column of flame, it was five, seven, ten, twelve. The seaborne gantries were briefly silhouetted like skeletal skyscrapers, lost soon after in billows of vaporized ocean water. Twelve pillars of white fire, separated by miles but compressed by perspective, clawed into a sky turned indigo blue by their combined light. The beach crowd began to cheer, and the sound merged with the sound of the solid-fuel boosters hammering for altitude, a throb that compressed the heart like ecstasy or terror. But it wasn't only the brute spectacle we were cheering. Almost certainly every one of these two million people had seen a rocket launch before, at least on television, and although this multiple ascendancy was grand and loud it was remarkable mainly for its intent, its motivating idea. We weren't just planting the flag of terrestrial life on Mars, we were defying the Spin itself.
The rockets rose. (And on the rectangular screen of the TV, when I glanced at it through the balcony door, similar rockets bent into cloudy daylight in Jiuquan, Svobodnyy, Baikonur, Xichang.) The fierce horizontal light became oblique and began to dim as night rushed back from the sea. The sound spent itself in sand and concrete and superheated salt water. I imagined I could smell the reek of fireworks coming ashore with the tide, the pleasantly awful stench of Roman candles.
A thousand cameras clattered like dying crickets and went still.
The cheering lasted, in one form or another, until dawn.
* * * * *
We went inside and drew the drapes against the anticlimactic darkness and opened the champagne. We watched the news from overseas. Apart from the French rain delay, every launch had been successful. A bacterial armada was en route to Mars.
'So why do they all have to go up at once?' Diane asked again.
Jason gave her a long thoughtful look. 'Because we want them to arrive at their destination at roughly the same time. Which is not as easy as it sounds. They have to enter the Spin membrane more or less simultaneously, or they'll exit separated by years or centuries. Not so critical with these anaerobic cargos, but we're practicing for when it really matters.'
'Years or centuries'? How is that possible?'
'Nature of the Spin, Diane.'
'Right, but centuries?'
He turned his chair to face her, frowning. 'I'm trying to grasp the extent of your ignorance here…'
'Just a question, Jase.'
'Count a second for me.'
'What?'
'Look at your watch and count me one second. No, I'll do it. One—' He paused. 'Second. Got that?'
'Jason—'
'Bear with me. You understand the Spin ratio?'
'Roughly.'
'Roughly isn't good enough. One terrestrial second equals 3.17 years Spin time. Keep that in mind. If one of our rockets enters the Spin membrane a single second behind the rest, it reaches orbit more than three years late.'
'Just because I can't quote numbers—'
'They're important numbers, Diane. Suppose our flotilla just emerged from the membrane, just now, now—' He ticked the air with his finger. 'One second, here and gone. For the flotilla, that was three and a fraction years. One second ago they were in Earth orbit. Now they've delivered their cargo to the surface of Mars. I mean now, Diane, literally now. It's already happened, it's done. So let a minute pass on your watch. That's approximately a hundred and ninety years by an outside clock.'
'That's a lot, of course, but you can't make over a planet in two hundred years, can you?'
'So now it's two hundred Spin years into the experiment. Right now, as we speak, any bacterial colonies that survived the trip will have been reproducing on Mars for two centuries. In an hour, they will have been there eleven thousand four hundred years. This time tomorrow they'll have been multiplying for almost two hundred seventy-four thousand years.'
'Okay, Jase. I get the idea.'
'This time next week, 1.9 million years.'
'Okay.'
'A month. 8.3 million years.'
'Jason—'
'This time next year, one hundred million years.'
'Yes, but—'
'On Earth, one hundred million years is roughly the span of time between the emergence of life from the sea and your last birthday. One hundred million years is time enough for those microorganisms to pump carbon dioxide out of carbonate deposits in the crust, leach nitrogen from nitrates, purge oxides from the regolith and enrich it by dying in large numbers. All that liberated C02 is a greenhouse gas. The atmosphere gets thicker and warmer. A year from now we send another armada of respirating organisms, and they begin to cycle C02 into free oxygen. Another year—or as soon as the spectroscopic signature from the planet looks right—we introduce grasses, plants, other complex organisms. And when all that stabilizes into some kind of crudely homeostatic planetary ecology, we send human beings. You know what that means?'
'Tell me,' Diane said sullenly.
'It means that within five years there'll be a flourishing human civilization on Mars. Farms, factories, roads, cities…'
'There's a Greek word for this, Jase.'
'Ecopoiesis.'
'I was thinking of 'hubris.''
He smiled. 'I worry about a lot of things. But offending the gods isn't one of them.'
'Or offending the Hypotheticals?'
That stopped him. He leaned back and sipped champagne, a little flat by now, from his hotel-room glass.
'I'm not afraid of offending them,' he said finally. 'On the contrary. I'm afraid we may be doing exactly what they want us to do.'
But he wouldn't explain, and Diane was eager to change the subject.
* * * * *
I drove Diane to Orlando the next day for her flight back to Phoenix. It had become obvious over the last few days that we would not discuss, mention, or allude in any way to the physical intimacy we had shared that night in the Berkshires before her marriage to Simon. If we acknowledged it at all it was only in the cumbersome detours we took to avoid it. When we hugged (chastely) in the space in front of the airport security gate she said, 'I'll call you,' and I knew she would—Diane made few promises but was scrupulous about keeping them—but I was equally conscious of the time that had passed since I had last seen her and the time that would inevitably pass before I saw her again: not Spin time, but something just as erosive and just as hungry. There were creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth, not unlike the ones I saw in the mirror every morning.
Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.
* * * * *
There were more launches during the spring and summer of that year, surveillance packages that spent months in high Earth orbit and returned with visual and spectrographic images of Mars—snapshots of the ecopoiesis.
The first results were equivocal: a modest increase in atmospheric C02 that might have been a side effect of solar warming. Mars remained a cold, inhospitable world by any plausible measure. Jason admitted that even the GEMOs— the genetically engineered Mars organisms that comprised the bulk of the initial seeding—might not have adjusted well to the planet's unfiltered daylight UV levels and oxidant-ridden regolith.
But by midsummer we were seeing strong spectrographic evidence of biological activity. There was more water vapor in a denser atmosphere, more methane and ethane and ozone, even a tiny but detectable increase in free nitrogen.
