Mel spent her first undisturbed night’s sleep since her arrest on Pedro’s surprisingly comfortable sofa. She had a wash, some breakfast – rationing, it seemed, had yet to bite at the research outpost – and she finally felt human again.
At least the MSS had not publicly revealed that Mel was a wanted fugitive and so Pedro was able to tell his colleagues a version of the truth which avoided them asking too many awkward questions. He said Mel was an old friend who had come to discuss her research, but gave her a false name and claimed she had suffered a rover breakdown, which was why she arrived on foot with no luggage.
She didn’t know how long her cover story would hold, but it should keep her safe for a few days. Wearing some clothes borrowed from one of Pedro’s female colleagues, she accepted his offer of showing her around. It would look strange, he pointed out, if a visiting scientist didn’t get a tour of the facility. So he began by taking her to the smallest of the domes where the scientists had planted a forest.
It was like stepping into another reality. Her whole career had been spent around plants, but the forest was a living ecosystem like nothing else she had experienced. She hadn’t thought it was possible for there to be so many shades of green all huddled together under a translucent sky augmented by artificial lighting. But it was the smell that filled her senses and overwhelmed her with its vibrancy – so strong, she could almost taste it. It was like the hint of mintiness drawn out by the steam of her tea, but magnified a hundred times.
“What do you think?” said Pedro, standing beside her.
“Phenomenal,” said Mel, still taking it in. “Impressive… I don’t know what to say.”
She looked more closely and began to identify the range of species that made up the shades of green. Small pine trees, various types of grasses, the white-capped growths of fungus, the mass of tiny emerald leaves of a ground-hugging bush, the arching fronds of bracken and the yellow of a single brave flower pushing up from a crocus bulb hidden beneath the soil.
“It’s a fragile ecosystem,” said Pedro. “Ideally, we would like to create a fully populated forest with insects, birds and bacteria, but we’re restricted to flora at the moment and some limited soil-bound organisms. There’s concern that insects could fly off and infest other plantations or even be the carrier of disease.”
“Surely nothing could fly out of here and survive.”
“I’ve made that argument, believe me. But I’m told, despite all of our precautions, something could attach itself to my clothes, hitch a lift with me on a rover and end up in one of the cities. It’s annoying because we want to recreate a natural habitat where plants have a symbiotic relationship with their surroundings – insects to pollinate, birds to eat and spread seeds…” He trailed off and smiled to himself. “I’m droning on, I’m sorry. You know all this.”
“You’re frustrated, I get it,” said Mel. “I wouldn’t have made it as a botanist if I hadn’t faced my own share of dealing with bureaucracy.”
“Come on, I want to show you something.”
Pedro led her through a path which looked like it had been well trodden by humans, to a section where the trees were taller, the bushes bushier. The plants appeared to be more mature than the ones closest to the entrance, although as Mel looked closely, she could see the diversity was severely restricted. There were only two species in the whole area which, she calculated, amounted to around twenty square meters.
“Was this area planted first?” she asked.
“No,” said Pedro with pride. “Second.”
She turned to him with a questioning glance. He was grinning and, she could see, still eager to explain.
“This is my experiment,” said Pedro. “At some point, Mars is going to need forests all over the planet. When the conditions are right for plants to grow on the surface – not just moss and lichen – we’re going to need to create a living ecosystem to maintain the atmosphere by soaking up carbon dioxide and generating oxygen…”
“You’re droning on again,” said Mel.
“Yes, sorry.”
“It’s fine.” She could see he was excited and it was nice to be reminded that working with plants could sometimes be like that. “I don’t mind.”
“The point is, we’re going to need plants, we’re going to need a lot of them and we’re going to need them quickly. We can’t wait thousands of years for forests to develop naturally like they did on Earth. So I’m engineering forests to grow much quicker. It’s just the two species so far, but I’m planning to extend that.”
“How did you do it?”
Pedro grinned at the chance to explain his achievement. “By increasing the ability of these plants to fix carbon dioxide from the air.”
Mel stared at him as she made sure she had heard him properly. Photosynthesis was a naturally very inefficient process and many eminent scientists had claimed it could be improved upon. But, even though they had tried, no one had actually been able to better millions of years of plant evolution. “I thought that area of research was a dead end.”
“I figured, just because no one else had managed to improve how plants harvest light energy, it didn’t mean it wasn’t possible,” said Pedro, his grin becoming wider. “Because this is a Tharsis project in an Inventrix facility, I was lucky to get access to all the previous research done by both corporations – including all unpublished data on those apparent dead ends. It was by building on their work that I was able to make the breakthrough.”
It was, she had to admit, impressive. “That’s amazing, Pedro.”
He gave a modest shrug. “The challenge is to ensure that accelerated growth doesn’t get passed to the next generation of plants, otherwise we could have runaway forests which might become a problem.”
“You need some kind of kill switch,” suggested Mel.
“Embedded in the genetic code of the plant, if possible,” Pedro agreed. “The Science Board don’t want some kind of kill switch released into the environment because of potential unforeseen consequences. Which means I’m a little bit stuck, as I tend to agree with them.”
“Once you’ve let the genie out, you can’t put it back in the bottle.”
Pedro gave her a puzzled look.
She laughed. “That’s one of my father’s sayings. It’s from an old Earth fable… it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, your father.” Pedro took on a sudden somber tone. “I thought of you when I heard he’d died.”
“It was five years ago,” said Mel. The sudden memory brought with it unexpected emotions and heat rose to her face.
“I thought the obituaries were needlessly unkind.”
“Some people say my father was unkind.”
“He came from a different era on a different planet,” said Pedro. “He grew up in a world where the population was paying a universal tax to fund the terraforming of Mars. You can understand why people like him thought the idea of Mars keeping the profits for itself, and even thinking for itself, was a betrayal.”
“You’re very understanding.”
“I try to see both sides, even when I don’t agree with one of them.”
“Dad could never do that. He fought for Earth to have the final say to his last breath. It tore him up inside. He loved his home planet, but he loved his family too. He couldn’t go home without leaving his family and he couldn’t be with his family unless he gave up the option to go home. He never fully made peace with his decision to stay on Mars – I think he resented us for it at the end.”
“I’m sorry, Mel.”
Mel waved away his concern, flapping her hand in front of her face to cool her emotions and dry her threatening tears. “Don’t be. Tell me more about your forest.”
“There’s not much more to tell. Until I perfect that kill switch, I can’t move forward.”
“Did you want me to take a look?”
“I thought you had your own troubles to deal with.”
“Yes,” said Mel. “But until the farm samples get here, I could do with the distraction. I think I might be able to apply my viral enhancer technology to your forest.”
“I’d appreciate that,” said Pedro.
He turned to go, but Mel reached out to take his hand. The gentle touch of another human being was warm and comforting. “Let’s stay here a little longer.”
He gave her that puzzled look again.
“You don’t mind if I sit in your experiment, do you?”
Mel drew Pedro to a tree as tall as a Martian man. She bent her knees slowly, allowing her hand to slip from his fingers, and lowered herself to the forest floor. The ground was hard and dry from where the tree had sucked up all the moisture from the surrounding soil.
“Join me for a moment.”
Pedro folded his legs awkwardly to sit next to her. “I’ve never done this before,” he confessed.
Mel rested her back against the tree trunk and looked up at the dome where the hazy disk of the sun was lighting the Martian sky. She had been around plants since university, but they had always been shut away in laboratories, in growing trays or warehouse-like cultivating environments. But Pedro’s forest was more like the natural world she had seen in videos or that her father had reminisced about when she was little. There was no birdsong, no insects buzzing around or small mammals running by, but it was still more alive than anything she had experienced on Mars.
Pedro leaned beside her. His reassuring presence brought back memories of when they were students. When she had felt science had all the answers, if only she could unlock them. When the excitement of being with Pedro had made her wonder if she was led by her hormones or if they had shared something deeper.
“Sitting here gives everything a different perspective,” said Pedro.
“Yes,” said Mel, not knowing if he meant the forest or their relationship.
“It’s strange how we think we need to leave the plants alone,” he said. “When, in a real forest, animals would be interfering and interacting with them all the time. When Mars gets to a point where we can grow forests outside of a dome, they will inevitably grow alongside people. So, in a way, we’re not contaminating the experiment, we’re becoming part of it.”
“Yes.” Mel tilted her head to one side and rested it against Pedro’s shoulder.
Her problems drifted away into the simple quiet of the forest. Shaded by its hues of green and masked by its sensual aroma, they existed only at the fringes of her mind. Waiting for her on the other side of the dome.