Coyote maintained that the Reds had considerably slowed terraforming. Some of them had even kept records to try to quantify the difference they had made. There was also, he said, a growing movement among some of the Reds to acknowledge reality and admit that terraforming was going to happen, but to work up policy papers advocating various kinds of least-impact terraforming. “There are some very detailed proposals for a largely carbon dioxide atmosphere, warm but water-poor, which would support plant life, and people with facemasks, but not wrench the world into a Terran model. It’s very interesting. There are also several proposals for what they call ecopoesis, or areobiospheres. Worlds in which the low altitudes are arctic, and just barely livable for us, while the higher altitudes remain above the bulk of the atmosphere, and thus in a natural state, or close to it. The calderas of the four big volcanoes would stay especially pure in such a world, or so they say.”
Ann doubted most of these proposals were achievable, or would have the effects predicted. But Coyote’s accounts intrigued her nevertheless. He was a strong supporter of all Red efforts, apparently, and he had been a big help to them from the start, giving them aid from the underground refuges, connecting them up with each other, and helping them to build their own refuges, which were chiefly in the mesas and fretted terrain of the Great Escarpment, where they remained close to the terraforming action, and could therefore interfere with it more easily. Yes— Coyote was a Red, or at least a sympathizer. “Really I’m nothing. An old anarchist. I suppose you could call me a Boonean, now, in that I believe in incorporating anything and everything that will help make a free Mars. Sometimes I think the argument that a human-viable surface helps the revolution is a good one. Other times not. Anyway the Reds are such a great guerrilla pool. And I take their point that we’re not here to, you know, reproduce Canada, for God’s sake! So I help. I’m good at hiding, and I like it.”
Ann nodded.
“So do you want to join them? Or at least meet them?”
“I’ll think about it.”
• • •
Her focus on rock was shattered. Now she could not help noticing how many signs of life there were on the land. In the southern tens and twenties, ice from the outbreak glaciers was melting during summer afternoons, and the cold water was flowing downhill, cutting the land in new primitive watersheds, and turning talus slopes into what ecologists called fellfields, those rocky patches that were the first living communities after ice receded, their living component made of algae and lichens and moss. Sandy regolith, infected by the water and microbacteria flowing through it, became fellfield with shocking speed, she found, and the fragile landforms were quickly destroyed. Much of the regolith on Mars had been superarid, so arid that when water touched it there were powerful chemical reactions— lots of hydrogen peroxide release, and salt crystallizations— in essence the ground disintegrated, flowing away in sandy muds that only set downstream, in loose terraces called solifluction rims, and in frosty new proto-fellfields. Features were disappearing. The land was melting. After one long day’s drive through terrain altered like this, Ann said to Coyote, “Maybe I will talk to them.”
• • •
But first they returned to Zygote, or Gamete, where Coyote had some business. Ann stayed in Peter’s room, as he was gone, and the room she had shared with Simon had been put to other uses. She wouldn’t have stayed in it anyway. Peter’s room was under Harmakhis’s, a round bamboo segment containing a desk, a chair, a crescent mattress on the floor, and a window looking out at the lake. Everything was the same but different in Gamete, and despite the years she had spent visiting Zygote regularly, she felt no connection with any of it. It was hard, in fact, to remember what Zygote had been like. She didn’t want to remember, she practiced forgetting assiduously; any time some image from the past came to her, she would jump up and do something that required concentration, studying rock samples or seismograph readouts, or cooking complex meals, or going out to play with the kids— until the image had faded, and the past was banished. With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely.
One evening Coyote stuck his head in the door of Peter’s room. “Did you know Peter is a Red too?”
“What?”
“He is. But he works on his own, in space mostly. I think that his ride down from the elevator gave him a taste for it.”
“My God,” she said, disgusted. That was another random accident; by all rights Peter should have died when the elevator fell. What were the chances of a spaceship floating by and spotting him, alone in areosynchronous orbit? No, it was ridiculous. Nothing existed but contingency.