New Horizons

Geospermia-2

"I appreciate the concern, but it’s not necessary." I squinted against the glare of sunlight—so much stronger than on Titan. It annoyed me; it made me hot. "Derek is my brother, my responsibility. Anyway, I won't be by myself. I'll have Sven."

The two men glared at each other.

I felt Sven tense behind my back. Maybe that's why he was so angry. People in the inner system rarely knew what to do with him. Do we store him with the bots? the shuttle crew had asked. Seriously, I’m not kidding. I suspected there was a huge trail of rumours about us waiting for me when I returned to the shuttle base. You know they slept in the same room? Do you think they…?

I seriously didn’t have the energy for that sort of stuff right now.

I touched Sven's arm, and hoped Sven got the message to calm down. Something was bugging him, and if Pavlo kept this up, the two were going to have a massive argument any moment and knowing Sven, I couldn’t guarantee no one would get killed. And that someone wouldn’t be me. Or Sven. And I didn't think the Settlement Authority took too lightly to having their employees killed on the job. Last time I looked, opinionated jackassery was not a capital offense. Not even on Mars.

And frankly, we could use a guide.

Most of that afternoon, the truck trundled up the hill, following the trail of crushed vegetation between solids walls of bamboo. It was slow going, and the heavy engine laboured. As we climbed, oxygen became suboptimal, and the air took on a stifling feel like you were running but never got enough air. And the closer we went to the dome roof, where the air pumps churned vast amounts of nitrogen into the valley, the thinner the oxygen became.

One thing that didn’t change was the infernal jungle.

"What’s with all the bamboo?" I asked, turning to Sven on the back seat.

Sven's eyes glazed over as they always did when he looked something up. "It says here it's a conservation program. It’s to stop erosion and then introducing threatened species from Earth. The vegetation program first planted the bamboo about ten years ago. It's done an excellent job in keeping the soil from eroding. It is also excellent building material and provides firewood."

"It looks to me like a pretty one-sided solution to the terraforming effort." A monoculture likely to lead to a massive biosphere collapse. I'd seen that sort of thing before. A species took over, did great, until some sort of disease felled it, or a nutrient deficiency, and voila, we got an emergency call. That's why we advocated diversity and provided new settlements with a range of seeds. Advice which, for some reason, the Mars Settlement Authority had ignored.

"We test everything and allow whatever thrives to propagate naturally," Pavlo said.

"Not all species grow well when first introduced. Some need a couple of introductions to establish, even if you use the specially selected seed mixes. If you wet a soil that hasn’t seen liquid water for billions of years, you get a release of salts. If the carbon-dioxide levels are high, like here, you get differences in availability and uptake of trace elements, like arsenic. That will kill many species, but will improve."

"Re-introducing species you’ve already tried is a waste of money and time. You spend far too much time trying to get something to grow that won’t ever do well. Take it from someone with experience. You’re much better off taking only species that already show promise. Let nature talk to you and listen to it. You can’t make it do your bidding."

"What do you mean?"

He stopped the truck abruptly and pointed at a rust-red rock face to the side of the track. "See there, that dark line in the rock? That is native organic matter. That is Mars. That's what we're destroying by forcing our will on the planet."

"But it's only a layer of fossilised organic matter."

"Yes, but it dates from before the time life first appeared on Earth. We can now prove that life came to Earth from here, so, by their very ancestry, some species are better suited to life on Mars than others, especially the more primitive species like the pines and ferns, and also the grasses. You terraformers barge over the peculiarities of each habitat you form. You try to make it conform to Earth standards. You believe in geospermia, where you must use Earth genetic material to seed life elsewhere."

"Well, it so happens we have found no other life in the solar system, save a few bacteria here and in the seas of Europa." And last time I looked, geospermia was merely a word for what we were doing, seeding Earth life all over the solar system. It was not a religion.

"That’s extant life. It didn’t always used to be like that. Our work here proves that. Life in the solar system originated on Mars: Areogenesis. Some Earth life retains the ability to adapt to conditions on Mars. Those species we need here."

God.

God help me. Areogenesis was nothing but an unproven theory.

Not only had I been saddled with an opinionated jackass, he was also stark raving crazy.

We continued on up the hill. Although the air thinned, the bamboo did not.

Every now and then, a lot of stems were broken, the remains scattered over the ground. I first thought this was because of the passage of the car, but the destruction reached further than that. I remembered the digging in the field.

"What kind of wildlife do they have? It looks like a herd of elephants has come past. Any idea what could have done this?"

Sven's eyes glazed over again. "No elephants here."

"Pigs?"

"Could be. Pigs, capybaras or turkeys. Pandas. There is a list of animals that have been released. There are twenty-three species still known on this list. Do you want it?"

"Later, yes, thank you, Sven."

A bit of calm descended upon me. Whatever terraforming decisions the department had taken really was none of my business. We set up the dome, and if the inhabitants chose to ignore our advice, then that was their problem, yes?

No, because it was also my brother's problem, and I couldn't imagine him giving up on growing crops.

Like potatoes. That hadn't been planted for months.

When the light was turning deep red, the van came to a halt on a steep incline in amongst stands of bamboo. The engine spluttered out and wouldn't start again. Ahead, the red cliffs of the canyon rose in the golden sunlight.

"We can't go any further," Pavlo said, leaning on the wheel. His breath was heavy. "It's too steep. Car is not getting enough oxygen."

The track still continued, with swathes of broken and crushed stems.

"What has he been using then? That looks like a car to me."

"Some people modify their engines with an extra tank of liquid oxygen to feed directly into the combustion chamber. It's dangerous, driving a rocket through town, not to mention illegal. As for us, we'll have to go back. Sorry, but you'll both have to go put on a mask and push so I can turn this thing around."

"I'm not going back. We'll walk."

He goggled at me. "I can’t allow that."

"I’m not giving up this easily. My brother has come this way."

"He might have gone all the way to the other end of the valley. Do you know how far that is? Or do you sit in your ship and look at the map of a whole planet and think it's a marble."

Sven spoke up. "Look, if you have a problem with us, just tell me in our face and be done with it. We didn’t ask you to come. Leave Wendy to look for her brother or f**k off."

"Sven!" What had gotten into him?

The two men glared at each other in heavy silence.

Pavlo got out of the truck and slammed the door, muttering. "At least let’s camp here for the night."

"What?" I mouthed to Sven.

He leaned over for a fleeting kiss. "I protect you. I protect your family. This man—these people—want ill. He doesn't want to help you. He wants to use us to gain legitimate access to this valley."

"Is that what you've been hearing?"

"I'm sensitive to a lot more frequencies than the antenna picks up. Someone is broadcasting on a higher frequency. They're talking about Pavlo collecting evidence. I don't understand what for. It seems they think something illegal happens in the valley and they're normally barred from visiting."

I thought of the checkpoint we'd passed and how the uniformed workers had looked through the back of the truck, for organic material, they said, by way of quarantine, to avoid cross-infection from one dome to the other.

They hadn't been, I realised now, from the Settlement Authority, but some agricultural crowd.

"God, Sven, I didn't ask to become their political football. I just want to see Derek."

"Derek is in the thick of it."

"He is all right, isn't he?"

Sven couldn't answer that.

We prepared for the night.

I had to admit I found the closing green walls rather spooky, more so with the approaching night and the lengthening shadows. The light was turning orange, something I seldom saw.

Pavlo said, "We need to get some firewood and cut some stalks to drape the tarp. There might be rain."

Sven and I went to collect bamboo stalks, but sounded easier than it turned out to be. At this altitude, any physical activity required a mask that rattled wheezed with hoses that got in my way. Bamboo was tough. We only had a pathetic little saw and the stands were so thick it was hard to push through, and awkward to saw close to the ground. Remember the mask?

Sven offered to take the saw so I could collect dead stalks for the fire, and as I was pulling lengths of bamboo free, there was a crash somewhere out of sight, and thumping footfalls of an animal. A very large animal.

I turned to Sven. "What the hell was that?"

Sven whispered, "Some creature." His eyes were wide. He had only known life in space where animals were either absent or lived in farms in cages.

"s**t. Where is Pavlo?" He had a hunting rifle in the truck; I’d seen it way back at the shuttle port when we loaded our luggage.

I peered into the maddening tangle of bamboo, remembering the marks in the soil at Derek’s farm. It was something that could dig. Not wild pigs; they had proven too dangerous for closed environments and no one introduced them anymore. Some sort of rodent? A deer? I went through my mental list of animals we recommended. This animal sounded big. By all rights, it shouldn't be up here in this thin air.

I listened, holding my breath, which made me dizzy.

"Can you see it?" I held my hand on Sven's arm.

He shook his head. It was the first time I'd felt his skin sweaty.

Then something crashed out of the bamboo with a savage growl. No wild pig. It was bigger, much bigger, much hairier, with a white face, black-rimmed eyes, black fluffy ears and a black behind.

I yelled out, "What the fu..." It was coming straight for me in a flat-footed run.

Sven grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me down. While I crashed into the bamboo, and the hoses of my mask tangled, and the contraption dislodged from my face, the creature charged past me. It was gone in a flash, crashing through the bamboo, but I knew that black-and-white pattern from the picture books of my youth.

"s**t. A panda." I scrambled up, readjusting the mask.