3

Sax threw himself into the work on the glacier and the surrounding terrain. Phyllis went out in the field sometimes, but she was always discreet in her behavior with him; Sax doubted if Claire (or Jessica!) or anyone else realized what had happened— or realized that every few days, it was happening again. This was another complication; how would Lindholm react to Phyllis’s apparent desire for secrecy? But in the end it was not an issue. Lindholm was more or less forced, as a matter of chivalry or compliance or something like that, to act as Sax would have. And so they kept their affair to themselves, much as they would have in Underhill, or on the Ares, or in Antarctica. Old habits die hard.

And with the distraction of the glacier, it was easy enough to keep the affair secret. The ice and the ribbed land around it were fascinating environments, and there was a lot to study and try to understand out there.

The surface of the glacier proved to be extremely broken, as the literature had suggested— mixed with regolith during the flooding, and shot through with trapped carbonation bubbles. Rocks and boulders caught on the surface had melted the ice underneath them, and then it had refrozen around them, in a daily cycle that had left them all about two-thirds submerged. All the seracs, standing above the jumbled surface of the glacier like titanic dolmens, were on close inspection found to be deeply pitted. The ice was brittle because of the extreme cold, and slow to flow downhill because of the reduced gravity; nevertheless it was moving downstream, like a river in slow motion, and because its source was emptied, the whole mass would eventually end up on Vastitas Borealis. And signs of this movement could be found in the newly broken ice seen every day— new crevasses, fallen seracs, cracked bergs. These fresh surfaces were quickly covered by crystalline ice flowers, whose saltiness only added to the speed of crystallization.

Fascinated by this environment, Sax got in the habit of going out by himself every day at dawn, following flagged trails the station crew had set out. In the first hour of the day all the ice glowed in vibrant pink and rose tones, reflecting tints of the sky. As direct sunlight struck the glacier’s smashed surfaces, steam would begin to rise out of the cracks and iced-over pools, and the ice flowers glittered like gaudy jewelry. On windless mornings a small inversion layer trapped the mist some twenty meters overhead, forming a thin orange cloud. Clearly the glacier’s water was diffusing fairly quickly out into the world.

As he hiked through the frigid air he spotted many different species of snow algae and lichen. The glacier-facing slopes of the two lateral ridges were especially well populated, flecked by small patches of green, gold, olive, black, rust, and many other colors— perhaps thirty or forty all told. Sax strolled over these pseudo-moraines carefully, as unwilling to step on the plant life as he would be to step on any experiment in the lab. Although truthfully it looked as though most of the lichens would not notice. They were tough; bare rock and water were all they required, plus light— though not much of that appeared necessary— they grew under ice, inside ice, and even inside porous chunks of translucent rock. In something as hospitable as a crack in the moraine, they positively flourished. Every crack Sax looked in sported knobs of Iceland lichen, yellow and bronze, which under the glass revealed tiny forking stalks, fringed by spines. On flat rocks he found the crustose lichens: button lichen, stud lichen, shield lichen, candellaria, apple-green map lichen, and the red-orange jewel lichen that indicated a concentration of sodium nitrate in the regolith. Clumped under the ice flowers were growths of pale gray-green snow lichen, which under magnification proved to have stalks like the Iceland lichen, great masses of them looking delicate as lace. Worm lichen was dark gray, and under magnification revealed weathered antlers that appeared extremely delicate. And yet if pieces broke off, the algal cells enclosed in their fungal threads would simply keep growing, and develop into more lichen, attaching wherever they came to rest. Reproduction by fragmentation; useful indeed in such an environment.

So the lichen were prospering, and along with the species that Sax could identify, with the help of photos on his wristpad’s little display screen, were many more that seemed not to correspond to any listed species. He was curious enough about these nondescripts to pluck a few samples, to take back and show to Claire and Jessica.

But lichen was only the beginning. On Earth, regions of broken rock newly exposed by retreating ice, or by the growth of young mountains, were called boulder fields, or talus. On Mars the equivalent zone was the regolith— thus effectively the greater part of the surface of the planet. Talus world. On Earth these regions were first colonized by microbacteria and lichen, which, along with chemical weathering, began to break the rock down into a thin immature soil; slowly filling the cracks between rocks. In time there was enough organic material in this matrix to support other kinds of flora, and areas at this stage were called fellfields, fell being Gaelic for stone. It was an accurate name, for stone fields they were, the ground surface studded with rocks, the soil between and under them less than three centimeters thick, supporting a community of small ground-hugging plants.

And now there were fellfields on Mars. Claire and Jessica suggested to Sax that he cross the glacier, and hike downstream along the lateral moraine, and so one morning (slipping away from Phyllis) he did so, and after half an hour’s hiking, stopped on a knee-high boulder. Below him, sloping into the rocky trough next to the glacier, was a wet patch of flat ground, twinkling in the late-morning light. Clearly meltwater ran over it most days— already in the utter stillness of the morning he could hear the drips of little streams under the glacier’s edge, sounding like a choir of tiny wooden chimes. And on this miniature watershed, among the threads of running water, were spots of color, everywhere, leaping out at the eye— flowers. A patch of fellfield, then, with its characteristic millefleur effect, the gray waste peppered with dots of red, blue, yellow, pink, white. . . .

The flowers were mounted on little mossy cushions or florettes, or tucked among hairy leaves. All the plants hugged the dark ground, which would be markedly warmer than the air above it; nothing but grass blades stuck higher than a few centimeters off the soil. He tiptoed carefully from rock to rock, unwilling to step on even a single plant. He knelt on the gravel to inspect some of the little growths, the magnifying lenses on his faceplate at their highest power. Glowing vividly in the morning light were the classic fellfield organisms: moss campion, with its rings of tiny pink flowers on dark green pads; a phlox cushion; five-centimeter sprigs of bluegrass, like glass in the light, using the phlox taproot to anchor its own delicate roots . . . there was a magenta alpine primrose, with its yellow eye and its deep green leaves, which formed narrow troughs to channel water down into the rosette. Many of the leaves of these plants were hairy. There was an intensely blue forget-me-not, the petals so suffused with warming anthocyanins that they were nearly purple— the color that the Martian sky would achieve at around 230 millibars, according to Sax’s calculations on the drive to Arena. It was surprising there was no name for that color, it was so distinctive. Perhaps that was cyanic blue.

The morning passed as he moved very slowly from plant to plant, using his wristpad’s field guide to identify sandwort, buckwheat, pussypaws, dwarf lupines, dwarf clovers, and his namesake, saxifrage. Rock breaker. He had never seen one in the wild before, and he spent a long time looking at the first one he found: arctic saxifrage, Saxifraga hirculus, tiny branches covered with long leaves, ending in small pale blue flowers.

As with the lichens, there were many plants that he couldn’t identify; they exhibited features from different species, even genuses, or else they were completely nondescript, their features an odd melange of features from exotic biospheres, some looking like underwater growths, or new kinds of cacti. Engineered species, presumably, although it was surprising these weren’t listed in the guide. Mutants, perhaps. Ah but there, where a wide crack had collected a deeper layer of humus and tiny rivulet, was a clump of kobresia. Kobresia and the other sedges grew where it was wet, and their extremely absorbent turf chemically altered the soil under it quite rapidly, performing important work in the slow transition from fellfield to alpine meadow. Now that he had spotted it he could see minuscule watercourses marked by their population of sedges, running down through the rocks. Kneeling on a thinsulate pad, Sax clicked off his magnifying glasses and looked around, and as low as he was, he could suddenly see a whole series of little fellfields, scattered on the slope of the moraine like patches of Persian carpet, shredded by the passing ice.

• • •

Back at the station Sax spent a lot of time sequestered in the labs, looking at plant specimens through microscopes, running a variety of tests, and talking about the results to Berkina and Claire and Jessica.

“They’re mostly polyploids?” Sax asked.

“Yes,” Berkina said.

Polyploidy was fairly frequent at high altitudes on Earth, so it was not surprising. It was an odd phenomenon— a doubling or tripling or even quadrupling of the original chromosome number in a plant. Diploid plants, with ten chromosomes, would be succeeded by polyploids with twenty or thirty or even forty chromosomes. Hybridizers had used the phenomenon for years to develop fancy garden plants, because polyploids were usually larger— larger leaves, flowers, fruits, cell sizes— and they often had a wider range than their parents. That kind of adaptability made them better at occupying new areas, like the spaces in and under a glacier. There were islands in the Terran Arctic where eighty percent of the plants were polyploid. Sax supposed that it was a strategy to avoid the destructive effects of excessive mutation rates, which would explain why it occurred in high-UV areas. Intense UV irradiation would break a number of genes, but if they were replicated in the other sets of chromosomes, then there was likely to be no genotypic damage, and no impediment to reproduction.

“We find that even when we haven’t started with polyploids, which we usually do, they change within a few generations.”

“Have you identified the triggering mechanism that causes it?”

“No.”

Another mystery. Sax stared into the microscope, vexed by this rather astonishing gap in the bizarrely rent fabric of biological science. But there was nothing to be done about it; he had looked into the matter himself in his Echus Overlook labs in the 2050s, and it had appeared that polyploidy was indeed stimulated by more UV radiation than the organism was used to, but how cells read this difference, and then actually doubled or tripled or quadrupled their chromosome count . . .

“I must say, I’m surprised at how much everything is flourishing.”

Claire smiled happily. “I was afraid that after Earth you might think this was pretty barren.”

“Well, no.” He cleared his throat. “I guess I expected nothing. Or just algae and lichen. But those fellfields seem to be thriving. I thought it would take longer.”

“It would on Earth. But you have to remember, we’re not just throwing seeds out there and waiting to see what happens. Every single species has been augmented to increase hardiness and speed of growth.”

“And we’ve been reseeding every spring,” Berkina said, “and fertilizing with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.”

“I thought it was denitrifying bacteria that were all the rage.”

“Those are distributed specifically in thick deposits of sodium nitrate, to transpire the nitrogen into the atmosphere. But where we’re gardening we need more nitrogen in the soil, so we spread nitrogen-fixers.”

“It still seems to be going very fast to me. And all of this must have happened before the soletta.”

“The thing is,” Jessica said from her desk across the room, “there isn’t any competition at this point. Conditions are harsh, but these are very hardy plants, and when we put them out there, there isn’t any competition to slow them down.”

“It’s an empty niche,” Claire said.

“And conditions here are better than most places on Mars,” Berkina added. “In the south you’ve got the aphelion winter, and the high altitude. The stations down there report that the winterkill is just devastating. But here the perihelion winter is a lot milder, and we’re only a kilometer high. It’s pretty benign, really. Better than Antarctica in many ways.”

“Especially in the CO2 level,” Berkina said. “I wonder if that doesn’t account for some of that speed you’re talking about. It’s like the plants are being supercharged.”

“Ah,” Sax said, nodding.

So the fellfields were gardens. Aided growth rather than natural growth. He had known that, of course— it was a given everywhere on Mars— but the fellfields, so rocky and diffuse, had looked spontaneous and wild enough to momentarily confuse him. And even remembering they were gardens, he was still surprised that they were so vigorous.

“Well, and now with this soletta pouring sunlight onto the surface!” Jessica exclaimed. She shook her head, as if disapproving. “Natural insolation averaged forty-five percent of Earth’s, and with the soletta it’s supposed to be up to fifty-four.”

“Tell me more about the soletta,” Sax said carefully.

They told him in a kind of round. A group of transnationals, led by Subarashii, had built a circular slatted array of solar sail mirrors, placed between the sun and Mars and aligned to focus inward sunlight that would have just missed the planet. An annular support mirror, rotating in a polar orbit, reflected light back to the soletta to counterbalance the pressure of the sunlight, and that light was bounced back onto Mars as well. Both these mirror systems were truly huge compared to the early freighter sails Sax had enlisted to reflect light onto the surface, and the reflected light they were adding to the system was really significant. “It must have cost a fortune to build them,” Sax murmured.

“Oh, it did. The big transnats are investing like you can’t believe.”

“And they’re not done yet,” Berkina said. “They’re planning to fly an aerial lens just a few hundred kilometers above the surface, and this lens will focus some of the incoming light from the soletta, until it heats the surface up to fantastic temperatures, like five thousand degrees—”

“Five thousand!”

“Yes, I think that’s what I heard. They plan to melt the sand and the regolith underneath, which will release all the volatiles into the atmosphere.”

“But what about the surface?”

“They plan to do it in remote areas.”

“In lines,” Claire said. “So that they end up with ditches?”

“Canals,” Sax said.

“Yes, that’s right.” They laughed.

“Glass-sided canals,” Sax said, troubled by the thought of all those volatiles. Carbon dioxide would be prominent among them, perhaps chief among them.

But he did not want to show too much interest in the larger terraforming issues. He let it go, and soon enough the talk returned to their work. “Well,” Sax said, “I guess some of the fellfields will turn into alpine meadows pretty soon.”

“Oh, they’re already there,” Claire said.

“Really!”

“Yes, well, they’re small. But hike down the western edge about three kilometers, have you done that yet? You’ll see. Alpine meadows and krummholz too. It hasn’t been that difficult. We planted trees without even altering them very much, because a lot of spruce and pine species turned out to have temperature tolerances much lower than they needed in their Terran habitats.”

“That’s peculiar.”

“A holdover from the Ice Ages, I guess. But now it’s coming in handy.”

“Interesting,” Sax said.

And he spent the rest of that day staring into the microscopes without seeing a thing, lost in thought. Life is so much spirit, Hiroko used to say. It was a very strange business, the vigor of living things, their tendency to proliferate, what Hiroko called their green surge, their viriditas. A striving toward pattern: it made him so curious.

• • •

When dawn arrived the next day he woke up in Phyllis’s bed, with Phyllis tangled in the sheets beside him. After dinner the whole group had retired to the observation room, as was becoming habitual, and Sax had continued the conversation with Claire and Jessica and Berkina, and Jessica had been very friendly to him, as was her wont, and Phyllis had seen this, and had followed him to the bathrooms by the elevator, and pounced on him with that shocking seductive embrace of hers, and they had ended up going down to the dorm floor, and to her room. And although Sax had felt uncomfortable about disappearing without saying good-night to the others, he had made love to her passionately enough.

Now, looking at her, he remembered their precipitate departure with distaste. It did not take any more than the most simple-minded sociobiology to explain such behavior: competition for mates, a very basic animal activity. Of course Sax had never been the subject of such competition before, but there was nothing to pride oneself on in this sudden manifestation; clearly it was happening because of Vlad’s cosmetic surgery, which through some chance had rearranged his face into a configuration appealing to women. Although why one arrangement of facial features should be more attractive than another was a total mystery to him. He had heard sociobiological explanations of sexual attractiveness before, and he could see that some of them might have some validity: a man would look for a mate with wide hips to be able safely to give birth to his children, with significant breasts in order to feed his children, etc.; a woman would look for a strong man to feed her children and to father strong children, etc., etc. That made a kind of sense; but none of it had anything to do with facial features. For them, sociobiological explanations got pretty tenuous: wide-set eyes for good eyesight, good teeth to aid health, a prominent nose to avoid getting colds— no. It just wasn’t as sensible as that. It was a matter of chance configurations, somehow appealing to the eye. An aesthetic judgment in which tiny nonfunctional features could make a great difference, which indicated that practical concerns were not a factor. A case in point was a pair of twin sisters with whom Sax had gone to high school— they had been identical twins, and had looked very much alike, and yet somehow one had been plain while the other had been beautiful. No, it was a matter of millimeters of flesh and bone and cartilage, accidentally falling into patterns that pleased or did not. So Vlad had made some alterations to his face, and now women were competing for his attentions, though he was the same person he had always been. A person Phyllis had never shown the slightest interest in before, when he had looked the way nature had made him. It was hard not to be somewhat cynical about it. To be wanted, yes; but wanted for trivialities. . . .

He got out of bed and suited up in one of the latest lightweight suits, so much more comfortable than the old stretch-fabric walkers; one had to insulate against the subfreezing temperatures, and wear a helmet and airtank of course, but there was no longer any need to provide pressure to avoid bruising of the skin. Even 160 millibars was enough for that, and so now it was only a matter of warm clothing and boots, and the helmet. So it only took a few minutes to dress, and then he was out to the glacier again.

He crunched over the hoarfrost on the main flagged trail across the river of ice, and then wound downstream on the western bank, passing the little millefleur fellfields, coated with frost that was already beginning to melt in the light. He came to a place where the glacier dropped down a small escarpment, in a short crazed icefall; it also took a few degrees’ turn to the left, following its bordering ribs. Suddenly a loud creak filled the air, followed by a low-frequency boom that vibrated in his stomach. The ice was moving. He stopped, listening. He heard the distant bell-sound of an under-ice stream. He hiked on, feeling lighter and happier with every step. The morning light was very clear, the steam on the ice like white smoke.

And then, in the shelter of some huge boulders, he came upon an amphitheater of fellfield, dotted with flowers like flecks of paint; and at the bottom of the field was a little alpine meadow, south-facing and shockingly green, the mats of grass and sedge all cut with ice-coated watercourses. And around the edges of the amphitheater, sheltered in cracks and under rocks, hunched a number of dwarf trees.

It was krummholz, then, which in the evolution of mountain landscapes was the next stage after alpine meadows. The dwarf trees he had spotted were actually members of ordinary species, mostly white spruce, Picea glauca, which in these harsh conditions miniaturized on their own, contouring into the protected spaces they sprouted in. Or had been planted in, more likely. Sax saw some lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta, joining the more numerous white spruce. These were the most cold-tolerant trees on Earth, and apparently the Biotique team had added salt tolerance from trees like the tamarisks. All kinds of engineering had been done to aid them, and yet still the extreme conditions stunted their growth, until trees that might have grown thirty meters high crouched in little knee-high pockets of protection, sheered off by winds and winter snowpacks as if by hedge clippers. Thus the name krummholz, German for “crooked wood” or perhaps “elfin wood”— the zone where trees first managed to take advantage of the soil-building work of fellfields and alpine meadows. Treelimit.

Sax wandered slowly around the amphitheater, stepping on rocks, inspecting the mosses, the sedges, the grasses, and every single individual tree. The gnarly little things were twisted as if cultivated by deranged bonsai gardeners. “Oh how nice,” he said out loud more than once, inspecting a branch or a trunk, or a pattern of laminate bark, peeling away like phyllo dough. “Oh how nice. Oh for some moles. Some moles and voles, and marmots and minxes and foxes.”

But the CO2 in the atmosphere was still nearly thirty percent of the air, perhaps fifty millibars all by itself. All mammals would die very quickly in such air. This was why he had always resisted the two-stage terraforming model, which called for a massive CO2 buildup to precede anything else. As if warming the planet were the only goal! But warming was not the goal. Animals on the surface was the goal. This was not only a good in itself, but good also for the plants, many of which needed animals. Most of these fellfield plants propagated on their own, of course, and there were some altered insects that Biotique had released, out there bumbling around in stubborn insect survivalist mode, half alive and only just managing their work of pollination. But there were many other symbiotic ecological functions that needed animals, like the soil aeration accomplished by moles and voles, or the spread of seeds by birds, and without them plants could not thrive, and some would not live at all. No, they needed to reduce the CO2 in the air, probably right back to the ten millibars it had been when they arrived, when it had been the only air there was. Which was why the plan his colleagues had mentioned, to melt the regolith with an aerial lens, was so troubling. It would only increase their problem.

Meanwhile, this unexpected beauty. Hours passed as he inspected specimens one by one, admiring in particular the spiraling trunk and branches, the flaking bark and sprays of needles, of one little lodgepole pine— like a piece of flamboyant sculpture, really. And he was down on his knees, with his face in a sedge and his butt in the air, when Phyllis and Claire and a whole group came trooping down into the meadow, laughing at him and trampling carelessly on the living grass.