Green Mars Part 9

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

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 b.u.t.ton 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'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 pa.s.sport listings a week later, and Desmond chuckled when he saw it. "Look at that," he said, pointing at Sax's new name. "Stephen Lindholm, Swiss citizen! Those folks are covering for us, there's no doubt about it. I'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."

"Are you sure?"

"No. They aren't saying, are they? But I'm pretty sure."

"Is it a good thing?"

"In theory, no. But in practice, if someone is on to you, it's nice to see them behaving as a friend. And the Swiss are good friends to have. This is the fifth time they've issued a pa.s.sport 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'd like you folks in the First Hundred. Interesting, don't you think?"

"Indeed."

"They are interesting people. They have their own plans, and I don't know what they are, but I like the look of them. I think they've made a decision to cover for us. Maybe they just want to know where we are. We'll never know for sure, because the Swiss dearly love their secrets. But it doesn't matter why when you've got the how."

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

A few days before he was going to fly with Peter north to Burroughs, he took a walk around Gamete'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'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 rea.s.sured; 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 understand, 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 Clayborne. 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. "You really look different," she said.

"Yes." 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. "Same me," he added.

"Of course." She did not look up at him. "So you're off to the overworld?"

"Yes."

"To get back to your work?"

"Yes."

She looked up at him. "What do you think science is for?"

Sax shrugged. It was their old argument, again and always, no matter what kind of beginning it had. To terraform or not to terraform, that is the question.... 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.

"To figure things out," he said.

"But terraforming is not figuring things out."

"Terraforming isn't science. I never said it was. It'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."

"So it's a matter of values."

"I suppose so." Sax thought about it, trying to marshal his thoughts concerning this murky topic. "I suppose our... 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."

"Science is also a human construct."

"Yes. But the connection between the two systems isn't clear. Beginning from the same facts, we can arrive at different values."

"But science itself is full of values," Ann insisted. "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?"

"I suppose," Sax said, thinking it over.

"Your science is a set of values," Ann said. "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're a reductionist. Parsimony and elegance and economy are values for you, and if you can make things simpler that's a real achievement, right?"

"But that's the scientific method itself," Sax objected. "It's not just me, it's how nature itself works. Physics. You do it yourself."

"There are human values imbedded in physics."

"I'm not so sure." He held out a hand to stop her for a second. "I'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'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."

"There are ecologists who would say that's a scientific description of a healthy ecosystem. Another way of saying climax ecosystem."

"That's a value judgment, I think. Some kind of bioethics. Interesting, but..." Sax squinted at her curiously, decided to change tack. "Why not try for a climax ecosystem here, Ann? You can't speak of ecosystems without living things. What was here on Mars before us wasn'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're starting it up again."

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's biota. The rock ethic, one might say. Ecology without life. An intrinsic worth indeed!

He sighed. "Perhaps that's just a value speaking. Favoring living systems over nonliving systems. I suppose we can't escape values, like you say. It's strange... 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- or what I would want to have happen, what I work toward..." He shrugged, struggling to understand himself. "It's hard to express. Something like a net gain in information. A net gain in order." 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's ultimate goal. They were both scientists after all, it was their shared enterprise....

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

"It's using science for a particular value. One I believe in."

"As do the transnationals."

"I guess."

"It certainly helps them."

"It helps everything alive."

"Unless it kills them. The terrain is destabilized; there are landslides every day."

"True."

"And they kill. Plants, people. It's happened already."

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

"What's this, the necessary murder? What kind of value is that?"

"No, no. They're accidents, Ann. People need to stay on bedrock, out of the slide zones, that kind of thing. For a while."

"But vast regions will turn to mud, or be drowned entirely. We're talking about half the planet."

"The water will drain downhill. Create watersheds."

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

He sighed. "I wish you wouldn'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."

"All but Red resistance."

"Yes, but what's the point of that, now?"

"Mars. Just Mars. The place you've never known."

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. "Look, Ann, I'm an advocate of what people call the minimum viable model. It'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't be much life of any kind- some high-alt.i.tude 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's a plan that makes sense to me. It expresses a comprehensible set of values."

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- 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 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? 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- 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- about Simon's death, which seemed to haunt Ursula more than her... all that was impossible. This was why he had more than once resolved to give up talking to Ann: it was so frustrating 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't make it any less distressing. In fact it was quite remarkable how much physiological discomfort could be generated by a merely emotional response. 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'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's route to Burroughs led them over the h.e.l.lespontus Montes, and Sax gazed down into the big basin of h.e.l.las curiously. They caught a glimpse of the edge of the icefield that had covered Low Point, a white ma.s.s 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. "You can look into it when you're Stephen Lindholm," he said with a grin. "You can make it part of your work for Biotique."

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 bas.e.m.e.nt of Libya Station, which was a little train station complex at the intersection of the Burroughs-h.e.l.las 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' 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's plateau, with window walls looking down on the ca.n.a.l park. A high-rent district, as only befitted the company leading the terraforming project's bioengineering efforts.

Burroughs, C. 2100 A.D.

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Out the Biotique office'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 gla.s.s 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 transnats was going to cover Hebes Chasma, a project that Ann had once suggested as an alternative to terraforming- 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' old ca.n.a.l park, and the broad gra.s.s 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 ca.n.a.l. There had 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 streetgra.s.s, considering as he did the mysterious phenomenon of the growth of cities. It was a cultural process with no very good physical or biological a.n.a.logy. 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 a.n.a.logy 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 gra.s.sy boulevards, the nine mesas appeared evenly distributed, and each mesa had a slightly different look, its rugged rock walls distinguished by characteristic k.n.o.bs, b.u.t.tresses, smooth walls, overhangs, cracks- 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'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 a.s.serted that many ancient Greek cities were sited princ.i.p.ally 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's sightseeing, Sax rode one of the big exterior elevators up the side of Branch Mesa, centrally located north of Ca.n.a.l 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 ma.s.s had been reached in some kind of group psychology- 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, a.s.suming he had ever had it. The formula governing the number of possible relations.h.i.+ps in a group was n n(n-1)/2 where n n is the number of individuals in the group; so that, for the 1,000 people at Biotique Burroughs, there were 499,500 possible relations.h.i.+ps. This seemed to Sax well beyond anyone's ability to comprehend- even the 4,950 possible relations.h.i.+ps in a group of 100, the hypothesized "design limit" of human group size, seemed unwieldy. Certainly it had been at Underhill, when they had had a chance to test it. is the number of individuals in the group; so that, for the 1,000 people at Biotique Burroughs, there were 499,500 possible relations.h.i.+ps. This seemed to Sax well beyond anyone's ability to comprehend- even the 4,950 possible relations.h.i.+ps in a group of 100, the hypothesized "design limit" of human group size, seemed unwieldy. Certainly it had been at Underhill, 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 j.a.panese 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 Ius 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's work, and then everything else.

Even there he found it surprisingly easy to "be" Lindholm, who, he discovered, asked a lot of questions, and laughed frequently; whose mouth somehow made laughter easier. Questions from the others- usually from Claire, and an English immigrant named Jessica, and a Kenyan man named Berkina- very rarely had anything to do with Lindholm's Terran past. When they did, Sax found it was easy to give a minimal response- Desmond had given Lindholm a past in Sax's own home town of Boulder, Colorado, a sensible move- 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 pa.s.s that time, which otherwise might be irritatingly 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 Lindholm as for Sax.

In these conversations his colleagues, especially Claire and Berkina, confirmed what was obvious in his walks- that Burroughs was in some sense becoming the de facto 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'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. "The UN has nothing to do with it, really," Berkina said. "The UN is just as dead on Earth as UNOMA is here. So the name is just a cover." 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'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. "The UN has nothing to do with it, really," Berkina said. "The UN is just as dead on Earth as UNOMA is here. So the name is just a cover."

Claire said, "Everyone calls it just the Transitional Authority anyway."

"They can see who is who," 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.

"But why?" Sax asked. "Who are they afraid of?"

"They're worried about Bogdanovists coming out of the hills," Claire said, and laughed. "It's ridiculous."

Sax raised his eyebrows, let it pa.s.s. 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... 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 personas 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'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 pa.s.s. The computer nets could not keep track of things because they were in compet.i.tion 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's rooms in the Hunt Mesa, he had Lindholm'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 Hundertwa.s.sers and some unsigned sketches by Spencer, an indiscretion that was certainly undetectable. He was secure in his new ident.i.ty. 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 '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 chasmoendolith from Wright Valley 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's fungus some phreatophytic 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 Underhill. 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 wish 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's edge. "Nitrogen is so valuable that it's the medium of exchange among the members of the underground," 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, pa.s.sed 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- there was an entire pharmacology inside every men'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's and Sax's behaviors diverged, apparently. So he breathed out and then put the little facemask over his mouth and nose, feeling Stephen'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- that was the subjective impression. It was was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one'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 were s.h.i.+fting 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. fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one'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 were s.h.i.+fting 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.

"But it's time to get beyond the alpine zone!" Claire was saying. "I'm sick of lichen, and I'm sick of mosses and gra.s.ses. Our equatorial fellfields are becoming meadows, we've even got krummholz, and they'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."

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

"Exactly. Stephen, you've done wonders since you arrived on that lichen, why don't you and Berkina and Jessica and C.J. start working on subalpine plants. See if we can't make some little forests."

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. "We need moles," Sax said, trying to wipe the grin from his face. "Moles and voles are crucial in changing fellfields to meadow, I wonder if we can make some kind of CO2-tolerant arctic moles."