Blue Mars (61 page)

This bounced off Ann like a thrown pebble. She said, “You sound
like me, when I tried to get Nadia away from Underbill.”

Zo shrugged. “Come on,” she said, “I have another meeting.”

“Mafia work never stops, does it.” But she followed, peering
around like a wizened court jester, dwarfish and oddly dressed in her
old-fashioned jumper.

Some Lake Geneva council members greeted them, somewhat nervously,
by the docks. They got on a small ferry, which threaded its way out through a
fleet of small sailing boats. Out on the lake it was windy. They puttered to
one of the forest islands. Vast specimens of balsa and teak stood over the
swampy mat of the floating island’s heated ground, and on the island’s shore
loggers were working outside a little sawmill. The mill was soundproofed,
nevertheless a muffled whine of saw cuts accompanied the conversation. Floating
on a lake on a moon of Jupiter, all the colors suffused with the gray of solar
distance: Zo felt little bursts of flier’s exhilaration, and she said to the
locals, “This is so beautiful. I can see why there are people on Eu-ropa who
talk about making their whole world a water world, sail around and around. They
could even ship away water to Venus and get down to some solid land for
islands. I don’t know if they’ve mentioned it to you. Maybe it’s just all talk,
like the idea I heard for creating a small black hole and dropping it into
Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Stellariz-ing Jupiter! You’d have all the light you
needed then.”

“Wouldn’t Jupiter be consumed?” one of the locals asked.

“Oh but it would take ever so long, they said; millions of years.”

“And then a nova,” Ann pointed out.

“Yes yes. Everything but Pluto destroyed. But by that time we’ll
be long gone, one way or another. Or if not, they’ll figure something out.”

Ann laughed harshly. The locals, thinking hard, did not appear to
notice.

Back on the lakeshore Ann and Zo walked the promenade. “You’re so
blatant,” Ann said.

“On the contrary. It’s very subtle. They don’t know if I’m
speaking for me, or for Jackie, or for Mars. It could be just talk. But it
reminds them of the larger context. It’s too easy for them to get wrapped up in
the Jovian situation and forget all the rest. The solar system entire, as a
single political body; people need help thinking about that, they can’t
conceptualize it.”

“You need help yourself. It’s not Renaissance Italy, you know.”

“Machiavelli will always remain true, if that’s what you mean. And
they need to be reminded of that here.”

“You remind me of Frank.”

“Frank?”

“Frank Chalmers.”

“Now there’s an issei I admire,” Zo said. “What I’ve read about
him, anyway. He was the only one of you who wasn’t a hypocrite. And he was the
one that got the most done.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Ann said.

Zo shrugged. “The past is the same for all of us. I know as much
about it as you do.”

A group of the Jovians walked by, pale and big-eyed, utterly
absorbed by their own talk. Zo gestured: “Look at them! They’re so focused. I
admire them too, really—throwing themselves so energetically into a project
that won’t be completed until long after their death—it’s an absurd gesture, a
gesture of defiance and freedom, a divine madness, as if they were sperm
wiggling madly toward an unknown goal.”

“That’s all of us,” Ann said. “That’s evolution. When do we go to
Miranda?”

Around Uranus
, four
times as far from the sun as Jupiter, objects were struck by one quarter of a
percent the light that would have struck them on Earth. This was a problem for
powering major terraforming projects, although as Zo found when they entered
the Uranian system, it still provided quite enough illumination for visibility;
the sunlight was 1,300 times as bright as the full moon on Earth, the sun still
a blinding little chip in the black array of stars, and though things in the
region were a bit dim and drained of their color, one could see them perfectly
well. Thus the great power of the human eye and spirit, functioning well so far
from home.

But there were no big moons around Uranus to attract a major
terraforming effort; Uranus’s family consisted of fifteen very small moons,
none larger than Titania and Oberon at six hundred kilometers in diameter, and
most considerably smaller—a collection of little asteroids, really, named after
Shakespeare’s women for the most part, all circling the blandest of the gas
giants, blue-green Uranus, rolling around with its poles in the plane of the
ecliptic, its eleven narrow graphite rings scarcely visible fairy loops. All in
all, not a promising system for inhabitation.

Nevertheless people had come, people had settled. This was no
surprise to Zo; there were people exploring and starting to build on Triton, on
Pluto, on Charon, and if a tenth planet were discovered and an expedition sent
out to it, they would no doubt find a tent town already there, its citizens
already squabbling with each other, already bristling at any suggestion of
outside interference in their affairs. This was life in the diaspora.

The major tent town in the Uranian system was on Oberon, the
biggest and farthest out of the fifteen moons. Zo and Ann and the rest of the
travelers from Mars parked in a planetary orbit just outside Oberon, and took a
ferry down to the moon to make a brief visit to the main settlement.

This town, Hippolyta, spanned one of the big groove valleys that
were common to all the larger Uranian moons. Because the gravity was even more
meager than the light was dim, the town had been designed as a fully
three-dimensional space, with railings and glide ropes and flying dumbbell
waiters, cliffside balconies and elevators, chutes and ladders, diving boards
and trampolines, hanging restaurants and plinth pavilions, all illuminated by
bright white floating lamp globes. Zo saw immediately that so much
paraphernalia in the air made flying inside the tent impossible; but in this
gravity daily life was a kind of flight, and as she bounded in the air with a
flex of her foot, she decided to join those residents who treated daily life
that way; she danced. And in fact very few people tried to walk in the Terran
way; here human movement was naturally airborne, sinuous, full of vaulting
leaps and spinning dives and long Tarzan loops. The lowest level of the city
was netted.

The people who lived out here came from everywhere else in the
system, although of course they were mostly Martian or Terran. At this point
there were no native Uranians, except for a single creche of young children who
had been born to mothers building the settlement. Six moons were now occupied,
and recently they had dropped a number of gas lanterns into the upper
atmosphere of Uranus, to swim in rings around its equator; these now burned in
the planet’s blue-green like pinpricks of sunlight, forming a kind of diamond
necklace around the middle of the giant. These lanterns had increased the
system’s light enough so that everyone they met in Oberon remarked on how much
more color there was in things, but Zo was not impressed. “I’d hate to have
seen it before,” she said to one of the local enthusiasts, “it’s
Monochromomundos.” Actually all the buildings in the town were brightly painted
in broad swaths of color, but which color a swath happened to be was sometimes
beyond Zo’s telling. She needed a pupil dilator.

But the locals seemed to like it. Of course some of them spoke of
moving on after the Uranian towns were finished, out to Triton, “the next great
problem,” or Pluto or Charon; they were builders. But others were settling in
here for good, giving themselves drugs and genetic transcriptions to adapt to
the low g, to increase the sensitivity of their eyes, etc. They spoke of guiding
in comets from the Oort cloud to provide water, and perhaps forcing two or
three of the smaller uninhabited moons to collide, to create larger and warmer
bodies to work with, “artificial Mirandas” as one person called them.

Ann walked out of that meeting, or rather pulled herself along a
railing, unable to cope with the mini-g. After a while Zo followed her, onto
streets covered with luxuriant green grass. She looked up: aquamarine giant,
slender dim rings; a cold fey sight, unappealing by any previous human
standard, and perhaps untenable in the long run because of the moonlet gravity.
But back in the meeting there had been Uranians praising the planet’s subtle
beauties, inventing an aesthetics to appreciate it, even as they planned to
modify everything they could. They emphasized the subtle shades of the colors,
the cool warmth of the tented air, the movement so like flight, like dance in a
dream.... Some of them had even become patriots to the point of arguing against
radical transformation; they were as preservationist as this inhospitable place
could logically sustain.

And now some of these preservationists found Ann. They came up to
Ann in a group, standing in a circle around her to shake her hand, hug her,
kiss the top of her head; one got down on his knees to kiss her feet. Zo saw
the look on Ann’s face and laughed. “Come on,” she said to the group, who
apparently had been assigned a kind of guardian status for the moon Miranda.
The local version of Reds, sprung into existence out here where it made no
sense at all, and long after redness had ceased to be much of an issue even on
Mars. But they flowed or pulled themselves into position around a table set out
in the middle of the tent on a tall slender column, and ate a meal as the
discussion rangecTall over the system. The table was an oasis in the dim air of
the tent, with the diamond necklace in its round jade setting shining down on
them; it seemed the center of town, but Zo saw suspended in the air other such
oases, and no doubt they seemed like the center as well. Hippolyta was a real
town, but Oberon could hold scores of towns like it, and so would Titania,
Ariel, Miranda; small as they were, these satellites all had surfaces covering
hundreds of square kilometers. This was the attraction of these sun-forsaken
moons: free land, open space—a new world, a frontier, with its ever-receding
chance to start new, to found a society from scratch. For the Uranians this
freedom was worth more than light or gravity. And so they had gathered the
programs and the starter robots, and taken off for the high frontier with plans
for a tent and a constitution, to be their own first hundred.

But these were precisely the kind of people least interested in
hearing about Jackie’s plans for a systemwide alliance. And already there had
been local disagreements strong enough to have caused trouble; among the people
sitting around the table were some serious enemies, Zo could tell. She watched
their faces closely as the head of their delegation, Marie, laid out the
Martian proposal in the most general terms: an alliance designed to deal with
the massive’ historical-economic-numerical gravity well of Earth, which was
huge, teeming, flooded, mired in its past like a pig in a sty, and still the
dominant force in the diaspora. It was in the best interests of all the other
settlements to band with Mars and present a united front, in control of their
own immigration, trade, growth—in control of their destinies.

Except none of the Uranians, despite their arguments with each
other, looked at all convinced. An elderly woman who was the mayor of Hippolyta
spoke, and even the Mir-andan “Reds” nodded: they would deal with Earth on
their own. Earth or Mars was equally dangerous to freedom. Out here they
planned on dealing with all potential alliances or confrontations as free
agents, in temporary collusion or opposition with equals, depending on
circumstances. There was simply no need for any more formal arrangements to be
made. “All that alliance stuff smacks of control from above,” the woman
concluded. “You don’t do it on Mars, why try it out here?”

“We do do it on Mars,” Marie said. “That level of control is
emergent from the complex of smaller systems below it, and it’s useful for
dealing with problems at the holistic level. And now at the interplanetary
level. You’re confusing totalization with totalitarianism, a very serious
error.”

They did not look convinced. Reason had to be backed with
leverage; that was why Zo was along. And the application of leverage would go
easier with the reasoning laid out like this beforehand.

Throughout the dinner Ann remained silent, until the general
discussion ended and the Miranda group began to ask her questions. Then she
came alive, as if switched on, and asked them in return about current local
planetology: the classification of different regions of Miranda as parts of the
two colliding planetessimals, the recent theory that identified the tiny moons
Ophelia, Desdemona, Bianca, and Puck as ejected pieces of the Mirandan
collision, and so on. Her questions were detailed and knowledgeable; the
guardians were thrilled, in transports, their eyes as big as lemurs’ eyes. The
rest of the Uranians were likewise pleased to see Ann’s interest. She was The
Red; now Zo saw what that really meant; she was one of the most famous people
in history. And it seemed possible that all the Uranians had a little Red in
them; unlike the settlers of the Jovian and Saturnian systems, they had no
plans for large-scale terraforming, they planned to live in tents and go out on
the primal rock for the rest of their lives. And they felt—at least its
guardian group felt—that Miranda was so unusual that it had to be left entirely
alone. That was a red idea, of course. Nothing humans did there, one of the
Uranian Reds said, would do anything but reduce what was most valuable about
it. It had an intrinsic worth that transcended even its value as a
pla-netological specimen. It had its dignity. Ann watched them carefully as
they said this, and Zo saw in her eyes that she did not agree, or even quite
understand. For her it was a matter of science—for these people, a matter of
spirit. Zo actually sympathized more with the locals’ view than Ann’s, with its
cramped insistence on the object. But the result was the same, they both had
the Red ethic in its pure form: no terraforming on Miranda, of course, also no
domes, no tents, no mirrors; only a single visitor’s station and a few rocket
pads (though this too appeared to be controversial within the guardian group);
a ban on anything except no-impact foot travel, and rocket hops high enough
over the surface to avoid disturbing the dust. The guardian group conceived of
Miranda as wilderness, to be walked through but never lived on, never changed.
A climber’s world, or even better, a flier’s world. Looked at and nothing more.
A natural work of art.

Ann nodded at all this.: And there—there it was, something more in
her than the crimping fear: a passion for rock, in a world of rock. Fetishes
could fix on anything. And all these people shared the fetish. Zo found it
peculiar to be among them, peculiar and intriguing. Certainly her leverage
point was coming clear. The guardian group had arranged a special ferry to
Miranda, to show it to Ann. No one else would be there. A private tour of the
strangest moon of all, for the strangest Red. Zo laughed. “I’d like to come
along,” she said earnestly.

And the Great No said yes. That was Ann on Miranda.

It was the smallest of Uranus’s five big moons, only 470
kilometers in diameter. In its early years, some 3.5 billion years before the
present, its smaller precursor had run into another moon of about the same
size; the two had shattered, then clumped, then, in the heat of the collision,
coalesced into a single ball. But the new moon had cooled before the coalescing
was quite finished.

The result was a landscape out of a dream, violently divergent and
disarranged. Some regions were as smooth as skin, others were ripped raw; some
were metamorphosed surfaces of two proto-moons, others were exposed interior
material. And then there were the deeply grooved rift zones, where the
fragments met, imperfectly. In these zones extensive parallel groove systems
bent at acute angles, in dramatic chevron formations, a clear sign of the
tremendous torques involved in the collision. The big rifts were so large that
they were visible from space as hack marks, incised scores of kilometers deep
into the side of the gray sphere.

They came down on a plateau next to the biggest of these hacked
chasms, called Prospero’s Rift. They suited up, then left the spacecraft, and
walked out to the rift’s edge. A dim abyss, so deep that the bottom looked to
be on a different world. Combined with the airy micro-g, the sight gave Zo the
distinct feeling of flying, flying however as she sometimes did in dreams, all
Martian conditions suspended in favor of some sky of the spirit. Overhead
Uranus floated full and green, giving all of Miranda a jade tinge. Zo danced
along the rim, pushing off on her toes and floating, floating, coming down in
little plies, her heart full of beauty. So strange, the diamond sparks of the
gas lanterns, surfing on Uranus’s stratosphere; the eldritch jade. Lights hung
across a round green paper lantern. The depths of the abyss only suggested.
Everything glowing with its own internal greenness, viriditas bursting out of
every thing—and yet everything still and motionless forever, except for them,
the intruders, the observers. Zo danced.