4

Marsians

The patio in Yalta Biome was filled by the Outpost’s inhabitants. Almost everyone was there for the welcoming dinner of the Gradivus mission. Earlier that sol, the Hadriaca and Tharsis had blazed through the Martian atmosphere several times to slow down, then had landed at Aurorae. Half of the several hundred kilograms of samples were on board the Interplanetary Transit Vehicle Ophir, ready to head for Earth; the other half had come to Aurorae for further research by Mars’s scientists.

“Congratulations again, Neal,” said Will, as he stopped by the table where three of the astronauts were seated. “I know it is the third or fourth time I’ve said it—”

“No, fifth!”

“Well, whatever. But I can’t say it enough. There are only 150 human beings on Mars, and we just pulled off our own deep space mission. It marks a really serious commitment to exploration. We have six shuttles and they’re needed only twice every twenty-six months to handle terrestrial flights, so we’re in the position to fly one or two asteroid missions per year! That’s more than Earth plans to launch for the near future. So, who’s committed to exploration?”

“We are!” agreed Neal. “We just need more people, Will.”

“I know, and we’re working on that. Columbus 8 was scheduled to fly sixty-four passengers and twelve tourists, but the computer virus and the huge drop in the stock market has caused half the tourists to pull out, and one now wants to settle here for at least a columbiad. So it appears we’ll be flying at least seventy new people here. We plan to import more engineers who can manufacture things we need. We’ll also train more people in shuttle repair.”

“Good, that will help. We need hundreds, though.”

“In time! We don’t have the interplanetary transportation system, Neal, and building a whole new system will cost billions that we don’t have. We need to replace the interplanetary habs with much larger vehicles and expand Embarcadero to provide more robust support and emergency assistance. Anyway, we’re expanding fifty percent again, and we’re importing settlers, not temporary workers. The gold exports are worth twice as much as expected because of economic uncertainty, so that helps, too.”

“That’s true. That will help a lot.”

Will hesitated. “It’ll help a lot for a while, but when gold prices jump, so does terrestrial production, and eventually that’ll depress the price. We could be rolling in dough for two years, then be really short.”

Neal nodded. Will shook hands with Zach. “I can’t thank everyone enough.”

“Thanks, Will.”

He reached out to Helmut. “Twenty-five years old and someone who has walked on Earth, moon, Phobos, Mars, Gradivus, and its moon.”

“I can’t believe it,” said Helmut, with a smile. They shook hands. “I feel like I’ve walked on Venus, too, since I stood on top of the debris pile in the impact crater.”

“That’s right. One of the highlights of the trip,” agreed Will. He waved goodbye to the table, then returned to his family to pick up dishes needing to be taken to the cleaning area. Then Will walked to the podium.

“Can I have everyone’s attention, please.” He paused for the conversation to die down. “We have a reason to celebrate tonight. We have sent six human beings beyond Mars space to another world in our solar system, completed a thorough exploration, reconnoitered its little moon, and brought them back here safely. We confirmed that Gradivus came from Vesta’s southern impact basin, suffered several additional impacts, and in another month our labs here will have dated the various impacts. Gradivus’s regolith contains fragments from all over the asteroid belt and possibly beyond. There are years of research to do on the samples recovered. The Venus samples should tell us when they were blasted off that world and they may contain hints about early life there; the wollastonite probably once was calcium carbonate deposited in an early Venus sea. The amazing thing to add is that we have the laboratory equipment here to do much of the basic study of these samples. We no longer have to export the samples to Earth.”

The audience broke out into spontaneous applause at that point. Will was surprised, but they were proud of their accomplishments as well. An excitement hung in the air. It stimulated Will to remember parts of the speech he had been working on over the last month, one he had decided not to make. “We have much to be proud of,” he continued. “Above all, we should be proud of what we have accomplished here. Mars is a world based on peace, mutual trust, acceptance of differences—I won’t say toleration because it goes beyond that—universal employment and prosperity, dialogue, and consensus. It is a community that develops the potential of all its members. It is a society that so far has been able to tap the talents of its members and help they express them maximally. It is a culture built upon the best of the cultures of Earth, with uniquely Martian additions that could only have been possible here. It is a world dedicated to exploring the unknown, now beyond this world as well. And finally, Mars is a leaven. As Earth appears increasingly to sink into partisanship, conflict, mistrust, a spiral of violence, and impoverishment, Mars can stand out as a beacon of hope and an example that a multicultural, international society really can work. Friends, we must continue our efforts, redouble them, and know that we work toward a great future for Mars and for all of humanity!”

A cheer broke out and applause swept the crowd again. Smiling, Will stepped down from the podium and returned to his table. It had been a good speech, and the spontaneity had improved it.

Dinner gradually broke up as families headed home to put children to bed and single people went back to work or gathered in small groups to relax. After putting the children to bed, Will and Ethel watched a bit of television; their favorite show was sufficiently popular on Mars that it received priority for the limited bandwidth the communications system allowed. After a month, they were still functioning at sixty percent of communications capacity, though a shuttle flight in a month would include repair EVAs for several communications satellites.

The next morning began an ordinary work day, with the usual heavy work load to complete. The family ate breakfast on the Patio in Yalta, where the big screen was carrying the BBC news live. It was a tense sol; the lead story was a United States bombing in Turanistan that had killed seven hundred civilians.

“Wait till you see the story,” said Skip to Will. “It’ll be repeated at the top of the hour. They hit the Grand Mosque during Friday prayer.”

“Skip, they say it was an accident!” exclaimed Roger, angrily. “Why would they do something like this on purpose? It makes no sense. They made an error entering the GPS coordinates.”

“Yeah, right. Roger, the Shaykh of this Mosque was a leading figure in the Lashkar and is still at large. His sermons inspired the computer virus that resulted in the deaths of about six thousand people and the beginning of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression! Accident, my foot. This is the most reactionary White House we’ve had in decades. They’re getting even.”

“They aren’t dumb, Skip. Revenge will only beget more revenge, and they’re sufficiently ethical to know that.”

“Take your choice; they’re either too dumb to program a bomb right or too dumb to realize the consequences of an intentional act of violence against innocent civilians.”

“And we won’t resolve that question here,” replied Will. “Skip, how’s the film?”

Skip didn’t answer right away; he didn’t want to change subjects. “They’ve started working on the special effects, but with the reduced communications, they can’t send any clips to me that are more than about thirty seconds long. It’s a pain.”

“We should be close to one hundred percent in about a month, and you can get it then,” replied Will. “Oh, here’s the story.”

They all turned to the screen. The details were as Skip and Roger had reported, except the death toll at the mosque had now been revised downward to six hundred as the last bodies had been pulled from the rubble; the mosque had been full and it was entirely enclosed because of Turanistan’s cold climate. The toll was expected to rise as the injured died in hospitals, which were overwhelmed by the enormity of the disaster. President White was shown expressing regrets for the event, though he seemed wooden and unconvincing, and he mispronounced several foreign words. Several spokesmen for radical Muslim causes expressed the certainty that revenge terrorism would follow.

The report lasted a full five minutes. It was followed, much to Will’s surprise, by his speech at last night’s dinner. Yalta Biome had several cameras and anything that happened there was regarded as public. “The guys in Houston running the Mars Channel must have liked what I said and rebroadcast it,” he said to Ethel.

“They didn’t ask you?” said Skip.

“No; anything I say here is regarded as public domain.”

“It’s a good speech, but quite a contrast to the previous news item,” noted Skip.

“I know,” replied Will, worriedly.

Soon everyone headed for work. Before Will was able to turn to his email, though, Enlai Tang and Vanessa Smith showed up at his door. “Can we talk to you?” asked Enlai.

“Sure, come in. For how long? I have a teleconference in about an hour.”

“Not that long. Five minutes.” Enlai and Vanessa sat at the table Will had in front of his desk, and he came around to join them. “We’re finishing up a paper for Nature,” said Enlai. “It’ll appear within the next month. We’ve been working very hard for the last seven months to study the five species of microorganisms recovered from the Hellas Ice Chimneys. The paper is coauthored by six people in the biology department at Stanford.”

“And?” asked Will.

“The Stanford people are experts in the genomes of hundreds of species of bacteria,” replied Vanessa. They helped us to convert existing equipment here on Mars into a laboratory for studying the genetic material of the Hellas species. It turns out we’re dealing with species that are not known on Earth. The genetics, however, tell us that their nearest relatives are usually found in tropical marine muds, especially in coral reefs and the deep water near them.”

Will was surprised. “That’s bizarre. You’d think they would have come from deep-sea vents, or from bacteria common in NASA engineering facilities.”

“Meteorites don’t blast many pieces of the deep sea floor into space,” replied Enlai. “And these guys didn’t colonize the chimneys after being accidentally transported to Mars on a spacecraft a decade or two ago. A big impact blasted a lot of terrestrial ejecta into space and some found its way to Mars.”

“But when?” asked Will.

Vanessa smiled. She looked at Enlai, who smiled back. “That’s the question, isn’t it” he replied. “And we can determine the answer roughly by determining the quantity of genetic mutation and estimating the rate of mutation. That’s what the Stanford people have been helping us do over the last seven months. That’s why you haven’t seen me at all for most of that time; our equipment allows very accurate DNA sequencing, but it’s slow. We’ve sequenced eight short DNA segments and we plan to sequence eight more in the next four months. Our estimate is that the bacteria was blasted off the Earth and settled onto Mars between 50 and 90 million years ago.”

“The new Mars climatic model has several warmer periods in that interval,” noted Will.

“Yes,” agreed Enlai. “And by the way, we now have new terminology: we’re using estival, from the Latin for summer, to refer to the times when Mars has a high axial tilt, the poles get lots of sun, and the atmosphere thickens; the added greenhouse effect indeed gives the entire planet a ‘summer.’ When Mars has a very low axial tilt and the poles get extremely cold and the atmosphere almost completely freezes out, we have a hibernal or ‘winter.’”

“And during an estival imported bacteria could spread atmospherically,” noted Will.

“Yes,” agreed Vanessa. “But there is a more interesting implication.”

Will frowned, then he opened his eyes wide as he considered the date. “Chicxulub.”

“Yes,” agreed Enlai. “Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs was by far the largest impact the Earth has experienced in the last two hundred fifty million years. It made the rise of mammals and humans possible. It probably populated Mars as well.”

Will smiled, then they all laughed. “So Mars has had life for sixty-five million years! After that long of an interval, they might as well be considered Martians!”

“Exactly. Mars had life at the beginning and it has had life again for some time. They’re as good as native. They deserve protection.”

“So much for terraforming. Well, no one planned to do that for a century, anyway. Maybe they could be moved to the tops of the volcanoes if we wanted the rest of this world. They’re anerobic, right?”

“Yes; they’re killed by oxygen,” said Vanessa. “We need to plan another trip back to the chimneys later this year to find out how many chimneys have colonies in them. We can also study paleochimneys and determine whether they were inhabited and if they still have spores. There may have been other species in the past, too; every time an estival is replaced by a hibernal, their habitat must shrink drastically and extinction may result. We have to examine the chimneys around Elysium again, also. Maybe there is evidence of past colonies that we didn’t recognize when we visited them.”

“Now we know what to look for. We will want to drill, eventually, to determine how much they’ve spread underground. But I suppose the Mars Council should declare the area a national park, next time it meets, so that it is off limits to settlement and resource exploitation.”

“We definitely won’t be setting up a hydrothermal power station there,” agreed Enlai, wryly. “You’ve got to let Louisa know. This will be public in about two weeks, once the peer reviews of the paper are completed and a publication date is set. It may start to leak earlier.”

“I’ll let her know. Send me a copy of the paper as soon as you feel it’s appropriate.”

“We’ll email a copy to you tomorrow, when it goes to Nature,” replied Vanessa. She and Enlai rose, so Will did as well. He thanked them and they left.

He turned back to his work, then called into a meeting in Houston. Work was beginning to get back to normal in the Commission headquarters, although the new computers had cost ten times as much as they would have a month earlier because of the severe shortage. The meeting reviewed the cargo and passenger manifests for Columbus 8; both were still being finalized, even though the first passengers would be on their way to Gateway Station between the Earth and moon in two months. During the scheduled long pauses—the meeting had three built-in pauses for communications to shift back and forth between Earth and Mars—he did email.

At lunch Will went back to the patio, where he and the family always sat at their own table with two empty seats in case anyone wanted to join them briefly. But normally lunch was a family gathering for them; often they took their food home to prevent interruptions. That sol, with the news from Turanistan, they sat to watch the big screen while they ate.

The cycle of news had changed. The story of the bombing had additional information: the Air Force was denying intentional bombing and promising an investigation; a leak suggested the bombing had been intentional, as a signal to the Lashkar; the death toll had begun to rise again. But this time Will’s comments were built into the story. Will sat up straight in his seat when the BBC announcer said that the President of the United States had been offended by the comments.

The picture cut away to President White walking across the tarmac when a reporter asked him about the comments from Mars. He stopped. “I think it’s a shame the Governor of the Mars Operations would have anything to say about our foreign policy at all,” he said. “It’s completely inappropriate and a breach of his own ethics. The operation up there has lost touch with the people on Earth. They’ve become Martians up there, rather than Americans, Europeans, and so on. They like to think of themselves as guardians of harmony and nonviolence. In fact it’s a tiny, isolated operation, and they have their own problems, as is well known. We’ve shifted our priorities elsewhere, as you know.” And then the President resumed walking to his limousine.

“Wow!” exclaimed Érico, who was seated at the next table.

Will sat there, shocked. “Bizarre,” he replied. “Especially since the speech I gave happened hour before the bombing and had nothing to do with it!”

“They’re sending a signal,” said Roger. “I guess Morgan’s efforts have not gone very well.”

“I guess not,” said Will. He looked at Ethel. “I’ll be hearing from Louisa about this.”

“Oh, I’m sure! I can’t believe they did this to us. Your comments were before the bombing and they weren’t even meant for distribution!”

“Exactly.”

“How does he dare attack our way of life this way,” echoed Ananda from another table.

“And what’s wrong with being a Martian?” added Érico. “I’ve been here over twelve years and I have no plans to go back to Earth. I guess I am a Martian, now.”

“Or a Marsian,” corrected Carmen. They had occasionally used the term, pronounced mar-zee-an, to refer to human efforts on Mars, such as “Marsian culture,” to distinguish between them and “little green men.”

“So am I,” agreed Will. “Maybe it’s time we all said so, too. The President just said he wasn’t going to give us any money, after all!”

Ethel reached out and touched his arm. “Let’s not antagonize.”

“Actually, I don’t need to antagonize; just say that since my comments were made before the bombing, I don’t understand what the President’s problem is.” His voice mail beeped. He looked at his attaché; it was Louisa. He rose and walked out of the patio and to the yard, where he could talk in privacy. He played her message.

“Will, you should see the President’s comment about your speech. I’ve attached the clip to this message if you haven’t seen it. As I understand it, the night shift here in Houston put a clip with your speech on our website and emailed the link to several dozen editors. You didn’t make it for release, right? I’m surprised you made the comments after the bombing; the timing must have looked pretty suspicious. Of course, the guys working last night were not the usual shift. Nothing is normal right now; half our people are still at home at odd times. Bye.”

Will set his attaché on the edge of a big pot that contained a tree, combed his hair, then faced it and recorded a reply. “Louisa, this is bizarre. I made my comments at dinner last night here in Aurorae. That would have been about 4 p.m. in Houston. I saw the news before going to bed four hours later and there was nothing about the bombing. Here’s a clip for you.” He paused to put himself in the right frame of mind. “You can ask me whether my comments had anything to do with the bombing this sol. No, my comments, made last night at 7 p.m. Aurorae time or about 4 p.m. Central Standard Time, were spontaneous and meant for us Marsians, who was celebrating the safe return of our Gradivus mission. They were not directed at any particular nation or news event. They certainly had nothing to do with the tragic bombing that occurred in Turanistan several hours after I gave my talk. I join with all other Marsians in extending our condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”

He had emphasized the words “us Marsians” and “our.” He hit send, wondering whether Louisa would edit out the last sentence. He didn’t hear back from her for over an hour, which surprised him. The return email was from Doug Morgan’s office; Louisa sat behind his desk with him.

“Thanks for the clarification, Will,” he began. “The President’s comments were aimed at me. The White House has been pushing very hard for me to assist them in their effort to reassert control over the Mars Commission. They’re threatening to pull the LANTRs from Columbus 8 if we don’t cooperate. So far I have refused to help, but I have also been careful to leave the door open; I’m trying to stall until after Columbus 8 is underway. I think if I approach them very gently and point out that they have overreacted and could be embarrassed if we point out your comment was recorded hours before the attack, we may win some good will, especially if we don’t release your statement. On the other hand, if they don’t budge, we’ll release your statement, though I think we’ll electronically tone down your emphasis on ‘Martian’; that’ll just anger the White House more.”

“Please don’t make any public statements right now,” added Louisa. “They’re also trying to draw attention away from the disaster in Turanistan. If we complain, we’ll assist them. We have a publicity agenda; we’ll stick to it. And Will, remember that I fly to Paris tonight for three months, so I’ll be unreachable for the next twenty hours or so. My assistant will stay in Houston another week, then follow, so contact her and she’ll reach me. I’ll be staying in my apartment and working out of the Commission offices there, except for early April when I’m taking two weeks of vacation.”

“Keep in touch, Will,” added Doug. Then the videomail ended.

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