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By Root 2197 0

of the state of their understanding of the atmosphere, in Sax’s opinion. But there it was. Martian weather was a violent semichaotic system. In some ways it resembled Earth’s, not surprising given that it was a matter of air and water moving around the surface of a spinning sphere: Coriolis forces were the same everywhere, and so here as on Earth there were tropical easterlies, temperate westerlies, polar easterlies, jet-stream anchor points and so on; but that was almost all one could say for sure about Martian weather. Well— you could say that it was colder and drier in the south than in the north. That there were rain shadows downwind of high volcanoes or mountain chains. That it was warmer near the equator, colder at the poles. But this sort of obvious generalization was all that they could assert with confidence, except for some local patterns, although most of those were subject to lots of variation— more a matter of highly analyzed statistics than lived experience. And with only fifty-two m-years on record, with the atmosphere thickening radically all the while, with water being pumped onto the surface, etc., etc., it was actually fairly difficult to say what normal or average conditions might be.

Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on east Pavonis. People kept interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile political situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weather’s. Already it was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds; there were sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent fights in defense of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-meter rise in sea level was going to push them off stage.

Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel for supper out in his rover.

“There’s no such thing as a fresh start,” he said as he put water on to boil.

“The Big Bang?” Michel suggested.

“As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the— the clumpiness of the early universe was caused by the earlier— clumpiness of the previous universe, collapsing down into its Big Crunch.”

“I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.”

“Singularities are strange— outside their event horizons, quantum effects allow some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting those particles out apparently caused small clumps to start and become big ones.” Sax frowned; he was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. “But I was referring to the flood on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of conditions as a singularity, by any means. In fact there must be people down there who don’t think of it as a break at all.”

“True.” For some reason Michel was laughing. “We should go there and see, eh?”

As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, “I want to get out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going away.”

“You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim. . . .” Michel shuddered.

“Yes, but that only makes me more curious.”

“Well— we’ll hold down the fort for you.”

As if one had to physically occupy any given space in order to be there. “The cerebellum never gives up,” Sax said.

Michel grinned. “Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.”

Sax frowned.

Before he left, he called Ann.

“Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to south Tharsis, to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the areobiosphere, together?”

She was startled. Her head was shaking