Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called-feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on.

These were influences only, Tariki added. As they did the work, they developed visions of their own. They followed the inclination of the land, as they saw that some plants prospered, and others died. Coevolution, a kind of epigenetic development.

“Nice,” Sax said, looking around. For the adepts, the walk from Sabishii up onto the massif must have been an aesthetic journey, filled with allusions and subtle variants of tradition that were invisible to him. Hiroko would have called it areoformation, or the areophany. “I’d like to visit your soil labs.”

“Of course.”

They returned to the rover, drove on. Late in the day, under dark threatening clouds, they came to the very top of the massif, which turned out to be a kind of broad undulating moor. Small ravines were filled with pine needles, sheered off by winds so that they looked like the blades of grass on a well-mowed yard. Sax and Tariki and Nanao again got out of the car, walked around. The wind cut through their suits, and the late-afternoon sun broke out from under the dark cloud cover, casting their shadows all the way out to the horizon. Up here on the moors there were many big masses of smooth bare bedrock; looking around, the landscape had the red primal look Sax remembered from the earliest years; but then they would walk to the edge of a small ravine, and suddenly be looking down into green.

Tariki and Nanao talked about ecopoesis, which for them was terraforming redefined, subtilized, localized. Transmuted into something like Hiroko’s areoformation. No longer powered by heavy industrial global methods, but by the slow, steady, and intensely local process of working on individual patches of land. “Mars is all a garden. Earth too for that matter. This is what humans have become. So we have to think about gardening, about that level of responsibility to the land. A human-Mars interface that does justice to both.”

Sax waggled a hand uncertainly. “I’m used to thinking of Mars as a kind of wilderness,” he said, as he looked up the etymology of the word garden. French, Teutonic, Old Norse, gard, enclosure. Seemed to share origins with guard, or keeping. But who knew what the supposedly equivalent word in Japanese meant. Etymology was hard enough without translation thrown into the mix. “You know— get things started, let loose the seeds, then watch it all develop on its own. Self-organizing ecologies, you know.”