Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [129]
It was a little group of Red ecoteurs. They had recognized her rover, they said after she let them inside, from the description given by the people at the Tempe refuge. They had been hoping they might run into her, and so they were happy; laughing, chattering, moving around the cabin to touch her, young tall natives with stone eyeteeth and gleaming young eyes, some of them Orientals, some white, some black. All happy. She recognized them from Pavonis Mons, not individually, but as a group; the young fanatics. Again she felt a chill.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To Botany Bay,” a young woman replied. “We’re going to take out the Whitebook labs.”
“And Boone Station,” another added.
“Ah no,” Ann said.
They went still, looked at her carefully. Like Kasei and Dao in Lastflow.
“What do you mean?” the young woman said.
Ann took a breath, tried to figure that out. They were watching her closely.
“Were you there in Sheffield?” she asked.
They nodded; they knew what she meant.
“Then you should know already,” she said slowly. “It’s pointless to achieve a red Mars by pouring blood over the planet. We have to find another way. We can’t do it by killing people. Not even by killing animals or plants, or blowing up machines. It won’t work. It’s destructive. It doesn’t appeal to people, do you understand? No one is won over. In fact they’re put off. The more we do things like that, the more green they become. So we defeat our purpose. If we know that and do it anyway, then we’re betraying the purpose. Do you understand? We aren’t doing it for anything but our own feelings. Because we’re angry. Or for thrills. We have to find another way.”
They stared at her, uncomprehending, annoyed, shocked, contemptuous. But riveted. This was Ann Clayborne, after all.
“I don’t know for sure what that other way is,” she went on. “I can’t tell you that. I think . . . that’s what I think we have to start working on. It has to be something like a red areophany. The areophany has always been understood as a green thing, right from the start. I suppose because of Hiroko, because she took the lead in defining it. And in bringing it into being. So the areophany has always been mixed up with viriditas. But there’s no reason that should be. We have to change that, or we’ll never accomplish anything. There has to be a red worship of this place that people can learn to feel. The redness of the primal planet has to become a counterforce to viriditas. We have to stain that green until it turns some other color. Some color like you see in certain stones, like jasper, or ferric serpentine. You see what I mean. It will mean taking people out onto the land, maybe, up into the highlands, so they can see what it is. It will mean moving there, all over the place, and establishing tenure and stewardship rights, so that we can speak for the land and they will have to listen. Wanderers’ rights as well, areologists’ rights, nomads’ rights. That’s what areoformation might mean. Do you understand?”
She stopped. The young natives were still attentive, now looking perhaps concerned for her, or concerned at what she had said.
“We’ve talked about this kind of thing before,” one young man said. “And there are people doing it. Sometimes we do it. But we think an active resistance is a necessary part of the struggle. Otherwise we’ll just get steamrolled. They’ll green everything.”
“Not if we stain it all. Right from the inside, right from their hearts too. But sabotage, murder; it’s green that springs out of all that, believe me I’ve seen it. I’ve been fighting just as long as you and I’ve seen it. You stomp on life and it just comes back stronger.”
The young man wasn’t convinced. “They gave us the six-kilometer limit because they were scared of us, because we were the driving force behind the revolution. If it weren’t for us fighting, the metanats would still rule everything here.