“Hmm,” Nadia said. She got out a map, and they pored over it. At the zero-longitude line, the south shore of the northern sea bent out in a little round peninsula, with a crater bay at its center. It was about halfway between Tharsis and Elysium. “We’ll have to go take a look.”
“Yes. Here, come to bed. We’ll talk about it more later. Right now I have another idea.”
Some months later they were flying backfrom Bradbury Point to Sheffield, and Nadia remembered that conversation with Art. She asked the pilot to land at a little station north of Sklodowska Crater, on the slope of Crater Zm, called Zoom. As they descended on the airstrip they saw to the east a big bay, now covered with ice. Across the bay was the rough mountainous country of Mamers Vallis, and the Deuteronilus Mensae. The bay was an incursion into the Great Escarpment, which was here fairly gentle. Longitude zero. Latitude forty-six degrees north, fairly far north; but the northern winters were mild compared to the south. They could see a lot of the icy sea, lying off a long shoreline. The rounded peninsula surrounding Zoom was high and smooth. The little station on the shore was home to about five hundred people, who were out there building with bulldozer and cranes and dredges and draglines. Nadia and Art got out and sent the plane on, and took a boardinghouse room and spent about a week with the people there, talking about the new settlement. The locals had heard of the proposal to build a new capital city here on the bay; some of them liked the idea, some didn’t. They had thought of calling their settlement Greenwich because of its longitude, but they had heard the British didn’t pronounce it “Green Witch,” and they didn’t know how they felt about spelling the town to sound that way and then calling it “Grenich.” Maybe just London, they said. We’ll think of something, they said. The bay itself, they said, had long been called Chalmers Bay.
“Really?” Nadia exclaimed. She laughed. “How perfect.”
She was already very attracted to the landscape: Zoom’s smooth conic apron, the incurve of the big bay; red rock over white ice, and presumably over blue sea, someday. On the days of their visit clouds flowed by constantly, riding the west wind and dappling both land and ice with their shadows — sometimes puffy white cumulus clouds, like galleons, other times scrolled herringbone patterns unrolling overhead, defining the dark dome of sky above them, and the curving rocky land under them. It could be a small handsome city, encircling a bay like San Francisco or Sydney, as beautiful as those two but smaller, human scale — Bogdanovist architecture — hand-built. Well, not exactly hand-built, of course. But they could design it at a human scale. And work on it as a kind of work of art. Walking with Art on the shores of the ice bay, Nadia talked through her CO2 mask about these ideas, while watching the parade of clouds gallop by in the low-rushing air.
“Sure,” Art said. “It would work. It’s going to be a city anyway, that’s the important thing. It’s one of the best bays on this stretch of the coast, so it’s bound to be used as a harbor. So you wouldn’t get the kind of capital city that just sits in the middle of nowhere, like Canberra or Brasilia, or Washington, B.C. It’ll have a whole other life as a seaport.”
“That’s right. That would be great.” Nadia walked on, excited as she thought about it, feeling better than she had in months. The movement to establish a capital somewhere else than Sheffield was strong, supported by almost every party up there. This bay had already been proposed as a site by the Sabishiians, so it would be a matter of supporting an already-existing idea, rather than forcing a new one on people. The support would be there. And as a public-works project, building it would be something she could take full part in. Part of the gift economy. She might even be able to have an influence on the plan of it. The more she thought about it, the more pleased she got.
They had walked far down the shore of the bay; they turned around and began to walk back to the little settlement. Clouds tumbled over them on a stiff wind. The curve of red land made its greeting to the sea. Just under the cloud layer, a ragged V of honking geese fletched the wind, heading north.
Later that day, as they flew back to Sheffield, Art picked up her hand and held it, inspecting her new finger. He said slowly, “You know, building a family would also be a very hands-on kind of construction.”
“What?”
“And they’ve got reproduction pretty much figured out.”
“What?”
“I said, as long as you’re alive, you can pretty much have children, one way or another.”
“What?”
“That’s what they say. If you wanted to, you could do it.”
“No.”
“That’s what they say.”
“No.”
“It’s a good idea.”
“No.”
“Well, you know, even building … it’s great, sure, but you can only go on plumbing for so long. Plumbing, hammering nails, bulldozing — it’s all interesting enough, of course, I guess, but still. We have a lot of time to fill. And the only work really interesting enough to pursue over the long haul would be raising a kid, don’t you think?”
“No I do not!”
“But did you ever have a kid?”
“No.”
“Well there you go.”
“Oh God.”
Her ghost finger was tingling. But now it was really there.
PART EIGHT
The Green and the White
Cadres came to the town Xiazha, in Guangzhou, and said, For the good of China we need you to recreate this village on Moon Plateau, Mars. You’ll go there together, the whole village. You’ll have your family and your friends and neighbors with you. Ten thousand of you all together. In ten years if you decide you want to come back, you can, and replacements will be sent to the new Xiazha. We think you will like it. It’s a few kilometers north of the harbor town ofNilokeras, near the Maumee River delta. The land is fertile. There are other Chinese villages already in that region, and Chinese sections in all the big cities. There are many hectares of empty land. The trip can begin in a month — train to Hong Kong, ferry to Manila, and then up the space elevator into orbit. Six months crossing the space between here and Mars, down their elevator to Pavonis Mons, a party train to Moon Plateau. What do you say? Let’s have a unanimous vote and start things off on the right foot.
Later a clerk in the town called up the Praxis office in Hong Kong, and told an operator there what had happened. Praxis Hong Kong sent the information along to Praxis’s demographic study group in Costa Rica. A planner there named Amy added the report to a long list of similar reports, and sat thinking for a morning. That afternoon she made a call to Praxis chairman emeritus William Fort, who was surfing a new reef in El Salvador. She described the situation to him. “The blue world is full,” he said, “the red world is empty. There’s going to be problems. Let’s talk about them.”
The demographics group and part of the Praxis policy team, including many of the Eighteen Immortals, gathered in Fort’s hillside surf camp. The demographers laid out the situation. “Everyone is getting the longevity treatment now,” Amy said. “We are fully into the hypermalthusian age.”
It was a demographically explosive situation. Naturally emigration to Mars was often seen by Terran government planners as one solution to the problem. Even with its new ocean, Mars still had almost as much land area as Earth, and hardly any people. The really populous nations, Amy told the group, were already sending up as many people as they could. Often the emigrants were members of ethnic or religious minorities who were dissatified with their lack of autonomy in their home countries, and so were happy to leave. In India the elevator cars of the cable that touched down at Suvadiva Atoll, south of the Maldives, were constantly at capacity, full of emigrants all day every day, a stream of Sikhs and Kashmiris and Muslims and also Hindus, ascending into space and moving to Mars. There were Zulus from South Africa. Palestinians from Israel. Kurds from Turkey. Native Americans from the United States. “In that sense,” Amy said, “Mars is becoming the new America.”