The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson
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vehement: “I don’t need John for that now, I only need him for how I feel about him, but now we don’t agree on anything and we’re not very much alike, and Frank who has been so careful to hold back no matter what, we agree about almost everything and I’ve been so enthusiastic about that part that I’ve given him the wrong signal again, so he did it again, yesterday in the pool he – he held me, you know, took my arms in his hands—” she crossed her arms and clasped her biceps in her hands, “ — and asked me to leave John for him, which I would never do, and he was shaking, and I said I couldn’t but I was shaking too.” So later she had been on edge, and had started a fight with John, started it so flagrantly that he had gotten truly angry and had left and taken a rover out to Nadia’s arcade, and spent the night there with the construction team; and Frank had come to talk to her again, and when she had (just barely) put him off, Frank had declared he was going to live with the European settlement on the other side of the planet; he who was the colony’s driving force! “And he’ll really do it, he’s not one to threaten. He’s been learning German the way he does, languages are nothing to Frank.”
Michel tried to concentrate on what she was saying. It was difficult, because he knew full well that in a week everything would be different, all the dynamics in that little trio altered beyond recognition. So it was hard to care. What about his troubles? They went much, much deeper; but no one ever listened to him. He walked back and forth in front of the window, reassuring her with the usual questions and comments. The greenery in the atrium was refreshing; it could have been a courtyard in Aries or Villefranche; or suddenly it reminded him of Avignon’s narrow cypress-arched plaza near the Pope’s palace, the plaza and its cafe tables which in the summer just after sunset had just the color of Mars. Taste of olive and red wine …
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said. Standard part of therapy hour. They crossed the atrium and went to the kitchens so Michel could eat a breakfast which he forgot even as he swallowed. We should call eating forgetting, he thought as they walked around the hall to the locks. They put on suits – Maya entering a change room to get her unders on – then checked them and went in the lock and depressurized it and then opened the big outer door and stepped outside.
The diamond chill. For a while they stayed on the sidewalks circling Underhill, taking a tour of the dump and its great salt pyramids. “Do you think they’ll ever find a use for all this salt?” he said.
“Sax is still working on it.”
From time to time Maya went on talking about John and Frank. Michel asked the questions that a shrink program would have asked, Maya answered in the way a Maya program would have answered. Their voices right in each other’s ears, the intimacy of the intercom.
They came to the lichen farm, and Michel stopped to gaze over the trays, to soak in their intense living color. Black snow algae, and then thick mats of otoo lichen, in which the algae symbiote was a blue-green strain that Vlad had just gotten to grow alone; red lichen, which seemed not to be doing well. Superfluous in any case. Yellow lichen, olive lichen, a lichen that looked exactly like battleship paint. Flaky white and lime green lichen – living green! It pulsed in the eye, a rich and improbable desert flower. He had heard Hiroko, looking down at such a growth, say “This is viriditas,” which was Latin for “greening power”. The word had been coined by a Christian mystic of the middle ages, a woman named Hildegard. Viriditas, now adapting to conditions here, and spreading slowly over the lowlands of the northern hemisphere. In the southern summers it did even better; one day it had reached 285° Kelvin, a record high by 12°. The world was changing, Maya remarked as they walked by the flats. “Yes,” Michel said, and could not help adding, “only three hundred years before we reach livable temperatures.”
Maya laughed. She was feeling better. Soon she would be back on a level, or at least crossing through that zone on the way to euphoria. Maya was labile. Stability-lability was the most recent characteristic Michel had been studying in the first hundred; Maya represented the labile extreme.
“Let’s drive out and see the arcade,” she said. Michel agreed, wondering what might happen if they ran into John. They went to the parking lot and checked out a roadrunner. Michel drove the little jeep and listened to Maya talk. Did conversation change when voices were divorced from bodies, planted right in the ears of the listeners by helmet mikes? It was as if one were always on the phone, even when sitting next to the person you were talking to. Or – was this better or worse? – as if you were engaged in telepathy.
The cement road was smooth, and he drove at the road-runner’s top speed of 60 kph. He could just feel the rush of thin air against his faceplate. All that CO2 that Sax so wanted to scrub from the atmosphere. Sax would need powerful scrubbers, even more powerful than the lichens; he needed forests, enormous multi-layered halophylic rainforests, trapping enormous loads of carbon in wood, leaves, mulch, peat. He needed peat bogs a hundred meters deep, rain forests a hundred meters tall. He had said as much. It marked Ann’s face just to hear the sound of his voice.
Fifteen minutes’ drive and they came to Nadia’s arcade. The site was still under construction and looked raw and messy, like Underhill in the beginning but on a larger scale. A long mound of burgundy rubble had been excavated from the trench, which ran east and west like Big Man’s grave.
They stood at one end of the great trench. Thirty meters deep, thirty wide, a kilometer long. The south side of the trench was now a wall of glass; the north side of the trench was covered with arrays of filtering mirrors, alternating with wall-mesocosms, Mars jars or terrariums, all of them together a colorful mix, like a tapestry of past and future. Most of the terrariums were filled with spruce trees and other flora that made it resemble the great world-wrapping Terran forest of the sixtieth latitude. Like Nadia Cherneshevsky’s old home in Siberia, in other words. Was this perhaps a sign that she had a touch of his disease? And could he prevail on her to build a Mediterranean?
Nadia was up working on a bulldozer. A woman with her own kind of viriditas. She stopped and came over to talk briefly with them. The project was coming along, she told them calmly. Amazing what one could do with the robot vehicles that were still being sent up from Earth. The concourse was done, and planted with a variety of trees, including a strain of dwarf sequoia already thirty meters tall, nearly as tall as the whole arcade. The three stacked rows of Underhill-style vaulted chambers behind the concourse were installed, their insulation in place. The settlement had just the other day been sealed and heated and pressurized, so that it was possible to work inside it without suits. The three floors were stacked on each other in ever smaller arches, reminding Michel of the Pont du Gard; of course all the architecture here was Roman in origin, so that should not be a surprise. The arches were wider, however, and slighter. Airier in the tolerance of the g.
Nadia went back to work. Such a calm person. Stabile, the very opposite of labile. Low-keyed, private, inward. Couldn’t be less like her old friend Maya; it was good for Maya to be around her. Opposite end of the scale, keep her from flying away. Set an example for her. As in this encounter, where Maya was matching Nadia’s calm tone. And when Nadia went back to work, Maya retained some of that serenity. “I’ll miss Underhill when we move out here,” she said. “Won’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” Michel said. “This will be a lot sunnier.” All three floors of the new habitat would open onto the tall concourse, and have terraced broad balconies on the sunny side of the rooms, so that even though the whole structure faced north and was buried deeper than Underhill, the heliotropic filtered mirrors on the other side of the trench would pour light onto them from dawn to dusk. “I’ll be happy to move. We’ve needed the space from the beginning.”
“But we won’t get all this space to ourselves. There’ll be new people here.”
“Yes. But that will give us space of a different kind.”
She looked thoughtful. “Like John and Frank leaving.”
“Yes. But even that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” In a larger society, he told her, the claustrophobic village atmosphere of Underhill would begin to dissipate; this would give a better perspective on certain aspects of things. Michel hesitated before continuing, unsure how to say it. Subtlety was dangerous