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"Its job, they say, was to get here before that big nuke."
"Huh?"
"Nuke had already left when Axelrod decided to send this," Viktor said. "To beat its time in getting
here."
"Why?"
"That is the mystery." Viktor grinned, though she could see he was bone-tired.
"Just showing off, I bet."
He waved this away. "Squirt from Earthside says not. Axelrod wants me to pick it up when it
aerobrakes."
"What? Why-wait, you can't do it."
"Orders."
"You're in no shape-"
"They said we should both get it. For our eyes only."
He grinned, always happy when intrigues got more complicated.
"When's it get here?"
"Two days. Sail burns up on entry. Payload chutes down. Trying to set the package-that little golden-
wrapped thing, you saw?-down in Gusev."
"Three days before the nuke." Julia frowned. "Damned funny."
"I like mysterious."
6
LAST TRAIN OUT OF DODGE
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To KEEP HER MIND off their situation, she puzzled over the Vent R incident. Science beat politics
every time.
Viktor had pointed out the biggest clue: the correlation between water vapor pressure near the site and
the magnetic waves.
Except for birds who used the magnetic field to find their way on migrations, Earthly life mostly ignored
magnetism. A few bacteria carried minute bits of iron and appeared to orient in a magnetic field, but
how it helped them was unclear. She shook her head; would evolution have produced the same answer
to the riddle of survival on Mars as on Earth?
She sat and thought and watched the Martian landscape as sharp shadows stretched across the afternoon.
A thin filament of cloud towered in the distance. Sure enough, it was in the right direction for Vent A.
The mat was opening its thick seals again, following a pattern no one had deciphered yet. She added one
more data entry to her slate; this was the first venting in several months. And nobody knew why the mat
did it, though there were plenty of theories. Vapor pressure...
The early discovery of methane in the Martian atmosphere, at ten parts per billion, had suggested that
life might be the source-but it was not a clear proof. Scientists could always rummage around and find
other interpretations, which in turn suggested further tests, and that was the dance of science itself.
Maybe a recent volcanic eruption had vented the methane from the warm interior; that happened often
on Earth. Or perhaps, since comets were known to have methane ices, one had blundered into the
atmosphere. And a calculation showed that the water vapor in the Martian atmosphere, kindled by
ultraviolet, could react with the methane and erase it in a few centuries. So any volcanoes or comets had
to be recent events. But in the hundreds of thousands of orbital photos there seemed no clear evidence
for recent volcano ventings, or impact craters from comets. So the issue had drifted along without clear,
sharp confirmation for any view. Until the Marsmat discoveries.
Now they knew that the Marsmat could send signals over great distances, hundreds of kilometers at
least, far larger than any single mat. They had seen that in Vent R, when the humanlike image shaped up
out of the mat on a first visit.
Why communicate over such scales? To sense a coming pulse of hydrogen sulfide vapor from deep
below, tell the entire network, and make ready? A clear survival value in that, she supposed. Could
organisms evolve such detailed response in this harsh place? Could an Earthly biofilm do it? Maybe
biologists had never noticed. On Earth mats like the stromatolites were considered to be early, primitive
forms with severe limitations and no future. The biofilms had just been outrun by other forms in the rich,
warm, wet oceans.
Julia went out to the big greenhouse and gardened to clear her mind. They all went to the greenhouse
when they were tired of the endless sunset hues of Mars. Or when they longed to see something alive
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that wouldn't talk. That first whiff of greenhouse air was a great morale boost. Greenhouses processed
air better than any filter, carrying a particular fresh scent unlike Earth, undefinable, more raw. She
would miss it.
She barely nodded to others working. Privacy was precious, and they'd adopted the Japanese habit of not
intruding on one another's space unless by mutual agreement. She skipped the fields of wheat, rice, and
potatoes, various beans, lines of broccoli and tomatoes. These looked ordinary, and then she walked
under the canopy of carrot stalks so green they changed the Marslight.
No one could predict what the combination of low gravity and low sunlight would do; some crops died,
others became green gushers. There was something very calming about being surrounded by green
leaves and vines, all nodding gently in the endless updraft. To strengthen trees and stalks, they had to
run breezes, fake winds. She recalled how, in the early years, she and Viktor had taken advantage of the
absence of others, off on rover trips, to make love amid the churning plants-exciting, though chilly. It'd
always been a big turn-on for her to look over the shoulder of a lover into the swaying foliage of a tree.
Viktor said it showed she was a real primitive.
She worked with her hands to free her mind-pruning, harvesting, helping. Even a biologist had to keep
reminding herself that life found ways nobody could foresee. Growing up in Australia, she had marveled
at lizards in the deserts that absorbed water through channels in their feet, because they were most likely
to come across moisture in shallow damp spots. On the other hand, nature made its creatures narrow of
purpose.
Silently she joined a team that was harvesting corn. It was good, solid work, letting her hands go and
have fun while her mind could idle, running on its own. Cut, sort, bag...
One winter she had gone out on a Girl Scout trip, and they had stayed overnight in a bush farmhouse
with a tin roof. In the night birds thumped heavily onto the roof, because when they looked down from
their migrating patterns, it reflected the moon and so looked like an inviting pond. She had rushed
outside and found dazed ducks, given them water, and off they had gone-no doubt to make the same
mistake again, because nature saw no point in giving them the processing power to learn from
experience, much less to tell others of their kind. If there had been many tin roofs, they would never
have made the migration, never made new ducks. Nature had not made them too narrow, not this time.
Too narrow ... Could evolution have found a way to give the mat some use for the magnetic field waves?
It sounded crazy.
Julia was thinking so hard about this that the burst of hand-clapping startled her. When she brought in a
bushel of picked corn, her coworkers applauded. "Fastest picking I've ever seen," a man said. Julia was
startled. She had not even noticed.
Sitting in the cafeteria, nursing a cup of coffee, a young woman from the bio section asked, "Mind if I sit
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down?" The room was crowded. Julia waved her into a chair. Stephanie, she recalled, a biochem type.
They had even been on a dozen-author paper together, on how the Marsmat used sulfur for energy.
"Nothing much to do," the woman chatted on. "I'm a sexile for the next few hours." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]