Gregory Benford - The Sunborn

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THE SUNBORN

GREGORY BENFORD

ASPECT

NEW YORK BOSTON

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or

dead, is

coincidental.

Aspect

Warner Books

Time Warner Book Group

1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com.

The Aspect name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: March 2005

10 987654321

ISBN: 0-466-53058-1

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LCCN: 2004114834

To Robert Forward, Charles Sheffield, and Hal Clement

They showed a scrupulous respect for the culture, methods, and findings of science, no matter where

these led.

PART I

RAW MARS

The world will never starve for wonders; but only for want of wonder.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The sun's seethe broke upward, flaring into a fountain of fire. A colossal magnetic arch trembled,

rubbery and snaking with scorching energies. At its very top the lacy magnetic fibers ruptured. Virulent

plasma poured forth, fleeing the star in furious jets. The angry spout curled and spat, thundering into

the vacuum, spreading, whipping into fresh filaments. White-hot, it splashed and spun. Yet from this

violence came structure. Crackling traceries writhed and coiled together. Bright strands peeled from the

outrushing flow. Howling ferocity fought, expanded, and then cooled as the billowing plume rose. Lacy

arrays came and went as magnetic forces struggled against the blaring heat of plasma now unleashed.

Here and there, fields weaved and knotted. Order arose in the sprawling, swelling teardrop. Internal

wrath dimmed. The plasma gout sped outward from the parent star, rushing into the realm of planets,

bringing stormy funnels, wriggling and fighting. A red world lay in its path, unshielded, its ancient rock

cloaked only by a thin film of gas. Yet life clung there. Frothing with great, seething energies, the

tempest roared toward it.

FIRM, FRIENDLY, POSITIVE

JULIA TURNED HER BEST SIDE toward the camera, a three-quarters shot, and spread her arms.

Okay, maybe a bit theatrical, but she had the backdrop for it.

"Welcome to Earth on Mars!" She always opened firm, friendly, positive. She swept an arm around,

taking in the stubby trees with their odd purple-green leaves, the raked mounds barely sprouting

brownish green patches, and above it all, the shiny curve of the dome, a hundred meters high. Beyond

the dome's ultraviolet screening hung the dark bowl of space. The somber cap was always there,

reminding them of how little atmosphere shielded them.

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"We showed you the inflation of the big dome a month ago, the planting of trees right after-now we have

grass."

Not any breed of grass you've ever seen before, though; it's a genetically modified plant more like a

dwarf bamboo, and technically bamboo is a grass, just a really stiff one, so...

"It'll be a while before we can play football on it, true. We're pretty sure nothing like grass ever grew on

the surface of ancient Mars, even back in the warm and wet period. So this prickly little fuzz"-she

stooped to stroke it-"is a first. It'll help along the big job that the microbes are doing down in the ground

already-breaking up the regolith, making it into real soil."

Was she sounding strained already? It was getting harder to strike the right level of enthusiasm in her

weekly broadcast to Earthside. She could barely remember the days, decades before, when she had

broadcast several times a day, sometimes from this same spot. But then, they had been breaking new

ground nearly every day. And betting pools on Earth gave new odds every time they went out in the

rover, for whether they'd come back alive. Usually about fifty-fifty. The good ol' days.

She smiled, strolling to her right as Viktor panned the camera. She had to remember her marks and

turns, and to keep out of camera view the crowd of camp staff watching nearby.

Viktor called, "Cut, got sun reflecting in the lens."

"Whew! Good. Let me memorize a few lines..."

She was glad for the break. It was getting harder to sound perky. The Consortium people had been

grousing about that lately. But then, they had done so periodically, over the two decades she and Viktor

had been doing their little shows. Media mavens had some respect for The Mars Couple (the title of the

Broadway musical about them), but the long shadow of the Consortium, which had backed the 2018

First Landing (the movie title), wanted to keep them on the air for the worldwide subscriber base-and

always pumping the numbers higher, of course. Axelrod, still the head of the Consortium, The Man Who

Sold Mars (the miniseries title), and now probably the wealthiest man in the solar system, played

diplomat between them and the execs Earthside. Exploration? Discovery? Yes, they still got to do some.

But a safari that turned up nothing new-like the Olympus Mons fiasco {Climb the Solar System's Highest

Mountain!)-could drive down Consortium shares, send heads rolling at high corporate levels, and make

headlines. So she and Viktor tried not to think too much about the eternal media issues. It never really

helped.

Viktor was fiddling, changing camera angle, and here came Andy Lang, trotting over with his studied

grin. "Julia, got an idea for a last shot."

"What is it?" She looked beyond him and saw the two arm wings Andy had brought from Earth the year

before, bright blue monolayer on a carbon strut. "Oh-well, look, we've done your flying stunt three times

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already."

"I'm thinking just a closing shot." He gestured up to the top of the dome, over a hundred meters above.

"I come off the top platform, swing around the eucalyptus clump, into Viktor's field of view-after you do

your last line."

"Ummm." She had to admit they had no good finishing image, and Earthside was always carping about

that. "You can do it?"

"Been practicing. I've got the timing down." He was a big, muscular guy, an engineering wizard who

had improved their geothermal system enormously. And a looker. Axelrod made sure to send them

lookers. After all, thousands volunteered to work here every year. Why take the ugly ones when the

worldwide audience liked eye candy?

Julia looked up at the ledge platform near the dome peak. Andy's earlier flights had gone around the

dome's outer curve, pleasantly graceful. The eucalyptus stand at the dome's center was her pet project.

She insisted on some blue gum trees from her Australian home, the forests north of Adelaide. Earthside

dutifully responded with a funded contest among plant biologists to find a eucalyptus that could

withstand the sleeting ultraviolet here. Of course, the dome helped a lot; chemists had developed a

miracle polymer that could billow into a broad dome, holding in nearly a full Earth atmosphere, and yet

also subtract a lot of the UV from sunlight-all without editing away the middle spectrum needed for

plant growth.

The blue gums were a darker hue, but they grew rapidly in the Martian regolith. Of course she had to

prepare the soil, in joyful days spent spading in the humus they had processed from their own wastes.

The French called it eau de fumier, spirit of manure, and chronicled every centimeter of blue gum

growth. She'd sprouted the seeds and nurtured the tiny seedlings fiercely. Once planted, their white

flanks had grown astonishingly fast. Their leaves hung down, minimizing their exposure to the residual

hard ultraviolet that got through the dome's filtering skin. But their trunks were spindly, with odd limbs

sticking out like awkward elbows-yet more evidence that bringing life to Mars was not going to be easy.

She considered. Andy was a media hit with the ladies Earthside, if perhaps a bit of a camera hog. She

had been giving him all the airtime he wanted lately, glad to off-load the work. "Okay, get on up there."

She checked the timing with Viktor while Andy shimmied up the climbing rope to the peak of the dome

and its platform, the big arm wings strapped to his back making him look like a gigantic moth. They

moved location so that Andy would be shielded from Viktor's view until he came around the clump of

whitebark eucalyptus trunks as Viktor panned upward from her concluding shot.

In a few minutes more they were ready to go. Julia wondered if she could ease out of this job altogether,

letting Andy the Hunk take most of it. She made a mental note to tactfully broach the subject with

Axelrod.

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"Positions!" Viktor called. Andy nodded from the platform, wings in place. "On," Viktor said.

Without thinking about it Julia hit the same marker where she had left off. "You can't imagine how

thrilling it is to walk on Martian grass, without a space suit, breathing air that smells ... well, I won't lie,

still pretty dusty. But better, yes. To think that we used to test the rocks here for signs of water

deposition! Once the raw frontier, now a park. Progress."

Of course, the hard part was turning regolith rocks and sand into topsoil, but that's booooring, yes.

Earthside had developed some fierce strains of bacteria that could break down all comers-old running

shoes, hardbound books, insulation, packing buffers-into rich black loam almost as you watched.

She ducked as a white shape hurtled by, narrowly missing her head. "Chicken alert!" she said lightly,

gesturing toward it with her head. It squawked and flapped, turning like a feathered blimp with wings.

"Who would have thought chickens could have so much fun up here, in the low gravity? They find it far

easier to fly here than on Earth. Of course, we brought them here so we could have fresh eggs, and they

do lay, so we predicted that part correctly. But we don't always know everything that's going to happen

in a biological experiment. This is the Mars version of the chicken and egg problem."

Viktor smiled dutifully; they'd shared this little joke before. The Earthside producer would more

probably wince. Okay, back to the script.

She waved a hand to her right, and Viktor followed the gesture with the camera, bringing in the view of

the slopes and hills in the distance, beyond the green lances of the eucalyptus limbs. The slopes were

still rusty red in the afternoon light, far beyond the dome that sloped down to its curved tie-down wall

eighty meters away. They stood out nicely with the green eucalyptus foreground. The other trees-

ranging from drought- and cold-resistant shrubs from Tasmania to hardy high-altitude species-almost

made a convincing forest. The "grass" was really a mixture of mosses, lichens, and small tundra species,

too. A big favorite of the staff was "vegetable sheep," soft, pale clumps from New Zealand's high

country. Convincing to the visual audience-a golf course on Mars!-but also able to survive a cold

Martian night and even a sudden pressure drop. The toughest stuff from Earth, made still more rugged

with bioengineering.

Axelrod had insisted on the visuals. Make it look Earthy, yes. She had worked for years to make the

inflated domes support life, and there was still plenty to do. Making the raw regolith swarm with

microbes to build soil, coaxing lichens onto the boulders used to help anchor the dome floors in place,

being sure the roots of the first shrubs could survive the cold and prickly alkaline dirt... Years, yes,

grubbing and figuring and trying everything she could muster. For a beginning.

Pay attention! You're on-Camera, and Viktor hates to reshoot.

"Ah, one of my faves..." She altered course to pass by a baobab- a tall, fat, tubular tree from Western

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file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20The%20Sunborn.htmTHESUNBORNGREGORYBENFORDASPECTNEWYORKBOSTONThisbookisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,places,andincidents\aretheproductoftheauthor'simaginationorareusedfictitiously.Anyresemblancetoactualevents,\locales,orpersons,livingordead,iscoinc...

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Gregory Benford - The Sunborn

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