I'm hiking over a glacier with fellow members of the independence movement. The sky's purple. We wear hotsuits and breathing masks. We're near the South Pole of Mars.

We came all the way from the North Pole, and the equator before that. On the run from the corporate owners of our world. Not just fleeing, though: we're following a long term plan. We needed to inspect our terraforming program at both poles, compare them to the equator.

Our program hasn't affected the tropics much yet, but the ice is MUCH thicker at both poles now. Total Martian surface water is way up. The new damper climate will creep down from the poles, and reach the warmer habitable zones at the equator last.

I know all that, but feel ironic anyway--all this work, and nothing to show for it so far but this damn glacier. I know with my head that ice on the surface is like money in the bank... but it's just not the same as a forest or a sea, though it'll lead to them. But I want them now. I want a place to live. I want... home.

A single chance word triggered this dream.

I feel a bit like the Martian revolutionaries in Kim Stanley Robinson's RED MARS trilogy. Just as on Mars, corporate money and power is flooding the San Francisco Bay Area, making us artists and slackers refugees in our homeland. The Martian rebels hid under the polar ice. Where do we go?

The Web boom caused a housing shortage in the Bay Area. Prices soared and our landlord sold our house. We're being evicted now, and house-hunting as a group. Not finding what we want so far. Lily and I have been willing for some time to consider fixing up places that are wrong for us now but have potential, but Alder kept saying it wouldn't work. Today, they came back from looking at more houses and Lily said drily "They were terrible. Alder's much more willing now to terraform."

Polar caps growing = my life feels MORE frozen now, more stuck, especially around dating and sex, than twenty years ago! But Martian ice is precious: it's water and air, in cold storage. Maybe I'm building up resources in OTHER areas that I can use later in the warmer zone of relationships. like assertiveness in hard times. Like stubbornness.

The "frozen" poles change first, the warm tropics change last = true of global warming on Earth at least--the poles warm far more than the tropics. True in my arid Martian life too--resources are building up in the deep freeze. The shift is auspicious, in the longer run--even if all I have to show for it now are changes that look, well... glacial.

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