The Martians(117)

These diskhouses were based on a design by a Paul Sattelmeier, from Minnesota. They were very simple, functional, and open places to live in, and easy to build. We got on the list for a mobile mold, and when it rolled by we punched in the commands and watched it throw big pottery: round roofs and slightly larger round floors, and then the walls, which were all interior straight segments; in effect the roof rested on a kind of double M made of interior walls, located under one semicircle of the roof only; the other side was the living room, a kind of big semicircular verandah, the roof freestanding over it. The several short walls extended from the central cross-wall into the other half of the house, dividing that semicircle into three bedrooms, two interior bathrooms, and part of a kitchen. The living rooms we faced downslope to give us the long view to the southwest, and the exterior circular “wall” on that side was only a clear tenting drape, which could be left open, which is what we did most of the time, living out in the wind; or else closed if it was cold or rainy. Same with the bedrooms on the upslope side, except their drape walls were white or colored or polarized to make them opaque. But those too were usually left open.

So we threw the parts for sixteen of these diskhouses, and then put them together. If you're willing to do the labor the whole operation is not that expensive, although admittedly we were in hock to our town co-op right to the ears. For the most part the assembly of the diskhouses was straightforward, indeed a great pleasure. Some parts just grew into place after we set the right cultures to work: Our toilets and sinks and bathtubs and tile floors, for instance, were all bioceramic and grew right into their places, essentially as a kind of templated coral. Really lovely to see.

Long before we had even started on the houses, however, we were out laying soil and planting our orchards and vineyards. We grew as much of our own food as we could in truck gardens around the tents, using complete soils trucked in, but our money crop, our contribution to the Jones economy, was to be almonds and wine grapes, both proven growers on that flank of the apron. The wines being made up to that point had a volcanic tang to them that I didn't like, almost a sulfur touch, but that was okay; it left room for improvement. And the almonds were great. We prepped soil and planted three hundred hectares of almonds and five hundred of wine grapes, in broad terraces concentric to the rim far above us, the ag zones broken by ponds and swamps, and all of them widening as they dropped downslope, so that they made a kind of giant quilt, pendant on our little farm which lay at the top of the land in our care. It was our work of art, and we were very devoted to it. I imagine we were like first-generation kibbutzim in many respects. About twenty couples, four of them same-sex; eleven single adults; thirty-odd kids, later fifty-three. Lots of travel by all of us on the local cog rail line up to Jones, and also laterally to other farms on the apron, to socialize and see what other people were doing agriculturally, and in their settlement design. They were all artists too.

I was involved throughout with our enology, and we made a good fumé blanc eventually, but my field work ended up being mostly in the almond orchards, strangely enough. It happened because I got caught up in the nutsedge problem. Early on we found some sedge creeping out of a radial-strip swamp into the vineyards, and I had gotten rid of it by direct removal. So when the almond orchards were infested I was called on to do it again there. But this time it wasn't so easy. Nutsedge is one of several plants I wish they had never introduced to Mars, but it's good in wet sandy areas, so at first people seeded it to help build meadows. It's a very ancient plant, coevolved with dinosaurs, I suspect, making it very hardy; and impervious to most attempts at eradication. In fact I've come to believe it regards such efforts as friendly stimulation, like a massage. But I only found that out the hard way.

I can't tell you how many days I spent out in our orchards weeding nutsedge. We had decided to be an organic farm, no chemical pesticides, so it was a matter of either biological control or hand-to-hand combat. I tried both, so what I was doing was integrated pest management. But ineffective no matter what you called it. For many hours I sat on the low ground at the southern end of the young almond trees, in what was in effect a ragged lawn of purple nutsedge. Cyperus rotundus. If it had been yellow nutsedge there would have been people in my group encouraging us to harvest it and eat the nuts. But purple nuts are hard brown gnarled oblong fibrous tubules, white inside and ghastly bitter to the tongue. They lie about half a meter below the ground, connected to the surface blades of grass by thin shoots that break at the slightest tug, and connected to each other underground by wiry rhizomes that also break easily, leaving the nuts behind. At first I thought I was succeeding when I loosened the soil and sifted through it to get all the nuts out of it. It was slow but not unpleasant work, sitting on the dirt in the sun, getting dirt under my fingernails, looking at the friable soil for the dirt clods that were actually living pebbles. The blades above, stacked in triplet tassels, V-shaped in cross section and stiffer than grass blades, I pulled and composted. The nuts I ground up and tossed in the supercooker compost, feeling superstitious. Which turned out to be not inappropriate given what happened.