The Martians

Chapter 12 Salt and Fresh

After the first water in the new streams was always silty, like liquid brick running down creases in the land. So many salts dissolved out of the dirt that the water became almost viscous, and the stream banks were often coated with fantastic strips of white crystals. In certain watersheds it looked like streams of blood were running through banks of rock candy. And there was more truth to that than people suspected.

You see, after the little red people became the nineteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, they became enlightened, and were faced with a dilemma. Before, the humans and all their claptrap on the surface had served as high entertainment; now they were the little red people’s problem, or at least a matter of great concern. The little red people needed to save Mars from humans in a way that would not harm these charming bunglers, but help them.

At the same time, they saw immediately what the resentful looks coming from their archaea crops had meant—it was obvious on the face of it. Just as the Dalai Lama would not eat cows on Earth, the little red people should not eat archaea on Mars.

This created an instantaneous famine situation for the little red people. For the most part they considered it a fortunate rise in consciousness, though there was some dismay as they changed to a vegan diet which took no lives at all, based on seeds and bacterial fruit, milk, and honey equivalents. They went hungry for a long time setting up these new agricultures, foraging also up on the surface when they had to, in the scraps of the humans, to make ends meet. But humans tended to react to these kinds of activities with pesticides, so they were only pursued in desperation; dangerous times call for dangerous measures.

Meanwhile, just as the humans were coming down on them from above, the ungrateful archaea were biting them from below. Many of the old ones were not appeased by their liberation; they wanted compensation, they wanted revenge, some of them were calling for a return to their original dominion over the Martian surface. It is an unfortunate fact that if you give archaea an inch they will take a mile; all the corners of my kitchen prove this. So cadres of disaffected archaea were plotting revolution from below, and though they were a minority at first, these malcontents managed to poison the minds of many other archaea, threatening to create results that would cascade upward through the larger levels of the planetary ecosystem.

So the little red people were caught in the middle, as moderates so often are. We need a lot more compassion to appear very quickly, they said to each other, on all levels of the ecosphere. But though they were telepathic, and now united by a single spirit of bodhisattva grace, they found themselves divided on the question of policy in the face of this crisis. Some thought they should focus on the archaea, others on the humans; some on both, others on neither. More compassion, sure—but how?

Finally the current stage of the terraforming, sometimes called the Great Rehydration, gave a group of them the idea that they could solve both problems at once.

They would never be able to influence humans directly, this group of little red scientists argued. Setting up towns in the porches of their ears and singing a continuo of common sense had only put them at terrible risk in the offices of ear nose and throat specialists. At the same time, the archaea could no longer be confined against their will in the cryptoendolithic world. So what did they have to work with? They had lots of water, lots of salt, lots of archaea, and lots of humans. The proposal involved mixing them all.

The evaporite salts on the surface were being dissolved back into the new hydrosphere. Carbonates, sulfates, and nitrates had all been left behind by the slow evaporation of the ancient Martian seas; there were huge deposits of them, now mixing with the water as it ran across the surface. The mechanics of saltification were still very poorly understood, but clearly the surface water on Mars was going to pick up salt for a long time to come. The archaea, meanwhile, were already hardy halophiles; one species, Haloferax, could live directly on and inside salt crystals. Human beings were not as salt tolerant as that, but their blood was about as salty as Earth’s ocean water, and many of them heavily oversalted most of their food. So an opportunity might exist. Salt was common ground.

A group of little red scientists advocated a subtle double intervention. Archaea would be released onto the surface, in salt containers that would look to them like ocean liners. These would get into the water, and would slip easily into the bloodstream when introduced into human hosts. Here even smaller vessels would carry some of these archaea across the blood-brain barrier—special varieties, genetically engineered by the little red scientists to create certain electrical fields, triggering the excretion of beneficial hormones and other brain chemicals.

Some of the little red people decried this as no more than drug therapy. The group of little red scientists defended it as such. State of mind was in great part chemical condition, as all admitted. Chemical intervention could be defended on that score. This was an emergency; very possibly humans were in the process of overrunning Mars, devastating the planet for all its unseen indigenous life. Meanwhile the archaea were experiencing a population explosion, and spoiling for a fight. A solution that neutralized both sides would be very welcome. The archaea would see it as the freedom of the surface; the little people would see it as drug therapy; the humans would see it as a deliberate mutation in their values. If no one ever suspected otherwise, where was the harm? Why not let them think so?

So all over Mars streams ran red with silt and salt, across the rain-soaked land. Eventually some of these streams combined to become rivers, and ran out estuaries into the burgeoning new ocean. Since the northern sea had been pumped up out of deep permafrost aquifers, its water at this point was still extremely pure. It was in effect an ocean of distilled water, while the streams and rivers were salty. Humans never failed to comment that this was the reverse of the situation on Earth.

A fair number of the new streams fell off cliffs right into the sea; in these places it looked like someone was pouring red paint into a clear pristine pond, where it spread out on rings and dabs of foam. That looks awful, the humans said to each other, though they didn’t know the half of it. Then they would take a swim in the ocean nearby, and get out and eat their lunches, and on their way home feel funny and resolve to be nicer to people that week.