Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [91]
As with the lichens, there were many plants that he couldn’t identify; they exhibited features from different species, even genuses, or else they were completely nondescript, their features an odd melange of features from exotic biospheres, some looking like underwater growths, or new kinds of cacti. Engineered species, presumably, although it was surprising these weren’t listed in the guide. Mutants, perhaps. Ah but there, where a wide crack had collected a deeper layer of humus and tiny rivulet, was a clump of kobresia. Kobresia and the other sedges grew where it was wet, and their extremely absorbent turf chemically altered the soil under it quite rapidly, performing important work in the slow transition from fellfield to alpine meadow. Now that he had spotted it he could see minuscule watercourses marked by their population of sedges, running down through the rocks. Kneeling on a thinsulate pad, Sax clicked off his magnifying glasses and looked around, and as low as he was, he could suddenly see a whole series of little fellfields, scattered on the slope of the moraine like patches of Persian carpet, shredded by the passing ice.
• • •
Back at the station Sax spent a lot of time sequestered in the labs, looking at plant specimens through microscopes, running a variety of tests, and talking about the results to Berkina and Claire and Jessica.
“They’re mostly polyploids?” Sax asked.
“Yes,” Berkina said.
Polyploidy was fairly frequent at high altitudes on Earth, so it was not surprising. It was an odd phenomenon— a doubling or tripling or even quadrupling of the original chromosome number in a plant. Diploid plants, with ten chromosomes, would be succeeded by polyploids with twenty or thirty or even forty chromosomes. Hybridizers had used the phenomenon for years to develop fancy garden plants, because polyploids were usually larger— larger leaves, flowers, fruits, cell sizes— and they often had a wider range than their parents. That kind of adaptability made them better at occupying new areas, like the spaces in and under a glacier. There were islands in the Terran Arctic where eighty percent of the plants were polyploid. Sax supposed that it was a strategy to avoid the destructive effects of excessive mutation rates, which would explain why it occurred in high-UV areas. Intense UV irradiation would break a number of genes, but if they were replicated in the other sets of chromosomes, then there was likely to be no genotypic damage, and no impediment to reproduction.
“We find that even when we haven’t started with polyploids, which we usually do, they change within a few generations.”
“Have you identified the triggering mechanism that causes it?”
“No.”
Another mystery. Sax stared into the microscope, vexed by this rather astonishing gap in the bizarrely rent fabric of biological science. But there was nothing to be done about it; he had looked into the matter himself in his Echus Overlook labs in the 2050s, and it had appeared that polyploidy was indeed stimulated by more UV radiation than the organism was used to, but how cells read this difference, and then actually doubled or tripled or quadrupled their chromosome count . . .
“I must say, I’m surprised at how much everything is flourishing.”
Claire smiled happily. “I was afraid that after Earth you might think this was pretty barren.”
“Well, no.” He cleared his throat. “I guess I expected nothing. Or just algae and lichen. But those fellfields seem to be thriving. I thought it would take longer.”
“It would on Earth. But you have to remember, we’re not just throwing seeds out there and waiting to see what happens. Every single species has been augmented to increase hardiness and speed of growth.”
“And we’ve been reseeding every spring,” Berkina said, “and fertilizing with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.”
“I thought it was denitrifying bacteria that were all the rage.”
“Those are distributed specifically in thick deposits of sodium nitrate, to transpire the nitrogen into the