Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [304]
“So what do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we just leave Burroughs alone?”
“I don’t think so. We’d be much better off if we came out from behind the sun with a completed takeover. If there are beleaguered Terran troops, holding out heroically in Burroughs, they’re almost sure to come out and save them. Call it a rescue mission and then go for the whole planet.”
“It won’t be easy to take Burroughs, with all those troops in it.”
“I know.”
Sax had been asleep on another couch across the room, and now he opened one eye. “The Reds are talking about flooding it.”
“What?”
“It’s below the level of the Vastitas ice. And there’s water under the ice. Without the dike—”
“No,” Nadia said. “There’s two hundred thousand people in Burroughs, and only a few thousand security troops. What are the people supposed to do? You can’t evacuate that many people. It’s crazy. It’s sixty-one all over again.” The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. “What can they be thinking?”
“Maybe it’s just a threat,” Art said over the screen.
“Threats don’t work unless the people you’re threatening believe you’ll carry them out.”
“Maybe they will believe it.”
Nadia shook her head. “Hasting’s not that stupid. Hell, he could evacuate his troops by way of the spaceport, and let the population drown! And then we become monsters, and Earth would be more certain than ever to come after us! No!”
She got up and went looking for some breakfast; then discovered, looking at the row of pastries in the kitchen, that her appetite was gone. She took a cup of coffee and went back to the office, watching her hands shake.
In 2061 Arkady had been faced with a splinter group, which had sent a small asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. It was meant to be a threat only. But the asteroid had been blown apart, in the biggest human-created explosion in history. And after that the war on Mars had suddenly become deadly in a way that it hadn’t been before. And Arkady had been helpless to stop it.
And it could happen again.
She walked back into the office. “We have to go to Burroughs,” she said to Sax.
3
Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.
So habits made their first incursions into the new terrain, like bacteria into rock, followed by procedures, protocols, a whole fell-field of social discourse, on its way to the climax forest of law. . . . Nadia saw that people (some people) were indeed coming to her to resolve arguments, deferring to her judgment. She might not have been in control, but she was as close to control as they had: the universal solvent, as Art called her, or General Nadia, as Maya said nastily over the wrist. Which only made Nadia shudder, as Maya knew it would. Nadia preferred something she had heard Sax say over the wrist to his faithful gang of techs, all young Saxes in the making: “Nadia is the designated arbitrator, talk to her about it.” Thus the power of names; arbitrator rather than general. In charge of negotiating what Art was calling the “phase change.” She had heard him use the term in the midst of a long interview on Mangalavid, with that deadpan expression of his that made it very hard to tell if he was joking or not: “Oh I don’t think it’s really a revolution we’re seeing, no. It’s a perfectly natural next step here, so it’s more a kind of evolutionary or developmental thing, or what in physics they call a phase change.”
His subsequent comments indicated to Nadia that he did not in fact know what a phase change was. But she did, and she found the concept intriguing. Vaporization of Terran authority, condensation of local power, the thaw finally come . . . however you wanted to think about it. Melting occurred when the thermal energy of particles was great enough to overcome the