All creatures very much like herself, all of these. All those little birds, those hopping, shivering, tunneling rodents, the half-dozen runty central Asian ponies whose sixty-six chromosomes firmly distinguished them from domesticated horses...They were all her Martian siblings under the skin.
Every creature in here had been cloned-especially the bacteria. The Martian soil-that unpromising melange of windy silt, crunchy bits of meteoric glass, volcanic ash, and salty pebbles-it was damp and alive.
Most of the microbes here were clones of native Martian microbes. The Chinese taikonauts had found microbial life on Mars: with deep drilling, in the subterranean ice. They had found and retrieved six different Martian species of sleepy but persistent microorganisms.
Those Martian bacteria were relatives of certain extremophile microbes also found on Earth. Very likely they were primeval rock-eating bugs-blasted off the fertile Earth in some huge volcanic upheaval, then blown across the solar system in some violent gust of solar spew. Giant volcanoes, huge solar flares...they didn't happen often. But they certainly happened.
Microbes cared nothing if they lived on Earth or Mars. Men had found alien Martian life and brought it back alive to the Earth. That was all the same to the microbes.
Maybe-as Montalban had once told her-there was something innately Chinese about exploring Mars. Every other nation-state with a major space program had collapsed. Nation-states always collapsed from their attempts to explore outer space. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States-even the Republic of India, China's biggest space rival-they had all ceased to exist politically. Montalban claimed that the reason was obvious. Nation-states were about the land and its strict boundaries, while space was about the cosmos and the globe. So the national urge to annex outer space brought a nation-killing curse.
That curse had not felled the Chinese. No. No curse could fell the Chinese. The Chinese had prevailed over three millennia of river floods, droughts, pestilences, mass starvations...and barbarian invasions, civil wars, plagues, uprisings, revolutions...China suffered, yes-collapsed, never.
When the taikonauts had returned from Mars to land safely in the Gobi Desert, the Chinese nation, what was left of it, had exploded with joy. Hollow-eyed Chinese eating human flesh in the shrouded ruins of their automobile plants had been proud about Mars.
The Chinese were still very proud of their taikonauts, though the aging taikonauts, whom Sonja knew very personally, seemed a little shaken by their ambiguous role in history. The space heroes had left a glittering China in a headlong economic boom; they had returned from their multiyear Mars adventure to a choking, thirsting China whose sky consisted of dust.
Six kinds of dust:
The black dust from the Gobi Desert.
The red loess dust of central China.
The industrially toxic yellow dust that came from the dried riverbeds and the emptied basins of the giant parched dams.
The brown smoking dust of China's burning fields and blazing forests.
The dense, gray, toxic dust of China's combusting cities.
And, last but most globally important, the awesome, sky-tinting, Earth-cooling, stratospheric, radioactive dust from dozens of Chinese hydrogen bombs, digging massive reservoirs for fresh ice in the Himalayas.
Sonja had worked on the ground in China during the last of those years. Foreign soldiers had flown into China from every corner of the planet, always hoping to reassert order there. China could not be allowed to fail, because China was the workshop of the entire world, the world's forge, the world's irreplaceable factory.
The Chinese people had died in a cataclysm beyond numeration, while the Chinese state had prevailed. The bloody mayhem that had once gripped the Celestial Empire was methodically pushed beyond its borders. Pushed onto people like Lucky.
"I know this grass!" cried Lucky, plucking a cruelly barbed seed from the flesh of his ankle. "Camels can eat this!"
"All of these plants are native plants from China's deserts," said Mishin. This was a major techno-nationalist selling point. "When, in the future, mankind brings Mars to life, Mars will be Asian tundra and steppes."
"Who will live there?" Lucky demanded. "People like you?"
"Oh no," Sonja told him. "They will be people like you."
Lucky scowled. Lucky knew that he was not in Heaven. He was in an alien world, and he already lived in an alien world. "You told me about the horses? Show me some horses!"
"We do have horses here," Mishin assured him. "Central Asia's Przewalski's horses. Genetically, these are the oldest horses on Earth." Mishin scratched his close-cropped head. "You, sir-you may have seen these wild mustangs in the new wilds of central Asia, eh? Maybe a few Przewalski's horses? There are large herds thriving around Chernobyl."
"Those little horses are too small to ride." Lucky shrugged. "I can eat them. I can drink their blood."