Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      

       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 СКАЧАТЬ