The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson
Frances shakes her head, as always. Never once has Eileen seen the two of them agree. In this case Frances thinks the ranges may be even older than Hans does, remnants of early-tectonic or prototectonic plate movement. There's a wide body of evidence for this early-tectonic era, she claims, but Hans is shaking his head: “The andesite indicating tectonic action is younger than that. The Phlegras are early Noachian. A pre—Big Hit big hit.”
Whatever the explanation, there the fine prow of rock stands, the end of a steep peninsula extending straight north into the ice for four hundred kilometers out of Firewater. A long sea cliff falling into the sea, and the same on the other side. The pilgrimage out the spine to the temple is one of the most famous walks on Mars; Eileen has made it a number of times since Roger first took her on it about forty years ago, sometimes with him, sometimes without. When they first came they looked out on a blue sea purled with whitecaps. Seldom since has it been free of ice.
He too is looking at the point, with an expression that makes Eileen think he might be remembering that time as well. Certainly he would remember if asked; his incredible memory has still not yet begun to weaken, and with the suite of memory drugs now available, drugs which have helped Eileen to remember quite a bit, it might well be that he will never forget anything his whole life long. Eileen envies that, though she knows he is ambivalent about it. But by now it is one of the things about him that she loves. He remembers everything and yet he has remained stalwart, even chipper, through all the years of the crash. A rock for her to lean on, in her own cycles of despair and mourning. Of course as a red it could be argued he has no reason to mourn. But that wouldn't be true. His attitude was more complex than that, Eileen has seen it; so complex that she does not fully understand it. Some aspect of his strong memory, taking the long view; a determination to make it well; rueful joy in the enduring land; some mix of all these things. She watches him as he stares absorbed at the promontory where he and she once stood together over a living world.
How much he has meant to her through the years has become beyond her ability to express. Sometimes it fills her to overflowing. That they have known each other all their lives; that they have helped each other through hard times; that he got her out into the land in the first place, starting her on the trajectory of her whole life; all these would have made him a crucial figure to her. But everyone has many such figures. And over the years their divergent interests kept splitting them up; they could have lost touch entirely. But at one point Roger came to visit her in Burroughs, and she and her partner of that time had been growing distant for many years, and Roger said, I love you, Eileen. I love you. Remember what it was like on Olympus Mons, when we climbed it? Well now I think the whole world is like that. The escarpment goes on forever. We just keep climbing it until eventually we fall off. And I want to climb it with you. We keep getting together and then going our ways, and it's too chancy, we might not cross paths again. Something might happen. I want more than that. I love you.
And so eventually they set up rooms in her co-op in Burroughs. She continued to work in the Ministry of the Environment, and he continued to guide treks in the backcountry, then to sail on the north sea; but he always came back from his treks and his cruises, and she always came back from her working tours and her vacations away; and they lived together in their rooms when they were both at home, and became a real couple. And through the years without summer, then the little ice age and the crash itself, his steadfast presence has been all that has kept her from despair. She shudders to think what it would have been like to get through those years alone. To work so hard, and then to fail . . . it's been hard. She has seen that he has worried about her. This trip is an expression of that: Look, he said once after she came home in tears over reports of the tropical and temperate extinctions—look, I think you need to get out there and see it. See the world the way it is now, see the ice. It's not so bad. There have been ice ages before. It's not so bad.
And as she had been more and more holing up in Burroughs, unable to face it, she finally was forced to agree that in theory it would be a good thing. Very soon after that he organized this trip. Now she sees that he gathered some of their friends from the Olympus Mons expedition to help entice her to come, perhaps; also, once here, to remind her of that time in their lives. Anyway it's nice to see their faces, flushed and grinning as they fly along.
Skate east! the wind says, and they skitter round Scrabster, the northeastern point of Elysium, then head south over the great plate of white ice inserted into the incurve of the coast. This is the Bay of Arcadia, and the steep rise of land backing the bluffs is called Acadia, for its supposed resemblance to Nova Scotia and the coast of Maine. Dark rock, battered by the dark north sea; sea cliffs of bashed granite, sluiced by big breakers. Now, however, all still and white, with the ice that has powdered down out of the spray and spume flocking and frosting the beach and the cliffs until they look like wedding-cake ramparts. No sign of life in Acadia; no greens anywhere in sight. This is not her Elysium.
Roger takes over the sailing from Arthur, and brings them around a point, and there suddenly is a steepwalled square island ahead, vivid green on top—ah. A township, frozen here near the entrance to a fjord, no doubt in a deep channel. All the townships have become islands in the ice. The greenery on top is protected by a tent which Eileen cannot see in the bright sun. “I'm just dropping by to pick up the rest of our crew,” Roger explains. “A couple of young friends of mine are going to join us."
“Which one is this?” Stephan inquires.
“This is the Altamira.”
Roger sails them around in a sweet curve that ends with them stalled into the wind and skidding to a halt. He retracts the cockpit dome. “I don't intend to go up there, by the way, that's an all-day trip no matter how you do it. My friends should be down here onshore to meet us.”
They step down onto the ice, which is mostly a dirty opaque white, cracked and a bit nobbled on the surface, so that it is slippery in some places, but mostly fairly steady underfoot; and Eileen sees that the treacherous spots stand out like windows inlaid in tile. Roger talks into his wristpad, then leads them into the fjord, which on one steep side displays a handsome granite staircase, frost lying like a fluffy carpet on the steps.
Up these stairs Roger climbs, putting his feet in earlier boot prints. Up on the headland over the fjord they have a good view over the ice to the township, which is really very big for a manufactured object, a kilometer on each side, and its deck only just lower than they are. Its square-tented middle glows green like a Renaissance walled garden, the enchanted space of a fairy tale.
There is a little stone shelter or shrine on the headland, and they follow the sidewalk over to it. The wind chills Eileen's hands, toes, nose, and ears. A big white plate, whistling in the wind. Elysium bulks behind them, its two volcanoes just sticking over the high horizon to the west. She holds Roger's hand as they approach. As always, her pleasure in Mars is mixed up with her pleasure in Roger; at the sight of this big cold panorama love sails through her like the wind. Now he is smiling, and she follows his gaze and sees two people through the shelter's open walls. “Here they are.”
They round the front of the shrine and the pair notices them. “Hi all,” Roger says. “Eileen, this is Freya Ahmet and Jean-Claude Bayer. They're going to be joining us. Freya, Jean-Claude, this is Eileen Monday.”
“We have heard of you,” Freya says to her with a friendly smile. She and Jean-Claude are both huge; they tower over the old ones.
“That's Hans and Frances behind us, down the path there arguing. Get used to that.”
Hans and Frances arrive, then Arthur and Stephan. Introductions are made all around, and they investigate the empty shrine or shelter, and exclaim over the view. The eastern side of the Elysian Massif was a rain shadow before, and now it bulks just as black and empty as ever, looking much as it always has. The huge white plate of the sea, however, and the incongruous square of the Altamira; the
On the way back down the stone stairs she looks at the exposed granite of the fjord's sidewall, and in one crack she sees black crumbly matter. She stops to inspect it.
“Look at this,” she says to Roger, scraping away at rime to see more of it. “Is it lichen? Moss? Is it alive? It looks like it might be alive.”
Roger sticks his face right down into it, eyes a centimeter away. “Moss, I think. Dead.”
Eileen looks away, feeling her stomach sink. “I'm so tired of finding dead plants, dead animals. The last dozen times out I've not seen a single living thing. I mean winterkill is winterkill, but this is ridiculous. The whole world is dying!”
Roger waggles a hand uncertainly, straightens up. He can't really deny it. “I suppose there was never enough sunlight to begin with,” he says, glancing up at their bronze button of light, slanting over Elysium. “People wanted it and so they did it anyway. But reality isn't interested in what people want.”
Eileen sighs. “No.” She pokes again at the black matter. “Are you sure this isn't a lichen? It's black, but it looks like it's still alive somehow.”
He inspects some of it between his gloved fingers. Small black fronds, like a kind of tiny seaweed, frayed and falling apart.
“Fringe lichen?” Eileen ventures. “Frond lichen?”
“Moss, I think. Dead moss.” He clears away more ice and snow. Black rock, rust rock. Black splotches. It's the same everywhere. “No doubt there are lichens alive, though. And Freya and Jean-Claude say the subnivean environment is quite lively still. Very robust. Protected from the elements.”
Life under a permanent blanket of snow. “Uh-huh.”
“Hey. Better than nothing, right?”
“Right. But this moss here was exposed.”
“Right. And therefore dead.”
They start down again. Roger hikes beside her, lost in thought. He smiles: “I'm having a déjà vu. This happened before, right? A long time ago we found some little living thing together, only it was dead. It happened before!”
She shakes her head. “You tell me. You're the memory man.”
“But I can't quite get it. It's more like déjà vu. Well, but maybe . . . maybe on that first trip, when we first met?” He gestures eastward—over the Amazonian Sea, she guesses, to the canyon country east of Olympus. “Some little snails or something.”
“But could that be?” Eileen asks. “I thought we met when I was still in college. The terraforming had barely started then, right?”
“True.” He frowns. “Well, there was lichen from the start, it was the first thing they propagated.”
“But snails?”
He shrugs. “That's what I seem to remember. You don't?”
“No way. Just whatever you've told me since, you know.”
“Oh well.” He shrugs again, smile gone. “Maybe it was just a déjà vu.”
Back in the iceboat's cockpit and cabin, they could be crowded around the kitchen table of a little apartment anywhere. The two newcomers, heads brushing the ceiling even though they are sitting on stools, cook for them. “No, please, that is why we are here,” Jean-Claude says with a big grin. “I very much like to be cooking the big meals.” Actually they're coming along to meet with some friends on the other side of the Amazonian Sea, all people Roger has worked with often in the last few years, to initiate some research on the western slope of Olympus—glaciology and ecology, respectively.
After these explanations they listen with the rest as Hans and Frances argue about the crash for a while. Frances thinks it was caused by the rapid brightening of the planet's albedo when the north sea was pumped out and froze; this the first knock in a whole series of positively reinforcing events leading in a negative direction, an autocatalytic drop into the death spiral of the full crash. Hans thinks it was the fact that the underground permafrost was never really thawed deeper than a few centimeters, so that the resulting extremely thin skin of the life zone looked much more well established than it really was, and was actually very vulnerable to collapse if attacked by mutant bacteria, as Hans believes it was, the mutations spurred by the heavy incoming UV—
“You don't know that,” Frances says. “You radiate those same organisms in the lab, or even expose them in space labs, and you don't get the mutations or the collapses we're seeing on the ground.”
“Interaction with ground chemicals,” Hans says. “Sometimes I think everything is simply getting salted to death.”
Frances shakes her head. “These are different problems, and there's no sign of synergistic effects when they're combined. You're just listing possibilities, Hans, admit it. You're throwing them out there, but no one knows. The etiology is not understood.”
That is true; Eileen has been working in Burroughs on the problem for ten years, and she knows Frances is right. The truth is that in planetary ecology, as in most other fields, ultimate causes are very hard to discern. Hans now waggles a hand, which is as close as he will come to conceding a point to Frances. “Well, when you have a list of possibilities as long as this one, you don't have to have synergy among them. Just a simple addition of factors might do it. Everything having its particular effect.”
Eileen looks over at the youngsters, their backs to the old ones as they cook. They're debating salt too, but then she sees one put a handful of it in the rice.
In the fragrance of basmati steam they spoon out their meals. Freya and Jean-Claude eat seated on the floor. They listen to the old ones, but don't speak much. Occasionally they lean heads together to talk in private, under the talk at the little table. Eileen sees them kiss.
She smiles. She hasn't been around people this young for a long time. Then through their reflections in the cockpit dome she sees the ice outside, glowing under the stars. It's a disconcerting image. But they are not looking out the window. And even if they were, they are young, and so do not quite believe in death. They are blithe.
Roger sees her looking at the young giants, and shares with her a small smile at them. He is fond of them, she sees. They are his friends. When they say good night and duck down the passageway to their tiny quarters in the bow, he kisses his fingers and pats them on the head as they pass him.
The old ones finish their meal, then sit staring out the window, sipping hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps.
“We can regroup,” Hans says, continuing the discussion with Frances. “If we pursued the heavy-industrial methods aggressively, the ocean would melt from below and we'd be back in business.”
Frances shakes her head, frowning. “Bombs in the regolith, you mean.”
“Bombs below the regolith. So that we get the heat, but trap the radiation. That and some of the other methods might do it. A flying lens to focus some of the mirrors' light, heat the surface with focused sunlight. Then bring in some nitrogen from Titan. Direct a few comets to unpopulated areas, or aerobrake them so that they burn up in the atmosphere. That would thicken things up fast. And more halocarbon factories, we let that go too soon.”
“It sounds pretty industrial,” Frances says.
“Of course it is. Terraforming is an industrial process, at least partly. We forgot that.”
“I don't know,” Roger says. “Maybe it would be best to keep pursuing the biological methods. Just regroup, you know, and send another wave out there. It's longer, but, you know. Less violence to the landscape.”
“Ecopoesis won't work,” Hans says. “It doesn't trap enough heat in the biosphere.” He gestures outside. “This is as far as ecopoiesis will take you.”
“Maybe for now,” Roger says.
“Ah yes. You are unconcerned, of course. But I suppose you're happy about the crash anyway, eh? Being such a red?”
“Hey, come on,” Roger says. “How could I be happy? I w
“But you used to want the terraforming gone.”
Roger waves a hand dismissively, glances at Eileen with a shy smile. “That was a long time ago. Besides, the terraforming isn't gone now anyway"—gesturing at the ice—"it's only sleeping.”
“See,” Arthur pounces, “you do want it gone.”
“No I don't, I'm telling you.”
“Then why are you so damn happy these days?”
“I'm not happy,” Roger says, grinning happily, “I'm just not sad. I don't think the situation calls for sadness.”
Arthur rolls his eyes at the others, enlisting them in his teasing. “The world freezes and this is not a reason for sadness. I shudder to think what it would take for you!”
“It would take something sad!”
“But you're not a red, no of course not.”
“I'm not!” Roger protests, grinning at their laughter, but serious as well. “I was a sailor, I tell you. Look, if the situation were as bad as you all are saying, then Freya and Jean-Claude would be worried too, right? But they're not. Ask them and you'll see.”
“They are simply young,” Hans says, echoing Eileen's thought. The others nod as well.
“That's right,” Roger says. “And it's a short-term problem.”