Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [67]
“Who’s building them?” she asked.
“Mostly Consolidated. There’s factories building them at Mareotis and Bradbury Point.” Coyote wolfed down food for a while more, then eyed her. “You don’t like it.”
“No.”
“Would you like to stop it?”
She didn’t reply.
Coyote seemed to understand. “I don’t mean stop the whole terraforming effort. But there are things that can be done. Blow up the factories.”
“They’ll just rebuild them.”
“You never can tell. It would slow them down. It might buy enough time for something to happen on a more global scale.”
“Reds, you mean.”
“Yes. I think people would call them Reds.”
Ann shook her head. “They don’t need me.”
“No. But maybe you need them, eh? And you’re a hero to them, you know. You would mean more to them than just another body.”
Ann’s mind had gone blank again. Reds— she had never believed in them, never believed that mode of resistance would work. But now— well, even if it wouldn’t work, it might be better than doing nothing. Poke them in the eye with a stick!
And if it did work. . . .
“Let me think about it.”
They talked about other things. Suddenly Ann was hit by a wall of fatigue, which was strange as she had spent so much time doing nothing. But there it was. Talking was exhausting work, she wasn’t used to it. And Coyote was a hard man to talk to.
“You should go to bed,” he said, breaking off his monologue. “You look tired. Your hands—” He helped her up. She lay down on a bed, in her clothes. Coyote pulled a blanket over her. “You’re tired. I wonder if it isn’t time for another longevity treatment for you, old girl.”
“I’m not going to take them anymore.”
“No! Well, you surprise me. But sleep, now. Sleep.”
• • •
She caravaned with Coyote back south, and in the evenings they ate together, and he told her about the Reds. It was a loose grouping, rather than any rigidly organized movement. Like the underground itself. She knew several of the founders: Ivana, and Gene and Raul from the farm team, who had ended up disagreeing with Hiroko’s areophany and its insistence on viriditas; Kasei and Dao and several of the Zygote ectogenes; a lot of Arkady’s followers, who had come down from Phobos and then clashed with Arkady over the value of terraforming to the revolution. A good many Bogdanovists, including Steve and Marian, had become Reds in the years since 2061, as had followers of the biologist Schnelling, and some radical Japanese nisei and sansei from Sabishii, and Arabs who wanted Mars to stay Arabian forever, and escaped prisoners from Korolyov, and so on. A bunch of radicals. Not really her type, Ann thought, feeling a residual sensation that her objection to terraforming was a rational scientific thing. Or at least a defensible ethical or aesthetic position. But then the anger burned through her again in a flash, and she shook her head, disgusted at herself. Who was she to judge the ethics of the Reds? At least they had expressed their anger, they had lashed out. Probably they felt better, even if they hadn’t accomplished anything. And maybe they had accomplished something, at least in years past, before the terraforming had entered this new phase of transnat gigantism.
Coyote maintained that the Reds had considerably slowed terraforming. Some of them had even kept records to try to quantify the difference they had made. There was also, he said, a growing movement among some of the Reds to acknowledge reality and admit that terraforming was going to happen, but to work up policy papers advocating various kinds of least-impact terraforming. “There are some very detailed proposals for a largely carbon dioxide atmosphere, warm but water-poor, which would support plant life, and people with facemasks, but not wrench the world into a Terran model. It’s very interesting. There are also several proposals for what they call ecopoesis, or areobiospheres. Worlds in which the low altitudes are arctic, and just barely livable for us, while the higher altitudes remain above the bulk of the atmosphere, and thus in a natural