Furious Gulf (43 page)

37,518  Fall of Family Bishop Citadel on Snowglade, termed the “Calamity.”

37,524  Escape of Family Bishop from Snowglade in ancient human vessel. Clandestine oversight of this band by Mantis level
mechanicals.

37,529  Surviving Bishops reach nearest star, encounter Cybers. Defeat local mechanicals. Adopt some human refugees.

37,530  Bishops leave, escorted by Cybers and cosmic string.

37,536  Bishops reach Absolute Center, enter Wedge.

37,538  Temporal sequences become stocastically ordered. Release of Trigger Codes into mechanical minds. Death of most mechanical
forms. Intervention of Highers to rectify damage done by excessive mechanical expansion.

Preservation of several human varieties. Archiving of early forms in several deeply embedded representations.

Beginning of cooperation between Higher mechanically-based forms and organic (“Natural”) forms. Decision to address the larger
problems of all lifeforms by Syntony, in collaboration with aspects of lower forms.

Beginning of mature phase of self-organized forms.

END OF PREAMBLE. LATER EVENTS CANNOT BE THUS REPRESENTED.

GREGORY BENFORD
is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was a Visiting Fellow at
Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. His research encompasses both theory
and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including two Nebula Awards,
one John W. Campbell Award, and one British SF Award. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.

More Gregory Benford!

Please turn this page for a preview of

The Sunborn

Available wherever books are sold.

Julia turned her best side toward the camera, a three-quarter shot, and spread her arms. Okay, maybe a bit theatrical, but
she had the backdrop for it.

“Welcome to Earth on Mars!” She always opened firm, friendly, positive. She swept an arm around, taking in the stubby trees
with their odd purple-green leaves, the raked mounds barely sprouting brownish-green patches, and above it all, the shiny
curve of the dome, a hundred meters high. Beyond the dome’s ultraviolet screening hung the dark of space. The somber cap was
always there, reminding them of how little atmosphere shielded them.

“We showed you the inflation of the big dome a month ago, the planting of trees right after—now we have grass.”

Not any breed of grass you’ve ever seen before, though; it’s a genetically modified plant more like a dwarf bamboo, and technically
bamboo is a grass, just a really stiff one, so . . .

“It’ll be a while before we can play football on it, true. We’re pretty sure nothing like grass ever grew on the surface of
ancient Mars even back in the warm and wet period. So this prickly little fuzz”—she stooped to stroke it—“is a first. It’ll
help along the big job that the microbes are doing down in the ground already—breaking up the regolith, making it into real
soil.”

Was she sounding strained already? It was getting harder to strike the right level of enthusiasm in her weekly broadcast to
Earthside. She could barely remember the days decades before, when she had broadcast several times a day, sometimes from this
same spot. But then, they had been breaking new ground nearly every day. And betting pools on Earth gave new odds every time
they went out in the rover on whether they’d come back alive. Usually about 50/50. The good ol’ days.

She smiled, strolling to her right as Viktor panned the camera. She had to remember her marks and turns, and to keep out of
camera view the crowd of camp staff watching nearby.

Viktor called, “Cut, got sun reflecting in the lens.”

“Whew! Good. Let me memorize a few lines . . .”

She was glad for the break. It was getting harder to sound perky. The Consortium people had been grousing about that lately.
But then, they had done so periodically, over the two decades she and Viktor had been doing their little shows. Media mavens
had some respect for
The Mars Couple
(the title of the Broadway musical about them), but the long shadow of the Consortium, which had backed the
2018 First Landing
(the movie title), wanted to keep them on the air for the worldwide subscriber base—and always pumping the numbers higher,
of course. Axelrod, still the head of the Consortium,
The Man Who Sold Mars
(the miniseries title), and now probably the wealthiest man in the solar system, played diplomat between them and the execs
Earthside. Exploration? Discovery—yes, they still got to do some. But a safari that turned up nothing new—like the Olympus
Mons fiasco—could drive down Consortium shares, send heads rolling at high corporate levels, and make headlines. So she and
Viktor tried not to think too much about the eternal media issues. It never really helped.

Viktor was fiddling, changing the camera angle, and here came Andy Lang, trotting over with his studied grin. “Julia, got
an idea for a last shot.”

“What is it?” She looked beyond him and saw the two arm wings Andy had brought from Earth the year before, bright blue monolayer
on a carbon strut. “Oh—well, look, we’ve done your flying stunt three times already.”

“I’m thinking just a closing shot.” He gestured up to the top of the dome, over a hundred meters above. “I come off the top
platform, swing around the eucalyptus clump, into Viktor’s field of view—after you do your last line.”

“Ummm.” She had to admit they had no good finishing image, and Earthside was always carping about that. “You can do it?”

“Been practicing. I’ve got the timing down.” He was a big, muscular guy, an engineering wizard who had improved their geothermal
system enormously. And a looker. Axelrod made sure to send them lookers. After all, thousands volunteered to work here every
year. Why take the ugly ones when the worldwide audience liked eye candy?

Julia looked up at the ledge platform near the dome peak. His earlier flights had flown around the dome’s outer curve, pleasantly
graceful. The eucalyptus stand at the dome’s center was her pet project. She insisted on some blue gum trees from her Australian
home, the forests north of Adelaide. Earthside dutifully responded with a funded contest among plant biologists to find a
eucalyptus that could withstand the sleeting ultraviolet here. Of course the dome helped a lot; chemists had developed a miracle
polymer that could billow into a broad dome, holding in nearly a full Earth atmosphere, and yet also subtract a lot of the
UV from sunlight—all without editing away the middle spectrum needed for plant growth.

The blue gums were a darker hue, but they grew rapidly in the Martian regolith. Of course she had to prepare the soil—joyful
days spent spading in the humus they had processed from their own wastes. The French called it
eau de fumier
or spirit of manure and chronicled every centimeter of blue gum growth. She’d sprouted the seeds and nurtured the tiny seedlings
fiercely. Once planted, their white flanks had grown astonishingly fast. Their leaves hung down, minimizing their exposure
to the residual hard ultraviolet that got through the dome’s filtering skin. But their trunks were spindly, with odd limbs
sticking out like awkward elbows—yet more evidence that bringing life to Mars was not going to be easy.

She considered Andy’s idea. Andy was a media hit with the ladies Earthside, if perhaps a bit of a camera hog. She had been
giving him all the air time he wanted lately, glad to offload the work. “Okay, get on up there.”

She checked the timing with Viktor while Andy shimmied up the climbing rope to the peak of the dome and its platform, the
big arm wings strapped to his back making him look like a gigantic moth. They moved location so that Andy would be shielded
from Viktor’s view, until he came around the clump of whitebark eucalyptus trunks as Viktor panned upward from her concluding
shot.

In a few minutes more they were ready to go. Julia wondered if she could ease out of this job altogether, letting Andy the
Hunk take most of it. She made a mental note to tactfully broach the subject with Axelrod.

“Positions!” Viktor called. Andy nodded from the platform, wings in place. “On,” Viktor said.

Without thinking about it Julia hit the same marker where she had left off and started. “You can’t imagine how thrilling it
is to walk on Martian grass, without a space suit, breathing air that smells . . . well, I won’t lie, still pretty dusty.
But better, yes. To think that we used to test the rocks here for signs of water deposition! Once the raw frontier, now a
park. Progress.”

Of course the hard part was turning regolith rocks and sand into topsoil, but that’s booooring, yes.
Earthside had developed some fierce strains of bacteria that could break down all comers—old running shoes, hardbound books,
insulation, packing buffers—into rich black loam almost as you watched.

She ducked as a white shape hurtled by, narrowly missing her head. “Chicken alert!” she said lightly, gesturing toward it
with her head. It squawked and flapped, turning like a feathered blimp with wings. “Who would have thought chickens could
have so much fun up here, in the low gravity? They find it far easier to fly here than on Earth. Of course we brought them
here so we could have fresh eggs, and they do lay, so we predicted that part correctly. But we don’t always know everything
that’s going to happen in a biological experiment. This is the Mars version of the chicken and egg problem.”

Viktor smiled dutifully; they’d shared this little joke before. The Earthside producer would more probably wince.
Okay, back to the script.

She waved a hand to her right and Viktor followed the gesture with the camera, bringing in the view of the slopes and hills
in the distance, beyond the green lances of the eucalyptus limbs. The slopes were still rusty red in the afternoon light,
of course, far beyond the curved dome that sloped down to its curved tie-down wall eighty meters away. They stood out nicely
with the green eucalyptus foreground. The other trees—ranging from drought and cold-resistent shrubs from Tasmania, to hearty
high-altitude species— almost made a convincing forest. The “grass” was really a mixture of mosses, lichens and small tundra
species, too. A big favorite of the staff was vegetable sheep, soft, pale clumps from New Zealand’s high country. Convincing
to the visual audience—
a golf course on Mars!
—but also able to survive a cold Martian night and even a sudden pressure drop. The toughest stuff from Earth, made still
more rugged with bioengineering.

Axelrod had insisted on the visuals.
Make it look Earthy, yes.
She had worked for years to make the inflated domes support life and there was still plenty to do. Making the raw regolith
swarm with microbes to build soil, coaxing lichens onto the boulders used to help anchor the dome floors in place, being sure
the roots of the first shrubs could survive the cold and prickly alkaline dirt. Years, yes, grubbing and figuring and trying
everything she could muster. For a beginning.

Pay attention! You’re on camera, and Viktor hates to reshoot.

“Ah, one of my faves . . .” She altered course to pass by a baobab—a tall, fat, tubular tree from western Australia, with
only a few thin spidery limbs sprouting from its top, like a nearly bald man. Early settlers had used them to store food,
take shelter, even as jail cells. On Mars they grew spectacularly fast, like eucalyptus, and nobody knew why. Aussie plants
generally did better here, from the early greenhouse days of the first landing, onward. Maybe, the biologist in her said,
this came from the low-energy biology of Australia. The continent had skated across the Pacific, its mountains getting worn
down, minerals depleted, rainfall lessening, and life had been forced to adapt. A hundred million years of life getting by
with less and less . . . much like Mars.

“For those of you who’ve loyally stuck with us through these—wow, twenty-two years!—I say thanks. Sometimes I think that this
is all a dream, and days like this prove it. Grass on Mars! Or”—she grinned, tilting her head up a bit to let the filtered
sunlight play on her still dark hair, using the only line she had prepared for this ’cast—“another way to say it, I started
out with nothing and still have most of it left. Out there—in wild Mars.”

Not that this little patch is so domesticated. It’s how we find out if raw regolith can become true soil, and what will grow
well here.

“Already there are environmental groups trying to preserve original, ancient Mars from us invaders.” She chuckled. “If Mars
were just bare stone and dust, I’d laugh—I never did believe that rocks have rights. But since there’s life here, they have
a point.”

This was just editorial patter, of course, while Viktor followed her on the walk toward the fountain. It tinkled and splashed
in the foreground while she approached, Viktor shooting from behind her, so the camera looked through the trees, on through
the clear dome walls to the dusty red landscape beyond. “I like to gaze out, so that I can imagine what Mars was like in its
early days, a hospitable planet.” She turned, spread her hands in self mockery. “Okay, we now know from fossils that there
were no really big trees—nothing larger than a bush, in fact. But I can dream . . .”

She smiled and tried to not make it look calculated. After a quarter century of peering into camera snouts, she had some media
savvy. Still, she and Viktor thought in terms of,
If we do this, people will like it.
That had been a steadier guide through the decades than taking the advice about exploring Mars from the Earthside media execs
of the Consortium, whose sole idea was,
If we do this, we’ll maximize our global audience share, get ideas for new product lines, and/or optimize near-term profitability.