Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [74]
But there on the beach sat one, as gaunt as a heron. Ann Clayborne. Sax hesitated, but she had already seen him. And so he walked on, until he stood by her side. She glanced up at him, and then stared out again at the white lake. “You really look different,” she said.
“Yes.” He could still feel the sore spots in his face and mouth, though the bruises had cleared up. It felt a bit like wearing a mask, and suddenly that made him uncomfortable. “Same me,” he added.
“Of course.” She did not look up at him. “So you’re off to the overworld?”
“Yes.”
“To get back to your work?”
“Yes.”
She looked up at him. “What do you think science is for?”
Sax shrugged. It was their old argument, again and always, no matter what kind of beginning it had. To terraform or not to terraform, that is the question. . . . He had answered the question long ago, and so had she, and he wished they could just agree to disagree, and get on with it. But Ann was indefatigable.
“To figure things out,” he said.
“But terraforming is not figuring things out.”
“Terraforming isn’t science. I never said it was. It’s what people-do with science. Applied science, or technology. What have you. The choice of what to do with what you learn from science. Whatever you call that.”
“So it’s a matter of values.”
“I suppose so.” Sax thought about it, trying to marshal his thoughts concerning this murky topic. “I suppose our . . . our disagreement is another facet of what people call the fact-value problem. Science concerns itself with facts, and with theories that turn facts into examples. Values are another kind of system, a human construct.”
“Science is also a human construct.”
“Yes. But the connection between the two systems isn’t clear. Beginning from the same facts, we can arrive at different values.”
“But science itself is full of values,” Ann insisted. “We talk about theories with power and elegance, we talk about clean results, or a beautiful experiment. And the desire for knowledge is itself a kind of value, saying that knowledge is better than ignorance, or mystery. Right?”
“I suppose,” Sax said, thinking it over.
“Your science is a set of values,” Ann said. “The goal of your kind of science is the establishment of laws, of regularities, of exactness and certainty. You want things explained. You want to answer the whys, all the way back to the big bang. You’re a reductionist. Parsimony and elegance and economy are values for you, and if you can make things simpler that’s a real achievement, right?”
“But that’s the scientific method itself,” Sax objected. “It’s not just me, it’s how nature itself works. Physics. You do it yourself.”
“There are human values imbedded in physics.”
“I’m not so sure.” He held out a hand to stop her for a second. “I’m not saying there are no values in science. But matter and energy do what they do. If you want to talk about values, better just to talk about them. They arise out of facts somehow, sure. But that’s a different issue, some kind of sociobiology, or bioethics. Perhaps it would be better just to talk about values directly. The greatest good for the greatest number, something like that.”
“There are ecologists who would say that’s a scientific description of a healthy ecosystem. Another way of saying climax ecosystem.”
“That’s a value judgment, I think. Some kind of bioethics. Interesting, but . . .” Sax squinted at her curiously, decided to change tack. “Why not try for a climax ecosystem here, Ann? You can’t speak of ecosystems without living things. What was here on Mars before us wasn’t an ecology. It was geology only. You could even say