Blue Mars (10 page)

“My rover is near,” he mumbled, leaning hard on her and trying to
move his legs fast enough to make steady plants of the foot. So good to see her
again. A solid little person, very powerful as always.

“It’s over here,” she said through her loudspeaker. “You were
pretty close.”

“How did you find me?”

“We were tracking you as you came down Arsia. Then today when the
storm hit I checked you out, and saw you were out of your rover. After that I
came out to see how you were doing.”

“Thanks.”

“You have to be careful in storms.”

Then they were standing before his rover. She let go of his wrist,
and it throbbed painfully. She bonked her faceplate against his goggles. “Go on
in,” she said.

He climbed carefully up the steps to the rover’s lock door; opened
it; fell inside. He turned clumsily to make room for Hiroko, but she wasn’t in
the door. He leaned back out into the wind, looked around. No sight of her. It
was dusk; the snow now looked black. “Hiroko!” he cried.

No answer.

He closed the lock door, suddenly frightened. Oxygen
deprivation—He pumped the lock, fell through the inside door into the little
changing room. It was shockingly warm, the air a steamy blast. He plucked
ineffectively at his clothes, made no progress. He went at it more
methodically. Goggles and face mask off. They were coated with ice. Ah—
possibly his air supply had been restricted by ice in the tube between tank and
mask. He sucked in several deep breaths, then sat still through another bout of
nausea. Pulled off his hood, unzipped the suit. It was almost more than he
could do to get his boots off. Then the suit. His underclothes were cold and
clammy. His hands were burning as if on fire. It was a good sign, proof that he
was not substantially frostbitten; nevertheless it was agony.

His whole skin began to buzz with the same inflamed pain. What
caused that, return of blood to capillaries? Return of sensation to chilled
nerves? Whatever it was, it hurt almost unbearably. “Ow!”

He was in excellent spirits. It was not just that he had been
spared from death, which was nice; but that Hiroko was alive. Hiroko was alive!
It was incredibly good news. Many of his friends had assumed all along that she
and her group had slipped away from the assault on Sabishii, moving through
that town’s mound maze back out into their system of hidden refuges; but Sax
had never been sure. There was no evidence to support the idea. And there were
elements in the security forces perfectly capable of murdering a group of
dissidents and disposing of their bodies. This, Sax had thought, was probably
what had happened. But he had kept this opinion to himself, and reserved
judgment. There had been no way of knowing for sure.

But now he knew. He had stumbled into Hiroko’s path, and she had
rescued him from death by freezing, or asphyxiation, whichever came first. The
sight of her cheery, somehow impersonal face—her brown eyes—the feel of her
body supporting him—her hand clamped over his wrist... he would have a bruise
because of that. Perhaps even a sprain. He flexed his hand, and the pain in his
wrist brought tears to his eyes, it made him laugh. Hiroko!

After a time the fiery return of sensation to his skin banked
down. Though his hands felt bloated and raw, and he did not have proper control
of his muscles, or his thoughts, he was basically getting back to normal. Or
something like normal.

“Sax! Sax! Where are you? Answer us, Sax!”

“Ah. Hello there. I’m back in my car.”

“You found it? You left your snow cave?”

“Yes. I—I saw my car, in the distance, through a break in the
snow.”

They were happy to hear it.

He sat there, barely listening to them babble, wondering why he
had spontaneously lied. Somehow he was not comfortable telling them about
Hiroko. He assumed that she would want to stay concealed; perhaps that was it.
Covering for her. . . .

He assured his associates that he was all right, and got off the
phone. He pulled a chair into the kitchen and sat on it. Warmed soup and drank
it in loud slurps, scalding his tongue. Frostbitten, scalded, shaky—slightly
nauseous— once weeping—mostly stunned—despite all this, he was very, very
happy. Sobered by the close call, of course, and embarrassed or even ashamed at
his ineptitude, staying out, getting lost and so on—all very sobering indeed—and
yet still he was happy. He had survived, and even better, so had Hiroko.
Meaning no doubt that all of her group had survived with her, including the
half dozen of the First Hundred who had been with her from the beginning, Iwao,
Gene, Rya, Raul, Ellen, Evgenia. . . . Sax ran a bath and sat in the warm
water, adding hotter water slowly as his body core warmed; and he kept
returning to that wonderful realization. A miracle—well not a miracle of
course—but it had that quality, of unexpected and undeserved joy.

When he found himself falling asleep in the bath he got out, dried
off, limped on sensitive feet to his bed, crawled under the coverlet, and fell
asleep, thinking of Hiroko. Of making love with her in the baths in Zygote, in
the warm relaxed lubriciousness of their bathhouse trysts, late at night when
everyone else was asleep. Of her hand clamped on his wrist, pulling him up. His
left wrist was very sore. And that made him happy.

The next day he drove back up
the great southern slope of Arsia, now covered with clean white
snow to an amazingly high altitude, 10.4 kilometers above the datum to be
exact. He felt a strange mix of emotions, unprecedented in their strength and
flux, although they somewhat resembled the powerful emotions he had felt during
the synaptic stimulus treatment he had taken after his stroke—as if sections of
his brain were actively growing—the limbic system, perhaps, the home of the
emotions, linking up with the cerebral cortex at last. He was alive, Hiroko was
alive, Mars was alive; in the face of these joyous facts the possibility of an
ice age was as nothing, a momentary swing in a general warming pattern,
something like the almost-forgotten Great Storm. Although he did want to do
what he could to mitigate it.

Meanwhile, in the human world there were still fierce conflicts
going on everywhere, on both worlds. But it seemed to Sax that the crisis had
somehow gotten beyond war. Flood, ice age, population boom, social chaos,
revolution; perhaps things had gotten so bad that humanity had shifted into
some kind of universal catastrophe rescue operation, or, in other words, the
first phase of the postcapi-talist era.

Or maybe he was just getting overconfident, buoyed by the events
on Daedalia Planitia. His Da Vinci associates were certainly very worried, they
spent hours onscreen telling him every little thing about the arguments ongoing
in east Pavonis. But he had no patience for that. Pavonis was going to become a
standing wave of argument, it was obvious. And the Da Vinci crowd, worrying
so—that was simply them. At Da Vinci if someone even raised his voice two
decibels people worried that things were getting out of control. No. After his
experience on Daedalia, these things simply weren’t interesting enough to
engage him. Despite the encounter with the storm, or perhaps because of it, he
only wanted to get back out into the country. He wanted to see as much of it as
he could—to observe the changes wrought by the removal of the mirrors—to talk
to various terraform-ing teams about how to compensate for it. He called Nanao
in Sabishii, and asked him if he could come visit and talk it over with the
university crowd. Nanao was agreeable.

“Can I bring some of my associates?” Sax asked.

Nanao was agreeable.

And all of a sudden Sax found he had plans, like little Athenas
jumping out of his head. What would Hiroko do about this possible ice age? That
he couldn’t guess. But he had a large group of associates in the labs at Da
Vinci who had spent the last decades working on the problem of independence,
building weapons and transport and shelters and the like. Now that was a
problem solved, and there they were, and an ice age was coming. Many of them
had come to Da Vinci from his earlier terraforming effort, and could be talked
into returning to it, no doubt. But what to do? Well, Sabishii was four
kilometers above the datum, and the Tyrrhena massif went up to five. The
scientists there were the best in the world at high-altitude ecology. So: a
conference. Another little Utopia enacted. It was obvious.

That afternoon Sax stopped his rover in the saddle between Pavonis
and Arsia, at the spot called Four Mountain View—a sublime place, with two of
the continent-volcanoes filling the horizons to north and south, and then the
distant bump of Olympus Mons off to the northwest, and on clear days (this one
was too hazy) a glimpse of As-craeus, in the distance just to the right of
Pavonis. In this spacious sere highland he ate his lunch, then turned east, and
drove down toward Nicosia, to catch a flight to Da Vinci, and then on to
Sabishii.

He had to spend a lot of screen time with the Da Vinci team and
many other people on Pavonis, trying to explain this move, reconciling them to
his departure from the warehouse meetings. “I am in the warehouse in every sense
that matters,” he said, but they wouldn’t accept that. Their cerebellums wanted
him there in the flesh, a touching thought in a way. “Touching”—a symbolic
statement that was nevertheless quite literal. He laughed, but Nadia came on
and said irritably, “Come on, Sax, you can’t give up just because things are
getting sticky, in fact that’s exactly when you’re needed, you’re General Sax
now, you’re the great scientist, you have to stay in the game.”

But Hiroko showed just how present an absent person could be. And
he wanted to go to Sabishii.

“But what should we do?” Nirgal asked him, and others too in less
direct ways.

The situation with the cable was at an impasse; on Earth there was
chaos; on Mars there were still pockets of meta-national resistance, and other
areas in Red control, where they were systematically tearing out all
terraforming projects, and much of the infrastructure as well. There were also
a variety of small revolutionary splinter movements that were taking this
opportunity to assert their independence, sometimes over areas as small as a
tent or a weather station.

“Well,” Sax said, thinking about all this as much as he could bear
to, “whoever controls the life-support system is in charge.”

Social structure as life-support system—infrastructure, mode of
production, maintenance ... he really ought to speak to the folks at Separation
de 1’Atmosphere, and to the tentmakers. Many of whom had a close relation to Da
Vinci. Meaning that in certain senses he himself was as much in charge as anyone.
A bad thought.

“But what do you suggest we do?” Maya demanded; something in her
voice made it clear she was repeating the question.

By now Sax was closing in on Nicosia, and impatiently he said,
“Send a delegation to Earth? Or convene a constitutional congress, and
formulate a first approximation constitution, a working draft.”

Maya shook her head. “That won’t be easy, with this crowd.”

“Take the constitutions of the twenty or thirty most successful
Terran countries,” Sax suggested, thinking out loud, “and see how they work.
Have an AI compile a composite document, perhaps, and see what it says.”

“How would you define most successful?” Art asked.

“Country Futures Index, Real Values Gauge, Costa Rica
Comparisons—even Gross Domestic Product, why not.” Economics was like
psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical
hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate
measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to
have been retired long before. But what the hell—”Use several different sets of
criteria, human welfare, ecologic success, what have you.”

“But Sax,” Coyote complained, “the very concept of the
nation-state is a bad one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.”

“Could be,” Sax said. “But as a starting point.”

“All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,” Jackie
said.

It was strange how certain elements of the greens were as obsessed
by total independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, “In physics I often
bracket the problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they
don’t get solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that
kind of problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.”

But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about
the cable, what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds
who had apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring
all his suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for
General Sax in the postrevolutionary world.

Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want
to go into the town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of
Spencer’s from Dawes’s Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built
just before the revolt, in anticipation of the freedom from the need for
stealth. As the AI pilot floated the big silver-winged craft over the great
maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom
of the fuselage which had a large clear floor, so that they could look over the
arms of their chairs at the view below; in this case, the immense linked
network of troughs which was the Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth
plateaus that stood between the canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice
places to live, somewhat like Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a
model town in a glass bottle.

The plane’s crew started talking about Separation de 1’Atmosphere,
and Sax listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the
revolution’s armaments and with basic materials research, while “Sep” as they
called it had dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they
still had a healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them
functioning was a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of
them said. Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.

Sep was associated with Praxis, apparently, and each tent or
covered canyon was run by a separate organization. They pooled information and
shared roving consultants and construction teams. Since they deemed themselves
necessary services, they ran on a cooperative basis—on the Mondra-gon plan, one
said, nonprofit version—though they made sure to provide their members with
very nice living situations and lots of free time. “They think they deserve it,
too. Because when something goes wrong they have to act fast or else.” Many of
the covered canyons had had close calls, sometimes the result of meteor strike
or other drama, other times more ordinary mechanical failures. The usual format
for covered canyons had the physical plant consolidated at the higher end of
the canyon, and this plant sucked in the appropriate amounts of nitrogen,
oxygen and trace gases from the surface winds. The proportions of gases and the
pressure range they were kept at varied from mesocosm to mesocosm, but they
averaged around five hundred millibars, which gave some lift to the tent roofs,
and was pretty much the norm for indoor spaces on Mars, in a kind of invocation
of the eventual goal for the surface at the datum. On sunny days, however, the
expansion of air inside the tents was very significant, and the standard
procedures for dealing with it included simply releasing air back into the
atmosphere, or else saving it by compressing it into huge container chambers
hollowed out of the canyon cliffs. “So one time I was in Dao Vallis,” one of
the techs said, “and the excess air chamber blew up, shattering the plateau and
causing a big landslide that fell down onto Reullgate and tore open the tent
roof. Pressures dropped to the local ambient, which was about two hundred and
sixty, and everything started to freeze, and they had the old emergency
bulkheads,” which were clear curtains only a few molecules thick but very
strong, as Sax recalled, “and when they deployed automatically around the
break, this one woman got pinned to the ground by the supersticky at the bottom
of the bulkhead, with her head on the wrong side! We ran over to her and did
some quick cut and paste and got her loose, but she almost died.”

Sax shivered, thinking of his own recent brush with cold; and 260
millibars was the pressure one would find on the peak of Everest. The others
were already talking about other famous blowouts, including the time
Hiranyagarba’s dome had fallen in its entirety under an ice rain, despite which
no one had died.

Then they were descending over the great cratered high plain of
Xanthe, coming down on the Da Vinci crater floor’s big sandy runway, which they
had just started using during the revolution. The whole community had been
preparing for years for the day when stealthing would become unnecessary, and
now a big curve of copper-mirrored windows had been installed in the arc of the
southern crater rim. There was a layer of snow in the bottom of the crater,
which the central knob broke out of quite dramatically. It was possible they
could arrange for a lake in the crater floor, with a central knob island, which
would have as its horizon the circling cliffy hills of the crater rim. A
circular canal could be built just under the rim cliffs, with radial canals
connecting it to the inner lake; the resulting alternation of circular water
and land would resemble Plato’s description of Atlantis. In this configuration
Da Vinci could support, in near self-sufficiency, some twenty or thirty
thousand people, Sax guessed; and there were scores of craters like Da Vinci. A
commune of communes, each crater a city-state of sorts, its polls fully capable
of supporting itself, of deciding what kind of culture it might have; and then
with a vote in a global council of some kind. . . . No regional association
larger than the level of the town, except for arrangements of local interchange
. . . might it work?

Da Vinci made it seem like it might. The south arc of the rim was
alive with arcades and wedge-shaped pavilions and the like, now all shot
through with sunlight. Sax toured the whole complex one morning, visiting one
lab after the next, and congratulating the occupants on the success of their
preparations for a smooth removal of UNTA from Mars. Some political power came
out of the end of a gun, after all, and some out of the look in the eye; and
the look in the eye changed depending on whether a gun was pointed at it or
not. They had spiked the guns, these people the saxaclones, and so they were in
high spirits—happy to see him, and already looking for different work—back to
basic research, or figuring out uses for the new materials that Spencer’s
alchemists were constantly churning out; or studying the terraforming problem.