Geoffrey A Landis - Ecopoiesis

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Ecopoiesis

Geoffrey A. Landis

First published in Science Fiction Age May 1997

"I wonder why they call this the red planet?" I asked. The rebreather made my

voice sound funny in my ears. "Looks like the brown planet to me."

"You got a problem with brown, boy?" Tally said. Her voice was muffled by the

rebreather she wore as well.

I turned, but Tally wasn't looking at me; she was watching the opposite

direction, standing in a half crouch. That position surely couldn't be

comfortable, but for her it looked completely easy and natural. Her head turned

with a quick birdlike grace to glance now one way, now the other. Guarding our

backs, I realized. Against what?

"Nothing wrong with brown, my opinion," she said.

The more my eyes got used to the terrain, the more colors came out. Brown, yes,

barren rocky brown plains and brown buttes and a brown stream frothing over a

tiny waterfall. The hills were sharp-edged, looking as if they had been blasted

out of bedrock the day before, barely touched by erosion. But in the brown was

hints of other colors; a sheen of dark, almost purple, echoing the purple-grey

of the cloudy sky, and even patches on the rocks where the amber shaded off to

almost army green.

"It's beautiful, isn't it," said Leah Hamakawa. She was, as always, two steps

ahead of us. She was down on one knee in the dirt, her nose right up against a

rock. She'd taken both her gloves off and was scraping the surface of the rock

inquisitively with her thumbnail.

I knelt down and scooped up a handful of rocks and dirt in my gloved hand. Close

up, I could see that the brown was an illusion. The rocks themselves were the

color of brick, but clinging to them were blotches of purple algae and tiny,

dark amber specks of lichen. I pulled off one glove so I could feel the texture.

Cold, with a rough grittiness. When I rubbed it between my fingers, the blotches

of purple had a slimy feel. I was tempted to try pulling off the rebreather for

a moment so I could put it right up to my nose and smell it, but decided that,

considering the absence of oxygen in the atmosphere, that would not be wise.

"Beautiful, yeah, right," Tally said. "You got rocks in your head, girl. Stinks.

I seen prettier stinking strip mines."

"It used to be red," Leah said. "Long ago. Before the Age of Confusion; before

the ecopoiesis." She paused, then added "I bet it was beautiful then, too."

I looked at the handful of dirt in my palm. Mars. Yes, perhaps it was beautiful.

In its way.

My ears and the flesh of my face in the places not covered by the rebreather

were getting cold. The temperature was above freezing, but it was still quite

chilly. The air in the rebreather was stale, smelling slightly rotten and

distinctly sulfurous. That indicated a problem with the rebreather; the

micropore filters in the system should have removed any trace of odor from the

recycled air. I thought again about taking the rebreather off and seeing what

the air smelled like.

"Shit," said Tally. "Anyway, you and Tinkerman about done gawking the scenery?

We got a murder to solve. Two murders."

"They've been dead for well over a year," Leah said. "They can wait another day.

God, isn't this place magnificent?"

"Stinks," said Tally.

The lander was bulbous and squat, painted a pale green, with the name Albert

Alligator in cursive script next to the airlock door. Leah and I cycled through

the airlock together. Langevin, the pilot who had shuttled us down, was waiting

for us in the suiting atrium when the inner lock opened. He opened his mouth to

say something, and then abruptly shut it, gagged, and turned away, his hand

going up to cover his mouth and nose. He scrambled out of the atrium abruptly. I

looked at Leah. She shrugged, and reached up to unfasten the strap of the

rebreather from behind her head.

"Let me get that," I said, and she turned around and bent her neck. Any excuse

to touch her. Behind me, I could hear Tally cycling through the lock. The strap

unfastened, and I gently took a finger and ran it along Leah's cheek, breaking

the seal of the rebreather to the skin.

Suddenly she broke away from me. "Oh, god!"

"What?"

"Take off your rebreather."

Puzzled, I reached up, snapped the strap free, and pulled it forward over my

head. The silicone made a soft "poik!" as the seal popped loose. I took a

breath, and gagged on the sudden odor.

The smell was as if I'd been wading through a cesspool in the middle of a very

rotten garbage dump. I looked down. My shoes were covered in brown. My hands

were brown. One leg, where I'd knelt on the ground, had a brown spot on the

knee. Leah was even dirtier.

Shit.

Tally popped through the lock, accompanied by a fresh burst of fecal odor. I

held my nose and suppressed my instinct to gag.

"Of course," said Leah. "Anaerobic bacteria." She thought for a second. "We're

going to have to find some boots, and maybe overalls. Leave them outside when we

come in."

I started to giggle.

"What's so goddam funny?" Tally said.

"I've decided you're right," I told her. "Mars stinks. Take off your rebreather.

You'll see."

The utility landing platform was a hexagonal truss plate with small rocket

engines mounted on three of the six corners. The hab-and-lab module that

Spacewatch was delivering for our stay was strapped on the top. It hovered in

the cloudy sky like a flying waffle-iron. Langevin guided it in by remote

control, setting it down in the sandy valley a hundred meters from the ruins of

the earlier habitat. His landing was as neat and as unconcerned as a man passing

a plate of potatoes. Still operating by remote control, he unstowed the power

crane, lifted the habitat off of the landing platform and lowered it gently to

the ground. The habitat itself was an unpainted aluminum cylinder, fixed with

brackets onto a platform with an electromechanical jack at each corner to level

it on uneven ground. It was a small dwelling for three people, but would be

adequate for our stay.

"Man, I don't envy y'all," he said. He delicately pinched two fingers over his

nose. "No surprise nobody comes here." He shook his head. "Anything else y'all

need?"

"How about the rover?" Leah asked.

"It's still in transit from the Moon; won't arrive for a few more days. When it

gets here, I'll send it right down."

Tally was first one inside the habitat, of course. Even though it had just come

down from space, like a cat, she had to sniff it out herself. After five minutes

she waved us in.

The interior of the habitat was brand new, the fixtures molded to the interior.

Across from the airlock atrium was the air regeneration equipment, with three

spherical pressure tanks painted blue to indicate oxygen, and three

green-painted tanks of nitrogen to provide make-up gas. To the left was a

combined conference room and kitchen area, and behind that the sleeping cubbies.

"Only two cubbies," Tally said, "and a mite cozy ones at that. Guess we girls

bunk down in one; give you the other all to yourself, Tinkerman."

I couldn't breathe for a moment. Somehow I managed to sneak a quick glance up.

Tally wasn't looking at me. She hadn't yet realized that the silence was

extending a bit too long. Leah glanced across at me. Her expression was neutral,

curious, perhaps, as to what I would do. I couldn't read her intention. I never

could.

In a very small voice, I said, "I volunteer to share a bunk with Leah."

Tally looked up sharply. Leah gazed back at her, her expression unreadable. But

she didn't voice an objection.

"Huh," said Tally. I don't think I'd ever seen Tally at a loss for words. "Well.

Guess I get a cubby to myself." She paused, and then added, almost to herself,

"lucky me."

Terraformed Mars had an atmosphere half as thick as Earth's. That was enough

pressure for a human to survive, but with no oxygen to breathe. With rebreathers

to recirculate exhaust carbon dioxide back into breathable oxygen, we could

survive outside comfortably without a vacuum suit. For that matter, you could

survive outside stark naked, as long as you had your rebreather, and didn't mind

the cold.

Outside again, this time with boots and coveralls to keep the worst of the

stinking dirt out of our habitat, we walked in silence across the rock-littered

landscape the hundred meters to the place that the earlier habitat had been.

Ragged edges of aluminum stuck out from the platform like ribs. Pieces of the

habitat had been scattered across the plain by the wind, a fan-tail of shining

metal and shards of composite sheeting visible against the brown all the way to

the horizon.

There were two bodies, one within the remains of the exploded habitat, one out

on the plain. Not much was left of them. The bodies were barely more than piles

of dirt with a rib-cage and part of a pelvis protruding, even the bones covered

with the purple-brown of the Martian microbiota. I was glad for the filtering

effect of the rebreather. I made videos of the bodies in position while Leah

knelt down to examine them and take samples: clothing, hair, skin, tissue. After

she examined the one in the habitat, she rose without speaking and went to the

one outside. Unlike the other one, the clothing on this one was partly eaten

away by bacteria.

Leah's long black hair blew around her face as she worked, but the

carbon-dioxide breeze wasn't strong enough to move the pieces of aluminum

framework. The wind must have been much stronger to have spread the wreckage so

far.

Tally stood, as always, a dozen paces away, eyes restlessly scanning the horizon

for enemies.

"We really should have had a doctor to do this analysis," Leah said, standing

up. "But a few things are obvious. For example, the man in the habitat had a

fractured skull."

"What?"

"But this one," she nodded down at the body she was standing over, "shows no

apparent sign of trauma. No rebreather, either, so I'll hazard a guess that

carbon dioxide poisoning was what did for him." Leah put the tissue samples into

her sample-pack and took a step toward the habitat. "I'll have to let the

computer analyze the samples to verify that, of course." She looked around. "Who

could have killed them? Why?" She looked up the plain, following the trail of

debris. "I think we've seen enough. Tinkerman, you have enough pictures? Does

your checklist have anything else?"

I looked down at the list. "No, as far as forensics is concerned, we're done."

"Then, unless you have any further suggestions, do you think maybe we could get

them decently buried?"

When there's a fatal incident in space, of whatever kind, there needs to be an

investigation. If it was an accident, the cause has to be found so that

Spacewatch Authority can take appropriate measures to prevent its recurrence,

and deliver warning to anybody else with similar equipment.

We were that incident investigation team, Leah and I. Tally, a freelance

survival specialist, was our protection. If somebody had killed the two

researchers, deliberately blown up their habitat for some as-yet undetermined

motive, whoever it was that had killed them might come back.

But nobody cared about Mars. The exciting horizons were light-years away, where

relativistic probes lasercast back terabits of images, giving the excitement of

vistas that anybody could access on optical disk without the danger and

discomfort of leaving Earth, and with far stranger life-forms than any mere

microbes. Mars was such an uninteresting location that it took over a year

before Spacewatch Authority noticed that a scientific team that had gone there

to study microbes hadn't returned. They were the first researchers to bother

with an on-site investigation of Mars in over a century.

"It doesn't make sense," I told Leah, back in the habitat. "Why would anybody

want to murder two researchers on a stinky planet too close to Earth to even be

interesting?"

She shrugged. "Kooks. Bacteria-worshipers. Or, maybe one of 'em had an angry

ex."

"It's not as if the planet were exciting," I said. "They tried to terraform it.

They failed. End of story, go home."

"Failed? Tinkerman, you have it all wrong. You should go learn a little history

before going on a trip." I could hear her switching into lecture mode. "They

didn't try to terraform Mars. They never tried to terraform Mars. What they did

was ecopoiesis, and they succeeded spectacularly, more than anybody had a right

to expect."

"Ecopoiesis," I said, "terraforming, same thing."

"Not at all."

The way Leah told it, it was part epic, part farce.

It's hard for us, now, to imagine what it was like in the age of confusion,

before the fusion renaissance and the second reformation, but the people of the

twenty-first century had a technology of chemical rockets and nuclear reactors

that, although primitive, had its own crude power. By the middle of the

twenty-first century, Mars had been explored, cataloged, and abandoned. It was

too cold to harbor life, even of the most primitive sort; the atmosphere was

closer to vacuum than to air, and there were far more accessible resources in

the asteroids. Mars was uninteresting.

It didn't even make good video. The largest canyon in the solar system-- so big

that if you stand in the middle, the walls on both sides were out of sight over

the horizon. The biggest mountain in the solar system--but the slope so gentle

that it meant nothing on any human scale. Ancient fossil bacteria-- but not even

a hint of anything that hadn't been dead and turned to rock a billion years

before trilobites crawled the oceans. A hundred spots on Earth and across the

solar system were more spectacular. Once somebody had climbedOlympus (and in

the low gravity of Mars it wasn't a hard climb), and had placed flags at both

poles of Mars, why go back?

The ecopoiesis of Mars was done by a band of malcontents from one of the very

first space settlements, Freehold Toynbee. Habitats--they called them "space

colonies" back then--were crowded, dangerous, undersupplied, constantly in need

of repair, and smelly. They were haven to malcontents, ideologues, fanatics, and

visionaries: the vanguard of humanity, the divine agents of the manifest destiny

of mankind into the universe. More succinctly, the habitats were home to people

who couldn't get along with their fellow humans on Earth. Arguments were their

way of life.

It was an engineer named Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick who proposed that Toynbee

could transform Mars. The people of Toynbee debated the question for a year,

arguing every conceivable point of view with a riotous enthusiasm. At the

beginning, the consensus of the colony seemed to be that since human destiny was

in space, even to consider living on planetary surfaces could only be idiocy, or

some deviant plot to subvert that destiny. But Kirkpatrick was more than just a

maverick engineer with wild dreams, he was a man with a divine mission. A year

later, the quibble about living on a planetary surface wasn't even part of the

argument. Toynbee decided that the right of Mars to remain unchanged was

preempted by the imperative of life to spread into new niches. They had

convinced themselves that they had not merely a right, but a divine duty to seed

life on Mars.

Mars, back then, was completely inhospitable to life. The atmosphere was less

than one percent of the Earth's, and the average temperature was far below

freezing, even at the equator. But their analysis showed that the climate of

Mars just might be unstable. The surface of Mars showed networks of canyons and

run-off channels, dry lakes and the seashores of ancient oceans. There had been

water on Mars, once, a billion years or more ago, and plenty of it. All that

water was still there, hidden away. The old scientific expeditions had proven

that--frozen in the polar ice-caps, locked into kilometer-thick hills of

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Ecopoiesis GeoffreyA.Landis FirstpublishedinScienceFictionAgeMay1997 "Iwonderwhytheycallthistheredplanet?"Iasked.Therebreathermademyvoicesoundfunnyinmyears."Lookslikethebrownplanettome.""Yougotaproblemwithbrown,boy?"Tallysaid.Hervoicewasmuffledbytherebreathersheworeaswell.Iturned,butTallywasn'...

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