Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [244]
Diana stopped the car, and a few people came out and crossed the meadow to see who they were. Pressure under the tent was 500 millibars, which helped to support the weight of the tenting, as the atmosphere at large was averaging about 250 millibars now. So Maya popped the lock of the car, and got out without her helmet on, feeling undressed and uncomfortable.
These settlers were all young natives. Most of them had come down in the last few years from Burroughs and Elysium. Some Terrans lived in the valley too, they said— not many, but there was a Praxis program that brought up groups from smaller countries, and here in the valley they had recently welcomed some Swiss, and Greeks, and Navajo. And there was a Russian settlement down near Hell’s Gate. So they heard some different languages in the valley, but English was the lingua franca, and the first tongue of almost all of the natives. They had accents to their English that Maya had not heard before, and made odd mistakes in grammar, at least to her ear; almost every verb after the first one was in present tense, for instance. “We went downstream and see some Swiss are working on the river. Stabilizing the banks in some places, with plants or rocks. They say in a few years the streambed is flushed enough for the water to clear.”
Maya said, “It will still be the color of the cliffs, and the sky.”
“Yeah, of course. But clear water looks better than silty water, somehow.”
“How do you know?” Maya enquired.
They squinted and frowned, thinking about it. “Just from the way it looks in your hand, eh?”
Maya smiled. “It’s wonderful you have so much room. Unbelievable what big spaces they can roof these days, isn’t it?”
They shrugged, as if they hadn’t thought of it that way. One said, “We look forward to the day when we take the tenting off, actually. We miss the rain, and the wind.”
“How do you know?”
But they knew.
She and Diana drove on, passing very small villages. Isolated farms. A pasture of sheep. Vineyards. Orchards. Cultivated fields. Big packed greenhouses, gleaming like labs. Once a coyote ran across the track ahead of their car. Then on a high little lawn under a talus slope Diana spotted a brown bear, and later some Dall sheep. In the little villages people were trading food and tools in open marketplaces, and talking over the day’s events. They did not monitor the news from Earth, and seemed to Maya astonishingly ignorant of it. All but a little community of Russians, who spoke a mongrel Russian which nevertheless brought tears to Maya’s eyes, and who told her that things on Earth were falling apart. As usual. They were happy to be in the canyon.
In one of the small villages there was an outdoor market in full swing, and there in the middle of the crowd was Nirgal, chomping an apple and nodding vigorously as someone spoke to him. He saw Maya and Diana get out of the car and rushed over and hugged her, lifting her off the ground. “Maya, what are you doing here?”
“On a tour from Odessa. This is Diana, Paul’s daughter. What are you doing here?”
“Oh, visiting the valley. They’ve got some soil problems I’m trying to help with.”
“Tell me about it.”
Nirgal was an ecological engineer, and seemed to have inherited some of Hiroko’s talent. The valley mesocosm was relatively new, they were still planting seedlings all up and down it, and though the soil had been prepped, nitrogen and potassium deficiencies were causing many plants not to thrive. As they walked around the marketplace Nirgal discussed this, and pointed out local crops and imported goods, describing the economics of the valley. “So they’re not self-sufficient?” Maya asked.
“No no. Not even close. But they do grow a lot of their own food, and then trade other crops, or give them away.”
He was working on eco-economics as well, it seemed. And he already had a lot of friends here; people kept coming up to hug him, and as he had his arm over Maya’s shoulders, she got pulled into these embraces and then introduced to one young native after another, all of them