Blue Mars(101)
“Why did you do it?” she shouted. “It’s my death to choose as I please!”
She waited for the message to reach him. Then it did and he jumped, the image of him jiggled. “Because—” he said, and stopped.
Ann felt a chill. That was just what Simon had said, after he had pulled her back in out of the chaos. They never had a reason, only life’s idiot because.
Sax went on: “I didn’t want— it seemed like such a waste— what a surprise to hear from you. I’m glad.”
“To hell with that,” Ann said.
She was about to cut the connection when he started speaking again— they were in simultaneous transmission now, alternating messages, “It was so I could talk to you, Ann. I mean it was for myself— I didn’t want to be missing you. I wanted you to forgive me. I wanted to argue with you more and— and make you see why I’ve done what I’ve done.”
His chatter stopped as abruptly as it had started, and then he looked confused, even frightened. Perhaps he had just heard “To hell with that.” She could scare him, no doubt of that.
“What crap,” she said.
After a while: “Yes. Um— how are you doing? You look. . . .”
She cut the connection. I just outran a polar bear! she shouted in her mind. I was almost eaten by your stupid games!
No. She wouldn’t tell him. The meddler. He had needed a good referee for his submissions to The Metajournal of Martian History, that was what it came down to. Making sure his science was properly peer-reviewed— for that he would crash around in a person’s most inward desires, in her essential freedom to choose life or death, to be a free human being!
At least he hadn’t tried to lie about it.
And— well— here she was. Rage; remorse without cause; inexplicable anguish; a strangely painful exhilaration: all this filled her at once. The limbic system, vibrating madly, spiking every thought with contradictory wild emotions, disconnected from the thoughts’ content: Sax had saved her, she hated him, she felt a fierce joy, Kasei was dead, Peter wasn’t, no bear could kill her, etc.— on and on and on. Oh so strange!
• • •
She spotted a little green rover, perched on a bluff over the ice bay. Impulsively she took over the wheel and drove up to it. A little face peered out at her; she waved through the windshields at it. Black eyes— spectacles— bald. Like her stepfather. She parked her rover next to his. The man gestured for her to come over, holding up a wooden spoon. He looked vague, only half pulled out of his own thoughts.
Ann put on a down jacket and went through the lock doors and walked between the cars, feeling the shock of the frigid air like a dousing in cold water. It was nice to be able to walk between one rover and another without suiting up, or, to get to the crux of the matter, risking death. Amazing that more people hadn’t been killed by carelessness or lock malfunction. Some had been, of course. Scores, probably, if you added them all up. Now it was just a dash of cold air.
The bald man opened his inner-lock door. “Hello,” he said, and offered a hand.
“Hello,” Ann said, and shook it. “I’m Ann.”
“I’m Harry. Harry Whitebook.”
“Ah. I’ve heard of you. You design animals.”
He smiled gently. “Yes.” No shame; no defensiveness.
“I was just chased by one of your polar bears.”
“Were you!” His eyes opened round. “Those are fast!”
“So they are. But they’re not just polar bears, are they.”
“They’ve got some grizzly genes, for altitude. But mostly it’s just Ursus maritimus. They’re very tough creatures.”
“A lot of creatures are.”
“Yes, isn’t it marvelous? Oh excuse me, have you eaten? Would you like some soup? I was just making soup, leek soup, I guess it must be obvious.”
It was. “Sure,” Ann said.
• • •
Over soup and bread she asked him questions about the polar bear. “Surely there can’t be a whole food chain here for something that huge?”
“Oh yes. In this area there is. It’s well-known for that— the first bioregion robust enough for bears. The bay is liquid to the bottom, you see. The Ap mohole is at the center of the crater, so it’s like a bottomless lake. Iced over in winter of course, but the bears are used to that from the Arctic.”
“The winters are long.”
“Yes. The female bears make dens in the snow, near some caves in dike outcroppings to the west. They don’t truly hibernate, their body temperatures drop just a few degrees, and they can wake up in a minute or two, if they need to adjust the den for heat. So they den for as much of the winters as they can, then live in there and forage out till spring. Then in spring we tow some of the ice plates through the mouth of the bay out to sea, and things develop from there, bottom to top. The basic chains are Antarctic in the water, Arctic on the land. Plankton, krill, fish and squid, Weddell seals, and on land rabbits and hares, lemmings, marmots, mice, lynx, bobcat. And the bears. We’re trying with caribou and reindeer and wolves, but there isn’t the forage for ungulates yet. The bears have been out just a few years, the air pressure hasn’t been adequate until recently. But it’s a four-thousand-meter equivalent here now, and the bears do very well with that, we find. They adapt very quickly.”