Blue Mars

BLUE MARS

Kim Stanley Robinson

Bantam Books

for Lisa and David and Timothy

Contents

Part 1: Peacock Mountain

Part 2: Areophany

Part 3: A New Constitution

Part 4: Green Earth

Part 5: Home at Last

Part 6: Ann in the Outback

Part 7: Making Things Work

Part 8: The Green and the White

Part 9: Natural History

Part 10: Werteswandel

Part 11: Viriditas

Part 12: It Goes So Fast

Part 13: Experimental Procedures

Part 14: Phoenix Lake

Map

The Martian Calendar

Year 1 (2027 AD)

669 total Martain days in 1 Martain year

24 months =

21 months at 28 days

3 months (every eighth) at 27 days)

Part One

Peacock Mountain

Mars is free now. We’re on our own. No one tells us what to do.

Ann stood at the front of the train as she said this.

But it’s so easy to backslide into old patterns of behavior. Break one hierarchy and another springs up to take its place. We will have to be on guard for that, because there will always be people trying to make another Earth. The areophany will have to be ceaseless, an eternal struggle. We will have to think harder than ever before what it means to be Martian.

Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out the windows at the terrain flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed Reds. In the harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land outside bare except for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked all Earthly power off Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by a burst of furious action following the great flood on Terra; and they were tired.

We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that we had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So we acted. We are making a better way to live.

This was the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to them again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered the revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police into Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Terrans up to Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of Sheffield, up the space cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be done. But in the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great victory, and some of the blank faces staring at Ann or out the window seemed to want a break, a moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.

Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train’s levitation over the land.