Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [39]
“But Sax,” Coyote complained, “the very concept of the nation-state is a bad one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.”
“Could be,” Sax said. “But as a starting point.”
“All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,” Jackie said.
It was strange how certain elements of the greens were as obsessed by total independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, “In physics I often bracket the problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they don’t get solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that kind of problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.”
But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about the cable, what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds who had apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring all his suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for General Sax in the postrevolutionary world.
• • •
Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want to go into the town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of Spencer’s from Dawes’s Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built just before the revolt, in anticipation of the freedom from the need for stealth. As the AI pilot floated the big silver-winged craft over the great maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom of the fuselage which had a large clear floor, so that they could look over the arms of their chairs at the view below; in this case, the immense linked network of troughs which was the Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth plateaus that stood between the canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice places to live, somewhat like Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a model town in a glass bottle.
The plane’s crew started talking about Séparation de l’Atmosphère, and Sax listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the revolution’s armaments and with basic materials research, while “Sep” as they called it had dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they still had a healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them functioning was a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of them said. Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.
Sep was associated with Praxis, apparently, and each tent or covered canyon was run by a separate organization. They pooled information and shared roving consultants and construction teams. Since they deemed themselves necessary services, they ran on a cooperative basis— on the Mondragon plan, one said, nonprofit version— though they made sure to provide their members with very nice living situations and lots of free time. “They think they deserve it, too. Because when something goes wrong they have to act fast or else.” Many of the covered canyons had had close calls, sometimes the result of meteor strike or other drama, other times more ordinary mechanical failures. The usual format for covered canyons had the physical plant consolidated at the higher end of the canyon, and this plant sucked in the appropriate amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and trace gases from the surface winds. The proportions of gases and the pressure range they were kept at varied from mesocosm to mesocosm, but they averaged around five hundred millibars, which gave some lift to the tent roofs, and was pretty much the norm for indoor spaces on Mars, in a kind of invocation of the eventual goal for the surface at the datum. On sunny days, however, the expansion of air inside the tents was very significant, and the standard procedures for dealing with it included simply releasing air back into the atmosphere, or else saving it by compressing it into huge container chambers hollowed out of the canyon cliffs. “So one time I was in Dao Vallis,” one of the techs said, “and the excess air chamber blew up, shattering the plateau