"Green Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

PART 4 The Scientist

Hold it between thumb and middle finger. Feel the rounded edge, observe the smooth curves of glass. A magnifying lens: it has the simplicity, elegance, and heft of a paleolithic tool. Sit with it on a sunny day, hold it over a pile of dry twigs. Move it up and down, until you see a spot in the twigs turn bright. Remember that light? It was as if the twigs caged a little sun.

The Amor asteroid that was spun out into the elevator cable was made up mostly of carbonaceous chondrites and water. The two Amor asteroids intercepted by groups of robot landers in the year 2091 were mostly silicates and water.

The material of New Clarke was spun out into a single long strand of carbon. The material of the two silicate asteroids was transformed by their robot crews into sheets of solar sail material. Silica vapor was solidified between rollers ten kilometers long, and pulled out in sheets coated with a thin layer of aluminum, and these vast mirror sheets were unfurled by spacecraft with human crews, into circular arrays which held their shape using spin and sunlight.

From one asteroid, pushed into a Martian polar orbit and called Birch, they teased the mirror sheets out into a ring a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter. This annular mirror spun around Mars in a polar orbit, the mirror ring facing the sun, angled in so that the light reflected from it met at a point inside Mars#8217;s orbit, near its Lagrange One point.

The second silicate asteroid, called Solettaville, had been pushed near this Lagrange point. There the solar sailmakers spun the mirror sheets out into a complex web of slatted rings, all connected and set at angles, so that they looked like a lens made of circular Venetian blinds, spinning around a hub that was a silver cone, with the cone#8217;s open end facing Mars. This huge delicate object, ten thousand kilometers in diameter, bright and stately as it wheeled along between Mars and the sun, was called the soletta.

Sunlight striking the soletta directly bounced through its blinds, hitting the sun side of one, then the Mars side of the next one out, and onward to Mars. Sunlight striking the annular ring in its polar orbit was reflected back and in to the inner cone of the soletta, and then was reflected again, also on to Mars. Thus light struck both sides of the soletta, and these countervailing pressures kept it moving in its position, about a hundred thousand kilometers out from Mars #8212; closer at perihelion, farther away at aphelion. The angles of the slats were constantly adjusted by the soletta#8217;s Al, to keep its orbit and its focus.

Through the decade when these two great pinwheels were being constructed out of their asteroids, like silicate webs out of rock spiders, observers on Mars saw almost nothing of them. Occasionally someone would see an arcing white line in the sky, or random glints by day or by night, as if the brilliance of a much vaster universe were shining through loose seams in the fabric of our sphere.

Then, when the two mirrors were completed, the annular mirror#8217;s reflected light was aimed at the cone of the soletta. The soletta#8217;s circular slats were adjusted, and it moved into a slightly different orbit.

And one day people living on the Tharsis side of Mars looked up, for the sky had darkened. They looked up, and saw an eclipse of the sun such as Mars had never seen: the sun bit into, as if there were some Luna-sized moon up there to block its rays. The eclipse then proceeded as they do on Earth, the crescent of darkness biting deeper into the round blaze as the soletta floated into its position between Mars and sun, with its mirrors not yet positioned to pass the light through: the sky going a dark violet, the darkness taking over the majority of the disk, leaving only a crescent of blaze until that too disappeared, and the sun was a dark circle in the sky, edged by the whisper of a corona #8212; then entirely gone. Total eclipse of the sun#8230;.

A very faint moire pattern of light appeared in the dark disk, unlike anything ever seen in any natural eclipse. Everyone on the daylight side of Mars gasped, squinted as they looked up. And then, as when one tugs open Venetian blinds, the sun came back all at once.

Blinding light!

And now more blinding than ever, as the sun was noticeably brighter than it had been before the strange eclipse had begun. Now they walked under an augmented sun, the disk appearing about the same size as it did from Earth, the light some twenty percent greater than before #8212; noticeably brighter, warmer on the back on the neck #8212; the red expanse of the plains more brilliantly lit. As if floodlights had suddenly been turned on, and all of them were now walking a great stage.

A few months after that a third mirror, much smaller than the so-letta, spun down into the highest reaches of the Martian atmosphere. It was another lens made of circular slats, and looked like a silver UFO. It caught some of the light pouring down from the soletta, and focused it still further, into points on the surface of the planet that were less than a kilometer across. And it flew like a glider over the world, holding that concentrated beam of light in focus, until little suns seemed to bloom right there on the land, and the rock itself melted, turning from solid to liquid. And then to fire.

The underground wasn#8217;t big enoughfor Sax Russell. He wanted to get back to work. He could have moved into the demimonde, perhaps taken a teaching position at the new university in Sabishii, which ran outside the net and covered many of his old colleagues, and provided an education for many of the children of the underground. But on reflection he decided he didn#8217;t want to teach, or remain on the periphery #8212; he wanted to return to terra-forming, to the heart of the project if possible, or as close as he could get to it. And that meant the surface world. Recently the Transitional Authority had formed a committee to coordinate all the work on terraforming, and a Subarashii-led team had gotten the old synthesis job that Sax had once held. This was unfortunate, as Sax didn#8217;t speak Japanese. But the lead in the biological part of the effort had been given to the Swiss, and was being run by a Swiss collective of biotech companies called Biotique, with main offices in Geneva and Burroughs, and close ties with the transnational Praxis.

So the first task was to insinuate himself into Biotique under a false name, and get himself assigned to Burroughs. Desmond took charge of this operation, writing a computer persona for Sax similar to the one he had given to Spencer years before, when Spencer had moved to Echus Overlook. Spencer#8217;s persona, and some extensive cosmetic surgery, had enabled him to work successfully in the materials labs in Echus Overlook, and then later in Kasei Vallis, the very heart of transnat security. So Sax had faith in Desmond#8217;s system. The new persona listed Sax#8217;s physical ID data #8212; genome, retina, voice, and finger prints #8212; all slightly altered, so that they still almost fit Sax himself, while escaping notice in any comparative matching searches in the nets. These data were given a new name with a full Terran background, credit rating, and immigration record, and a viral subtext to attempt to overwhelm any competing ID for the physical data, and the whole package was sent off to the Swiss passport office, which had been issuing passports to these arrivals without comment. And in the balkanized world of the transnat nets, that seemed to be doing the job. #8220;Oh yeah, that part works no problem,#8221; Desmond said. #8220;But you First Hundred are all movie stars. You need a new face too.#8221;

Sax was agreeable. He saw the need, and his face had never meant anything to him. And these days the face in the mirror didn#8217;t much resemble what he thought he looked like anyway. So he got Vlad to do the work on him, emphasizing the potential usefulness of his presence in Burroughs. Vlad had become one of the leading theoreticians of the resistance to the Transitional Authority, and he was quick to see Sax#8217;s point. #8220;Most of us should just live in the demimonde,#8221; he said, #8220;but a few people hidden in Burroughs would be a good thing. So I might as well practice my cosmetic surgery on a no-lose situation like yours.#8221;

#8220;A no-lose situation!#8221; Sax said. #8220;And verbal contracts are binding. I expect to come out handsomer.#8221;

And for a wonder he did, although it was impossible to tell until the spectacular bruising went away. They capped his teeth, puffed his thin lower lip, and gave his button nose a prominent bridge, and a little bit of a bend. They thinned his cheeks and gave him more of a chin. They even cut some muscles in his eyelids so that he didn#8217;t blink so often. When the bruises went away he looked like a real movie star, as Desmond said. Like an ex-jockey, Nadia said. Or an ex-dance instructor, said Maya, who had faithfully attended Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. Sax, who had never liked the effects of alcohol, waved her off.

Desmond took photos of him and put them in the new persona, then inserted this construct successfully into the Biotique files, along with a transfer order from San Francisco to Burroughs. The persona appeared in the Swiss passport listings a week later, and Desmond chuckled when he saw it. #8220;Look at that,#8221; he said, pointing at Sax#8217;s new name. #8220;Stephen Lindholm, Swiss citizen! Those folks are covering for us, there#8217;s no doubt about it. I#8217;ll bet you anything they put a stopper on the persona, and checked your genome with old print records, and even with my alterations I bet they figured out who you really are.#8221;

#8220;Are you sure?#8221;

#8220;No. They aren#8217;t saying, are they? But I#8217;m pretty sure.#8221;

#8220;Is it a good thing?#8221;

#8220;In theory, no. But in practice, if someone is on to you, it#8217;s nice to see them behaving as a friend. And the Swiss are good friends to have. This is the fifth time they#8217;ve issued a passport to one of my personas. I even have one myself, and I doubt they were able to find out who I really am, because I was never ID#8217;d like you folks in the First Hundred. Interesting, don#8217;t you think?#8221;

#8220;Indeed.#8221;

#8220;They are interesting people. They have their own plans, and I don#8217;t know what they are, but I like the look of them. I think they#8217;ve made a decision to cover for us. Maybe they just want to know where we are. We#8217;ll never know for sure, because the Swiss dearly love their secrets. But it doesn#8217;t matter why when you#8217;ve got the how.#8221;

Sax winced at the sentiment, but was happy to think that he would be safe under Swiss patronage. They were his kind of people #8212; rational, cautious, methodical.

A few days before he was going to fly with Peter north to Burroughs, he took a walk around Gamete#8217;s lake, something he had rarely done in his years there. The lake was certainly a neat bit of work. Hiroko was a fine systems designer. When she and her team had disappeared from Underhill so long ago, Sax had been quite mystified; he hadn#8217;t seen the point, and had worried that they would begin to fight the terraforming somehow. When he had managed to coax a response out of Hiroko on the net, he had been partly reassured; she seemed sympathetic to the basic goal of terraforming, and indeed her own concept of viriditas seemed just another version of the same idea. But Hiroko appeared to enjoy being cryptic, which was very unscientific of her; and during her years of hiding she had indulged herself to the point of information damage. Even in person she was none too easy to understandj and it was only after some years of coexistence that Sax had become confident that she too desired a Martian biosphere that would support humans. That was all the agreement he asked for. And he could not think of a better single ally to have in that particular project, unless it was the chairperson of this new Transitional Authority committee. And probably the chair was an ally too. There were not too many opposed, in fact.

But there on the beach sat one, as gaunt as a heron. Ann Clay-borne. Sax hesitated, but she had already seen him. And so he walked on, until he stood by her side. She glanced up at him, and then stared out again at the white lake. #8220;You really look different,#8221; she said.

#8220;Yes.#8221; He could still feel the sore spots in his face and mouth, though the bruises had cleared up. It felt a bit like wearing a mask, and suddenly that made him uncomfortable. #8220;Same me,#8221; he added.

#8220;Of course.#8221; She did not look up at him. #8220;So you#8217;re off to the overwork!?#8221;

#8220;Yes.#8221;

#8220;To get back to your work?#8221;

#8220;Yes.#8221;

She looked up at him. #8220;What do you think science is for?#8221;

Sax shrugged. It was their old argument, again and always, no matter what kind of beginning it had. To terraform or not to ter-raform, that is the question#8230; He had answered the question long ago, and so had she, and he wished they could just agree to disagree, and get on with it. But Ann was indefatigable.

#8220;To figure things out,#8221; he said.

#8220;But terraforming is not figuring things out.#8221;

#8220;Terraforming isn#8217;t science. I never said it was. It#8217;s what people do with science. Applied science, or technology. What have you. The choice of what to do with what you learn from science. Whatever you call that.#8221;

#8220;So it#8217;s a matter of values.#8221;

#8220;I suppose so.#8221; Sax thought about it, trying to marshal his thoughts concerning this murky topic. #8220;I suppose our #8230; our disagreement is another facet of what people call the fact-value problem. Science concerns itself with facts, and with theories that turn facts into examples. Values are another kind of system, a human construct.#8221;

#8220;Science is also a human construct.#8221;

#8220;Yes. But the connection between the two systems isn#8217;t clear. Beginning from the same facts, we can arrive at different values.#8221;

#8220;But science itself is full of values,#8221; Ann insisted. #8220;We talk about theories with power and elegance, we talk about clean results, or a beautiful experiment. And the desire for knowledge is itself a kind of value, saying that knowledge is better than ignorance, or mystery. Right?#8221;

#8220;I suppose,#8221; Sax said, thinking it over.

#8220;Your science is a set of values,#8221; Ann said. #8220;The goal of your kind of science is the establishment of laws, of regularities, of exactness and certainty. You want things explained. You want to answer the whys, all the way back to the big bang. You#8217;re a reductionist. Parsimony and elegance and economy are values for you, and if you can make things simpler that#8217;s a real achievement, right?#8221;

#8220;But that#8217;s the scientific method itself,#8221; Sax objected. #8220;It#8217;s not just me, it#8217;s how nature itself works. Physics. You do it yourself.#8221;

#8220;There are human values imbedded in physics.#8221;

#8220;I#8217;m not so sure.#8221; He held out a hand to stop her for a second. #8220;I#8217;m not saying there are no values in science. But matter and energy do what they do. If you want to talk about values, better just to talk about them. They arise out of facts somehow, sure. But that#8217;s a different issue, some kind of sociobiology, or bioethics. Perhaps it would be better just to talk about values directly. The greatest good for the greatest number, something like that.#8221;

#8220;There are ecologists who would say that#8217;s a scientific description of a healthy ecosystem. Another way of saying climax ecosystem.#8221;

#8220;That#8217;s a value judgment, I think. Some kind of bioethics. Interesting, but#8230;#8221; Sax squinted at her curiously, decided to change tack. #8220;Why not try for a climax ecosystem here, Ann? You can#8217;t speak of ecosystems without living things. What was here on Mars before us wasn#8217;t an ecology. It was geology only. You could even say there was a start at an ecology here, long ago, that somehow went wrong and froze out, and now we#8217;re starting it up again.#8221;

She growled at that, and he stopped. He knew she believed in some kind of intrinsic worth for the mineral reality of Mars; it was a version of what people called the land ethic, but without the land#8217;s biota. The rock ethic, one might say. Ecology without life. An intrinsic worth indeed!

He sighed. #8220;Perhaps that#8217;s just a value speaking. Favoring living systems over nonliving systems. I suppose we can#8217;t escape values, like you say. It#8217;s strange #8230; I mostly feel like I just want to figure things out. Why they work the way they do. But if you ask me why I want that #8212; or what I would want to have happen, what I work toward#8230;#8221; He shrugged, struggling to understand himself. #8220;It#8217;s hard to express. Something like a net gain in information. A net gain in order.#8221; For Sax this was a good functional description of life itself, of its holding action against entropy. He held out a hand to Ann, hoping to get her to understand that, to agree at least to the paradigm of their debate, to a definition of science#8217;s ultimate goal. They were both scientists after all, it was their shared enterprise#8230;

But she only said, #8220;So you destroy the face of an entire planet. A planet with a clear record nearly four billion years old. It#8217;s not science. It#8217;s making a theme park.#8221;

#8220;It#8217;s using science for a particular value. One I believe in.#8221; , #8220;As do the transnationals.#8221;

#8220;I guess.#8221;

#8220;It certainly helps them.#8221;

#8220;It helps everything alive.#8221;

#8220;Unless it kills them. The terrain is destabilized; there are landslides every day.#8221;

#8220;True.#8221;

#8220;And they kill. Plants, people. It#8217;s happened already.#8221;

Sax waggled a hand, and Ann jerked her head up to glare at -him.

#8220;What#8217;s this, the necessary murder? What kind of value is that?#8221;

#8220;No, no. They#8217;re accidents, Ann. People need to stay on bedrock, out of the slide zones, that kind of thing. For a while.#8221;

#8220;But vast regions will turn to mud, or be drowned entirely. We#8217;re talking about half the planet.#8221;

#8220;The water will drain downhill. Create watersheds.#8221;

#8220;Drowned land, you mean. And a completely different planet. Oh, that#8217;s a value all right! And the people who hold the value of Mars as it is #8230; we will fight you, every step of the way.#8221;

He sighed. #8220;I wish you wouldn#8217;t. At this point a biosphere would help us more than the transnationals. The transnats can operate from the tent cities, and mine the surface robotically, while we hide and concentrate most of our efforts on concealment and survival. If we could live everywhere on the surface, it would be a lot easier for all kinds of resistance.#8221;

#8220;All but Red resistance.#8221;

#8220;Yes, but what#8217;s the point of that, now?#8221;

#8220;Mars. Just Mars. The place you#8217;ve never known.#8221;

Sax looked up at the white dome over them, feeling distress like a sudden attack of arthritis. It was useless to argue with her.

But something in him made him keep trying. #8220;Look, Ann, I#8217;m an advocate of what people call the minimum viable model. It#8217;s a model that calls for a breathable atmosphere only up to about the two- or three-kilometer contour. Above that the air would be kept too thin for humans, and there wouldn#8217;t be much life of any kind #8212; some high-altitude plants, and above that nothing, or nothing visible. The vertical relief on Mars is so extreme that there can be vast regions that will remain above the bulk of the atmosphere. It#8217;s a plan that makes sense to me. It expresses a comprehensible set of values.#8221;

She did not reply. It was distressing, it really was. Once, in an attempt to understand Ann, to be able to talk to her, he had done research in the philosophy of science. He had read a fair amount of material, concentrating particularly on the land ethic, and the fact-value interface. Alas, it had never proved to be of much help; in conversation with her, he had never seemed able to apply what he had learned in any useful manner. Now, looking down at her, feeling the ache in his joints, he recalled something that Kuhn had written about Priestley #8212; that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist. It seemed that something like this had happened to Ann, but what then was she now? A counterrevolutionary? A prophet?

She certainly looked like a prophet #8212; harsh, gaunt, angry, unforgiving. She would never change, and she would never forgive him. And all that he would have liked to say to her, about Mars, about Gamete, about Peter #8212; about Simon#8217;s death, which seemed . to haunt Ursula more than her #8230; all that was impossible. This was why he had more than once resolved to give up talking to Ann: it was so frustrating never to get anywhere, to be faced with the dislike of someone he had known for over sixty years. He won every argument but never got anywhere. Some people were like that; but that didn#8217;t make it any less distressing. In fact it was quite remarkable how much physiological discomfort could be generated by a merely emotional response.

Ann left with Desmond the next day. Soon after that Sax got a ride north with Peter, in one of the small stealthed planes that Peter used to fly all over Mars.

Peter#8217;s route to Burroughs led them over the Hellespontus Monies, and Sax gazed down into the big basin of Hellas curiously. They caught a glimpse of the edge of the icefield that had covered Low Point, a white mass on the dark night surface, but Low Point itself stayed over the horizon. That was too bad, as Sax was curious to see what had happened over the Low Point mohole. It had been thirteen kilometers deep when the flood had filled it, and that deep it was likely that the water had remained liquid at the bottom, and probably warm enough to rise quite a distance; it was possible that the icefield was in that region an ice-covered sea, with telltale differences at the surface.

But Peter would not change his route to get a better view. #8220;You can look into it when you#8217;re Stephen Lindholm,#8221; he said with a grin. #8220;You can make it part of your work for Biotique.#8221;

And so they flew on. And the next night they landed in the broken hills south of Isidis, still on the high side of the Great Escarpment. Sax then walked to a tunnel entrance, and went down into the tunnel and followed it into the back of a closet in the service basement of Libya Station, which was a little train station complex at the intersection of the Burroughs-Hellas piste and the newly rerouted Burroughs-Elysium piste. When the next train to Burroughs came in, Sax emerged from a service door and joined the crowd getting on the train. He rode into Burroughs#8217; main station, where he was met by a man from Biotique. And then he was Stephen Lindholm, newcomer to Burroughs and to Mars.

The man from Biotique, a personnel secretary, complimented him on his skillful walking, and took him to a studio apartment high in Hunt Mesa, near the center of the old town. The labs and offices of Biotique were also in Hunt, just under the mesa#8217;s plateau, with window walls looking down on the canal park. A high-rent district, as only befitted the company leading the terraforming project#8217;s bioengineering efforts.

Out the Biotique office#8217;s windows he could see most of the old city, looking about the same as he remembered it, except that the mesa walls were even more extensively lined by glass windows, colorful horizontal bands of copper or gold or metallic green or blue, as if the mesas were stratified by some truly wonderful mineral layers. Also the tents that had topped the mesas were gone, their buildings now standing free under the much larger tent that now covered all nine mesas, and everything in between and around them. Tenting technology had reached the point where they could enclose vast mesocosms, and Sax had heard that one of the trans-nats was going to cover Hebes Chasma, a project that Ann had once suggested as an alternative to terraforming #8212; a suggestion that Sax himself had scoffed at. And now they were doing it. One should never underestimate the potential of materials science, that was clear.

Burroughs#8217; old canal park, and the broad grass boulevards that climbed away from the park and between the mesas, were now strips of green, cutting through orange tile rooftops. The old double row of salt columns still stood beside the blue canal. There had    i been a lot of building, to be sure; but the configuration of the city was still the same. It was only on the outskirts that one could see clearly how much things had changed, and how much larger the city really was; the city wall lay well beyond the nine mesas, so that quite a bit of surrounding land was sheltered, and much of it built upon already.

The personnel secretary gave Sax a quick tour of Biotique, making introductions to more people than he could remember. Then Sax was asked to report to his lab the next morning, and given the rest of the day to get settled in.

As Stephen Lindholm he planned to exhibit signs of intellectual energy, sociability, curiosity, and high spirits; and so he very plausibly spent that afternoon exploring Burroughs, wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood. He strolled up and down the wide swards of streetgrass, considering as he did the mysterious phenomenon of the growth of cities. It was a cultural process with no very good physical or biological analogy. He could see no obvious reason why this low end of Isidis Planitia should have become home to the largest city on Mars. None of the original reasons for siting the city here were at all adequate to explain it; so far as he knew, it had begun as an ordinary way station on the piste route from Elysium to Tharsis. Perhaps it was precisely because of its lack of strategic location that it had prospered, for it had been the only major city not damaged or destroyed in 2061, and thus perhaps it simply had had a head start on growth in the postwar years. By analogy to the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution, one might say that this particular species had accidentally survived an impact that had devastated most other species, giving it an open ecosphere to expand in.

And no doubt the bowllike shape of the region, with its archipelago of small mesas, gave it an impressive look as well. When he walked around on the wide grassy boulevards, the nine mesas appeared evenly distributed, and each mesa had a slightly different look, its rugged rock walls distinguished by characteristic knobs, buttresses, smooth walls, overhangs, cracks #8212; and now the horizontal bands of colorful mirror windows, and the buildings and parks on the flat plateaus crowning each mesa. From any point on the streets one could always see several of the mesas, scattered like magnificent neighborhood cathedrals, and this no doubt gave a certain pleasure to the eye. And then if one took an elevator up to one of the mesa#8217;s plateau tops, all about a hundred meters higher than the city floor, then one had a view over the rooftops of several different districts, and a different perspective on the other mesas, and then, beyond those, the land surrounding the city for many kilometers, distances larger than were usual on Mars, because they were at the bottom of a bowl-shaped depression: over the flat plain of Isidis to the north, up the dark rise to Syrtis in the west, and to the south one could see the distant rise of the Great Escarpment itself, standing on the horizon like a Himalaya.

Of course whether a handsome prospect mattered to city formation was an open question, but there were historians who asserted that many ancient Greek cities were sited principally for their view, in the face of other inconveniences, so it was at least a possible factor. And in any case Burroughs was now a bustling little metropolis of some 150,000 people, the biggest city on Mars. And it was still growing. Near the end of his afternoon#8217;s sightseeing, Sax rode one of the big exterior elevators up the side of Branch Mesa, centrally located north of Canal Park, and from its plateau he could see that the northern outskirts of town were studded with construction sites all the way to the tent wall. There was even work going on around some of the distant mesas outside the tent. Clearly critical mass had been reached in some kind of group psychology #8212; some herding instinct, which had made this place the capital, the social magnet, the heart of the action. Group dynamics were complex at best, even (he grimaced) unexplainable.

Which was unfortunate, as always, because Biotique Burroughs was a very dynamic group indeed, and in the days that followed Sax found that determining his place in the crowd of scientists working on the project was no easy thing. He had lost the skill of finding his way in a new group, assuming he had ever had it. The formula governing the number of possible relationships in a group was n(n #8212; 1)/2, where n is the number of individuals in the group; so that, for the 1,000 people at Biotique Burroughs, there were 499,500 possible relationships. This seemed to Sax well beyond anyone#8217;s ability to comprehend #8212; even the 4,950 possible relationships in a group of 100, the hypothesized #8220;design limit#8221; of human group size, seemed unwieldy. Certainly it had been at Underbill, when they had had a chance to test it.

So it was important to find a smaller group at Biotique, and Sax set about doing so. It certainly made sense to concentrate at first on his lab. He had joined them as a biophysicist, which was risky, but put him where he wanted to be in the company; and he hoped he could hold his own. If not, then he could claim to have come to biophysics from physics, which was true. His boss was a Japanese woman named Claire, middle-aged in appearance, a very congenial woman who was good at running their lab. On his arrival she put him to work with the team designing second- and third-generation plants for the glaciated regions of the northern hemisphere. These newly hydrated environments represented tremendous new possibilities for botanical design, as the designers no longer had to base all species on desert xerophytes. Sax had seen this coming from the very first moment he had spotted the flood roaring down lus Chasma into Melas, in 2061. And now forty years later he could actually do something about it.

So he very happily joined in the work. First he had to bring himself up to date on what had already been put out there in the glacial regions. He read voraciously in his usual manner, and viewed videotapes, and learned that with the atmosphere still so thin and cold, all the new ice released on the surface was subliming until its exposed surfaces were fretted to a minute lacework. This meant there were billions of pockets large and small for life to grow in, directly on the ice; and so one of the first forms to have been widely distributed were varieties of snow and ice algae. These algae had been augmented with phreatophytic traits, because even when the ice started pure it became salt-encrusted by way of the ubiquitous windblown fines. The genetically engineered salt-tolerant algaes had done very well, growing in the pitted surfaces of the glaciers, and sometimes right into the ice. And because they were darker than the ice, pink or red or black or green, the ice under them had a tendency to melt, especially during summer days, when temperatures were well above freezing. So small diurnal streams had begun to run off the glaciers, and along their edges. These wet morainelike regions were similar to some Terran polar and mountain environments. Bacteria and larger plants from these Terran environments, genetically altered to help them survive the pervasive saltiness, had first been seeded by teams from Biotique several M-years before, and for the most part these plants were prospering as the algae had.

Now the design teams were trying to build on these early successes and introduce a wider array of larger plants, and some insects bred to tolerate the high CO₂ levels in the air. Biotique had an extensive inventory of template plants to take chromosome sequences from, and 17 M-years of field experimental records, so Sax had a lot of catching up to do. In his first weeks at the lab, and in the company arboretum on Hunt plateau, he focused on the new plant species to the exclusion of everything else, content to work his way up to the bigger picture in due time.

Meanwhile, when he was not at his desk reading, or looking through the microscopes or into the various Mars jars in the labs, or up in the arboretum, there was the daily work of being Stephen Lindholm to keep him busy as well. In the lab it was not all that different from being Sax Russell. But at the end of the workdays he would often make a conscious effort and join the group that went upstairs to one of the plateau cafes, to have a drink and talk about the day#8217;s work, and then everything else.

Even there he found it surprisingly easy to #8220;be#8221; Lindholm, who, he discovered, asked a lot of questions, and laughed frequently; whose mouth somehow made laughter easier. Questions from the others #8212; usually from Claire, and an English immigrant named Jessica, and a Kenyan man named Berkina #8212; very rarely had anything to do with Lindholm#8217;s Terran past. When they did, Sax found it was easy to give a minimal response #8212; Desmond had given Lindholm a past in Sax#8217;s own home town of Boulder, Colorado, a sensible move #8212; and then he could turn things around on the questioner, in a technique he had often observed Michel using. People were so happy to talk. And Sax himself had never been a particularly quiet one, like Simon. He had always pitched in his conversational ante, and if he had contributed infrequently thereafter, it was because he was only interested when the stakes reached a certain minimum level. Small talk was usually a waste of time. But it did in fact pass that time, which otherwise might be irritat-ingly blank. It also seemed to ameliorate feelings of solitude. And his new colleagues usually engaged in pretty interesting shop talk, anyway. And so he did his part, and told them about his walks around Burroughs, and asked them many questions about what he had seen, and about their past, and Biotique, and the Martian situation, and so on. It made as much sense for Lindholrn as for Sax.

In these conversations his colleagues, especially Claire and Ber-kina, confirmed what was obvious in his walks #8212; that Burroughs was in some sense becoming the de facto capital of Mars, in that the headquarters for all of the biggest transnationals were located there. The transnationals were at this point the effective rulers of Mars. They had enabled the Group of Eleven and the other wealthy industrial nations to win or at least survive the war of 2061, and now they were all intertwined in a single power structure, so that it wasn#8217;t clear who on Earth was calling the shots, the countries or the supracorporations. On Mars, however, it was obvious. UNOMA had been shattered in 2061 like one of the domed cities, and the agency that had taken its place, the United Nations Transitional Authority, was an administrative group staffed by transnat executives, its decrees enforced by transnat security forces. #8220;The UN has nothing to do with it, really,#8221; Berkina said. #8220;The UN is just as dead on Earth as UNOMA is here. So the name is just a cover.#8221;

Claire said, #8220;Everyone calls it just the Transitional Authority anyway.#8221;

#8220;They can see who is who,#8221; Berkina said. And indeed, uniformed transnational security police were to be seen frequently in Burroughs. They wore rust-colored construction jumpers, with armbands of different colors. Nothing very ominous, but there they were.

#8220;But why?#8221; Sax asked. #8220;Who are they afraid of?#8221;

#8220;They#8217;re worried about Bogdanovists coming out of the hills,#8221; Claire said, and laughed. #8220;It#8217;s ridiculous.#8221;

Sax raised his eyebrows, let it pass. He was curious, but it was a dangerous topic. Better just to listen when it came up on its own. Still, after that when he walked around Burroughs he watched the crowds more, checking the security police wandering around for their armband identification. Consolidated, Amexx, Oroco #8230; he found it curious that they had not formed a single force. Possibly the transnationals were still rivals as well as partners, and competing security systems would naturally result. This perhaps would also explain the proliferation of identification systems, which created the gaps that made it possible for Desmond to insert his per-sonas into one system, and have them creep elsewhere. Switzerland was obviously willing to cover for some people coming into its system from nowhere, as Sax#8217;s own experience showed; and no doubt other countries and transnationals were doing the same kind of thing.

So in the current political situation, information technology was creating not totalization but balkanization. Arkady had predicted such a development, but Sax had considered it too irrational to be a likely eventuality. Now he had to admit that it had come to pass. The computer nets could not keep track of things because they were in competition with each other; and so there were police in the streets, keeping an eye out for people like Sax.

But he was Stephen Lindholm. He had Lindholm#8217;s rooms in the Hunt Mesa, he had Lindholm#8217;s work, and his routines, and his habits, and his past. His little studio apartment looked very unlike what Sax himself would have lived in: the clothes were in the closet, there were no experiments in the refrigerator or on the bed, there were even prints on the walls, Eschers and Hundertwassers and some unsigned sketches by Spencer, an indiscretion that was certainly undetectable. He was secure in his new identity. And really, even if he was found out, he doubted the results would be all that traumatic. He might even be able to return to something like his previous power. He had always been apolitical, interested only in terraforming, and he had disappeared during the madness of #8216;61 because it looked as if it might be fatal not to do so. No doubt several of the current transnationals would see it that way and try to hire him.

But all that was hypothetical. In reality he could settle into the life of Lindholm. ‘

As he did, he discovered that he enjoyed his new work very much. In the old days, as head of the entire terraforming project, it had been impossible not to get bogged down in administration^ or diffused across the whole range of topics, trying to do enough of everything to be able to make informed policy decisions. Naturally this had led to a lack of depth in any one discipline, with a resulting loss of understanding. Now, however, his whole attention was focused on creating new plants to add to the simple ecosystem that had been propagated in the glacial regions. For several weeks he worked on a new lichen, designed to extend the borders of the new bioregions, based on a chasmdendolith from the Wright Valleys in Antarctica. The base lichen had lived in the cracks in the Antarctic rock, and here Sax wanted it to do the same, but he was trying to replace the algal part of the lichen with a faster algae, so that the resulting new symbiote would grow more quickly than its template organism, which was notoriously slow. At the same time he was trying to introduce into the lichen#8217;s fungus some phreato-phytic genes from salt-tolerant plants like tamarisk and pickleweed. These could live in salt levels three times as salty as sea water, and the mechanisms, which had to do with the permeability of cell walls, were somewhat transferable. If he managed it, then the result would be a very hardy and fast-growing new salt lichen. Very encouraging, to see the progress that had been made in this area since their first crude attempts to make an organism that would survive on the surface, back in Underbill. Of course the surface had been more difficult then. But their knowledge of genetics and their range of methods were also greatly advanced.

One problem that was proving very obdurate was adjusting the plants to the paucity of nitrogen on Mars. Most large concentrations of nitrites were being mined upon discovery and released as nitrogen into the atmosphere, a process Sax had initiated in the 2040s and thoroughly approved of, as the atmosphere was desperately in need of nitrogen. But so was the soil, and with so much of it being put into the air, the plant life was coming up short. This was a problem that no Terran plant had ever faced, at least not to this degree, so there were no obvious adaptive traits to clip into the genes of their areoflora.

The nitrogen problem was a recurrent topic of conversation in their after-work sessions at the Cafe Lowen, up on the mesa plateau#8217;s edge. #8220;Nitrogen is so valuable that it#8217;s the medium of exchange among the members of the underground,#8221; Berkina told Sax, who nodded uncomfortably at this misinformation.

Their cafe group made its own homage to the importance of nitrogen by inhaling N2O from little canisters, passed from person to person around the table. It was claimed, with marginal accuracy but very high spirits, that their exhalation of this gas would help the terraforming effort. When the canister came around to Sax for the first time, he regarded it dubiously. He had noticed that one could purchase the canisters in restrooms #8212; there was an entire pharmacology inside every men#8217;s room now, wall units that dispensed canisters of nitrous oxide, omegendorph, pandorph, and other drug-laced gases. Apparently respiration was the current method of choice for drug ingestion. It was not something that interested him, but now he took the canister from Jessica, who was leaning against his shoulder. This was an area in which Stephen#8217;s and Sax#8217;s behaviors diverged, apparently. So he breathed out and then put the little facemask over his mouth and nose, feeling Stephen#8217;s slim face under the plastic.

He breathed in a cold rush of the gas, held it briefly, exhaled, and felt all the weight go out of him #8212; that was the subjective impression. It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one#8217;s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself. Not on the face of it a pleasant realization. But at the moment, not a problem. In fact it made him grin. He looked over the rail at the rooftops of Burroughs, and noticed for the first time that the new neighborhoods to the west and north we#8217;re shifting to blue tile roofs and white walls, so that they were taking on a Greek look, while the old parts of town were more Spanish. Jessica was definitely making an effort to keep their upper arms in contact. It was possible her balance was impaired by mirth.

#8220;But it#8217;s time to get beyond the alpine zone!#8221; Claire was saying. #8220;I#8217;m sick of lichen, and I#8217;m sick of mosses and grasses. Our equatorial fellfields are becoming meadows, we#8217;ve even got krummholz, and they#8217;re all getting lots of sunlight year-round, and the atmospheric pressure at the foot of the escarpment is as high as in the Himalayas.#8221;

#8220;Top of the Himalayas,#8221; Sax pointed out, then checked himself mentally; that had been a Saxlike qualification, he could feel it. As Lindholm he said, #8220;But there are high Himalayan forests.#8221;

#8220;Exactly. Stephen, you#8217;ve done wonders since you arrived on that lichen, why don#8217;t you and Berkina and Jessica and C.J. start working on subalpine plants. See if we can#8217;t make some little forests.#8221;

They toasted the idea with another hit of nitrous oxide, and the idea of the briny frozen borders of the aquifer outbreaks becoming meadows and forests suddenly struck them all as extremely funny. #8220;We need moles,#8221; Sax said, trying to wipe the grin from his face. #8220;Moles and voles are crucial in changing fellfields to meadow, I wonder if we can make some kind of CO₂-tolerant arctic moles.#8221;

His companions thought this was hilarious, but he was lost in thought for a while, and didn#8217;t notice.

#8220;Listen, Claire, do you think we could go out and have a look at one of the glaciers? Do some of the work on-site?#8221;

Claire stopped giggling and nodded. #8220;Sure. In fact that reminds me. We#8217;ve got a permanent experimental station out at Arena Glacier, with a good lab. And we#8217;ve been contacted by a biotech group from Armscor, one with a lot of clout with the Transitional Authority. They want to be taken out to see the station and the ice. I guess they#8217;re planning to build a similar station in Marineris. We can go out with that group and show them around, and do some fieldwork, and kill two birds with one stone.#8221;

Plans to make this trip actually made it from the Lowen into the lab, and then the front office. Approval came swiftly, as was usual in Biotique. So Sax worked hard for a couple of weeks, preparing for the fieldwork, and at the end of that intensive period he packed his bag, and one morning took the subway out to West Gate. There in the Swiss garage he spotted some people from the office, gathered with several strangers. Introductions were still being made. Sax approached, and Claire saw him and drew him into the crowd, looking excited. #8220;Here, Stephen, I want to introduce you to our guest for the trip.#8221; A woman wearing some kind of prisming fabric turned around, and Claire said, #8220;Stephen, I#8217;d like you to meet Phyllis Boyle. Phyllis, this is Stephen Lindholm.#8221;

#8220;How do you do?#8221; Phyllis said, extending a hand.

Sax took her hand and shook. #8220;I do fine,#8221; he said.

Vlad had nicked his vocal cords to give him a different vocal print if he was ever tested, but everyone in Gamete had agreed that he sounded just the same. And now Phyllis cocked her head curiously at him, alerted by something. #8220;I#8217;m looking forward to the trip,#8221; he said, and glanced at Claire. #8220;I hope I haven#8217;t held you up?#8221;

#8220;No no, we#8217;re still waiting for the drivers.#8221;

#8220;Ah.#8221; Sax backed away. #8220;Good to meet you,#8221; he said to Phyllis politely. She nodded, and with a final curious glance turned back to the people she had been talking to. Sax tried to concentrate on what Claire was saying about the drivers. Apparently driving a rover across open terrain was a specialized occupation now.

That was fairly cool, he thought. Of course coolness was a Sax-trait. Probably he ought to have gushed all over her, said he knew her from the old vids and had admired her for years, etc. Although how someone could admire Phyllis he had no idea. Surely she had come out of the war fairly compromised; on the winning side, but the only one of the First Hundred to have chosen it. A quisling, did they call that? Something like that. Well, she hadn#8217;t been the only one of the First Hundred; Vasili had stayed in Burroughs throughout, and George and Edvard had been on Clarke with Phyl-lis when it detached from the cable and catapulted out of the plane of the ecliptic. A neat bit of work to survive that, actually. He wouldn#8217;t have thought it possible #8212; but there she was, chattering with her host of admirers. Luckily he had heard of her survival a few years before; otherwise it would have been a shock to see her.

She still looked about sixty years old, although she had been born the same year as Sax, and so was now 115. Silver-haired, blue-eyed, her jewelry made of gold and bloodstone, her blouse made of a material that shone through all the colors of the spectrum #8212; right now her back was a vibrant blue, but as she turned tr glance over her shoulder at him it went emerald green. He pretended not to notice the look.

Then the drivers came, and they were into the rovers and off, and fcr a blessing Phyllis was in one of the other cars. The rovers were big hydrazine-powered things, and they followed a concrete road north, so that Sax could not see the necessity for specialist drivers, unless it was to handle .the rovers#8217; speed; they were rolling along at about a hundred and sixty kilometers an hour, and to Sax, who was used to rover speeds about a quarter that, it felt fast and smooth. The other passengers complained at how bumpy and slow the ride was #8212; apparently express trains now floated over the pistes at about six hundred kilometers per hour.

The Arena Glacier was some eight hundred kilometers northwest of Burroughs, spilling from the highlands of Syrtis Major north onto Utopia Planitia. It ran in one of the Arena Fossae for a distance of some three hundred fifty kilometers. Claire and Berkina and the others in the car told Sax the glacier#8217;s history, and he did his best to indicate absorbed interest; indeed it was interesting, for they were aware that Nadia had rerouted the outbreak of the Arena aquifer. Some of the people who had been with Nadia when she did it had ended up in South Fossa after the war, and the story had been told there, and had spread into the public domain.

In fact these people seemed to think they knew a lot about Nadia. #8220;She was against the war,#8221; Claire told him confidently, #8220;and she did everything she could to stop it and then to repair the damage, even while it was happening. People who saw her on Elysium say she never slept at all, just took stimulants to keep going. They say she saved ten thousand lives in the week she was active around South Fossa.#8221;

#8220;What happened to her?#8221; Sax asked.

#8220;No one knows. She dis?.ppeared from South Fossa.#8221;

#8220;She was headed for Low Point,#8221; Berkina said. #8220;If she got there in time for that flood, she was probably killed.#8221;

#8220;Ah.#8221; Sax nodded solemnly. #8220;That was a bad time.#8221;

#8220;Very bad,#8221; Claire said vehemently. #8220;So destructive. It set the terraforming back decades, I#8217;m sure.#8221;

#8220;Although the aquifer outbreaks have been useful,#8221; Sax murmured.

#8220;Yes, but those could have been done anyway, in a controlled manner.#8221;

#8220;True.#8221; Sax shrugged and let the conversation go on without him. After the encounter with Phyllis it was a bit much to get into a discussion of #8216;61.

He still couldn#8217;t quite believe she hadn#8217;t recognized him. The passenger compartment they were in had shiny magnesium panels over the windows, and there, among the faces of his new colleagues, was the little face of Stephen Lindholm. A bald old man with a slightly hooked nose, which made the eyes somewhat hawkish rather than just birdlike. Visible lips, strong jaw, a chin #8212; no, it didn#8217;t look like him at all. No reason why she should have recognized him.

But looks weren#8217;t everything.

He tried not to think about that as they hummed north over the road. He concentrated on the view. The passenger compartment had a domed skylight, as. well as windows on all four sides, so he could see a lot. They were driving up the slope of west Isidis, a section of the Great Escarpment that was like a great shaved berm. The jagged dark hills of Syrtis Major rose over the northwest horizon, sharp as the edge of a saw. The air was clearer than it had been in the old days, even though it was fifteen times thicker. But there was less dust in it, as snowstorms were knocking the fines down and then fixing them on the surface in a crust. Of course this crust was often broken by strong winds, and the trapped fines rein-troduced to the air. But these breaks were localized, and the sky-cleaning storms were slowly getting the upper hand.

And so the sky was changing color. Overhead it was a rich violet, and above the western hills it was whitish, shading up into lavender, and some color between lavender and violet that Sax didn#8217;t have a name for. The eye could distinguish differences in light frequency of only a few wavelengths, so the few names for the colors between red and blue were totally inadequate to describe the phenomena. But whatever you called them, or didn#8217;t, they were sky colors very unlike the tans and pinks of the early years. Of course a dust storm would always temporarily return the sky to that primeval ochre tone; but when the atmosphere washed out, its color would be a function of its thickness and chemical composition. Curious as to what they could expect to see in the future, Sax took his lectern from his pocket to try some calculations.

He stared at the little box, suddenly realizing that it was Sax Russell#8217;s lectern #8212; that if checked, it would give him away. It was like-carrying around a genuine passport.

He dismissed the thought, as there was nothing to be done about it now. He concentrated on the color of the sky. In clean air, sky color was caused by preferential light scattering in the air molecules themselves. Thus the thickness of the atmosphere was critical. Air pressure when they had arrived had been about 10 millibars, and now it averaged about 160. But since air pressure was created by the weight of the air, creating 160 millibars on Mars had taken about three times as much air over any given spot than would have created such a pressure on Earth. So the 160 millibars here ought to scatter light about as much as 480 millibars on Earth; meaning the sky overhead ought to have something like the dark blue color seen in photos taken in mountains about 4,000 meters high.

But the actual color filling the windows and skylight of their rover was much more reddish than that, and even on clear mornings after heavy storms, Sax had never seen it look anywhere near as blue as a Terran sky. He thought about it more. Another effect of Mars#8217;s light gravity was that the air column lofted taller than Earth#8217;s. It was possible that the smallest fines were effectively in suspension, and had been blown above the altitude of most clouds, where they escaped being scrubbed out by storms. He recalled that haze layers had been photographed that were as much as fifty kilometers high, well above the clouds. Another factor might be the composition of the atmosphere; carbon dioxide molecules were more efficient light scatterers than oxygen and nitrogen, and Mars, despite Sax#8217;s best efforts, still had much more CO₂ in its atmosphere than Earth did. The effects of that difference would be calculable. He typed up the equation for Rayleigh#8217;s law of scattering, which states that the light energy scattered per unit volume of air is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength of the illuminating radiation. Then he scribbled away on his lectern screen, altering the variables, checking handbooks, or filling in quantities by memory, or guesswork.

He concluded that if the atmosphere was thickened to one bar, then the sky would probably turn milk white. He also confirmed that in theory the present-day Martian sky ought to be a lot bluer than it was, with its scattered blue light about sixteen times the intensity of the red. This suggested that fines very high in the atmosphere were probably reddening the sky. If that was the correct explanation, one could infer that the color and opacity of the Martian sky would for many years be subject to very wide variation, depending on weather and other influences on the cleanness of the air#8230;

And so he worked on, trying to incorporate into the calculation skylight radiance intensities, Chandrasekhar#8217;s radiative transfer equation, chromaticity scales, aerosol chemical compositions, Le-gendre polynomials to evaluate the angular scattering intensities, Riccati-Bessel functions to evaluate the scattering cross sections, and so on #8212; occupying the better part of the drive to Arena Glacier, concentrating hard and steadfastly ignoring the world around him and the situation in which he now found himself.

Early that afternoon they came to a small town called Bradbury, which under its Nicosia-class tent looked like something out of Illinois: treelined blacktop streets, screened-in porches fronting two-story brick houses with shingle roofs, a main street with shops and parking meters, a central park with a white gazebo under giant maples#8230;

They headed west on a smaller road, across the top of Syrtis Major. The road was made of black sand that had been cleared of rocks and sprayed with a fixative. This whole region was very dark #8212; Syrtis Major had been the first Martian surface feature spotted through Earth telescopes, by Christiaan Huygens on November 28, 1659, and it was this dark rock that had allowed him to see it. The ground was almost black, sometimes a kind of eggplant purple; the hills and grabens and escarpments that the road twisted through were black; the fretted mesas were black, the thulleya or little ribs were black, ridge after ridge after ridge of them; the giant ejecta erratics, on the other hand, were often rust-colored, reminding them forcibly of the color from which they had temporarily escaped.

Then they drove over a black bedrock rib and the glacier lay before them, crossing the world from left to right like a lightning bolt inlaid into the landscape. A bedrock rib on the far side of the glacier paralleled the one they were on, and the two ribs together looked like old lateral moraines, although really they were just parallel ridges that had channelized the outbreak flood.

The glacier was about two kilometers across. It appeared to be no more than five or six meters thick, but apparently it had run down a canyon, so there were hidden depths.

Parts of its surface were like ordinary regolith, just as rocky and dusty, with a kind of gravel surface that revealed no sign of the ice below. Other parts looked like chaotic terrain, except clearly made of ice, with knots of white seracs sticking up out of what looked like boulders. Some of the seracs were broken plates, bunched like the back of a stegosaurus, translucent yellow with the setting sun behind them.

All was motionless, to every horizon #8212; not a movement to be seen anywhere. Of course not; Arena Glacier had been here for forty years. But Sax could not help remembering the last time he had seen such a sight, and he glanced involuntarily to the south, as if a new flood might burst out at any moment.

The Biotique station was located a few kilometers upstream, on the rim and apron of a small crater, so that it had an excellent view over the glacier. In the last part of sunset, as some of the regulars got the station activated, Sax went with Claire and the visitors from Armscor, including Phyllis, up to a big observation room on the top floor of the station, to look at the broken mass of ice in the waning moments of the day.

Even on a relatively clear afternoon like this one, the horizontal rays of the sun turned the air a burnished dark red, and the surface of the glacier sparked in a thousand places, the recently broken ice reflecting the light like mirrors. The majority of these scarlet gleams lay in a rough line between them and the sun, but there were a few elsewhere on the ice, where the reflecting surfaces stood at odd angles. Phyllis pointed out how much larger the sun looked, now that the soletta was in position. #8220;Isn#8217;t it wonderful? You can almost see the mirrors, can#8217;t you?#8221;

#8220;It looks like blood.#8221;

#8220;It looks positively Jurassic.#8221;

To Sax it looked like a G-type star about one astronomical unit away. Of course this was significant, as they were 1.5 astronomical units away. As for the talk of rubies, or dinosaur#8217;s eyes #8230;

The sun slipped over the horizon and all the points of red light disappeared at once. A great fan of crepuscular rays stretched across the sky, the pinkish beams cutting a dark purple sky. Phyllis exclaimed over the colors, which were indeed very clear and pure. She said, #8220;I wonder what makes those magnificent rays,#8221; and automatically Sax opened his mouth to explain about the shadows of hills or clouds over the horizon, when it occurred to him that a, it was a rhetorical question (perhaps), and b, to give a technical answer would be a very Sax Russell thing to do. So he shut his mouth, and considered what Stephen Lindholm would say in such a situation. This kind of self-consciousness was new to him, and distinctly uncomfortable, but he was going to have to say things, at least some of the time, because long silences were also fairly Sax Russellish, and not at all like Lindholm as he had been playing him so far. So he tried his best.

#8220;Just think how close those photons came to hitting Mars,#8221; he said, #8220;and now they#8217;re going to run all the way across the universe instead.#8221;

People squinted at this odd observation. But it drew him into the group nonetheless, and so served its purpose.

After a while they went down to the dining room, to eat pasta and tomato sauce, and bread just out of the ovens. Sax stayed at the main table, and ate and talked as much as the rest, striving for the norm, doing his best to follow the elusive rules of conversation and of social discourse. These he had never understood well, and less so the more he thought about them. He knew that he had always been considered eccentric; he had heard the story of the hundred transgenic lab rats taking over his brain.  #8212; A strange moment, that, standing outside the lab door in the dark, hearing the tale being promulgated with much hilarity from one generation of postdocs to the next, experiencing the rare discomfort of seeing himself as if he were someone else, someone strikingly peculiar.

But Lindholm, now: he was a congenial fellow. He knew how to get along. Someone who could partake of a bottle of Utopian zinfandel, someone who could do his part to make a dinner party festive. Someone who understood intuitively the hidden algorithms of good fellowship, so that he would be able to operate the system without even thinking about it.

So Sax ran a forefinger up and down the bridge of his new nose, and drank the wine which did indeed suppress his parasympathetic nervous system to the point of making him less inhibited and more voluble, and he chattered away very successfully, he thought, although several times he was alarmed by the way he was drawn into conversation by Phyllis, sitting across the table from him #8212; and by the way she looked at him #8212; and by the way he looked back! There were protocols for this kind of thing too, but he had never understood them in the slightest. Now he recalled the way Jessica had leaned on him at the Lowen, and drank another half glass and smiled, and nodded, thinking uneasily about sexual attraction and its causes.

Someone asked Phyllis the inevitable question about the escape from Clarke, and as she launched into the tale she glanced frequently at Sax, seeming to assure him that she was telling the story principally to him. He attended politely, resisting a certain tendency to go cross-eyed, which might indicate his dismay.

#8220;There was no warning of any kind,#8221; Phyllis said to the questioner. #8220;One minute we were orbiting Mars at the top of the elevator, just sick at what was happening down on the surface, and doing our best to figure out some way to stop the unrest, and then the next minute there was a jerk like an earthquake, and we were on our way out of the solar system.#8221; She smiled and paused for the laugh that followed, and Sax saw that she had told the story many times before in just this way.

#8220;You must have been terrified!#8221; someone said.

#8220;Well,#8221; Phyllis said, #8220;it#8217;s strange how in an emergency there isn#8217;t really time for any of that. As soon as we understood what had happened, we knew that every second we stayed on Clarke diminished our chances of surviving by hundreds of kilometers. So we convened in the command center and counted heads and talked it over and took stock of what we had available. It was hectic but not panicked, if you see what I mean. Anyway, there turned out to be about the usual number of Earth-to-Mars freighters in the hangars, and the AI calculations indicated we would need the thrust of almost all of them to get ourselves back down into the plane of the ecliptic in time to intersect the Jovian system. We were on our way out as well as up, and in the general direction of Jupiter, which was a blessing. Anyway, that was when it got crazy. We had to get all the freighters outside the hangars and flying beside Clarke, and then link them together and stock them with everything they could hold of Clarke#8217;s air and fuel and so on. And we were off in that jury-rigged lifeboat only thirty hours after launching, which now that I look back on it, is almost unbelievable. Those thirty hours #8230;#8221;

She shook her head, and Sax thought he saw a real memory suddenly invade her tale, shaking her slightly. Thirty hours was a remarkably fast evacuation, and no doubt the time had flashed by in a dreamlike rush of action, in a state of mind so different from ordinary time that it might pass for transcendence.

#8220;After that it was just a matter of cramming into a couple of crew quarters #8212; two hundred and eighty-six of us, there were #8212; and going out on EVAs to cut away inessential parts of the freighters. And hoping there would be enough fuel to get us on course down to Jupiter. It was more than two months before we could be positive we would intercept the Jovian system, and ten weeks before we actually did. We used Jupiter itself as a gravity handle, and swung around toward Earth, which at that time was closer than Mars. And we swung so hard around Jupiter that we needed Earth#8217;s atmosphere and Luna#8217;s gravity to slow us down, because we were almost out of fuel at the very same time that we were the fastest humans in history, by a factor of two. Eighty thousand kilometers an hour, I think it was when we hit the stratosphere the first time. A useful speed, really, because we were running out of food and air. We got really hungry near the end. But we made it. And we saw Jupiter from about this close,#8221; holding thumb and forefinger apart a couple of centimeters.

People laughed, and the gleam of triumph in Phyllis#8217;s eye had nothing to do with Jupiter. But there was a tightening at the comer of her mouth; something at the end of her tale had darkened the triumph, somehow.

#8220;And you were the leader, right?#8221; someone asked.

Phyllis held up a hand, to say she could not deny it though she wanted to. #8220;It was a cooperative effort,#8221; she said. #8220;But sometimes someone has to decide when there#8217;s an impasse, or simply a need for speed. And I had been head of Clarke before the catastrophe.#8221;

She flashed her big smile, confident that they had enjoyed the account. Sax smiled with the rest, and nodded when she looked his way. She was an attractive woman, but not, he thought, very bright. Or maybe it was just that he did not like her very much. For certainly she was very intelligent in some ways, a good biologist when she had done biology, and certain to score high on an IQ test.-But there were different types of intelligence, and not all of them were subject to analytic testing. Sax had noticed this fact in his student years: that there were people who would score high on any intelligence test, and were very good at their work, but who at the same time could walk into a room of people and within an hour have many of the occupants of that room laughing at them, or even despising them. Which was not very smart. Indeed the most giddy of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician#8217;s #8212; the calculus of human interaction being so much more subtle and variable than any physics, somewhat like the emerging field of math called cascading recom-binant chaos, only less simple. So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.

Phyllis, however, basking in the attention of her listeners, most of them much younger than her and, at least on the surface, in awe of her historicity #8212; Phyllis was not one of those polymaths. On the contrary, she seemed rather dim when it came to judging what people thought of her. Sax, who knew he shared the deficiency, watched her with the best Lindholm smile he could muster. But it seemed to him a fairly obviously vain performance on her part, even a bit arrogant. And arrogance was always stupid. Or else a #8220; mask for some kind of insecurity. Hard to guess what that insecurity might be, in such a successful and attractive person. And she certainly was attractive.

After supper they went back up to the observation room on the top floor, and there under a glittering bowl of stars the crowd from Biotique turned on some music. It was the kind called nuevo calypso, the current rage in Burroughs, and several members of the group brought out instruments and played along, while others moved to the middle of the room and began to dance. The music was paced at about a hundred beats a minute, Sax calculated, perfect physiological riming for stimulating the heart just a bit; the secret to most dance music, he supposed.

And then Phyllis was there by his side, grabbing for his hand and pulling him out among the dancers. Sax only just restrained-himself from jerking his hand away from her, and he was sure that his response to her smiling invitation was sickly at best. He had never danced in his life; as far as he could recall. But that was Sax Russell#8217;s life. Surely Stephen Lindholm had danced a lot. So Sax began to hop gently up and down in time with the bass steel drum, wiggling his arms uncertainly at his sides, smiling at Phyllis in a desperate simulation of debonair pleasure.

Later that evening the younger Biotique crew were still dancing, and Sax took the elevator down to bring some tubs of ice milk back up from the kitchens. When he got back into the elevator Phyllis was already inside, coming back up from the dorm floor. #8220;Here, let me help with those,#8221; she said, and took two of the four plastic bags hanging from his fingers. Then when she had them she leaned down (she was a few centimeters taller than him) and kissed him full on the mouth. He kissed back, but it was such a shock that he didn#8217;t really start to feel it until she pulled away; then the memory of her tongue between his lips was like another kiss. He tried to look less than befuddled, but by the way she laughed he knew he had failed. #8220;I see you#8217;re not as much of a lady-killer as you look,#8221; she said, which given the situation only made him more alarmed. In point of fact, no one had ever done that to him before. He tried to rally, but the elevator slowed and the doors hissed open.

Through dessert and the rest of the party Phyllis did not approach him again. But when the timeslip began he went to the elevators to go back to his room, and as the doors began to close Phyllis slipped through them and in, and as soon as the elevator began to drop she was kissing him again. He put his arms around her and kissed back, trying to figure out what Lindholm would do in this situation, and if there was any way out of it that wouldn#8217;t lead to trouble. When the elevator slowed, Phyllis leaned back with a dreamy unfocused gaze and said, #8220;Come walk me to my room.#8221; Reeling a bit, Sax held her upper arm like a bit of delicate lab equipment, and was led to her room, a tiny chamber like all the rest of the bedrooms. Standing in the doorway they kissed again, despite Sax#8217;s strong feeling that this was his last chance to escape, gracefully or not; but he was kissing her back pretty passionately, he noticed, and when she pulled back to murmur, #8220;You might as well come inside,#8221; he followed without protest; indeed his penis was snagged halfway up in its blind grope toward the stars, all his chromosomes humming loudly, the silly fools, at this chance at immortality. It had been a long time since he had made love to anyone except Hiroko, and those encounters, though friendly and pleasant, were not passionate, more an extension of their bathing; whereas Phyllis, fumbling at their clothes as they fell onto her bed kissing, was clearly excited, and this excitement was transferring to Sax by a kind of immediate conduction. His erection sprang free eagerly from his pants as Phyllis got the pants down his legs, as if in illustration of the selfish gene theory, and he could only laugh and tug at the long ventral zipper of her jumpsuit. Lindholm, free of any worries, would certainly be aroused by the encounter. That was clear. And so he had to be too. And besides, although he did not especially like Phyllis, he did know her; there was that old First Hundred bond, the memories of those years together in Underbill #8212; there was something provocative in the notion of making love to a woman he had known so long. And every one else in the First Hundred had been polygamous, it seemed, everyone but Phyllis and him. So now they were making up for it. And she was very attractive. And it was something, actually, just to be wanted.

All these rationalizations were easy in the moment itself, and indeed forgotten entirely in the rush of sexual sensation. But immediately upon completion of the act Sax began to worry again. Should he go back to his room, should he stay? Phyllis had fallen asleep with her hand on his flank, as if to assure herself that he would stay. In sleep everyone looked like a child. He surveyed the length of her body, shocked slightly once again by the various manifestations of sexual dimorphism. Breathing so calmly. Just to be wanted #8230; her fingers, still tensed across his ribs. And so he stayed; but he did not sleep much.

Sax threw himself into the work on the glacier and the surrounding terrain. Phyllis went out in the field sometimes, but she was always discreet in her behavior with him; Sax doubted if Claire (or Jessica!) or anyone else realized what had happened #8212; or realized that every few days, it was happening again. This was another complication; how would Lindholm react to Phyllis#8217;s apparent desire for secrecy? But in the end it was not an issue. Lindholm was more or less forced, as a matter of chivalry or compliance or something like that, to act as Sax would have. And so they kept their affair to themselves, much as they would have in Underbill, or on the Ares, or in Antarctica. Old habits die hard.

And with the distraction of the glacier, it was easy enough to keep the affair secret. The ice and the ribbed land around it were fascinating environments, and there was a lot to study and try to understand out there.

The surface of the glacier proved to be extremely broken, as the literature had suggested #8212; mixed with regolith during the flooding, and shot through with trapped carbonation bubbles. Rocks and boulders caught on the surface had melted the ice underneath them, and then it had refrozen around them, in a daily cycle that had left them all about two-thirds submerged. All the seracs, standing above the jumbled surface of the glacier like titanic dolmens, were on close inspection found to be deeply pitted. The ice was brittle because of the extreme cold, and slow to flow downhill because of the reduced gravity; nevertheless it was moving downstream, like a river in slow motion, and because its source was emptied, the whole mass would eventually end up on Vastitas Bo-#8217;realis. And signs of this movement could be found in the newly broken ice seen every day #8212; new crevasses, fallen seracs, cracked bergs. These fresh surfaces were quickly covered by crystalline ice flowers, whose saltiness only added to the speed of crystallization.

Fascinated by this environment, Sax got in the habit of going out by himself every day at dawn, following flagged trails the station crew had set out. In the first hour of the day all the ice glowed in vibrant pink and rose tones, reflecting tints of the sky. As direct sunlight struck the glacier#8217;s smashed surfaces, steam would begin to rise out of the cracks and iced-over pools, and the ice flowers glittered like gaudy jewelry. On windless mornings a small inversion layer trapped the mist some twenty meters overhead, forming a thin orange cloud. Clearly the glacier#8217;s water was diffusing fairly quickly out into the world.

As he hiked through the frigid air he spotted many different species of snow algae and lichen. The glacier-facing slopes of the two lateral ridges were especially well populated, flecked by small patches of green, gold, olive, black, rust, and many other colors #8212; perhaps thirty or forty all told. Sax strolled over these pseudo-moraines carefully, as unwilling to step on the plant life as he would be to step on any experiment in the lab. Although truthfully it looked as though most of the lichens would not notice. They were tough; bare rock and water were all they required, plus light #8212; though not much of that appeared necessary #8212; they grew under ice, inside ice, and even inside porous chunks of translucent rock. In something as hospitable as a crack in the moraine, they positively flourished. Every crack Sax looked in sported knobs of Iceland lichen, yellow and bronze, which under the glass revealed tiny forking stalks, fringed by spines. On flat rocks he found the crustose lichens: button lichen, stud lichen, shield lichen, candel-laria, apple-green map lichen, and the red-orange jewel lichen that indicated a concentration of sodium nitrate in the regolith. Clumped under the ice flowers were growths of pale gray-green snow lichen, which under magnification proved to have stalks like the Iceland lichen, great masses of them looking delicate as lace. Worm lichen was dark gray, and under magnification revealed weathered antlers that appeared extremely delicate. And yet if pieces broke off, the algal cells enclosed in their fungal threads would simply keep growing, and develop into more lichen, attaching wherever they came to rest. Reproduction by fragmentation; useful indeed in such an environment.

So the lichen were prospering, and along with the species that Sax could identify, with the help of photos on his wristpad#8217;s little display screen, were many more that seemed not to correspond to any listed species. He was curious enough about these nondescripts to pluck a few samples, to take back and show to Claire and Jessica.

But lichen was only the beginning. On Earth, regions of broken rock newly exposed by retreating ice, or by the growth of young mountains, were called boulder fields, or talus. On Mars the equivalent zone was the regolith #8212; thus effectively the greater part of the surface of the planet. Talus world. On Earth these regions were first colonized by microbacteria and lichen, which, along with chemical weathering, began to break the rock down into a thin immature soil, slowly filling the cracks between rocks. In time there was enough organic material in this matrix to support other kinds of flora, and areas at this stage were called fellfields,/el! being Gaelic for stone. It was an accurate name, for stone fields they were, the ground surface studded with rocks, the soil between and under them less than three centimeters thick, supporting a community of small ground-hugging plants.

And now there were fellfields on Mars. Claire and Jessica suggested to Sax that he cross the glacier, and hike downstream along the lateral moraine, and so one morning (slipping away from Phyl-lis) he did so, and after half an hour#8217;s hiking, stopped on a knee-high boulder. Below him, sloping into the rocky trough next to the glacier, was a wet patch of flat ground, twinkling in the late-morning light. Clearly meltwater ran over it most days #8212; already in the utter stillness of the morning he could hear the drips of little streams under the glacier#8217;s edge, sounding like a choir of tiny wooden chimes. And on this miniature watershed, among the threads of running water, were spots of color, everywhere, leaping out at the eye #8212; flowers. A patch of fellfield, then, with its characteristic millefleur effect, the gray waste peppered with dots of red, blue, yellow, pink, white#8230;

The flowers were mounted on little mossy cushions or florettes, or tucked among hairy leaves. All the plants hugged the dark ground, which would be markedly warmer than the air above it; nothing but grass blades stuck higher than a few centimeters off the soil, tie tiptoed carefully from rock to rock, unwilling to step on even a single plant. He knelt on the gravel to inspect some of the little growths, the magnifying lenses on his faceplate at their highest power. Glowing vividly in the morning light were the classic fellfield organisms: moss campion, with its rings of tiny pink flowers on dark green pads; a phlox cushion; five-centimeter sprigs of bluegrass, like glass in the light, using the phlox taproot to anchor its own delicate roots #8230; there was a magenta alpine primrose, with its yellow eye and its deep green leaves, which formed narrow troughs to channel water down into the rosette. Many of the leaves of these plants were hairy. There was an intensely blue forget-me-not, the petals so suffused with warming anthocyanins that they were nearly purple #8212; the color that the Martian sky would achieve at around 230 millibars, according to Sax#8217;s#8217;calculations on the drive to Arena. It was surprising there was no name for that color, it was so distinctive. Perhaps that was cyanic blue.

The morning passed as he moved very slowly from plant to plant, using his wristpad#8217;s field guide to identify sandwort, buckwheat, pussypaws, dwarf lupines, dwarf clovers, and his namesake, saxifrage. Rock breaker. He had never seen one in the wild before, and he spent a long time looking at the first one he found: arctic saxifrage, Saxifraga hirculus, tiny branches covered with long leaves, ending in small pale blue flowers.

As with the lichens, there were many plants that he couldn#8217;t identify; they exhibited features from different species, even gen-uses, or else they were completely nondescript, their features an odd melange of features from exotic biospheres, some looking like underwater growths, or new kinds of cacti. Engineered species, presumably, although it was surprising these weren#8217;t listed in the guide. Mutants, perhaps. Ah but there, where a wide crack had collected a deeper layer of humus and a tiny rivulet, was a clump of kobresia. Kobresia and the other sedges grew where it was wet, and their extremely absorbent turf chemically altered the soil under it quite rapidly, performing important work in the slow transition from fellfield to alpine meadow. Now that he had spotted it he could see minuscule watercourses marked by their population of sedges, running down through the rocks. Kneeling on a thinsulate pad, Sax clicked off his magnifying glasses and looked around, and as low as he was, he could suddenly see a whole series of little fellfields, scattered on the slope of the moraine like patches of Persian carpet, shredded by the passing ice.

Back at the station Sax spent a lot of time sequestered in the labs, looking at plant specimens through microscopes, running a variety of tests, and talking about the results to Berkina and Claire and Jessica.

#8220;They#8217;re mostly polyploids?#8221; Sax asked.

#8220;Yes,#8221; Berkina said.

Polyploidy was fairly .frequent at high altitudes on Earth, so it was not surprising. It was an odd phenomenon #8212; a doubling or tripling or even quadrupling of the original chromosome number in a plant. Diploid plants, with ten chromosomes, would be succeeded by polyploids with twenty or thirty or even forty chromosomes. Hybridizers had used the phenomenon for years to develop fancy garden plants, because polyploids were usually larger #8212; larger leaves, flowers, fruits, cell sizes #8212; and they often had a wider range than their parents. That kind of adaptability made them better at occupying new areas, like the spaces in and under a glacier. There were islands in the Terran Arctic where eighty percent of the plants were polyploid. Sax supposed that it was a strategy to avoid the destructive effects of excessive mutation rates, which would explain why it occurred in high-UV areas. Intense UV irradiation would break a number of genes, but if they were replicated in the other sets of chromosomes, then there was likely to be no genotypic damage, and no impediment to reproduction.

#8220;We find that even when we haven#8217;t started with polyploids, which we usually do, they change within a few generations.#8221;

#8220;Have you identified the triggering mechanism that causes it?#8221;

#8220;No.#8221;

Another mystery. Sax stared into the microscope, vexed by this rather astonishing gap in the bizarrely rent fabric of biological science. But there was nothing to be done about it; he had looked into the matter himself in his Echus Overlook labs in the 2050s, and it had appeared that polyploidy was indeed stimulated by more UV radiation than the organism was used to, but how cells read this difference, and then actually doubled or tripled or quadrupled their chromosome count#8230;

#8220;I must say, I#8217;m surprised at how much everything is flourishing.#8221;

Claire smiled happily. #8220;I was afraid that after Earth you might think this was pretty barren.#8221;

#8220;Well, no.#8221; He cleared his throat. #8220;I guess I expected nothing. Or just algae and lichen. But those fellfields seem to be thriving. I thought it would take longer.#8221;

#8220;It would on Earth. But you have to remember, we#8217;re not just throwing seeds out there and waiting to see what happens. Every single species has been augmented to increase hardiness and speed of growth.#8221;

#8220;And we#8217;ve been reseeding every spring,#8221; Berkina said, #8220;and fertilizing with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.#8221;

#8220;I thought it was denitrifying bacteria that were all the rage.#8221;

#8220;Those are distributed specifically in thick deposits of sodium nitrate, to transpire the nitrogen into the atmosphere. But where we#8217;re gardening we need more nitrogen in the soil, so we spread nitrogen-fixers.#8221;

#8220;It still seems to be going very fast to me. And all of this must have happened before the soletta.#8221;

#8220;The thing is,#8221; Jessica said from her desk across the room, #8220;there isn#8217;t any competition at this point. Conditions are harsh, but these are very hardy plants, and when we put them out there, there isn#8217;t any competition to slow them down.#8221;

#8220;It#8217;s an empty niche,#8221; Claire said.

#8220;And conditions here are better than most.places on Mars,#8221; Berkina added. #8220;In the south you#8217;ve got the aphelion winter, and the high altitude. The stations down there report that the winterkill is just devastating. But here the perihelion winter is a lot milder, and we#8217;re only a kilometer high. It#8217;s pretty benign, really. Better than Antarctica in many ways.#8221;

#8220;Especially in the CO₂ level,#8221; Berkina said. #8220;I wonder if that doesn#8217;t account for some of that speed you#8217;re talking about. It#8217;s like the plants are being supercharged.#8221;

#8220;Ah,#8221; Sax said, nodding.

So the fellfields were gardens. Aided growth rather than natural growth. He had known that, of course #8212; it was a given everywhere on Mars #8212; but the fellfields, so rocky and diffuse, had looked spontaneous and wild enough to momentarily confuse him. And even remembering they were gardens, he was still surprised that they were so vigorous.

#8220;Well, and now with this soletta pouring sunlight onto the surface!#8221; Jessica exclaimed. She shook her head, as if disapproving. #8220;Natural insolation averaged forty-five percent of Earth#8217;s, and with the soletta it#8217;s supposed to be up to fifty-four.#8221;

#8220;Tell me more about the soletta,#8221; Sax said carefully.

They told him in a kind of round. A group of transnationals, led by Subarashii, had built a circular slatted array of solar sail mirrors, placed between the sun and Mars and aligned to focus inward sunlight that would have just missed the planet. An annular support mirror, rotating in a polar orbit, reflected light back to the soletta to counterbalance the pressure of the sunlight, and that light was bounced back onto Mars as well. Both these mirror systems were truly huge compared to the early freighter sails Sax had enlisted to reflect light onto the surface, and the reflected light they were adding to the system was really significant. #8220;It must have cost a fortune to build them,#8221; Sax murmured.

#8220;Oh, it did. The big transnats are investing like you can#8217;t believe.#8221;

#8220;And they#8217;re not done yet,#8221; Berkina said. #8220;They#8217;re planning to fly an aerial lens just a few hundred kilometers above the surface, and this lens will focus some of the incoming light from the soletta, until it heats the surface up to fantastic temperatures, like five thousand degrees#8212;#8221;

#8220;Five thousand!#8221;

#8220;Yes, I think that#8217;s what I heard. They plan to melt the sand and the regolith underneath, which will release all the volatiles into the atmosphere.#8221;

#8220;But what about the surface?#8221;

#8220;They plan to do it in remote areas.#8221;

#8220;In lines,#8221; Claire said. #8220;So that they end up with ditches?#8221;

#8220;Canals,#8221; Sax said.

#8220;Yes, that#8217;s right.#8221; They laughed.

#8220;Glass-sided canals,#8221; Sax said, troubled by the thought of all those volatiles. Carbon dioxide would be prominent among them, perhaps chief among them.

But he did not want to show too much interest in the larger terraforming issues. He let it go, and soon enough the talk returned to their work. #8220;Well,#8221; Sax said, #8220;I guess some of the fellfields will turn into alpine meadows pretty soon.#8221;

#8220;Oh, they#8217;re already there,#8221; Claire said.

#8220;Really!#8221;

#8220;Yes, well, they#8217;re small. But hike down the western edge about three kilometers, have you done that yet? You#8217;ll see. Alpine meadows and krummholz too. It hasn#8217;t been that difficult. We planted trees without even altering them very much, because a lot of spruce and pine species turned out to have temperature tolerances much lower than they needed in their Terran habitats.#8221;

#8220;That#8217;s peculiar.#8221;

#8220;A holdover from the Ice Ages, I guess. But now it#8217;s coming in handy.#8221;

#8220;Interesting,#8221; Sax said.

And he spent the rest of that day staring into the microscopes without seeing a thing, lost in thought. Life is so much spirit, Hi-roko used to say. It was a very strange business, the vigor of living things, their tendency to proliferate, what Hiroko called their green surge, their viriditas. A striving toward pattern: it made him so.

When dawn arrived the next day he woke up in Phyllis#8217;s bed, with Phyllis tangled in the sheets beside him. After dinner the whole group had retired to the observation room, as was becoming habitual, and Sax had continued the conversation with Claire and Jessica and Berkina, and Jessica had been very friendly to him, as was her wont, and Phyllis had seen this, and had followed him to the bathrooms by the elevator, and pounced on him with that shocking seductive embrace of hers, and they had ended up going down to the dorm floor, and to her room. And although Sax had felt uncomfortable about disappearing without saying good-night to the others, he had made love to her passionately enough.

Now, looking at her, he remembered their precipitate departure with distaste. It did not take any more than the most simple-minded sociobiology to explain such behavior: competition for mates, a very basic animal activity. Of course Sax had never been the subject of such competition before, but there was nothing to pride oneself on in this sudden manifestation; clearly it was happening because of Vlad#8217;s cosmetic surgery, which through some chance had rearranged his face into a configuration appealing to women. Although why one arrangement of facial features should be more attractive than another was a total mystery to him. He had heard sociobiological explanations of sexual attractiveness before, and he could see that some of them might have some validity: a man would look for a mate with wide hips to be able safely to give birth to his children, with significant breasts in order to feed his children, etc.; a woman would look for a strong man to feed her children and to father strong children, etc., etc. That made a kind of sense; but none of it had anything to do with facial features. For them, sociobiological explanations got pretty tenuous: wide-set eyes for good eyesight, good teeth to aid health, a significant nose to avoid getting colds #8212; no. It just wasn#8217;t as sensible as that. It was a matter of chance configurations, somehow appealing to the eye. An aesthetic judgment in which tiny nonfunctional features could make a great difference, which indicated that practical concerns were not a factor. A case in point was a pair of twin sisters with whom Sax had gone to high school #8212; they had been identical twins, and had looked very much alike, and yet somehow one had been plain while the other had been beautiful. No, it was a matter of millimeters of flesh and bone and cartilage, accidentally falling into patterns that pleased or did not. So Vlad had made some alterations to his face, and now women were competing for his attentions, though he was the same person he had always been. A person Phyllis had never shown the slightest interest in before, when he had looked the way nature had made him. It was hard not to be somewhat cynical about it. To be wanted, yes; but wanted for trivialities#8230;

He got out of bed and suited up in one of the latest lightweight suits, so much more comfortable than the old stretch-fabric walkers; one had to insulate against the subfreezing temperatures, and wear a helmet and airtank of course, but there was no longer any need to provide pressure to avoid bruising of the skin. Even 160 millibars was enough for that, and so now it was only a matter of warm clothing and boots, and the helmet. So it only took a few minutes to dress, and then he was out to the glacier again.

He crunched over the hoarfrost on the main flagged trail across the river of ice, and then wound downstream on the western bank, passing the little millejleur fellfields, coated with frost that was already beginning to melt in the light. He came to a place where the glacier dropped down a small escarpment, in a short crazed icefall; it also took a few degrees#8217; turn to the left, following its bordering ribs. Suddenly a loud creak filled the air, followed by a low-frequency boom that vibrated in his stomach. The ice was moving. He stopped, listening. He heard the distant bell-sound of an under-ice stream. He hiked on, feeling lighter and happier with every step. The morning light was very clear, the steam on the ice like white smoke.

And then, in the shelter of some huge boulders, he came upon an amphitheater of fellfield, dotted with flowers like flecks of paint; and at the bottom of the field was a little alpine meadow, south-facing and shockingly green, the mats of grass and sedge all cut with ice-coated watercourses. And around the edges of the amphitheater, sheltered in cracks and under rocks, hunched a number of dwarf trees.

It was krummholz, then, which in the evolution of mountain landscapes was the next stage after alpine meadows. The dwarf trees he had spotted were actually members of ordinary species, mostly white spruce, Picea glauca, which in these harsh conditions miniaturized on their own, contouring into the protected spaces they sprouted in. Or had been planted in, more likely. Sax saw some lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta, joining the more numerous white spruce. These were the most cold-tolerant trees on Earth, and apparently the Biotique team had added salt tolerance from trees like the tamarisks. All kinds of engineering had been done to aid them, and yet still the extreme conditions stunted their growth, until trees that might have grown thirty meters high crouched in little knee-high pockets of protection, sheered off by winds and winter snowpacks as if by hedge clippers. Thus the name ferummho!z, German for #8220;crooked wood#8221; or perhaps #8220;elfin wood#8221; #8212; the zone where trees first managed to take advantage of the soil-building work of fellfields and alpine meadows. Treelimit.

Sax wandered slowly around the amphitheater, stepping on rocks, inspecting the mosses, the sedges, the grasses, and every single individual tree. The gnarly little things were twisted as if cultivated by deranged bonsai gardeners. #8220;Oh how nice,#8221; he said out loud more than once, inspecting a branch or a trunk, or a pattern of laminate bark, peeling away like phyllo dough. #8220;Oh how nice. Oh for some moles. Some moles and voles, and marmots and minxes and foxes.#8221;

But the CO₂ in the atmosphere was still nearly thirty percent of the air, perhaps fifty millibars all by itself. All mammals would die very quickly in such air. This was why he had always resisted the two-stage terraforming model, which called for a massive CO₂ buildup to precede anything else. As if warming the planet were the only goal! But warming was not the goal. Animals on the surface was the goal. This was not only a good in itself, but good also for the plants, many of which needed animals. Most of these fellfield plants propagated on their own, of course, and there were some altered insects that Biotique had released, out there bumbling around in stubborn insect survivalist mode, half alive and only just managing their work of pollination. But there were many other symbiotic ecological functions that needed animals, like the soil aeration accomplished by moles and voles, or the spread of seeds by birds, and without them plants could not thrive, and some would not live at all. No, they needed to reduce the CO₂ in the air, probably right back to the ten millibars it had been when they arrived, when it had been the only air there was. Which was why the plan his colleagues had mentioned, to melt the regolith with an aerial lens, was so troubling. It would only increase their problem.

Meanwhile, this unexpected beauty. Hours passed as he inspected specimens one by one, admiring in particular the spiraling trunk and branches, the flaking bark and sprays of needles, of one little lodgepole pine #8212; like a piece of flamboyant sculpture, really. And he was down on his knees, with his face in a sedge and his butt in the air, when Phyllis and Claire and a whole group came trooping down into the meadow, laughing at him and trampling carelessly on the living grass.

Phyllis stayed with him that afternoon, as she had one or two times before, and they walked back together, Sax trying at first to play the role of native guide, pointing out plants he had just learned the previous week. But Phyllis asked no questions about them, and did not appear even to listen when he spoke. It seemed she only wanted him to be an audience to her, a witness to her life. So he gave up on the plants and asked questions, and listened and then asked more. It was a good opportunity to learn more about the current Martian power structure, after all. Even if she exaggerated her,own role in it, it was still informative. #8220;I was amazed how fast Subarashii got the new elevator built and into position,#8221; she said.

#8220;Subarashii?#8221;

#8220;They were the principal contractor.#8221;

#8220;Who awarded the contract, UNOMA?#8221;

#8220;Oh no. UNOMA has been replaced by the UN Transitional Authority.#8221;

#8220;So when you were president of the Transitional Authority, you were in effect president of Mars.#8221;

#8220;Well, the presidency just rotates among the members, it doesn#8217;t confer much more power than any other members have. It#8217;s just for media consumption, and to run the meetings. Scut work.#8221;

#8220;Still…#8221;

#8220;Oh, I know.#8221; She laughed. #8220;It#8217;s a position a lot of my old colleagues wanted but never got. Chalmers, Bogdanov, Boone, Toitovna #8212; I wonder what they would have thought if they had seen it. But they backed the wrong horse.#8221;

Sax looked away from her. #8220;So why did Subarashii get the new elevator?#8221;

#8220;The steering committee of the TA voted that way. Praxis had made a bid for it, and no one likes Praxis.#8221;

#8220;Now that the elevator is back, do you think things will change again?#8221;

#8220;Oh certainly! Certainly! A lot of things have been on hold since the unrest. Emigration, building, terraforming, commerce #8212; they#8217;ve all been slowed down. We#8217;ve barely managed to rebuild some of the damaged towns. It#8217;s been a kind of martial law, necessary of course, given what happened.#8221;

#8220;Of course.#8221;

#8220;But now! All the stockpiled metals from the last forty years are ready to enter the Terran market, and that#8217;s going to stimulate the entire two-world economy unbelievably. We#8217;ll see more production out of Earth now, and more investment here, more emigration too. We#8217;re finally ready to get on with things.#8221;

#8220;Like the soletta?#8221;

#8220;Exactly! That#8217;s a perfect example of what I mean. There#8217;s all kinds of plans for major investment here.#8221;

#8220;Glass-sided canals,#8221; Sax said. It would make the moholes look trivial.

Phyllis was saying something about how bright things looked for Earth, and he shook his head to clear it of joules per square centimeter. He said, #8220;But I thought Earth had some serious difficulties.#8221;

#8220;Oh, Earth always has serious difficulties. We#8217;re going to have to get used to that. No, I#8217;m very optimistic. I mean this recession has hit them hard down there, especially the little tigers and the baby tigers, and of course the less developed countries. But the influx of industrial metals from here will stimulate the economy for everyone, including the environment-control industries. And, unfortunately, it looks like the diebacks will solve a lot of their other problems for them.#8221;

Sax focused on the section of moraine they were climbing. Here solifluction, the daily melting of ground ice on a tilt, had caused the loose regolith to slide down in a series of dips and rims, and although it all looked gray and lifeless, a faint pattern like minuscule tiling revealed that it was actually covered with blue-gray flake lichen. In the dips there were clumps of what looked like gray ash, and Sax stooped to pluck a#8217;small sample. #8220;Look,#8221; he said brusquely to Phyllis, #8220;snow liverwort.#8221;

#8220;It looks like dirt.#8221;

#8220;That#8217;s a parasitic fungus that grows on it. The plant is actually green, see those little leaves? That#8217;s new growth that the fungus hasn#8217;t covered yet.#8221; Under magnification the new leaves looked like green glass.

But Phyllis didn#8217;t bother to look. #8220;Who designed that one?#8221; she asked, her tone of voice implying that the designer had poor taste.

#8220;I don#8217;t know. Could be no one. Quite a few of the new species out here weren#8217;t designed.#8221;

#8220;Can evolution be working so fast?#8221; ‘ #8220;Well, you know^is polyploidy evolution?#8221;

#8220;No.#8221;

Phyllis moved on, not much interested in the gray little specimen. Snow liverwort. Probably very lightly engineered, or even undesigned. Test specimens, cast out here among the rest to see how they would do. And thus very interesting, in Sax#8217;s opinion.

But somewhere along the way Phyllis had lost interest. She had been a first-rate biologist once, and Sax found it hard to imagine losing the curiosity which lay at the core of science, that urge to figure things out. But they were getting old. In the course of their now unnatural lives it was likely they would all change, perhaps profoundly. Sax didn#8217;t like the idea, but there it was. Like all the rest of the new centenarians, he was having more and more trouble remembering specifics from his past, especially the middle years, things that had happened between the ages of around twenty-five to ninety. Thus the years before #8216;61, and most of his years on Earth, were getting dim. And without fully functioning memories, they were certain to change.

So when they returned to the station he went to the lab, disturbed. Perhaps, he thought, they had gone polyploidal, not as individuals but culturally #8212; an international array, arriving here and effectively quadrupling the meme strands, providing the adaptability to survive in this alien terrain despite all the stress-induced mutations#8230;

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless #8212; a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches#8217; tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.

So, okay, there was no such thing as cultural polyploidy. There was just a determinate historical situation, the consequence of all that had come before #8212; the decisions made, the results spreading out over the planet in complete disarray, evolving, or one should say developing, without a plan. Planless. In that regard there was a similarity between history and evolution, both of them being matters of contingency and accident, as well as patterns of development. But the differences, particularly in time scales, were so gross as to make that similarity nothing more than analogy again.

No, better to concentrate on homologies, those structural similarities that indicated actual physical relationships, that really explained something. This of course took one back into science. But after an encounter with Phyllis, that was just what he wanted.

So he dove back into studying plants. Many of the fellfield organisms he was finding had hairy leaves, and very thick leaf surfaces; which helped protect the plants from the harsh UV blast of Martian sunlight. These adaptations could very well be examples of homologies, in which species with the same ancestors had all kept family traits. Or they could be examples ‘of convergence, in which species from separate phyla had come to the same forms through functional necessity. And these days they could also be simply the result of bioengineering, the breeders adding the same traits to different plants in order to provide the same advantages.

Finding out which it was required identifying the plant, and then checking the records to see if it had been designed by one of the terraforming teams. There was a Biotique lab in Elysium, led by a Harry Whitebook, designing many of the most successful surface plants, especially the sedges and grasses, and a check in the Whitebook catalog often showed that his hand had been at work, in which case the similarities were often a matter of artificial convergence, Whitebook inserting traits like hairy leaves into almost every leaved plant he bred.

An interesting case of history imitating evolution. And certainly, since they wanted to create a biosphere on Mars in a short time, perhaps 107 times quicker than it had taken on Earth, they would have to intervene continuously in the act of evolution itself. So the Martian biosphere would not be a case of phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny, a discredited notion in any case, but of history recapitulating evolution. Or rather imitating it, to the extent possible given the Martian environment. Or even directing it. History directing evolution. It was a daunting thought.

Whitebook was going about the task with a lot of flair; he had bred phreatophytic lichen reefs, for instance, which built the salts they incorporated into a kind of millepore coral structure, so that the resulting plants were olive or dark green masses of semicrys-tailine blocks. Walking through a patch of them was like walking through a Lilliputian garden maze which had been crushed, abandoned, and half covered with sand. The individual blocks of the plant were fractured or fissured in a crackle pattern, and they were so lumpish they looked diseased, with a disease that appeared to petrify plants while they were still living, leaving them struggling to exist inside broken sheaths of malachite and jade. Strange-looking, but very successful; Sax found quite a few of these lichen reefs growing on the crest of the western moraine rib, and in the more arid regolith beyond.

He spent a few mornings studying them there, and one morning crossing the ridge he looked back over the glacier, and saw a sandy whirlwind spinning over the ice, a sparkling rust-colored little tornado that rushed downstream. Immediately afterward he was struck by a high wind, with gusts of at least a hundred kilometers an hour, and then a hundred and fifty; he ended up crouching behind a lichen reef, lifting a hand to try to estimate the wind speed. It was hard to make an accurate guess, because the thickening atmosphere had increased the force of winds, making them seem faster than they really were. All estimates based on the instincts from the Underbill days were now badly off. The gusts striking him now might have been as slow as eighty kilometers an hour. But full of sand, ticking against his faceplate and reducing visibility to a hundred meters or so. After an hour of waiting for the sandstorm to decrease he gave up and returned to the station, crossing the glacier by moving very carefully from flag to flag, careful not to lose the trail they made #8212; important, if one wanted to stay out of dangerous crevasse zones.

Once across the ice Sax made his way back to the station quickly, pondering the little tornado that had announced the arrival of the wind. Weather was strange. Inside he called up the meteorology channel, and ran through all its information on the day#8217;s weather, and then stared at a satellite photo of their region. A cyclonic cell was bearing down on them from Tharsis. With the air thickening, the winds coming off Tharsis were powerful indeed. The bulge would forever remain an anchoring point in Martian climatology, Sax suspected. Most of the time the northern hemisphere jet stream would circle up and around its northern end, like Terra#8217;s northern jet stream did around the Rockies. But every once in a while, air masses would shove over the Tharsis crest between volcanoes, dropping their moisture on west Tharsis as they rose. Then these dehydrated air masses would roar down the eastern slope, Big Man#8217;s mistral or sirocco or foehn, with winds so fast and forceful that as the atmosphere thickened they were getting to be a problem; some tent towns on the open surface were endangered to the point where it looked like they might have to retreat into craters or canyons, or at least greatly strengthen their tenting.

As Sax considered it the whole issue of weather became so exciting that he wanted to drop his botanical studies, and go after it full-time. In the old days he would have done that, and dived into climatology for a month or a year until his curiosity was satisfied, and he had managed to think of some contribution to policy regarding any problems that were arising.

But that had been a rather undisciplined approach, as he now saw, leading to a kind of scattershot method, even to a certain dilettantism. Now, as Stephen Lindholm, working for Claire and Biotique, he had to abandon climatology with a longing glance at the satellite photos and their suggestively swirling new cloud systems, and merely tell the others about the whirlwind, and talk about weather in a recreational way in the lab or over dinner #8212; while his main effort returned to their little ecosystem and its plants, and how to help them along. And as he was just beginning to feel he was learning the particularities of Arena, these restrictions imposed by his new identity were not a bad thing. They meant he was forced to concentrate on a single discipline in a way he hadn#8217;t since his postdoc work. And the rewards of concentration were becoming more and more evident to him. They could make him a better scientist.

The next day, for instance, with the winds merely brisk, he went back out and located the coral lichen patch he had been investigating when the sandstorm had hit. All the structure#8217;s fissures were filled with sand, which must have been true most of the time. So he brushed one of the fissures clean, and looked inside through the 20x magnifiers on his faceplate. The walls of the fissures were coated with very fine cilia, somewhat like the tiny versions of the hairs on exposed leaves of alpine cinquefoil. Clearly there was no need for protection of these already well-hidden surfaces. Perhaps they were there to release excess oxygen from the tissues of the semicrystalline outside mass. Spontaneous or planned? He read through descriptions on his wrist, and added a new one of this specimen, which because of the cilia appeared to be nondescript. He took out a little camera from his thigh pocket and took a picture, put a sample of the cilia in a bag, and put both camera and bag in his thigh pocket, and moved on.

He went down to look at the glacier, stepping onto it at one of the many junctures where its side came down and met smoothly the rising slope of the moraine rib. It was bright on the glacier at midday, as if bits of broken mirror were reflecting sunlight everywhere on it. Chunks of ice crunched underfoot. Little watersheds gathered to deep-channeled streams, which abruptly disappeared down holes in the ice. These holes, like the crevasses, were various shades of blue. The moraine ribs gleamed like gold, and seemed to bounce in the rising heat. Something in the sight reminded Sax of the soletta plan, and he whistled through his teeth.

He straightened up and stretched his lower back, feeling very alive and curious, absolutely in his element. The scientist at work. He was learning to like the ever-fresh primary effort of #8220;natural history,#8221; its close observation of things in nature; description, categorization, taxonomy #8212; the primal attempt to explain, or rather its first step, simply to describe. How happy the natural historians had always seemed to him in their writings, Linnaeus and his wild Latin, Lyell and his rocks, Wallace and Darwin and their great step from category to theory, from observation to paradigm. Sax could feel it, right there on Arena Glacier in the year 2101, with all these new species, this flourishing process of speciation that was half human and half Martian #8212; a process that would need its own theories eventually, some kind of evohistory, or historico-evolution, or ecopoesis, or simply areology. Or Hiroko#8217;s viriditas, perhaps. Theories of the terraforming project #8212; not only in what it intended, but how it was actually working. A natural history, precisely. Very little of what was happening could be studied with experimental lab science, so natural history was going to return to its proper place among the sciences, as one among equals. Here on Mars all kinds of hierarchies were destined to fall, and that was no meaningless analogy, but simply a precise observation of what all could see.

What all could see. Would he have understood, before his time out here? Would Ann understand? Looking down the wild cracked surface of the glacier, he found himself thinking of her. Every little berg and crevasse stood out as if he still had the 20x magnification on in his faceplate, but with an infinite depth of field #8212; every tint of ivory and pink in the pocked surfaces, every mirror gleam of meltwater, the bumpy hillocks of the far horizon #8212; everything was, for the moment, surgically clear and focused. And it occurred to him that this vision was not a matter of accident (the lensing of tears over his cornea, for instance) but the result of a new and growing conceptual understanding of the landscape. It was a kind of cognitive vision, and he could not help but remember Ann saying angrily to him, Mars is the place you have never seen.

He had taken it as a figure of speech. But now he recalled Kuhn, asserting that scientists who used different paradigms existed in literally different worlds, epistemology being such an integral component of reality. Thus Aristoteleans simply did not see the Galilean pendulum, which to them was a body falling with some difficulty; and in general, scientists debating the relative merits of competing paradigms simply talked right through each other, using the same words to discuss different realities.

He had considered that too to be a figure of speech. But thinking of it now, absorbing the hallucinatory clarity of the ice, he had to admit that it certainly described what his conversations with Ann had always felt like. It had been a frustration to both of them, and when Ann had cried#8217; out that he had never seen Mars, a statement that was obviously false on some levels, she had perhaps meant only to say that he hadn#8217;t seen her Mars, the Mars created by her paradigm. And that was no doubt true.

Now, however, he was seeing a Mars he had never seen before. But the transformation had come by focusing for a matter of weeks on just those parts of the Martian landscape that Ann despised, the new life-forms. So he doubted that the Mars he was seeing, with its snow algae and ice lichen, and the enchanting little patches of Persian carpet fringing the glacier, was Ann#8217;s Mars. Nor was it the Mars of his colleagues in terraforming. It was a function of what he believed, and what he wanted #8212; it was his Mars, evolving right before his very eyes, always in the process of becoming something new. Like a stab to the heart he felt the wish that he could seize Ann at that very moment, and pull her by the arm down the western moraine crying, See? See? See?

Instead he had Phyllis, perhaps the least philosophical person he had ever known. He avoided her when he could do it without appearing to, and passed his days on the ice, in the wind under the vast northern sky, or on the moraines, crawling around studying plants. Back in the station he talked over dinner with Claire and Berkina and the rest about what they were finding out there, and what it meant. After dinner they retired to the observation room and talked some more, dancing on some nights, especially Fridays and Saturdays. The music they played was always nuevo calypso, guitars and steel drums in fast simultaneous melodies, creating complex rhythms that Sax had great difficulty analyzing. There were often measures of 5/4 time alternating or even coexisting with 4/4, a pattern seemingly designed to throw him out of step. Luckily the current dance style was a kind of free-form movement that had little relation to the beat anyway, so when he failed in his attempts to stay in rhythm, he was pretty sure he was the only one who noticed. In fact it made a pretty good entertainment just trying to keep time, off on his own, hopping around with a little jig added to the 5/4 measures. When he returned to the tables and Jessica said to him, #8220;You#8217;re really a good dancer, Stephen,#8221; he burst out laughing, pleased even though he knew all it revealed was Jessica#8217;s incompetence to judge dance, or her attempt to please him. Although perhaps the daily boulder-walking in the field was improving his balance and timing. Any physical action, properly studied and practiced, could no doubt be accomplished with a reasonable amount of skill, if not flair.

He and Phyllis talked or danced together only as much as they did with everyone else; and only in the secrecy of their rooms did they embrace, kiss, make love. It was the old pattern of the hidden affair, and one morning around four A.M., returning to his room from hers, a flash of fear shook him; it seemed to him suddenly that his immediate undiscussed complicity in this behavior must tag him to Phyllis as suspiciously like one of the First Hundred. Who else would fall into such a bizarre pattern so readily, as if it were the natural thing to do?

But on consideration it did not seem that Phyllis was attentive to nuances of that kind. Sax had almost given up trying to understand her thinking and her motivations, as the data were contradictory and, despite the fact that they were spending nights together on a fairly regular basis, rather sparse. She seemed interested mostly in the intertransnational maneuvering that was going on in Sheffield, and back on Earth #8212; shifts in executive personnel and subsidiaries and stock prices that were clearly ephemeral and meaningless, but to her utterly absorbing. As Stephen he remained brightly interested in all this, and asked her questions about it to show his interest when she brought it up, but when he asked about what the daily changes meant in any larger strategic sense, she was either unable or unwilling to give him good answers. Apparently it was interesting to her more for the personal fortunes of those she knew than for the system that their careers revealed. An ex-Consolidated executive now with Subarashii had been made head of elevator operations, a Praxis executive had disappeared in the outback, Armscor was going to explode scores of hydrogen bombs in the megaregolith under the north polar cap, to stimulate growth and warming of the northern sea; and this last fact was no more interesting to her than the two previous ones.

And perhaps it made sense to pay attention to the individual careers of the people running the biggest transnational, and the micropolitics of the jockeying for power among them. These were the current rulers of the world, after all. So Sax lay next to Phyllis, listening to her and making Stephen#8217;s comments, trying to sort out all the names, wondering if the founder of Praxis really was a senile surfer, wondering if Shellalco would be taken over by Amexx, wondering why the transnat executive teams were so fiercely competitive, given that they already ruled the world, and had everything they could conceivably want in their personal lives. Perhaps socio-biology indeed had the answer, and it was all primate dominance dynamics, a matter of increasing one#8217;s reproductive success in the corporate realm #8212; which might not be a mere analogy, if one considered one#8217;s company as one#8217;s kin. And then again, in a world where one might live indefinitely, it could be simple self-protection. #8220;Survival of the fittest,#8221; which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order#8230;

And then Phyllis would roll over onto him and kiss him, and he would enter the realm of sex, where different rules seemed to obtain. For instance, though he liked Phyllis less and less as he got to know her better, his attraction to her did not correlate to this, but fluctuated according to mysterious principles of its own, no doubt pheromone-driven and hormonally based; so that sometimes he had to steel himself to accept her touches, while other times he felt alive with a lust that seemed all the stronger because it was so unmixed with affection. Or more senseless still, a lust actually heightened by dislike. This last reaction was rare, however, and as the stay at Arena went on, and the novelty of their affair wore off, Sax more and more frequently found himself distanced from their lovemaking, and inclined to fantasize during it, and fall very deeply into Stephen Lindholm, who appeared to be thinking about caressing women Sax did not know or had scarcely heard of, like Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe.

One dawn, after a disturbing night of that sort, Sax got up to go out on the ice, and Phyllis stirred and woke, and decided to come along.

They suited up and went out into a pure purple dawn, and hiked in silence down the near moraine to the side of the glacier, ascending it by a trail of steps cut into the ice. Sax took the southernmost flagged trail across the glacier, intending to climb the west lateral moraine as far upstream as he could go in a morning.

They made their way between knee-high crenellations of ice, all holed like Swiss cheese, and stained pink with snow algae. Phyllis was charmed as always by the fantastic jumble, and commented on the more unusual seracs, comparing those they passed this morning to a giraffe, the Eiffel Tower, the surface of Europa, etc. Sax stopped often to inspect chunks of jade ice that were shot through with an ice bacteria. In one or two places the jade ice sat exposed in suncups turned pink with snow algae; the effect was strange, like a vast field of pistachio ice cream.

So their progress was slow, and they were still on the glacier when a sequence of small tight whirlwinds popped into existence one after the next, like something out of a magic trick: brown dust devils, glittering with ice particulates, in a rough line that bore down the glacier toward them. Then the whirlwinds collapsed in some fluctuation, and with a clattery bang a gust struck them hard, whistling downslope with a surge so powerful they had to crouch into it to keep their balance. #8220;What a gale!#8221; Phyllis exclaimed in his ear.

#8220;Katabatic wind,#8221; Sax said, watching a knot of seracs disappear in the dust. #8220;Falling off Tharsis.#8221; Visibility was dropping. #8220;We should try to get back to the station.#8221;

So they set off back along the flagged trail, moving from one emerald dot to the next. But visibility continued to decrease, until they couldn#8217;t see from one marker to the next. Phyllis said, #8220;Here, . let#8217;s get into the shelter of those icebergs.#8221;

She struck off toward the dim shape of an ice prominence, and Sax hurried after her, saying, #8220;Be careful, a lot of seracs have crevasses at their base,#8221; and reaching forward to take her hand, when she dropped as if falling through a trap door. He caught an upflung wrist and was jerked down hard, hitting his knees painfully on the ice. Phyllis was still falling, sliding down a chute at the end of a shallow crevasse; he should have let go of her but instinctively held on, and was dragged over the edge head first. Both of them slid down into the packed snow at the bottom of the crevasse, and the snow gave under them so that they dropped again, crashing onto frosty sand after a brief but terrifying free-fall.

Sax, having landed mostly on Phyllis, sat up unhurt. Alarming sucking sounds came over the intercom from Phyllis, but it soon became clear that she had only had the wind knocked out of her. When she controlled her gasping she tested her limbs gingerly, and declared she was okay. Sax admired her toughness.

There was a rip in the fabric over his right knee; but otherwise he was fine. He took some suit tape from his thigh pocket and taped the rip; theT^knee still bent without pain, so he forgot about it and stood.

The hole that they had punched through the snow above them was about two meters over his outstretched hand. They were in an elongated bubble, the lower half of a crevasse that had a kind of hourglass shape. The downstream wall of their little bubble was ice, the upstream wall ice-coated rock. The rough circle of visible sky overhead was an opaque peach color, and the bluish ice wall of the crevasse gleamed with reflections of the dusty sunlight, so that the net effect was somewhat opalescent, and quite picturesque. But they were stuck.

#8220;Our beeper signal will be cut off, and then they#8217;ll come looking,#8221; Sax said to Phyllis as she stood up beside him.

#8220;Yes,#8221; Phyllis said. #8220;But will they find us?#8221;

Sax shrugged. #8220;The beeper leaves a directional record.#8221;

#8220;But the wind! Visibility may go right down to nothing!#8221;

#8220;We#8217;ll have to hope they can deal with it.#8221;

The crevasse extended to the east like a narrow low hallway. Sax ducked under a low point, and shone his headlamp down the space between ice and rock; it extended for as far as he could see, in the direction of the east side of the glacier. It seemed possible that it might reach all the way to one of the many small caves on the glacier#8217;s lateral edge, so after sharing the thought with Phyllis he set off to explore the crevasse, leaving her in position to be sure that any searchers who found the hole would also find someone at the bottom of it.

Outside the glary cone of his headlamp#8217;s beam, the ice was an intense cobalt blue, an effect caused by the same Rayleigh scattering that blued the color of the sky. There was a fair amount of light even with his headlamp off, which suggested that the ice overhead was not very thick. Probably the same approximate thickness as the height of their fall, now that he thought of it.

Phyllis#8217;s voice in his ear asked if he was all right.

#8220;I#8217;m fine,#8221; he said. #8220;I think this space might have been caused by the glacier running over a transverse escarpment. So it very well might run all the way out.#8221;

But it didn#8217;t. A hundred meters farther on, the ice on the left closed in and met the ice over the rockface to the right, and that was it: dead end.

On the way back he walked more slowly, stopping to inspect cracks in the ice, and bits of rock underfoot that had perhaps been plucked from the escarpment. In one fissure the cobalt of the ice turned blue-green, and reaching into it with a gloved finger, he pulled out a long dark green mass, frozen on the surface but soft underneath. It was a long dentritic mass of blue-green algae.

#8220;Wow,#8221; he said, and plucked a few frozen strands away, then shoved the rest back into their home crack. He had read that algae were burrowing down into the rock and ice of the planet, and bacteria were going even deeper; but actually to find some buried down here, so far from the sun, was enough to make one marvel. He turned off his headlamp again, and the luminous cobalt blue of the glacial light glowed around him, dim and rich. So dark, so cold, how did any living thing do it?

#8220;Stephen?#8221;

#8220;I#8217;m coming. Look,#8221; he said to Phyllis when he returned to her side, #8220;it#8217;s blue-green algae, all the way down here.#8221;

He held it out for her to look at, but she only gave it the briefest glance. He sat down and got out a sample bag from his thigh pocket, and put a small strand of algae inside, then stared at it through his 20x magnifying lenses. The lenses were not powerful enough to show him all he wanted to see, but they did reveal the long strands of dentritic green, looking slimy as they thawed out. His lectern had catalogs with photos at similar magnifications, but he couldn#8217;t find the species that resembled this one in every detail. #8220;It could be nondescript,#8221; he said. #8220;Wouldn#8217;t that be something. It really makes you wonder if the mutation rate out here is higher than the standard rates. We should work up experiments to determine that.#8221;

Phyllis did not reply.

Sax kept his thoughts to himself as he continued to search through the catalogs. He was still at it when they heard scratchy squeals and hisses over their radio, and Phyllis began calling out over the common band. Soon they could hear voices on the intercom, and not long after that, a round helmet filled the hole overhead. #8220;We#8217;re here!#8221; Phyllis cried.

#8220;Wait a second,#8221; Berkina said, #8220;we#8217;ve got a rope ladder for you.#8221;

And after an awkward swinging climb they were back on the surface of the glacier, blinking in the dusty fluctuating daylight, and crouching over to meet the gusts of wind, which were still powerful. Phyllis was laughing, explaining what had happened in her usual manner #8212; #8220;We were holding hands so we didn#8217;t lose each other, and boom, down we went!#8221; #8212; and their rescuers were describing the brute force of the strongest gusts. All seemed back to normal; but when they got inside the station, and took off their helmets, Phyllis gave him a brief searching glance, a very curious look indeed, as if he had revealed something to her out there which had made her wary #8212; as if he had somehow reminded her of something, down in that crevasse. As if he had behaved down there in a manner which gave him away, without hope of contradiction, as her old comrade Saxifrage Russell.

Through the Northern fall they worked around the glacier, and saw the days grow shorter, and the winds colder. Big intricate ice flowers grew on the glacier every night, and only melted at the edges briefly in the midafternoons, after which they hardened and served as the base for even more complex petals that appeared the next morning, the small sharp crystalline flakes bursting away in every direction from the larger fins and tines beneath. They could not help crushing entire fractal worlds with every step as they crunch-crunched over the ice, looking for the plants now covered in frost, to see how they were coping with the coming cold. Looking across the bumpy white waste, feeling the wind cut through one of the thicker insulated walkers, it seemed to Sax that a very severe winterkill was inevitable. ‘

But looks were deceptive. Oh there would be winterkill, of course; but the plants were hardening, as the overwintering gardeners called it, acclimatizing to the onset of winter. It was a three-stage process, Sax learned, digging in the thin hard-packed snow to find the signs. First, phytochrome clocks in the leaves sensed the shorter days-and now they were getting shorter fast, with dark fronts coming through every week or so, dumping dirtywhite snow out of black low-bellied cumulonimbus clouds. In the second stage, growth ceased, carbohydrates translocated to the roots, and amounts of abscisic acid grew in some leaves until they fell off. Sax found lots of these leaves, yellowed or brown and still hanging from their stems, hugging the ground and providing the yet living plant with some more insulation. During this stage water was moving out of cells into intercellular ice crystals, and the cell membranes were toughening, while sugar molecules replaced water molecules in some proteins. Then in the third and coldest stage, a smooth ice formed around the cells without rupturing them, in a process called vitrification.

At this point the plants could tolerate temperatures down to 220°K, which had been approximately the average temperature of Mars before their arrival, but was now about as cold as it got. And the snow which fell in the ever more frequent storms actually served as insulation for the plants, keeping the ground that it covered warmer than the windy surface. As he dug around in the snow with numbed fingers, the subnivean environment looked to Sax to be a fascinating place, especially the adaptations to the spectrally selected blue light that was transmitted through as much as three meters of snow-^-another example of Rayleigh scattering. He would have liked to study this winter world in person for the entire six months of the season; he found he liked it out under the low dark waves of cloud, on the white surface of the snowy glacier, leaning into the wind and stomping through drifts. But Claire wanted him to return to Burroughs, to work with the labs there on a tundra tamarisk they were close to succeeding with in the Mars jars. And Phyllis and the rest of the crew from Armscor and the Transitional Authority were going back as well. So one day they left the station to a little crew of researcher-gardeners, and got in a caravan of cars, and drove back south together.

Sax had groaned when he heard that Phyllis and her group would be going back with them. He had hoped that mere physical separation would end the relationship with Phyllis, and get him away from that probing eye. But as they were going back together, it looked like some sort of action would have to be taken. He would have to break it off if he wanted it to end, which he did. The whole idea of getting involved with her had been a bad one to begin with; talk about the surge of the unexplainable! But the surge was over,

and he was left in the company of a person who was at best irritating, and at worst dangerous. And of course it was no comfort to think that he had been acting in bad faith the entire time. No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous.

So their first night back in Burroughs, when his wrist beeped and Phyllis appeared to ask him out to dinner, he agreed and ended the call, and muttered to himself uneasily. It was going to be awkward.

They went out to a patio restaurant that Phyllis knew of on Ellis Butte, west of Hunt Mesa. Because of Phyllis they were seated at a corner table, with a view over the high district between Ellis and Table Mountain, where the woods of Princess Park were ringed by new mansions. Across the park Table Mountain was so glass-walled that it looked like a giant hotel, and the more distant mesas were not much less gaudy.

Waiters and waitresses brought by a carafe of wine, and then dinner, interrupting Phyllis#8217;s chatter, which was mostly about the new construction on Tharsis. But she seemed very willing to talk with the waiters and waitresses, signing napkins for them, and asking where they were from, how long they had been on Mars, and so forth. Sax ate steadily and watched Phyllis, and Burroughs, waiting for the meal to come to an end. It seemed to go on for hours.

But finally they were done, and taking the elevator ride to the valley floor. The elevator brought back memories of their first night together, which made Sax acutely uncomfortable. Perhaps Phyllis felt the same way, for she moved to the other side of the car, and the long descent passed in silence.

And then on the streetgrass of the boulevard she pecked him on the cheek with a swift hard hug, and said, #8220;It#8217;s been a lovely evening, Stephen, and a lovely time out at Arena as well, I#8217;ll never forget our little adventure under the glacier. But now I have to get back up to Sheffield and deal with everything that#8217;s been piling up, you know. I hope you#8217;ll come visit me if you#8217;re ever up there.#8221;

Sax struggled to control his face, trying to figure out how Stephen would feel and what he would say. Phyllis was a vain woman, and it was possible she would forget the entire affair faster if she was avoiding thought about the hurt she had caused someone by dropping him, rather than brooding over why he had seemed so relieved. So he tried to locate the minority voice inside him that was offended to be treated in such a manner. He tightened the corners of his mouth, and looked down to the side. #8220;Ah,#8221; he said.

Phyllis laughed like a girl, and caught him up in an affectionate hug. #8220;Come on,#8221; she admonished him. #8220;It#8217;s been fun, hasn#8217;t it? And we#8217;ll see each other again when I visit Burroughs, or if you ever come up to Sheffield. Meanwhile, what else can we do? Don#8217;t be sad.#8221;

Sax shrugged. This made such sense that it was hard to imagine any but the most lovelorn suitor objecting, and he had never pretended to be that. They were both over a hundred, after all. #8220;I know,#8221; he said, and gave her a nervous, rueful smile. #8220;I#8217;m just sorry the time has come.#8221;

#8220;I know.#8221; She kissed him again. #8220;Me too. But we#8217;ll meet again, and then we#8217;ll see.#8221;

He nodded, looking down again, feeling a new appreciation for the difficulties actors faced. What to do?

But with a brisk good-bye she was off. Sax said his own goodbye to a look over the shoulder, a quick wave.

He walked across Great Escarpment Boulevard, toward Hunt Mesa. So that was that. Easier than he had thought it would be, certainly. In fact, extremely convenient. But a part of him was still irritated. He looked at his reflection in the shop windows he passed on the lower floors of Hunt. A raffish old geezer; handsome? Well, whatever that meant. Handsome for some women, sometimes. Picked up by one and used as a bed partner for a few weeks, then tossed aside when it was time to move on. Presumably it had happened to many another through the years, more often to women than to men, no doubt, given the inequalities of culture and reproduction. But now, with reproduction out of the picture, and the culture in pieces#8230; She really was rather awful. But then again he had no right to complain; he had agreed to it without conditions, and had lied to her from the very start, not only about who he was, but about how he felt toward her. And now he was free of it, and all that it implied. And all that it threatened.

Feeling a kind of nitrous oxide lift, he walked up Hunt#8217;s huge atrium staircase to his floor, and down the hall to his little apartment.

Late that winter, for a couple of weeks in 2 February, the annual conference on the terraforming project took place in Burroughs. It was the tenth such conference, titled by the organizers #8220;M-38: New Results and New Directions,#8221; and it would be attended by scientists from all over Mars, nearly three thousand of them all told. The meetings were held in the big conference center in Table Mountain,, while the visiting scientists stayed in hotels all over the city.

Everyone at Biotique Burroughs went over to attend the meetings, hurrying back to Hunt Mesa if they had experiments running that they wanted to check in on. Sax was intensely interested in every aspect of the conference, naturally enough, and on its first morning he went down early to Canal Park and grabbed a coffee and pastry, and walked up to the conference center and was nearly the first in line at the check-in table. He took his packet of program information, pinned his name tag to his coat, and wandered through the halls outside the meeting rooms, sipping his coffee, reading the program for the morning, and glancing at the poster displays set in designated parts of the halls.

Here, and for the first time in more years than he could remember, Sax felt supremely in his element. Scientific conferences were all the same, at all times and in all places, even down to the way people dressed: the men in conservative, slightly shabby professorial jackets, all tans and browns and dark rust colors; the women, perhaps thirty percent of the total population, in unusually drab and severe business dress; many people still wearing spectacles, even though it was a rare vision problem that was not correctable by surgery; most of them carrying around their program packets; everyone with their name tag on their left lapel. Inside the darkened meeting rooms Sax passed talks that were beginning, and there too all was the same as ever: speakers standing before video screens that displayed their graphs and tables and molecular structures and so on, talking in stilted cadences timed to the rhythm of their images, using a pointer to indicate the parts of overcrowded diagrams that were relevant#8230; The audiences, composed of the thirty or forty colleagues most interested in the work being described, sat in rows of chairs next to their friends, listening closely and readying questions that they would ask at the end of the presentation.

For those fond of this world, it was a very pleasant sight. Sax poked his head into several of the rooms, but none of the talks intrigued him enough to draw him in, and soon he found himself in a hall full of poster displays, so he kept on browsing.

#8220;Solubilization of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Mono-meric and Micellar Surfactant Solutions.#8221; #8220;Post-Pumping Subsidence in Southern Vastitas Borealis.#8221; #8220;Epithelial Resistance to Third-Stage Gerontological Treatment.#8221; #8220;Incidence of Radial Fracture Aquifers in Impact Basin Rims.#8221; #8220;Low-voltage Electroporation of Long Vector Plasmids.#8221; #8220;Katabatic Winds in Echus Chasma.#8221; #8220;Base Genome for a New Cactus Genera.#8221; #8220;Resurfacing of the Martian Highlands in the Amenthes and Tyrrhena Region.#8221; #8220;Deposition of the Nilosyrtis Sodium Nitrate Strata.#8221; #8220;A Method for Assessing Occupational Exposure to Chlorophenates Through Analysis of Contaminated Work Clothing.#8221;

As always, the posters were a deliciously mixed bag. They were posters rather than talks for a variety of reasons-often the work of graduate students at the university in Sabishii, or concerned with topics peripheral to the conference-but anything might be there, and it was always very interesting to browse. And at this conference there had been no strong attempt to organize the posters into hallways by subject matter, so that #8220;Distribution of Rhizocarpon geo-graphicum in the East Charitum Monies,#8221; detailing the high-altitude fortunes of a crustose lichen that could live up to four thousand years, was facing #8220;Origins of Graupel Snow in Saline Particulates Found in Cirrus, Altostratus and Altocumulus Clouds in Cyclonic Vortexes in North Tharsis,#8221; a meteorological study of some importance.

Sax was interested in everything, but the posters that held him the longest were those that described aspects of the terraforming that he had initiated, or once had a hand in. One of these, #8220;Estimate of the Cumulative Heat Released by the Underhill Windmills,#8221; stopped him in his tracks. He read it through twice, feeling a slight dampening of spirits as he did.

The mean temperature of the Martian surface before their arrival had been around 220°K, and one of the universally agreed-upon goals of terraforming was to raise that mean temperature to something above the freezing point of water, which was 273°K. Raising the average surface temperature of an entire planet by more than 53°K was a very intimidating challenge, requiring, Sax had figured, the application over time of no less than 3.5 X 10#8221; joules to every square centimeter of the Martian surface. Sax in his own modeling had always aimed to reach a mean of about 274°K, figuring that with this as the average, the planet would be warm enough for much of the year to create an active hydrosphere, and thus a biosphere. Many people advocated even more warming than that, but Sax did not see the need.

In any case, all methods for adding heat to the system were judged by how much they had raised the global mean temperature; and this poster examining the effect of Sax#8217;s little windmill heaters estimated that over seven decades they had added no more than 0.05°K. And he could find nothing wrong with the various assumptions and calculations in the model outlined in the poster. Of course heating was not the only reason he had distributed the windmills; he had also wanted to provide warmth and shelter for an early engineered cryptoendolith he had wanted to test on the surface. But all those organisms had in fact died immediately upon exposure, or shortly thereafter. So on the whole the project could not be said to be one of his better efforts.

He moved on. #8220;Application of Process-Level Chemical Data in Hydrochemical Modeling: Dao Vallis Watershed, Hellas.#8221; #8220;Increasing CO₂ Tolerance in Bees.#8221; #8220;Epilimnetic Scavenging of Compton Fallout Radionuclides in the Marineris Glacial Lakes.#8221; #8220;Clearing Fines from Piste Reaction Rails.#8221; #8220;Global Warming As a Result of Released Halocarbons.#8221;

This last one stopped him again. The poster was the work of the atmospheric chemist S. Simmon and some of his students, and reading it made Sax feel considerably better. When Sax had been made head of the terraforming project in 2042, he had immediately initiated the construction of factories to produce and release into the atmosphere a special greenhouse gas mix, composed mostly of carbon tetrafluoride, hexafluoroethane, and sulphur hexafluoride, along with some methane and nitrous oxide. The poster referred to this mix as the #8220;Russell Cocktail,#8221; which was what his Echus Overlook team had called it in the old days. The halocarbons in the cocktail were powerful greenhouse gases, and the best thing about them was that they absorbed outgoing planetary radiation at the 8-to 12-micron wavelength, the so-called #8220;window#8221; where neither water vapor nor CO₂ had much absorptive ability. This window, when open, had allowed fantastic amounts of heat to escape back into space, and Sax had decided early on to attempt to close it, by releasing enough of the cocktail so that it would form ten or twenty parts per million of the atmosphere, following the classic early modeling on the subject by McKay et al. So from 2042 on, a major effort had been put into building automated factories, scattered all over the planet, to process the gases from local sources of carbon and sulphur and fluorite, and then release them into the atmosphere. Every year the amounts pumped out had increased, even after the twenty parts per million level had been reached, because they wanted to retain that proportion in an ever-thickening atmosphere, and also because they had to compensate for the continual high-altitude destruction of the halocarbons by UV radiation.

And as the tables in the Simmon poster made clear, the factories had continued to operate through 2061 and the decades since, keeping the levels at about twenty-six parts per million; and the poster#8217;s conclusion was that these gases had warmed the surface by around 12°K.

Sax moved on, a little smile fixed on his face. Twelve degrees! Now that was something!-over twenty percent of all the warming they needed, and all by the early and continuous deployment of a nicely designed gas cocktail. It was elegant, it truly was. There was something so comforting about simple physics…

By now it was ten A.M., and a keynote talk was beginning by H. X. Borazjani, one of the best atmospheric chemists on Mars, concerning just this matter of global warming. Borazjani was apparently going to give his calculations of the contributions of all the attempts at wanning that had been made up until 2100, the year before the soletta had come into operation. After estimating individual contributions, he was going to try to judge whether there were any synergistic effects taking place. This talk was therefore one of the crucial talks of the conference, as so many other people#8217;s work was going to be mentioned and evaluated in it.

It took place in one of the biggest meeting rooms, and the chamber was packed for the occasion, a couple of thousand people in there at least. Sax slipped in right at starting time, and stood at the back behind the last row of chairs.

Borazjani was a small dark-skinned white-haired man, speaking with a pointer before a large screen, which was now showing video images of the various heating methods that had been tried: black dust and lichen on the poles, the orbiting mirrors that had sailed out from Luna, the moholes, the greenhouse gas factories, the ice asteroids burning up in the atmosphere, the denitrifying bacteria, and then all the rest of the biota.

Sax had initiated every single one of these processes in the 2040s and #8216;50s, and he watched the video even more intently than the rest of the audience. The only obvious warming strategy that he had avoided in the early years was the massive release of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Those supporting this strategy had wanted to start a runaway greenhouse effect and create a CO₂ atmosphere of up to 2 bar, arguing that this would warm the planet tremendously, and stop UV radiation, and encourage rampant plant growth. All true, no doubt; but for humans and other animals it would be poisonous, and though advocates of the plan spoke of a second phase that would scrub the CO₂ from the atmosphere and replace it with a breathable one, their methods were vague, as were their time scales, which varied from 100 to 20,000 years. And the sky milk white however long it lasted.

Sax didn#8217;t find this an elegant solution to the problem. He much preferred his single-phase model, striking directly toward the eventual goal. It meant they had always been a bit short on heat, but Sax judged that disadvantage worth it. And he had done his best to find replacements for the heat that CO₂ would have added, as for instance the moholes. Unfortunately Borazjani#8217;s estimate of the heat released by the moholes was fairly low; altogether they had added perhaps 5°K to the mean temperature. Well, there was no getting around it, Sax thought as he tapped notes into his lectern- the only good source of heat was the sun. Thus his aggressive introduction of the orbiting mirrors, which had been growing yearly as sunsailers came out from Luna, where a very efficient production process made them from lunar aluminum. These fleets, Borazjani said, had grown large enough to have added some 5°K to the mean temperature.

The reduced albedo, an effort which had never been very vigorously pursued, had added some 2 degrees. The two hundred or so nuclear reactors scattered around the planet had added another 1.5 degrees.

Then Borazjani came to the cocktail of greenhouse gases; but instead of using the 12°K figure from Simmon#8217;s poster, he estimated it was 14°K, and cited a twenty-year-old paper by J. Watkins to support his assertion. Sax had spotted Berkina sitting in the back row near him, and now he sidled over and leaned down until his mouth was by Berkina#8217;s ear, and whispered, #8220;Why isn#8217;t he using Simmon#8217;s work?#8221;

Berkina grinned and whispered back, #8220;A few years ago Simmon published a paper in which he had taken a very complex figure of the UV-halocarbon interaction from Borazjani. He modified it slightly, and that first time he attributed it to Borazjani, but after that when he used it he only cited his own earlier paper. It#8217;s made Borazjani furious, and he thinks Simmon#8217;s papers on this subject are derivative of Watkins anyway, so whenever he talks about warming he goes back to the Watkins work, and pretends Simmon#8217;s stuff doesn#8217;t exist.#8221;

#8220;Ah,#8221; Sax said. He straightened up, smiling despite himself at Borazjani#8217;s subtle but telling little payback. And in fact Simmon was there across the room, frowning heavily.

By now Borazjani had moved on to the warming effects of the water vapor and CO₂ that had been released into the atmosphere, which he estimated together as adding another 10°K. #8220;Some of this might be called a synergistic effect,#8221; he said, #8220;as the desorption of CO₂ is mainly a result of other warming. But other than that I don#8217;t think we can say that synergy has been much of a factor. The sum of the warming created by all the individual methods matches pretty closely the temperatures reported by weather reports from around the planet.#8221;

The video screen displayed his final table, and Sax made a simplified copy of it into his lectern:

From Borazjani 2 February 14, 2102:

Halocarbons: 14

H₂O and CO₂: 10

Moholes: 5

Pre-Soletta Mirrors: 5

Reduced Albedo: 2

Nuclear Reactors: 1.5

Borazjani had not even included the windmill heaters, so on his lectern Sax did. Altogether it came to 37.55°K, a very respectable step, Sax thought, toward their goal of #8217;53°+. They had only been going at it for sixty years, and already most summer days were reaching temperatures above freezing, allowing arctic and alpine plant life to flourish, as he had seen in the Arena Glacier area. And all this before the introduction of the soletta, which was raising insolation by twenty percent.

The question period had begun, and someone brought up the soletta, asking Borazjani if he thought it was necessary, given the progress being made with the other methods.

Borazjani shrugged in just the way Sax would have. #8220;What does necessary mean?#8221; he replied. #8220;It depends how warm you want it. According to the standard model as initiated by Russell at Echus Overlook, it is important to keep CO₂ levels as low as possible. If we do this, then other warming methods are going to have to be applied to compensate for the loss of the heat that CO₂ would have contributed. The soletta might be thought of as compensating for the eventual reduction of CO₂ to breathable levels.#8221;

Sax was nodding despite himself.

Someone else rose and said, #8220;Don#8217;t you think the standard model is inadequate, given the amount of nitrogen we now know we have?#8221;

#8220;Not if all the nitrogen is put into the atmosphere.#8221;

But this was an unlikely achievement, as the questioner was quick to point out. A fair percentage of the total would remain in the ground, and in fact was needed there for plants. So they were short on nitrogen, as Sax had always known. And if they kept the amount of CO₂ in the air to the lowest levels possible, that left the percentage of oxygen in the air at a dangerously high level, because of its flammability. Another person rose to state that it was-possible that the lack of nitrogen could be compensated for by the release of other inert gases, chiefly argon. Sax pursed his lips; he had been introducing argon into the atmosphere since 2042, as he had seen this problem coming, and there were significant amounts of argon in the regolith. But they were not easy to free, as his engineers had found, and as other people were now pointing out. No, the balance of gases in the atmosphere was turning out to be a real problem.

A woman rose to note that a consortium of transnats coordinated by Armscor was building a continuous shuttle system to harvest nitrogen from the almost pure nitrogen atmosphere of Titan, liquefying it and flying it back to Mars and dumping it in the upper atmosphere. Sax squinted at this, and did some quick calculations on his lectern. His eyebrows shot up when he saw the result. It would take a very great number of shuttle trips to accomplish anything that way, that or else extremely large shuttles. It was remarkable that anyone had thought it worth the investment.

Now they were discussing the soletta again. It certainly had the capability of compensating for the 5 or 8°K that would be lost if they scrubbed the current amount of CO₂ from the air, and probably it would add even more heat than that; theoretically, Sax calculated on his lectern, it could add as much as 22°K. The scrubbing itself would not be easy, someone pointed out. A man standing near Sax, from a Subarashii lab, rose to announce that a demonstration talk on the soletta and the aerial lens would occur later in the conference, when some of these issues would be greatly clarified. He added before sitting down that serious flaws in the single-phase model made the creation of a two-phase model nearly mandatory.

People rolled their eyes at this, and Borazjani declared that the next meeting in the room needed to begin. No one had commented on his skillful modeling, which had sorted out so plausibly all the contributions of the various warming methods. But in a way this was a sign of respect-no one had challenged the model either, Borazjani#8217;s preeminence in this area being taken for granted. Now people stood, and some went up to talk with him; a thousand conversations broke out as the rest filed out of the room and into the halls.

Sax went to lunch with Berkina, in a cafe just outside the foot of Branch Mesa. Around them scientists from all over Mars ate and talked about the events of the morning. #8220;We think it#8217;s parts per billion.#8221; #8220;No, sulfates behave conservatively.#8221; It sounded like the people at the table next to theirs were assuming there was going to be a shift to a two-phase model. One woman said something about raising the mean temperature to 295°K, seven degrees higher than Terra#8217;s average.

Sax squinted at all these expressions of haste, of greed for heat. He saw no need to be dissatisfied with the progress that had been made so far. The ultimate goal of the project was not purely heat, after all, but a viable surface. The results so far certainly seemed to give no reason for complaint. The present atmosphere was averaging 160 millibars at the datum, and it was composed about equally of CO₂, oxygen, and nitrogen, with trace amounts of argon and other gases. This was not the mixture Sax wanted to see in the end, but it was the best they had been able to do given the inventory of volatiles they had to begin with. It represented a substantial step on the way to the final mix Sax had in mind. His recipe for this mix, following the early Fogg formulation, was as follows:

300 millibars nitrogen

160 millibars oxygen

30 millibars argon, helium, etc.

10 millibars CO₂ =

Total pressure at datum, 500 millibars

All these amounts had been fixed by physical requirements and limits of various kinds. The total pressure had to be high enough to drive oxygen into the blood, and 500 millibars was what was obtained on Earth at about the 4,000-meter elevation, near the upper limit of what people could live at permanently. Given that it was near the upper limit, it would be best if such a thin atmosphere had more than the Terran percentage of oxygen in it, but it could not be too much more or else fires might be hard to extinguish. Meanwhile CO₂ had to be kept below 10 millibars, or else it would be poisonous. As for nitrogen, the more the better, in fact 780 millibars would be ideal, but the total nitrogen inventory on Mars was now estimated at less than 400 millibars, so 300 millibars was as much as one could reasonably ask to put into the air, and perhaps more. Lack of nitrogen was in fact one of the biggest problems the terraforming effort faced; they needed more than they had, both in the air and in their soil.

Sax stared down at his plate and ate in silence, thinking hard about all these factors. The morning#8217;s discussions had given him cause to wonder whether he had made the right decisions back in 2042-whether the volatile inventory could justify his attempt to go straight for a human-viable surface in a single stage. Not that there was much that could be done about it now. And all things considered, he still thought they were the right decisions; shikata ga nai, really, if they wanted to walk freely on the surface of Mars in their own lifetimes. Even if their lifetimes were going to be considerably extended.

But there were people who seemed more concerned with high temperatures than breathability. Apparently they were confident that they could balloon the CO₂ level, heat things tremendously, and then reduce the CO₂ without problems. Sax was dubious about that; any two-phase operation was going to be messy, so messy that Sax couldn#8217;t help wondering if they would get stuck with the 20,000-year time scales predicted in the earliest two-phase models.

It made him blink to think of it. He couldn#8217;t see the need. Were people really willing to risk such a long-term problem? Could they be so impressed by the new gigantic technologies that were becoming available that they believed anything was possible?

#8220;How was the pastrami?#8221; Berkina asked.

#8220;The what?#8221;

#8220;The pastrami. That#8217;s the kind of sandwich you just ate, Stephen.#8221;

#8220;Oh! Fine, fine. It must have been fine.#8221;

The afternoon#8217;s sessions were mostly devoted to problems caused by the successes of the global warming campaign. As surface temperatures rose, and the underground biota began to penetrate deeper into the regolith, the permafrost down there was melting, just as hoped. But this was proving disastrous in certain permafrost-rich regions. One of these, unfortunately, was Isidis Planitia itself. A well-attended talk by an areologist from a Praxis lab in Burroughs described the situation; Isidis was one of the big old impact basins, about the size of Argyre, with its northern side completely erased, and its southern rim now part of the Great Escarpment. Underground ice had been creeping off the Escarpment and pooling in the basin for billions of years. Now the ice near the surface was melting, and in the winters freezing again. This thaw-freeze cycle was causing frost heaving on an unprecedented scale; it was pretty near the usual two-magnitude enlargement compared to similar phenomena on Earth, and karsts and pingos a hundred times the size of their Terran analogues were big holes, and big mounds. All over Isidis these giant new holes and hummocks were blistering the landscape, and after her talk and a sequence of mind-boggling slides, the areologist led a large group of interested scientists to the south end of Burroughs, past Moeris Lacus Mesa to the tent wall, where the neighborhood looked like it had been devastated by earthquake, the ground having heaved up to reveal a rising mass of ice like a bald round hill.

#8220;This is a fine specimen of a pingo,#8221; the areologist said with a proprietary air. #8220;The ice masses are relatively pure compared to the permafrost matrix, and they act in the matrix the same way rocks do-when the permafrost refreezes at night or in winter, it expands, and anything hard stuck in this expansion gets pushed upward toward the surface. There#8217;s a lot of pingos in Terran tundra, but none as big as this one.#8221; She led the group up the shattered concrete of what had been a flat street, and they stared out from an earthen crater rim, onto a mound of dirty white ice. #8220;We#8217;ve lanced it like a boil, and are melting it and piping it into the canals.#8221;

#8220;Out in the country one of these coming up would be like an oasis,#8221; Sax remarked to Jessica. #8220;It would melt in the summer, and hydrate the ground around it. We ought to develop a community of seeds and spores and rhizomes that we could scatter on any sites like this out in the country.#8221;

#8220;True,#8221; Jessica said. #8220;Although, to be realistic, the permafrost country is mostly going to end up under the Vastitas sea anyway.#8221;

#8220;Hmm.#8221;

The truth was Sax had temporarily forgotten the drilling and mining in Vastitas. When they had returned to the conference center, he deliberately looked for a talk describing an aspect of that work. There was one at four: #8220;Recent Advances in North Polar Lens Permafrost Pumping Procedures.#8221;

He watched the speaker#8217;s video show impassively. The lens of ice that extended underground from the northern polar cap was like the submerged part of an iceberg, containing some ten times as much water as the visible cap. The Vastitas permafrost contained even more. But getting that water to the surface #8230; like the retrieval of nitrogen from Titan#8217;s atmosphere, it was a project so massive that Sax had never even considered it in the early years; it simply hadn#8217;t been possible then. All these big projects-the so-letta, the nitrogen from Titan, the northern ocean drilling, the frequent arrival of ice asteroids-were on a scale that Sax found he was having trouble adjusting to. They were thinking big these days, the transnational. Certainly the new abilities in design and in materials science, and the emergence of fully self-replicating factories, were what made the projects technically feasible; but the initial financial investments were still huge.

As for the technical capabilities involved, he found himself adjusting to the idea of them fairly rapidly. It was an extension of what they had done in the old days: solve some initial problems in materials, design, and homeostatic control, and one#8217;s powers grew very considerable indeed. One might say that their reach no longer exceeded their grasp. Which, given the directions their reach sometimes took, was a frightening thought.

In any case, some fifty drilling platforms were now located in the northern Sixties, boring wells and inserting permafrost melting devices at their bottoms that ranged from heated collection galleries to nuclear explosives. The new meltwater was then being pumped up and distributed over the dunes of Vastitas Borealis, where it froze again. Eventually this ice sheet would melt, partly under its own weight, and they would have an ocean in the shape of a ring around the northern Sixties and Seventies, no doubt a very good thermal sink, as all oceans were, although while it remained an ice sea the increase in albedo would probably make it a net heat loss to the global system. Yet another example of their operations cutting against each other. As was the location of Burroughs itself, relative to this new sea; the city was well below the sea level most often mentioned, the datum itself. People talked of a dike, or a smaller sea, but no one knew for sure. It was all very interesting.

So Sax attended the conference every day, all day, living in the hushed rooms and halls of the conference center, chatting with colleagues, and the authors of posters, and his neighbors in audiences. More than once he had to pretend not to know old associates, and it made him nervous enough that he avoided them when he could. But people did not seem to feel that he reminded them of someone they knew, and for the most part he was able to concentrate on the science. He did that with gusto. People gave talks, asked questions, debated details of fact, discussed implications, all under the uniform fluorescent glow of the conference rooms, in the low hum of ventilators and video machines-as if they were in a world outside of time and space, in the imaginary space of pure science, surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit-a kind of Utopian community, cozy and bright and protected. For Sax, a scientific conference was Utopia.

The sessions at this conference, however, had a new tone, a kind of nervous edge that Sax had never witnessed before, and did not like. The questions after the presentations were more aggressive, the answers more quickly defensive. The pure play of scientific discourse which he so enjoyed (and which admittedly was never quite pure) was now more and more diluted by sheer argument, by obvious power struggles, motivated by something more than the usual egotism. It wasn#8217;t like Simmon#8217;s unconscionable lift from Borazjani, and Borazjani#8217;s exquisite riposte; it was more a matter of direct assault. As at the end of a presentation on deep moholes and the possibility of reaching the mantle, when a short bald Terran stood and said, #8220;I don#8217;t think the basic model of the lithosphere here is valid,#8221; and then walked out of the room.

Sax witnessed this in complete disbelief. #8220;What is his problem?#8221; he whispered to Claire.

She shook her head. #8220;He works for Subarashii on the aerial lens, and they don#8217;t like any potential competition for their regolith melting program.#8221;

#8220;My Lord.#8221;

The question-and-answer session staggered on, shaken by this display of rudeness, but Sax slipped out of the room and stared down the hall curiously after the Subarashii scientist. What could he be thinking?

But this miscreant wasn#8217;t the only one acting strange. People were stressed, nerves were on edge. Of course the stakes were high; as the pingo below Moeris Lacus showed in a small-scale way, there were going to be some bad side effects to the procedures being studied and advocated at the conference, side effects which would cost money, time, lives. And then there were financial motivations#8230;

And now that they were entering its final days, the programming was shifting from very specific issues to more general presentations and workshops, including some presentations in the main room on the big new projects, what people were calling the #8220;monster projects.#8221; These were going to have such major impacts that they affected almost everyone else#8217;s programs. So when they discussed them, they were arguing policy, in effect, talking about what to do next rather than about what had already happened. That always made things more of a wrangle-but never more so than now, as people began to try to plug the information from the earlier presentations into advocacy for their own causes, whatever they might be. They were entering that unfortunate zone where science began to drift into politics, where papers became grant proposals; and it was dismaying to see that degraded dark zone invade the heretofore neutral terrain of a conference.

Part of this, Sax reflected over a solitary lunch, was no doubt caused by the big-science nature of the monster projects. They were all so expensive and difficult that they had been contracted out to different transnational. This was a plausible strategy on the face of it, an obvious efficiency move, but unfortunately it meant that the different angles of attack on the terraforming problem now had interested parties defending them as the #8220;best#8221; methods, twisting data in order to defend their own ideas.

Praxis, for instance, was the leader along with Switzerland in the very extensive bioengineering effort, and so its representative theoreticians defended what they called the ecopoesis model, which claimed that no further influx of heat or volatiles was necessary at this point, and that biological processes alone, aided by a minimum of ecological engineering, would be sufficient to terraform the planet to the levels envisioned in the early Russell model. Sax thought they were probably correct in this judgment, given the arrival of the soletta, though he deemed their time scales optimistic. And he worked for Biotique, so possibly his judgment was skewed.

The scientists from Amscor, however, were adamant that the low nitrogen inventory would cripple any ecopoetic hopes. They insisted that continued industrial intervention was necessary; and of course it was Armscor that was building the Titan nitrogen transfer shuttles. People from Consolidated, in charge of the drilling in Vastitas, emphasized the vital importance of an active hydrosphere. And people from Subarashii, in charge of the new mirrors, touted the great power of the soletta and the aerial lens to pump heat and gases into the system, allowing everything else to accelerate. It was always quite obvious why people were advocating one program over another; you could look at people#8217;s name tags and see their institutional affiliation, and predict what they were going to support or attack. To see science twisted so blatantly pained Sax a great deal, and it seemed to him that it distressed everyone there, even the ones doing it, which added to the general irritability and defensiveness. Everyone knew what was going on, and no one liked it, and yet no one would admit it.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the last morning#8217;s panel discussion of the CO₂ question. This quickly became a defense of the soletta and the aerial lens, made very vehemently by the two Subarashii scientists on the panel. Sax sat at the back of the room and listened to their enthusiastic description of the big mirrors, feeling more and more tense and unhappy as they went on. He liked the soletta itself, which was no more than the logical extension of the mirrors he had been putting into orbit from the very beginning. But the low-flying aerial lens was clearly an extremely powerful instrument, and if wielded on the surface to anywhere near its full capacity, it would volatilize hundreds of millibars of gases into the atmosphere, much of it CO₂, which according to Sax#8217;s single-phase model they did not want, and which in any sensible course of action would stay bonded in the regolith. No, there were several hard questions that needed to be asked about the effects of this aerial lens, and the Subarashii people ought to be harshly censured for beginning the melting of the regolith without consulting anyone outside their UNTA rubberstamp committee about it. But Sax did not want to draw attention to himself, and so he could only sit there by Claire and Berkina with his lectern out, squirming in his seat and hoping that someone else would ask the hard questions for him.

And as they were obvious questions as well as hard, they did get asked; a scientist from Mitsubishi, which was in a perpetual hometown feud with Subarashii, stood and inquired very politely about the runaway greenhouse effect that might result from too much CO₂. Sax nodded emphatically. But the Subarashii scientists replied that this was exactly what they were hoping for, that there could not be too much heat, and that an eventual atmospheric pressure of seven or eight hundred millibars would be preferabk to five hundred anyway. #8220;But not if it#8217;s CO₂!#8221; Sax muttered to Claire, who nodded.

H. X. Borazjani stood to say the same. He was followed by others; many in the room were still using Sax#8217;s original model as their template for action, and they insisted in many different ways on the difficulty of scrubbing any great excess of CO₂ from the air. But there were also a good many scientists, from Armscor and Consolidated as well as Subarashii, who either claimed that scrubbing CO₂ would not be difficult, or else that a CO₂-heavy atmosphere would not be so bad. An ecosystem of mostly plants, with CO₂-tolerant insects and perhaps some genetically engineered animals, would flourish in the warm thick air, and people could walk around in their shirtsleeves with nothing more cumbersome than a facemask.

This set Sax#8217;s teeth on edge, and happily he was not the only one, so he could stay in his seat while others rose to their feet to challenge this fundamental shift in the goal of terraforming. The argument quickly became heated, even rancorous.

#8220;It#8217;s not a jungle planet we#8217;re after here!#8221;

#8220;You#8217;re making a hidden assumption that people can be genetically engineered to tolerate higher CO₂ levels, but it#8217;s ridiculous!#8221;

Very soon it became clear that they were accomplishing nothing.

No one was really listening, and everyone had their opinions, which were tightly aligned to their employers#8217; interests. It was unseemly, really. A mutual distaste for the tone of the debate caused all but the immediate participants to withdraw-around Sax people were folding programs, turning off lecterns, whispering to their companions, all while people were still standing and speaking #8230; bad form, no doubt about it. But it only took a moment#8217;s thought to realize that they were now arguing over policy decisions that were not going to be made at the level of working scientists anyway. No one liked that, and people actually began to get up and leave the room, right in the middle of the discussion. The overwhelmed panel moderator, an overpolite Japanese woman who was looking miserable, spoke over the rising voices, and suggested that they close the session. People trooped into the halls in little knots, some still talking heatedly to their allies, making their cases decisively now that they were only complaining to their friends.

Sax followed Claire and Jessica and the other Biotique people across the canal and into Hunt Mesa. They took the elevator up to the mesa plateau, and had lunch at Antonio#8217;s.

#8220;They#8217;re going to flood us with CO₂,#8221; Sax said, unable to hold his tongue any longer. #8220;I don#8217;t think they understand what a fundamental blow that will be to the standard model.#8221;

#8220;It#8217;s a different model entirely,#8221; Jessica said. #8220;A two-phase, heavy-industrial model.#8221;

#8220;But it will keep people and animals in tents more or less indefinitely,#8221; Sax said.

#8220;Maybe the transnat executives don#8217;t mind that,#8221; Jessica said.

#8220;Maybe they like it,#8221; Berkina said.

Sax made a face.

Claire said, #8220;It could just be that they#8217;ve got this soletta and lens, and they want to use them. Like playing with toys. It#8217;s so much like the magnifying glass you use to start fires with when you#8217;re ten. But this one is so powerful. They can#8217;t stand not to use it. And then calling the burn zones canals, you know#8230;#8221;

#8220;That is so stupid,#8221; Sax said sharply, and when the others stared at him in some surprise, he tried to lighten his tone: #8220;Well, it#8217;s just so silly, you know. It#8217;s such a kind of fuzzy romanticism. They won#8217;t be canals in the sense of usefully connecting one body of

water with another, and even if they tried to use them, the banks would be slag.#8221;

#8220;Glass, they#8217;re claiming,#8221; Claire said. #8220;And it#8217;s just the idea of canals, anyway.#8221;

#8220;But it#8217;s not a game we#8217;re playing here,#8221; Sax said. It was extremely hard to keep Stephen#8217;s sense of humor about it; for some reason it was really irritating to him, really distressing. Here they had started so well, sixty years of solid achievement-and now different people were hacking about with different ideas and different toys, arguing and working against each other, bringing ever more powerful and expensive methods to bear, but with ever less coordination. They were going to ruin his plan!

The afternoon#8217;s closing sessions were perfunctory, and did nothing to restore his faith in the conference as disinterested science. That evening, back in his room, he watched the environmental news on vid more closely than ever, searching for answers to questions he hadn#8217;t quite formulated. Cliffs were falling. Rocks of all sizes were being shoved out of the permafrost by the thaw-freeze cycle, the rocks arranging themselves into characteristic polygonal patterns. Rock glaciers were forming in ravines and chutes, the rocks pried free by ice and then sliding down gorges in masses that behaved much like ice glaciers. Pingos were blistering the northern lowlands, except of course where the frozen seas were pouring out of the drilling platforms, inundating the land.

It was change on a massive scale, becoming apparent everywhere now, and accelerating every year as the summers got warmer, and the submartian biota grew deeper-while everything still froze solid every winter, and froze a little bit almost every summer night. Such an intense freeze-thaw cycle would tear any landscape apart, and the Martian landscape was particularly susceptible to it, having been stalled in a cold arid stasis for millions of years. Mass wasting was causing many landslides a day, and fatalities and unexplained disappearances were not at all uncommon. Cross-country travel was dangerous. Canyons and fresh craters were no longer safe places to locate a town, or even to spend a night.

Sax stood and walked to the window of his room, looked down at the lights of the city. All of this was as Ann had predicted to him, long ago. No doubt she was noting reports of all the changes with disgust, she and all the rest of the Reds. For them every collapse was a sign that things were going wrong rather than right. In the past Sax would have shrugged them off; mass wasting exposed frozen soil to the sun, warming it and revealing potential nitrate sources and the like. Now, with the conference fresh in his mind, he was not so sure.

On the vid no one seemed to be worrying about it. There were no Reds on vid. The collapse of landforms were considered no more than an opportunity, not only for terraforming, which seemed to be considered the exclusive business of the transnats, but for mining. Sax watched a news account of a freshly revealed vein of gold ore with a sinking feeling. It was strange how many people seemed to feel the lure of prospecting. That was Mars as the twenty-second century began; with the elevator returned they were back to the old gold rush mentality, it seemed, as if it really were a manifest destiny, out on the frontier with great tools wielded left and right: cosmic engineers, mining and building. And the terraforming that had been his work, the sole focus of his life, in fact, for sixty years and more, seemed to be turning into something else#8230;

Insomnia began to plague Sax. He had never suffered the phenomenon before, and found it quite uncomfortable. He would wake, roll over, gears in his mind would catch, and everthing would start whirring. When it was clear he was not going to fall back asleep he would get up, and turn on the AI screen and watch video programs, even the news, which he had never watched before. He saw symptoms of some kind of sociological dysfunction on Earth. It did not appear, for instance, that they had even attempted to adjust their societies to the impact of the population rise caused by the gerontological treatments. That should have been elementary-birth control, quotas, sterilization, the lot-but most countries hadn#8217;t done any of that. Indeed it appeared that a permanent underclass of the untreated was developing, especially in the highly populated poor countries. Statistics were hard to come by now that the UN was moribund, but one World Court study claimed that seventy percent of the population of the developed nations had gotten the treatment, while only twenty percent had in the poor countries. If that trend held for long, Sax thought, it would lead to a kind of physicalization of class-a late emergence or retroactive unveiling of Marx#8217;s bleak vision-only more extreme than Marx, because now class distinctions would be exhibited as an actual physiological difference caused by a bimodal distribution, something almost akin to speciation…

This divergence between rich and poor was obviously dangerous, but it seemed to be taken on Earth as something of a given, as if it were part of nature. Why couldn#8217;t they see the danger?

He no longer understood Earth, if he ever had. He sat there shivering through the dregs of his insomniac nights, too tired to read or to work; he could only call up one Terran news program after another, trying to understand better what was happening down there. He would have to if he wanted to understand Mars, for the transnational#8217; Martian behavior was being driven by Terran ultimate causes. He needed to understand. But the news vids seemed beyond rational comprehension. Down there, even more dramatically than on Mars, there was no plan.

He needed a science of history, but unfortunately there was no such thing. History is Lamarckian, Arkady used to say, a notion that was ominously suggestive given the pseudospeciation caused by the unequal distribution of the gerontological treatments; but it was no real help. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, they were all suspect. The scientific method could not be applied to human beings in any way that yielded useful Information. It was the fact-value problem stated in a different way; human reality could only be explained in terms of values. And values were very resistant to scientific analysis: Isolation of factors for study, falsifiable hypotheses, repeatable experiments-the entire apparatus as practiced in lab physics simply could not be brought to bear. Values drove history, which was whole, nonrepeatable, and contingent. It might be characterized as Lamarckian, or as a chaotic system, but even those were guesses, because what factors were they talking about, what aspects might be acquired by learning and passed on, or cycling in some nonrepetitive but patterned way?

No one could say.

He began to think again about the discipline of natural history which had so captivated him on Arena Glacier. It used scientific methods to study the natural world#8217;s history, and in many ways that history was just as problematic a methodological problem.as human history, being likewise nonrepeatable and resistant to experiment. And with human consciousness out of the picture, natural history was often fairly successful, even if it was based mostly on observation and hypothesis that could be tested only by further observation. It was a real science; it had discovered, there among the contingency and disorder, some valid general principles of evolution-development, adaptation, complexification, and many more specific pri#8217;nciples as well, confirmed by the various subdis-ciplines.

What he needed were similar principles influencing human history. The little reading he did in historiography was not encouraging; it was either a sad imitation of the scientific method, or art pure and simple. About every decade a new historical explanation revised all that had come before, but clearly revisionism held pleasures that had nothing to do with the actual justice of the case being made. Sociobiology and bioethics were more promising, but they tended to explain things best when working on evolutionary time scales, and he wanted something for the past hundred years, and the next hundred. Or even the past fifty and the next five.

Night after night he woke, failed to fall back asleep, got up, sat at the screen and puzzled over these matters, too tired to think well. And as these night watches kept happening, he found himself returning more and more to shows about 2061. There were any number of video compilations on the events of that year, and some of them were not shy about naming it: World War Three! was the title of the longest series, some sixty hours#8217; worth of video from that year, poorly edited and sequenced.

One only had to watch the series for a while to realize that the title was not entirely sensationalist. Wars had raged all over Terra in that fateful year, and the analysts reluctant to call it the Third World War seemed to think that it simply hadn#8217;t gone on long enough to qualify. Or that it hadn#8217;t been the contest of two great global alliances, but was much more confused and complex: different sources would claim it was north against south, or young against old, or UN against nations, or nations against transnationals, or transnationals against flags of convenience, or armies against police, or police against citizens-so that it began to seem every kind of conflict at once. For a matter of six or eight months the world had descended into chaos. In the course of his wanderings through #8220;political science#8221; Sax had stumbled across a pseudo-scientific chart by a Herman Kahn, called an #8220;Escalation Ladder,#8221; which attempted to categorize conflicts according to their nature and severity. There were forty-four steps in Kahn#8217;s ladder, going from the first, Ostensible Crisis, up gradually through categories like Political and Diplomatic Gestures, Solemn and Formal Declarations, and Significant Mobilization, then more steeply through steps like Show of Force, Harassing Acts of Violence, Dramatic Military Confrontations, Large Conventional War, and then off into the unexplored zones of Barely Nuclear War, Exemplary Attacks Against Property, Civilian Devastation Attack, and right on up to number forty-four, Spasm or Insensate War. It was certainly an interesting attempt at taxonomy and logical sequence, and although there were obviously elements of fetishization in the excessive detail, Sax could see that the categories had been abstracted from many wars of the past. And by the definitions of the table, 2061 had shot right up the ladder to number forty-four.

In that maelstrom, Mars had been no more than one spectacular war among fifty. Very few general programs about #8216;61 devoted more than a few minutes to it, and these merely collected clips Sax had seen at the time: the frozen guards at Korolyov, the broken domes, the fall of the elevator, and then that of Phobos. Attempts at analysis of the Martian situation were shallow at best; Mars had been an exotic sideshow, with some good vid, but nothing else to distinguish it from the general morass. No. One sleepless dawn it came to him; if he wanted to understand 2061, he was going to have to piece it together himself, from the primary sources of the videotapes, from all the bouncing shots of enraged crowds torching cities, and the occasional press conferences with desperate, frustrated leaders.

Even getting these in chronological order was no easy task. And indeed this became (in his Echus style) his only interest for a few weeks, as slotting events into a chronology was the first step in piecing together what had happened-which had to precede figuring out why.

Over the weeks he began to get a sense of it. Certainly the common wisdom was correct; the emergence of the transnationals in the 2040s had set the stage, and was the ultimate cause of the war. In that decade, while Sax had been devoting every bit of his attention to terraforming Mars, a new Terran order had come into being, shaped as the thousands of multinational corporations began to coalesce into the scores of colossal transnationals. Something like planetary formation, he thought one night, planetesimals becoming planets.

It was not entirely a new order, however. The multinationals had mostly originated in the wealthy industrial nations, and so in certain senses the transnationals were expressions of these nations-extensions of their power into the rest of the world, in a way that reminded Sax of what little he knew of the imperial and colonial systems that had preceded them. Frank had said something like that: colonialism had never died, he used to declare, it just changed names and hired local cops. We#8217;re all colonies of the transnats.

This was Frank#8217;s cynicism, Sax decided (wishing that he had that hard bitter mind on hand to instruct him), because all colonies were not equal. It was true that transnats were so powerful that they had rendered national governments little more than toothless servants. And no transnat had shown any particular loyalty to any given government, or the UN. But they were children of the West- children who no longer cared for their parents, yet still supported them. For the record showed that the industrial nations had prospered under the transnats, while the developing nations had had no recourse but to fight each other for flag-of-convenience status. And thus in 2060 when the transnats had come under fire from desperate poor countries, it had been the Group of Seven and its military might that had come to their defense.

But the proximate cause? Night after night he sifted through vid of the 2040s and ‘50s, looking for traces of patterns. Eventually he decided that it was the longevity treatment which had pushed things over the edge. Through the 2050s the treatment had spread through the rich countries, illustrating the gross economic inequality in the world like a color stain in a microscope sample. And as the treatment spread, the situation had gotten increasingly tense, rising steadily up the steps of Kahn#8217;s ladder of crises.

The immediate cause of the explosion of #8216;61, strangely enough, appeared to be a squabble concerning the Martian space elevator. The elevator had been operated by Praxis, but after it had started operations, in February of 2061 to be precise, it had been taken over by Subarashii, in a clearly hostile takeover. Subarashii at that time was a conglomeration of most of the Japanese corporations that had not folded into Mitsubishi, and it was a rising power, very aggressive and ambitious. Upon acquisition of the elevator-a takeover approved by UNOMA-Subarashii had immediately increased the emigration quotas, causing the situation on Mars to go critical. At the same time on Earth, Subarashii#8217;s competitors had objected to what was effectively an economic conquest of Mars, and though Praxis had confined its objections to legal action at the hapless UN, one of Subarashii#8217;s flags of convenience, Malaysia, had been attacked by Singapore, which was a base for Shellalco. By April of 2061 much of south Asia was at war. Most of the fights were long-standing conflicts, such as Cambodia versus Vietnam, or Pakistan versus India; but some were attacks on Subarashii flags, as in Burma and Bangladesh. Events in the region had shot up the escalation ladder with deadly speed as old enmities joined the new transnat conflicts, and by June wars had spread all over Terra, and then to Mars. By October fifty million people had died, and another fifty million were to die in the aftermath, as many basic services had been interrupted or destroyed, and a newly released malaria v ctor remained without an effective prevention or cure.

That seemed enough to qualify it as a world war to Sax, brevity nonwithstanding. It had been, he concluded, a deadly synergistic combination of fights among the transnats, and revolutions by a wide array of disenfranchised groups against the transnat order. But the chaotic violence had convinced the transnats to resolve their disputes, or at least table them, and all the revolutions had failed, especially after the militaries of the Group of Seven intervened to rescue the transnats from dismemberment in their flags of convenience. All the giant military-industrial nations had ended up on the same side, which had helped to make it a very short world war compared to the first two. Short, but terrible-about as many people had died in 2061. as in the first two world wars together.

Mars had been a minor campaign in this Third World War, a campaign in which certain of the transnats had overreacted to a flamboyant but disorganized revolt. When it was over, Mars had been seized firmly in the grip of the major transnationals, with the blessing of the Group of Seven and the transnats#8217; other clients. And Terra had staggered on, a hundred million people fewer.

But nothing else had changed. None of its problems had been addressed. So it all might happen again. It was perfectly possible. One might even say that it was likely.

Sax continued to sleep poorly. And though he spent his days in the ordinary routines of work and habit, it seemed that he saw things differently than he had before the conference. Another proof, he supposed glumly, of the notion of vision as a paradigm construct. But now it was so obvious the transnationals were everywhere. In terms of authority, there was hardly anything else. Burroughs was a transnat town, and from what Phyllis had said, Sheffield was too. There were none of the national scientific teams that had proliferated in the years before the treaty conference; and with the First Hundred dead or in hiding, the whole tradition of Mars as a research station was extinct. What science there was was devoted to the terraforming project, and he had seen what kind of science that was becoming. No, the research was applied only, these days.

And there were very few other signs of the old nation-states, now that he looked. The news gave the impression that they were mostly bankrupt, even the Group of Seven; and the transnats were holding the debts, if anybody was. Some reports made Sax think that in a sense the transnats were even taking on smaller countries as a kind of capital asset, in a new business/government arrangement that went far beyond the old flag-of-convenience contracts.

An example of this new arrangement in a slightly different form was Mars itself, which seemed effectively in the possession of the big transnats. And now that the elevator was back, the export of metals and the import of people and goods had vastly accelerated. Terran stock markets were ballooning hysterically to mark the action, with no end in sight, despite the fact that Mars could only provide Terra with certain metals in certain quantities. So the stock market rise was probably some kind of bubble phenomenon, and if it burst it might very well be enough to bring everything down again. Or perhaps not; economics was a bizarre field, and there were senses in which the whole stock market was simply too unreal to have impacts beyond itself. But who knew till it happened? Sax, wandering the streets of Burroughs looking at the stock market displays in the office windows, certainly didn#8217;t claim to. People were not rational systems.

This profound truth was reinforced when Desmond showed up one evening at his door. The famous Coyote himself, the stowaway, Big Man#8217;s little bro, standing there small and slight in a brightly colored construction worker#8217;s jumper, diagonal slashes of aquamarine and royal blue leading the eye down to lime-green walker boots. Many construction workers in Burroughs (and there were a lot of them) wore the new light and flexible walker boots all the time as a kind of fashion statement, and all were brightly colored, but very few achieved the stunning quality of Desmond#8217;s fluorescent greens.

He grinned his cracked grin as Sax stared at them. #8220;Yes, so beautiful aren#8217;t they? And very distracting.#8221;

Which was just as well, as his dreadlocks were stuffed into a voluminous red, yellow, and green beret, an unusual sight,anywhere on Mars. #8220;Come on, let#8217;s go out for a drink.#8221;

He led Sax down to a cheap canalside bar, built into the side of a massive emptied pingo. The construction crowd here was tightly packed around long tables, and sounded mostly Australian. At the canalside itself a particularly rowdy group were throwing ice shot-puts the size of cannonballs out into the canal, and very occasionally thumping one down on the grass of the far bank, which caused cheers and often a round of nitrous oxide for the house. Strollers on the far bank were giving that part of the canalside a wide berth.

Desmond got them four shots of tequila and one nitrous inhaler. #8220;Pretty soon we#8217;ll have agave cactus growing on the surface, eh?#8221;

#8220;I think you could do it now.#8221;

They sat at the end of one table, with their elbows bumping and Desmond talking into Sax#8217;s ear as they drank. He had a whole wish list of things he wanted Sax to steal from Biotique. Seed stocks, spores, rhizomes, certain growth media, certain hard-to-synthesize chemicals#8230; #8220;Hiroko says to tell you she really needs all of it, but especially the seeds.#8221;

#8220;Can#8217;t she breed those herself? I don#8217;t like taking things.#8221;

#8220;Life is a dangerous game,#8221; Desmond said, toasting the thought with a big whiff of nitrous, followed by a shot of tequila. #8220;Ahhhhhhhhh,#8221; he said.

#8220;It#8217;s not the danger,#8221; Sax said. #8220;I just don#8217;t like doing it. I work with those people.#8221;

Desmond shrugged and did not answer. It occurred to Sax that these scruples might strike Desmond, who had spent most of the twenty-first century living by theft, as a bit overfine.

#8220;You won#8217;t be taking it from those people,#8221; Desmond said at last. #8220;You#8217;ll be taking it from the transnat that owns Biotique.#8221;

#8220;But that#8217;s a Swiss collective, and Praxis,#8221; Sax said. #8220;And Praxis doesn#8217;t look so bad. It#8217;s a very loose egalitarian system, it reminds me of Hiroko#8217;s, actually.#8221;

#8220;Except that they#8217;re part of a global system that has a fairly small oligarchy running the world. You have to remember the context.#8221;

#8220;Oh believe me, I do,#8221; Sax, said, remembering his sleepless nights. #8220;But you have to make distinctions as well.#8221;

#8220;Yes, yes. And one distinction is that Hiroko needs these materials and cannot make them, given the necessity to hide from the police hired by your wonderful transnational.#8221;

Sax blinked disgruntledly.

#8220;Besides, theft of materials is one of the few resistance actions left to us these days. Hiroko has agreed with Maya that obvious sabotage is simply an announcement of the underground#8217;s existence, and an invitation for reprisal and a shutdown of the demimonde. Better simply to disappear for a while, she says, and make them think that we never existed in any great numbers.#8221;

#8220;It#8217;s a good idea,#8221; Sax said. #8220;But I#8217;m surprised you#8217;re doing what Hiroko says.#8221;

#8220;Very funny,#8221; Desmond said with a grimace. #8220;Anyway, I think it#8217;s a good idea too.#8221;

#8220;You do?#8221;

#8220;No. But she talked me into it. It may be for the best. Anyway there#8217;s still a lot of materials to be obtained.#8221;

#8220;Won#8217;t theft itself tip off the police that we#8217;re still out there?#8221;

#8220;No way. It#8217;s so widespread that what we do can#8217;t be noticed against the background levels. There#8217;s a whole lot of inside jobs.#8221;

#8220;Like me.#8221;

#8220;Yes, but you#8217;re not doing it for money, are you.#8221;

#8220;I still don#8217;t like it.#8221;

Desmond laughed, revealing his stone eyetooth, and the odd asymmetricality of his jaw and his whole lower face. #8220;It#8217;s hostage syndrome. You work with them and you get to know them, and have a sympathy for them. You have to remember what they#8217;re doing here. Come on, finish that cactus and I#8217;ll show you some things you haven#8217;t seen, right here in Burroughs.#8221;

There was a commotion, as an ice shot had hit the other bank and rolled up the grass and bowled over an old man. People were cheering and lifting the woman who had made the throw onto their shoulders, but the group with the old man was charging down to the nearest bridge. #8220;This place is getting too noisy,#8221; Desmond said. #8220;Come on, drink that and let#8217;s go.#8221;

Sax knocked back the liquor while Desmond popped the last of the inhaler. Then they left quickly to avoid the developing brouhaha, walking up the canalside path. A half hour#8217;s walk took them past the rows of Bareiss columns and up into Princess Park, where they turned right and walked up the steep wide grassy incline of Thoth Boulevard. Beyond Table Mountain they turned left down a narrower swath of streetgrass, and came to the westernmost part of the tent wall, extending in a big arc around Black Syrtis Mesa. #8220;Look, they#8217;re getting back to the old coffin quarters for workers again,#8221; Desmond pointed out. #8220;That#8217;s Subarashii#8217;s standard housing now, but see how these units are set into the mesa. Black Syrtis contained a plutonium processing plant in the early days of Burroughs, when it was well out of town. But now Subarashii has built workers#8217; quarters right next to it, and their jobs are to oversee the processing and the removal of the waste, north to Nili Fossae, where some integral fast reactors will use it. The cleanup operation used to be almost completely robotic, but the robots are hard to keep on-line. They#8217;ve found it#8217;s cheaper to use people for a lot of the jobs.#8221;

#8220;But the radiation,#8221; Sax said, blinking.

#8220;Yes,#8221; Desmond said with his savage grin. #8220;They take on forty rem a year.#8221;

#8220;You#8217;re kidding!#8221;

#8220;I am not kidding. They tell the workers this, and give them hardship pay, and after three years they get a bonus, which is the treatment.#8221;

#8220;Is it withheld from them otherwise?#8221;

#8220;It#8217;s expensive, Sax. And there are waiting lists. This is a way to skip up the list, and cover the costs.#8221;

#8220;But forty rems! There#8217;s no way to be sure the treatment will repair the damage that could do!#8221;

#8220;We know that,#8221; Desmond said with a scowl. There was no need to refer to Simon. #8220;But they don#8217;t.#8221;

#8220;And Subarashii is doing this just to cut costs?#8221;

#8220;That#8217;s important in such a large capital investment, Sax. All kinds of cost-cutting measures are showing up. The sewage systems in Black Syrtis are all the same system, for instance-the med clinic and the coffins and the plants in the mesa.#8221;

#8220;You#8217;re kidding.#8221;

#8220;I am not kidding. My jokes are funnier than that.#8221;

Sax waved him off.

#8220;Look,#8221; Desmond said, #8220;there are no regulatory agencies anymore. No building codes or whatever. That is what the transnational success in sixty-one really means-they make their own rules now. And you know what their one rule is.#8221;

#8220;But this is simply stupid.#8221;

#8220;Well, you know, this particular division of Subarashii is run by Georgians, and they#8217;re in the grip of a big Stalin revival there. It#8217;s a patriotic gesture to run their country as stupidly as possible. That means business too. And of course the top managers of Subarashii are still Japanese, and they believe Japan became great by being tough. They say they won in sixty-one what they lost in World War Two. They#8217;re the most brutal transnat up here, but all the rest are imitating them to compete successfully. Praxis is an anomaly in that sense, you must remember that.#8221;

#8220;So we reward them by stealing from them.#8221;

#8220;You#8217;re the one who went to work for Biotique. Maybe you should change jobs.#8221;

#8220;No.#8221;

#8220;Do you think you can get these materials from one of Subarashii#8217;s firms?#8221;

#8220;No.#8221;

#8220;But you could from Biotique.#8221;

#8220;Probably. Security is pretty tight.#8221;

#8220;But you could do it.#8221;

#8220;Probably.#8221; Sax thought about it. #8220;I want something in return.#8221;

#8220;Yes?#8221;

#8220;Will you fly me out to have a look at this soletta burn zone?#8221;

#8220;Certainly! I would like to see it again myself.#8221;

So the next afternoon they left Burroughs and trained south up the Great Escarpment, getting off at Libya Station, some seventy kilometers from Burroughs. There they slipped into the basement and their closet door, down their tunnel and out into the rocky countryside. Down in a shallow graben they found one of Desmond#8217;s cars, and when night came they drove east along the Escarpment to a small Red hideout in the rim of Du Martheray Crater, next to a stretch of flat bedrock the Reds used as an airstrip. Desmond did not identify Sax to their hosts. They were led into a little cliffside hangar, where they got into one of Spencer#8217;s old stealth planes and taxied out to the bedrock, then took off in an undulant acceleration down the runway. Once in the air they flew east slowly through the night.

They flew in silence for a while. Sax saw lights on the dark surface of the planet only three times: once a station in Escalante Crater, once the tiny moving line of lights of a round-the-world train, and the last an unidentified blink in the rough land behind the Great Escarpment. #8220;Who do you think that is?#8221; Sax asked.

#8220;No idea.#8221;

After a few minutes more Sax said, #8220;I ran into Phyllis.#8221;

#8220;Really! Did she recognize you?#8221;

#8220;No.#8221;

Desmond laughed. #8220;That#8217;s Phyllis for you.#8221;

#8220;A lot of old acquaintances haven#8217;t recognized me.#8221;

#8220;Yeah, but Phyllis #8230; Is she still president of the Transitional Authority?#8221;

#8220;No. She didn#8217;t seem to think it was a powerful post, anyway.#8221;

Desmond laughed again. #8220;A silly woman. But she did get that group on Clarke back to civilization, I#8217;ll give her that. I thought they were goners, myself.#8221;

#8220;Do you know much about that?#8221;

#8220;I talked with two of the people who were on it, yeah. One night in Burroughs at the Pingo Bar, in fact. You couldn#8217;t get them to shut up about it.#8221;

#8220;Did anything happen near the end of their flight?#8221;

#8220;The end? Well, yeah-someone died. I guess some woman got a hand crushed when they were evacuating Clarke, and Phyllis was the closest thing they had to a doctor, so Phyllis took care of her through the whole trip, and thought she was going to make it, but I guess they ran out of something, the two telling me the story weren#8217;t too clear on it, and she took a turn for the worse. Phyllis called a prayer meeting for her and prayed for her, but she died anyway, a couple of days before they came into the Terran system.#8221;

#8220;Ah,#8221; Sax said. Then: #8220;Phyllis doesn#8217;t seem all that #8230; religious anymore.#8221;

Desmond snorted. #8220;She was never religious, if you ask me. Hers was the religion of business. You visit real Christians like the folks down in Christianopolis, or Bingen, and you don#8217;t find them talking profits at breakfast, and lording it over you with that horrible unctuous righteousness they have. Righteousness, good Lord-it is      I a most unpleasant quality in a person. You know it has to be a house built on sand, eh? But the demimonde Christians are not      i like that. They#8217;re gnostics, Quakers, Baptists, Baha#8217;i Rastafarians, whatever-the most agreeable people in the underground if you ask me, and I#8217;ve traded with everybody. So helpful. And no airs about being best friends with Jesus. They#8217;re tight with Hiroko, and the Sufis as well. Some kind of mystic networking going on down there.#8221; He cackled. #8220;But Phyllis, now, and all those business fundamentalists-using religion to cover extortion, I hate that. Actually I never heard Phyllis speak in a religious manner after we landed. #8220;

#8220;Did you have much opportunity to hear Phyllis speak after we landed?#8221;

Another laugh. #8220;More than you might think! I saw more than you did in those years, Mister Lab Man! I had my little hidey-holes everywhere.#8221;

Sax made a skeptical noise, and Desmond shouted a laugh and slapped him on the shoulder. #8220;Who else could tell you that you and Hiroko were an item in the Underbill years, eh?#8221;

#8220;Hmm.#8221;

#8220;Oh yes, I saw a lot. Of course you could make that particular observation about practically any man in Underbill and be right. That vixen was keeping us all as a harem.#8221;

#8220;Polyandry?#8221;

#8220;Two-timing, goddammit! Or twenty-timing.#8221;

#8220;Hmm.#8221;

Desmond laughed at him.

Just after dawn they caught sight of a white column of smoke, obscuring the stars over a whole quadrant of the sky. For a while this dense cloud was the only anomaly they could see in the landscape. Then, as they flew on and the terminator of the planet rolled under them, a broad swath of bright ground appeared on the east-em horizon ahead-an orange strip, or trough, running roughly northeast to southwest across the land, obscured by smoke that poured out of one section of it. The trough under the smoke was white and turbulent, as if a small volcanic eruption were confined to that one spot. Above it stood a beam of light-a beam of illuminated smoke, rather, so tight and solid that it was like a physical pillar, extending straight up and becoming less distinct as the cloud smoke thinned, and disappearing where the smoke reached its maximum height of around ten thousand meters.

At first there was no sign of the origin of this beam in the sky- the aerial lens was some four hundred kilometers overhead, after all. Then Sax thought he saw something like the ghost of a cloud, soaring very far above. Maybe that was it, maybe it wasn#8217;t. Desmond wasn#8217;t sure.

At the foot of the pillar of light, however, there was no question of visibility-the pillar of light had a kind of biblical presence, and the melted rock under it was truly incandescent, a very brilliant white. That was what 5000°K looked like, exposed to the open air. #8220;We have to be careful,#8221; Desmond said. #8220;We fly into that beam and it would be like a moth in a flame.#8221;

#8220;I#8217;m sure the smoke is very turbulent as well.#8221;

#8220;Yes. I plan to stay windward of it.#8221;

Down where the pillar of lit smoke met the orange channel, new smoke was spewing out in violent billows, weirdly lit from underneath. To the north of the white spot, where the rock had had a chance to cool, the melted channel reminded Sax of film of the eruptions of the Hawaiian volcanoes. Bright yellow-orange waves surged north in the channel of fluid rock, occasionally meeting resistances and splashing up onto the dark banks of the molten channel. The channel was about two kilometers wide, and ran over the horizon in both directions; they could see perhaps two hundred kilometers of it. South of the pillar of light, the channel bed was almost covered with cooling black rock, webbed by dark orange cracks. The straightness of the channel, and the pillar of light itself, were the only obvious signs that it was not some kind of natural lava channel; but these signs were more than enough. Besides, there hadn#8217;t been any volcanic activity on the surface of Mars for many thousands of years.

Desmond closed on the sight, then banked their plane sharply and headed north. #8220;The beam from the aerial lens is moving south, so up the line we should be able to fly closer.#8221;

For many kilometers the channel of melted rock ran northeast without changing. Then as they got farther away from the current burn zone, the orange of the lava darkened and began to cake over from the sides with a black surface, broken by more orange cracks. Beyond that the channel surface was black, as were the banks on each side of it; a straight swath of pure black, running over the rust-colored highlands of Hesperia.

Desmond banked and turned south again, and flew closer to the channel. He was a rough pilot, shoving the light plane around ruthlessly. When the orange cracks reappeared, a thermal updraft bucked the plane hard, and he slid to the west a little. The light of the molten rock itself illuminated the banks of the channel, which appeared to be smoking lines of hills, very black. #8220;I thought they were supposed to be glass,#8221; Sax said.

#8220;Obsidian. Actually I#8217;ve seen some different colors. Swirls of various minerals in the glass.#8221;

#8220;How far does this bum extend?#8221;

#8220;They#8217;re cutting from Cerberus to Hellas, running just west of Tyrrhena and Hadriaca volcanoes.#8221;

Sax whistled.

#8220;They say it will be a canal between the Hellas Sea and the northern ocean.#8221;

#8220;Yes, yes. But they#8217;re volatilizing carbonates much too fast.#8221;

#8220;Thickens the atmosphere, right?#8221;

#8220;Yes, but with CO₂! They#8217;re wrecking the plan! -We won#8217;t be able to breathe the atmosphere for years! We#8217;ll be stuck in the cities.#8221;

#8220;Maybe they think they#8217;ll be able to scrub the CO₂ out when things are warmed up.#8221; Desmond glanced at him. #8220;Have you seen enough?#8221;

#8220;More than enough.#8221;

Desmond laughed his unsettling laugh, and banked the plane sharply. They began to chase the terminator to the west, flying low over the long shadows of the dawn terrain.

#8220;Think about it, Sax. For a while people are forced to stay in the cities, which is convenient if you want to keep control of things. You burn cuts with this flying magnifying glass, and fairly quickly you have your one-bar atmosphere, and your warm wet planet. Then you have some method for scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide-they must have something in mind, industrial or biological or both. Something they can sell, no doubt. And presto, you have another Earth, and very quickly. It might be expensive-#8221;

#8220;It#8217;s definitely expensive! All these big projects must be setting the transnationals back by huge amounts, and they#8217;re doing it even though we#8217;re a good step on the way to two-seventy-three K. I don#8217;t get it.#8221;

#8220;Maybe they feel two-seventy-three is too modest. An average of freezing is a bit chilly, after all. Kind of a Sax Russell vision of terraforming, you might call that. Practical, but#8230;#8221; He cackled. #8220;Or maybe they#8217;re feeling rushed. Earth is in a mess, Sax.#8221;

#8220;I know that,#8221; Sax said sharply. #8220;I#8217;ve been studying it.#8221;

#8220;Good for you! No, really. So you kntiw that the people who haven#8217;t got the treatment are getting desperate-they#8217;re getting older, and their chances of ever getting it seem to be getting worse. And the people who have gotten the treatment, especially the ones at the top, are looking around trying to figure out what to do. Sixty-one taught them what can happen if things get out of control. So they#8217;re buying up countries like bad mangoes at the end of market day. But it doesn#8217;t seem to be helping. And here right next door they see a fresh empty planet, not quite ready for occupation, but close. Full of potential. It could be a new world. Beyond the reach of the untreated billions.#8221;

Sax thought it over. #8220;A kind of bolt-hole, you mean. To escape to if there#8217;s trouble.#8221;

#8220;Exactly. I think there are people in these transnationals who want Mars terraformed just as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.#8221;

#8220;Ah,#8221; Sax said. And was silent all the way back.

Desmond accompanied him back into Burroughs, and as they walked from South Station to Hunt Mesa, they could see across the treetops of Canal Park, through the slot between Branch Mesa and Table Mountain to Black Syrtis. #8220;Are they really doing things as stupid as that all over Mars?#8221; Sax said.

Desmond nodded. #8220;I will bring you a list next time.#8221;

#8220;Do that.#8221; Sax shook his head as he pondered it. #8220;It doesn#8217;t make sense. It doesn#8217;t take into account the long run.#8221;

#8220;They are short-run thinkers.#8221;

#8220;But they#8217;re going to live a long time! Presumably they#8217;ll still be in charge when these policies collapse on them!#8221;

#8220;They may not see it that way. They change jobs a lot up at the top. They try to establish a reputation by building a company very quickly, then get hired upward somewhere else, then try to do it again. It#8217;s musical chairs up there.#8221;

#8220;It won#8217;t matter what chair they#8217;re in, it#8217;s the whole room that#8217;s going to come down! They aren#8217;t paying attention to the laws of physics!#8221;

#8220;Of course not! Haven#8217;t you noticed that before, Sax?#8221;

#8220;#8230; I guess not.#8221;

Of course he had seen that human affairs were irrational and unexplainable. This no one could miss. But he realized now that he had been making the assumption that the people who involved themselves in governance were making a good-faith effort to run things in a rational manner, with a view to the long-term well-being of humanity and its biophysical support system. Desmond laughed at him as he tried to express this, and irritably he exclaimed, #8220;But why else take on such compromised work, if not to that end?#8221;

#8220;Power,#8221; Desmond said. #8220;Power and gain.#8221;

#8220;Ah.#8221;

Sax had always been so uninterested in those things that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one#8217;s options, and reduce one#8217;s freedom. One became a servant of one#8217;s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one#8217;s time protecting it. So that properly seen, the freedom of a scientist with a lab at his command was the highest freedom possible. Any more wealth and power only interfered with that.

Desmond was shaking his head as Sax described this philosophy. #8220;Some people like to tell others what to do. They like that more than freedom. Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it#8217;s high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It#8217;s safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.#8221;

Sax shook his head. #8220;I think it#8217;s simply an inability to understand the concept of diminishing returns. As if there can never be too much of a good thing. It#8217;s very unrealistic. I mean, there is no process in nature that is a constant irrespective of quantity!#8221;

#8220;Speed of light.#8221;

#8220;Bah., Irrelevant. Physical reality is clearly not a factor in these calculations.#8221;

#8220;Well put.#8221;

Sax shook his head, frustrated. #8220;Religion again. Or ideology. What was it Frank used to say? An imaginary relationship to a real situation?#8221; . #8220;There was a man who loved power.#8221;

#8220;True.#8221;

#8220;But he was very imaginative.#8221;

They stopped at Sax#8217;s apartment and changed clothes, then-went up to the top of the mesa, to get breakfast at Antonio#8217;s. Sax was still thinking about their discussion. #8220;The problem is that people with a hypertrophied regard for wealth and power achieve positions that give them these gifts in excess, and then they find that they#8217;re as much slaves to them as masters. And then they become dissatisfied and bitter.#8221;

#8220;Like Frank, you mean.#8221;

#8220;Yes. So the powerful almost always seem to have a dysfunctional aspect to them. Everything from cynicism to full-blown de-structiveness. They#8217;re not happy.#8221;

#8220;But they are powerful.#8221;

#8220;Yes. And thus our problem. Human affairs#8221;-Sax paused to eat one of the rolls just brought to their table; he was famished- #8220;you know, they ought to be run according to principles of systems ecology.#8221;

Desmond laughed out loud, hastily grabbing up a napkin to clean off his chin. He laughed so hard that people at other tables looked over at them, worrying Sax somewhat. #8220;What a concept!#8221; he cried, and started to laugh again. #8220;Ah ha ha! Oh, my Saxifrage! Scientific management, eh?#8221;

#8220;Well, why not?#8221; Sax said mulishly. #8220;I mean, the principles governing the behavior of the dominant species in a stable ecosystem are fairly straightforward, as I recall. I#8217;ll bet a council of ecol-ogists could construct a program that would result in a stable benign society!#8221;

#8220;If only you ran the world!#8221; Desmond cried, and started laughing again. He put his face right down on the table and howled.

#8220;Not just me.#8221;

#8220;No, I am joking.#8221; He composed himself. #8220;You know Vlad and Marina have been working on their eco-economics for years now. They have even had me using it in the trade between the underground colonies.#8221;

#8220;I didn#8217;t know that,#8221; Sax said, surprised.

Desmond shook his head. #8220;You have to pay more attention, Sax. In the south we have lived by eco-economics for years now.#8221;

#8220;I#8217;ll have to look into that.#8221;

#8220;Yes.#8221; Desmond grinned widely, on the verge of cracking up yet again. #8220;You have a lot to learn.#8221;

Their orders arrived, with a carafe of orange juice, and Desmond poured their glasses full. He clinked his glass against Sax#8217;s, offered a toast: #8220;Welcome to the revolution!#8221;

Desmond left for the South, having extracted a promise that Sax would pilfer what he could from Biotique for Hiroko. #8220;I#8217;ve got to go meet Nirgal.#8221; He gave Sax a hug and was gone.

A month or so passed, during which Sax thought about all he had learned from Desmond and the videos, sifting through it slowly, getting more and more disturbed as he did. His sleep was still broken nearly every night by hours of wakefulness.

Then one morning after one of these restless, fruitless bouts of insomnia, Sax got a call on his wristpad. It was Phyllis, in town for meetings, and she wanted to get together for dinner.

Sax agreed, with his surprise and Stephen#8217;s enthusiasm. He met her that evening, at Antonio#8217;s. They kissed in the European style, and were led to one of the corner tables, overlooking the city. There they ate a meal that Sax scarcely noticed, talking inconsequentially about the latest events in Sheffield and Biotique.

After cheesecake they lingered over brandies. Sax was in no hurry to leave, as he was not sure what Phyllis had in mind for afterward. She had given no clear sign, and she seemed in no hurry either.

Now she leaned back in her chair, and regarded him cheerfully. #8220;It really is you, isn#8217;t it.#8221;

Sax tilted his head to indicate his incomprehension.

Phyllis laughed. #8220;It#8217;s hard to believe, really. You were never like this in the old days, Sax Russell. I wouldn#8217;t have guessed in a hundred years that you would be such a lover.#8221;

Sax squinted uncomfortably and looked around. #8220;I would hope that says more about you than me,#8221; he said with Stephen#8217;s insouciance. The nearby tables were all empty, and the waiters were leaving them alone. The restaurant would close in a half hour or so.

Phyllis laughed again, but her eyes had a hard look to them, and suddenly Sax saw that she was angry. Embarrassed, no doubt, at being fooled by a man she had known for some eighty years. And angry that he had decided to fool her. And why not? It showed a very fundamental lack of trust, after all, especially from someone who was sleeping with you. The bad faith of his behavior at Arena was coming back to him with a vengeance, making him quite queasy. But what to do about it?

He recalled that moment in the elevator when she had kissed him, when he had been similarly nonplussed. Taken aback first by her nonrecognition, and now by her recognition. It had a certain symmetry. And both times he had gone along with it.

#8220;Don#8217;t you have anything more to say?#8221; Phyllis demanded.

He spread his hands. #8220;What makes you think this?#8221;

Again she laughed angrily, then regarded him with lips tight. #8220;It#8217;s so easy to see it now,#8221; she said. #8220;They just gave you a nose and a chin, I suppose. But the eyes are the same, and the head shape. It#8217;s funny what you remember and what you forget.#8221;

#8220;That#8217;s true.#8221;

Actually it was not a matter of forgetting, but of being unable to recollect. Sax suspected the memories were still there, in storage.

#8220;I can#8217;t really remember your old face,#8221; Phyllis said. #8220;To me you were always in a lab with your nose pressing a screen. You might as well have worn a white lab coat, that#8217;s the way I see you in my memories. A kind of giant lab rat.#8221; Now her eyes were glittering. #8220;But somewhere along the line you managed to learn to imitate ! human behavior pretty well, didn#8217;t you? Well enough to fool an old friend who liked the way you looked.#8221;

#8220;We are not old friends.#8221;

#8220;No,#8221; she snapped. #8220;I guess we#8217;re not. You and your old tried to kill me. And they did kill thousands of other people, and destroyed most of this planet. And obviously they#8217;re still out there, or else you wouldn#8217;t be here, would you. In fact they must be pretty widespread, because when I ran a DNA check on your sperm, the official TA records had you as Stephen Lindholm. That put me off the trail for a while. But there was something about you that made me wonder. When we fell in that crevasse. That did it #8212; it reminded me of something that happened when we were in Antarctica. You and Tatiana Durova and I were up on Nussbaum Riegel when Ta-tiana tripped and sprained her ankle, and it got windy and late and they had to helicopter us back down to the base, and while we were waiting, you found some kind of rock lichen #8230;#8221;

Sax shook his head, truly surprised. #8220;I don#8217;t remember that.#8221; And he didn#8217;t. The year of training and evaluation in Antarctica#8217;s dry valleys had been intense, but now the entire year was a dim blur to him, and that incident would not come back at all; it was hard to believe it had happened. He couldn#8217;t even remember what poor Tatiana Durova had looked like.

Absorbed in his thoughts, and in a concerted push for his memories of that year, he missed a bit of what Phyllis was saying, but then he caught #8220;#8230; checked again with one of my old copies of my AFs memory, and there you were.#8221;

#8220;Your AI#8217;s memory units may be degrading,#8221; he said absently. #8220;They#8217;re finding that the circuitry tends to get scrambled by cosmic radiation if it isn#8217;t reinforced from time to time.#8221;

She ignored that weak sally. #8220;The point is, people who can change Transitional Authority records like that are still worth watching out for. I#8217;m afraid I can#8217;t just let this pass. Even if I wanted to.#8221;

#8220;What do you mean?#8221;

#8220;I#8217;m not sure. It depends what you do. You could just tell me where you were hiding, and who with, and what#8217;s going on. You just showed up at Biotique a year ago, after all. Where were you before that?#8221;

#8220;On Earth.#8221;

Her smile had a bad twist to it. #8220;If that#8217;s the course you take, I#8217;ll be forced to ask for help from some of my associates. There are security people in Kasei Vallis who will be able to refresh your memory.#8221;

#8220;Come on.#8221;

#8220;I don#8217;t mean that metaphorically. They won#8217;t beat the information out of you or anything like that. It#8217;s more a matter of extraction. They put you under, stimulate the hippocampus and the amygdala, and ask questions. People simply answer.#8221;

Sax considered this. The mechanisms of memory were still very poorly understood, but no doubt something crude could be applied to the areas they knew were involved. Fast MRI, point-specific ultrasound, who knew what. It would surely be dangerous, however#8230;

#8220;Well?#8221; Phyllis said.

He stared at her smile, so angry and triumphant. A sneer. Random thoughts nickered through his mind, images without words: Desmond, Hiroko, the kids in Zygote shouting Why, Sax, why? He had to hold his face steady to keep it from revealing his dislike for her, suddenly pouring through him in a wave. Perhaps this.sort of distaste was what people called hatred.

After a time he cleared his throat. #8220;I suppose I#8217;d rather just tell you.#8221;

She nodded firmly, as if this was the decision she would have made herself. She looked around: the whole restaurant was empty now, the waiters sitting at one table, nursing glasses of grappa. #8220;Come on,#8221; she said, #8220;let#8217;s go to my offices.#8221;

Sax nodded and rose stiffly. His right leg had gone asleep. He limped after her. They said good-night to the mobilizing waiters and left.

They got into the elevator, and Phyllis punched the button for the subway level. The door closed and they dropped. In an elevator again; Sax took a deep breath, then jerked his head down as if to look at something unusual on the control panel. Phyllis followed his gaze and with a jerky motion he slugged her on the side of the jaw. She crashed into the side of the elevator and collapsed in a heap, dazed and breathing in gasps. The two middle knuckles of his right hand hurt horribly. He hit the button for the floor two above the subway, which had a long passageway through Hunt Mesa, lined with shops that would be closed at this hour. He grabbed Phyllis by the armpits and hauled her up; she was taller than him, loose and heavy, and when the elevator door opened, he prepared himself to shout for help. But no one stood outside the door, and he pulled one of her arms over his neck and dragged her over to one of the little carts that sat by the elevator for the convenience of people who wanted to cross the mesa quickly, or with a load. He dumped her onto the backseat and she groaned, sounding as if she was coming to. He sat down ahead of her in the driver#8217;s seat and stomped the accelerator pedal to the floor, and the little vehicle hummed down the hallway. He found he was breathing hard, and sweating.

He passed a pair of rest rooms, and stopped the cart. Phyllis rolled helplessly off the seat and onto the floor, moaning louder than ever. Soon she would regain consciousness, if she hadn#8217;t already. He got out and ran over to see if the men#8217;s room was unlocked. It was, so he ran to the cart and pulled Phyllis up by the shoulders, up and over his back. He staggered under her weight until he reached the men#8217;s room door, then flopped her down; her head cracked against the concrete floor, and her moaning stopped. He opened the door and pulled her through it, then closed and locked it.

He sat on the bathroom floor beside her, gasping. She was still breathing, and her pulse was shallow but steady. She seemed okay, but knocked out even more definitively than when he had hit her. Her skin was pale and damp, and her mouth hung open. He felt sorry for her, until he remembered her threat to give him to security technicians, to tear his secrets out of him. Their methods were advanced, but still it was torture. And if they had succeeded they would know about the refuges in the south, and all the rest. Once they had a general idea of what he knew, they could coax the specifics out of him; it wouldn#8217;t be possible to resist their combinations of drugs and behavior modification.

And even now Phyllis knew too much. The fact that he had such a good false ID implied a whole infrastructure that up until now had been hidden. Once they knew of its existence, they could probably ferret it out. Hiroko, Desmond, Spencer who was deep in the system in Kasei Vallis, all exposed #8230; Nirgal and Jackie, Peter, Ann #8230; all of them. Because he had not been clever enough to avoid a stupid awful woman like Phyllis.

He looked around the men#8217;s room. It was the size of two toilet stalls, one stall with a toilet, the other with a sink, a mirror, and the usual wall of dispensers: sterility pills, recreational gases. He stared at these, catching his breath and thinking things over. As plans tumbled in his mind he whispered instructions to the AI in his wristpad. Desmond had given him some very destructive viral programs, and he plugged his wristpad into Phyllis#8217;s, and waited for the transfers to take place. With luck he could crash her entire system: personal security measures were nothing against Desmond#8217;s military-based viruses, or so Desmond claimed.

But there was still Phyllis. The recreational gases in the wall dispenser were mostly nitrous oxide, in individual inhalers containing about two or three cubic meters of gas. The room was, he judged, about thirty-five or forty cubic meters. The ventilation grill was next to the ceiling, and could be blocked with a strip of the towel, on its roll by the sink.

He stuck money cards in the dispenser and bought all the recreational gases in it: twenty little pocket-sized bottles, with nose-and-mouth masks. And nitrous oxide would be slightly heavier than Burroughs air.

He took the little scissors out of the key compartment on his wristpad, and cut a sheet out of the continuous roll of towel. He climbed onto the toilet tank and covered the ventilation grill, stuffing the sheet into the slits. There were still gaps, but they were small. He climbed back down and went over to the door. There was a gap at the bottom of the door, almost a centimeter tall. He cut some more strips from the towel. Phyllis was snoring. He went to the door, opened it, kicked the gas bottles out and stepped out after them. He took one last look at Phyllis, prone on the floor, and then closed the door. He stuffed the towel strips under the door, leaving only a small opening at one comer. Then, after glancing up and down the hall, he sat down and took a bottle and shaped the flexible mask to the hole he had left, and shot the contents of the bottle into the men#8217;s room. He did that twenty times, stuffing the empty bottles in his pockets until they were full, and then making a little satchel for the remainder out of the last strip of towel. He got up and clanked over to the cart and sat down in the driver#8217;s seat. He stepped on the accelerator and the cart jerked forward, in a movement the opposite of the sudden stop that had thrown Phyllis off the back-seat and onto the floor. That would have hurt.

He stopped the cart. He got out and ran back to the men#8217;s room, clinking and clanking. He jerked open the door, walked in holding his breath, and grabbed Phyllis#8217;s ankles and hauled her out into the air. She was still breathing, and had a little smile on her face. Sax resisted the impulse to kick her, and ran back to the cart.

He drove to the other side of Hunt Mesa at full speed, and then took the elevator there down to the subway level. He got on the next subway train, and waited out the trip across town to South Station. He observed that his hands were trembling, and the two big knuckles on his right hand were swollen and turning blue. They hurt a good deal.

At the station he bought a ticket south, but when he gave the ticket and his ID to the ticket-taker at the track entrance, the man#8217;s eyes went round and he and his associates actually pulled their pistols to make the arrest, calling out nervously for help from people in another room. Apparently Phyllis had come to faster than his calculations had led him to expect.