The Caryatids

"The breathable air within this model Martian biosphere," Mishin recited grudgingly, "was created, and is maintained, entirely by our extraterrestrialized organisms. Through the ubiquitous oversight of the state and the heroic efforts of the dedicated scientific workers of the glorious Jiuquan Space Launch Center-" Mishin drew a breath. "-this project has become the model, not of Mars today, but of the future Mars! Your translation understands all that, sir? Yes? That's very good!"

Mishin wheeled in his insulated worker boots, waving his uniformed arms at the glowing Martian sunset and the spare, frozen scrub that dotted the rusty soil. "At this moment you are privileged to step within the Mars of Tomorrow! Here, spread all around you, is the living, air-breathing harbinger of Humanity's Second Home World! The development of Mars is China's most ambitious megaproject-and this dome, which is merely a model of that future effort, ranks with the Great Wall of China as the most ambitious construction on the surface of planet Earth!"

It was a pity that they'd lost valuable time while trapped within that balky airlock. With the setting of the pink sun in its tear-proofed plastic sky, the Martian bubble was getting bitterly cold.

The three of them crunched briskly across the rust-red cinders, staring at the Chinese and Latin botanical labels stuck in the tough, humble scrub: harsh tufts of spiky needlegrass ( Stipa gobica ). Indestructible, colorless saltwort ( Salsola passerina ). Bone-colored Mongolian sagebrush ( Artemisia xerophytic ).

Mishin rambled on, but Sonja had heard his lectures. She could not help but remember what John Montgomery Montalban had quipped while he was walking in here. She and Montalban had been lovers at the time, and, to her stunned amazement, Montalban had somehow managed to smuggle a fancy glass ball into the Martian dome. It was a tiny, liquid city that he confidently tossed from hand to hand.

Montalban had whispered to her, endearments mostly, but sometimes he would slyly subvert the official discourse with classic poetry from his distant California...The Dispensation, the Acquis, they always tried to mock or ignore Chinese national accomplishments. The global civil societies were afraid of nation-states. Especially the Chinese state, the largest and most powerful state left on Earth.

One hundred years in the past, Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, had chosen the province of Gansu, the city-prefecture of Jiuquan, the Gobi Desert at the edge of Mongolia, as a locus of Communist futurity. This was where China's spacecraft would conquer the sky. Little did Mao know that the sky of the Gobi Desert was the true future of China...

China, its sky reddening with endless smokestack spew, China as its own Red Planet...The world had never seen a technological advance so headlong, so relentless, so ambitious in scope and so careless of Earthly consequence as China's bid to dominate the global economy...

That was how John Montgomery Montalban perceived things around here...As a lover, she missed Montalban keenly, all the more so in that she had sworn never to meet him again. No one had ever been kinder, sweeter, more considerate, more nearly understanding of her troubles and pains...Of the five men that she had truly loved in her life, John Montalban was the only one who wasn't yet dead.

A jerboa bounded between her booted feet like a fur-covered tennis ball. Then they scared up a big captive flock of tiny finches, each thumb-sized desert bird with its own unique ID and onboard health-tracking instruments.

One greasy, bean-laden bush had thoroughly mastered Martian survival. It was bursting through the alkaline soil on an eager net of roots and runners. The way it flung itself out like that, all runners, green pods, and rooty crisscrossings...it was rather like a little city of Jiuquan, when you looked at it.

Lucky dodged the orating scientist, slipping around to place her body between himself and the other man.

This Martian extraterrarium, the most ambitious biosphere in the world, had cost as much to build as the damming of a major Chinese river. It surely deserved a much greater world fame-but the topsy-turvy life trapped within here was so frail, so advanced, and so imperiled that the state rarely allowed any human beings inside this place. The Martian biosphere was gardened by sterilized robots, Earthly twins to the state-controlled devices remotely exploring Mars.

Quite likely the state had wisely sensed that human beings had already wrecked one biosphere and would be cruelly thrilled to smash this new one.

The life struggling here had been carefully redesigned for extraterrestrial conditions. Some cloned organisms proved themselves in practice, while most mutants perished young. The extraterrarium was an entire experimental ecology of genetic mutants...