Actually, Nanao told him, most of the basins were intensively cultivated. This basin was planted by Abraham. Each little region was the responsibility of a certain gardener or gardening group.
Ah! Sax said. And fertilized, then?
Tariki laughed. In a manner of speaking. The soil itself has been imported, for the most part.
I see.
This explained the diversity of plants. A little bit of cultivation, he knew, had been done around Arena Glacier, where he had first encountered the fellfields. But here they had gone far beyond those early steps. Labs in Sabishii, Tariki told him, were trying their best to manufacture topsoil. A good idea; soil in fellfields appeared naturally at a rate of only a few centimetres a century. But there were reasons for this, and manufacturing soil was proving to be extremely difficult.
Still, We pick up a few million years at the start, Nanao said. Evolve from there. They hand-planted many of their specimens, it seemed, then for the most part left them to their fate, and watched what developed.
I see, Sax said.
He looked more closely yet. The clear dim light: it was true that each great open room displayed a slightly different array of species. These are gardens, then.
Yes or things like that. Depends.
Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on.
These were influences only, Tariki added. As they did the work, they developed visions of their own. They followed the inclination of the land, as they saw that some plants prospered, and others died. Co-evolution, a kind of epigenetic development.
Nice, Sax said, looking around. For the adepts, the walk from Sabishii up onto the massif must have been an aesthetic journey, filled with allusions and subtle variants of tradition that were invisible to him. Hiroko would have called it areo-formation, or the areophany. Id like to visit your soil labs.
Of course.
They returned to the rover, drove on. Late in the day, under dark threatening clouds, they came to the very top of the massif, which turned out to be a kind of broad, undulating moor. Small ravines were filled with pine needles, sheered off by winds so that they looked like the blades of grass on a well-mowed yard. Sax and Tariki and Nanao again got out of the car, walked around. The wind cut through their suits, and the late afternoon sun broke out from under the dark cloud cover, casting their shadows all the way out to the horizon. Up here on the moors there were many big masses of smooth, bare bedrock; looking around, the landscape had the red, primal look Sax remembered from the earliest years; but then they would walk to the edge of a small ravine, and suddenly be looking down into green.
Tariki and Nanao talked about ecopoesis, which for them was terraforming redefined, subtilized, localized. Transmuted into something like Hirokos areoformation. No longer powered by heavy industrial global methods, but by the slow, steady, and intensely local process of working on individual patches of land. Mars is all a garden. Earth too for that matter. This is what humans have become. So we have to think about gardening, about that level of responsibility to the land. A human-Mars interface that does justice to both.
Sax waggled a hand uncertainly. Im used to thinking of Mars as a kind of wilderness, he said, as he looked up the etymology of the word garden. French, Teutonic, Old Norse, gard, enclosure. Seemed to share origins with guard, or keeping. But who knew what the supposedly equivalent word in Japanese meant? Etymology was hard enough without translation thrown into the mix. You know get things started, let loose the seeds, then watch it all develop on its own. Self-organizing ecologies, you know.
Yes, Tariki said, but wilderness too is a garden now. A kind of garden. Thats what it means to be what we are. He shrugged, his forehead wrinkled; he believed the idea was true, but did not seem to like it. Anyway, ecopoesis is closer to your vision of wilderness than industrial terraforming ever was.
Maybe, Sax said. Maybe theyre just two stages of a process. Both necessary.
Tariki nodded, willing to consider it. And now?
It depends on how we want to deal with the possibility of an ice age, Sax said. If its bad enough, kills off enough plants, then ecopoesis wont have a chance. The atmosphere could freeze back onto the surface, the whole process crash. Without the mirrors, Im not confident that the biosphere is robust enough to continue growing. Thats why I want to see those soil labs you have. It may be that industrial work on the atmosphere remains to be done. Well have to try some modelling and see.
Tariki nodded, and Nanao too. Their ecologies were being snowed under, right before their eyes; flakes drifted down through the transient bronze sunlight at this very moment, tumbling in the wind. They were open to suggestion.
Meanwhile, as throughout these drives, their young associates from Da Vinci and Sabishii were running over the massif together, and returning to Sabishiis mound maze babbling through the night about geomancy and areomancy, ecopoetics, heat exchange, the five elements, greenhouse gases, and so on. A creative ferment that looked to Sax very promising. Michel should be here, he said to Nanao. John should be here. How he would love a group like this.
And then it occurred to him: Ann should be here.
So he went back to Pavonis, leaving the group in Sabishii talking things over.
Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people, spurred on by Art Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional congress. Write an at least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then establish the government described.
Good idea, Sax said. Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.
Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout, others wouldnt.
He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis gone, people said, to a Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went there but Reds, they said.
After some thought Sax asked for Steves help, and looked up the outposts location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and flew north, past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past his old headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.
Ann too had no doubt flown this route, and thus gone by the first headquarters of the terraforming effort. Terraforming there was evolution in everything, even in ideas. Had Ann noticed Echus Overlook, had she even remembered that small beginning? No way of telling. That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was very like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelleys The Last Man, a book that had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the conclusion occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, shared a meal then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their lives; for every world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as empty as Mars had been in the beginning.
He flew past the blackened curve of Kasei Vallis without noting it at all.
The Reds had long ago hollowed out a rock the size of a city block, in a promontory that served as the last dividing wedge in the intersection of two of the Tempe Fossae, just south of Perepelkin Crater. Windows under overhangs gave them a view over both of the bare straight canyons, and the larger canyon they made after their confluence. Now all these fossae cut down what had become a coastal plateau; Mareotis and Tempe together formed a huge peninsula of ancient highlands, sticking far into the new ice sea.
Sax landed his little plane on the sandy strip on top of the promontory. From here the ice plains were not visible; nor could he spot any vegetation not a tree, not a flower, not even a patch of lichen. He wondered if they had somehow sterilized the canyons. Just primal rock, with a dusting of frost. And nothing they could do about frost, unless they wanted to tent these canyons, to keep air out rather than in. Hmm, Sax said, startled at the idea.
Two Reds let him in the lock door on the top of the promontory, and he descended the stairs with them. The shelter appeared to be nearly empty. Just as well. It was nice only to have to withstand the cold gazes of two young women leading him through the rough-hewn rock galleries of the refuge, rather than a whole gang. Interesting to see Red aesthetics. Very spare, as might be expected not a plant to be seen just different textures of rock: rough walls, rougher ceilings, contrasted to a polished basalt floor, and the glistening windows overlooking the canyons.
They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave, no straighter than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were mosaics inlaid into the back wall; made of bits of coloured stone, polished and set against each other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed almost to represent something, if only he could focus properly on them. The floor was a stone parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The gallery went on and on big, dusty the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps. Reds preferred their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as unfortunate necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have walked down the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and Sax felt that this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be unobtrusive before the land itself, to melt into it.
As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window-seat. Sax stopped abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as an ignorant traveller might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting there. He looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didnt see that much any more, and the longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had told him, once, that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had been some years before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame. Now, with the Red rebellion quelled, she was ash. Grey flesh. It was an awful sight. She was somewhere around one hundred and fifty years old, like all the First Hundred left alive, and without the treatments she would soon die.
Well. Strictly speaking, she was at the physiological equivalent of being seventy or so, depending on when she had last had the treatments. So not that bad. Perhaps Peter would know. But the longer one went between treatments, he had heard, the more problems cropped up, statistically speaking. It made sense. It was only wise to be prudent.
But he couldnt say that to her. In fact, it was hard to think what he could say to her.
Eventually her gaze lifted. She recognized him and shuddered, her lip lifting like a trapped animals. Then she looked away from him, grim, stone-faced. Beyond anger, beyond hope.
I wanted to show you some of the Tyrrhena Massif, he said lamely.
She got up like a statue rising, and left the room.
Sax, feeling his joints creak with the pseudo-arthritic pain that so often accompanied his dealings with Ann, followed her.
He was trailed in his turn by the two stern-looking young women. I dont think she wants to talk to you, the taller one informed him.
Very astute of you, Sax said.
Far down the gallery, Ann was standing before another window: spellbound, or else too exhausted to move. Or part of her did want to talk.
Sax stopped before her.
I want to get your impressions of it, he said. Your suggestions for what we might do next. And I have some, some, some areological questions. Of course it could be that strictly scientific questions arent of interest to you any more
She took a step toward him and struck him on the side of the face. He found himself slumped against the gallery wall, sitting on his bottom. Ann was nowhere to be seen. He was being helped to his feet by the two young women, who clearly didnt know whether to cheer or groan. His whole body hurt, more even than his face, and his eyes were very hot, stinging slightly. It seemed he might cry before these two young idiots, who by trailing him were complicating everything enormously; with them around he could not yell or plead, he could not go on his knees and say Ann, please, forgive me. He couldnt.
Where did she go? he managed to say.
She really, really doesnt want to talk to you, the tall one declared.
Maybe you should wait and try later, the other advised.
Oh shut up! Sax said, suddenly feeling an irritation so vehement that it was like rage. I suppose you would just let her stop taking the treatment and kill herself!
Its her right, the tall one pontificated.
Of course it is. I wasnt speaking of rights. I was speaking of how a friend should behave when someone is suicidal. Not a subject you are likely to know anything about. Now help me find her.
Youre no friend of hers.
I most certainly am. He was on his feet. He staggered a little as he tried to walk in the direction he thought she had gone. One of the young women tried to take his elbow. He avoided the help and went on. There Ann was, in the distance, collapsed in a chair, in some kind of dining chamber, it seemed. He approached her, slowing like Apollo in Zenos paradox.
She swivelled and glared at him.
Its you who abandoned science, right from the start, she snarled. So dont you give me that shit about not being interested in science!
True, Sax said. Its true. He held out both hands. But now I need advice. Scientific advice. I want to learn. And I want to show you some things as well.
But after a moments consideration she was up and off again, right past him, so that he flinched despite himself. He hurried after her; her gait was much longer than his, and she was moving fast, so that he had almost to jog. His bones hurt.
Perhaps we could go out here, Sax suggested. It doesnt matter where we go out.
Because the whole planet is wrecked, she muttered.
You must still go out for sunsets occasionally. Sax persisted. I could join you for that, perhaps.
No.
Please, Ann. She was a fast walker, and enough taller than him that it was hard to keep up with her and talk as well. He was huffing and puffing, and his cheek still hurt. Please, Ann.
She did not answer, she did not slow down. Now they were walking down a hall between suites of living quarters, and Ann sped up to go through a doorway and slam the door behind her. Sax tried it; it was locked.