After that winds blew from the south for several days. They caught a glimpse of Cassini, another great old crater, and passed over hundreds of smaller ones. They dropped several windmills per day, but the flight was giving them a stronger sense of the size of the planet, and the project began to seem like a joke, as if they flew over Antarctica and tried to melt the ice by setting down a number of camping stoves. “You’d have to drop millions to make any difference,” Nadia said as they climbed up from another drop.
“True,” Arkady said. “But Sax would like to drop millions. He’s got an automated assembly line that will just keep churning them out, it’s only distribution that is a problem. And besides, it’s just one part of the campaign he has in mind.” He gestured back toward the last arc of Cassini, inscribing the whole northwest. “Sax would like to bang out a few more holes like that one. Capture some icy moonlets from Saturn, or from the asteroid belt if he can find any, and push them back and smash them into Mars. Make hot craters, melt the permafrost— they’d be like oases.”
“Dry oases, wouldn’t they be? You’d lose most of the ice on entry, and have the rest disappear on contact.”
“Sure, but we can use more water vapor in the air.”
“But it wouldn’t just vaporize, it would break into its constituent atoms.”
“Some of it. But hydrogen and oxygen, we could use more of both.”
“So you’re bringing hydrogen and oxygen from Saturn? Come on, there’s lots of both here already! You could just break down some of the ice.”
“Well, it’s just one of his ideas.”
“I can’t wait to hear what Ann says to that.” She sighed, thought about it. “The thing to do, I suppose, would be to graze an ice asteroid through the atmosphere, as if trying to aerobrake it. That would burn it up without breaking the molecules apart. You’d get water vapor in the atmosphere, which would help, but you wouldn’t be bombing the surface with explosions as big as a hundred hydrogen bombs going off all at once.”
Arkady nodded. “Good idea! You should tell Sax.”
“You tell him.”
East of Cassini the terrain grew rougher than ever. This was some of the oldest surface on the planet, cratered to saturation in the earliest years of torrential bombardment. A hellish age, the Noachian, you could see that in the landscape. No Man’s Land from a titanic trench war, the sight of it induced a kind of numbness after a while, a cosmological shell shock.
They floated on, east, northeast, southeast, south, northeast, west, east, east. They finally came to the end of Xanthe, and began to descend the long slope of Syrtis Major Planitia. This was a lava plain, much less densely cratered than Xanthe. The land sloped down and down, until finally they drifted over a smooth-floored basin: Isidis Planitia, one of the lowest points on Mars. It was the essence of the northern hemisphere, and after the southern highlands it seemed especially smooth and flat and low. And it too was a very large region. There really was a lot of land on Mars.
Then one morning when they lofted up to cruising altitude, a trio of peaks rose over the eastern horizon. They had come to Elysium, the only other Tharsislike “bulge continent” that the planet had. Elysium was a much smaller bulge than Tharsis, but it was still big, a high continent, 1,000 kilometers long and ten kilometers taller than the surrounding terrain. As with Tharsis, it was ringed by patches of fractured land, crack systems caused by the uplift. They flew over the westernmost of these crack systems, Hephaestus Fossae, and found the area an unearthly sight: five long deep parallel canyons, like claw marks in the bedrock. Elysium loomed beyond, a saddleback in shape, Elysium Mons and Hecates Tholus rearing at each end of a long spine range, 5,000 meters higher than the bulge they punctuated: an awesome sight. Everything about Elysium was so much bigger than anything Nadia and Arkady had seen so far that as the dirigible floated toward the range, the two were speechless for minutes at a time. They sat in their seats, watching it all float slowly toward them. When they did speak, it was just thinking aloud: “Looks like the Karakoram,” Arkady said. “Desert Himalayas. Except these are so simple. Those volcanoes look like Fuji. Maybe people will hike up them someday in pilgrimages.”
Nadia said, “These are so big, it’s hard to imagine what the Tharsis volcanoes will look like. Aren’t the Tharsis volcanoes twice as big as these?”
“At least. It does look like Fuji, don’t you think?”
“No, it’s a lot less steep. Why, did you ever see Fuji?”
“No.”
After a while: “Well, we’d better try to go around the whole damn thing,” Arkady said. “I’m not sure we have the loft to get over those mountains.”
So they turned the props and pushed south as hard as they could, and the winds naturally cooperated, as they were curving around the continent too. So the Arrowhead floated southeast into a rough mountainous region called Cerberus, and all of the next day they could mark their progress by the sight of Elysium, passing slowly to their left. Hours passed, the massif shifted in their side windows; the slowness of the shift made it plain just how big this world was. Mars has as much land surface as the Earth— everyone always said that, but it had been just a phrase. Their creep around Elysium was the proof of the senses.
• • •
The days passed: up in the frigid morning air, over the jumbled red land, down in the sunset, to bounce at an airy anchorage. One evening when the supply of windmills had dwindled they rearranged those that remained, and moved their beds together under the starboard windows. They did it without discussion, as if it had been the obvious thing to do when they had room; as if they had already agreed to do it long before. And as they moved around the cramped gondola rearranging things, they bumped into each other just as they had all trip long, but now intentionally, and with a sensuous rubbing which accentuated what they had been up to all along, accidents become foreplay; and finally Arkady burst out laughing and caught her up into a wild bear hug, and Nadia shouldered him back onto their new double bed and they kissed like teenagers, and made love through the night. And after that they slept together, and made love frequently in the ruddy glow of dawn and in the starry black nights, with the ship lightly bobbing at its moorings. And they lay together talking, and the sensation of floating as they embraced was palpable, more romantic than any train or ship. “We became friends first,” Arkady said once, “that’s what makes this different, don’t you think?” He prodded her with a finger. “I love you.” It was as if he were testing the words with his tongue. It was clear to Nadia that he hadn’t said them often; it was clear they meant a lot to him, a kind of commitment. Ideas meant so much to him! “And I love you,” she said.
And in the mornings Arkady would pad up and down the narrow gondola naked, his red hair bronzed like everything else by the horizontal morning light, and Nadia would watch from their bed feeling so serene and happy that she had to remind herself that the floating sensation was probably just Martian g. But it felt like joy.
• • •
One night as they were falling asleep Nadia said curiously, “Why me?”
“Huhn?” He had been almost asleep.
“I said, why me? I mean, Arkady Nikelyovich, you could have loved any of the women here, and they would have loved you back. You could have had Maya if you wanted.”
He snorted. “I could have had Maya! Oh my! I could have had the joy of Maya Katarina! Just like Frank and John!” He snorted, and they both laughed out loud. “How could I have passed on such joy! Silly me!” He giggled until she punched him.
“All right, all right. One of the others then, the beautiful ones, Janet or Ursula or Samantha.”
“Come on,” he said. He propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. “You really don’t know what beauty is, do you?”
“I certainly do,” Nadia said mulishly.
Arkady ignored her and said, “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at
her belly, “expressed in curves.”
“Curves I’ve got,” Nadia said, pushing his hand away.
He leaned forward and tried to bite her breast, but she dodged him.
“Beauty is what you are, Nadezhda Francine. By these criteria you are queen of Mars.”
“Princess of Mars,” she corrected absently, thinking it over.
“Yes that’s right. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky, the nine-fingered Princess of Mars.”
“You’re not a conventional man.”
“No!” He hooted. “I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!— the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward.” And he laughed like a wild man.
• • •
One morning they crossed the last broken hills of Cerberus, and floated out over the flat dusty plain of Amazonis Planitia. Arkady brought the dirigible down, to set a windmill in a pass between two final hillocks of old Cerberus. Something went wrong with the clasp on the winch hook, however, and it snapped open when the windmill was only halfway to the ground. The windmill thumped down flat on its base. From the ship it looked okay, but when Nadia suited up and descended in the sling to check it out, she found that the hot plate had cracked away from the base.
And there, behind the plate, was a mass of something. A dull green something with a touch of blue to it, dark inside the box. She reached in with a screwdriver and poked at it carefully. “Shit,” she said.
“What?” Arkady said above.
She ignored him and scraped some of the substance into a bag she used for screws and nuts.
She got into the sling. “Pull me back up,” she ordered.
“What’s wrong?” Arkady asked.
“Just get me up there.”
He closed the bomb bay doors after her, and met her as she was getting out of the sling. “What’s up?”
She took off her helmet. “You know what’s up, you bastard!” She took a swing at him and he leaped back, banging into a wall of windmills. “Ow!” he cried; a vane had caught him in the back. “Hey! What’s the problem! Nadia!”
She took the bag from her walker pocket and waved it before him. “This is the problem! How could you do it? How could you lie to me? You bastard, do you have any idea what kind of trouble this is going to get us in? They’ll come up here and send us all back to Earth!”
Round-eyed, Arkady rubbed his jaw. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Nadia,” he said earnestly. “I don’t lie to my friends. Let me see that.”
She stared at him and he stared back, his arm stretched out for the bag, the whites of his eyes visible all the way round the irises. He shrugged, and she frowned.
“You really don’t know?” she demanded.
“Know what?”“What?”
She couldn’t believe he would fake ignorance; it just wasn’t his style. Which suddenly made things very strange. “At least some of our windmills are little algae farms.”
“The fucking windmills that we’ve been dropping everywhere,” she said. “They’re stuffed with Vlad’s new algae or lichen or whatever it is. Look.” She put the little bag on the tiny kitchen table, opened it, and used the screwdriver to spoon out a little bit of it. Little knobby chunks of bluish lichen. Like Martian life-forms out of an old pulp novel.
They stared at it.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Arkady said. He leaned over until his eyes were a centimeter from the stuff on the table.
“You swear you didn’t know?” Nadia demanded.
“I swear. I wouldn’t do that to you, Nadia. You know that.”
She heaved a big breath. “Well— our friends would do it to us, apparently.”
He straightened up and nodded. “That’s right.” He was distracted, thinking hard. He went to one of the windmill bases and hefted it away from the others. “Where was it?”
“Behind the heating pad.”
They went to work on it with Nadia’s tools, and got it open. Behind the plate was another colony of Underhill algae. Nadia poked around at the edges of the plate and discovered a pair of small hinges where the top of the plate met the inside of the container wall. “Look, it’s made to open.”
“But who opens it?” Arkady said.
“Radio?”
“Well I’ll be damned.” Arkady stood, walked up and down the narrow corridor. “I mean . . .”
“How many dirigible trips have been made so far, ten? Twenty? And all of them dropping these things?”
Arkady started to laugh. He tilted his head back, and his huge crazed grin split his red beard in two, and he laughed until he held his sides. “Ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Nadia, who didn’t think it was funny at all, nevertheless felt her face grinning at the sight of him. “It’s not funny!” she protested. “We’re in big trouble!”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Definitely! And it’s all your fault! Some of those fool biologists in the trailer park took your anarchist rant seriously!”
“Well,” he said, “that at least is a point in their favor, the bastards. I mean—” he went back to the kitchen table to stare at the clump of blue stuff—”who exactly do you think we’re talking about, anyway? How many of our friends are in on this? And why in the world didn’t they tell me?”
This really rankled, she could tell. In fact the more he thought about it, the less amused he was, because the algae meant there was a subculture in their group that was acting outside UNOMA supervision but had not let Arkady in on it, even though he had been the first and most vocal advocate of such subversion. What did that mean? Were there people who were on his side but didn’t trust him? Were there dissidents with a competing program?
They had no way of telling. Eventually they pulled anchor, and sailed on over Amazonis. They passed a medium-sized crater named Pettit, and Arkady remarked that it would make a good site for a windmill, but Nadia only snarled. They flew by, talking the situation over. Certainly several people in the bioengineering labs had to be in on it; probably most of them; maybe all. And then Sax, the designer of the windmills, certainly had to be a part of it. And Hiroko had been an advocate of the windmills, but they had neither been sure why— it was impossible to judge whether she would approve of something like this or not, as she was simply too close with her opinions. But it was possible.
As they talked it over, they took the broken windmill completely apart. The heating plate doubled as a gate for the compartment containing the algae; when the gate opened, the algae would be released into an area that would be a bit warmer because of the hot plate itself. Each windmill thus functioned as a micro-oasis, and if the algae managed to survive with its help, and then grow beyond the small area warmed by the hot plate, then good. If not it was not going to do very well on Mars anyway. The hot plate served to give it a good sendoff, nothing more. Or so its designers must have thought. “We’ve been made into Johnny Appleseed,” Arkady said.
“Johnny what?”
“American folktale.” He told her about it.
“Yeah, right. And now Paul Bunyan is going to come kick our ass.”
“Ha. Never. Big Man is much bigger than Paul Bunyan, believe me.”
“Big Man?”
“You know, all those names for landscape features. Big Man’s Footprints, Big Man’s Bathtub, Big Man’s Golf Course, whatever.”
“Ah yeah.”
“Anyway, I don’t see why we should get in trouble. We didn’t know anything about it.”
“Now who’s going to believe that?”
“. . . Good point. Those bastards, they really got me with this one.”
Clearly this was what bothered Arkady most. Not that they had contaminated Mars with alien biota, but that he had been kept out of a secret. Men were such egomaniacs when it came down to it. And Arkady, he had his own group of friends, perhaps more than that: people who agreed with him, followers of a sort. The whole Phobos crew, a lot of the programmers in Underhill. And if some of h
is own people were keeping things from him, that was bad; but if another group had secret plans of its own, that was worse, apparently, because they were at least interference, and perhaps competition.
Or so he seemed to think. He wouldn’t say much of this explicitly, but it became obvious in his mutterings, and his sudden sharp curses, which were genuine even though they alternated with bursts of hilarity. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he was pleased or angry, and Nadia finally believed that he was both at once. That was Arkady; he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn’t much worried about consistency. But she wasn’t too sure she liked his reasons this time, for either his anger or his amusement, and she told him so with considerable irritation.
“Well, but come on!” he cried. “Why should they keep it a secret from me, when it was my idea to begin with?”
“Because they knew I might come along with you. If they told you, you would have had to tell me. And if you told me, I would have stopped it!”
Arkady laughed outrageously at this. “So it was pretty considerate of them after all!”
“Fuck.”
The bioengineers, Sax, the people in the Quarter who had actually constructed the things. Someone in communications, probably . . . there were quite a few who must have known.
“What about Hiroko?” Arkady asked.
They couldn’t decide. They didn’t know enough of her views to be able to guess what she might think. Nadia was pretty sure she was in on it, but couldn’t explain why. “I suppose,” she said, thinking about it, “I suppose I feel like there is this group around Hiroko, the whole farm team and a fair number of others, who respect her and . . . follow her. Even Ann, in a way. Although Ann will hate this when she hears about it! Whew! Anyway, it just seems to me that Hiroko would know about anything secret going on. Especially something having to do with ecological systems. The bioengineering group works with her most of the time, after all, and for some of them she’s like a guru, they almost worship her. They probably got her advice when they were splicing this algae together!”
“Hmm. . . .”
“So they probably got her agreement for the idea. Maybe I should even say her permission.”