Ilya’s face reddened with embarrassment.
Ti Sandra held up her hands above the raucous cheering. “She’s from Majumdar but she isn’t a banker, so you be good to her and don’t ask for more loans.”
More cheers.
“Her name is Casseia. Stand up, Cassie.” I stood and it was my turn to blush. The cheers nearly brought down the insulation.
Kiqui toasted our health and asked if I was interested in fossils.
“I love them,” I said, and that was true; I loved them because of their connection to Ilya.
“That’s good, because Ilya’s the only man I know who gets depressed when he hasn’t dug for a week,” Kiqui said. “He’s my kind of assistant.”
“She hasn’t decided what arrangements to make, but we’ll be happy either way,” Ti Sandra said.
“We’ve decided, actually,” Ilya said.
“What?” the crowd asked as one.
“I’ve offered to transfer to Majumdar,” Ilya said.
“Very good,” Ti Sandra said, but her expression betrayed her.
“But Casseia tells me she’s ready for a change. She’s transferring to Erzul.”
“If you’ll have me,” I added.
More cheers. Ti Sandra embraced me again. A hug from her was like being folded in the arms of a large, soft tree with a core of iron. “Another daughter,” she said. ‘That’s lovely!“
They crowded around Ilya and me, offering congratulations. Aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, all offered bits of advice and stories about Ilya. Ilya’s face got redder and redder as the stories piled one on top of another. “Please!” he protested. “We haven’t signed any papers yet… Don’t scare her off!”
After dessert, we squatted in a circle around a large rotating table and sampled a variety of drinks and liqueurs. They drank more than any Martians I had met, yet kept their dignity and intelligence at all times.
Ti Sandra took me aside toward the end of the evening, saying she wanted to show me her prize tropical garden. The garden was beautiful, but she did not spend much time with the tour.
“I know a little about you, Casseia. What I’ve heard impressed the hell out of me. We may not look it, but we’re an ambitious little family, you know that?”
“Ilya’s given me some hints.”
“Some of us have been studying the Charter and thinking things through. You’ve had a lot of experience in politics…”
“Not that much. Government and management… from the point of view of one BM.”
“Yes, but you’ve been to Earth. We have a unique opportunity in this BM. Nobody hates us. We go everywhere, meet everybody, we’re friendly… A lot of trust. We think we might have something to offer Mars.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said.
“Shall we talk more later?” Her eyes twinkled, but her face was stern, an expression I would come to know very well in the months ahead. Ti Sandra had bigger plans — and more talents — than I could possibly have imagined then.
Ilya and I honeymooned at Cyane Sulci, a few hundred kilometers east of Lycus Sulci. For transportation, we used Professor Jordan-ErzuFs portable lab, a ten-meter-long cylinder that rolled on seven huge spring-steel tires. The interior was cramped and dusty, with two pull-down cots, rudimentary nano kitchen producing pasty recycled food, sponge-baths only. The air smelled of sizzle and flopsand and we sneezed all the time. I have never been happier or more at ease in my life.
We followed no schedule. I spent dozens of hours in a pressure suit, accompanying my husband across the lava ridges to deep gorges where mother cysts might be found.
Diversity had never completely separated life on Mars; co-genotypic bauplans, creatures having different forms but a common progenitor, had been the rule. On Earth, such manifestations had been limited to different stages of growth in individual animals — caterpillar to butterfly, for example. On Mars, a single reproductive organism, depending on the circumstances, could generate offspring with a wide variety of shapes and functions. Those forms which did not survive, did not return to “check in” with the reproductive organism and were not replicated in the next breeding cycle. New forms could be created from a morphological grab-bag, following rules we could only guess at. The reproducers themselves closed up and died after a few thousand years, laying eggs or cysts — some of which had been fossilized.
The mothers had been the greatest triumph of this strategy. A single mother cyst, blessed with proper conditions, could “bloom” and produce well over ten thousand different varieties of offspring, plant-like and animal-like forms together, designed to interact as an ecos. These would spread across millions of hectares, surviving for thousands of years before running through their carefully marshaled resources. The ecos would shrink, wither, and die; new cysts would be laid, and the waiting would begin again.
Across the ages, the Martian springtimes of flash floods and heavier atmosphere from evaporating carbon dioxide came farther apart, and finally stopped, and the cysts ceased blooming. Mars finally died.
Fossil mother cysts were most often buried a few meters below the lip of a gorge, revealed by landslides. Typically, remains of the mother’s sons and daughters — delicate spongy calcareous bones and shells, even membranes tanned by exposure to ultraviolet before being buried — would lie in compacted layers around the cysts, clueing us to their locations with a darker stain in the soil.
Months before we met, Ilya and Kiqui discovered that the last bloom of a mother ecos had occurred, not five hundred million Earth years past, but a mere quarter billion. The puzzle remained, however: no organic molecules could remain viable across the tens of thousands of years that the cysts had typically lay buried between blooms.
We parked the lab at the end of a finger of comparatively smooth terrain. A few dozen meters beyond our parking place on the finger lay hundreds upon thousands of labyrinthine cracks and arroyos: the sulci. Fifty meters away, within a particularly productive shallow arroyo, stood a specimen storage shed of corrugated metal sheeting draped with plastic tarps.
Hours after we arrived, Ilya introduced me to a cracked cyst in the shed. “Casseia, meet mother,” he said. “Mother, this is Casseia. Mother isn’t feeling well today.” Two meters wide, it lay in a steel cradle in the unpressurized building. He let me run my gloved hands along its dark rocky exterior. As he shined a torch to cast out the gloom, I reached into the interior and felt with gloved fingers the tortuous, sparkling folds of silicate, the embedded parallel lines of zinc clays.
‘These were the last,“ he said. ”The Omega.“
Nobody knew how cysts bloomed. Nobody knew the significance of this purely inorganic structure. The generally accepted theory was that the cysts once contained soft reproductive organs, but no remains of such organs had been found.
I studied the cyst’s interior closely, vainly hoping to see some clue the scientists might have missed. “You’ve found offspring around open cysts — and mothers themselves — but no actual connections between.”
“All we’ve found have been late Omega hatchings,” Ilya said. “They died before their ecos could reach maturity. The remains were close enough to convince.”
I listened to the sound of my own breathing for a moment, the gentle sighs, of the cycler. “Have you ever dug an aqueduct bridge?”
“When I was a student,” Ilya said. “Beautiful things.”
We left the shed and stood under the comparatively clear sky. I was almost used to being Up. The surface of my world was becoming familiar; however hostile, it touched me deeply, its past and present. I had been seeing it through Ilya’s eyes, and Ilya did not judge Mars by any standards but its own.