As they talked it over, they took the broken windmill completely apart. The heating plate doubled as a gate for the compartment containing the algae; when the gate opened, the algae would be released into an area that would be a bit warmer because of the hot plate itself. Each windmill thus functioned as a micro-oasis, and if the algae managed to survive with its help, and then grow beyond the small area warmed by the hot plate, then good. If not it was not going to do very well on Mars anyway. The hot plate served to give it a good sendoff, nothing more. Or so its designers must have thought. “We’ve been made into Johnny Appleseed,” Arkady said.
“Johnny what?”
“American folktale.” He told her about it.
“Yeah, right. And now Paul Bunyan is going to come kick our ass.”
“Ha. Never. Big Man is much bigger than Paul Bunyan, believe me.”
“Big Man?”
“You know, all those names for landscape features. Big Man’s Footprints, Big Man’s Bathtub, Big Man’s Golf Course, whatever.”
“Ah yeah.”
“Anyway, I don’t see why we should get in trouble. We didn’t know anything about it.”
“Now who’s going to believe that?”
“. . . Good point. Those bastards, they really got me with this one.”
Clearly this was what bothered Arkady most. Not that they had contaminated Mars with alien biota, but that he had been kept out of a secret. Men were such egomaniacs when it came down to it. And Arkady, he had his own group of friends, perhaps more than that: people who agreed with him, followers of a sort. The whole Phobos crew, a lot of the programmers in Underhill. And if some of his own people were keeping things from him, that was bad; but if another group had secret plans of its own, that was worse, apparently, because they were at least interference, and perhaps competition.
Or so he seemed to think. He wouldn’t say much of this explicitly, but it became obvious in his mutterings, and his sudden sharp curses, which were genuine even though they alternated with bursts of hilarity. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether he was pleased or angry, and Nadia finally believed that he was both at once. That was Arkady; he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn’t much worried about consistency. But she wasn’t too sure she liked his reasons this time, for either his anger or his amusement, and she told him so with considerable irritation.
“Well, but come on!” he cried. “Why should they keep it a secret from me, when it was my idea to begin with?”
“Because they knew I might come along with you. If they told you, you would have had to tell me. And if you told me, I would have stopped it!”
Arkady laughed outrageously at this. “So it was pretty considerate of them after all!”
“Fuck.”
The bioengineers, Sax, the people in the Quarter who had actually constructed the things. Someone in communications, probably . . . there were quite a few who must have known.
“What about Hiroko?” Arkady asked.
They couldn’t decide. They didn’t know enough of her views to be able to guess what she might think. Nadia was pretty sure she was in on it, but couldn’t explain why. “I suppose,” she said, thinking about it, “I suppose I feel like there is this group around Hiroko, the whole farm team and a fair number of others, who respect her and . . . follow her. Even Ann, in a way. Although Ann will hate this when she hears about it! Whew! Anyway, it just seems to me that Hiroko would know about anything secret going on. Especially something having to do with ecological systems. The bioengineering group works with her most of the time, after all, and for some of them she’s like a guru, they almost worship her. They probably got her advice when they were splicing this algae together!”
“Hmm. . . .”
“So they probably got her agreement for the idea. Maybe I should even say her permission.”
Arkady nodded. “I see your point.”
On and on they talked, hashing over every point of it. The land they passed over, flat and immobile, looked different to Nadia now. It was seeded, fertilized; it was going to change, now, inevitably. They talked about the other parts of Sax’s terraforming plans, giant orbiting mirrors reflecting sunlight onto the dawn and dusk terminators, carbon distributed over the polar caps, areothermal heat, the ice asteroids. It was all really going to happen, it seemed. The debate had been bypassed; they were going to change the face of Mars.
• • •
The second evening after their momentous discovery, as they were cooking dinner in a crater’s lee anchorage, they got a call from Underhill, relayed off one of the comm satellites. “Hey you two!” John Boone said by way of greeting. “We’ve got a problem!”