Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [131]
His meeting room was a big open chamber, with a continuous floor-to-ceiling window as its western wall. When John walked into the room looking for Sax, it was still mid-morning, and the window was almost clear; far, far below lay the chasm floor, still half in shadow, and there out in the sunlight stood the much lower western wall of Echus, and beyond that the great slope of the Tharsis Bulge, rising higher and higher to the south. Out in the middle distance was the low bump of Tharsis Tholus, and to the left of it, just poking over the horizon, lay the purple flat-topped cone of Ascraeus Mons, the northernmost of the great prince volcanoes.
But Sax was not in the meeting room, and he never looked out this window as far as John could tell. He was next door in a lab, more lab rat than ever, hunch-shouldered and twitch-whiskered, gazing around at the floor, speaking in a voice that sounded like an AI. He led John through a whole sequence of labs, leaning forward to peer into screens or at inching graph paper, talking to John over a shoulder, in a state of distraction. The rooms they passed through were jammed with computers, printers, screens, books, rolls and stacks of paper, disks, GC-mass specs, incubators, fume hoods, long apparatus-filled lab tables, whole libraries; and placed on every precarious surface were potted plants, most of them unrecognizable bulges, armored succulents and the like, so that at a glance it looked like a virulent mold had sprung up and covered everything. “Your labs are getting kind of messy,” John said.
“The planet is the lab,” Sax replied.
John laughed, moved a bright yellow surarctic cactus from a countertop and sat down. It was said Sax never left these rooms anymore. “What are you simming today?”
“Atmospheres.”
Of course. It was a problem that gave Sax a serious case of the blinks. All the heat they were releasing or applying to the planet was thickening the atmosphere, but all their CO2-fixing strategies were thinning it; and as the chemical composition of the air slowly shifted to something less poisonous it became less greenhouse-gassed as well, so that things cooled back down and the process slowed. Negative feedback countering positive feedback, all over the place. Juggling all these factors into any meaningful extrapolative program was more than anyone had yet accomplished to Sax’s satisfaction, so he had resorted to his usual solution; he was trying to do it himself.
He paced the narrow aisles left between equipment, moving chairs out of his way. “There’s just too much carbon dioxide. In the old days the modelers swept that under the rug. I think I’m going to have to have robots feed the southern polar cap into Sabatier factories. What we can process won’t sublime, and we can release the oxygen and make bricks of the carbon, I guess. We’ll have more carbon blocks than we’ll know what to do with. Black pyramids to go along with the white.”
“Pretty.”
“Uhn.” The Crays and the two new Schillers hummed away behind him, providing his monotonal recitative with a ground bass. These computers spent all their time running through one set of conditions after another, Sax said; but the results, while never the same, were seldom encouraging. The air was going to be cold and poisonous for a good while yet.
Sax wandered down the hall, and John followed him into what looked like another lab, although there was a bed and a refrigerator in one corner. Violently disarranged bookscapes were overgrown with potted plants, bizarre Pleistocene growths that looked as deadly as the air outside. John sat in the lone empty chair. Sax stood and looked down at a seashell shrub as John described his meeting with Ann.
“Do you think she’s involved?” Sax said.
“I think she may know who is. She mentioned someone called the coyote.”
“Ah yes.” Sax glanced briefly at John— at his feet, to be precise. “She’s siccing us onto a legendary character. He’s supposed to have been on the Ares with us, you know. Hidden by Hiroko.”
John was so surprised