Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [119]
He returned to the banquet much more relaxed. In fact filled with a little glow. He had escaped death, after all, and by running like a wild man! Some more endorphins were not inappropriate. He moved easily from table to table, asking questions as he went. This was what pleased people, what gave them the festival feeling that a meeting with John Boone should bring. John liked being able to do that, it was the part of his job that made celebrity tolerable; because when he asked questions, people leaped to answer like salmon in the stream. It was peculiar, really, as if people were seeking to right the imbalance they felt in the situation, in which they knew so much about him while he knew so little about them. So that with the right encouragement, often a single carefully judged prompt, they would erupt with the most astonishing spills of personal information: witnessing, testifying, confessing.
So he spent the evening learning about life at Senzeni Na. (“Means, what have we done?” Quick grin.) And afterward he was led to his big guest suite, the rooms thick with live bamboo, the bed seemingly hacked out of a stand of it. When he was alone he connected his code box to the phone, and called Sax Russell.
• • •
Russell was at Vlad’s new headquarters, a research complex built into a dramatic fin ridge in the Acheron Fossae north of Olympus Mons. Sax spent all his time there now, studying genetic engineering like an undergrad; he had become convinced that biotechnology was the key to terraforming, and he was determined to educate himself to the point where he could contribute actively to that part of the campaign, despite the fact that all his training was in physics. Modern biology was notoriously gooey, and a lot of physicists hated it, but the people at Acheron said Sax was a quick learner, and John believed it. Sax himself made little snicking noises at his own progress, but it was clear he was deep in. He talked about it all the time, “It’s the crux,” he would say, “we need the water and nitrogen out of the ground and the carbon dioxide out of the air, and it’s going to take biomass to do both.” And so he slaved at the screens and in the labs.
He listened to Boone’s report with his usual impassivity. Such a parody of the scientist, John thought. He even wore a lab coat. Seeing his characteristic blink made John think of a story he had heard one of Sax’s assistants tell, to a laughing audience at a party: in a secret experiment gone awry, a hundred lab rats that had been injected with an intelligence booster became geniuses. They revolted, escaped from their cages, captured their principal investigator, and strapped him down and retro-injected all their minds into his body, using a method they invented on the spot— and that scientist was Saxifrage Russell, whitecoated, blinking, twitching, inquisitive, lab-bound. His brain the sum of a hundred hyperintelligent rats, “and named for a flower like lab rats are, it’s their little joke, see?”
It explained a lot. John smiled as he finished his report, and Sax cocked his head at him curiously. “Do you think this truck was meant to kill you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do the people there seem?”
“Scared.”
“Think they’re in on it?”
John shrugged. “I doubt it. They’re probably just worried about what happens next.”
Sax flicked a hand out. “Sabotage like that won’t make the slightest dent in the project,” he said mildly.
“I know.”
“Who’s doing this, John?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it be Ann, do you think? Has she become another prophet, like Hiroko or Arkady, with followers and a program and the like?”
“You have followers and a program too,” John reminded him.
“But I’m not telling my followers to wreck things and try to kill people.”