The Martians(90)

So we started up again and Gregor struck out the side, and we won the tournament. We were mobbed, Gregor especially. He was the hero of the hour. Everyone wanted him to sign something. He didn't say much, but he wasn't stooping either. He looked surprised. Afterward Werner took two balls and everyone signed them, to make kind-of trophies for Gregor and me. Later I saw half the names on my trophy were jokes, “Mickey Mantel” and other names like that. Gregor had written on it “Hi Coach Arthur, Regards Greg.” I have the ball still, on my desk at home.





Salt and Fresh

After the first water in the new streams was always silty, like liquid brick running down creases in the land. So many salts dissolved out of the dirt that the water became almost viscous, and the stream banks were often coated with fantastic strips of white crystals. In certain watersheds it looked like streams of blood were running through banks of rock candy. And there was more truth to that than people suspected.

You see, after the little red people became the nineteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, they became enlightened, and were faced with a dilemma. Before, the humans and all their claptrap on the surface had served as high entertainment; now they were the little red people's problem, or at least a matter of great concern. The little red people needed to save Mars from humans in a way that would not harm these charming bunglers, but help them.

At the same time, they saw immediately what the resentful looks coming from their archaea crops had meant—it was obvious on the face of it. Just as the Dalai Lama would not eat cows on Earth, the little red people should not eat archaea on Mars.

This created an instantaneous famine situation for the little red people. For the most part they considered it a fortunate rise in consciousness, though there was some dismay as they changed to a vegan diet which took no lives at all, based on seeds and bacterial fruit, milk, and honey equivalents. They went hungry for a long time setting up these new agricultures, foraging also up on the surface when they had to, in the scraps of the humans, to make ends meet. But humans tended to react to these kinds of activities with pesticides, so they were only pursued in desperation; dangerous times call for dangerous measures.

Meanwhile, just as the humans were coming down on them from above, the ungrateful archaea were biting them from below. Many of the old ones were not appeased by their liberation; they wanted compensation, they wanted revenge, some of them were calling for a return to their original dominion over the Martian surface. It is an unfortunate fact that if you give archaea an inch they will take a mile; all the corners of my kitchen prove this. So cadres of disaffected archaea were plotting revolution from below, and though they were a minority at first, these malcontents managed to poison the minds of many other archaea, threatening to create results that would cascade upward through the larger levels of the planetary ecosystem.

So the little red people were caught in the middle, as moderates so often are. We need a lot more compassion to appear very quickly, they said to each other, on all levels of the ecosphere. But though they were telepathic, and now united by a single spirit of bodhisattva grace, they found themselves divided on the question of policy in the face of this crisis. Some thought they should focus on the archaea, others on the humans; some on both, others on neither. More compassion, sure—but how?

Finally the current stage of the terraforming, sometimes called the Great Rehydration, gave a group of them the idea that they could solve both problems at once.

They would never be able to influence humans directly, this group of little red scientists argued. Setting up towns in the porches of their ears and singing a continuo of common sense had only put them at terrible risk in the offices of ear nose and throat specialists. At the same time, the archaea could no longer be confined against their will in the cryptoendolithic world. So what did they have to work with? They had lots of water, lots of salt, lots of archaea, and lots of humans. The proposal involved mixing them all.

The evaporite salts on the surface were being dissolved back into the new hydrosphere. Carbonates, sulfates, and nitrates had all been left behind by the slow evaporation of the ancient Martian seas; there were huge deposits of them, now mixing with the water as it ran across the surface. The mechanics of saltification were still very poorly understood, but clearly the surface water on Mars was going to pick up salt for a long time to come. The archaea, meanwhile, were already hardy halophiles; one species, Haloferax, could live directly on and inside salt crystals. Human beings were not as salt tolerant as that, but their blood was about as salty as Earth's ocean water, and many of them heavily oversalted most of their food. So an opportunity might exist. Salt was common ground.