Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [232]
Zo put a hand to the man’s arm, said kindly, “We’re very concerned that if Mercury and Mars don’t make a solid partnership, Terra will wedge between us and play us off against each other. We’re the two largest collections of heavy metals left in the solar system, and the more civilization spreads, the more valuable that becomes. And civilization is certainly spreading. This is the Accelerando, after all. Metals are valuable.”
And Mercury’s natural fund of metals, though hard to mine, was truly spectacular; the planet was only a little bigger than Luna and yet its gravity nearly equaled that of Mars, a very tangible sign of its heavy iron core, and its accompanying array of more precious metals, seamed all through the meteor-battered surface.
“Yes . . . ?” the young man said.
“We feel that we need to establish a more explicit. . . . “
“Cartel?”
“Partnership.”
The young Mercurian smiled. “We aren’t worried about being pitted against Mars by anyone.”
“Obviously. But we are.”
For a time there, at the beginning of its colonization, Mercury had seemed to be very flush. Not only did the colonists have metals, but being so close to the sun, they had the possibility of tapping a great deal of solar energy. Just the resistance set up between the city’s sleeves and the expanding tracks they slid over created enormous amounts of it, and there was even more in solar-collection potential; collectors in Mercurial orbit had started lazing some of that sunlight out to the new outer-solar-system colonies. From the first fleet of track-laying cars, in 2142, through the rolling construction of Terminator in the 2150s, and throughout the 2160s and 70s, the Mercurians had thought they were rich.
Now it was 2181, however, and with the successful wide deployment of various kinds of fusion power, energy was cheap, and light was reasonably plentiful. The so-called lamp satellites, and the gas lanterns burning in the upper atmospheres of the gas giants, were being built and lit all over the outer system. As a result Mercury’s copious solar resources had been rendered insignificant. Mercury had become once again nothing more than a metal-rich but dreadfully hot-and-cold place, a hardship assignment. And unterraformable to boot.
Quite a crash in their fortunes, as Zo reminded the young man without much subtlety. Which meant they needed to cooperate with their more conveniently located allies in the system. “Otherwise the risk of Terran return to dominance is very real.”
“Terra is too enmeshed in its own problems to endanger anyone else,” the young man said.
Zo shook her head gently. “The more trouble Terra is in, the worse danger for the rest of us. That’s why we’re worried. That’s why we’re thinking that, if you don’t want to enter into an agreement with us, we may just have to build another city and track system on Mercury, down in the southern hemisphere, and cruise in the terminator down there. Where some of the best metal deposits are.”
The young man was shocked. “You couldn’t do that without our permission.”
“Couldn’t we?”
“No city on Mercury can exist if we don’t want it to.”
“Why, what will you do?”
The young man was silent.
Zo said, “Anyone can do what they want, eh? This is true for everyone ever born.”
The young man thought it over. “There’s not enough water.”
“No.” Mercury’s water supply consisted in its entirety of small ice fields lying inside craters at the two poles, where they remained in permanent shadow. These crater glaciers contained enough water for Terminator’s purposes, but not much more. “A few comets directed at the poles would add more, however.”
“Unless their impact blasted all the water on the poles away! No, that wouldn’t work! The ice in those polar craters is only a tiny fraction of the water from billions of years of comets, hitting all over the planet. Most of the water was lost to space on impact, or burned off. The same thing would happen if