Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [0]
GREEN MARS
Kim Stanley Robinson
* * *
Bantam Books
Bantam Books by Kim Stanley Robinson
FICTION
The Mars Trilogy
Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars
A Short, Sharp Shock
Antarctica
The Martians
The Years of Rice and Salt
This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
Green Mars
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published April 1994
Bantam paperback edition / June 1995
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994 by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-39516.
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eISBN 0-553-89828-0
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v 1.0
for Lisa and David
Temperature Comparisons
Map
Part One
Areoformation
Prologue
The point is not to make another Earth: Not another Alaska or Tibet, not a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make something new and strange, something Martian.
In a sense our intentions don’t even matter. Even if we try to make another Siberia or Sahara, it won’t work. Evolution won’t allow it, and at its heart this is an evolutionary process, an endeavor driven at a level below intention, as when life made its first miracle leap out of matter, or when it crawled out of sea onto land.
Again we struggle in the matrix of a new world, this time truly alien. Despite the great long glaciers left by the giant floods of 2061, it is a very arid world; despite the beginnings of atmosphere creation, the air is still very thin; despite all the applications of heat, the average temperature is still well below freezing. All these conditions make survival for living things difficult in the extreme. But life is tough and adaptable, it is the green force viriditas, pushing into the universe. In the decade following the catastrophes of 2061, people struggled in the cracked domes and torn tents, patching things up and getting by; and in our hidden refuges, the work of building a new society went on. And out on the cold surface new plants spread over the flanks of the glaciers, and down into the warm low basins, in a slow inexorable surge.
Of course all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn’t, pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of new species. And as the generations pass, all the members of a biosphere evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex communal response, a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we intervene in it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. And eventually the designers’ minds, along with everything else, have been forever changed.
This is the process of areoformation.
1
One day the sky fell. Plates of ice crashed into the lake, and then started thumping on the beach. The children scattered like frightened sandpipers. Nirgal ran over the dunes to the village and burst into the greenhouse, shouting, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” Peter sprinted out the doors and across the dunes faster than Nirgal could follow.
Back on the beach great panes of ice stabbed the sand, and some chunks of dry ice fizzed in the water of the lake. When the children were