Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [215]
Peter turned and followed it in its descent, keeping well to the east of it. And so they could still see it below them, there in the violet morning sky, as the main mass of it heated to an incandescent glare and caught fire, like a great yellow comet with a hairy tangled silver tail, dropping down to the tawny planet. All fall down.
“Good shot,” Sax said.
• • •
Back in Wallace Crater they were welcomed as heroes. Peter deflected all congratulations: “It was Sax’s idea, the flight itself was no big deal, just another reconnaissance except for the firing, I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.”
“They’ll just drop another one into position,” Ann said from the edge of the crowd, staring at Sax with a very curious expression.
“But they’re so vulnerable,” Peter said.
“Surface-to-space missiles,” Sax said, feeling nervous. “Can you invent— can you inventory all orbiting objects?”
“We already have,” Peter said. “Some of them we don’t have ID’d, but most are obvious.”
“I’d like to see the list.”
“I’d like to talk to you,” Ann told him darkly.
And the rest quickly left the room, wagging their eyebrows at each other like a bunch of Art Randolphs.
Sax sat down in a bamboo chair. It was a little room, without a window. It could have been one of the barrel vaults in Underhill, back in the beginning. The shape was right. The textures. Brick was such a stable staple. Ann pulled a chair over and sat across from him, leaning forward to stare in his face. She looked older. The vaunted Red leader, vaunted, gaunted, haunted. He smiled. “Are you about due for a gerontological treatment?” his mouth said, surprising them both.
Ann brushed the question off as an impertinence. “Why did you want to bring down the lens?” she said, her gaze boring into him.
“I didn’t like it.”
“I know that,” she said. “But why?”
“It wasn’t necessary. Things are warming up fast enough. There’s no reason to go faster. We don’t even need much more heat. And it was releasing very large amounts of carbon dioxide. That will be hard to scrub. And it was very nicely stuck— it’s hard to get CO2 out of carbonates. As long as one doesn’t melt the rock, it stays.” He shook his head. “It was stupid. They were just doing it because they could. Canals. I don’t believe in canals.”
“So it just wasn’t the right kind of terraforming for you.”
“That’s right.” He met her stare calmly. “I believe in the terraforming outlined in Dorsa Brevia. You signed off too. As I recall.”
She shook her head.
“No? But the Reds signed?”
She nodded.
“Well . . . it makes sense to me. I said this to you before. Human-viable to a certain elevation. Above that, air too thin and cold. Go slow. Ecopoesis. I don’t like any of the big new heavy-industry methods. Maybe some nitrogen from Titan. But not any of the rest.”
“What about the oceans?”
“I don’t know. See what happens without pumping?”
“What about the soletta?”
“I don’t know. The extra insolation means less warming needed from industrial gassing. Or other methods. But— we could have done without it. I thought the dawn mirrors were enough.”
“But it’s not in your hands anymore.”
“No.”
They sat in silence for a while. Ann appeared to be thinking. Sax watched her weathered face, wondering when she had last had the treatment. Ursula recommended repeating it every forty years, at a minimum.
“I was wrong,” his mouth said. As she stared at him, he tried to follow the thought. It was a matter of shapes, geometries, mathematical elegance. Cascading recombinant