Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,108

to new kinetic configurations. Wiry pubic hair tickled his bottom, and he felt what had to have been an erect penis against his hip. The dirt was heavy in his stomach, and he felt light-headed; his blood was fire, his skin felt like a taut balloon, containing a blaze. The stars were packed overhead in astonishing numbers, and each one had its own color, green or red or blue or yellow; they looked like sparks.

He was a phoenix. Hiroko herself pressed against him, and he rose in the center of the fire, ready for rebirth. She held his new body in a full embrace, squeezed him; she was tall, and seemed all muscle. She looked him eye-to-eye. He felt her breasts against his ribs, her pubic bone hard on his thigh. She kissed him, her tongue touching his teeth; he tasted the dirt, then suddenly felt all of her at once; all the rest of his life the involuntary memory of that feeling would be enough to start the pulse of an erection, but at that moment he was too overwhelmed, completely aflame.

Hiroko pulled her head back and looked at him again. His breath was whooshing in his lungs, in and out. In English, in a voice formal but kind, she said, “This is your initiation into the areophany, the celebration of the body of Mars. Welcome to it. We worship this world. We intend to make a place for ourselves here, a place that is beautiful in a new Martian way, a way never seen on Earth. We have built a hidden refuge in the south, and now we are leaving for it.

“We know you, we love you. We know we can use your help. We know you can use our help. We want to build just what you are yearning for, just what you have been missing here. But all in new forms. For we can never go back. We must go forward. We must find our own way. We start tonight. We want you to come with us.”

And Michel said, “I’ll come.”

PART 5

Falling

into History

The lab hummed quietly. Desks and tables and benches were cluttered with things, the white walls crowded with graphs and posters and cut-out cartoons, all vibrating slightly under bright artificial light. Like any lab anywhere: somewhat clean, somewhat disorderly. The one window in the corner was black and reflected the interior; it was night outside. The whole building was nearly empty.

But two men in lab coats stood at one of the benches, leaning forward to look at a computer screen. The shorter of the two tapped at the keyboard below the screen with a forefinger, and the image on the screen changed. Green corkscrews on a black field, squiggling so that they looked sharply three-dimensional, as if the screen were a box. An image from an electron microscope; the field was only a few microns across.

“You see it’s a kind of plasmid repair of the gene sequence,” the short scientist said. “Breaks in the original strands are identified. Replacement sequences are synthesized, and when mass quantities of these replacement sequences are introduced into the cell, the breaks are seen as attachment sites, and the replacements bind to the originals.”

“Do you introduce them by transformation? Electroporation?”

“Transformation. Treated cells are injected along with a competent, and the repair strands make a conjugal transfer.”

“In vivo?”

“In vivo.”

A low whistle. “So you can repair any little thing? Cell-division error?”

“That’s right.”

The two men stared at the corkscrews on the screen, waving about like the new tips of grapevines in a breeze.

“You’ve got proof?”

“Did Vlad show you those mice in the next room?”

“Yeah.”

“Those mice are fifteen years old.”

Another whistle.

They went next door into the mice room, muttering to each other under the hum of machinery. The tall one stared curiously into a cage, where patches of fur breathed under wood chips. When they left again they turned out the lights in both rooms. The flicker of the electron-microscope screen illuminated the first lab, giving it a green cast. The scientists went to the window, talking in low voices. They looked out. The sky was purple with the coming day; stars were popping out of existence. Out on the horizon stood a black massive bulk, the flat-topped mound of an immense volcano. Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system.

The tall scientist shook his head. “This changes everything, you know.”

“I know.”

From the bottom of the shaft, the sky looked like a bright pink coin. The shaft was round, a kilometer in