Blue Mars

  The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the northern arc of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window walls, overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath them. The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under vine-covered trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305 K, and people muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air to escape, or even working up a system where they could simply roll off the mesh during the summer.

  Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the outer satellites. The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and green-house-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some feed-stocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.

  One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.

  Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly stunned through the whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric inquiries to his associates, and spent his time staring down at the forest below the town. When someone at dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I taught your mother once.”

  “Yes,” Zo said.

  “Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.

  “I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.

  “I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.

  The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.

  • • •

  They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade under the eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a high canopy through which lemurs howled and leaped. The old man walked slowly along, peering at the heedless creatures of the forest, and he spoke seldom, mostly to ask if Zo knew the names of the various ferns and trees. All she could identify for him were the birds. “The names of plants go in one ear and out the other, I’m afraid,” she admitted cheerfully.

  His forehead wrinkled at this.

  “I think that helps me to see them better,” she added.

  “Really.” He looked around again, as if trying it. “Does that mean you don’t see the birds as well as the plants?”

  “They’re different. They’re my brothers and sisters, they have to have names. It’s part of them. But this stuff”— she gestured at the green fronds around them, giant ferns under spiky flowering trees—”this stuff is nameless, really. We make up names, but they don’t really have them.”

  He thought about this.

  “Where do you fly?” he said a kilometer down the overgrown trail.

  “Everywhere.”

  “Do you have favorite places?”

  “I like Echus Overlook.”

  “Good updrafts?”

  “Very good. I was there until Jackie descended on me and put me to work.”

  “It’s not your work?”

  “Oh yes, yes. But my co-op is good at flex time.”

  “Ah. So you will stay here awhile?”

  “Only until the Galilean shuttle leaves.”

  “Then you will emigrate?”

  “No no. A tour, for Jackie. Diplomatic mission.”

  “Ah. Will you visit Uranus?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to see Miranda.”

  “Me too. That’s one reason I’m going.”

  “Ah.”

  They crossed a shallow creek, stepping on exposed flat stones. Birds called, insects whirred. Sunlight filled the entire crater bowl now, but under the forest canopy it was still cool, the air shot with parallel columns and wires of slanting yellow light. Russell crouched to stare into the creek they had crossed.

  “What was my mother like as a child?” Zo asked.

  “Jackie?”

  He thought about it. A long time passed. Just as Zo was concluding with exasperation that he had forgotten the question, he said, “She was a fast runner. She asked a lot of questions. Why why why. I liked that. She was the oldest of that generation of ectogenes, I think. The leader anyway.”

  “Was she in love with Nirgal?”

  “I don’t know. Why, have you met Nirgal?”

  “I think so, yes. With the ferals once. What about with Peter Clayborne, was she in love with him?”

  “In love? Later, maybe. When they were older. In Zygote, I don’t know.”

  “You aren’t much help.”

  “No.”

  “Forgotten it all?”

  “Not all. But what I remember is— hard to characterize. I remember Jackie asking about John Boone one day, just in the way you’re asking about her. More than once. She was pleased to be his granddaughter. Proud of him.”

  “She still is. And I’m proud of her.”

  “And— I remember her crying, once.”

  “Why? And don’t say I don’t know!”

  This balked him. Finally he looked up at her, with a smile almost human. “She was sad.”

  “Oh very good!”

  “Because her mother had left. Esther?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Kasei and Esther broke up, and Esther left for— I don’t know. But Kasei and Jackie stayed in Zygote. And one day she got to school early, on a day I was teaching. She asked why a lot. And this time too, but about Kasei and Esther. And then she cried.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I don’t. . . . ‘Nothing, I suppose. I didn’t know what to say. Hmm. . . . I thought she perhaps should have gone with Esther. The mother bond is crucial.”

  “Come on.”

  “You don’t agree? I thought all you young natives were sociobiologists.”

  “What’s th
at?”

  “Um— someone who believes that most cultural traits have a biological explanation.”

  “Oh no. Of course not. We’re much freer than that. Mothering can be any kind of thing. Sometimes mothers are nothing but incubators.”

  “I suppose so—”

  “Take my word for it.”

  “. . . But Jackie cried.”

  On they hiked, in silence. Like a lot of the big craters, Moreux turned out to have several pie-wedge watersheds, converging on a central marsh and lake. In this case the lake was small and kidney-shaped, curving around the rough low knobs of a central peak complex. Zo and Russell came out from under the forest canopy on an indistinct trail that faded into elephant grass, and they would have gotten quickly lost except for the stream, which was oxbowing through the grass toward a meadow and then the marshy lake. Even the meadow was dominated by elephant grass, great circular clumps of it that stood well overhead, so that they often had a view of nothing but giant grasses and sky. The long blades of grass gleamed under the lilac midday zenith. Russell stumbled along well behind Zo, his round sunglasses like mirrors in his face, reflecting the grass bundles as he looked this way and that. He appeared utterly foxed, amazed at the surroundings, and he muttered into an old wristpad that hung on his wrist like a manacle.

  A final oxbow into the lake had created a fine sand-and-pebble beach, and after testing with a stick for quicksand at the waterline, and finding the sand firm, Zo stripped off her sweaty singlet and walked out into the water, which got nice and cold a few meters offshore. She dove under, swam around, hit her head on the bottom. There was a beached boulder standing over some deep water, and she climbed it and dove in three or four times, doing a forward flip in the water right after entry; this forward somersault, difficult and graceless in the air, caused a quick little tug of weightless pleasure in the pit of her stomach, a feeling as close to orgasm as any nonorgasm she had ever felt. So she dove several times, until the sensation wore off and she was cooled. Then she walked out of the lake and lay on the sand, feeling its heat and the solar radiation cook both sides of her. A real orgasm would have been perfect, but despite the fact that she was laid out before him like a map of sex, Russell sat cross-legged in the shallows, absorbed apparently by the mud, naked himself except for sunglasses and wristpad. A farmer-tanned little bald wizened primate, like her image of Gandhi or Homo habilis. It was even a bit sexy how different he was, so ancient and small, like the male of some turtle-without-a-shell species. She pulled her knee to the side and shifted up her bottom in an unmistakable present posture, the sunlight hot on her exposed vulva.

  “What amazing mud,” he said, staring at the glop in his hand. “I’ve never seen anything like this biome.”

  “No.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “This biome? I suppose so. It’s a bit hot and overgrown, but interesting. It makes a change.”

  “So you don’t object. You’re not a Red.”

  “A Red?” She laughed. “No, I’m a whig.”

  He thought that one over. “Do you mean to say that greens and Reds are no longer a contemporary political division?”

  She gestured at the elephant grass and saal trees backing the meadow. “How could they be?”

  “Very interesting.” He cleared his throat. “When you go to Uranus, will you invite a friend of mine?”

  “Maybe,” Zo said, and shifted her hips back a bit.

  He took the hint, and after a moment leaned forward and began to massage the thigh nearest him. It felt like a monkey’s little hands on her skin, clever and knowing. He could lose his whole hand in her pubic hair, a phenomenon he appeared to like, as he repeated it several times and got an erection, which she held hard as she came. It was not like being tabled, of course, but any orgasm was a good thing, especially out in the sun’s hot rain. And although his handling of her was basic, he did not exhibit any of that hankering for simultaneous affection which so many of the old ones had, a sentimentality which interfered with the much more acute pleasures that could be achieved one person at a time. So when her shuddering had stilled she rolled on her side, and took his erection in her mouth— like a little finger she could wrap her tongue entirely around— while giving him a good view of her body. She stopped once to look herself, big rich taut curves, and saw that the span of her hips stood nearly as high as his shoulders. Then back to it, vagina dentata, so absurd those frightened patriarchal myths, teeth were entirely superfluous, did a python need teeth, did a rock stamp need teeth? Just grab the poor creatures by the cock and squeeze till they whimpered, and what were they going to do? They could try to stay out of the grip, but at the same time it was the place they most wanted to be, so that they wandered in the pathetic confusion and denial of that double bind— and put themselves at the risk of teeth anyway, any chance they got; she nipped at him, to remind him of his situation; then let him come. Men were so lucky they weren’t telepathic.

  Afterward they took another dip in the lake, and back on the sand he pulled a loaf of bread from his day pack. They broke the loaf in half and ate.

  “Were you purring, then?” he said between swallows.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You had the trait inserted?”

  She nodded, swallowed. “Last time I took the treatment.”

  “The genes are from cats?”

  “From tigers.”

  “Ah.”

  “It turns out to be a minor change in the larynx and vocal cords. You should try it, it feels really good.”

  He was blinking and did not answer.

  “Now who’s this friend you want me to take to Uranus?”

  “Ann Clayborne.”

  “Ah! Your old nemesis.”

  “Something like that.”

  “What makes you think she would go?”

  “She might not. But she might. Michel says she’s trying some new things. And I think Miranda would be interesting to her. A moon knocked apart in an impact, and then reassembled, moon and impactor together. It’s an image I’d . . . like her to see. All that rock, you know. She’s fond of rock.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Russell and Clayborne, the green and the Red, two of the most famous antagonists in all the melodramatic saga of the first years of settlement. Those first years: a situation so claustrophobic Zo shuddered to think of it. Clearly the experience had brecciated the minds of all those who had suffered through it. And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage inflicted later on, as she recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s stories tended to blur together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony, Maya’s betrayals— all the arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so on— such sordid stuff, with scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far as she could tell. As if the old ones had been anaerobic bacteria, living in poison, slowly excreting the necessary conditions for the emergence of a fully oxygenated life.

  Except perhaps for Ann Clayborne, who seemed, from the stories, to have understood that to feel joy in a rock world, you had to love rock. Zo liked that attitude, and so she said, “Sure, I’ll ask her. Or you should, shouldn’t you? You ask, and tell her I’m agreeable. We can make room in the diplomatic group.”

  “It’s a Free Mars group?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  He asked her questions about Jackie’s political ambitions, and she answered when she could, looking down her body and its curves, the hard muscles smoothed by the fat under the skin— hipbones flanking the belly, navel, wiry black pubic hair (she brushed bread crumbs out of it), long powerful thighs. Women’s bodies were much more handsomely proportioned than men’s, Michelangelo had been wrong about that, although his David made a best case for his argument, a flier’s body if ever there was one.

  “I wish we could fly back up to the rim,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to fly the birdsuits.”

  “I could have carried you on my back.”

  “Rea
lly?”

  She glanced at him. Another thirty or thirty-five kilos. . . . “Sure. It would depend on the suit.”

  “It’s amazing what those suits can do.”

  “It’s not just the suits.”

  “No. But we weren’t meant to fly. Heavy bones and all. You know.”

  “I do. Certainly the suits are necessary. Just not sufficient.”

  “Yes.” He was looking at her body. “It’s interesting how big people are getting.”

  “Especially genitals.”

  “Do you think so?”

  She laughed. “Just teasing.”

  “Ah.”

  “Although you would think the parts would grow that had increased use, eh?”

  “Yes. Depth of chests have grown greater, I read.”

  She laughed again. “The thin air, right?”

  “Presumably. It’s true in the Andes, anyway. The distances from spine to sternum in Andean natives are nearly twice as large as they are in people who live at sea level.”

  “Really! Like the chest cavities of birds, eh?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Then add big pecs, and big breasts. . . .”