Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [89]
He looked at Ann, and all eyes followed her. Ann’s mouth was tight, her shoulders slumped. She knew she was beaten.
She shrugged, as if she were shrugging a hooded cape back over her head and body, a heavy carapace that weighed her down, and covered her entirely from them. In the flat dead tone that she usually employed when she was upset, she said, “I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshiping it with our attention.” She met Sax’s mild gaze, and one final flare of her anger jetted out: “You’ve never even seen Mars.”
And she left the room.
• • •
Janet had had her camera specs on, and videotaped this exchange. Phyllis sent a copy back to Earth. A week later the UNOMA committee on environmental alterations approved the dissemination of the heater windmills.
• • •
The plan was to drop them from dirigibles. Arkady immediately claimed the right to pilot one, as a sort of reward for his work on Phobos. Maya and Frank were not unhappy at the thought of Arkady disappearing from Underhill for another month or two, so they immediately assigned him one of the craft. He would drift east in the prevailing winds, descending to place windmills in channel beds and on the outer flanks of craters, both places where winds tended to be strong. Nadia first heard of the expedition when Arkady skipped through the chambers to her and told her about it.
“Sounds nice,” she said.
“Want to come along?” he asked.
“Why yes,” she said. Her ghost finger was tingling.
6
Their dirigible was the biggest ever made, a planetary model built back in Germany by Friedrichshafen Noch Einmal, and shipped up in 2029, so that it had just recently arrived. It was called the Arrowhead, and it measured 120 meters across the wings, a hundred meters front to back, and forty meters tall. It had an internal ultralite frame, and turboprops at each wingtip and under the gondola; these were driven by small plastic engines whose batteries were powered by solar cells arrayed on the upper surface of the bag. The pencil-shaped gondola extended most of the length of the underside, but it was smaller inside than Nadia had expected, because much of it was temporarily filled with their cargo of windmills; at takeoff their clear space consisted of nothing more than the cockpit, two narrow beds, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet, and the crawlspace necessary to move among these. It was pretty tight, but happily both sides of the gondola were walled with windows, and though somewhat blocked by windmills these still gave them a lot of light, and good visibility.
Takeoff was slow. Arkady released the lines extending from the three mooring masts with the flip of a cockpit toggle; the turboprops ran hard, but they were dealing with air that was only twelve millibars thick. The cockpit bounced up and down in slow motion, flexing with the internal frame: and every up bounce was a little higher off the ground. For someone used to rocket launches it was comical.
“Let’s take a three-sixty and see Underhill before we go,” Arkady said when they were fifty meters high. He banked the ship and they made a slow wide turn, looking out Nadia’s window. Tracks, pits, mounds of regolith, all dark red against the dusty orange surface of the plain— it looked as if a dragon had