Blue Mars

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 of 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.

She drove sightlessly back around the caldera, clockwise this time. Eventually she found herself 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 soletta gone, they would at least be 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, 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 Jetstream. 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 as if 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 colour 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 Areophany (#u350d1c38-f769-416d-a614-ffe9dd29e0fd)

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 terraforming 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 with which Sax was trying hard to come to grips. 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 Jetstream. The cable stuck out of the ruins like a black line of carbon nanotube fibres.

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 mirror; 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 mirrors 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 Kasei,’ he said.

She ignored that, and made him promise to remove the space mirrors. 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 per cent, 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 just to 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 aluminium 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 other plans for terraforming Venus one had, 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 post-docs in any lab anywhere, any time; 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 non-coloration, 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 behaviour. 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 clangour 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 artefacts 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 kilometres. 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 kilometres a primal wilderness zone,’ Sax said. ‘Keep it like this forever.’

‘Bacteria?’ Michel asked. ‘Lichen?’

‘Probably. But do they matter?’

‘To Ann they do.’