Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

was going on in space and on Earth. A fast shuttle from Earth, contents unknown, had contacted them requesting permission to make an orbital insertion without a keg of nails being thrown in its way. So a Da Vinci team was now nervously working out security protocols, in heavy consultation with the Swiss embassy, which had taken an office in a suite of apartments at the northwest end of the arc. From rebels to administrators; it was an awkward transition.

      ‘What political parties do we support?’ Sax asked.

      ‘I don’t know. The usual array I guess.’

      ‘No party gets much support. Whatever works, you know.’

      Sax knew. That was the old tech position, held ever since scientists had become a class in society, a priest caste almost, intervening between the people and their power. They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants – empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments and other mass delusional systems of that sort.

      The standard scientist politics, in other words. Sax had once tried to explain this outlook to Desmond, causing his friend for some reason to laugh prodigiously, even though it made perfect sense. Well, it was a bit naive, therefore a bit comical, he supposed; and like a lot of funny things, it could be that it was hilarious right up to the moment it turned horrible, because it was an attitude that had kept scientists from going at politics in any useful way for centuries now; and dismal centuries they had been.

      But now they were on a planet where political power came out of the end of a mesocosm aerating fan. And the people in charge of that great gun (holding the elements at bay) were at least partly in charge. If they cared to exercise the power. Gently Sax reminded people of this when he visited them in their labs; and then to ease their discomfort with the idea of politics, he talked to them about the terraforming problem. And when he finally got ready to leave for Sabishii, about sixty of them were willing to come with him, to see how things were going down there. ‘Sax’s alternative to Pavonis,’ he heard one of the lab techs describe the trip. Which was not a bad thought.

      Sabishii was located on the western side of a five-kilometre high prominence called the Tyrrhena Massif, south of Jarry-Desloges Crater, in the ancient highlands between Isidis and Hellas, centred at longitude 275°, latitude 15° south. A reasonable choice for a tent town site, as it had long views to the west, and low hills backing it to the east, like moors. But when it came to living in the open air, or growing plants out in the rocky countryside, it was a bit high; in fact it was, if you excluded the very much larger bulges of Tharsis and Elysium, the highest region on Mars, a kind of bioregion island, which the Sabishiians had been cultivating for decades.

      They proved to be severely disappointed by the loss of the big mirrors, one might even say thrown into emergency mode, an all-out effort to do what they could to protect the plants of the biome; but it was precious little. Sax’s old colleague Nanao Nakayama shook his head. ‘Winterkill will be very bad. Like ice age.’

      ‘I’m hoping we can compensate for the loss of light,’ Sax said. ‘Thicken the atmosphere, add greenhouse gases – it’s possible we could do some of that with more bacteria and suralpine plants, right?’

      ‘Some,’ Nanao said dubiously. ‘A lot of niches are already full. The niches are quite small.’

      They settled in over a meal to talk about it. All the techs from Da Vinci were there in the big dining hall of the Claw, and many Sabishiians were there to greet them. It was a long, interesting, friendly talk. The Sabishiians were living in the mound maze of their mohole, behind one talon of the dragon figure it made, so that they didn’t have to look at the burned ruins of their city when they weren’t working on it. The rebuilding was much reduced now, as most of them were out dealing with the results of the mirror loss. Nanao said to Tariki, in what was clearly the continuation of a long-standing argument, ‘It makes no sense to rebuild it as a tent city anyway. We might as well wait, and build it open air.’

      ‘That may be a long wait,’ Tariki said, glancing at Sax. ‘We’re near the top of the viability atmosphere named in the Dorsa Brevia document.’

      Nanao looked at Sax. ‘We want Sabishii under any limit that is set.’

      Sax nodded, shrugged; he didn’t know what to say. The Reds would not like it. But if the viable altitude limit was raised a kilometre or so, it would give the Sabishiians this massif, and make little difference on the larger bulges – so it seemed to make sense. But who knew what they would decide on Pavonis? He said, ‘Maybe we should focus now on trying to keep atmospheric pressures from dropping.’

      They looked sombre.

      Sax said, ‘You’ll take us out and show us the massif?’

      They cheered up. ‘Most happy.’

      The land of the Tyrrhena Massif was what the areologists in Sax’s day had called the ‘dissected unit’ of the southern highlands, which was much the same as the ‘cratered unit’, but further broken by small channel networks. The lower and more typical highlands surrounding the massif also contained areas of ‘ridged unit’ and ‘hilly unit’. In fact, as quickly became obvious the morning they drove out onto the land, all aspects of the rough terrain of the southern highlands were on view, often all at once: cratered, broken, uneven, ridged, dissected and hilly land, the quintessential Noachian landscape. Sax and Nanao and Tariki sat on the observation deck of one of the Sabishii university rovers; they could see other cars carrying other colleagues, and there were teams out walking ahead of them. On the last hills before the horizon to the east, a few energetic people were fell-running. The hollows of the land were all lightly dusted with dirty snow. The massif was centred 15° south of the equator, and they got a fair bit of precipitation around Sabishii, Nanao said. The southeast side of the massif was drier, but here, the cloud masses pushed south over the ice in Isidis Planitia and climbed the slope and dropped their loads.

      Indeed, as they drove uphill great waves of dark cloud rolled in from the northwest, pouring over them as if chasing the fell-runners. Sax shuddered, remembering his recent exposure to the elements; he was happy to be in a rover, and felt he would need only short walks away from it to be satisfied.

      Eventually, however, they stopped on a high point in a low old ridge, and got out. They made their way over a surface littered with boulders and knobs, cracks, sand drifts, very small craters, breadloafed bedrock, scarps and alases, and the old shallow channels that gave the dissected unit its name. In truth there were deformational features of every kind to be seen, for the land here was four billion years old. A lot had happened to it, but nothing had ever happened to destroy it completely and clean the slate, so all four billion years were still there to be seen, in a veritable museum of rockscapes. It had been thoroughly pulverized in the Noachian, leaving regolith several kilometres deep, and craters and deformities that no aeolian stripping could remove. And during this early period the other side of the planet had had its lithosphere to a depth of six kilometres blasted into space by the so-called Big Hit; a fair amount of that ejecta had eventually landed in the south. That was the explanation for the Great Escarpment, and the lack of ancient highlands in the north; and one more factor in the extremely disordered look of this land.

      Then also, at the end of the Hesperian had come the brief warm wet period, when water had occasionally run on the surface. These days most areologists thought that this period had been quite wet but not really very warm, annual averages of well under 273 still allowing for surface water sometimes, replenished by hydrothermal convection rather than precipitation. This period had lasted for only a hundred million years or so, according to current estimates, and it had been followed by billions of years of winds, in the arid cold Amazonian Age, which had lasted right up to the point of their arrival. ‘Is there a name for the age starting with M-l?’ Sax asked.

      ‘The Holocene.’

      And then lastly, everything had been scoured by two billion years of ceaseless wind, scoured so hard that the older craters were completely rimless, everything stripped by the relentless winds stratum by stratum, leaving behind a wilderness of rock. Not chaos, technically