Green Mars

Hiroko was there in the commons, watching him. She rarely spent evenings in the village, and he didn’t need to look at her to know what she was thinking. They were made to give, she had always said, and this would be the ultimate gift. An act of pure viriditas. “Of course,” he said, happy at the opportunity.

The hospital was next to the bathhouse and the school. It was smaller than the school, and had five beds. They laid Simon on one, and Nirgal on another.

The old man smiled at him. He didn’t look sick, only old. Just like all the rest of the ancients, in fact. He had seldom said much, and now he said only, “Thanks, Nirgal.”

Nirgal nodded. Then to his surprise Simon went on: “I appreciate you doing this. The extraction will hurt afterward for a week or two, right down in the bone. That’s quite a thing to do for someone else.”

“But not if they really need it,” Nirgal said.

“Well, it’s a gift that I’ll try to repay, of course.”

Vlad and Ursula anaesthetised Nirgal’s arm with a shot. “It isn’t really necessary to do both operations now, but it’s a good idea to have you two together for it. It will help the healing if you are friends.”

So they became friends. After school Nirgal would go by the hospital, and Simon would step slowly out the door, and they would walk the path over the dunes, to the beach. There they watched the waves ripple across the white surface and rise up and crumple on the strand. Simon was a lot less talkative than anyone Nirgal had ever spent time with: it was like being silent with Hiroko’s group, only it never ended. At first it made him uncomfortable. But after a while he found it left time to really look at things: the gulls wheeling under the dome, the sandcrab bubbles in the sand, the circles surrounding each tuft of dune grass. Peter was back in Zygote a lot now, and many days he would come with them. Occasionally even Ann would interrupt her perpetual travelling, and visit Zygote and join them. Peter and Nirgal would race around playing tag, or hide and seek, while Ann and Simon strolled the beach arm in arm.

But Simon was still weak, and he got weaker. It was hard not to see this as some kind of moral failing; Nirgal had never been sick, and he found the concept disgusting. It could only happen to the old ones. And even they were supposed to have been saved by their ageing treatment, which everyone got when they were old, and so never died. Only plants and animals died. But people were animals. But they had invented the treatment. At night, worrying about these discrepancies, Nirgal read his lectern’s whole entry on leukaemia, even though it was as long as a book. Cancer of the blood. White cells proliferated out of the bone marrow and flooded the system, attacking healthy systems. They were giving Simon chemicals and irradiation and pseudoviruses to kill the white blood cells, and trying to replace the sick marrow in him with new marrow from Nirgal. They had also given him the ageing treatment three times now. Nirgal read about this too. It was a matter of genomic mismatch scanning, which found broken chromosomes and repaired them so that cell division error did not occur. But it was hard to penetrate bone with the array of introduced auto repair cells, and apparently in Simon’s case little pockets of cancerous marrow had remained behind every time. Children had a better chance of recovery than adults, as the leukaemia entry made clear. But with the ageing treatments and the marrow transfusions he was sure to get well. It was just a matter of time and of giving. The treatments cured everything in the end.

“We need a bioreactor,” Ursula said to Vlad. They were working on converting one of the ectogene tanks into one, packing it with spongy animal collagen and inoculating it with cells from Nirgal’s marrow, hoping to generate an array of lymphocytes, macrophages, and granulocytes. But they didn’t have the circulatory system working right, or perhaps it was the matrix, they weren’t sure. Nirgal remained their living bioreactor.

Sax was teaching them soil chemistry during the mornings when he was teacher, and he even took them out of the schoolroom occasionally to work in the soil labs, introducing biomass to the sand and then wheelbarrowing it to the greenhouses or the beach. It was fun work, but it tended to pass through Nirgal as if he were asleep. He would catch sight of Simon outside, stubbornly taking a walk, and he would forget whatever they were doing.

Despite the treatments Simon’s steps were slow and stiff. He walked bowlegged, in fact, his legs swinging forward with very little bend to them. Once Nirgal caught up to him and stood beside him on the last dune before the beach. Sandpipers were charging up and down the wet strand, chased by white tapestries of foaming water. Simon pointed at the herd of black sheep, cropping grass between dunes. His arm rose like a bamboo crossbar. The sheep’s frosted breath poured onto the grass.

Simon said something that Nirgal didn’t catch; his lips were stiff now, and some words he was finding hard to pronounce. Perhaps it was this that was making him quieter than ever. Now he tried again, and then again, but no matter how hard he tried Nirgal couldn’t guess what he was trying to say. Finally Simon gave up trying and shrugged, and they were left looking at each other, mute and helpless.

When Nirgal played with the other kids, they both took him in and kept their distance, so that he moved in a kind of circle. Sax admonished him mildly for his absent-mindedness in class. “Concentrate on the moment,” he would say, forcing Nirgal to recite the loops of the nitrogen cycle, or to shove his hands deep into the wet black soil they were working on, instructing him to knead it, to break up the long strings of diatom blooms, and the fungi and lichen and algae and all the invisible microbacteria they had grown, to distribute them through the rusty clods of grit. “Get it distributed as regularly as possible. Pay attention, that’s it. Nothing but this. Thisness is a very important quality. Look at the structures on the microscope screen. That clear one like a rice grain is a chemolithotroph, Thiobacillus denitrificans. And there’s a chunk of sulphides. Now what will result when the former eats the latter?”

“It oxidises the sulphur.”

“And?”

“And denitrifies.”

“Which is?”

“Nitrates into nitrogen. From the ground into the air.”

“Very good. A very useful microbe, that.”

So Sax forced him to pay attention to the moment, but the price was high. He found himself exhausted at midday when school was over, it was hard to do things in the afternoon. Then they asked him to give more marrow for Simon, who lay in the hospital mute and embarrassed, his eyes apologising to Nirgal, who steeled himself to smile, to put his fingers around Simon’s bamboo forearm. “It’s all right,” he said cheerily, and lay down. Although surely Simon was doing something wrong, was weak or lazy or somehow wanted to be sick. There was no other way to explain it. They stuck the needle in Nirgal’s arm and it went numb. Stuck the IV needle in the back of his hand and after a while it too went numb. He lay back, part of the fabric of the hospital, trying to go as numb as he could. Part of him could feel the big marrow needle, pushing against his upper arm bone. No pain, no feeling in his flesh at all, just a pressure on the bone. Then it let up, and he knew the needle had penetrated to the soft inside of his bone.

This time the process did not help at all. Simon was useless—he stayed in the hospital continually. Nirgal visited him there from time to time, and they played a weather game on Simon’s screen, tapping buttons for dice rolls, and exclaiming when the roll of one or twelve cast them abruptly onto another quadrant of Mars, one with a whole new climate. Simon’s laugh, never more than a chuckle, had diminished now to just a little smile.

Nirgal’s arm hurt, and he slept poorly, tossing through the nights and waking hot and sweaty, and frightened for no reason. Then one night Hiroko woke him from the depths of slumber, and led him down the winding staircase and over to the hospital. He leaned groggily against her, unable to wake fully. She was as impassive as ever, but had her arm. around his shoulders, holding him with surprising strength. When they passed Ann sitting in the hospital’s outer room something in the slope of Ann’s shoulders caused Nirgal to wonder why Hiroko was here in the village at night, and he struggled to wake fully, touched by dread.

The hospital’s bedroom was overlit, sharp-edged, pulsing as if glories were trying to burst out of every thing. Simon lay with his head on a white pillow. His skin was pale and waxy. He looked a thousand years old.

He turned his head and saw Nirgal. His dark eyes searched Nirgal’s face with a hungry look, as if he were trying to find a way into Nirgal—a way to jump across into him. Nirgal shivered and held the dark intense gaze, thinking okay, come into me. Do it if you want. Do it.

But there was no way across. They both saw that. They both relaxed. A little smile passed over Simon’s face, and he reached over with an effort and held Nirgal’s hand. Now his eyes darted back and forth, searching Nirgal’s face with a completely different expression, as if he were trying to find words that would help Nirgal in the years to come, that would pass across whatever it was that Simon had learned.

But that too was impossible. Again they both saw it. He would have to give Nirgal to his fate, whatever it was. There was no way to help. “Be good,” he whispered finally, and Hiroko led Nirgal out of the room. She took him through the dark back up to his room, and he fell into a deep sleep. Simon died sometime during the night.

It was the first funeral in Zygote, and the first for all the children. But the adults knew what to do. They met in one of the greenhouses, among the work benches, and sat in a circle around the long box holding Simon’s body. They passed around a flask of rice liquor, and everyone filled their neighbour’s cup. They drank the fiery stuff down, and the old ones walked around the box holding hands, and then they sat in a knot around Ann and Peter. Maya and Nadia sat by Ann with their arms around her shoulders. Ann appeared stunned, Peter disconsolate. Jurgen and Maya told stories about Simon’s legendary taciturnity. “One time,” Maya said, “we were in a rover and an oxygen canister blew out and knocked a hole in the cabin roof, and we were all running around screaming and Simon had been outside and he picked up a rock just the right size, jumped up, dropped it in the hole and plugged it. And afterward we were all talking like crazy people, and working to make a real plug, and suddenly we realised Simon still hadn’t said anything, and we all stopped working and looked at him, and he said, ‘That was close’!”

They laughed. Vlad said, “Or remember the time we gave out mock awards in Underhill, and Simon got one for best video, and he went up to accept the award and said ‘Thank you,’ and started to return to his seat, and then he stopped and went back up to the podium, as if something had occurred to him to say, you know, which got our attention naturally, and he cleared his throat and said ‘Thank you very much’!”

Ann almost laughed at that, and stood, and led them out into the frigid air. The old ones carried the box down to the beach, and everyone else followed. It was snowing through mist when they took his body out and buried it deep in the sand, just above the wave’s high water mark. They slid the board out of the top of the long box and burned Simon’s name onto it with Nadia’s soldering iron, and stuck the board in the first dune. Now Simon would be part of the carbon cycle, food for bacteria and crabs and then sandpipers and gulls, thus slowly melting into the biomass under the dome. This was how one was buried. And sure, part of it was comforting; to spread out into one’s world, to disperse into it. But to end as a self, to go away …

And here they all were walking under the dim dome, having buried Simon in suffocating sand, trying to behave as if reality had not suddenly ripped apart and snatched one of them away. Nirgal couldn’t believe it. They straggled back into the village blowing on their hands, talking in subdued voices. Nirgal drew near Vlad and Ursula, longing for reassurance of some kind. Ursula was sad, and Vlad was trying to cheer her up. “He lived more than a hundred years, we can’t go around thinking his death was premature, or it makes a mockery of all those poor people who died at fifty, or twenty, or one.”

“But it was still premature,” Ursula said stubbornly. “With the treatments, who knows? He might have lived a thousand years.”

“I’m not so sure. It looks to me like the treatments are not in fact penetrating to every part of our bodies. And with all the radiation we’ve taken on, we may have more troubles than we thought at first.”

“Maybe. But if we had been at Acheron, with the whole crew, and a bioreactor, and all our facilities, I bet we would have saved him. And then you can’t say how many more years he might have had. I call that premature.”

She went off to be by herself.

That night Nirgal could not sleep at all. He kept feeling the transfusions, seeing every moment of them and imagining that there had been some kind of backwash in the system, so that he had been infected with the disease. Or contaminated by touch alone, why not? Or just by that last look in Simon’s eye! So that he had caught the disease they could not stop, and would die. Stiffen up, go mute, stop and go away. That was death. His heart pounded and a sweat broke through his skin, and he cried with the fear of it. There was no avoiding it; and it was horrible. Horrible no matter when it happened. Horrible that the cycle itself should work the way it did—that it should go round and round and round, while they lived only once and then died forever. Why live at all? It was too strange, too horrible. And so he shivered through the long night, his mind gone cyclonic with the fear of death.

After that he found it extremely hard to concentrate. He felt as if he was always at a remove from things, as if he had slipped into the white world and could not quite touch the green one.

Hiroko noticed this problem, and suggested he go with Coyote on one of his trips out. Nirgal was shocked by the idea, having never been more than a walk away from Zygote. But Hiroko insisted. He was seven years old, she said, and about to become a man. Time he saw a bit of the surface world.

A few weeks later Coyote dropped by, and when he left again Nirgal was with him, seated in the copilot’s seat of his boulder car, and goggling out the low windshield at the purple arch of evening sky. Coyote turned the car around to give him a view of the great glowing pink wall of the polar cap, which arced across the horizon like an enormous rising moon.

“It’s hard to believe something that big could ever melt,” Nirgal said.

“It will take a while.”

They drove north at a sedate pace; the boulder car was stealthed, and a no-track device on the front bumper was reading the terrain and passing the information to the back bumper, where scraper-shapers were ploughing their wheel tracks, returning the sand and rock to whatever shape they had had before their passing.

For a long time they travelled in silence, though Coyote’s silence was not the same as Simon’s had been. He hummed, he muttered, he talked in a low sing-song voice to his AI, in a language that sounded like English but was not comprehensible. Nirgal tried to concentrate on the limited view out the window, feeling awkward and shy. The region around the south polar cap was a series of broad flat terraces, and they descended from one to the next by routes that seemed programmed into the car, down terrace after terrace until it seemed the polar cap must be sitting on a kind of huge pedestal. Nirgal stared into the dark, impressed by the size of the things, but happy too that it was not absolutely overwhelming, as his first walk out had been. That had happened a long time ago, but he could still remember the staggering astonishment of it perfectly.

This was not like that. “It doesn’t seem as big as I thought it would,” he said. “I guess it’s the curvature of the land, it being such a small planet and all.” As the lectern said. “The horizon isn’t any farther away than one side of Zygote to the other!”

“Uh huh,” Coyote said, giving him a look. “You better not let Big Man hear you say such a thing, he kick your ass for that.” Then—"Who’s your father, boy?”

“I don’t know. Hiroko is my mother.”

Coyote snorted. “Hiroko takes the matriarchy too far, if you ask me.”

“Have you told her that?”

“You bet I have, but Hiroko only listens to me when I say things she wants to hear.” He cackled. “Same as with everyone, right?”

Nirgal nodded, a grin splitting his attempt to be impassive.

“You want to find out who your father is?”

“Sure.” Actually he was not sure. The concept of father meant little to him; and he was afraid it would turn out to be Simon. Peter was like an elder brother to him, after all.

“They’ve got the equipment in Vishniac. We can try there if you want.” He shook his head. “Hiroko is so strange. When I met her you would never have guessed it would come to this. Of course we were young then—almost as young as you are, though you will find that hard to credit.”

Which was true.

“When I met her she was just a young eco-engineering student, smart as a whip and sexy as a cat. None of this mother goddess of the world stuff. But by and by she started to read books that were not her technical manuals, and it went on and on and by the time she got to Mars she was crazy. Before, actually. Which is lucky for me as that is why I’m here. But Hiroko, oh my. She was convinced that all human history had gone wrong at the start. At the dawn of civilisation, she would say to me very seriously, there was Crete and Sumeria, and Crete had a peaceful trading culture, run by women and filled with art and beauty—a Utopia in fact, where the men were acrobats who jumped bulls all day, and women all night, and got the women pregnant and worshipped them, and everyone was happy. It sounds good except for the bulls. While Sumeria on the other hand was ruled by men, who invented war and conquered everything in sight and started all the slave empires that have come since. And no one knew, Hiroko said, what might have happened if these two civilisations had had a chance to contest the rule of the world, because a volcano blew Crete to kingdom come, and the world passed into Sumeria’s hands and has never left it to this day. If only that volcano had been in Sumeria, she used to tell me, everything would be different. And maybe it’s true. Because history could hardly get any blacker than it has been.”

Nirgal was surprised at this characterisation. “But now,” he ventured, “we’re starting again.”

“That’s right, boy! We are the primitives of an unknown civilisation. Living in our own little techno-Minoan matriarchy. Ha! I like it fine, myself. Seems to me the power that our women have taken on was never that interesting to begin with. Power is one half of the yoke, don’t you remember that from the stuff I made you kids read? Master and slave wear the yoke together. Anarchy is the only true freedom. So, well, whatever women do, it seems to go against them. If they’re men’s cows, then they work till they drop. But if they’re our queens and goddesses then they only work the harder, because they still have to do the cow work and then the paperwork too! No way. Just be thankful you’re a man, and as free as the sky.”

It was a peculiar way to think of things, Nirgal thought. But clearly it was one way to deal with the fact of Jackie’s beauty, of her immense power over his mind. And so Nirgal ducked low in his seat and stared out the window at the white stars in the black, thinking, Free as the sky! Free as the sky!

It was Ls 4, 2 March 22nd, M-year 32, and the southern days were getting shorter. Coyote drove their car hard every night, over intricate and invisible paths, through terrain that got more and more rugged the farther they got from the polar cap. They stopped to rest during the daylight, and drove the rest of the time. Nirgal tried to stay awake, but inevitably slept through part of every drive, and through part of every day’s stop as well, until he became thoroughly confused in both time and space.

But when he was awake he was almost always looking out the window, at the ever-changing surface of Mars. He couldn’t get enough of it. In the layered terrain there was an infinite array of patterns, the stratified stacks of sand fluted by the wind until each winglike dune was cut like a bird’s wing. When the layered terrain finally ran out onto exposed bedrock, the laminate dunes became individual sand islands, scattered over a jumbled plain of outcroppings and clusters of rock. It was red rock everywhere he looked, rock sized from gravel to immense boulders that sat like buildings on the land. The sand islands were tucked into every dip and hollow in this rockscape, and they also clustered around the feet of big knots of boulders, and on the lee sides of low scarps, and in the interiors of craters.

And there were craters everywhere. They first appeared as two bumps rolling over the skysill, which quickly proved to be the connected outer points of a low ridge. They passed scores of these flat-topped hills, some steep and sharp, others low and nearly buried, still others with their rims broken by smaller later impacts, so that one could see right in to the sand drifts filling them.

One night just before dawn Coyote stopped the car.

“Something wrong?”

“No. We’ve reached Ray’s Lookout, and I want you to see it. Sun’ll be up in a half hour.”

So they sat in the pilots’ seats and watched the dawn.

“How old are you, boy?”

“Seven.”

“What’s that, thirteen Earth years? Fourteen?”

“I guess.”

“Wow. You’re already taller than me.”

“Uh huh.” Nirgal refrained from pointing out that this did not imply any great height. “How old are you?”

“One hundred and nine. Ah ha ha! You best shut your eyes or they’ll pop out of your head. Don’t you look at me like that. I was old the day I was born and I’ll be young the day I die.”

They drowsed as the sky on the eastern skyline turned a deep purply blue. Coyote hummed a little tune to himself, sounding as if he had eaten a tab of omegendorph, as he often did in the evenings at Zygote. Gradually it became clear that the skysill was very far away, and also very high; Nirgal had never seen land so far away, and it seemed to curve around them as well, a black curving wall that lay an immense distance off, over a black rocky plain. “Hey Coyote!” he exclaimed. “What is this?”

“Ha!” Coyote said, sounding deeply satisfied.

The sky lightened and the sun suddenly cracked the upper edge of the distant wall, blasting Nirgal’s vision for a while. But as the sun rose, the shadows on the huge semi-circular cliff gave way in wedges of light that revealed sharp ragged embayments, scalloping the larger curve of the wall, which was so big that Nirgal simply gasped, his nose pressed right against the windshield—it was almost frightening it was so big! “Coyote, what is it?”

Coyote let out one of his alarming laughs, the animal cackle filling the car. “So you see it isn’t such a small world after all, eh, boy? This is the floor of Promethei Basin. It’s an impact basin, one of the biggest on Mars, almost as big as Argyre, but it hit down here near the South Pole, so about half of its rim has since been buried under the polar cap and the layered terrain. The other half is this curved escarpment here.” He waved a hand expansively. “Kind of like a super-big caldera, but only half there, so you can drive right into it. This little rise is the best place I know for seeing it.” He called up a map of the region, and pointed. “We’re on the apron of this little crater here, Vt, and looking northwest. The cliff is Promethei Rupes, there. It’s about a kilometre high. Of course the Echus cliff is three kilometres high, and the Olympus Mons cliff is six kilometres high, do you hear that Mister Small Planet? But this baby will have to do for this morning.”