Blue Mars(154)

They went to work planting new starts of Himalayan grasses throughout the basin, concentrating on the stream banks and their veinlike tracery under the trickles and ice. A hard freeze actually helped, as it killed the infected plants faster than the ones free of infection. They incinerated the infected plants in a kiln down the massif. People came from the surrounding basins to help, bringing replacement starts for planting later.

Two months passed, and the invasion surge weakened. The plants that remained seemed to be more resistant. Newly planted plants did not get infected or die. The basin looked like it was autumn, though it was midsummer; but the dying had stopped. The marmots looked thin, and more concerned than ever; they were a worrying species. And Nirgal could see their point. The basin looked ravaged. But it seemed the biome would survive. The viroid was subsiding, eventually they could hardly even find it, no matter how hard and long they centrifuged samples. It seemed to have left the basin, as mysterious in departure as in arrival.

Sax shook his head. “If the viroids that infect animals ever get more robust. . . .” He sighed. “I wish I could talk to Hiroko about it.”

“I’ve heard them say she’s at the north pole,” Nirgal said sourly.

“Yes.”

“But?”

“I don’t think she’s there. And— I don’t think she wants to talk to me. But I’m still . . . I’m waiting.”

“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.

Sax nodded.

They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko— mother, lover— she had abandoned them both.

But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave, Nirgal gave him a bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”

“What will you do now?”

“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”

“Ah! Good luck.”

Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off, waving once before putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the rib and gone.

• • •



So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and microbial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind of potato.

Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na— at their latitude, but all the way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the last minute it veered north.

They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.

But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might as well have been night— a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and rattling the outer window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked pensively. Then the howl lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt more and more sick the less the wind howled— until the air was still, and he was so nauseated he could scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms sometimes did this; they ended abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind, or a particular landform. And then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines. It was raining dust now, in fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash were settling over the world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even the biggest dust storms would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at the end of their runs. But with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds so much more powerful, great quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and if they came down all at once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much deeper than a few millimeters.

As near suspension as some fines were, in an hour all but the very finest had fallen out of the air and onto them. After that it was only a hazy afternoon, windless, the air filled with something like a thin smoke, so that they could see the whole of the basin; which was covered with a lumpy blanket of dust.

Nirgal went out with his mask on as always, and dug desperately with a shovel, then with his bare hands. Sax came out, staggering through the soft drifts, to put a hand to Nirgal’s shoulder. “I don’t believe there’s anything that can be done.” The layer of dust was about a meter deep, or deeper.