Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson
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Earth.
Firebrand legal representatives for the dvas had even demanded of the UN that their clients actually “own” the land they worked, not just receive lifelong leases. A Volga German lawyer named Rotlein had played on public sympathies—everyone admired the dva bravery, especially after learning of the horrors that had befallen the adin phase. Why not throw the dvas a bone? The dvas would probably not live long in such a harsh environment anyway. …
For a time, the dva project appeared to be a complete success. Over the years, the dvas had received enormous, robotically piloted shipments containing the modules for Lowell Base and the four other human bases scattered across the surface of Mars. Before the first unmodified humans arrived to stay, the dvas completed all the prep work, like servants sent ahead to prepare the master’s room. Three years after the last dva landing, Rachel and fifty others arrived at Lowell Base to prepare for the “Grand Opening” of a terraformed Mars.
But, when a project was as large as an entire planet, the work never ended. Pchanskii’s team of dvas had been searching for subterranean water in Noctis Labyrinthus. But Pchanskii had been a surgeon on Earth, not a geologist or a construction engineer. He had not understood what he was doing when he blasted the fragile rocks.
When Lowell Base received no progress reports from them for several days, and with a large seasonal dust storm approaching, Rachel had dispatched a search team. She herself had rushed out on the rescue mission, as others watched the green-and-pink skies thicken with approaching waves of dust. Rachel had stared at the fallen rocks, the sheared-off cliffs, and the fine dust that refused to settle, whipped back into the air by precursor gusts of wind.
As much as a week could have gone by since the collapse; little wonder they found no survivors, no sign at all.
With grim irony, Pchanskii’s avalanche had exposed a rich vein of water ice that looked like a steaming white gash on the rock. It created a thick, temporary fog in the canyons as the ice sublimed in the thin air. …
The weather satellites politely advised everyone to take shelter at the base and ride out the storm. The rescue team, unable to recover dva bodies or precious equipment from under tons and tons of rock, was forced back to the base. Later, after the abrasion from the month-long storm, there had been little point in even looking.
Pchanskii’s group had been swallowed up by the tumbling walls of rock, but Rachel was left to face the avalanche of recriminations, and “I-told-you-so”s, and the sadly shaking heads. She had endured it, barely flinching, with no more than a tic in the right eye and a grim twitch at the corner of her wide mouth.
She could no longer deny that the entire dva project, her brainchild, was at an end, with only a few messy loose ends to tie up: 150 dvas still toiling on the surface of Mars, while spacesuited humans plowed ahead with their own work. In a few more decades, neither surgical augmentations nor environmental suits would be necessary to survive in the cold, brittle atmosphere. The remaining dvas were obsolete, the program a dead end, and they would live out their lives on Mars with no hope of returning to Earth.
Now, Rachel’s decade as commissioner seemed like such a grand folly. She stared at the motionless rubble in the canyon and listened to the whispers of wind and the burbling of her air-regeneration system.
In the first launch opportunity from Earth after the dva disaster, the UN Space Agency had dispatched a new commissioner along with a dozen more mission members assigned to Lowell Base. Jesús Keefer, her replacement, would arrive tomorrow. The Mars transfer vehicle was already in orbit. She craned her neck, looked through her polarized faceplate up into the frigid sky that sometimes showed a few bright stars even during daytime when the dust or the algae clouds weren’t too thick; but she saw no sign of the orbiter.
She stayed at Noctis Labyrinthus for a few useless and depressing hours. Finally, leaving the wreckage behind with the wreckage of her dvas’ future, Rachel returned to the rover, brushing the clinging dust from her thermal suit.
She should get back to the base and put her things in order.
THE MARS TRANSPORT SLID into high orbit as if with an exhausted sigh after the long marathon across interplanetary space. Then, in a leisurely manner over the next two days, the captain damped velocity to shrink and circularize the orbit in preparation for deploying the lander to the surface of Mars.
During the final weeks of the slow approach, Jesús Keefer ran thin fingers through his neat, dark hair and watched the planet’s disk grow larger. Though the ground-based sensors indicated phenomenal improvement in the Martian environment, sixty years of aggressive terraforming had left little to be seen from this high up. It seemed disappointing, belittling the extensive efforts of mankind. But then, Mars was a big place.
Finally, Keefer distinguished a tinge of green through the on-board telescopes, a smear of murkiness in one of the deep canyons, which he insisted on showing to Tam Smith, the young agronomist, and Chetwynd, and Ogawa, and Shen, and any of the other passengers bound for Lowell Base. Everyone quickly learned to avoid him when his enthusiasm began to get out of control.
The terraforming process was working, by God, and it shored up his faith in the slow, long-term project. He cracked his knuckles and grinned like a kid in the small lounge. So much more exhilarating to see the awakening planet with his own eyes, rather than just viewing status reports and videobursts from the five UN bases on the surface.
Inside the cramped-but-tolerable craft that had been their home for four months, Keefer felt the tug of shifting forces as another short engine burn diverted the craft into parking orbit. Captain Rubens announced over the intercom that orbital insertion was successful. The Mars-bound people in the lounge cheered.
Though the view had changed little over the past few days, suddenly everybody hurried to the lounge viewport. Ogawa and Shen, Chetwynd, and Tam each took turns to gawk, silently jockeying to keep Commissioner Keefer last in line, since he had already spent more than his share of time at the observation scopes.
Keefer simply sat back in his webbed relaxation seat with an inward smile, feeling at peace.
Mars. At last.
He had been only twenty-eight when he had begun working with the United Nations Space Agency on the terraforming efforts. He had served with the ground support staff on Earth, watching the first manned landing in many years. The small multinational team of explorers had collected geological samples, taken data on how much hydrated water in the rocks was boiling out and how much permafrost was thawing and oozing into the soil to chart the progress of the terraforming efforts, already several decades under way. The mission specialists had endlessly imaged sun-exposed outcroppings and sheltered crannies, cataloging which species of the robotically introduced simple plants were gaining a foothold. The astronauts had returned to Earth to a genuine ticker-tape parade, leaving Mars to continue its slow and inexorable progress toward paradise.
Only four years after that, Dr. Dycek and her team from the Sovereign Republics had thrown everything into confusion with the surprise landing on Mars of the adins—monstrously altered human beings—long before any humans were expected to live on Mars. …
Tam Smith moved away from the viewport and gestured for him to look, her wispy blond hair crackling around her head with static electricity. “You’re not fooling anybody with that bored act, Keef,” she said with a smile. “Go ahead, take a look.”
“Caught me,” he answered and launched himself out of the web chair. At the viewport he peered down through a wispy veil of thickening atmosphere, the faint milkiness of high cirrus clouds smeared out near the poles. The bloody-ochre surface carried a flush of olive color, the first heartbeats of new life. He realized he was grinning with glassy-eyed delight, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Ogawa and Shen were chuckling at him and whispering to each other.
What other project could be so grand? Keefer asked himself. This sculpting