Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [159]
But they did have to incorporate some construction into whatever production methods they tried, and there Nadia was at least able to understand the issues. She began to concentrate on that aspect of things, looking at the mechanical design of the pedons, and also the holding tanks for the living constituents of the soil. She also studied the molecular structure of the parent clays, to see if it suggested anything to her about working with them. Martian smectites were aluminosilicates, she found, meaning each unit of the clay had a sheet of aluminum octahedrals sandwiched between two sheets of silicon tetrahedrals; the different kinds of smectites had different amounts of variation in this general pattern, and the more variation there was, the easier it was for water to seep into the interlayer surfaces. The most common smectite clay on Mars, montmorillonite, had a lot of variety, and so was very open to water, expanding when wet, and shrinking when dry to the point of cracking.
Nadia found this interesting. “Look,” she said to Arne, “what about a pedon filled with a matrix of feeder veins, which would introduce the biota all through the parent material.” Take a batch of parent material, she went on, and get it wet, then let it dry. Insert into the crack systems the feeder vein matrix. Then pour in whatever important bacteria and other constitutents they could grow. Then if the bacteria and other creatures could eat their way out of their feeder veins, digesting that material as they emerged, they would all suddenly be there together in the clay, interacting. That would be a tricky time, no doubt many trials would be necessary to calibrate the initial amounts of the various biota needed to avoid population booms and crashes— but if they could get them to settle into their usual communities, then they would suddenly have living soil. “There are feeder-vein systems like this used for certain quick-setting construction materials, and now I hear that doctors feed apatite paste into broken bones the same way. The feeder veins are made of protein gels appropriate to whatever substance they’re going to contain, molded into the appropriate tubular structures.”
A matrix for growth. Worth looking into, Arne said. Which made Nadia smile. She went around that afternoon feeling happy, and that evening when she joined Art she said, “Hey! I did some work today.”
“Well!” Art said. “Let’s go out and celebrate.”
• • •
Easy to do, in Bogdanov Vishniac. It was a Bogdanovist city, all right, as buoyant as Arkady himself. A party every night. They had often joined the evening promenade, and Nadia loved walking along the railing of the highest terrace, feeling that Arkady was somehow there, had somehow persisted. And never more so than on this night, celebrating a bit of work done. She held Art’s hand, looked down and across at the crowded lower terraces and their crops, orchards, pools, sports fields, lines of trees, arcuate plazas occupied by cafés, bars, dance pavilions— bands battling for sonic space, the crowds chugging around them, some dancing but many more simply making the night’s promenade, like Nadia herself. All this still under a tent, with tenting that they hoped to remove someday; meanwhile it was warm, and the young natives wore an outlandish array of pantaloons, headdresses, sashes, vests, necklaces, so that Nadia was reminded of the video footage of Nirgal and Maya’s reception in Trinidad. Was this coincidence, or was there some supraplanetary culture coming into being among the young? And if there was, did that mean that their Coyote, the Trinidadian, had invisibly conquered the two worlds? Or her Arkady, posthumously? Arkady and Coyote, culture kings. It made her grin to think of it, and she took sips of Art’s cup of scalding kavajava, the drink of choice in this cold town, and watched all the young people moving like angels, always dancing no matter