Green Mars

So they were safe, for the moment. But over the next couple of days, spent in the village in an unhappy state of tension, an investigation into the cause of the fall revealed that the the whole mass of dry ice over them had sagged ever so slightly, cracking the layer of water ice and sending it down through the mesh. Sublimation on the surface of the cap was apparently speeding up to a remarkable degree, as the atmosphere thickened and the world warmed.

During the next week the icebergs in the lake slowly melted, but the plates scattered over the dunes were still there, melting ever so slowly. The youngsters weren’t allowed on the beach anymore; it wasn’t clear how stable the remainder of the ice layer was.

The tenth night after the collapse they had a village meeting in the dining hall, all two hundred of them. Nirgal looked around at them, at his little tribe; the sansei looked frightened, the nisei defiant, the issei stu

It did not need saying that they would not surrender themselves to the surface world. And yet the dome was becoming untenable, and they were too large a group to impose themselves on any of the other hidden sanctuaries. Splitting up would solve that problem, but it wasn’t a happy solution.

It took an hour’s talk to lay all this out. “We could try Vishniac,” Michel said. “It’s big, and they’d welcome us.”

But it was the Bogdanovists’ home, not theirs. This was the message on the faces of the old ones. Suddenly it seemed to Nirgal that they were the most frightened of all.

He said, “You could move back farther under the ice.”

Everyone stared at him.

“Melt a new dome, you mean,” Hiroko said.

Nirgal shrugged. Having said it, he realized he disliked the idea.

But Nadia said, “The cap is thicker back there. It will be a long time before it sublimes enough to trouble us. By that time everything will have changed.”

There was a silence, and then Hiroko said, “It’s a good idea. We can hold on here while a new dome is being melted, and move things over as space becomes available. It should only take a few months.”

“Shikata ga nai,” Maya said sardonically. There is no other choice. Of course there were other choices. But she looked pleased at the prospect of a big new project, and so did Nadia. And the rest of them looked relieved that they had an option that kept them together, and hidden. The issei, Nirgal saw suddenly, were very frightened of exposure. He sat back, wondering at that, thinking of the open cities he had visited with Coyote.

They used steam hoses powered by the Rickover to melt another tu

While the excavation went on they dug up the shallow ru

One day Nirgal went back with Peter to take a look at the old place. It was shocking to see the only home he had ever had reduced to such a shell — the ice all cracked above, the sand all torn up, the raw root holes of the village gaping like horrible wounds, the lakebed scraped clear even of its algae. It looked small and ramshackle, some desperate animal’s den. Moles in a hole, Coyote had said. Hiding from vultures. “Let’s get out of here,” Peter said sadly, and they walked together down the long bare poorly lit tu

They laid out the new dome in a new pattern, with the village away from the tu

But once as he left the schoolhouse and saw the dining hall, rather than the big shoots of Creche Crescent, the sight brought him up short. His old familiar world was gone, gone forever. That was how time worked. It sent a pang through him that brought tears to his eyes, and he spent the rest of that day somewhat stu

She stared at him, birdlike, her head cocked to one side. He thought he could see her affection for him in that cock of the head, but he wasn’t sure; as he got older he felt he understood her (along with everyone else) less and less.

She said, “It is sad the old dome is gone, isn’t it. But we must focus on what is coming. This too is viriditas. To concentrate not on what we have created, but what we will create. The dome was like a flower which wilts and falls, but contains the seed of a new plant, which grows and then there are new flowers and new seeds. The past is gone. Thinking about it will only make you melancholy. Why, I was a girl in Japan once, on Hokkaido Island! Yes, as young as you! And I can’t tell you how far gone that is. But here we are now, you and me, surrounded by these plants and these people, and if you pay attention to them, and how you can make them increase and prosper, then the life comes back into things. You feel the kami inside all things, and that is all you need. This moment itself is all we ever live in.”