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By Root 1924 0

out long DNA strings precisely was there; the accumulated knowledge of genomes was immense, and growing exponentially; and used all together, this new biotechnology was allowing all kinds of trait mobilization, promotion, replication, triggered suicide (to stop excess success), and so forth. It was possible to find the DNA sequences from an organism that carried the desired characteristic, and then synthesize these DNA messages and cut and paste them into plasmid rings; after that cells were washed and suspended in a glycerol with the new plasmids, and the glycerol was suspended between two electrodes and given a short sharp shock of about 2,000 volts, and the plasmids in the gycerol shot into the cells, and voilá! There, zapped to life like Frankenstein’s monster, was a new organism. With new abilities.

And so: fast-growing lichens. Radiation-resistant algae, Extreme-cold fungi. Halophylic Archaea, eating salt and excreting oxygen. Surarctic mosses. An entire taxonomy of new kinds of life, all partially adapted to the surface of Mars, all out there having a try at it. Some species went extinct: natural selection. Some prospered: survival of the fittest. Some prospered wildly, at the expense of other organisms, and then chemicals in their excretions activated their suicide genes, and they died back until the levels of those chemicals dropped again.

So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole.

And so: more oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Black fuzz on the polar ice. Black fuzz on the ragged surfaces of bubbled rock. Pale green patches on the ground. Bigger grains of frost in the air. Animalcules shoving through the depths of the regolith, like trillions of tiny moles, turning nitrites into nitrogen, oxides into oxygen.

At first it was nearly invisible, and very slow. With a cold snap or a solar storm there would be massive die-offs, whole species extinct in a night. But the remains of the dead fed other creatures; conditions were thus easier for them, and the process picked up momentum. Bacteria reproduce quickly, doubling their mass many times a day if conditions are right; the mathematical possibilities for the speed of their growth are staggering, and although environmental constraints— especially on Mars— keep all actual growth far from the mathematical limits, still, the new organisms, the areophytes, quickly reproduced, sometimes mutated, always died, and the new life fed on the compost of their ancestors, and reproduced again. Lived and died; and the soil and air left behind were different than they were before these millions of brief generations.

And so one morning the sun rises, shooting long rays through the ragged cloud cover, up the length of Valles Marineris. On the north walls are tiny traces of black and yellow and olive and gray and green. Specks of lichen dot the vertical faces of stone, which stand as they always have, stony, and cracked, and red; but now speckled, as if with mold.

1

Michel Duval dreamed of home. He was swimming in the surf off the point at Villefranche-sur-Mer, the warm August water lifting him up and down. It was windy and near sunset and the water was a sloppy white bronze, the sunlight bouncing all over it. The waves were big for the Mediterranean, swift breakers that rose up all riven with wind chop to crash in quick uneven lines, allowing him to ride them for a moment. Then it was under in a tumble of bubbles and sand, and back up into a burst of gold light and the taste of salt in everything, his eyes stinging voluptuously. Big black pelicans rode air cushions just over the swells, soared into steep clumsy turns, stalled, dropped into the water around him. They half-folded their wings when they dove, making adjustments with them until the actual moment of the awkward crash into the water. Often they came up gulping small fish. Just meters from him one splashed