Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [253]
So she would keep that in mind even as she lectured them as sternly as she had the kids in Zygote, and after her lessons she took pains to mingle among them and just talk, share some food, listen to their stories. After an hour of that, Spencer would announce that she had to leave. The implication throughout was that she was visiting from another city— although, as she had seen some of their faces on the streets of Odessa, they certainly must have seen her as well, and knew at least that she spent a lot of time in the town. But afterward Spencer and his friends would take her through an elaborate routine, to make sure they were not followed. And most of the group would fade away into the staircased alleys of the upper town before they reached the western quarter, and the Praxis apartment building. Then they would slip in through the gate, and the door would shut with a clang, reminding her that the sunny double apartment she shared with Michel was a safe house.
One night after a very sharp meeting with a group of young engineers and areologists, as she was telling Michel about it, she tapped away at her lectern, and found the photo of the young Frank in that article, and printed out a copy of it. The article had taken the photo out of a newspaper of the time, and it was black and white, and quite grainy. She taped the photo to the side of the cabinet over the kitchen sink, feeling odd and turbulent.
Michel looked up from his AI and peered at it, and nodded approvingly. “It’s amazing how much you can read from people’s faces.”
“Frank didn’t think so.”
“He was just afraid of the ability.”
“Hmm,” Maya said. She couldn’t remember. She recalled instead the looks on the faces of the people at that night’s meeting. It was true, they had revealed everything— they had been like masks expressing exactly the sentences their owners had spoken. The metanats are out of control. They’re screwing things up. They’re selfish, they only care about themselves. Metanationalism is a new kind of nationalism, but without any home feeling. It’s money patriotism, a kind of disease. People are suffering, not so much here, but on Earth. And if it doesn’t change it will happen here too. They will infect us.
All said with the look from the photo, that knowing confident righteous blaze. It could change to cynicism, no doubt about it; Frank was the proof of that. It was possible to break that fervor, or lose it, in cynicism which could be so contagious. They would have to act before that happened;not too soon, but not too late. Timing would be everything. But if they timed it right. . . .
• • •
One day at the office, news came in from the Hellespontus. They had discovered a new aquifer, very deep compared to the others, very far away from the basin, and very big. Diana speculated that earlier glacial ages had run west off the Hellespontus range, and come to rest out there, underground— some twelve million cubic meters, more than any other aquifer, raising the amount of located water from 80 percent to 120 percent of the amount needed to fill the basin to the—1-kilometer contour.
It was amazing news, and the whole headquarters group gathered in Maya’s office to discuss it and plot it onto the big maps, the areographers already charting pipeline routes over the mountains, and debating the relative merits of different kinds of pipeline. The