Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [249]
And unpredictable as well; the next day Clayborne called back, and said she would go.
4
In person Ann Clayborne proved to be indeed as withered and sun-dried as Russell, but even more silent and strange— waspish, laconic, prone to brief ill-tempered outbursts. She showed up at the last minute with a single backpack and a slim black wristpad, one of the latest models. Her skin was a nut brown, and marked by wens and warts and scars where skin disorders had been removed. A long life spent outdoors, and in the early days too, when UV bombardment had been intense; in short, she was fried. A bakehead, as they said in Echus. Her eyes were gray, her mouth a lizard slash, the lines from the corners of her mouth to her nostrils like deep hatchet chops. Nothing could be more severe than that face.
During the week of the voyage to Jupiter she spent her time in the little ship park, walking through the trees. Zo preferred the dining hall, or the big viewing bubble where a small group gathered in the evening watch, to eat tabs of pandorph and play go, or smoke opium and look at the stars. So she seldom saw Ann on the trip out.
They shot over the asteroid belt, slightly out of the plane of the ecliptic, passing over several of the hollowed-out little worlds, no doubt, though it was hard to tell; inside the rock potatoes shown on the ship’s screens there might be rough shells like finished mines, or towns landscaped into beautiful estates; societies anarchic and dangerous, or settled by religious groups or utopian collectives, and painfully peaceable. The existence of such a wide variety of systems, coexisting in a semianarchic state, made Zo doubt that Jackie’s plans for organizing the outer satellites under a Martian umbrella would ever succeed; it seemed to her that the asteroid belt might serve as a model for what the entire solar system’s political organization would become. But Jackie did not agree; the asteroid belt was as it was, she said, because of its particular nature, scattered through a broad band all around the sun. The outer satellites on the other hand were clumped in groups around their gas giants, and were certain to become leagues because of that; and were such large worlds, compared to the asteroids, that eventually it would make a difference with whom they allied themselves in the inner system.
Zo was not convinced. But their deceleration brought them into the Jovian system, where she would have a chance to put Jackie’s theories to the test. The ship ran a cat’s cradle through the Galileans to slow down further, giving them close-ups of the four big moons. All four of them had ambitious terraforming plans, and had started to put them into action. The outer three, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, had similar initial conditions to deal with; they were all covered by water ice layers, Callisto and Ganymede to a depth of a thousand kilometers, Europa to a depth of a hundred kilometers. Water was not uncommon in the outer solar system, but it was by no means ubiquitous either, and so these water worlds had something to trade. All three moons had large amounts of rock scattered over their icy surfaces, the remnants of meteoric impact for the most part, carbonaeous chondrite rubble, a very useful building material. The settlers of the three moons had, on their arrival some thirty m-years before, rendered the chondrites and built tent frameworks of carbon nanotube similar to that used in Mars’s space elevator, tenting spaces twenty or fifty kilometers across with multilayered tent materials. Under their tents they had spread crushed rock to create a thin layer of ground— the ultimate permafrost— in some places surrounding lakes they had melted into the ice.
On Callisto the tent town built to this plan was called Lake Geneva; this was where the Martian delegation went to meet with the various leaders and policy groups of the Jovian League. As usual Zo accompanied the delegation as a minor functionary and observer, looking for opportunities to convey Jackie’s messages to