humanlike image shaped up out of the mat on a first visit.
Why communicate over such scales? To sense a coming pulse of hydrogen sulfide vapor from deep below, tell the entire network, and make ready? A clear survival value in that, she supposed. Could organisms evolve such detailed response in this harsh place? Could an Earthly biofilm do it? Maybe biologists had never noticed. On Earth mats like the stromatolites were considered to be early, primitive forms with severe limitations and no future. The biofilms had just been outrun by other forms in the rich, warm, wet oceans.
Julia went out to the big greenhouse and gardened to clear her mind. They all went to the greenhouse when they were tired of the endless sunset hues of Mars. Or when they longed to see something alive that wouldn’t talk. That first whiff of greenhouse air was a great morale boost. Greenhouses processed air better than any filter, carrying a particular fresh scent unlike Earth, undefinable, more raw. She would miss it.
She barely nodded to others working. Privacy was precious, and they’d adopted the Japanese habit of not intruding on one another’s space unless by mutual agreement. She skipped the fields of wheat, rice, and potatoes, various beans, lines of broccoli and tomatoes. These looked ordinary, and then she walked under the canopy of carrot stalks so green they changed the Marslight.
No one could predict what the combination of low gravity and low sunlight would do; some crops died, others became green gushers. There was something very calming about being surrounded by green leaves and vines, all nodding gently in the endless updraft. To strengthen trees and stalks, they had to run breezes, fake winds. She recalled how, in the early years, she and Viktor had taken advantage of the absence of others, off on rover trips, to make love amid the churning plants—exciting, though chilly. It’d always been a big turn-on for her to look over the shoulder of a lover into the swaying foliage of a tree. Viktor said it showed she was a real primitive.
She worked with her hands to free her mind—pruning, harvesting, helping. Even a biologist had to keep reminding herself that life found ways nobody could foresee. Growing up in Australia, she had marveled at lizards in the deserts that absorbed water through channels in their feet, because they were most likely to come across moisture in shallow damp spots. On the other hand, nature made its creatures narrow of purpose.
Silently she joined a team that was harvesting corn. It was good, solid work, letting her hands go and have fun while her mind could idle, running on its own. Cut, sort, bag…
One winter she had gone out on a Girl Scout trip, and they had stayed overnight in a bush farmhouse with a tin roof. In the night birds thumped heavily onto the roof, because when they looked down from their migrating patterns, it reflected the moon and so looked like an inviting pond. She had rushed outside and found dazed ducks, given them water, and off they had gone—no doubt to make the same mistake again, because nature saw no point in giving them the processing power to learn from experience, much less to tell others of their kind. If there had been many tin roofs, they would never have made the migration, never made new ducks. Nature had not made them too narrow, not this time.
Too narrow… Could evolution have found a way to give the mat some use for the magnetic field waves? It sounded crazy.
Julia was thinking so hard about this that the burst of hand-clapping startled her. When she brought in a bushel of picked corn, her coworkers applauded. “Fastest picking I’ve ever seen,” a man said. Julia was startled. She had not even noticed.
Sitting in the cafeteria, nursing a cup of coffee, a young woman from the bio section asked, “Mind if I sit down?” The room was crowded. Julia waved her into a chair. Stephanie, she recalled, a biochem type. They had even been on a dozen-author paper
Why communicate over such scales? To sense a coming pulse of hydrogen sulfide vapor from deep below, tell the entire network, and make ready? A clear survival value in that, she supposed. Could organisms evolve such detailed response in this harsh place? Could an Earthly biofilm do it? Maybe biologists had never noticed. On Earth mats like the stromatolites were considered to be early, primitive forms with severe limitations and no future. The biofilms had just been outrun by other forms in the rich, warm, wet oceans.
Julia went out to the big greenhouse and gardened to clear her mind. They all went to the greenhouse when they were tired of the endless sunset hues of Mars. Or when they longed to see something alive that wouldn’t talk. That first whiff of greenhouse air was a great morale boost. Greenhouses processed air better than any filter, carrying a particular fresh scent unlike Earth, undefinable, more raw. She would miss it.
She barely nodded to others working. Privacy was precious, and they’d adopted the Japanese habit of not intruding on one another’s space unless by mutual agreement. She skipped the fields of wheat, rice, and potatoes, various beans, lines of broccoli and tomatoes. These looked ordinary, and then she walked under the canopy of carrot stalks so green they changed the Marslight.
No one could predict what the combination of low gravity and low sunlight would do; some crops died, others became green gushers. There was something very calming about being surrounded by green leaves and vines, all nodding gently in the endless updraft. To strengthen trees and stalks, they had to run breezes, fake winds. She recalled how, in the early years, she and Viktor had taken advantage of the absence of others, off on rover trips, to make love amid the churning plants—exciting, though chilly. It’d always been a big turn-on for her to look over the shoulder of a lover into the swaying foliage of a tree. Viktor said it showed she was a real primitive.
She worked with her hands to free her mind—pruning, harvesting, helping. Even a biologist had to keep reminding herself that life found ways nobody could foresee. Growing up in Australia, she had marveled at lizards in the deserts that absorbed water through channels in their feet, because they were most likely to come across moisture in shallow damp spots. On the other hand, nature made its creatures narrow of purpose.
Silently she joined a team that was harvesting corn. It was good, solid work, letting her hands go and have fun while her mind could idle, running on its own. Cut, sort, bag…
One winter she had gone out on a Girl Scout trip, and they had stayed overnight in a bush farmhouse with a tin roof. In the night birds thumped heavily onto the roof, because when they looked down from their migrating patterns, it reflected the moon and so looked like an inviting pond. She had rushed outside and found dazed ducks, given them water, and off they had gone—no doubt to make the same mistake again, because nature saw no point in giving them the processing power to learn from experience, much less to tell others of their kind. If there had been many tin roofs, they would never have made the migration, never made new ducks. Nature had not made them too narrow, not this time.
Too narrow… Could evolution have found a way to give the mat some use for the magnetic field waves? It sounded crazy.
Julia was thinking so hard about this that the burst of hand-clapping startled her. When she brought in a bushel of picked corn, her coworkers applauded. “Fastest picking I’ve ever seen,” a man said. Julia was startled. She had not even noticed.
Sitting in the cafeteria, nursing a cup of coffee, a young woman from the bio section asked, “Mind if I sit down?” The room was crowded. Julia waved her into a chair. Stephanie, she recalled, a biochem type. They had even been on a dozen-author paper
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