Blue Mars (45 page)

The group from the committee left, and Nirgal sat with the house
marmots, feeling odd. “Well,” he said to them, “now we’re indigenous.”

He was happy in his basin, above the world and its concerns. In
the spring new plants appreared from nowhere, and some he greeted with a trowel
of compost, others he plucked out and turned into compost. The greens of spring
were unlike any other greens—light electric jades and limes of bud and leaf,
new blades of emerald grass, blue nettles, red leaves. And then later the
flowers, that tremendous expense of a plant’s energy, the push beyond survival,
the reproductive urge all around him ... sometimes when Na-dia and Nikki came
back from their walks holding miniature bouquets in their big hands, it seemed
to Nirgal that the world made sense. He would eye them, and think about
children, and feel some wild edge in him that was not usually there.

It was a feeling generally shared, apparently. Spring lasted 143
days in the southern hemisphere, coming all the way back from the harsh
aphelion winter. More plants bloomed as the spring months passed, first early
ones like promise-of-spring and snow liverwort, then later ones such as phlox
and heather, then saxifrage and Tibetan rhubarb, moss campion and alpine
nailwort, cornflowers and edelweiss, on and on until every patch of green
carpet in the rocky palm of the basin was touched with brilliant dots of cyanic
blue, dark pink, yellow, white, each color waving in a layer at the
characteristic height of the plant holding it, all of them glowing in the dusk
like drips of light, welling out into the world from nowhere—a pointillist
Mars, the ribbiness of the seamed basin etched in the air by this scree of
color. He stood in a cupped rock hand which tilted its snowmelt down a lifeline
crease in the palm, down into the wide world so far below, a vast shadowy world
that loomed to the west under the sun, all hazy and low. The last light of day
seemed to shine slightly upward.

One clear morning Jackie appeared on his house AI screen, and
announced she was on the piste from Odessa to Libya, and wanted to drop by.
Nirgal agreed before he had time to think.

He went down to the path by the outlet stream to greet her. Little
high basin . . . there were a million craters like it in the south. Little old
impact. Nothing the slightest bit distinguished about it. He remembered Shining
Mesa, the stupendous yellow view at dawn.

They came up in three cars, bouncing wildly over the terrain, like
kids. Jackie was driving the first car, Antar the second. They were laughing
hard as they got out. Antar didn’t seem to mind losing the race. They had a whole
group of young Arabs with them. Jackie and Antar looked young themselves,
amazingly so; it had been a long time since Nirgal had seen them, but they had
not changed at all. The treatments; current folk wisdom was to get it done
early and often, ensuring perpetual youth and balking any of the rare diseases
that still killed people from time to time. Balking death entirely, perhaps.
Early, often. They still looked like they were fifteen m-years old. But Jackie
was a year older than Nirgal, and he was almost thirty-three m-years old now,
and feeling older. Looking at their laughing faces, he thought, I’ll have to
get the treatment myself someday.

So they wandered around, stepping on the grass and ooh-ing and
ahhing at the flowers, and the basin seemed smaller and smaller with every
exclamation they made. Near the end of their visit Jackie took him to one side,
looking serious.

She said, “We’re having trouble holding off the Terrans, Nirgal.
They’re sending up almost a million a year, just like you said they never
could. And these new arrivals aren’t joining Free Mars like they used to.
They’re still supporting their home governments. Mars isn’t changing them fast
enough. If this goes on, then the whole idea of a free Mars will be a joke. I
sometimes wonder if it was a mistake to leave the cable up.”

She frowned and twenty years jumped onto her face all at once.
Nirgal suppressed a little shudder.

“It would help if you weren’t hiding here,” she exclaimed with
sudden anger, dismissing the basin with a wave of her hand. “We need everyone
we can get to help. People still remember you now, but in a few years. . ..”

So he only had to wait a few more years, he thought. He watched
her. She was beautiful, yes. But beauty was a matter of the spirit, of
intelligence, vivacity, empathy. So that while Jackie grew ever more beautiful,
at the same time she grew less beautiful. Another mysterious infolding. And
Nirgal was not pleased by this internal loss in Jackie, not in any way; it was
only one more note in the chord of his Jackie pain, really. He didn’t want it
to be true.

“We can’t really help them by taking more immigrants,” she said.
“That was wrong, when you said that on Earth. They know it too. They can see it
better than we can, no doubt. But they send people anyway. And you know why?
You know why? Just to wreck things here. Just to make sure there isn’t
someplace where people are doing it right. That’s their only reason.”

Nirgal shrugged. He didn’t know what to say; probably there was
some truth to what she had said, but it was just one of a million different
reasons for people to come; there was no reason to fix on it.

“So you won’t come back,” she said at last. “You don’t care.”

Nirgal shook his head. How to say to her that she was not worried
about Mars, but about her own power? He wasn’t the one who could tell her that.
She wouldn’t believe him. And maybe it was only true to him anyway.

Abruptly she stopped trying to reach him. A regal glance at Antar,
and Antar did the work of gathering their coterie into the cars. A final
questioning look; a kiss, full on the mouth, no doubt to bother Antar, or him,
or both of them; like an electric shock to the soul; and she was off.

He spent the afternoon and the next day wandering, sitting on flat
rocks and watching the little rivulets bounce downstream. Once he remembered
how fast water had fallen on Earth. Unnatural. No. But this was his place,
known and loved, every dyad and every clump of campion, even the speed of water
as it lofted off stone and plashed down in its smooth silver shapes. The way
moss felt under the finger pads. His visitors were people for whom Mars was
forever an idea, a nascent state, a political situation. They lived in the
tents and they might as well have been in a city anywhere, and their devotion,
while real, was given to some cause or idea, some Mars of the mind. Which was
fine. But for Nirgal now it was the land that mattered, the places where water
arrived just so, trickling over the billion-year-old rock onto pads of new
moss. Leave politics to the young, he had done his part. He didn’t want to do
anymore. Or at least he wanted to wait until Jackie was gone. Power was like
Hiroko, after all—it always slipped away. Didn’t it? Meanwhile, the cirque like
an open hand.

But then one morning when he went out for a dawn walk, there was
something different. The sky was clear, its purest morning purple, but a
juniper’s needles had a yellowish tinge to them, and so did the moss, and the
potato leaves on their mounds.

He plucked the yellowest samples of needles and sprigs and leaves,
and took them back to the workbench in his greenhouse. Two hours’ work with
microscope and AI did not find any problem, and he went back out and pulled up
some root samples, and bagged some more needles and leaves and blades and flowers.
Much of the grass had a wilted look, though it wasn’t a hot day.

Heart thudding, stomach taut, he worked all day and into the
night. He could discover nothing. No insects, no pathogens. But the potato
leaves in particular looked yellow. That night he called Sax and explained the
situation. By coincidence Sax was visiting the university in Sabishii, and he
drove up the next morning in a little rover, the latest from Spencer’s co-op.

“Nice,” Sax said as he got out and looked around. He checked
Nirgal’s samples in the greenhouse. “Hmm,” he said. “I wonder.”

He had brought some instruments in his car, and they lugged them
into the boulder and he went to work. At the end of a long day he said, “I
can’t find anything. We’ll have to take some samples down to Sabishii.”

“You can’t find anything?”

“No pathogen. No bacteria, no virus.” He shrugged. “Let’s take
several potatoes.”

They went out and dug potatoes from the field. Some of them were
gnarled, elongated, cracked. “What is it?” Nirgal exclaimed.

Sax was frowning a little. “Looks like spindle tuber disease.”

“What causes it?”

“A viroid.”

“What’s that?”

“A bare RNA fragment. Smallest known infectious agent. Strange.”

“Ka.” Nirgal felt his stomach clamping inward. “How did it get
here?”

“On a parasite, probably. This kind seems to be infecting grass.
We need to find out.”

So they gathered samples, and drove back down to Sabishii.

Nirgal sat on a futon on the floor of Tariki’s living room,
feeling sick. Tariki and Sax talked long after dinner, discussing the situation.
Other viroids had been appearing in a rapid dispersal from Tharsis; apparently
they had made it across the cordon sanitaire of space, arriving on a world that
had been previously innocent of them. They were smaller than viruses, much
smaller, and quite a bit simpler. Nothing but strands of RNA, Tariki said,
about fifty nanometers long. Individuals had a molecular weight of about
130,000, while the smallest known viruses had molecular weights of over a
million. They were so small that they had to be centrifuged at over 100,000 g
in order to be pulled out of suspension.

The potato-spindle-tuber viroid was well understood, Tariki told
them, tapping around on his screen and pointing at the schematics called up. A
chain of merely 359 nucleo-tides, lined out in a closed single strand with
short double-strand regions braiding it. Viroids like this one caused several
plant diseases, including pale cucumber disease, chrysanthemum stunt, chlorotic
mottle, cadang-cadang, citrus exocortis. Viroids had also been confirmed as the
agent in some animal brain diseases, like scrapie, and kuru, and
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The viroids used host enzymes to
reproduce, and then were taken to be-regulatory molecules in the nuclei of
infected cells, disturbing growth-hormone production in particular.

The particular viroid in Nirgal’s basin, Tariki said, had mutated
from potato spindle tuber. They were still identifying it in the labs at the
university, but the sick grass made him sure they were going to find something
different, something new.

Nirgal felt sick. The names of the diseases alone were enough to
do it. He stared at his hands, which had been plunged thick in infected plants.
Through the skin, into the brain, some kind of spongiform encephalopathy,
mushroom growths of brain blooming everywhere.

“Is there anything we can do to fight it?” he said.

Sax and Tariki looked at him.

“First,” Sax said, “we have to find out what it is.”

That turned out to be no simple matter. After a few days, Nirgal
returned to his basin. There he could at least do something; Sax had suggested
removing all the potatoes from the potato fields. This was a long dirty task, a
kind of negative treasure hunt, as he turned up diseased tuber after tuber.
Presumably the soil itself would still hold the viroid. It was possible he
would have to abandon the field, or even the basin. At best, plant something
else. No one yet understood how viroids reproduced; and the word from Sabishii
was that this might not even be a viroid as previously understood.

“It’s a shorter strand than usual,” Sax said. “Either a new
viroid, or something like a viroid but smaller still.” In the Sabishii labs
they were calling it “the virid.”

A long week later, Sax came back up to the basin. “We can try to
remove it physically,” he said over dinner. “Then plant different species, ones
that are resistant to viroids. That’s the best we can do.”

“But will that work?”

“The plants susceptible to infection are fairly specific. You got
hit by a new one, but if you change grasses, and types of potatoes—perhaps
cycle out some of your potato-patch soil....” Sax shrugged.

Nirgal ate with more appetite than he *had had for the previous
week. Even the suggestion of a possible solution was a great relief. He drank
some wine, felt better and better. “These things are strange, eh?” he said over
an after-dinner brandy. “What life will come up with!”

“If you call it life.”

“Well, of course.”

Sax didn’t reply.

“I’ve been looking at the news on the net,” Nirgal said. “There
are a lot of infestations. I had never noticed before. Parasites, viruses....”

“Yes. Sometimes I worry about a global plague. Something we can’t
stop.”

“Ka! Could that happen?”

“There’s all kinds of invasions going on. Population surges,
sudden die-offs. All over. Things in disequilibrium. Upsetting balances we
didn’t even know existed. Things we don’t understand.” As always this thought
made Sax unhappy.

“Biomes will eventually come into equilibrium,” Nirgal suggested.