Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [101]
A gust knocked her over. She got up and shuffled slowly along, letting out a nylon line behind her, adjusting her course as she followed the volume of the pings. The ground flowed underfoot, when she could see it; visibility was actually down to a meter or less, at least in the thickest gusts. Then it would clear a touch and brown jets of dust would flash by, sheet after sheet, moving at an awesome speed. The wind buffeted her as hard as anything she had ever felt on Earth, or harder; it was painful work to keep her balance, a constant physical effort.
While inside a thick, blinding cloud, she nearly shuffled right into one of the transponders, standing there like a fat fence post. “Hey!” she shouted.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! I scared myself running into the roadmark.”
“You found it!”
“Yeah.” She felt her exhaustion run down into her hands and feet. She sat on the ground for a minute, then stood again; it was too cold to sit. Her ghost finger hurt.
She took up the nylon line and returned blindly to the dirigible, feeling she had wandered into the ancient myth, and was following the only thread out of the labyrinth.
• • •
During their rover trip south, blind in the flying dust, word came crackling over the radio that UNOMA had just approved and funded the establishment of three follow-up colonies. Each would consist of 500 people, all to be from countries not represented in the first hundred.
And the subcommittee on terraforming had recommended, and the General Assembly approved, a whole package of terraforming efforts, among them the distribution on the surface of genetically engineered microorganisms constructed from parent stock such as algaes, bacteria, or lichens.
Arkady laughed for a good thirty seconds. “Those bastards, those lucky bastards! They’re going to get away with it.”
Part 4
Homesick
Prologue
One winter morning the sun shines down on Valles Marineris, illuminating the north walls of all the canyons in that great concatenation of canyons. And in that bright light one can see that here and there a ledge or outcropping is touched by a warty speck of black lichen.
Life adapts, you see. It has only a few needs, some fuel, some energy; and it is fantastically ingenious at extracting these needs from a wide range of Terran environments. Some organisms live always below the freezing point of water, others above the boiling point; some live in high radiation zones, others in intensely salty regions, or within solid rock, or in pitch black, or in extreme dehydration, or without oxygen. All kinds of environments are accommodated, by adaptive measures so strange and marvelous they are beyond our capacity to imagine; and so from the bedrock to high in the atmosphere, life has permeated the Earth with the full weave of one great biosphere.
All these adaptive abilities are coded and passed along in genes. If the genes mutate, the organisms change. If the genes are altered, the organisms change. Bioengineers use both these forms of change, not only recombinant gene splicing, but also the much older art of selective breeding. Microorganisms are plated, and the fastest growers (or those that exhibit most the trait you want) can be culled and plated again; mutagens can be added to increase the mutation rate; and in the quick succession of microbial generations (say ten per day), you can repeat this process until you get something like what you want. Selective breeding is one of the most powerful bioengineering techniques we have.
But the newer techniques tend to get the attention. Genetically engineered microorganisms, or GEMs, had been on the scene only about half a century when the first hundred arrived on Mars. But half a century in modern science is a long time. Plasmid conjugates had become very sophisticated tools in those years. The array of restriction enzymes for cutting, and ligase enzymes for pasting, was big and versatile; the ability to line