Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 3 - Green Mars

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Areoformation

The point is not to make another Earth. Not another Alaska or Tibet, not

a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make

something new and strange, something Martian.

In a sense our intentions don't even matter. Even if we try to make

another Siberia or Sahara, it won't work. Evolution won't allow it, and at its

heart this is an evolutionary process, an endeavor driven at a level below

intention, as when life made its first miracle leap out of matter, or when it

crawled out of sea onto land.

Again we struggle in the matrix of a new world, this time truly alien.

Despite the great long glaciers left by the giant floods of 2061, it is a very

arid world; despite the beginnings of atmosphere creation, the air is still

very thin; despite all the applications of heat, the average temperature is

still well below freezing. All these conditions make survival for living things

difficult in the extreme. But life is tough and adaptable, it is the green force

viriditas, pushing into the universe. In the decade following the

catastrophes of 2061, people struggled in the cracked domes and torn

tents, patching things up and getting by; and in our hidden refuges, the

work of building a new society went on. And out on the cold surface new

plants spread over the flanks of the glaciers, and down into the warm low

basins, in a slow inexorable surge.

Of course all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the

minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a

powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn't,

pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of new

species. And as the generations pass, all the members of a biosphere

evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex communal response,

a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we

intervene in it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures

evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. And

eventually the designers' minds, along with everything else, have been

forever changed.

Back on the beach great panes of ice stabbed the sand, and some

chunks of dry ice fizzed in the water of the lake. When the children were all

clumped around him Peter stood with his head craned back, staring at the

dome so far above. "Back to the village," he said in his no-nonsense tone.

On the way there he laughed. "The sky is falling!" he squeaked, tousling

Nirgal's hair. Nirgal blushed and Dao and Jackie laughed, their frosted

breath shooting out in quick white plumes.

Peter was one of those who climbed the side of the dome to repair it. He

and Kasei and Michel spidered over the village in sight of all, over the

beach and then the lake until they were smaller than children, hanging in

slings from ropes attached to icehooks. They sprayed the flaw in the dome

with water until it froze into a new clear layer, coating the white dry ice.

When they came down they talked of the warming world outside. Hiroko

had emerged from her little bamboo stand by the lake to watch, and Nirgal

said to her, "Will we have to leave?"

"We will always have to leave," Hiroko said. "Nothing on Mars will last."

But Nirgal liked it under the dome. In the morning he woke in his own

round bamboo room, high in Creche Crescent, and ran down to the frosty

dunes with Jackie and Rachel and Frantz and the other early risers. He

saw Hiroko on the far shore, walking the beach like a dancer, floating over

her own wet reflection. He wanted to go to her but it was time for school.

They went back to the village and crowded into the schoolhouse

coatroom, hanging up their down jackets and standing with their blue hands

stretched over the heating grate, waiting for the day's teacher. It could be

Dr. Robot and they would be bored senseless, counting his blinks like the

seconds on the clock. It could be the Good Witch, old and ugly, and then

they would be back outside building all day, exuberant with the joy of tools.

Or it could be the Bad Witch, old and beautiful; and they would be stuck

before their lecterns all morning trying to think in Russian, in danger of a

rap on the hand if they giggled or fell asleep. The Bad Witch had silver hair

and a fierce glare and a hooked nose, like the ospreys that lived in the

pines by the lake. Nirgal was afraid of her.

and she tried to hit him and Maya with the same furious swing, and fell over

bare-bottomed and howled.

** *

It wasn't true that Jackie was their sister. There were twelve sansei or

third-generation children in Zygote, and they knew each other like brothers

and sisters and many of them were, but not all. It was confusing and

seldom discussed. Jackie and Dao were the oldest, Nirgal a season

younger, the rest bunched a season after that: Rachel, Emily, Reull, Steve,

Simud, Nanedi, Tiu, Frantz, and Huo Hsing. Hiroko was mother to

everyone in Zygote, but not really-only to Nirgal and Dao and six other of

the sansei, and several of the nisei grownups as well. Children of the

mother goddess.

But Jackie was Esther's daughter. Esther had moved away after a fight

with Kasei, who was Jackie's father. Not many of them knew who their

fathers were. Once Nirgal had been crawling over a dune after a crab when

Esther and Kasei had loomed overhead, Esther crying and Kasei shouting,

"If you're going to leave me then leave!" He had been crying too. He had a

pink stone eyetooth. He too was a child of Hiroko's; so Jackie was Hiroko's

granddaughter. That was how it worked. Jackie had long black hair and

was the fastest runner in Zygote, except for Peter. Nirgal could run the

longest, and sometimes ran around the lake three or four times in a row,

just to do it, but Jackie was faster in the sprints. She laughed all the time. If

Nirgal ever argued with her she would say, "All right Uncle Nirgie," and

laugh at him. She was his niece, although a season older. But not his

sister.

The school door crashed open and there was Coyote, teacher for the

day. Coyote traveled all over the world, and spent very little time in Zygote.

It was a big day when he taught them. He led them around the village

finding odd things to do, but all the time he made one of them read aloud,

from books impossible to understand, written by philosophers, who were

went from blue to white, and their teeth chattered so much they couldn t talk

clearly. "You kids sure get cold easy," he said. "All but Nirgal."

Nirgal was good with cold. He knew intimately all its many stages, and

he did not dislike the feel of it. People who disliked cold did not understand

that one could adjust to it, that its bad effects could all be dealt with by a

sufficient push from within. Nirgal was very familiar with heat as well. If you

pushed heat out hard enough, then cold only became a sort of vivid

shocking envelope in which you moved. And so cold's ultimate effect was

as a stimulant, making you want to run.

"Hey Nirgal, what's the air temperature?"

"Two seventy-one."

Coyote's laugh was scary, an animal cackle that included all the noises

anything could make. Different every time too. "Here, let's stop the wave

machine and see what the lake looks like flat."

The water of the lake was always liquid, while the water ice coating the

underside of the dome had to stay frozen. This explained most of their

mesocosmic weather, as Sax put it, giving them their mists and sudden

winds, their rain and fog and occasional snow. On this day the weather

machine was almost silent, the big hemisphere of space under the dome

nearly windless. With the wave machine turned off, the lake soon settled

down to a round flat plate. The surface of the water became the same white

color as the dome, but the lake bottom, covered by green algae, was still

visible through the white sheen. So the lake was simultaneously pure white

and dark green. On the far shore the dunes and scrub pines were reflected

upside down in this two-toned water, as perfectly as in any mirror. Nirgal

stared at the sight, entranced, everything falling away, nothing there but

this pulsing green/white vision. He saw: there were two worlds, not one-two

worlds in the same space, both visible, separate and different but collapsed

together, so that they were visible as two only at certain angles. Push at

vision's envelope, push like one pushed against the envelope of cold:

push.' Such colors! ...

"Mars to Nirgal, Mars to Nirgal!"

Mars! Course just now you re down here like moles in a hole, with vultures

above all ready to eat you, but the day is coming when you walk this planet

free of every bond. You remember what I'm telling you, it's prophecy my

children! And meanwhile look how fine it is, this little ice paradise."

He threw a chip straight 'at the dome, and they all chanted Ice Paradise!

Ice Paradise! Ice Paradise! until diey were helpless with laughter.

But that night Coyote spoke to Hiroko, when he thought no one was

listening. "Roko you got to take those kids outside and show them the

world. Even if it's only under the fog hood. They're like moles in a hole

down here, for Christ's sake." Then he was gone again, who knew where,

off on one of his mysterious journeys into that other world folded over them.

Some days Hiroko came into the village to teach them. These to Nirgal

were the best days of all. She always took them down to the beach; and

going to the beach with Hiroko was like being touched by a god. It was her

world-the green world inside the white-and she knew everything about it,

and when she was there the subtle pearly colors of sand and dome pulsed

with both worlds' colors at once, pulsed as if trying to break free of what

held them. They sat on the dunes, watching the shore birds skitter and

peep as they charged together up and down the strand. Gulls wheeled

overhead and Hiroko asked them questions, her black eyes twinkling

merrily. She lived by the lake with a small group of her intimates, Iwao,

Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all in a little bamboo stand in the dunes. And she

spent a lot of time visiting other hidden sanctuaries around the South Pole.

So she always needed catching up on the village news. She was a slender

woman, tall for one of the issei, as neat as the shore birds in her dress and

her movement. She was old, of course, impossibly ancient like all the issei,

but with something in her manner which made her seem younger than even

Peter or Kasei-just a little bit older than the kids, in fact, with everything in

the world new before her, pushing to break into all its colors.

"Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving

inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's a constant

pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever

as here on Mars.

This to her was the supreme act of love, and when she talked about it,

even if they didn't fully understand, they felt the love. Another push, another

kind of warmth in the envelope of cold. She touched them as she talked,

and they dug for shells as they listened. "Mud clam! Antarctic limpet. Glass

sponge, watch out, it can cut you." It made Nirgal happy just to look at her.

And one morning, as they stood from their dig to do more

beachcombing, she returned his gaze, and he recognized her expression-it

was precisely the expression on his face when he looked at her, he could

feel it in his muscles. So he made her happy too! Which was intoxicating.

He held her hand as they walked the beach. "It's a simple ecology in

some ways," she said as they knelt to inspect another clam shell. "Not

many species, and the food chains are short. But so rich. So beautiful." She

tested the temperature of the lake with her hand. "See the mist? The water

must be warm today."

By this time she and Nirgal were alone, the other kids running around

the dunes or up and down the strand. Nirgal bent down to touch a wave as

it stalled out next to their feet, leaving behind a white lace of foam. "It's two

seventy-five and a little over."

"You're so sure."

"I can always tell."

"Here," she said, "do I have a fever?"

He reached up and held her neck. "No, you're cool."

"That's right. I'm always about half a degree low. Vlad and Ursula can't

figure out why."

"It's because you're happy."

Hiroko laughed, looking just like Jackie, suffused with joy. "I love you,

Nirgal."

Inside he warmed as if a heating grate were in there. Half a degree at

least. "And I love you."

And they walked down the beach hand in hand, silently following the

sandpipers.

day they went into the hangar locks and put on tight elastic jumpers, rolling

up sleeves and legs; then heavy boots, and tight gloves, and finally

helmets, with bubble windows on their front side. Getting more excited

every moment, until the excitement became something very like fright,

especially when Simud started crying and insisting she didn't want to go.

Hiroko calmed her with a long touch. "Come on. I'll be there with you."

They huddled together speechlessly as the adults herded them into the

lock. There was a hissing noise, and then the outer door opened. Clutching

the adults, they walked cautiously outside, bumping together as they

moved.

It was too bright to see. They were in a swirling white mist. The ground

was dotted with intricate ice flowers, all aglint in the bath of light. Nirgal was

holding Hiroko and Coyote by the hand, and they propelled him forward

and let go of his hands. He staggered in the onslaught of white glare. "This

is the fog hood," Hiroko's voice said over an intercom in his ear. "It lasts

through the winter. But now it's Ls 205, springtime, when the green force

pushes hardest through the world, fueled by the sun's light. See it!"

He could see nothing but it: a white coalescing fireball. Sudden sunlight

pierced this ball, transforming it into a spray of color, turning the frosty sand

to shaved magnesium, the ice flowers to incandescent jewels. The wind

pushed at his side and rent the fog; gaps in it appeared, and the land

gaped off into the distance, making him reel. So big! So big-everything was

so big-he went to one knee on the sand, put his hands on his other leg to

keep his balance. The rocks and ice flowers around his boots glowed as if

under a microscope. The rocks were dotted with round scales of black and

green lichen.

Out on the horizon was a low flat-topped hill. A crater. There in the

gravel was a rover track, nearly filled with frost, as if it had been there a

million years. Pattern pulsing in the chaos of light and rock, green lichen

pushing into the white... .

Everyone was talking at once. The other children were beginning to race

around giddily, shrieking with delight as the fog opened up and gave them

a glimpse of the dark pink sky. Coyote was laughing hard. "They're like

over them like molten water. They turned away, unable to face it. Blinking

away floods of tears, Nirgal saw his shadow cast against the fog scraping

over the rocks below them. The shadow was surrounded by a bright

circular band of rainbow light. He shouted loudly and Coyote raced up to

them, his voice in Nirgal's ear crying, "What's wrong! What is it?"

He stopped when he saw the shadow. "Hey, it's a glory! That's called a

glory. It's like the Spectre of the Brocken. Wave your arms up and down!

Look at the colors! Christ almighty, aren't you the lucky ones."

On an impulse Nirgal moved to Jackie's side, and their glories merged,

becoming a single nimbus of glowing rainbow colors, surrounding their blue

double shadow. Jackie laughed with delight and' went off to try it with Peter.

About a year later Nirgal and the other children began to figure out how

to deal with the days when they were taught by Sax. He would start at the

blackboard, sounding like a particularly characterless Al, and behind his

back they would roll their eyes and make faces as he droned on about

partial pressures or infrared rays. Then one of them would see an opening

and begin the game. He was helpless before it. He would say something

like, "In nonshiv-ering thermogenesis the body produces heat using futile

cycles," and one of them would raise a hand and say, "But why, Sax?" and

everyone would stare hard at their lectern and not look at each other, while

Sax would frown as if this had never happened before, and say, "Well, it

creates heat without using as much energy as shivering does. The muscle

proteins contract, but instead of grabbing they just slide over each other,

and that creates the heat." Jackie, so sincerely the whole class nearly lost

it: "But how?" He was blinking now, so fast they almost exploded watching

him. "Well, the amino acids in the proteins have broken covalent bonds,

and the breaks release what is called bond dissociation energy."

"But why?"

their stable number of electrons, and they ll share electrons when they have

to."

"But why?"

Now he was looking trapped. "That's just the way atoms bond. One of

the ways."

"But WHY?"

A shrug. "That's how the atomic force works. That's how things came

out-"

And they all would shout, "in the Big Bang."

They would howl with glee, and Sax's forehead would knot up as he

realized that they had done it to him again. He would sigh, and go back to

where he had been when the game began. But every time they started it

again, he never seemed to remember, as long as the initial why was

plausible enough. And even when he did recognize what was happening,

he seemed helpless to stop it. His only defense was to say, with a little

frown, "Why what?" That slowed the game for a while; but then Nirgal and

Jackie got clever at guessing what in any statement most deserved a why,

and as long as they could do that, Sax seemed to feel it was his job to

continue answering, right on up the chains of because to the Big Bang, or,

every once in a while, to a muttered "We don't know."

"We don't know!" the class would exclaim in mock dismay. "Why not?"

"It's not explained," he would say, frowning. "Not yet."

And so the good mornings with Sax would pass; and both he and the

kids seemed to agree that these were better than the bad mornings, when

he would drone on uninterrupted, and protest "This is really a very

important matter" as he turned from the blackboard and saw a crop of

heads laid out snoring on the desktops.

** *

One morning, thinking about Sax's frown, Nirgal stayed behind in the

school until he and Sax were the only ones left, and then he said, "Why

don't you like it when you can't say why?"

confronted something mysterious, she loved it and it made her happy-it

was viriditas, a holy power. Looking from the white side, when Sax

confronted something mysterious, it was the Great Unexplainable,

dangerous and awful. He was interested in the true, while Hiroko was

interested in the real. Or perhaps it was the other way around-those words

were tricky. Better to say she loved the green world, he the white.

"But yes!" Michel said when Nirgal mentioned this observation to him.

"Very good, Nirgal. Your sight has such insight. In archetypal terminologies

we might call green and white the Mystic and the Scientist. Both extremely

powerful figures, as you see. But what we need, if you ask me, is a

combination of the two, which we call the Alchemist."

The green and the white.

Afternoons the children were free to do what they wanted, and

sometimes they stayed with the day's teacher, but more often they ran on

the beach or played in the village, which lay nestled in its cluster of low

hills, halfway between the lake and the tunnel entrance. They climbed the

spiraling staircases of the big bamboo treehouses, and played hide and

seek among the stacked rooms and the daughter shoots and the hanging

bridges connecting them.

The bamboo dorms made a crescent which held most of the rest of the

village inside it; each of the big shoots was five or seven segments high,

each segment a room, getting smaller as they got higher. The children

each had a room of their own in the top segments of the shoots-windowed

vertical cylinders that were four or five steps across, like the towers of the

castles in their stories. Below them in the middle segments the adults had

their rooms, mostly alone but sometimes in couples; and the bottom

segments were living rooms. From the windows of their top rooms they

looked down on the village rooftops, clustered in the circle of hills and

bamboo and greenhouses like mussels in the lake shallows.

On the beach they hunted shells or played German dodgeball, or shot

arrows across the dunes into blocks of foam. Usually Jackie and Dao

chose the games, and led the teams if there were teams. Nirgal and the

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摘要：

AreoformationThepointisnottomakeanotherEarth.NotanotherAlaskaorTibet,notaVermontnoraVenice,notevenanAntarctica.Thepointistomakesomethingnewandstrange,somethingMartian.Inasenseourintentionsdon'tevenmatter.EvenifwetrytomakeanotherSiberiaorSahara,itwon'twork.Evolutionwon'tallowit,andatitsheartthisisane...

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Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 3 - Green Mars

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