Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [142]
But his own rushing about was probably wrong, too. He had been operating on the unarticulated theory that if he only saw more of the planet, visited one more settlement, talked to one more person, that he would somehow (without really thinking too hard) get it— and that his holistic understanding would then flow back from him to everybody else, spreading out through all the new settlers and changing things. Now he was pretty sure that this feeling had been naíve; there were so many people on the planet these days he could never hope to connect with them, to become the articulator of all their hopes and desires. And not only that, but few of the newcomers seemed much like the first hundred in regard to their reasons for coming. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; there were still scientists coming up, and people like the Swiss road-building gypsies. But he didn’t know them like he did the first hundred, and he never would. That little band had formed him, really, they had shaped his opinions and ideas, had taught him; they were his family, he trusted them. And he wanted their help, he needed it now more than ever. Perhaps it was this which explained the sudden new intensity of his feeling for Maya. And perhaps it was this which made him so angry with Hiroko— he wanted to talk to her, he needed her help! And she had abandoned them.
5
Vlad and Ursula had relocated their biotech complex to a finlike ridge in the Acheron Fossae, a narrow prominence which looked like the conning tower of a vast submerged submarine. They had honeycombed the upper part of it with excavations that extended from cliff to cliff; some of the rooms were a kilometer wide, and glass-walled on both sides. The windows on the south side had a view of Olympus Mons, some 600 kilometers away; north-facing windows looked down onto the pale tan sands of Arcadia Planitia.
John drove up a wide ledge to the bottom of the fin, and plugged into the garage lock door, noticing as he did that the ground in the narrow canyon south of the settlement was lumpy with heaps of what appeared to be melted brown sugar.
“It’s a new kind of cryptogamic crust,” Vlad said when John asked him about it. “A symbiosis of cyanobacteria and Florida platform bacteria. The platform bacteria goes very deep, and converts sulfates in the rock to sulfides, which then feed a variant of Microcoleus. The top layers of that grow in filaments, which bind to sand and clay in big dendritic formations, so it’s like little forest sylvanols with really long bacterial root systems. It looks like these root systems will keep on going right down through the regolith to bedrock, melting the permafrost as they go.”
“And you’ve released this stuff?” John said.
“Sure. We need something to bust up the permafrost, right?”
“Is there anything to stop it from growing planetwide?”
“Well, it has the usual array of suicide genes in case it begins to overwhelm the rest of the biomass, but if it keeps to its niche . . .”
“Wow.”
“It’s not too unlike the first life-forms that covered the Terran continents, we think. We’ve just enhanced its speed of growth, and its root systems. The funny thing is that I think at first it’s going to cool the atmosphere, even though it’s warming things underground. Because it’ll really increase chemical weathering of the rock, and all those reactions absorb CO2 from the air, so the air pressure is going to drop.”
Maya had come up and joined them with a big hug for John, and now she said, “But won’t the reactions release oxygen as fast as they absorb CO2, and keep air pressure up?”
Vlad shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see.”
John laughed. “Sax is a long-term thinker. He’ll probably be pleased.”
“Oh yes. He authorized the release. And he’s coming to study here again when spring comes.”
They had dinner in a hall located high on the fin, just under the crest.