Green Mars Part 8

"Ann," she said, as if vomiting.

Ten minutes later he was in her car, reaching up to give her a hug. "How long have you been here?"

"Not... not long."

They sat. She collected herself. It was like thinking, it was thinking out loud. Surely she still thought in words.

Coyote talked on, perhaps a bit slower than usual, eyeing her closely.

She asked him about the ice-drilling rig.

"Ah. I wondered if you would run across one of those."

"How many are there?"

"Fifty."

Coyote saw her expression, and nodded briefly. He was eating voraciously, and it occurred to her that he had arrived at the cache empty. "They're putting a lot of money into these big projects. The new elevator, these water rigs, nitrogen from t.i.tan... a big mirror out there between us and the sun, to put more light on us. Have you heard of that?"

She tried to collect herself. Fifty. Ah, G.o.d....

It made her mad. She had been angry at the planet, for not giving her her release. For frightening her, but not backing it up with action. But this was different, a different kind of anger. And now as she sat watching Coyote eat, thinking about the inundation of Vast.i.tas Borealis, she could feel that anger contracting inside her, like a prestellar dustcloud, contracting until it collapsed and ignited. Hot fury- it was painful to feel it. And yet it was the same old thing, anger at the terraforming. That old burnt emotion that had gone nova in the early years, now coalescing and going off again; she didn't want it, she really didn't. But dammit, the planet was melting under her feet. Disintegrating. Reduced to mush in some Terran cartel's mining venture.

Something ought to be done.

And really she had to do something, if only just to fill the hours that she had to fill before some accident had mercy on her. Something to occupy the preposthumous hours. Zombie vengeance- well, why not? p.r.o.ne to violence, p.r.o.ne to despair....

"Who's building them?" she asked.

"Mostly Consolidated. There's factories building them at Mareotis and Bradbury Point." Coyote wolfed down food for a while more, then eyed her. "You don't like it."

"No."

"Would you like to stop it?"

She didn't reply.

Coyote seemed to understand. "I don't mean stop the whole terraforming effort. But there are things that can be done. Blow up the factories."

"They'll just rebuild them."

"You never can tell. It would slow them down. It might buy enough time for something to happen on a more global scale."

"Reds, you mean."

"Yes. I think people would call them Reds."

Ann shook her head. "They don't need me."

"No. But maybe you need them, eh? And you're a hero to them, you know. You would mean more to them than just another body."

Ann's mind had gone blank again. Reds- she had never believed in them, never believed that mode of resistance would work. But now- well, even if it wouldn't work, it might be better than doing nothing. Poke them in the eye with a stick!

And if it did work....

"Let me think about it."

They talked about other things. Suddenly Ann was. .h.i.t by a wall of fatigue, which was strange as she had spent so much time doing nothing. But there it was. Talking was exhausting work, she wasn't used to it. And Coyote was a hard man to talk to.

"You should go to bed," he said, breaking off his monologue. "You look tired. Your hands-" He helped her up. She lay down on a bed, in her clothes. Coyote pulled a blanket over her. "You're tired. I wonder if it isn't time for another longevity treatment for you, old girl."

"I'm not going to take them anymore."

"No! Well, you surprise me. But sleep, now. Sleep."

She caravaned with Coyote back south, and in the evenings they ate together, and he told her about the Reds. It was a loose grouping, rather than any rigidly organized movement. Like the underground itself. She knew several of the founders: Ivana, and Gene and Raul from the farm team, who had ended up disagreeing with Hiroko's areophany and its insistence on viriditas; Kasei and Dao and several of the Zygote ectogenes; a lot of Arkady's followers, who had come down from Phobos and then clashed with Arkady over the value of terraforming to the revolution. A good many Bogdanovists, including Steve and Marian, had become Reds in the years since 2061, as had followers of the biologist Schnelling, and some radical j.a.panese nisei and sansei from Sabis.h.i.+, and Arabs who wanted Mars to stay Arabian forever, and escaped prisoners from Korolyov, and so on. A bunch of radicals. Not really her type, Ann thought, feeling a residual sensation that her objection to terraforming was a rational scientific thing. Or at least a defensible ethical or aesthetic position. But then the anger burned through her again in a flash, and she shook her head, disgusted at herself. Who was she to judge the ethics of the Reds? At least they had expressed their anger, they had lashed out. Probably they felt better, even if they hadn't accomplished anything. And maybe they had accomplished something, at least in years past, before the terraforming had entered this new phase of transnat gigantism.

Coyote maintained that the Reds had considerably slowed terraforming. Some of them had even kept records to try to quantify the difference they had made. There was also, he said, a growing movement among some of the Reds to acknowledge reality and admit that terraforming was going to happen, but to work up policy papers advocating various kinds of least-impact terraforming. "There are some very detailed proposals for a largely carbon dioxide atmosphere, warm but water-poor, which would support plant life, and people with facemasks, but not wrench the world into a Terran model. It's very interesting. There are also several proposals for what they call ecopoesis, or areobiospheres. Worlds in which the low alt.i.tudes are arctic, and just barely livable for us, while the higher alt.i.tudes remain above the bulk of the atmosphere, and thus in a natural state, or close to it. The calderas of the four big volcanoes would stay especially pure in such a world, or so they say."

Ann doubted most of these proposals were achievable, or would have the effects predicted. But Coyote's accounts intrigued her nevertheless. He was a strong supporter of all Red efforts, apparently, and he had been a big help to them from the start, giving them aid from the underground refuges, connecting them up with each other, and helping them to build their own refuges, which were chiefly in the mesas and fretted terrain of the Great Escarpment, where they remained close to the terraforming action, and could therefore interfere with it more easily. Yes- Coyote was a Red, or at least a sympathizer. "Really I'm nothing. An old anarchist. I suppose you could call me a Boonean, now, in that I believe in incorporating anything and everything that will help make a free Mars. Sometimes I think the argument that a human-viable surface helps the revolution is a good one. Other times not. Anyway the Reds are such a great guerrilla pool. And I take their point that we're not here to, you know, reproduce Canada reproduce Canada, for G.o.d's sake! So I help. I'm good at hiding, and I like it."

Ann nodded.

"So do you want to join them? Or at least meet them?"

"I'll think about it."

Her focus on rock was shattered. Now she could not help noticing how many signs of life there were on the land. In the southern tens and twenties, ice from the outbreak glaciers was melting during summer afternoons, and the cold water was flowing downhill, cutting the land in new primitive watersheds, and turning talus slopes into what ecologists called fellfields, those rocky patches that were the first living communities after ice receded, their living component made of algae and lichens and moss. Sandy regolith, infected by the water and microbacteria flowing through it, became fellfield with shocking speed, she found, and the fragile landforms were quickly destroyed. Much of the regolith on Mars had been superarid, so arid that when water touched it there were powerful chemical reactions- lots of hydrogen peroxide release, and salt crystallizations- in essence the ground disintegrated, flowing away in sandy muds that only set downstream, in loose terraces called solifluction rims, and in frosty new proto-fellfields. Features were disappearing. The land was melting. After one long day's drive through terrain altered like this, Ann said to Coyote, "Maybe I will talk to them."

But first they returned to Zygote, or Gamete, where Coyote had some business. Ann stayed in Peter's room, as he was gone, and the room she had shared with Simon had been put to other uses. She wouldn't have stayed in it anyway. Peter's room was under Harmakhis's, a round bamboo segment containing a desk, a chair, a crescent mattress on the floor, and a window looking out at the lake. Everything was the same but different in Gamete, and despite the years she had spent visiting Zygote regularly, she felt no connection with any of it. It was hard, in fact, to remember what Zygote had been like. She didn't want to remember, she practiced forgetting a.s.siduously; any time some image from the past came to her, she would jump up and do something that required concentration, studying rock samples or seismograph readouts, or cooking complex meals, or going out to play with the kids- until the image had faded, and the past was banished. With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely.

One evening Coyote stuck his head in the door of Peter's room. "Did you know Peter is a Red too?"

"What?"

"He is. But he works on his own, in s.p.a.ce mostly. I think that his ride down from the elevator gave him a taste for it."

"My G.o.d," she said, disgusted. That was another random accident; by all rights Peter should have died when the elevator fell. What were the chances of a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p floating by and spotting him, alone in areosynchronous...o...b..t? No, it was ridiculous. Nothing existed but contingency.

But still she was angry.

She went to sleep upset by these thoughts, and once in her uneasy slumber she had a dream in which she and Simon were walking through the most spectacular part of Candor Chasma, on that first trip they had taken together, when everything was immaculate, and nothing had changed for a billion years- the first humans to walk in that vast gorge of layered terrain and immense walls. Simon had loved it just as much as she had, and he was so silent, so absorbed in the reality of rock and sky- there was no better companion for such glorious contemplation. Then in the dream one of the giant canyon walls started to collapse, and Simon said, "Long runout," and she woke up instantly, sweating.

She dressed and left Peter's rooms and went out into the little mesocosm under the dome, with its white lake and the krummholz on the low dunes. Hiroko was such a strange genius, to conceive such a place and then convince so many others to join her in it. To conceive so many children, without the fathers' permission, without controls over the genetic manipulations. It was a form of insanity, really, divine or not.

There along the icy strand of their little lake came a group of Hiroko's brood. They couldn't be called kids anymore, the youngest were fifteen or sixteen Terran years old, the oldest- well, the oldest were out scattered over the world; Kasei was probably fifty by now, and his daughter Jackie nearly twenty-five, a graduate of the new university in Sabis.h.i.+, active in demimonde politics. That group of ectogenes were back in Gamete on a visit, like Ann herself. There they were, coming along the beach. Jackie was leading the group, a tall graceful black-haired young woman, quite beautiful and imperious, the leader of her generation no doubt. Unless it might be the cheery Nirgal, or the brooding Dao. But Jackie led them- Dao followed her with doggy loyalty, and even Nirgal kept an eye on her. Simon had loved Nirgal, and Peter did too, and Ann could see why; he was the only one among Hiroko's gang of ectogenes who did not put her off. The rest cavorted in their self-absorption, kings and queens of their little world, but Nirgal had left Zygote soon after Simon's death, and had hardly ever come back. He had studied in Sabis.h.i.+, which was what had given Jackie the idea, and now he spent most of his time in Sabis.h.i.+, or out with Coyote or Peter, or visiting the cities of the north. So was he too a Red? Impossible to say. But he was interested in everything, aware of everything, running around everywhere, a kind of young male Hiroko if such a creature was possible, but less strange than Hiroko, more engaged with other people; more human. Ann had never in her life managed to have a normal conversation with Hiroko, who seemed an alien consciousness, with entirely different meanings for all the words in the language, and, despite her brilliance at ecosystem design, not really a scientist at all, but rather some kind of prophet. Nirgal on the other hand seemed intuitively to strike right to the heart of whatever was most important to the person he was talking to- and he focused on that, and asked question after question, curious, a.s.similative, sympathetic. As Ann watched him trailing Jackie down the strand, running here and there, she recalled how slowly and carefully he had walked at Simon's side. How he had looked so frightened that last night, when Hiroko in her peculiar way had brought him in to say good-bye. All that business had been a cruel thing to subject a boy to, but Ann hadn't objected at the time; she had been desperate, ready to try anything. Another mistake she could never repair.

She stared at the blond sand underfoot, upset, until the ectogenes had pa.s.sed. It was a shame Nirgal was so hooked by Jackie, who cared so little for him. Jackie was a remarkable woman in her way, but much too much like Maya- moody and manipulative, fixated on no man, except, perhaps, for Peter- who luckily (although it had not seemed so at the time) had had an affair with Jackie's mother, and was not the least bit interested in Jackie herself. A messy business that, and Peter and Kasei were still estranged by it, and Esther had never been back. Not Peter's finest hour. And its effects on Jackie... Oh yes, there would be effects (there, watch out- some black blank, there in her own deep past) yes, on and on and on it went, all their sordid little lives, repeating themselves in their meaningless rounds....

She tried to concentrate on the composition of the sand grains. Blond was not really a usual color for sand on Mars. A very rare granitic stuff. She wondered if Hiroko had hunted for it, or else gotten lucky.

The ectogenes were gone, down by the other side of the lake. She was alone on the beach. Simon somewhere underneath her. It was hard to keep from connecting with any of that.

A man came walking over the dunes toward her. He was short, and at first she thought it was Sax, then Coyote, but he wasn't either of these. He hesitated when he saw her, and by that motion she saw that it was indeed Sax. But a Sax greatly altered in appearance. Vlad and Ursula had been doing some cosmetic surgery on his face, enough so that he didn't look like the old Sax. He was going to move to Burroughs, and join a biotech company there, using a Swiss pa.s.sport and one of Coyote's viral ident.i.ties. Getting back into the terraforming effort. She looked out at the water. He came over and tried to talk to her, strangely un-Saxlike, nicer-looking now, a handsome old coot; but it was still the old Sax, and her anger filled her up so much that she could hardly think, hardly remember what they were talking about from one second to the next. "You really do look different," was all she could recall. Inanities like that. Looking at him she thought, He will never change. But there was something frightening about the stricken look on his new face, something deadly that it would evoke, if she did not stop it... and so she argued with him until he grimaced one last time, and went away.

She sat there for a long time, getting colder and more distraught. Finally she put her head on her knees, and fell into a kind of sleep.

She had a dream. All the First Hundred were standing around her, the living and the dead, Sax at their center with his old face, and that dangerous new look of distress. He said, "Net gain in complexity."

Vlad and Ursula said, "Net gain in health."

Hiroko said, "Net gain in beauty."

Nadia said, "Net gain in goodness."

Maya said, "Net gain in emotional intensity," and behind her John and Frank rolled their eyes.

Arkady said, "Net gain in freedom."

Michel said, "Net gain in understanding."

From the back Frank said, "Net gain in power," and John elbowed him and cried, "Net gain in happiness!"

And then they all stared at Ann. And she stood up, quivering with rage and fear, understanding that she alone among them did not believe in the possibility of the net gain of anything at all, that she was some kind of crazy reactionary; and all she could do was point a shaking finger at them and say, "Mars. Mars. Mars." "Mars. Mars. Mars."

That night after supper, and the evening in the big meeting room, Ann got Coyote alone and said, "When do you go out again?"

"In a few days."

"Are you still willing to introduce me to those people you talked about?"

"Yeah, sure." He looked at her with his head c.o.c.ked. "It's where you belong."

She only nodded. She looked around the common room, thinking, Good-bye, good-bye. Good riddance.

A week later she was flying with Coyote in an ultralight plane. They flew north through the nights, into the equatorial region, then onward to the Great Escarpment, to the Deuteronilus Mensae north of Xanthe- wild fretted terrain, the mensae like an archipelago of stack islands, dotting a sand sea. They would become a real archipelago, Ann thought as Coyote descended between two of the stacks, if the pumping to the north continued.

Coyote landed on a short stretch of dusty sand, and taxied into a hangar cut into the side of one of the mesas. Out of the plane they were greeted by Steve and Ivana and a few others, and taken up in an elevator to a floor just under the top of the mesa. The northern end of this particular mesa came to a sharp rocky point, and high in this point a large triangular meeting room had been excavated. On entering it Ann stopped in surprise; it was jammed with people, several hundred of them at least, all seated at long tables about to start a meal, leaning over the tables to pour each other's water. The people at one table saw her, and stopped what they were doing, and the people at the next table noticed that and looked around, and saw her and likewise stopped- and so the effect rippled out through the room, until they had all gone still. Then one stood, and another, and in a ragged motion they all rose to their feet. For a moment everything was as if frozen. Then they began to applaud, their hands flailing wildly, their faces gleaming; and then they cheered.

Part Four

The Scientist as Hero

Hold it between thumb and middle finger. Feel the rounded edge, observe the smooth curves of gla.s.s. A magnifying lens: it has the simplicity, elegance, and heft of a paleolithic tool. Sit with it on a sunny day, hold it over a pile of dry twigs. Move it up and down, until you see a spot in the twigs turn bright. Remember that light? It was as if the twigs caged a little sun.

The Amor asteroid that was spun out into the elevator cable was made up mostly of carbonaceous chondrites and water. The two Amor asteroids intercepted by groups of robot landers in the year 2091 were mostly silicates and water.

The material of New Clarke was spun out into a single long strand of carbon. The material of the two silicate asteroids was transformed by their robot crews into sheets of solar sail material. Silica vapor was solidified between rollers ten kilometers long, and pulled out in sheets coated with a thin layer of aluminum, and these vast mirror sheets were unfurled by s.p.a.cecraft with human crews, into circular arrays which held their shape using spin and sunlight.

From one asteroid, pushed into a Martian polar orbit and called Birch, they teased the mirror sheets out into a ring a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter. This annular mirror spun around Mars in a polar orbit, the mirror ring facing the sun, angled in so that the light reflected from it met at a point inside Mars's...o...b..t, near its Lagrange One point.

The second silicate asteroid, called Solettaville, had been pushed near this Lagrange point. There the solar sailmakers spun the mirror sheets out into a complex web of slatted rings, all connected and set at angles, so that they looked like a lens made of circular venetian blinds, spinning around a hub that was a silver cone, with the cone's open end facing Mars. This huge delicate object, ten thousand kilometers in diameter, bright and stately as it wheeled along between Mars and the sun, was called the soletta.

Sunlight striking the soletta directly bounced through its blinds, hitting the sun side of one, then the Mars side of the next one out, and onward to Mars. Sunlight striking the annular ring in its polar orbit was reflected back and in to the inner cone of the soletta, and then was reflected again, also on to Mars. Thus light struck both sides of the soletta, and these countervailing pressures kept it moving in its position, about a hundred thousand kilometers out from Mars- closer at perihelion, farther away at aphelion. The angles of the slats were constantly adjusted by the soletta's AI, to keep its...o...b..t and its focus.

Through the decade when these two great pinwheels were being constructed out of their asteroids, like silicate webs out of rock spiders, observers on Mars saw almost nothing of them. Occasionally someone would see an arcing white line in the sky, or random glints by day or by night, as if the brilliance of a much vaster universe were s.h.i.+ning through loose seams in the fabric of our sphere.

Then, when the two mirrors were completed, the annular mirror's reflected light was aimed at the cone of the soletta. The soletta's circular slats were adjusted, and it moved into a slightly different orbit.

And one day people living on the Tharsis side of Mars looked up, for the sky had darkened. They looked up, and saw an eclipse of the sun such as Mars had never seen: the sun bit into, as if there were some Luna-sized moon up there to block its rays. The eclipse then proceeded as they do on Earth, the crescent of darkness biting deeper into the round blaze as the soletta floated into its position between Mars and sun, with its mirrors not yet positioned to pa.s.s the light through: the sky going a dark violet, the darkness taking over the majority of the disk, leaving only a crescent of blaze until that too disappeared, and the sun was a dark circle in the sky, edged by the whisper of a corona- then entirely gone. Total eclipse of the sun....

A very faint moire pattern of light appeared in the dark disk, unlike anything ever seen in any natural eclipse. Everyone on the daylight side of Mars gasped, squinted as they looked up. And then, as when one tugs open venetian blinds, the sun came back all at once.

Blinding light!

And now more blinding than ever, as the sun was noticeably brighter than it had been before the strange eclipse had begun. Now they walked under an augmented sun, the disk appearing about the same size as it did from Earth, the light some twenty percent greater than before- noticeably brighter, warmer on the back on the neck- the red expanse of the plains more brilliantly lit. As if floodlights had suddenly been turned on, and all of them were now walking a great stage.

A few months after that a third mirror, much smaller than the soletta, spun down into the highest reaches of the Martian atmosphere. It was another lens made of circular slats, and looked like a silver UFO. It caught some of the light pouring down from the soletta, and focused it still further, into points on the surface of the planet that were less than a kilometer across. And it flew like a glider over the world, holding that concentrated beam of light in focus, until little suns seemed to bloom right there on the land, and the rock itself melted, turning from solid to liquid. And then to fire.

The underground wasn't big enough for Sax Russell. He wanted to get back to work. He could have moved into the demimoride, perhaps taken a teaching position at the new university in Sabis.h.i.+, which ran outside the net and covered many of his old colleagues, and provided an education for many of the children of the underground. But on reflection he decided he didn't want to teach, or remain on the periphery- he wanted to return to terraforming, to the heart of the project if possible, or as close as he could get to it. And that meant the surface world. Recently the Transitional Authority had formed a committee to coordinate all the work on terraforming, and a Subaras.h.i.+-led team had gotten the old synthesis job that Sax had once held. This was unfortunate, as Sax didn't speak j.a.panese. But the lead in the biological part of the effort had been given to the Swiss, and was being run by a Swiss collective of biotech companies called Biotique, with main offices in Geneva and Burroughs, and close ties with the transnational Praxis.

So the first task was to insinuate himself into Biotique under a false name, and get himself a.s.signed to Burroughs. Desmond took charge of this operation, writing a computer persona for Sax similar to the one he had given to Spencer years before, when Spencer had moved to Echus Overlook. Spencer's persona, and some extensive cosmetic surgery, had enabled him to work successfully in the materials labs in Echus Overlook, and then later in Kasei Vallis, the very heart of transnat security. So Sax had faith in Desmond's system. The new persona listed Sax's physical ID data- genome, retina, voice, and finger prints- all slightly altered, so that they still almost fit Sax himself, while escaping notice in any comparative matching searches in the nets. These data were given a new name with a full Terran background, credit rating, and immigration record, and a viral subtext to attempt to overwhelm any competing ID for the physical data, and the whole package was sent off to the Swiss pa.s.sport office, which had been issuing pa.s.sports to these arrivals without comment. And in the balkanized world of the transnat nets, that seemed to be doing the job. "Oh yeah, that part works no problem," Desmond said. "But you First Hundred are all movie stars. You need a new face too."

Sax was agreeable. He saw the need, and his face had never meant anything to him. And these days the face in the mirror didn't much resemble what he thought he looked like anyway. So he got Vlad to do the work on him, emphasizing the potential usefulness of his presence in Burroughs. Vlad had become one of the leading theoreticians of the resistance to the Transitional Authority, and he was quick to see Sax's point. "Most of us should just live in the demimonde," he said, "but a few people hidden in Burroughs would be a good thing. So I might as well practice my cosmetic surgery on a no-lose situation like yours."