Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [190]
“This,” Sax said slowly. “This suggests— take over— while surface nonvivable. Then continue process— as independent.”
“They’ll want you,” Ann said. “When they see the surface open up, they’ll come get you.”
“Not if they collapse,” Sax said.
“The transnationals are in firm control,” Ann said. “Don’t think they’re not.”
Sax was watching Ann most intently, and instead of dismissing her points, as he had in the debates of old, he seemed on the contrary hyperfocused on them, observing her every move, blinking as he considered her words, and then replying with even more hesitation than his speech problems would explain. With his altered face it sometimes seemed to Nadia that someone else was arguing with her this time, not Sax but some brother of his, a dance instructor or ex-boxer with a broken nose and a speech impediment, struggling patiently to choose the right words, and often failing.
And yet the effect was the same. “Terraforming— irreversible,” he croaked. “Would be tactically hard—technically hard— to start— to stop. Effort equal to one— made. And might not— And— environment can be a— a weapon in our case— in our cause. At any stage.”
“How so?” several people asked, but Sax did not elaborate. He was concentrating on Ann, who was looking back at him with a curious expression, as if exasperated.
“If we’re on course to viability,” she said to him, “then Mars represents an incredible prize to the transnationals. Maybe even their salvation, if things go really wrong down there. They can come here and take over and have their own new world, and let Earth go to hell. That being the case, we’re out of luck. You saw what happened in sixty-one. They have giant militaries at their disposal, and that’s how they’ll keep their power here.”
She shrugged. Sax blinked as he considered this; he even nodded. Looking at them, Nadia felt her heart wrench; they were so dispassionate it was almost as if they didn’t care, or as if the parts of them that cared just barely outweighed the parts that didn’t, and tipped the balance to speech. Ann like a weatherbeaten sodbuster from the early daguerreotypes, Sax incongruously charming— they both appeared to be in their early seventies, so that seeing them, and feeling her own nervous pulse, it was hard for Nadia to believe that they were over 120 now, inhumanly ancient, and so . . . changed, somehow— worn down, overexperienced, jaded, used up— or at the very least, long past getting too passionate about any mere exchange of words. They knew now how little importance words had in the world. And so they fell silent, still looking into each other’s eyes, locked in a dialectic nearly drained of anger.
But others more than compensated for their thoughtfulness, and the younger hotheads went at it hammer and tongs. The younger Reds regarded terraforming as nothing more than part of the imperial process; Ann was a moderate compared to them, they raged even at Hiroko in their fury—”Don’t call it areoforming,” one of them shouted at her, and Hiroko stared nonplussed at this tall young woman, a blond Valkyrie made nearly rabid by the use of the word—”it’s terraforming you mean and terraforming you’re doing. Calling it areoforming is a sickening lie.”
“We terraform the planet,” Jackie said to the woman, “but the planet areoforms us.”
“And that’s a lie too!”
Ann stared grimly at Jackie. “Your grandfather said that to me,” she said, “a long time ago. As you may know. But I’m still waiting to see what areoforming is supposed to mean.”
“It’s happened to everyone born here,” Jackie said confidently.
“How so? You were born on Mars— how are you any different?”
Jackie glowered. “Like the rest of the natives, Mars is all I know, and all I care about. I was brought up in a culture made of strands from many different Terran predecessors, mixed to a new Martian thing.”
Ann shrugged. “I don’t see how you’re so different.