Alexis Latner: The Life-Blood of the Land

A sweating and sooty Chang materialized at Mark’s shoulder. “When he visited us last week, were you able to persuade the director to give you soil polymer?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Chang frowned. “We need soil polymer in the Canyon.”

“No more than other outfits need it for their special places. There’s never enough to go around.”

Chang held his tongue, as usual. Mark thought, What we really need is an artesian well. Throwing his shovel on the pile with the others, to be cleaned and returned to the tool shed, Mark turned away from Chang and walked toward the zeppelin.

On the zeppelin pier lay a heap of goods fresh out of the cargo bay. Mark’s assistant and the zep pilot haggled over minor additions and subtractions to the supply list. But they had already dispatched a high-priority package to the drilling derrick.

Mark wanted to run, but made himself walk so as to appear more calm than he felt. His destination, the derrick, pointed toward a morning sky of ceramic blue. Grass covered the hills beyond it. But the green was fragile— a mere sketch on the pale ground, too easy to erase. He needed water to make the green deeper and more durable.

On the derrick’s platform, the drillers in gray coveralls and Tinaja, the tall blonde geologist, clustered around the new bit, which they had lifted from its bed of packing material. It looked like a sea serpent’s head. Tight plates of metal, edged with dark industrial diamonds, ringed a hollow maw.

Tinaja handed Mark a small piece of paper. Mark unfolded it to read a few words in Ev’s graceful but age-shivered handwriting. This is it. No more. Mark crumpled and stuffed the paper into his pocket. “Let’s use it today.”

The foreman attached the diamond bit to the drill pipe. Everyone waited, tense, until he announced that the connection was right and tight. Then the crew lowered the drill stem into the ground. Lengths of pipe, lifted from the stack and locked on one after another, followed the bit into the deep hole.

“It’ll take a while to get it down there, won’t it?” Mark asked Tinaja. “I need to do something in Creek Canyon.”

“Go right ahead. This’ll take most of the morning.”

Mark headed for the gulch between the hills. Out of sight from the rig, he stopped to pant. This world’s atmosphere was high-mountain thin here in the interior.

The gulch opened up onto a canyon, the floor of which was a wet-weather creek, a ribbon of rounded stones. Mesquite fringed the creek. The stringy little trees had long roots that reached deep in the ground, finding moisture from the last rains months ago. Tiny, tough green leaves fringed the mesquite’s twigs like tatted lace.

Mark crossed the stony creek bed. On a patch of soft sand under the canyon wall, the fanned footprint of sporadic rain runoff, he discovered the zigzag trail of a small snake—a wondrous trace of animal life in this once-desolate place. Creek Canyon was Chang’s territory. Chang did good work.

Mark had told Tinaja he needed to do something in the canyon. True in a way. He needed to think.

A planet wears life like a green skin, he thought, the patterned skin of a snake. Like a snake, the Earth had changed its skin many times in geological history at one catastrophe or another, most recently the environmental disaster constituted by Homo sapiens. It had never mattered much to planet Earth if, while its continents collided and split wide open above the simmering cauldron of its mantle, its green skin largely died and sloughed off every so often. The death of a snake’s, or a planet’s, skin only matters to the skin itself.

Humans had been part of a thin, fragile and impermanent skein of life on Earth. Even more so here. If the greening of the continents failed, this planet would endure, uncaring. But the human colony would be forced to live beside the shallow seas, in domes like surf bubbles that shimmer for a little while, then pop and vanish.

No. This raw land had to become a place for mesquite and snakes and people to exist under the wide blue sky.

With a groan, Mark stretched out on the sand in the shade of the canyon wall. Overhead, the zeppelin floated away with a mechanical purr that barely distorted the silence. In the canyon, a grasshopper trilled. One of the grasshoppers of the admirable Chang.

Mark woke up in full hot sunlight. In the distance, he heard the derrick with its signature clangs and bangs. He broke into a sweat, remembering Ev’s note. No more.

Mark returned to the derrick at high noon. Unbuffered sunlight blazed down. Near the derrick, the field of boxy solar energy collectors threw off dazzling reflections. Heat shimmered over the roof of the powerhouse from which electrical cables snaked away to the dome, the shop and the derrick.

They had stopped drilling. The crew languished on the platform, sitting or lying down under tarps hung up for shade. Only Tinaja seemed alert and unwilted as she picked rock chips out of the sieve.

Mark ran up to join her on the platform. “Can the diamond bit cut the caprock?” he asked.

“Does good,” she answered. “Want some lunch?”

Knees weak with relief, he sat down. “Yes, thanks.”

Tinaja handed him a metal plate. To his surprise, beside the pile of cooked prickly pear cactus on the plate lay several little chips of rock, clean and moist. Drill chips right out of the sieve. “Tinna, why are you serving me rocks?”

“That shiny bit broke through the caprock an hour ago,” said Tinaja. “Into soft old limestone.” She pointed at the rocks in his plate and grinned at him. “There was a sea down there once, and may just be some of it left! Will salty water be OK?”

Salt water would be wonderful, Mark muttered in his sleep that night. Salt water would be wonderful. Residual adrenaline smoldered in his nerves like embers in ash. Finally Mark snapped wide awake in a cold sweat. Pulling on his clothes, he left the dome.

The wind outside blew as cold now as it had been searing hot at midday. Overhead the sky was clear, strewn with scintillating stars.

Near zenith was a thin, ragged ring of pale nebulosity. The astronomers said the ring marked the death of a giant blue star so near that it would have washed out all of the other stars in the dark night sky. But it evolved rapidly and exploded, supernova, tens of thousands of years ago, a cosmic catastrophe in geological time, leaving a nebula around a neutron star.

Yellow light shone in the window of Tinaja’s lab in the shop shack. Mark had meant to start one of the nocturnal walks for which he was notorious; he changed his mind. At the door of Tinaja’s lab, he knocked before letting himself in.

Tinaja was engrossed in her work. She had a computer running, its screen split four ways, text disks and printouts strewn about the table, and cylinders of stone in front of her, plus rocks and sands in at least ten piles, and a microscope. Wisps of honey-colored hair had escaped from her ponytail.

“I took a core sample,” Tinaja announced. “This is the supernova layer. There are isotopes aplenty. This planet was cosmically irradiated, all right, but good.”

“That’s great! That you found geological evidence of that, I mean.”

Tinaja made a wry face. “Look in the microscope.”

The magnified shapes, though worn and fuzzy, were insistently reminiscent of regular geometry. Mark saw spirals, cones, fluted spars and tiny boxes. “Microscopic marine shells.”

Tinaja said flatly, “Right. This is, after all, limestone. But the variety of the shells is phenomenal, compared to the species that exist in the seas now.”

“From the Near Supernova layer?” Mark’s skin crawled. “There must have been a die-off. One that the world hasn’t recovered from.”