Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [121]
“But the radiation,” Sax said, blinking.
“Yes,” Desmond said with his savage grin. “They take on forty rem a year.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I am not kidding. They tell the workers this, and give them hardship pay, and after three years they get a bonus, which is the treatment.”
“Is it withheld from them otherwise?”
“It’s expensive, Sax. And there are waiting lists. This is a way to skip up the list, and cover the costs.”
“But forty rems! There’s no way to be sure the treatment will repair the damage that could do!”
“We know that,” Desmond said with a scowl. There was no need to refer to Simon. “But they don’t.”
“And Subarashii is doing this just to cut costs?”
“That’s important in such a large capital investment, Sax. All kinds of cost-cutting measures are showing up. The sewage systems in Black Syrtis are all the same system, for instance— the med clinic and the coffins and the plants in the mesa.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not kidding. My jokes are funnier than that.”
Sax waved him off.
“Look,” Desmond said, “there are no regulatory agencies anymore. No building codes or whatever. That is what the transnational success in sixty-one really means— they make their own rules now. And you know what their one rule is.”
“But this is simply stupid.”
“Well, you know, this particular division of Subarashii is run by Georgians, and they’re in the grip of a big Stalin revival there. It’s a patriotic gesture to run their country as stupidly as possible. That means business too. And of course the top managers of Subarashii are still Japanese, and they believe Japan became great by being tough. They say they won in sixty-one what they lost in World War Two. They’re the most brutal transnat up here, but all the rest are imitating them to compete successfully. Praxis is an anomaly in that sense, you must remember that.”
“So we reward them by stealing from them.”
“You’re the one who went to work for Biotique. Maybe you should change jobs.”
“No.”
“Do you think you can get these materials from one of Subarashii’s firms?”
“No.”
“But you could from Biotique.”
“Probably. Security is pretty tight.”
“But you could do it.”
“Probably.” Sax thought about it. “I want something in return.”
“Yes?”
“Will you fly me out to have a look at this soletta burn zone?”
“Certainly! I would like to see it again myself.”
• • •
So the next afternoon they left Burroughs and trained south up the Great Escarpment, getting off at Libya Station, some seventy kilometers from Burroughs. There they slipped into the basement and their closet door, down their tunnel and out into the rocky countryside. Down in a shallow graben they found one of Desmond’s cars, and when night came they drove east along the Escarpment to a small Red hideout in the rim of Du Martheray Crater, next to a stretch of flat bedrock the Reds used as an airstrip. Desmond did not identify Sax to their hosts. They were led into a little cliffside hangar, where they got into one of Spencer’s old stealth planes and taxied out to the bedrock, then took off in an undulant acceleration down the runway. Once in the air they flew east slowly through the night.
They flew in silence for a while. Sax saw lights on the dark surface of the planet only three times: once a station in Escalante Crater, once the tiny moving line of lights of a round-the-world train, and the last an unidentified blink in the rough land behind the Great Escarpment. “Who do you think that is?” Sax asked.
“No idea.”
After a few minutes more Sax said, “I ran into Phyllis.”
“Really! Did she recognize you?”
“No.”
Desmond laughed. “That’s Phyllis for you.”
“A lot of old acquaintances haven’t recognized me.”
“Yeah, but Phyllis . . . Is she still president of the Transitional Authority?”
“No. She didn’t seem to think it was a powerful post, anyway.”
Desmond laughed again. “A silly woman. But she did get that group on Clarke back to civilization, I’ll give her that. I thought they were goners, myself.”
“Do you know much about