Green Mars Read online

  Praise for Green Mars

  “The term ‘epic’ has been applied so often . . . that it has nearly lost any meaning beyond that of length. But Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest, Green Mars, earns the appellation as few works ever have. . . . Dense as a diamond and as sharp; it makes even most good novels seem pale and insignificant by comparison.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Has the breathtaking scope, plausible science and intellectual daring that made Red Mars a hit.”

  —Daily News, Los Angeles

  “Grand in scope, meticulous in detail.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “With Robinson’s epic story now two-thirds complete, it is becoming clear that this could become a work, much like Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, against which ail future literary extrapolations of mankind’s destiny are compared.”

  —Science Fiction Eye

  “The scale of Robinson’s creation matches the scale of his subject, and the storytelling in these pages is as grand as the underlying conception.”

  —The Plain Dealer, Cleveland

  Praise for Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars

  “A high-water mark in novels of Earth emigration . . . a tremendous achievement.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “An absorbing novel . . . a scientifically informed imagination of rare ambition at work.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Promises to become a classic . . . This is epic science fiction in the best sense of the term—thoughtful, provoking, and haunting.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A staggering book . . . the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.”

  —Arthur C. Clark, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rama Revealed (with Gentry Lee)

  “Robinson provices enough ‘sense of wonder’ for any dozen SF novels, introduces and juggles a mammoth cast of characters and provides intrigue, mystery, murder and political maneuvering, as well as a nuts-and-bolts account of how human technology would tame a wild planet.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “The best pure science fiction novel I have read in years, a book so full of credible human drama, technological savvy, breathtaking planetary scope, stunning historical sweep, and hard-nosed spiritual uplift that I regard it as the prologue of a brand-new Martian Chronicles.”

  —Michael Bishop, Science Fiction Age

  “If Red Mars were a movie, it would feature a cast of charismatic stars . . . big special effects and set-pieces, and a literate script full of intrigue, romance, and high adventure . . . Fortunately, it is a novel, and as fully-imagined a science fiction novel as any I can think of.”

  —Locus

  “A lyrical, beautiful, accurate legend of the future by one of the best writers of our time.”

  —David Brin, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of Glory Season

  “Impossible to stop reading.”

  —The Philadelphia Press

  “For power, scope, depth, and detail, no other Martian epic comes close. . . . An intricate and fascinating mosaic of science and politics, love and betrayal, survival and discovery, murder and revolution.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A huge, engaging novel that provides a provocative and compelling vision of a very plausible scenario for Martian colonization . . . a fascinating story of the early days of human existence on an alien world.”

  —Gentry Lee, director of mission planning for Viking mission to Mars and co-author of Rama Revealed

  “Not only the best SF novel about Mars ever written, but one of the best novels of political science fiction yet published in English. Readers across a broad spectrum of literary tastes should enjoy it.”

  —New York Newsday

  “If you’re looking for a scientifically sophisticated story, deftly told with enormity and grace, here it is.”

  —Gregory Benford, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of Furious Gulf

  “An enthralling work, as vast and colorful as its namesake subject . . . Red Mars is a ‘real’ science fiction novel that is beautifully written, and an epic in the classical sense—a narrative of heroic scope peopled with heroic characters. . . . A wonderful book . . . its last chapters fly past, until we reach those final stunning pages.”

  —The Detroit Metro Times

  “A splendid book . . . utterly convincing . . . gives a sense of time passing and history happening such as is rare in world literature.”

  —Poul Anderson

  Bantam Books by Kim Stanley Robinson

  FICTION

  The Mars Trilogy

  Red Mars

  Green Mars

  Blue Mars

  A Short, Sharp Shock

  Antarctica

  The Martians

  The Years of Rice and Salt

  for Lisa and David

  CONTENTS

  PART 1 Areoformation

  PART 2 The Ambassador

  PART 3 Long Runout

  PART 4 The Scientist as Hero

  PART 5 Homeless

  PART 6 Tariqat

  PART 7 What is to Be Done?

  PART 8 Social Engineering

  PART 9 The Spur of the Moment

  PART 10 Phase Change

  PART 1

  —— Areoformation

  The point is not to make another Earth. Not another Alaska or Tibet, not a Vermont nor a Venice, not even an Antarctica. The point is to make something new and strange, something Martian.

  In a sense our intentions don’t even matter. Even if we try to make another Sibeúa or Sahara, it won’t work. Evolution won’t allow it, and at its heart this is an evolutionary process, an endeavor driven at a level below intention, as when life made its first miracle leap out of matter, or when it crawled out of sea onto land.

  Again we struggle in the matrix of a new world, this time truly alien. Despite the great long glaciers left by the giant floods of 2061, it is a very and world; despite the beginnings of atmosphere creation, the air is still very thin; despite all the applications of heat, the average temperature is still well below freezing. All these conditions make survival for living things difficult in the extreme. But life is tough and adaptable, it is the green force viuditas, pushing into the universe. In the decade following the catastrophes of 2061, people struggled in the cracked domes and torn tents, patching things up and getting by; and in our hidden refuges, the work of building a new society went on. And out on the cold surface new plants spread over the flanks of the glaciers, and down into the warm low basins, in a slow inexorable surge.

  Of course all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn’t, pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of new species. And as the generations pass, all the members of a biosphere evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex communal response, a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we intervene in it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. And eventually the designers’ minds, along with everything else, have been forever changed.

  This is the process of areoformation.

  One day the sky fell. Plates of ice crashed into the lake, and then started thumping on the beach. The children scattered like frightened sandpipers. Nirgal ran over the dunes to the village and burst into the greenhouse, shouting, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” Peter sprinted out the doors and across the dunes faster than Nirgal could follow.

  Back on the beach great panes of ice stabbed the sand, and so
me chunks of dry ice fizzed in the water of the lake. When the children were all clumped around him Peter stood with his head craned back, staring at the dome so far above. “Back to the village,” he said in his no-nonsense tone. On the way there he laughed. “The sky is falling!” he squeaked, tousling Nirgal’s hair. Nirgal blushed and Dao and Jackie laughed, their frosted breath shooting out in quick white plumes.

  Peter was one of those who climbed the side of the dome to repair it. He and Kasei and Michel spidered over the village in sight of all, over the beach and then the lake until they were smaller than children, hanging in slings from ropes attached to icehooks. They sprayed the flaw in the dome with water until it froze into a new clear layer, coating the white dry ice. When they came down they talked of the warming world outside. Hiroko had emerged from her little bamboo stand by the lake to watch, and Nirgal said to her, “Will we have to leave?”

  “We will always have to leave,” Hiroko said. “Nothing on Mars will last.”

  But Nirgal liked it under the dome. In the morning he woke in his own round bamboo room, high in Creche Crescent, and ran down to the frosty dunes with Jackie and Rachel and Frantz and the other early risers. He saw Hiroko on the far shore, walking the beach like a dancer, floating over her own wet reflection. He wanted to go to her but it was time for school.

  They went back to the village and crowded into the schoolhouse coatroom, hanging up their down jackets and standing with their blue hands stretched over the heating grate, waiting for the day’s teacher. It could be Dr. Robot and they would be bored senseless, counting his blinks like the seconds on the clock. It could be the Good Witch, old and ugly, and then they would be back outside building all day, exuberant with the joy of tools. Or it could be the Bad Witch, old and beautiful; and they would be stuck before their lecterns all morning trying to think in Russian, in danger of a rap on the hand if they giggled or fell asleep. The Bad Witch had silver hair and a fierce glare and a hooked nose, like the ospreys that lived in the pines by the lake. Nirgal was afraid of her.

  So like the others he concealed his dismay as the school door opened and the Bad Witch walked in. But on this day she seemed tired, and let them out on time even though they had done poorly at arithmetic. Nirgal followed Jackie and Dao out of the schoolhouse and around the corner, into the alley between Creche Crescent and the back of the kitchen. Dao peed against the wall and Jackie pulled down her pants to show she could too, and just then the Bad Witch came around the corner. She pulled them all out of the, alley by the arm, Nirgal and Jackie clutched together in one of her talons, and right out in the plaza she spanked Jackie while shouting furiously at the boys. “You two stay away from her! She’s your sister!” Jackie, crying and twisting to pull up her pants, saw Nirgal looking at her, and she tried to hit him and Maya with the same furious swing, and fell over bare-bottomed and howled.

  It wasn’t true that Jackie was their sister. There were twelve sansei or third-generation children in Zygote, and they knew each other like brothers and sisters and many of them were, but not all. It was confusing and seldom discussed. Jackie and Dao were the oldest, Nirgal a season younger, the rest bunched a season after that: Rachel, Emily, Reull, Steve, Simud, Nanedi, Tiu, Frantz, and Huo Hsing. Hiroko was mother to everyone in Zygote, but not really—only to Nirgal and Dao and six other of the sansei, and several of the nisei grownups as well. Children of the mother goddess.

  But Jackie was Esther’s daughter. Esther had moved away after a fight with Kasei, who was Jackie’s father. Not many of them knew who their fathers were. Once Nirgal had been crawling over a dune after a crab when Esther and Kasei had loomed overhead, Esther crying and Kasei shouting, “If you’re going to leave me then leave!” He had been crying too. He had a pink stone eyetooth. He too was a child of Hiroko’s; so Jackie was Hiroko’s granddaughter. That was how it worked. Jackie had long black hair and was the fastest runner in Zygote, except for Peter. Nirgal could run the longest, and sometimes ran around the lake three or four times in a row, just to do it, but Jackie was faster in the sprints. She laughed all the time. If Nirgal ever argued with her she would say, “All right Uncle Nirgie,” and laugh at him. She was his niece, although a season older. But not his sister.

  The school door crashed open and there was Coyote, teacher for the day. Coyote traveled all over the world, and spent very little time in Zygote. It was a big day when he taught them. He led them around the village finding odd things to do, but all the time he made one of them read aloud, from books impossible to understand, written by philosophers, who were dead people. Bakunin, Nietzsche, Mao, Bookchin—these people’s comprehensible thoughts lay like unexpected pebbles on a long beach of gibberish. The stories Coyote had them read from the Odyssey or the Bible were easier to understand, though unsettling, as the people in them killed each other a lot and Hiroko said it was wrong. Coyote laughed at Hiroko and he often howled for no obvious reason as they read these gruesome tales, and asked them hard questions about what they had heard, and argued with them as if they knew what they were talking about, which was disconcerting. “What would you do? Why would you do that?” All the while teaching them how the Rickover’s fuel recycler worked, or making them check the plunger hydraulics on the lake’s wave machine, until their hands went from blue to white, and their teeth chattered so much they couldn’t talk clearly. “You kids sure get cold easy,” he said. “All but Nirgal.”

  Nirgal was good with cold. He knew intimately all its many stages, and he did not dislike the feel of it. People who disliked cold did not understand that one could adjust to it, that its bad effects could all be dealt with by a sufficient push from within. Nirgal was very familiar with heat as well. If you pushed heat out hard enough, then cold only became a sort of vivid shocking envelope in which you moved. And so cold’s ultimate effect was as a stimulant, making you want to run.

  “Hey Nirgal, what’s the air temperature?”

  “Two seventy-one.”

  Coyote’s laugh was scary, an animal cackle that included all the noises anything could make. Different every time too. “Here, let’s stop the wave machine and see what the lake looks like flat.”

  The water of the lake was always liquid, while the water ice coating the underside of the dome had to stay frozen. This explained most of their mesocosmic weather, as Sax put it, giving them their mists and sudden winds, their rain and fog and occasional snow. On this day the weather machine was almost silent, the big hemisphere of space under the dome nearly windless. With the wave machine turned off, the lake soon settled down to a round flat plate. The surface of the water became the same white color as the dome, but the lake bottom, covered by green algae, was still visible through the white sheen. So the lake was simultaneously pure white and dark green. On the far shore the dunes and scrub pines were reflected upside down in this two-toned water, as perfectly as in any mirror. Nirgal stared at the sight, entranced, everything falling away, nothing there but this pulsing green/white vision. He saw: there were two worlds, not one—two worlds in the same space, both visible, separate and different but collapsed together, so that they were visible as two only at certain angles. Push at vision’s envelope, push like one pushed against the envelope of cold: push! Such colors! . . .

  “Mars to Nirgal, Mars to Nirgal!”

  They laughed at him. He was always doing that, they told him. Going off. His friends were fond of him, he saw that in their faces. Coyote broke chips of flat ice from the strand, then skipped them across the lake. All of them did the same, until the intersecting white-green ripples made the upside-down world shiver and dance. “Look at that!” Coyote shouted. Between throws he chanted, in his bouncing English that was like a perpetual song: “You kids are living the best lives in history, most people just fluid in the great world machine, and here you’re in on the birth of a world! Unbelievable! But it’s pure luck you know, no credit to you, not until you do something with it, you could have been born in a mansion, a jail, a shantytown in Port of Spain, but here
you are in Zygote, the secret heart of Mars! ’Course just now you’re down here like moles in a hole, with vultures above all ready to eat you, but the day is coming when you walk this planet free of every bond. You remember what I’m telling you, it’s prophecy my children! And meanwhile look how fine it is, this little ice paradise.”

  He threw a chip straight at the dome, and they all chanted Ice Paradise! Ice Paradise! Ice Paradise! until they were helpless with laughter.

  But that night Coyote spoke to Hiroko, when he thought no one was listening. “Roko you got to take those kids outside and show them the world. Even if it’s only under the fog hood. They’re like moles in a hole down here, for Christ’s sake,” Then he was gone again, who knew where, off on one of his mysterious journeys into that other world folded over them.

  Some days Hiroko came into the village to teach them. These to Nirgal were the best days of all. She always took them down to the beach; and going to the beach with Hiroko was like being touched by a god. It was her world—the green world inside the white—and she knew everything about it, and when she was there the subtle pearly colors of sand and dome pulsed with both worlds’ colors at once, pulsed as if trying to break free of what held them.

  They sat on the dunes, watching the shore birds skitter and peep as they charged together up and down the strand. Gulls wheeled overhead and Hiroko asked them questions, her black eyes twinkling merrily. She lived by the lake with a small group of her intimates, Iwao, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all in a hide bamboo stand in the dunes. And she spent a lot of time visiting other hidden sanctuaries around the South Pole. So she always needed catching up on the village news. She was a slender woman, tall for one of the issei, as neat as the shore birds in her dress and her movement. She was old, of course, impossibly ancient like all the issei, but with something in her manner which made her seem younger than even Peter or Kasei—just a little bit older than the kids, in fact, with everything in the world new before her, pushing to break into all its colors.