Red Mars(133)
“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”
“No.”
Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums— about at 2 percent, to be precise— and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was nonexistent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation was still 25 percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of ending. Temperatures had dropped, and tempers were rising. All the new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.
Sax dismissed all that with a mild shrug. “It’s the last global storm,” he said. “It will go down in history as some kind of heroic age. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
This was poorly received. Sax, however, did not notice.
A few days later, Ann and Simon drove into the settlement with their boy Peter, who was now three. He had been, so far as they could tell, the thirty-third child born on Mars; the colonies established after the first hundred had been fairly prolific. John played with the boy on the floor as he and Ann and Simon caught up on news, and exchanged some of the thousand and one tales of the Great Storm. It seemed to John that Ann ought to be enjoying the storm and the horrendous knock it had put on the terraforming process, like some kind of planetary allergic response, the temperatures plummeting below the baseline, the reckless experimenters struggling with their puny clogged machines. . . . But she was not amused. Irritated as usual, in fact. “A dowsing team drilled into a volcanic vent in Daedalia and came up with a sample containing unicellular microorganisms significantly different from the cyanobacteria you released in the north. And the vent was pretty nearly encased in bedrock, and very far from any biotic release sites. They sent samples of the stuff up to Acheron for analysis, and Vlad studied it and declared that it looked like a mutant strain of one of their releases, perhaps injected into the sample rock by contaminated drilling equipment.” Ann poked John in the chest: “
‘Probably Terran,’ Vlad said. Probably Terran!”
“Probabry tewwan!” her little boy said, catching Ann’s intonation perfectly.
“Well, it probably is,” John said.
“But we’ll never know! They’ll end up debating it for centuries to come, there’ll be a journal devoted to that issue alone, but we’ll never really know.”
“If it’s too close to tell, it’s probably Terran,” John said, grinning at the boy. “Anything that evolved separately from Terran life would give itself away in an instant.”
“Probably,” Ann said. (“Probabry.”) “Except what if there’s a common source, the space-spores theory, for instance, or ejecta blasted from one planet to another with microorganisms buried in its rock?”
“That’s not too likely, is it?”
“We don’t know. We’ll never know, now.”
John had a hard time sharing her concern. “They might have come from the Viking landers for all we know,” he said. “There’s never been a very effective effort to sterilize our explorations here, that’s just the way it is. Meanwhile we’ve got more pressing problems.” Such as a global dust storm longer than the longest one ever recorded, or an influx of immigrants whose commitment to Mars was as minimal as their housing, or an upcoming treaty revision that no one could agree on, or a terraforming effort that a lot of people hated. Or a home planet going critical. Or an attempt (or two) to do one John Boone some harm.
“Yeah yeah,” Ann said. “I know. But all that’s politics, we’ll never get away from that. This was science, a question I wanted answered. And now I can’t. Nobody can.”
John shrugged. “We’ll never answer that one, Ann. No matter what. That was one of those questions that was fated always to remain unanswered. Didn’t you know that?”
“Probabwy Tewwan.”
• • •
A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they walked. Investigative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related incidents. There were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young women. Most had been assigned from the American FBI. Their leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone, and John agreed politely.