Comfort wasn't even on the horizon, but I thanked her for her patience and spent the day packing for the flight back to Orlando. I was nagged by the idea that I ought to take something of my mother's with me, that she would have wanted me to keep a memento for some shoebox of my own. But what? One of her Hummel figurines, which she had loved but which had always struck me as expensive kitsch? The cross-stitched butterfly from the living room wall, the print of Water Lilies in a do-it-yourself frame?
Diane showed up at the door while I was debating. "Does that offer still stand? The trip to Florida? Were you serious about that?"
"Of course I was."
"Because I talked to Simon. He's not completely delighted with the idea, but he thinks he'll be okay on his own for a few more days."
Mighty considerate of him, I thought.
"So," she said, "unless—I mean, I know you'd been drinking—"
"Don't be silly. I'll call the airline."
I booked a seat in Diane's name on the next day's first D.C/Orlando junket.
Then I finished packing. Of my mother's things, I settled at last on the pair of chipped jade Buddha bookends.
I looked around the house, even checked under the beds, but the missing mementos (school) seemed to have vanished permanently.
SNAPSHOTS OF THE ECOPOIESIS
Jason suggested we take rooms in Cocoa Beach and wait a day for him to join us there. He was doing a last round of media Q & A at Perihelion but had cleared his schedule prior to the launches, which he wanted to witness without a CNN crew dunning him with boneheaded questions.
"Great," Diane said when I relayed this information. "I can ask all the boneheaded questions myself."
I had managed to calm her fears about Jason's medical condition: no, he wasn't dying, and any temporary blips on his medical record were his own business. She accepted that, or seemed to, but still wanted to see him, if only to reassure herself, as if my mother's death had shaken her faith in the fixed stars of the Lawton universe.
So I used my Perihelion ID and my connection with Jase to rent us two neighboring suites in a Holiday Inn with a view toward Canaveral. Not long after the Mars project was conceived—once the EPA's objections had been noted and ignored—a dozen shallow-water launch platforms had been constructed and anchored off the coast of Merritt Island. It was these structures we could see most clearly from the hotel. The rest of the view was parking lots, winter beaches, blue water.
We stood on the balcony of her suite. She had showered and changed after the drive from Orlando and we were about to go down and brave the lobby restaurant. Every other balcony we could see bristled with cameras and lenses: the Holiday Inn was a designated media hotel. (Simon may have distrusted the secular press but Diane was suddenly knee-deep in it.) We couldn't see the setting sun but its light caught the distant gantries and rockets and rendered them more ethereal than real, a squadron of giant robots marching off to some battle in the Mid-Atlantic Trench. Diane stood back from the balcony railing as if she found the view frightening. "Why are there so many of them?"
"Shotgun ecopoiesis," I said.
She laughed, a little reproachfully. "Is that one of Jason's words?"
It wasn't, not entirely. "Ecopoiesis" was a word coined by a man named Robert Haynes in 1990, back when terraforming was a purely speculative science. Technically it meant the creation of a self-regulating anaerobic biosphere where none had existed before, but in modern usage it referred to any purely biological modification of Mars. The greening of Mars required two different kinds of planetary engineering: crude terraforming, to raise the surface temperature and atmospheric pressure to a plausible threshold for life, and ecopoiesis: using microbial and plant life to condition the soil and oxygenate the air.
The Spin had already done the heavy lifting for us. Every planet in the solar system—barring Earth—had been warmed significantly by the expanding sun. What remained was the subtler work of ecopoiesis. But there were many possible routes to ecopoiesis, many candidate organisms, from rock-dwelling bacteria to alpine mosses.
"So it's called shotgun," Diane surmised, "because you're sending all of them."
"All of them, and as many of them as we can afford, because no single organism is guaranteed to adapt and survive. But one of them might."
"More than one might."
"Which is fine. We want an ecology, not a monoculture." In fact the launches would be timed and staggered. The first wave would carry only anaerobic and photoautotrophic organisms, simple forms of life that required no oxygen and derived energy from sunlight. If they thrived and died in sufficient numbers they would create a layer of biomass to nurture more complex ecosystems. The next wave, a year from now, would introduce oxygenating organisms; the last unmanned launches would include primitive plants to fix the soil and regulate evaporation and rainfall cycles.
"It all seems so unlikely."
"We live in unlikely times. But no, it's not guaranteed to work."
"And if it doesn't?"
I shrugged. "What have we lost?"
"A lot of money. A lot of manpower."
"I can't think of a better use for it. Yes, this is a wager, and no, it's not a sure thing, but the potential payoff is more than worth the risk. And it's been good for everybody, at least so far. Good for morale at home and a good way of promoting international cooperation."
"But you'll have misled a lot of ordinary people. Convinced them the Spin is something we can manage, something we can find a technological fix for."
"Given them hope, you mean."
"The wrong kind of hope. And if you fail you leave them with no hope at all."
"What would you have us do, Diane? Retreat to our prayer mats?"
"It would hardly be an admission of defeat—prayer, I mean. And if you do succeed, the next step is to send people?"
"Yes. If we green the planet we send people." A much more difficult and ethically complex proposition. We'd be sending candidates in crews of ten. They would have to endure an unpredictably long passage in absurdly small quarters on limited rations. They would have to suffer atmospheric braking at a near-lethal delta-V after months of weightlessness, followed by a perilous descent to the planet's surface. If all this worked, and if their meager allotment of survival gear made its parallel descent and landed anywhere near them, they would then have to teach themselves subsistence skills in an environment only approximately fit for human habitation. Their mission brief was not to return to Earth but to live long enough to reproduce in sufficient numbers and pass on to their offspring a sustainable mode of existence.
"What sane person would agree to that?"
"You'd be surprised." I couldn't speak for the Chinese, the Russians, or any of the other international volunteers, but the North American flight candidates were a shockingly ordinary group of men and women. They had been selected for their youth, physical hardiness, and ability to tolerate and endure discomfort. Only a few had been Air Force test pilots but all possessed what Jason called "the test pilot mentality," a willingness to accept grave physical risk in the name of a spectacular achievement. And, of course, most of them were in all likelihood doomed, just as most of the bacteria mounted on these distant rockets were doomed. The best outcome we could reasonably expect was that some band of nomadic survivors wandering the mossy canyons of Valles Marineris might encounter a similar group of Russians or Danes or Canadians and engender a viable Martian humanity.
"And you countenance this?"