“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.

“Which part of Earth would you like to visit?” I asked.

“The deserts,” he said.

“Not the rain forests?”

He grinned behind his face plate. “Better fossils in dry places.”

We climbed into the lab, destatted and sucked off our dust, and ate soup in the cramped kitchen. We had barely finished our cups when a shrill alarm came from our slates and the lab’s com.

Emergency displays automatically flickered before us. The distinctive masculine voice of Security Mars spoke. “A cyclonic low-pressure system in Arcadia Planitia has produced a force ten pressure surge moving southwest at eight-hundred and thirty kiphs. All stations and teams between Alba Patera in the north and Gordii Dorsum in the south are advised to take emergency precautions.” Graphs of the surge and a low-orbit satellite picture appeared, superimposed on a projected map. The surge resembled a thin curving smudge of charcoal drawn over the terrain. Its numbers were impressive: two thousand kilometers long, following a great-circle contour, absolutely clear atmosphere ahead and murk behind, with a dark pressure curl along its central axis. The surge had already reached a pressure of one third of a bar — almost fifty times normal.

First seen in the twentieth in early Viking photographs, surges were the worst Mars had to offer. Induced by supersonic shock-waves, the high-pressure curls were unique to Mars, with its thin atmosphere, cold days, and even colder nights. Here, the borders between night and day could become weather fronts in themselves. There were no oceans, as on Earth, to liberate heat slowly and mediate between ground and sky… At nightfall, the ground cooled quickly, and the thin air above the ground descended dramatically, only to warm and rise rapidly at daybreak. Most of the time, the worst weather patterns Mars could muster were the thin, high-wind-speed storms familiar to all. These spread across basins and plains, covering everything with dust but producing only slight changes in barometric pressure.

Under the right conditions, however, and in the proper terrain — crossing the plains of the northern lowlands, in mid-morning or late evening — winds generated by the terminator could exceed the speed of sound, compressing the air to as much as a hundred times its normal pressure of four to seven millibars. Passing from the plains to rough terrain, the shock-wave could be given a deft horizontal spin, producing a super-dense rolling curl that picked up huge volumes of fine clay, and sand, and at peak, even pebbles and rocks.