• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2454 0

jumping out of his head. What would Hiroko do about this possible ice age? That he couldn’t guess. But he had a large group of associates in the labs at Da Vinci who had spent the last decades working on the problem of independence, building weapons and transport and shelters and the like. Now that was a problem solved, and there they were, and an ice age was coming. Many of them had come to Da Vinci from his earlier terraforming effort, and could be talked into returning to it, no doubt. But what to do? Well, Sabishii was four kilometers above the datum, and the Tyrrhena massif went up to five. The scientists there were the best in the world at high-altitude ecology. So: a conference. Another little utopia enacted. It was obvious.

That afternoon Sax stopped his rover in the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia, at the spot called Four Mountain View— a sublime place, with two of the continent-volcanoes filling the horizons to north and south, and then the distant bump of Olympus Mons off to the northwest, and on clear days (this one was too hazy) a glimpse of Ascraeus, in the distance just to the right of Pavonis. In this spacious sere highland he ate his lunch, then turned east, and drove down toward Nicosia, to catch a flight to Da Vinci, and then on to Sabishii.

He had to spend a lot of screen time with the Da Vinci team and many other people on Pavonis, trying to explain this move, reconciling them to his departure from the warehouse meetings. “I am in the warehouse in every sense that matters,” he said, but they wouldn’t accept that. Their cerebellums wanted him there in the flesh, a touching thought in a way. “Touching”— a symbolic statement that was nevertheless quite literal. He laughed, but Nadia came on and said irritably, “Come on, Sax, you can’t give up just because things are getting sticky, in fact that’s exactly when you’re needed, you’re General Sax now, you’re the great scientist, you have to stay in the game.”

But Hiroko showed just how present an absent person could be. And he wanted to go to Sabishii.

“But what should we do?” Nirgal asked him, and others too in less direct ways.

The situation with the cable was at an impasse; on Earth there was chaos; on Mars there were still pockets of metanational resistance, and other areas in Red control, where they were systematically tearing out all terraforming projects, and much of the infrastructure as well. There were also a variety of small revolutionary splinter movements that were taking this opportunity to assert their independence, sometimes over areas as small as a tent or a weather station.

“Well,” Sax said, thinking about all this as much as he could bear to, “whoever controls the life-support system is in charge.”

Social structure as life-support system— infrastructure, mode of production, maintenance . . . he really ought to speak to the folks at Séparation de l’Atmosphère, and to the tentmakers. Many of whom had a close relation to Da Vinci. Meaning that in certain senses he himself was as much in charge as anyone. A bad thought.

“But what do you suggest we do?” Maya demanded; something in her voice made it clear she was repeating the question.

By now Sax was closing in on Nicosia, and impatiently he said, “Send a delegation to Earth? Or convene a constitutional congress, and formulate a first approximation constitution, a working draft.”

Maya shook her head. “That won’t be easy, with this crowd.”

“Take the constitutions of the twenty or thirty most successful Terran countries,” Sax suggested, thinking out loud, “and see how they work. Have an AI compile a composite document, perhaps, and see what it says.”

“How would you define most successful?” Art asked.

“Country Futures Index, Real Values Gauge, Costa Rica Comparisons— even Gross Domestic Product, why not.” Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before. But