Red Mars (30 page)

But the newer techniques tend to get the attention. Genetically engineered microorganisms, or GEMs, had been on the scene only about half a century when the first hundred arrived on Mars. But half a century in modern science is a long time. Plasmid conjugates had become very sophisticated tools in those years. The array of restriction enzymes for cutting, and ligase enzymes for pasting, was big and versatile; the ability to line out long DNA strings precisely was there; the accumulated knowledge of genomes was immense, and growing exponentially; and used all together, this new biotechnology was allowing all kinds of trait mobilization, promotion, replication, triggered suicide (to stop excess success), and so forth. It was possible to find the DNA sequences from an organism that carried the desired characteristic, and then synthesize these DNA messages and cut and paste them into plasmid rings; after that cells were washed and suspended in a glycerol with the new plasmids, and the glycerol was suspended between two electrodes and given a short sharp shock of about 2,000 volts, and the plasmids in the gycerol shot into the cells, and voilá! There, zapped to life like Frankenstein’s monster, was a new organism. With new abilities.

And so: fast-growing lichens. Radiation-resistant algae, Extreme-cold fungi. Halophylic Archaea, eating salt and excreting oxygen. Surarctic mosses. An entire taxonomy of new kinds of life, all partially adapted to the surface of Mars, all out there having a try at it. Some species went extinct: natural selection. Some prospered: survival of the fittest. Some prospered wildly, at the expense of other organisms, and then chemicals in their excretions activated their suicide genes, and they died back until the levels of those chemicals dropped again.

So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole.

And so: more oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Black fuzz on the polar ice. Black fuzz on the ragged surfaces of bubbled rock. Pale green patches on the ground. Bigger grains of frost in the air. Animalcules shoving through the depths of the regolith, like trillions of tiny moles, turning nitrites into nitrogen, oxides into oxygen.

At first it was nearly invisible, and very slow. With a cold snap or a solar storm there would be massive die-offs, whole species extinct in a night. But the remains of the dead fed other creatures; conditions were thus easier for them, and the process picked up momentum. Bacteria reproduce quickly, doubling their mass many times a day if conditions are right; the mathematical possibilities for the speed of their growth are staggering, and although environmental constraints— especially on Mars— keep all actual growth far from the mathematical limits, still, the new organisms, the areophytes, quickly reproduced, sometimes mutated, always died, and the new life fed on the compost of their ancestors, and reproduced again. Lived and died; and the soil and air left behind were different than they were before these millions of brief generations.

And so one morning the sun rises, shooting long rays through the ragged cloud cover, up the length of Valles Marineris. On the north walls are tiny traces of black and yellow and olive and gray and green. Specks of lichen dot the vertical faces of stone, which stand as they always have, stony, and cracked, and red; but now speckled, as if with mold.

M
ichel Duval dreamed of home. He was swimming in the surf off the point at Villefranche-sur-Mer, the warm August water lifting him up and down. It was windy and near sunset and the water was a sloppy white bronze, the sunlight bouncing all over it. The waves were big for the Mediterranean, swift breakers that rose up all riven with wind chop to crash in quick uneven lines, allowing him to ride them for a moment. Then it was under in a tumble of bubbles and sand, and back up into a burst of gold light and the taste of salt in everything, his eyes stinging voluptuously. Big black pelicans rode air cushions just over the swells, soared into steep clumsy turns, stalled, dropped into the water around him. They half-folded their wings when they dove, making adjustments with them until the actual moment of the awkward crash into the water. Often they came up gulping small fish. Just meters from him one splashed in, silhouetted against the sun like a Stuka or a pterodactyl. Cool and warm, immersed in salt, he bobbed on the swell and blinked, blinded by salt light. A breaking wave looked like diamonds smashed to cream.

His phone rang.

His phone rang. It was Ursula and Phyllis, calling to tell him that Maya was having another fit and was inconsolable. He got up, put on unders and went to the bathroom. Waves leaped over a line of backwash. Maya, depressed again. Last time he had seen her she had been in high spirits, almost euphoric, and that was what, a week ago? But that was Maya. Maya was crazy. Crazy in a Russian way, however, which meant she was a power to be reckoned with. Mother Russia! The church and the communists both had tried to eradicate the matriarchy that had preceded them, and all they had achieved was a flood of bitter emasculating scorn, a whole nation full of contemptuous
russalkas
and
baba yagas
and twenty-hour-a-day superwomen, living in a nearly parthenogenic culture of mothers, daughters, babushkas, granddaughters. Yet still necessarily absorbed in their relationships with men, desperately trying to find the lost father, the perfect mate. Or just a man who would pull his share of the load. Finding that great love, and then more often than not destroying it. Crazy!

Well, it was dangerous to generalize. But Maya was a classic case. Moody, angry, flirtatious, brilliant, charming, manipulative, intense— and now filling his office like a huge slab of dejection, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, her mouth haggard. Ursula and Phyllis nodded and whispered thanks to Michel for getting up so early, and left. He went to the venetian blinds and opened them, and the light from the central dome poured in. He saw again that Maya was a beautiful woman, with wild lustrous hair and a dark charismatic gaze, immediate and direct. It was dismaying to see her this upset, he never got used to it, it contrasted too sharply with her usual vivaciousness, the way she would put a finger to your arm as she rattled on in a confiding tone about one fascinating thing or other. . . .

All strangely mimicked by this desperate creature, who leaned forward onto his desk and began to tell him in a ragged hoarse voice about the latest scene in the unfolding drama of her and John, and then, again, Frank. Apparently she had gotten angry at John for refusing to help her in a plan she had to get some of the Russian-based multinationals to underwrite the development of settlements in Hellas Basin, which being the deepest point on Mars was going to be first to benefit from the atmospheric changes they were beginning to see. The air pressure at Low Point, four kilometers below the datum, was always going to be ten times thicker than that on top of the great volcanoes, and three times thicker than at the datum. It was going to be the first human-viable place, perfect for development.

But apparently John preferred to work through UNOMA and governments. And this was just one of the many basic political disagreements which were beginning to infect their personal life, to the point that they were fighting pretty frequently about other things, things that didn’t matter, things about which they had never fought before.

Watching her Michel almost said, John wants you irritated with him. He wasn’t sure what John would say to that. Maya rubbed her eyes, leaned her forehead on his desk, revealing the back of her neck and her broad rangy shoulders. She would never look this distraught in front of most of Underhill; it was an intimacy between them, something she only did with him. It was as if she had taken off her clothes. People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life. Although it was true she would be beautiful naked, she had perfect proportions. He recalled the way she looked swimming in the pool, doing the backstroke in a blue bathing suit cut high over the hipbones. A Mediterranean image: he was floating in the water at Villefranche, everything flooded with sunset’s amber light, and he was looking in at the beach where men and women were walking, naked except for the neon triangles of
cache-sexe
bathing suits— brown-skinned bare-breasted women, walking in pairs like dancers in the sunlight— then dolphins sliced out of the water between him and the beach, their sleek black bodies rounded like the women’s—

But now Maya was talking about Frank. Frank, who had a sixth sense for trouble between John and Maya (six would not be necessary), and who came running to Maya every time he felt the signs, to walk with her and talk about his vision of Mars, which was progressive, exciting, ambitious, everything that John’s was not. “Frank is so much more dynamic than John these days, I don’t know why.”

“Because he agrees with you,” Michel said.

Maya shrugged. “Perhaps that’s all I mean. But we have a chance to build a whole civilization here, we do. But John is so . . .”

Big sigh. “And yet I love him, I really do. But . . .”

She talked for a while about their past, how their courtship had saved the voyage out from anarchy (or at least ennui), how John’s easygoing stability had been so good for her. How you could count on him. How impressed she had been by his fame, how she had felt that the liaison made her part of world history forever. But now she understood that she herself was going to be part of world history anyway; all of them in the first hundred were. Her voice rose, became faster and more 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 Arles or Villefranche; or suddenly it reminded him of Avignon’s narrow plane tree-shaded plaza near the Pope’s palace, the plaza and its café 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 too 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 degrees Kelvin, a record high by twelve degrees. 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 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.