Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [57]
Coyote stared gravely out the windshield as he drove the ambassadors to Earth south to the elevator, with Art sitting beside him. They rolled slowly through the battered neighborhoods that bordered the Socket, in the southwest part of Sheffield where the streets had been designed to handle enormous freight-container gantries, so that things had an ominous Speeresque quality to them, inhuman and gigantic. Sax was explaining once again to Coyote that the trip to Earth would not remove the travelers from the constitutional congress, that they would contribute by vid, that they would not end up like Thomas Jefferson in Paris, missing the whole thing. “We’ll be on Pavonis,” Sax said, “in all the senses that matter.”
“Then everyone will be on Pavonis,” Coyote said ominously. He didn’t like this trip to Earth for Sax and Maya and Michel and Nirgal; he didn’t seem to like the constitutional congress; nothing these days pleased him, he was jumpy, uneasy, irritable. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” he would mutter, “you mark my words.”
Then the Socket stood before them, the cable emerging black and glossy from the great mass of concrete, like a harpoon plunged into Mars by Earthly powers, holding it fast. After identifying themselves the travelers drove right into the complex, down a big straight passageway to the enormous chamber at the center, where the cable came down through the socket’s collar, and hovered over a network of pistes crisscrossing the floor. The cable was so exquisitely balanced in its orbit that it never touched Mars at all, but merely hung there with its ten-meter diameter end floating in the middle of the room, the collar in the roof doing no more than stabilizing it; for the rest, its positioning was up to the rockets installed up and down the cable, and, more importantly, to the balance between centrifugal force and gravity which kept it in its areosynchronous orbit.
A row of elevator cars floated in the air like the cable itself, though for a different reason, as they were electromagnetically suspended. One of them levitated over a piste to the cable, and latched onto the track inlaid in the cable’s west side, and rose up soundlessly through a valve door in the collar.
The travelers and their escorts got out of their car. Nirgal was withdrawn, already on his way; Maya and Michel excited; Sax his usual self. One by one they hugged Art and Coyote, stretching up to Art, leaning down to Desmond. For a time they all talked at once, staring at each other, trying to comprehend the moment; it was just a trip, but it felt like more than that. Then the four travelers crossed the floor, and disappeared into a jetway leading up into the next elevator car.
After that Coyote and Art stood there, and watched the car float over to the cable and rise through the valve door and disappear. Coyote’s asymmetrical face clenched into a most uncharacteristic expression of worry, even fear. That was his son, of course, and three of his closest friends, going to a very dangerous place. Well, it was just Earth; but it felt dangerous, Art had to admit. “They’ll be okay,” Art said, giving the little man a squeeze on the shoulder. “They’ll be stars down there. It’ll go fine.” No doubt true. In fact he felt better himself at his own reassurances. It was the home planet, after all. Humans were made for it. They would be fine. It was the home planet. But still. . . .
2
Back in east Pavonis the congress had begun.
It was Nadia’s doing, really. She simply started working in the main warehouse on draft passages, and people started joining her, and things snowballed. Once the meetings were going people had to attend or risk losing a say. Nadia shrugged if anyone complained that they weren’t ready, that things had to be regularized, that they needed to know more, etc.; “Come on,” she said impatiently. “Here we are, we might as well get to it.”
So a fluctuating group of about three hundred people began meeting daily in the industrial complex of east Pavonis. The main warehouse, designed to hold piste parts and train cars, was huge,