The Martians(116)

Enough Is As Good As a Feast

We built our house on the apron of Jones Crater, latitude 19 degrees south, longitude 20 degrees. The apron was pretty well populated, some two thousand farms like ours scattered around it, but we could not see any other homesteads from ours, even though we built most of it on the top of a broad-backed low ridge raying down the southwest flank of the crater. We could see the vineyards of the Namibians' village to the north of us, and the tops of the line of cypresses that bordered their pond. And down the apron the bare rock in our prospect was patched with light green squares, marking young orchards like ours.

Craters turned out to be one of the places that people homed in on when they moved out into the backcountry, especially in the southern highlands. For one thing there were a million of them, so it was easy to find empty ones. At first people sheltered inside them, in the early years often doming the craters over and establishing little central crater lakes. By the time the ambient air had become livable, people had learned that settling inside a crater is like moving into a hole. Short days, no view, problems with flooding, and so on. So the new open-air settlements moved out over the rims onto the aprons, to have a look around. The interiors became full crater lakes, or lakes and rice terraces, depending on their climate, water allotment, pan integrity, and the like. Meanwhile the aprons were developed into crops, orchards, and pasturage, wherever there were the right conditions for soil creation. Fissures raying down the aprons served as the streambeds for rapid tumultuous creeks, the water pumped to their tops, or drawn down from rim water tanks that were pump-filled. Irrigation systems were always elaborate. Meanwhile the rims themselves tended to turn into the downtowns, as they had the longest views, and access both back in to the old towns in the crater interiors, and out to the many new settlements stretching down the apron. Rim roads called High Street became common, with fully developed urbanization all the way around. For small craters, the thousands that are around one kilometer in diameter, the densely populated rim was like a large village, very homey and comfortable; everyone known by sight, that kind of thing. Perhaps a thousand people; then the apron would typically have a population of half that, or less. With bigger craters the rim towns got bigger, of course, and a town of fifty thousand people on the rim of a ten-kilometer crater was a common sight, something like the hilltop city-states of the Italian Renaissance, or American Midwestern college towns, in their characters—and there were hundreds of them. Some prospered and became bustling little cities, spilling down into their interiors, which were like central parks, with round lakes or sculptured wetlands. The aprons almost always stayed agricultural, often supplying most of the food for the city up top. All these aspects of crater culture grew up spontaneously as the pattern language of the landscape, so to speak, combined with the emerging co-op culture, and, most simply, the needs of the people in the region being met in a rational way. Of course there was some planning. People would arrive at an unoccupied crater (among the some twenty thousand still listed by the environmental court for the southern highlands alone) with permits and programs, and set to work, and the first decade's economic activity in the town was primarily the building of it, often by people who had an idea what they wanted; sometimes with people holding tattered copies of A Pattern Language or some other design primer in their hands, or surfing the Web for things they liked. But soon enough every crater had people moving in who were out of the original group's control, and then it was a matter of spontaneous group self-organization, a process which works extremely well when the group is socially healthy.

Jones Crater was a big one, fifty kilometers in diameter, and its rim town was a beautiful new thing of transparent mushroom buildings and water tanks, and stone-faced skyscrapers clustered at the four points of the compass. Most of our farm group had been working up in town for some time, and eventually twenty families working on various ag projects decided to try moving downslope together, establishing a homestead and entering it into one of the ag travel loops. So we asked the regional environmental court for tenant rights to unclaimed land on the ray ridge, some forty kilometers down the south-south-west slope of the rim, and when we got the stewardship permits we moved on down and lived in tents that first winter. We had nothing, really, but the tents were big house tents from an earlier era, for the most part transparent and very pleasant to live in, as we could see so much of the world and its weather. So even though we were short on many things, that winter was so nice that we decided to build diskhouses as our permanent structures, so that we would continue to “live outdoors when indoors.”