Blue Mars (6 page)

This morning they wouldn’t have. Now they still didn’t want to.
She waited out the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed
glare of Ann Clayborne.... A lot of them had joined the fight because of her,
back in the days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual
working alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on
the same side....

They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne
was against them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that—without
Kasei, without Dao— with the bulk of the natives green, and firmly behind the
leadership of Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor. . . .

“Coyote will get you off Tharsis,” Ann said, feeling sick. She
left the room, walked through the terminal and out the lock, back into her
rover. Kasei’s wristpad lay on the car’s dashboard, and she threw it across the
compartment, sobbed. She sat in the driver’s seat and composed herself, and
then started the car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.

Eventually she found herself back in east Pavonis, and there they
were, all still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they
stared at her as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was
personally responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day
and throughout the revolution—just as they had stared at her after Burroughs,
in fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him,
and ignored the rest, or tried to, Irishka frightened, Jackie red-eyed and furious,
her father killed this day after all, and though she was in Peter’s camp and so
partly responsible for the crushing response to the Red offensive, you could
see with one look at her that someone would pay—but Ann ignored all that, and
walked across the room to Sax—who was in his nook in the far corner of the big
central room, sitting before a screen reading long columns of figures,
muttering things to his AI. Ann waved a hand between his face and his screen
and he looked up, startled.

Strangely, he was the only one of the whole crowd who did not
appear to blame her. Indeed he regarded her with his head tilted to the side,
with a birdlike curiosity that almost resembled sympathy.

“Bad news about Kasei,” he said. “Kasei and all the rest. I’m glad
that you and Desmond survived.”

She ignored that, and told him in a rapid undertone where the Reds
were going, and what she had told them to do. “I think I can keep them from
trying any more direct attacks on the cable,” she said. “And from most acts of
violence, at least in the short term.”

“Good,” Sax said.

“But I want something for it,” she said. “I want it and if I don’t
get it, I’ll set them on you forever.”

“The soletta?” Sax asked.

She stared at him. He must have listened to her more often than
she had thought. “Yes.”

His eyebrows came together as he thought it over. “It could cause
a kind of ice age,” he said.

“Good.”

He stared at her as he thought about it. She could see him doing
it, in quick flashes or bursts: ice age—thinner atmosphere—terraforming slowed—new
ecosystems destroyed— perhaps compensate—greenhouse gases. And so on and so
forth. It was almost funny how she could read this stranger’s face, this hated
brother looking for a way out. He would look and look, but heat was the main
driver of terraforming, and with the huge orbiting array of mirrors in the
soletta gone, they would be at least restricted to Mars’s normal level of
sunlight, thus slowed to a more “natural” pace. It was possible that the
inherent stability of that approach even appealed to Sax’s conservatism, such
as it was.

“Okay,” he said.

“You can speak for these people?” she said, waving disdainfully at
the crowd behind them, as if all her oldest companions were not among them, as
if they were UNTA technocrats or metanat functionaries....

“No,” he said. “I only speak for me. But I can get rid of the
soletta.”

“You’d do it against their wishes?”

He frowned. “I think I can talk them into it. If not, I know I can
talk the Da Vinci team into it. They like challenges.”

“Okay.”

It was the best she could get from him, after all. She
straightened up, still nonplussed. She hadn’t expected him to agree. And now
that he had, she discovered that she was still angry, still sick at heart. This
concession—now that she had it, it meant nothing. They would figure out other
ways to heat things. Sax would make his argument using that point, no doubt.
Give the soletta to Ann, he would say, as a way of buying off the Reds. Then
forge on.

She walked out of the big room without a glance at the others. Out
of the warehouses to her rover.

For a while she drove blindly, without any sense of where she was
going. Just get away, just escape. Thus by accident she headed westward, and in
short order she had to stop or run over the rim’s edge.

Abruptly she braked the car.

In a daze she looked out the windshield. Bitter taste in her
mouth, guts all knotted, every muscle tense and aching. The great encircling
rim of the caldera was smoking at several points, chiefly from Sheffield and
Lastflow, but also from a dozen other places as well. No sight of the cable
over Sheffield—but it was still there, marked by a concentration of smoke
around its base, lofting east on the thin hard wind. Another peak banner, blown
on the endless jet stream. Time was a wind sweeping them away. The plumes of
smoke marred the dark sky, obscuring some of the many stars that shone in the
hour before sunset. It looked like the old volcano was waking again, rousing
from its long dormancy and preparing to erupt. Through the thin smoke the sun
was a dark red glowing ball, looking much like an early molten planet must have
looked, its color staining the shreds of smoke maroon and rust and crimson. Red
Mars.

But red Mars was gone, and gone for good. Soletta or not, ice age
or not, the biosphere would grow and spread until it covered everything, with
an ocean in the north, and lakes in the south, and streams, forests, prairies,
cities and roads, oh she saw it all; white clouds raining mud on the ancient
highlands while the uncaring masses built their cities as fast as they could,
the long run-out of civilization burying her world.

PART
TWO

              
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---Areophany

              
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To Sax it looked like that least rational of conflicts, civil war.
Two parts of a group shared many more interests than disagreements, but fought
anyway. Unfortunately it was not possible to force people to study cost-benefit
analysis. Nothing to be done. Or—possibly one could identify a crux issue
causing one or both sides to resort to violence. After that, try to defuse that
issue.

Clearly in this case a crux issue was terraforming. A matter with
which Sax was closely identified. This could be viewed as a disadvantage, as a
mediator ought ideally to be neutral. On the other hand, his actions might
speak symbolically for the terra-forming effort itself. He might accomplish
more with a symbolic gesture than anyone else. What was needed was a concession
to the Reds, a real concession, the reality of which would increase its
symbolic value by some hidden exponential factor. Symbolic value: it was a
concept Sax was trying very hard to understand. Words of all kinds gave him
trouble now, so much so that he had taken to etymology to try to understand
them better. A glance at the wrist: symbol, “something that stands for something
else,” from the Latin symbolum, adopted from a Greek word meaning “throw
together. “Exactly. It was alien to his understanding, this throwing together,
a thing emotional and even unreal, and yet vitally important.

The afternoon of the battle for Sheffield, he called Ann on the
wrist and got her briefly, and tried to talk to her, and failed. So he drove to
the edge of the city’s wreckage, not knowing what else to do, looking for her.
It was very disturbing to see how much damage a few hours’ fighting could do.
Many years of work lay in smoking shambles, the smoke not fire ash particulates
for the most part but merely disturbed fines, old volcanic ash blown up and
then torn east on the jet stream. The cable stuck out of the ruins like a black
line of carbon nanotube fibers.

There was no sign of any further Red resistance. Thus no way of
locating Ann. She was not answering her phone. So Sax returned to the warehouse
complex in east Pavonis, feeling balked. He went back inside.

And then there she was, in the vast warehouse walking through the
others toward him as if about to plunge a knife in his heart. He sank in his
seat unhappily, remembering an overlong sequence of unpleasant interviews
between them. Most recently they had argued on the train ride out of Libya
Station. He recalled her saying something about removing the soletta and the
annular minor; which would be a very powerful symbolic statement indeed. And he
had never been comfortable with such a major element of the terraforming’s heat
input being so fragile.

So when she said “I want something for it,” he thought he knew
what she meant, and suggested removing the minors before she could. This
surprised her. It slowed her down, it took the edge off her terrible anger.
Leaving something very much deeper, however—grief, despair-—he could not be
sure. Certainly a lot of Reds had died that day, and Red hopes as well. “I’m
sorry about Ka-sei,” he said.

She ignored that, and made him promise to remove the space minors.
He did, meanwhile calculating the loss of light that would result, then trying
to keep a wince off his face. Insolation would drop by about twenty percent, a
very substantial amount indeed. “It will start an ice age,” he muttered.

“Good,” she said.

But she was not satisfied. And as she left the room, he could see
by the set of her shoulders that his concession had done little if anything to
comfort her. One could only hope her cohorts were more easily pleased. In any
case it would have to be done. It might stop a civil war. Of course a great
number of plants would die, mostly at the higher elevations, though it would
affect every ecosystem to some extent. An ice age, no doubt about it. Unless
they reacted very effectively. But it would be worth it, if it stopped the
fighting.

It would have been easy
to just cut the great band of the annular mirror and let it fly
away into space, right out of the plane of the ecliptic. Same with the soletta:
fire a few of its positioning rockets and it would spin away like a Catherine
wheel.

But that would be a waste of processed aluminum silicate, which
Sax did not like to see. He decided to investigate the possibility of using the
mirrors’ directional rockets, and their reflectivity, to propel them elsewhere
in the solar system. The soletta could be located in front of Venus, and its
mirrors realigned so that the structure became a huge parasol, shading the hot
planet and starting the process of freezing out its atmosphere; this was
something that had been discussed in the literature for a long time, and no
matter what the various plans for terraforming Venus included, this was the
standard first step. Then having done that, the annular mirror would have to be
placed in the corresponding polar orbit around Venus, as its reflected light
helped to hold the soletta/parasol in its position against the push of solar
radiation. So the two would still be put to use, and it would also be a
gesture, another symbolic gesture, saying Look here—this big world might be
terraformable too. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible. Thus some of the
psychic pressure on Mars, “the only other possible Earth,”
 
might be relieved. This was not logical, but
it didn’t matter; history was strange, people were not rational systems, and in
the peculiar symbolic logic of the limbic system, it would be a sign to the
people on Earth, a portent, a scattering of psychic seed, a throwing together.
Look there! Go there! And leave Mars alone.

So he talked it over with the Da Vinci space scientists, who had
effectively taken over control of the mirrors. The lab rats, people called them
behind their backs, and his (though he heard anyway); the lab rats, or the
saxaclones. Serious young native Martian scientists, in fact, with just the
same variations of temperament as grad students and postdocs in any lab anywhere,
anytime; but the facts didn’t matter. They worked with him and so they were the
saxaclones. Somehow he had become the very model of the modern Martian
scientist; first as white-coated lab rat, then as full-blown mad scientist,
with a crater-castle full of eager Igors, mad-eyed but measured in manner,
little Mr. Spocks, the men as skinny and awkward as cranes on the ground, the
women drab in their protective noncoloration, their neuter devotion to Science.
Sax was very fond of them. He liked their devotion to science, it made sense to
him—an urge to understand things, to be able to express them mathematically. It
was a sensible desire. In fact it often seemed to him that if everyone were a
physicist then they would be very much better off. “Ah, no, people like the
idea of a flat universe because they find negatively curved space difficult to
deal with.” Well, perhaps not. In any case the young natives at Da Vinci Crater
were a powerful group, strange or not. At this point Da Vinci was in charge of
a lot of the underground’s technological base, and with Spencer fully engaged
there, their production capability was staggering. They had engineered the
revolution, if the truth were told, and were now in de facto control of Martian
orbital space.

This was one reason why many of them looked displeased or at least
nonplussed when Sax first told them about the removal of the soletta and
annular mirror. He did it in a screen meeting, and their faces squinched into
expressions of alarm: Captain, it is not logical. But neither was civil war.
And the one was better than the other.

“Won’t people object?” Aonia asked. “The greens?”

“No doubt,” Sax said. “But right now we exist in, in anarchy. The
group in east Pavonis is a kind of proto-government, perhaps. But we in Da
Vinci control Mars space. And no matter the objections, this might avert civil
war.”

He explained as best he could. They got absorbed in the technical
challenge, in the problem pure and simple, and quickly forgot their shock at
the idea. In fact giving them a technical challenge of that sort was like
giving a dog a bone. They went away gnawing at the tough parts of the problem,
and just a few days later they were down to the smooth polished gleam of
procedure. Mostly a matter of instructions to AIs, as usual. It was getting to
the point where having conceived a clear idea of what one wanted to do, one
could just say to an AI, “please do thus and such”— please spin the soletta and
annular mirror into Venusian orbit, and adjust the slats of the soletta so that
it becomes a parasol shielding the planet from all of its incoming insolation;
and the AIs would calculate the trajectories and the rocket firings and the
mirror angles necessary, and it would be done.

People were becoming too powerful, perhaps. Michel always went on
about their godlike new powers, and Hiroko in her actions had implied that
there should be no limit to what they tried with these new powers, ignoring all
tradition. Sax himself had a healthy respect for tradition, as a kind of
default survival behavior. But the techs in Da Vinci cared no more for
tradition than Hiroko had. They were in an open moment in history, accountable
to no one. And so they did it.

Then Sax went to Michel. “I’m worried about Ann.” They were in a
corner of the big warehouse on east Pavonis, and the movement and clangor of
the crowd created a kind of privacy. But after a look around Michel said,
“Let’s go outside.”

They suited up and went out. East Pavonis was a maze of tents,
warehouses, manufactories, pistes, parking lots, pipelines, holding tanks,
holding yards; also junkyards and scrap heaps, their mechanical detritus
scattered about like volcanic ejecta. But Michel led Sax westward through the
mess, and they came quickly to the caldera rim, where the human clutter was put
into a new and larger context, a logarithmic shift that left the pharaonic
collection of artifacts suddenly looking like a patch of bacterial growth.

At the very edge of the rim, the blackish speckled basalt cracked
down in several concentric ledges, each lower than the last. A set of
staircases led down these terraces, and the lowest was railed. Michel led Sax
down to this terrace, where they could look over the side into the caldera.
Straight down for five kilometers. The caldera’s large diameter made it seem
less deep than that; still it was an entire round country down there, far far
below. And when Sax remembered how small the caldera was proportional to the
volcano entire, Pavonis itself seemed to bulk under them like a conical
continent, rearing right up out of the planet’s atmosphere into low space.
Indeed the sky was only purple around the horizon, and blackish overhead, with
the sun a hard gold coin in the west, casting clean slantwise shadows. They
could see it all. The fines thrown up by the explosions were gone, everything
returned to its normal telescopic clarity. Stone and sky and nothing
more—except for the thread of buildings cast around the rim. Stone and sky and
sun. Ann’s Mars. Except for the buildings. And on Ascraeus and Arsia and Elysium,
and even on Olympus, the buildings would not be there.

“We could easily declare everything above about eight kilometers a
primal wilderness zone,” Sax said. “Keep it like this forever.”

“Bacteria?” Michel asked. “Lichen?”

“Probably. But do they matter?”

“To Ann they do.”

“But why, Michel? Why is she like that?”

Michel shrugged.

After a long pause he said, “No doubt it is complex. But I think
it is a denial of life. A turning to rock as something she could trust. She was
mistreated as a girl, did you know that?”

Sax shook his head. He tried to imagine what that meant.

Michel said, “Her father died. Her mother married her stepfather
when she was eight. From then on he mistreated her, until she was sixteen, when
she moved to the mother’s sister. I’ve asked her what the mistreatment
consisted of, but she says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Abuse is abuse,
she said. She doesn’t remember much anyway, she says.”

“I believe that.”

Michel waggled a gloved hand. “We remember more than we think we
do. More than we want to, sometimes.”

They stood there looking into the caldera.

“It’s hard to believe,” Sax said.

Michel looked glum. “Is it? There were fifty women in the First
Hundred. Odds are more than one of them were abused by men in their lives. More
like ten or fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated,
struck, mistreated ... that’s just the way it was.”

“It’s hard to believe.”

“Yes.”

Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless
with a single blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had
needed to do it, though. Or so it had felt at the time.

“Everyone has their reasons,” Michel said, startling him. “Or so
they think.” He tried to explain—tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it
something other than plain evil. “At the base of human culture,” he said as he
looked down into the country of the caldera, “is a neurotic response to
people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist
in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then
sometime in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate
individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from
which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies used
to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the
mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father—this strategy often lasts
forever, and the people of that culture worship their king and their father
god, and so on. Or the ego ideal might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to
the brotherhood of men. There are names and full descriptions for all these
complexes—the Dionysian, the Persean, the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all
exist, and they are all neurotic, in that they all lead to misogyny, except for
the Dionysian complex.”

“This is one of your semantic rectangles?” Sax asked
apprehensively.

“Yes. The Apollonian and the Heraclean complexes might describe
Terran industrial societies. The Persean its earlier cultures, with strong
remnants of course right up to this day. And they are all three patriarchal.
They all denied the maternal, which was connected in patriarchy with the body
and with nature. The feminine was instinct, the body, and nature; while the
masculine was reason, mind, and law. And the law ruled.”

Sax, fascinated by so much throwing together, said only, “And on
Mars?”

“Well, on Mars it may be that the ego ideal is shifting back to
the maternal. To the Dionysian again, or to some kind of postoedipal
reintegration with nature, which we are still in the process of inventing. Some
new complex that would not be so subject to neurotic overinvestment.”

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborated a
pseudoscience could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt
to be more like physics. But what they did not understand was that physics,
while admittedly complicated, was always trying very hard to become simpler.

Michel, however, was continuing to elaborate. Correlated to
patriarchy was capitalism, he was saying, a hierarchical system in which most
men had been exploited economically, also treated like animals, poisoned,
betrayed, shoved around, shot. And even in the best of circumstances under
constant threat of being tossed aside, out of a job, poor, unable to provide
for loved dependents, hungry, humiliated. Some trapped in this unfortunate
system took out their rage at their plight on whomever they could, even if that
turned out to be their loved ones, the people most likely to give them comfort.
It was illogical, and even stupid. Brutal and stupid. Yes. Michel shrugged; he
didn’t like where this train of reasoning had led him. It sounded to Sax like
the implication was that many men’s actions indicated that they were, alas,
fairly stupid. And the limbic array got all twisted in some minds, Michel was
going on, trying to veer away from that, to make a decent explanation.
Adrenaline and testosterone were always pushing for a fight-or-flight response,
and in some dismal situations a satisfaction circuit got established in the get
hurt/hurt back axis, and then the men involved were lost, not only to fellow
feeling but to rational self-interest. Sick, in fact.

Sax felt a litle sick himself. Michel had explained away male evil
in several different ways in no more than a quarter of an hour, and still the
men of Earth had a lot to answer for. Marsmen were different. Although there
had been torturers in Kasei Vallis, as he well knew. But they had been settlers
from Earth. Sick. Yes, he felt sick. The young natives were not like that, were
they? A Marsman who hit a woman or molested a child would be ostracized,
excoriated, perhaps beaten up, he would lose his home, he would be exiled to
the asteroids and never allowed back. Wouldn’t he?

Something to look into.

Now he thought again of Ann. Of how she was: her manner, so
obdurate; her focus on science, on rock. A kind of Apollonian response,
perhaps. Concentration on the abstract, denial of the body and therefore of all
its pain. Perhaps.

“What would help Ann now, do you think?” Sax said.