It was a feeling generally shared, apparently. Spring lasted 143 days in the southern hemisphere, coming all the way back from the harsh aphelion winter. More plants bloomed as the spring months passed, first early ones like promise-of-spring and snow liverwort, then later ones such as phlox and heather, then saxifrage and Tibetan rhubarb, moss campion and alpine nailwort, cornflowers and edelweiss, on and on until every patch of green carpet in the rocky palm of the basin was touched with brilliant dots of cyanic blue, dark pink, yellow, white, each color waving in a layer at the characteristic height of the plant holding it, all of them glowing in the dusk like drips of light, welling out into the world from nowhere — a pointillist Mars, the ribbiness of the seamed basin etched in the air by this scree of color. He stood in a cupped rock hand which tilted its snowmelt down a lifeline crease in the palm, down into the wide world so far below, a vast shadowy world that loomed to the west under the sun, all hazy and low. The last light of day seemed to shine slightly upward.
One clear morning Jackie appeared on his house AI screen, and announced she was on the piste from Odessa to Libya, and wanted to drop by. Nirgal agreed before he had time to think.
He went down to the path by the outlet stream to greet her. Little high basin… there were a million craters like it in the south. Little old impact. Nothing the slightest bit distinguished about it. He remembered Shining Mesa, the stupendous yellow view at dawn.
They came up in three cars, bouncing wildly over the terrain, like kids. Jackie was driving the first car, Antar the second. They were laughing hard as they got out. Antar didn’t seem to mind losing the race. They had a whole group of young Arabs with them. Jackie and Antar looked young themselves, amazingly so; it had been a long time since Nirgal had seen them, but they had not changed at all. The treatments; current folk wisdom was to get it done early and often, ensuring perpetual youth and balking any of the rare diseases that still killed people from time to time. Balking death entirely, perhaps. Early, often. They still looked like they were fifteen m-years old. But Jackie was a year older than Nirgal, and he was almost thirty-three m-years old now, and feeling older. Looking at their laughing faces, he thought, I’ll have to get the treatment myself someday.
So they wandered around, stepping on the grass and ooh-ing and ahhing at the flowers, and the basin seemed smaller and smaller with every exclamation they made. Near the end of their visit Jackie took him to one side, looking serious.
She said, “We’re having trouble holding off the Terrans, Nirgal. They’re sending up almost a million a year, just like you said they never could. And these new arrivals aren’t joining Free Mars like they used to. They’re still supporting their home governments. Mars isn’t changing them fast enough. If this goes on, then the whole idea of a free Mars will be a joke. I sometimes wonder if it was a mistake to leave the cable up.”
She frowned and twenty years jumped onto her face all at once. Nirgal suppressed a little shudder.
“It would help if you weren’t hiding here,” she exclaimed with sudden anger, dismissing the basin with a wave of her hand. “We need everyone we can get to help. People still remember you now, but in a few years…”
So he only had to wait a few more years, he thought. He watched her. She was beautiful, yes. But beauty was a matter of the spirit, of intelligence, vivacity, empathy. So that while Jackie grew ever more beautiful, at the same time she grew less beautiful. Another mysterious infolding. And Nirgal was not pleased by this internal loss in Jackie, not in any way; it was only one more note in the chord of his Jackie pain, really. He didn’t want it to be true.
“We can’t really help them by taking more immigrants,” she said. “That was wrong, when you said that on Earth. They know it too. They can see it better than we can, no doubt. But they send people anyway. And you know why? You know why? Just to wreck things here. Just to make sure there isn’t someplace where people are doing it right. That’s their only reason.”
Nirgal shrugged. He didn’t know what to say; probably there was some truth to what she had said, but it was just one of a million different reasons for people to come; there was no reason to fix on it.
“So you won’t come back,” she said at last. “You don’t care.”
Nirgal shook his head. How to say to her that she was not worried about Mars, but about her own power? He wasn’t the one who could tell her that. She wouldn’t believe him. And maybe it was only true to him anyway.
Abruptly she stopped trying to reach him. A regal glance at Antar, and Antar did the work of gathering their coterie into the cars. A final questioning look; a kiss, full on the mouth, no doubt to bother Antar, or him, or both of them; like an electric shock to the soul; and she was off.
He spent the afternoon and the next day wandering, sitting on flat rocks and watching the little rivulets bounce downstream. Once he remembered how fast water had fallen on Earth. Unnatural. No. But this was his place, known and loved, every dyad and every clump of campion, even the speed of water as it lofted off stone and plashed down in its smooth silver shapes. The way moss felt under the finger pads. His visitors were people for whom Mars was forever an idea, a nascent state, a political situation. They lived in the tents and they might as well have been in a city anywhere, and their devotion, while real, was given to some cause or idea, some Mars of the mind. Which was fine. But for Nirgal now it was the land that mattered, the places where water arrived just so, trickling over the billion-year-old rock onto pads of new moss. Leave politics to the young, he had done his part. He didn’t want to do anymore. Or at least he wanted to wait until Jackie was gone. Power was like Hiroko, after all — it always slipped away. Didn’t it? Meanwhile, the cirque like an open hand.
But then one morning when he went out for a dawn walk, there was something different. The sky was clear, its purest morning purple, but a juniper’s needles had a yellowish tinge to them, and so did the moss, and the potato leaves on their mounds.
He plucked the yellowest samples of needles and sprigs and leaves, and took them back to the workbench in his greenhouse. Two hours’ work with microscope and AI did not find any problem, and he went back out and pulled up some root samples, and bagged some more needles and leaves and blades and flowers. Much of the grass had a wilted look, though it wasn’t a hot day.
Heart thudding, stomach taut, he worked all day and into the night. He could discover nothing. No insects, no pathogens. But the potato leaves in particular looked yellow. That night he called Sax and explained the situation. By coincidence Sax was visiting the university in Sabishii, and he drove up the next morning in a little rover, the latest from Spencer’s co-op.
“Nice,” Sax said as he got out and looked around. He checked Nirgal’s samples in the greenhouse. “Hmm,” he said. “I wonder.”
He had brought some instruments in his car, and they lugged them into the boulder and he went to work. At the end of a long day he said, “I can’t find anything. We’ll have to take some samples down to Sabishii.”
“You can’t find anything?”
“No pathogen. No bacteria, no virus.” He shrugged. “Let’s take several potatoes.”
They went out and dug potatoes from the field. Some of them were gnarled, elongated, cracked. “What is it?” Nirgal exclaimed.
Sax was frowning a little. “Looks like spindle tuber disease.”
“What causes it?”
“A viroid.”
“What’s that?”
“A bare RNA fragment. Smallest known infectious agent. Strange.”
“Ka.” Nirgal felt his stomach clamping inward. “How did it get here?”