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
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 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.