The Martians

Chapter 19 An Argument for the Deployment of All Safe Terraforming Technologies

The Oxia River runs heavy with silt after storms on Margaritifer Terra, and the muddy water pours through the sandbars at the river’s mouth and stains Chryse Gulf as red as blood, in a bloom extending three or four kilometers out toward the archipelago on the horizon. When the flow recedes, and the silt settles to the bottom, the river’s channel is almost always changed. The mouth might have moved all the way to the other end of the beach. The old channel then silts up, its underwater banks continuing to serve as point breaks for incoming waves, until the waves wear them down. It’s all new, week by week, storm by storm—except for the elements involved, of course: sun, sea, sky; the bluffs nosing out into the sea, the river canyon between them; the river’s final beach-dammed lagoon, the dunes, the river water rippling out the break and over the tide bars to slide under the waves of the shorebreak. These are always there.

“Always” in the relative sense, of course. I mean that for years it had been this way. But on Mars the landscape is a matter of perpetual change. Punctuated equilibrium, as Sax once said, without the equilibrium. And the cooling of the 2210s, the years without summer, was such that if something were not done, this river-mouth scene would not exist like this for many more years.

But the methods that seemed to contain any hope of stopping the trend sounded drastic indeed. For someone who loves the land, the idea of a million thermonuclear explosions in the deep regolith is a shocking thing, an ugly thing. You can make all the arguments you like about the containment of radiation, about the essential heat from below, even about the disposal of old Terran weapons, and still it doesn’t seem like something an environmentalist should approve.

And it didn’t help that there were advocates using the stupidest language possible to argue for the various heavy-industrial methods being proposed. These were people who did not understand the power of language. They would speak casually of a “manifest destiny” for Mars, as if this phrase did not come from a determinate moment in American history, a moment inextricably tied to imperialist wars of conquest, to idiot yahoo patriotism, and to a genocide that most Americans still did not like to admit had occurred. So that to use that horrible old phrase to describe the rescue of the Martian biosphere was insane; but some people did it anyway.

And other people, like Irishka, were extremely put off by it. And all because of words. I sat through the whole of that session of the global environmental court, listening to the arguments pro and con, and though my work is in words I thought to myself, This is absurd, this is horrible. Language is nothing but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make one’s point.

So when the session was over I got Irishka and her partner Freya to come with me, and we took the equatorial piste west to Ares Fjord, then drove northwest up the shore of Chryse Gulf to the gravel road that went out to Soochow Point, above the Oxia River’s broad beach of a mouth. Early one summer morning we drove around a turn in the sea-cliff road, and all was clear. The horizon was a clean line between sea and sky. Both were blue: the sky a very dark blue with purplish tinges, as if there were a red shell above the blue one; the sea a blue almost black, its water on this day transparent to a great depth. The land was the usual red rock, though here tinted blackish, as it tended to be through the region, darkening as you move east toward black Syrtis. There was no wind, and the stillness of the water was such that the waves broke as in a wave tank in a physics class, peeling cleanly across their breaks, purring in, leaving white tapestries fizzing behind them, until the shorebreak foamed up the wet red strand.

I saw right away that the bottom had changed again in the most recent storm. There was a new point break off to the far left side of the beach. And this offshore sandbar was angled perfectly to the morning’s incoming swell, which was fairly big. Probably there was a hard wind blowing down Kasei’s great canyon and fjord on the other side of Chryse Gulf, creating these waves some thirteen hundred kilometers away. We could see the swells right out to the horizon, crests perfectly spaced and slightly bowed toward us, like arcs of a circle bigger than the Chryse Gulf itself, sweeping in to curl around Soochow Point and onto our beach, one after the next, all pitching over first at the new point break, then breaking in a continuous clean line all the way across the beach to the new river mouth, far to the right. The break was swift but not too swift, and each was slightly different, of course, shallow bowls giving way to quick walls, or long tubular sections purling over in perfect clear waterfalls. Conditions could never be more perfect. “Oh my God,” Irishka said. “Heaven has come.”

We parked on the bluff just above the beach, got out of the car and put on our wetsuits, then walked down the path and across the beach with flippers in hand. The shorebreak foam ran over our booties and we hooted at the cold water seeping into our wetsuits at the calves—it was about eight or ten degrees, but quickly warmed up. We walked out to where it was waist-deep, then put on fins and pulled up our wetsuit hoods, and dived under the next breaker. Though only our faces were exposed, that was enough to have us all screaming at the shock of the cold, standing again chest deep. We breasted out, still on foot, turning our backs when the waves crashed into us, then dived under a tall white wall of broken water and started swimming.

It was hard work getting outside. The waves always look smaller from the beach, and smaller still from up on a bluff, especially when there’s no one riding them to give you a sense of scale. Now we saw firsthand that the broken waves were walls between two and three meters overhead, and getting under one of those can be a workout if you don’t do it right. And no matter how good wetsuits have gotten, it still feels cold in them at first.

I dived deep just before a wall hit me and relaxed, letting the bottom of the wave’s underwater revolution shove me back. A bit of turbulence shook me like a flag in a wind, then pushed me up hard, out of the break. I hit the surface swimming head-up freestyle as hard as I could, through the hissing wrack to the next boiling wall, where I dived under again. If you time it right, so that you use the waves’ underwater action to help you, it makes getting out much easier than if you fight the break directly. Irishka is a real master at this, and on this day as always she was already far ahead of us.

Six times under for me, and then I saw that I might make it over or through the next wave just before it broke, so I sprinted hard, kicking my long fins and feeling the backwash sucking me out as well, and flew up the face of the next wave and smashed through the clear upper section, then fell down the back of it and swam on to get free of the turbulence. Outside!

And the next wave was just a lift into the air, giving me a brief view around. I was floating just down the line from the point break, and I could see Irishka and Freya already out there ahead of me. Irishka swam out to a wave, then turned and was swimming backstroke hard when the wave picked her up—a big mass of water, a mound swelling into a wall as if by magic, carrying Irishka higher and higher on it.

Then she spun onto her chest and fell down the face of the wave. She extended her webbed gloves down and before her, making a little planing surface, then twisted and made a sharp bottom turn, throwing a white wing of water out away from her cut. Wetsuits these days are much like birdsuits, in that they stiffen in reaction to the stress on them, and the knees will lock together, allowing Irishka to hydroplane over the water’s surface, touching it only with her hands, lower legs, and fins.

She skidded like that out onto the broad shoulder of the wave, which was breaking left at a steady majestic pace, not fast except in occasional bowl sections, which she fired across; but usually she had time enough to carve lines up and down the face, slipping up near the crest and then shooting down and dangerously far out in front of the break, where in effect she had to catch the wave all over again, but with much more momentum this time, so she could rise back up the steepening face toward the waterfall that was pitching out over the flat water below. A tube, yes! There was a fast section mid-beach, it appeared, where the wave went tubular for long stretches, so that Irishka disappeared from my sight for seconds, then shot out of the tube high onto the shoulder, cutting down again to stay in the wave.

Yow! I cried, and swam hard for the point break. Freya took off on one just as I arrived, and disappeared past me with a whoop. Now I had the break entirely to myself, and the very next wave looked just as good as all the previous ones, even a bit better. I swam for the steepest part of it, and saw I had gotten to its takeoff zone in time, and so turned and swam hard for shore. The wave picked me up and I began falling down its face, and knew I had caught it. After a big turn at the bottom I barreled out onto the shoulder of the wave, studying the wave rising up under me to my left, but aware also of the river-mouth canyon standing to my right, and the sky. I was riding the wave as if it were a toboggan ride, down a shifting hill perpetually swinging up into reality before me.

The experience of riding a wave is so strange it is hard to describe. During the ride time changes, or I should say consciousness of time changes—if these are not the same statement. The moment balloons. You seem to notice ten or a hundred times as many things as you could in any ordinary second. Yet at the same time, or in a paradoxical oscillation, everything seems to rush by in a moment. Each ride seems to be a timeless little eternity, jammed into a few seconds. Often the rides really are only a few seconds long, but they feel that way at their ends even if they have lasted a minute or more. Maybe it’s just that at the end you always feel it wasn’t long enough!

However one experiences these knots in time, afterward one can scarcely remember the details of what has been a day of perpetual activity, on the part of both you and the world. Something impedes the memory; there aren’t the words for it, perhaps. One ride merges with the next, and at the end of the day, back on the beach in ordinary reality, if you struggle to remember, only certain peak moments come to mind, moments of vision where an image or a movement branded itself in the brain for good, to come back in unexpected moments and unremembered dreams.

So of any particular ride that day I can say little, although the first of the day (like most firsts) stuck better than most. It was a long and eventful ride, like all the rest that followed. I planed across the shoulder, roller-coastering up and down as the wave bulged beneath me, feeling the way my body was both still and moving rapidly, shifting my angles to stay in the right spot. I saw the fast section coming, and stalled back into a tube that lasted for some time; then I saw the tube was collapsing, and shot out of its last little oval gate, skidding back out high on the shoulder and almost off the back side of the swell, so that I did a 360 spinner to fall back into the wave, and nailed a bottom turn to fly on again. The ride went on like that for the whole length of the beach, lasting almost two minutes.

And all the rides were like that. When they ended we found it easier to roll like grunion onto the shore, spent, and walk back down the beach and swim out at the point, than it would have been to swim out and back south the length of the beach. So we all three got rides and then walked back together, kicking the shallows into fans of spray ahead of us, exclaiming over the rides, and looking around at the sun-drenched day. Then back out for another strenuous fight to get outside, and another wild ride.

The waves got bigger as morning gave way to afternoon, and a wind finally disturbed the glassy surface of the water. It was an offshore wind, however, the surfer’s friend; it held the waves up for us by swooshing down-canyon into the afternoon sun, stalling the breaks and whipping spray off their tops, spray that fell like heavy rain onto the back side of the waves. Looking down the line as we bobbed over the crests, we saw some of those brief rainbows in the blown spray that the Hawaiians call ehukai. And late in the day I took off and saw Irishka dropping in ahead of me on the shoulder of the same wave, and after a timeless time I was streaking along deep in the tube behind her, both of us as still as statues and yet flying through a great rolling tube of water swirling up on our left and out over our heads. And I saw the tube close-out begin ahead of Irishka, and both of us turned up and burst back out into the air at the same time, inside the spray flung back by the wind, and I looked over and saw her suspended in the ehukai with her arms out-stretched, like a mermaid trying to fly up a rainbow.