about you, and I see you’re still alive.”
Coyote shook his head violently. “No. I am the exception that proves the rule. Anyone else, when they are reported in two places at once, that means they are dead. A sure sign.” He made a stop thrust to forestall Sax’s next remark, shouted “She’s dead! Face it! She died in the attack on Sabishii! Those UNTA storm troopers caught her and Iwao and Gene and Rya and all the rest of them, and they took them to some room and sucked the air or pulled the trigger. That’s what happens! Do you think it never happens? Do you think that secret police haven’t killed dissidents and then disappeared the bodies so that no one ever finds out? It happens! Fuck yes it happens, even on your precious Mars it happens, yes and more than once! You know it’s true! It happened. That’s how people are. They’ll do anything, they’ll kill people and figure they’re just earning their keep or feeding their children or making the world safe. And that’s what happened. They killed Hiroko and all the rest of them too.”
Nirgal and Sax stared. Coyote was quivering, he looked like he was going to stab the wall.
Sax cleared his throat. “Desmond— what makes you so sure?”
“Because I looked! I looked. I looked like no one else could look. She’s not in any of her places. She’s not anywhere. She didn’t get out. No one has really seen her since Sabishii. That’s why you’ve never heard from her. She’s not so inhuman she would let us go all this time without ever letting us know.”
“But I saw her,” Sax insisted.
“In a storm, you said. In a bit of trouble, I suppose. Saw her for a little while, just long enough to get you out of trouble. Then gone for good.”
Sax blinked.
Coyote laughed harshly. “So I thought. No, that’s fine. Dream about her all you want. Just don’t get that confused with reality. Hiroko is dead.”
Nirgal looked back and forth between the two silent men. “I’ve looked for her too,” he said. And then, seeing the blasted look on Sax’s face: “Anything’s possible.”
Coyote shook his head. He went back into the kitchen, muttering to himself. Sax looked at Nirgal, stared right through him.
“Maybe I’ll try looking for her again,” Nirgal told him.
Sax nodded.
“Beats farming,” Coyote said from the kitchen.
Recently Harry Whitebook had found a method for increasing animal tolerance to CO2, by introducing into mammals a gene which coded for certain characteristics of crocodile hemoglobin. Crocodiles could hold their breath for a very long time underwater, and the CO2 that should have built up in their blood actually dissolved there into bicarbonate ions, bound to amino acids in the hemoglobin, in a complex that caused the hemoglobin to release oxygen molecules. High CO2 tolerance was thus combined with increased oxygen
ation efficiency, a very elegant adaptation, and as it turned out fairly easy (once Whitebook showed the way) to introduce into mammals by utilizing the latest trait transcription technology: designed strands of the DNA repair enzyme photolyase were assembled, and these would patch the descriptions for the trait into the genome during the gerontological treatments, changing slightly the hemoglobin properties of the subject.
Sax was one of the first people to have this trait administered to him. He liked the idea because it would obviate the need for a face mask in the outdoors, and he was spending a lot of his time outdoors. Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere were still at about 40 millibars of the 500 total at sea level, the rest consisting of 260 millibars nitrogen, 170 millibars oxygen, and 30 of miscellaneous noble gases. So there was still too much CO2 for humans to tolerate without filter masks. But after trait transcription he could walk free in the air, observing the wide array of animals with similar trait transcriptions already out there. All of them monsters together, settling into their ecological niches, in a very confusing flux of surges, die-offs, invasions and retreats— everything vainly seeking a balance that could not, given the changing climate, exist. No different than life on Earth had ever been, in other words; but here all happening at a much faster rate, pushed by the human-driven changes, modifications, introductions, transcriptions, translations— the interventions that worked, the interventions that backfired— the effects unintended, unforeseen, unnoticed— to the point where many thoughtful scientists were giving up any pretense of control. “Let happen what may,” as Spencer would say when he was in his cups. This offended Michel’s sense of meaning, but there was nothing to be done about that, except to alter Michel’s sense of what was meaningful. Contingency, the flux of life: in a word, evolution. From the Latin, meaning the unrolling of a book. And not directed evolution either, not by a long shot. Influenced evolution perhaps, accelerated evolution certainly (in some aspects, anyway). But not managed, nor directed. They didn’t know what they were doing. It took some getting used to.
CHRYSE GULF
• • •
So Sax wandered around on Da Vinci Peninsula, a rectangular chunk of land surrounding the round rim hill of Da Vinci Crater, and bounded by the Simud, Shalbatana, and Ravi fjords, all of which debouched onto the southern end of Chryse Gulf. Two islands, Copernicus and Galileo, lay to the west, in the mouths of the Ares and Tiu fjords. A very rich braiding of sea and land, perfect for the burgeoning of life— the Da Vinci lab techs could not have chosen a better site, although Sax was quite sure they had had no sense at all of their surroundings when they chose the crater for the underground’s hidden aerospace labs. The crater had had a thick rim and was located a good distance from Burroughs and Sabishii, and that had been that. Stumbled into paradise. More than a lifetime’s observations to be made, without ever leaving home.
Hydrology, invasion biology, areology, ecology, materials science, particle physics, cosmology: all these fields interested Sax extremely, but most of his daily work in these years concerned the weather. Da Vinci Peninsula got a lot of dramatic weather; wet storms swept south down the gulf, dry katabatic winds dropped off the southern highland and out the fjord canyons, initiating big northward waves at sea. Because they were so close to the equator, the perihelion-aphelion cycle affected them much more than the ordinary inclination seasons. Aphelion brought cold weather twenty degrees north of the equator at least, while perihelion cooked the equator as much as the south. In the Januaries and Februaries, sun-warmed southern air lofted into the stratosphere, turned east at the tropopause and joined the jet streams in their circumnavigations. The jet streams were difluent around the Tharsis Bulge; the southern stream carried moisture from Amazonis Bay, and dumped it on Daedalia and Icaria, sometimes even on the western wall of the Argyre Basin mountains, where glaciers were forming. The northern jet stream ran over the Tempe-Mareotis highlands, then blew over the North Sea, picking up the moisture for storm after storm. North of that, over the polar cap, air cooled and fell on the rotating planet, causing surface winds from the northeast. These cold dry winds sometimes shot underneath the warmer wetter air of the temperate westerlies, causing fronts of huge thunderheads to rise over the North Sea, thunderheads twenty kilometers high.
The southern hemisphere, being more uniform than the north, had winds that followed even more clearly the physics of air over a rotating sphere: southeast trades from the equator to latitude thirty; prevailing westerlies from latitude thirty down to latitude sixty; polar easterlies from there to the pole. There were vast deserts in the south, especially between latitude fifteen and thirty, where the air that rose at the equator sank again, causing high air pressure and hot air that held a lot of water vapor without condensing; it hardly ever rained in this band, which included the hyperarid provinces of Solis, Noachis, and Hesperia. In these regions the winds picked up dust off the dry land, and the dust storms, while more localized than before, were also thicker, as Sax had witnessed himself, unfortunately, while up on Tyrrhena with Nirgal.
Those were the major patterns in Martian weather: violent around aphelion, gentle during the helionequinoxes; the south the hemisphere of extremes, the north of moderation. Or so some models suggested. Sax liked generating the simulations that created such models, but he was aware that their match with reality was approximate at best; every year on record was an exception of some kind, with conditions changing at each stage of the terraforming. And the future of their climate was impossible to predict, even if one froze the variables and pretended terraformation had stabilized, which it certainly had not. Over and over Sax watched a thousand years of weather, altering variables in the models, and every time a completely different millennium flitted past. Fascinating. The light gravity and the resulting scale height of the atmosphere, the vast vertical relief of the surface, the presence of the North Sea that might or might not ice over, the thickening air, the perihelion-aphelion cycle, which was an eccentricity that was slowly precessing through the inclination seasons; these had predictable effects, perhaps, but in combination they made Martian weather a very hard thing to understand, and the more he watched, the less Sax felt they knew. But it was fascinating, and he could watch the iterations play out all day long.
• • •
Or else just sit out on Simshal Point, watching clouds flow across hyacinth skies. Kasei Fjord, off to the northwest, was a wind tunnel for the strongest katabatic blows on the planet, winds pouring out of it onto Chryse Gulf at speeds that occasionally reached five hundred kilometers an hour. When these howlers struck Sax could see the cinnamon clouds marking them, over the horizon to the north. Ten or twelve hours later big swells would roll in from the north, and rise up and hammer the sea cliffs, fifty-meter-high wedges of water blasting to spray against the rock, until the air all over the peninsula was a thick white mist. It was dangerous to be at sea during a howler, as he had found out once while sailing the coastal waters of the southern gulf, in a little catamaran he had learned to operate.
Nicer by far to observe storms from the sea cliffs. No howler today; just a steady stiff wind, and the distant black broom of a squall on the water north of Copernicus, and the heat of sun on skin. Global average temperature changed every year, up and down, mostly up. With time as the horizontal axis, a rising mountain range. The Year Without Summer, now an old chasm; actually it had lasted three years, but people would not disturb such a name for a mere fact. Three Unusually Cold Years— no. It didn’t have what people wanted, some kind of compression of the truth, to create a strong trace in the memory, perhaps. Symbolic thinking; people needed things thrown together. Sax knew this because he spent a lot of time in Sabishii visiting Michel and Maya. People loved drama. Maya more than most, perhaps, but it served to show. Limit-case demonstration of the norm. He worried about her effect on Michel. Michel seemed not to be enjoying life. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, “a return home,” and algos, “pain.” Pain of the return home. A very accurate description; despit
e their blurs, words could sometimes be so exact. It was a paradox until you looked into how the brain worked, then it became less surprising. A model of the mind’s interaction with physical reality, blurred at the edges. Even science had to admit it. Not that this meant giving up trying to explain things!
“Come out and do some field studies with me,” he would urge Michel.
“Soon.”
“Concentrate on the moment,” Sax suggested. “Each moment is its own reality. It has its particular thisness. You can’t predict, but you can explain. Or try. If you are observant, and lucky, you can say, this is why this is happening! It’s very interesting!”
“Sax. When did you become such a poet?”
Sax did not know how to answer that. Michel was still stuffed with his immense nostalgia. Finally Sax said, “Make time to come out into the field.”
• • •
In the mild winters when the winds were gentle, Sax took sailing trips around the south end of Chryse Gulf. The golden gulf. The rest of the year he stayed on the peninsula, and went out from Da Vinci Crater on foot, or in a little car for overnighters. Mostly he did meteorology, though of course he looked at everything. On the water he would sit and feel the wind in the sail as he wandered into one little convolution of the coast after another. On the land he would drive in the mornings, looking at the view until he saw a good spot. Then he would stop the car and go outside.
Pants, shirt, windbreaker, hiking boots, his old hat; all he needed on this day of m-year 65. A fact that never ceased to amaze him. Usually it was in the 280s— bracing, but he liked it. Global averages were bouncing around the mid-270s. A good average, he felt— above freezing— sending a thermal pulse down into the permafrost. On its own this pulse would melt the permafrost in about ten thousand years. But of course it was not on its own.
He wandered over tundra moss and samphire, kedge and grass. Life on Mars. An odd business. Life anywhere, really. Not at all obvious why it should appear. This was something Sax had been thinking about recently. Why was there increasing order in any part of the cosmos, when one might expect nothing but entropy everywhere? This puzzled him greatly. He had been intrigued when Spencer had offered an offhand explanation, over beer one night on the Odessa corniche— in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order. Sax had been surprised to hear such an interesting cosmological notion from Spencer, but Spencer was a surprising man. Although he drank too much alcohol.