Blue Mars(127)
Nadia found this interesting. “Look,” she said to Arne, “what about a pedon filled with a matrix of feeder veins, which would introduce the biota all through the parent material.” Take a batch of parent material, she went on, and get it wet, then let it dry. Insert into the crack systems the feeder vein matrix. Then pour in whatever important bacteria and other constitutents they could grow. Then if the bacteria and other creatures could eat their way out of their feeder veins, digesting that material as they emerged, they would all suddenly be there together in the clay, interacting. That would be a tricky time, no doubt many trials would be necessary to calibrate the initial amounts of the various biota needed to avoid population booms and crashes— but if they could get them to settle into their usual communities, then they would suddenly have living soil. “There are feeder-vein systems like this used for certain quick-setting construction materials, and now I hear that doctors feed apatite paste into broken bones the same way. The feeder veins are made of protein gels appropriate to whatever substance they’re going to contain, molded into the appropriate tubular structures.”
A matrix for growth. Worth looking into, Arne said. Which made Nadia smile. She went around that afternoon feeling happy, and that evening when she joined Art she said, “Hey! I did some work today.”
“Well!” Art said. “Let’s go out and celebrate.”
• • •
Easy to do, in Bogdanov Vishniac. It was a Bogdanovist city, all right, as buoyant as Arkady himself. A party every night. They had often joined the evening promenade, and Nadia loved walking along the railing of the highest terrace, feeling that Arkady was somehow there, had somehow persisted. And never more so than on this night, celebrating a bit of work done. She held Art’s hand, looked down and across at the crowded lower terraces and their crops, orchards, pools, sports fields, lines of trees, arcuate plazas occupied by cafés, bars, dance pavilions— bands battling for sonic space, the crowds chugging around them, some dancing but many more simply making the night’s promenade, like Nadia herself. All this still under a tent, with tenting that they hoped to remove someday; meanwhile it was warm, and the young natives wore an outlandish array of pantaloons, headdresses, sashes, vests, necklaces, so that Nadia was reminded of the video footage of Nirgal and Maya’s reception in Trinidad. Was this coincidence, or was there some supraplanetary culture coming into being among the young? And if there was, did that mean that their Coyote, the Trinidadian, had invisibly conquered the two worlds? Or her Arkady, posthumously? Arkady and Coyote, culture kings. It made her grin to think of it, and she took sips of Art’s cup of scalding kavajava, the drink of choice in this cold town, and watched all the young people moving like angels, always dancing no matter what they did, flowing in graceful arcs from terrace to terrace. “What a great little town,” Art said.
Then they came upon an old photo of Arkady himself, framed and hung on a wall next to a door. Nadia stopped and clutched Art’s arm: “That’s him! That’s him to the life!”
The photo had caught him talking with someone, standing just inside a tent wall and gesturing, his hair and beard lofting away from his head and blending into a landscape exactly the color of his wild curls. A face coming out of a hillside, it seemed, blue eyes squinting in the glare of all that red glee. “I’ve never seen a photo that looked so much like him. If he saw a camera pointed at him he didn’t like it, and the picture came out wrong.”
She stared at the photo, feeling flushed, and strangely happy; such a lifelike encounter! Like running into someone again after years of not seeing them. “You’re like him, in some ways, I think. But more relaxed.”
“It looks like it would be hard to get much more relaxed than that,” Art said, peering closely at the photo.
Nadia smiled. “It was easy for him. He was always sure he was right.”
“None of the rest of us have that problem.”
She laughed. “You’re cheerful like he was.”
“And why not.”
They walked on. Nadia kept thinking of her old companion, seeing the photo in her mind’s eye. There was still so much she remembered. The feelings connected to the memories were fading, however, the pain blunted— the fixative leached out, all that flesh and trauma now only a pattern of a certain kind, like a fossil. And very unlike the present moment, which, looking around, feeling her hand in Art’s, was real, vivid, brief, perpetually changing— alive. Anything could happen, everything was felt.