Moving Mars (32 page)

I laughed. No, I said.

Good. I dont think Ilya would get along with a banker. Hed always be asking for research money. She smiled sunnily, her deep warm eyes crinkling almost shut, and pulled a loop of flowers from a bag Ilya carried. She spread her large, strong arms wide and said, You are always welcome. You have such a lovely name, and Ilya is a good judge. He is like my son, except that we are not too far apart in agefive years, you know!

We ate a huge dinner in the syndics quarters that evening, joined by twenty family members, and I met Ti Sandras husband, Paul Crossley, a quiet, thoughtful man ten years older than Ti Sandra. Paul stood no taller than Ilya. Ti Sandra towered over her husband, but only in size. They flirted like newlyweds.

The gatherings lively informality charmed me. They chatted in Spanish, French, Creole, Russian, Tagalog, Hawaiian, and for my benefit, English. Their curiosity about me was boundless.

Why dont you speak Hindi? Kiqui Jordan-Erzul asked.

I never learned, I said. My family speaks English

All of them?

Some of the older members speak other languages. My mother and father spoke only English when I was young.

English is a cramped language. You should speak Creole. All music.

Not much good for science, Ilya said. Russians best for science.

Kiqui snorted. Another digger, Oleg Schovinski, said he thought German might be best for science.

German! Kiqui snorted again. Good for metaphysics. Not the best for science.

What kind of tea do you brew in Ylla? asked Kiquis wife, Therese.

Ti Sandra was much loved in Erzul. Young and old looked on her as matriarch, even though she was less than twenty Martian years old. After dinner, she carried a huge bowl of fresh fruit around the table, offering everybody dessert, then stood before the group. All right now, all of you put down your beers and listen.

Lawbond! Lawbond! several chanted.

You be quiet. You have no manners. I am pleased to bring you a friend of Ilyas. Youve talked with her, impressed her with our savoir-faire, and shes impressed me, and Im very pleased to say that she is going to marry our little digger-after-useless-things.

Ilyas face reddened with embarrassment.

Ti Sandra held up her hands above the raucous cheering. Shes from Majumdar but she isnt a banker, so you be good to her and dont ask for more loans.

More cheers.

Her name is Casseia. Stand up, Cassie. I stood and it was my turn to blush. The cheers nearly brought down the insulation.

Kiqui toasted our health and asked if I was interested in fossils.

I love them, I said, and that was true; I loved them because of their connection to Ilya.

Thats good, because Ilyas the only man I know who gets depressed when he hasnt dug for a week, Kiqui said. Hes my kind of assistant.

She hasnt decided what arrangements to make, but well be happy either way, Ti Sandra said.

Weve decided, actually, Ilya said.

What? the crowd asked as one.

Ive offered to transfer to Majumdar, Ilya said.

Very good, Ti Sandra said, but her expression betrayed her.

But Casseia tells me shes ready for a change. Shes transferring to Erzul.

If youll have me, I added.

More cheers. Ti Sandra embraced me again. A hug from her was like being folded in the arms of a large, soft tree with a core of iron. Another daughter, she said. Thats lovely!

They crowded around Ilya and me, offering congratulations. Aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, all offered bits of advice and stories about Ilya. Ilyas face got redder and redder as the stories piled one on top of another. Please! he protested. We havent signed any papers yet Dont scare her off!

After dessert, we squatted in a circle around a large rotating table and sampled a variety of drinks and liqueurs. They drank more than any Martians I had met, yet kept their dignity and intelligence at all times.

Ti Sandra took me aside toward the end of the evening, saying she wanted to show me her prize tropical garden. The garden was beautiful, but she did not spend much time with the tour.

I know a little about you, Casseia. What Ive heard impressed the hell out of me. We may not look it, but were an ambitious little family, you know that?

Ilyas given me some hints.

Some of us have been studying the Charter and thinking things through. Youve had a lot of experience in politics

Not that much. Government and management from the point of view of one BM.

Yes, but youve been to Earth. We have a unique opportunity in this BM. Nobody hates us. We go everywhere, meet everybody, were friendly A lot of trust. We think we might have something to offer Mars.

Im sure you do, I said.

Shall we talk more later? Her eyes twinkled, but her face was stern, an expression I would come to know very well in the months ahead. Ti Sandra had bigger plansand more talentsthan I could possibly have imagined then.

Ilya and I honeymooned at Cyane Sulci, a few hundred kilometers east of Lycus Sulci. For transportation, we used Professor Jordan-ErzuFs portable lab, a ten-meter-long cylinder that rolled on seven huge spring-steel tires. The interior was cramped and dusty, with two pull-down cots, rudimentary nano kitchen producing pasty recycled food, sponge-baths only. The air smelled of sizzle and flopsand and we sneezed all the time. I have never been happier or more at ease in my life.

We followed no schedule. I spent dozens of hours in a pressure suit, accompanying my husband across the lava ridges to deep gorges where mother cysts might be found.

Diversity had never completely separated life on Mars; co-genotypic bauplans, creatures having different forms but a common progenitor, had been the rule. On Earth, such manifestations had been limited to different stages of growth in individual animalscaterpillar to butterfly, for example. On Mars, a single reproductive organism, depending on the circumstances, could generate offspring with a wide variety of shapes and functions. Those forms which did not survive, did not return to check in with the reproductive organism and were not replicated in the next breeding cycle. New forms could be created from a morphological grab-bag, following rules we could only guess at. The reproducers themselves closed up and died after a few thousand years, laying eggs or cystssome of which had been fossilized.

The mothers had been the greatest triumph of this strategy. A single mother cyst, blessed with proper conditions, could bloom and produce well over ten thousand different varieties of offspring, plant-like and animal-like forms together, designed to interact as an ecos. These would spread across millions of hectares, surviving for thousands of years before running through their carefully marshaled resources. The ecos would shrink, wither, and die; new cysts would be laid, and the waiting would begin again.

Across the ages, the Martian springtimes of flash floods and heavier atmosphere from evaporating carbon dioxide came farther apart, and finally stopped, and the cysts ceased blooming. Mars finally died.

Fossil mother cysts were most often buried a few meters below the lip of a gorge, revealed by landslides. Typically, remains of the mothers sons and daughtersdelicate spongy calcareous bones and shells, even membranes tanned by exposure to ultraviolet before being buriedwould lie in compacted layers around the cysts, clueing us to their locations with a darker stain in the soil.

Months before we met, Ilya and Kiqui discovered that the last bloom of a mother ecos had occurred, not five hundred million Earth years past, but a mere quarter billion. The puzzle remained, however: no organic molecules could remain viable across the tens of thousands of years that the cysts had typically lay buried between blooms.

We parked the lab at the end of a finger of comparatively smooth terrain. A few dozen meters beyond our parking place on the finger lay hundreds upon thousands of labyrinthine cracks and arroyos: the sulci. Fifty meters away, within a particularly productive shallow arroyo, stood a specimen storage shed of corrugated metal sheeting draped with plastic tarps.

Hours after we arrived, Ilya introduced me to a cracked cyst in the shed. Casseia, meet mother, he said. Mother, this is Casseia. Mother isnt feeling well today. Two meters wide, it lay in a steel cradle in the unpressurized building. He let me run my gloved hands along its dark rocky exterior. As he shined a torch to cast out the gloom, I reached into the interior and felt with gloved fingers the tortuous, sparkling folds of silicate, the embedded parallel lines of zinc clays.

These were the last, he said. The Omega.

Nobody knew how cysts bloomed. Nobody knew the significance of this purely inorganic structure. The generally accepted theory was that the cysts once contained soft reproductive organs, but no remains of such organs had been found.

I studied the cysts interior closely, vainly hoping to see some clue the scientists might have missed. Youve found offspring around open cystsand mothers themselvesbut no actual connections between.

All weve found have been late Omega hatchings, Ilya said. They died before their ecos could reach maturity. The remains were close enough to convince.

I listened to the sound of my own breathing for a moment, the gentle sighs, of the cycler. Have you ever dug an aqueduct bridge?

When I was a student, Ilya said. Beautiful things.

We left the shed and stood under the comparatively clear sky. I was almost used to being Up. The surface of my world was becoming familiar; however hostile, it touched me deeply, its past and present. I had been seeing it through Ilyas eyes, and Ilya did not judge Mars by any standards but its own.

Which part of Earth would you like to visit? I asked.

The deserts, he said.

Not the rain forests?

He grinned behind his face plate. Better fossils in dry places.

We climbed into the lab, destatted and sucked off our dust, and ate soup in the cramped kitchen. We had barely finished our cups when a shrill alarm came from our slates and the labs com.

Emergency displays automatically flickered before us. The distinctive masculine voice of Security Mars spoke. A cyclonic low-pressure system in Arcadia Planitia has produced a force ten pressure surge moving southwest at eight-hundred and thirty kiphs. All stations and teams between Alba Patera in the north and Gordii Dorsum in the south are advised to take emergency precautions. Graphs of the surge and a low-orbit satellite picture appeared, superimposed on a projected map. The surge resembled a thin curving smudge of charcoal drawn over the terrain. Its numbers were impressive: two thousand kilometers long, following a great-circle contour, absolutely clear atmosphere ahead and murk behind, with a dark pressure curl along its central axis. The surge had already reached a pressure of one third of a baralmost fifty times normal.

First seen in the twentieth in early Viking photographs, surges were the worst Mars had to offer. Induced by supersonic shock-waves, the high-pressure curls were unique to Mars, with its thin atmosphere, cold days, and even colder nights. Here, the borders between night and day could become weather fronts in themselves. There were no oceans, as on Earth, to liberate heat slowly and mediate between ground and sky At nightfall, the ground cooled quickly, and the thin air above the ground descended dramatically, only to warm and rise rapidly at daybreak. Most of the time, the worst weather patterns Mars could muster were the thin, high-wind-speed storms familiar to all. These spread across basins and plains, covering everything with dust but producing only slight changes in barometric pressure.

Under the right conditions, however, and in the proper terraincrossing the plains of the northern lowlands, in mid-morning or late eveningwinds generated by the terminator could exceed the speed of sound, compressing the air to as much as a hundred times its normal pressure of four to seven millibars. Passing from the plains to rough terrain, the shock-wave could be given a deft horizontal spin, producing a super-dense rolling curl that picked up huge volumes of fine clay, and sand, and at peak, even pebbles and rocks.

Ilya and I immediately suited and set to work lowering the mobile lab and shooting anchors deep into the soil and rock beneath. We slung cables over the lab from anchor to anchor, then pulled folded plastic foils from the boot in the labs round stern, stretching them from the ground and fastening them to the labs sides to make a wind ramp. The foil stiffened quickly into the proper shape. It would also function as a shield against debris.

Weve got about ten minutes, I said. We both looked into the arroyo at the slab-sided shed with its precious specimens, a tin shanty that would love to fly.

Theres a spare tarp and foil, Ilya said. We can rig it in six minutesor we can get inside.

Rig it, I said. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

We worked quickly. Surges could be terribly destructive even to a buried station if it was unprepared. The center of a surges curl could compress to as much as half a bar, a rolling-pin of tight-packed air moving at well over eight hundred kiphs; and the farther a surge rolled, the tighter it packed, until it blew itself out against a volcano or plateau and spread dust and cyclones over half of Mars.

We stiffened the sheds foil and kicked the tarp pegs. All was firm. We ran for the lab and sealed the flap behind us. A little excavator clambered up from a fresh-dug trench under the labs cylindrical body and fastened itself to its receptacle in the bottom of the lab. We crawled into the trench and spread our personnel foils. The foils undulated, stiffened, and glued themselves to the edges of the trench.

Ilya switched on a torch and shined it in our faces. We lay in the coffin-shaped ditch, with two layers of foil and the ponderous mobile lab over our heads, hands tight-clenched.

Outside: a horrid empty silence. Even the rock was quiet; the surge was still dozens of kilometers away. Ilya removed his slate from his utility belt and instructed the mobile labs roof camera to show us what was happening. To the northwest, all was dark gray shot through with streaks of brown.

Are we cozy? he asked. Our helmet radios whined faintly, we lay so close together.