"Isn't time what they took away from us?"
"On the contrary. Outside our little terrestrial bubble we have millions of years to play with. And we have a tool that works extremely reliably over exactly those spans of time."
"Tool," I said, bewildered, while he speared another cube of beef. The meal was straight to the point. A steak on a plate, bottle of beer on the side. No frills, barring the three-bean salad, of which he took a modest helping.
"Yes, a tool, the obvious one: evolution."
"Evolution."
"We can't have this talk, Tyler, if you just repeat everything back to me."
"Okay, well, evolution as a tool… I still don't see how we can evolve sufficiently in thirty or forty years to make a difference."
"Not us, for god's sake, and certainly not in thirty or forty years. I'm talking about simple forms of life. I'm talking about eons. I'm talking about Mars."
"Mars." Oops.
"Don't be obtuse. Think about it."
Mars was a functionally dead planet, even if it may once have possessed the primitive precursors to life. Outside the Spin bubble, Mars had been "evolving" for millions of years since the October Event, warmed by the expanding sun. It was still, according to the latest orbital photographs, a dead, dry planet. If it had possessed simple life and a supportive climate it could have become, I guessed, a lush green jungle by now. But it didn't and it wasn't.
"People used to talk about terraforming," Jason said. "Remember those speculative novels you used to read?"
"I still read them, Jase."
"More power to you. How would you go about terraforming Mars?"
"Try to get enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to warm it up. Release its frozen water. Seed it with simple organisms. But even with the most optimistic assumptions, that would take—"
He smiled.
I said, "You're kidding me."
"No." The smile went away. "Not at all. No, this is quite serious."
"How would you even begin—?"
"We would begin with a series of synchronized launches containing payloads of engineered bacteria. Simple ion engines and a slow glide to Mars. Mostly controlled crashes, survivable for unicells, and a few larger payloads with bunker-buster warheads to deliver the same organisms below the surface of the planet where we suspect the presence of buried water. Hedge our bets with multiple launches and a whole spectrum of candidate organisms. The idea is to get enough organic action going to loosen up the carbon locked into the crust and respirate it into the atmosphere. Give it a few million years—months, our time—then survey the planet again. If it's a warmer place with a denser atmosphere and maybe a few ponds of semiliquid water we do the cycle again, this time with multicelled plants engineered for the environment. Which puts some oxygen into the air and maybe cranks up the atmospheric pressure another couple of millibars. Repeat as necessary. Add more millions of years and stir. In a reasonable time—the way our clocks measure time—you might be able to cook up a habitable planet."
It was a breathtaking idea. I felt like one of those sidekick characters in a Victorian mystery novel—"It was an audacious, even ludicrous, plan he had contrived, but try as I might, I could find no flaw in it!"
Except one. One fundamental flaw.
"Jason," I said. "Even if this is possible. What good does it do us?"
"If Mars is habitable, people can go there and live."
"All seven or eight billion of us?"
He snorted. "Hardly. No, just a few pioneers. Breeding stock, if you want to be clinical about it."
"And what are they supposed to do?"
"Live, reproduce, and die. Millions of generations for each of our years."
"To what end?"
"If nothing else, to give the human species a second chance in the solar system. In the best case—they'll have all the knowledge we can give them, plus a few million years to improve on it. Inside the Spin bubble we don't have time enough to figure out who the Hypotheticals are or why they're doing this to us. Our Martian heirs might have a better chance. Maybe they can do our thinking for us."
Or our fighting for us?
(This was, incidentally, the first time I had heard them called "Hypotheticals"—the hypothetical controlling intelligences, the unseen and largely theoretical creatures who had enclosed us in their time vault. The name didn't catch on with the general public for a few more years. I was sorry when it did. The word was too clinical, it suggested something abstract and coolly objective; the truth was likely to be more complex.)
"There's a plan," I said, "to actually do these things?"
"Oh yes." Jason had finished three quarters of his steak. He pushed his plate away. "It's not even prohibitively expensive. Engineering extremely hardy unicells is the only problematic part. The surface of Mars is cold, dry, virtually airless, and bathed in sterilizing radiation every time the sun comes up. Even so, we have whole rafts of extremophiles to work with—bacteria living in Antarctic rocks, bacteria living in the outflow from nuclear reactors. And everything else is fully proven technology. We know rockets work. We know organic evolution works. The only really new thing is our perspective. To be able to get extremely long-term results literally days or months after we launch. It's… people are calling it 'teleological engineering.'"
"It's almost like," I said (testing the new word he had given me), "what the Hypotheticals are doing."
"Yes," Jason said, raising his eyebrows in a look I still found flattering after all these years: surprise, respect. "Yes, in a way I guess it is."
* * * * *
I had once read an interesting detail in a book about the first manned moon landing back in 1969. At that time, the book said, some of the very elderly—men and women born in the nineteenth century, old enough to remember a world before automobiles and television—had been reluctant to believe the news. Words that would have made only fairy-tale sense in their childhood ("two men walked on the moon tonight") were being offered as statements of fact. And they couldn't accept it. It confounded their sense of what was reasonable and what was absurd.
Now it was my turn.
We're going to terraform and colonize Mars, said my friend Jason, and he wasn't delusional… or at least no more delusional than the dozens of smart and powerful people who apparently shared his conviction. So the proposition was serious; it must already have been, at some bureaucratic level, a work in progress.
I took a walk around the grounds after dinner while there was still a little daylight.
Mike the yard guy had done a decent job. The lawn glowed like a mathematician's idea of a garden, the cultivation of a primary color. Beyond it, shadows had begun to rise in the wooded acreage. Diane would have appreciated the woods in this light, I thought. I thought again of those summer sessions by the creek, years ago now, when she would read to us from old books. Once, when we talked about the Spin, Diane had quoted a little rhyme by the English poet A. E. Housman:
The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;
He has devoured the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
He has been eaten by the bear.
* * * * *
Jason was on the phone when I came back through the kitchen door. He looked at me, then turned away and lowered his voice.
"No," he said. "If it has to be that way, but—no, I understand. All right. I said all right, didn't I? All right means all right."
He pocketed the phone. I said, "Was that Diane?"
He nodded.
"She's coming?"
"She's coming. But there are a couple of things I want to mention before she gets here. You know what we talked about over dinner? We can't share that with her. Or, actually, anyone. It's not public information."
"You mean it's classified."
"Technically, I suppose so, yes."
"But you told me about it."