Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [126]
She glanced at him. “It’s the second half that matters.”
“All right, maybe so. You take too much for granted, but that’s the way people are. But you have to realize that you’re having your effect on us, Ann. You’ve changed the way everyone thinks about what we’re doing here. Hell, Sax and a lot of others used to talk about doing anything possible to terraform as quick as possible— driving a bunch of asteroids directly into the planet, using hydrogen bombs to try and start volcanoes— whatever it took! Now all those plans have been scrapped because of you and your supporters. The whole vision of how to terraform and how far to go with it has changed. And I think we can eventually reach a compromise value, where we get some protection from radiation, and a biosphere and maybe air we can breathe, or at least not die in immediately— and still leave it pretty much like it was before we came.” Ann rolled her eyes at this, but he forged on: “No one’s talking about pumping it up into a jungle planet you know, even if they could! It’ll always be cold, and the Tharsis Bulge will always stick right out into space, in effect, so there’ll be a huge part of the planet that’s never touched. And that’ll be partly because of you.”
“But who’s to say that with that first step done, you won’t want more?”
“Maybe some will. But I for one will try to stop them. I will! I may not be on your side, but I see your point. And when you fly over the highlands like I did today, you can’t help but love it. People may try to change the planet, but all the while the planet will be changing them too. A sense of place, an aesthetics of landscape, all those things change with time. You know the people who first saw the Grand Canyon thought it was ugly as hell because it wasn’t like the Alps. It took them a long time to see its beauty.”
“They drowned most of it anyway,” Ann said blackly.
“Yeah yeah. But who knows what our kids will think is beautiful? It’s sure to be based on what they know, and this place will be the only place they know. So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us.”
“Areoforming,” Ann said, and a rare little smile flashed over her face. Seeing it John felt his face flush; he hadn’t seen her smile like that in years, and he loved Ann, he loved to see her smile.
“I like that word,” she said now. She pointed a finger at him: “But I’ll hold you to it, John Boone! I’ll remember what you’ve said tonight!”
“Me too,” he said.
• • •
The rest of the evening was more relaxed. And the next day Simon saw him down to the airstrip, to the rover he was going to drive northward, and Simon, who usually would have seen him off with a smile and a handshake, at most a “nice to see you,” suddenly said to him, “I really appreciate what you said last night. I think it really cheered her up. Especially what you said about kids. She’s pregnant, you see.”
“What?” John shook his head. “She didn’t tell me. Are you the, the father?”
“Yeah.” Simon grinned.
“How old is she now, sixty?”
“Yeah. It’s stretching things a bit, so to speak, but it’s been done before. They took an egg frozen about fifteen years ago, fertilized it and planted it in her. We’ll see how it goes. They say Hiroko stays pregnant all the time these days, just keeps popping them like an incubator, same C section over and over.”
“They say a lot of things about Hiroko, but it’s all just stories.”
“Well, but we heard this from someone who supposedly knows.”
“The coyote?” John said sharply.
Simon raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised she told you about him.”
John grunted, obscurely annoyed. No doubt his fame meant he missed out on a lot of gossip. “It’s good that she did. Well, anyway—” He extended his right hand and they shook, hooking their fingers in the stiff clasp that had developed in the old space days. “Congratulations. Take care of her.”
Simon shrugged. “You know Ann. She does what she wants.”
2
So Boone drove north from Argyre for three days, enjoying the countryside and the solitude, and spending a few hours each afternoon