Blue Mars Part 33

"We should probably kill you all when you turn a hundred."

"Or as soon as we have children."

She grinned. He was so imperturbable! "Whichever comes first."

He nodded as if this were a sensible suggestion. She laughed, although it was vexing too: "Of course it will never happen."

"No. But it won't be necessary."

"No? You're going to act like lemmings and run off cliffs?"

"No. Treatment-resistant diseases are appearing. Older people are dying. It's bound to happen."

"Is it?"

"I think so."

"You don't think they'll figure out ways to cure these new diseases, keep stringing things along?"

"In some cases. But senescence is complex, and sooner or later...." He shrugged.

"That's a bad thought," Zo said.

She stood, pulled the dried fabric of her singlet up her legs. He stood and dressed too.

"Have you ever met Bao Shuyo?" he asked.

"No, who's she?"

"A mathematician, living in Da Vinci."

"No. Why do you ask?"

"Just curious."

They hiked uphill through the forest, from time to time stopping to look after the quick blur of an animal. A big jungle chicken, what looked like a lone hyena, standing looking down a wash at them.... Zo found she was enjoying herself. This issei was unteasable, unshockable; and his opinions were unpredictable, which was an unusual trait in the old, indeed in anyone. Most of the ancient ones Zo had met seemed especially bound in the tightly warped s.p.a.ce-time of their values; and as the way people lived their values was in inverse proportion to how tightly they were bound in them, the old had ended up Tartuffes to a man, or so she had thought, hypocrites for whom she had no patience at all. She despised the old and their precious values. But this one didn't seem to have any. It made her want to talk more with him.

When they got back to the village she patted him on the head. "That was fun. I'll talk to your friend."

"Thanks."

A few days later she gave Ann Clayborne a call. The face that appeared on the screen was as forbidding as a skull.

"Hi, I'm Zoya Boone."

"Yes?"

"It's my name," Zo said. "That's how I introduce myself to strangers."

"Boone?"

"Jackie's daughter."

"Ah."

Clearly she didn't like Jackie. A common reaction; Jackie was so wonderful that a lot of people hated her.

"I'm also a friend of Sax Russell's."

"Ah."

Impossible to read what she meant by that one.

"I was telling him that I'm on my way out to the Uranian system, and he said you might be interested in joining me."

"He did?"

"He did. So I called. I'm going to Jupiter and then Ura.n.u.s, with two weeks on Miranda."

"Miranda!" she said. "Who are you again?"

"I'm Zo Boone! What are you, senile?"

"Miranda, you said?"

"Yes. Two weeks, maybe more if I like it."

"If you like like it?" it?"

"Yes. I don't stay places I don't like."

Clayborne nodded as if that were only sensible, and so Zo added mock solemnly, as if to a child, "There's a lot of rock there."

"Yes yes."

A long pause. Zo studied the face on the screen. Gaunt and wrinkled, like Russell, only in her case almost all the wrinkles were vertical. A face hacked out of wood. Finally she said, "I'll think about it."

"You're supposed to be trying new things," Zo reminded her.

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Sax told you that?"

"No- I asked Jackie about you."

"I'll think about it," she said again, and cut the connection.

So much for that, Zo thought. Still she had tried, and therefore felt virtuous, a disagreeable sensation. These issei had a way of pulling one into their realities; and they were all mad.

And unpredictable as well; the next day Clayborne called back, and said she would go.

In person Ann Clayborne proved to be indeed as withered and sun-dried as Russell, but even more silent and strange- waspish, laconic, p.r.o.ne to brief ill-tempered outbursts. She showed up at the last minute with a single backpack and a slim black wristpad, one of the latest models. Her skin was a nut brown, and marked by wens and warts and scars where skin disorders had been removed. A long life spent outdoors, and in the early days too, when UV bombardment had been intense; in short, she was fried. A bakehead, as they said in Echus. Her eyes were gray, her mouth a lizard slash, the lines from the corners of her mouth to her nostrils like deep hatchet chops. Nothing could be more severe than that face.

During the week of the voyage to Jupiter she spent her time in the little ship park, walking through the trees. Zo preferred the dining hall, or the big viewing bubble where a small group gathered in the evening watch, to eat tabs of pandorph and play go, or smoke opium and look at the stars. So she seldom saw Ann on the trip out.

They shot over the asteroid belt, slightly out of the plane of the ecliptic, pa.s.sing over several of the hollowed-out little worlds, no doubt, though it was hard to tell; inside the rock potatoes shown on the ship's screens there might be rough sh.e.l.ls like finished mines, or towns landscaped into beautiful estates; societies anarchic and dangerous, or settled by religious groups or utopian collectives, and painfully peaceable. The existence of such a wide variety of systems, coexisting in a semianarchic state, made Zo doubt that Jackie's plans for organizing the outer satellites under a Martian umbrella would ever succeed; it seemed to her that the asteroid belt might serve as a model for what the entire solar system's political organization would become. But Jackie did not agree; the asteroid belt was as it was, she said, because of its particular nature, scattered through a broad band all around the sun. The outer satellites on the other hand were clumped in groups around their gas giants, and were certain to become leagues because of that; and were such large worlds, compared to the asteroids, that eventually it would make a difference with whom they allied themselves in the inner system.

Zo was not convinced. But their deceleration brought them into the Jovian system, where she would have a chance to put Jackie's theories to the test. The ship ran a cat's cradle through the Galileans to slow down further, giving them close-ups of the four big moons. All four of them had ambitious terraforming plans, and had started to put them into action. The outer three, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, had similar initial conditions to deal with; they were all covered by water ice layers, Callisto and Ganymede to a depth of a thousand kilometers, Europa to a depth of a hundred kilometers. Water was not uncommon in the outer solar system, but it was by no means ubiquitous either, and so these water worlds had something to trade. All three moons had large amounts of rock scattered over their icy surfaces, the remnants of meteoric impact for the most part, carbonaeous chondrite rubble, a very useful building material. The settlers of the three moons had, on their arrival some thirty m-years before, rendered the chondrites and built tent frameworks of carbon nanotube similar to that used in Mars's s.p.a.ce elevator, tenting s.p.a.ces twenty or fifty kilometers across with multilayered tent materials. Under their tents they had spread crushed rock to create a thin layer of ground- the ultimate permafrost- in some places surrounding lakes they had melted into the ice.

On Callisto the tent town built to this plan was called Lake Geneva; this was where the Martian delegation went to meet with the various leaders and policy groups of the Jovian League. As usual Zo accompanied the delegation as a minor functionary and observer, looking for opportunities to convey Jackie's messages to people who could discreetly do something about it.

This particular meeting was part of a biannual series the Jovians held to discuss the terraforming of the Galileans, and so a good context for Jackie's interests to be expressed. Zo sat at the back of the room next to Ann, who had decided to sit in on the meeting. The technical problems of terraforming these moons were big in scale, but simple in concept. Callisto, Ganymede and Europa were being dealt with in the same way, at least at the beginning: mobile fusion reactors were out roaming their surfaces, heating the ice and pumping gases into early hydrogen/oxygen atmospheres. Eventually they hoped to create equatorial belts where gathered rock had been crushed to create ground over the ice; atmospheric temperatures would then be kept near freezing, so that tundra ecologies could be established around a string of equatorial lakes, in a breathable oxygen/hydrogen atmosphere.

Io, the innermost of the Galileans, was more difficult, but intriguing; rail-gun launchers were firing large missiles of ice and chaldates down to it from the other three big moons; being so close to Jupiter it had very little water, its surface made up of intermixed layers of basalt and sulfur- the sulfur spewing out onto the surface in spectacular volcanic plumes, driven by the tidal action from Jupiter and the other Galileans. The plan for Io's terraformation was more long-term than most, and was to be driven in part by an infusion of sulfur-eating bacteria into hot sulfur springs around the volcanoes.

All four of these projects were slowed by the lack of light, and s.p.a.ce mirrors of tremendous size were being built at Jupiter's Lagrange points, where the complications of the Jovian system's gravitational fields were reduced; sunlight would be directed from these mirrors to the equators of the four Galileans. All four moons were tidally locked around Jupiter, so their solar days depended on the length of their orbits around Jupiter, ranging from forty-two hours for Io to fifteen days for Callisto; and whatever the length of their days, they all received during them only four percent as much sunlight as the Earth. But the truth was that the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth was stupendously excessive, so that four percent was actually a lot of light, when it came to visibility- seventeen thousand times as much as the full moon on Earth- but not much heat, if one wanted to terraform. They therefore were cadging light any way they could; Lake Geneva and all the settlements on the other moons were located facing Jupiter, to take advantage of the sunlight reflected from that giant globe in the sky; and flying "gas lanterns" had been dropped into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, cl.u.s.ters of them igniting some of the planet's helium3 in points of light that were too brilliant to look directly at for more than a second; the fusion burns were suspended before electromagnetic reflecting dishes that put all the light out into the planet's plane of the ecliptic. Thus the banded monster ball was now made an even more spectacular sight by the achingly bright diamond dots of some twenty gas lanterns wandering its face.

The s.p.a.ce mirrors and the gas lanterns together would still leave the settlements with less than half the sunlight Mars got, but it was the best they could do. That was life in the outer solar system, a somewhat dim business all around, Zo judged. Even gathering that much light would require the manufacture of a ma.s.sive infrastructure; and this was where the Martian delegation came in. Jackie had arranged to offer a lot of help, including more fusion behemoths, more gas lanterns, and also Martian experience in s.p.a.ce mirrors and terraforming techniques generally, through an a.s.sociation of aeros.p.a.ce co-ops interested in obtaining more projects now that the situation in Martian s.p.a.ce was largely stabilized. They would contribute capital and expertise, in return for preferential trade agreements, supplies of helium3 culled from Jupiter's upper atmosphere, and the opportunity to explore, mine, and possibly join terraforming efforts on Jupiter's clutch of smaller moons, all eighteen of them.

Invested capital, expertise, trade; this was the carrot, and a big one. Clearly if the Galileans accepted it, the tendrils of a.s.sociation with Mars would be there, and Jackie could then follow that up with political alliances of various sorts; and pull the Jovian moons into her web. This eventuality was as clear to the Jovians as it was to anyone, however, and they were doing what they could to get what they wanted without giving too much in return. No doubt they would soon be playing the Martians off against similar offers from the Terran exmetas and other organizations.

This was where Zo came in; she was the stick. Public carrot, private stick; this was Jackie's method, in all phases of life.

Zo revealed Jackie's threats in tiny indirect glimpses, to make them seem even more threatening. Brief meeting with officials from Io: the ecopoetic plan, Zo said to them, casually, seemed far too slow. It would be thousands of years before their bacteria chewed the sulfur into useful gases, and meanwhile Jupiter's intense radio field, which enveloped Io and added to its problems, would mutate the bacteria beyond recognition. They needed an ionosphere, they needed water, it was possible they even needed to think about pulling the moon out into a higher orbit around their great gas G.o.d. Mars, home of terraforming expertise and the healthiest wealthiest civilization in the solar system, could help them with all that, give them special help. Or even discuss with the other Galileans the notion of taking over the project, in order to bring it up to speed.

After that, casual conversations with various authorities from the ice Galileans: in c.o.c.ktail parties after workshops, in bars after the parties, walking in groups along Lake Geneva's signature lakefront promenade, under the sonolu-minescent streetlights suspended from the tent framework. The delegates from Io, she told these people, are looking into cutting a separate deal on their own. They had the situation with the most potential, when all was said and done; hard ground to stand on, heat, heavy metals; great tourist potential. Zo ventured that they seemed to be willing to use these advantages to strike out on their own, and fractionate the Jovian League.

Ann followed Zo and the others on some of these walks, and Zo let her listen in on a couple of the conversations, curious to see what she would make of them. She followed them down the waterfront promenade, which was set on the low meteor crater rim they had used to contain the lake. The slosh craters here beat any slosh crater on Mars by a long shot; the icy rim of this one was only a few meters higher than the general surface of the moon, forming a round levee from which one could look over the water of the lake, or back onto the gra.s.sy streets of the town, or beyond the streets to the rubbly ice plain outside the tent, visibly curving to the nearby horizon. The extreme flatness of the landscape outside the tent gave an indication of its nature- a glacier covering a whole world, ice a thousand kilometers deep, ice which ate every meteor impact and tidal cracking, and quickly flowed back to flatness again.

On the surface of the lake small black waves formed interference patterns on the flat sheet of water, which was white like the lake's ice bottom, tinted yellow by the great ball of Jupiter looming gibbous overhead, all its bands of creamy yellow and orange visibly swirled at their edges and around the pinp.r.i.c.k lanterns.

They pa.s.sed a line of wooden buildings; the wood came from forested islands, floating around like rafts on the far side of the lake. Streetgra.s.s gleamed greenly, and gardens grew in oversized planter boxes behind the buildings, under long bright lamps. Zo showed a bit of the stick to their companions on the walk, confused functionaries from Ganymede; she reminded them of Mars's military might, mentioned again that Io was considering defection from their league.

The Ganymedans went off to get dinner, looking dismayed. "So subtle," Ann remarked when they were out of earshot.

"Now we're being sarcastic," Zo said.

"You're a thug. Put it that way."

"I will have to enroll in the Red school of diplomatic subtlety. Perhaps arrange for a.s.sistants to come along with me and blow up some of their property."

Ann made a noise between her teeth. She continued down the promenade, and Zo kept up with her.

"Strange that the Great Red Spot is gone," Zo remarked as they crossed a bridge over a white-bottomed ca.n.a.l. "Like some kind of sign. I keep expecting it to come around into view."

The air was chill and damp. The people they pa.s.sed were mostly of Terran origin, part of the diaspora. Some fliers cut lazy spirals up near the tent frame. Zo watched them cross the face of the great planet. Ann stopped frequently to inspect cut surfaces of rock, ignoring the town on ice and its crowds, with their tiptoe grace and their rainbow clothing, a gang of young natives greyhounding past-"You really are more interested in rocks than people," Zo said, half-admiring, half-irritated.

Ann looked at her; such a basilisk glare! But Zo shrugged and took her by the arm, pulled her along. "The young natives out here are less than fifteen m-years old, they've lived in point-one g all their lives, they don't care about Earth or Mars. They believe in the Jovian moons, in water, in swimming and flying. Most of them have altered their eyes for the low light. Some of them are growing gills. They have a plan to terraform these moons that will take them five thousand years. They're the next step in evolution, for ka's sake, and here you are staring at rocks that are just the same as rocks everywhere else in this galaxy. You're just as crazy as they said."

This bounced off Ann like a thrown pebble. She said, "You sound like me, when I tried to get Nadia away from Underhill."

Zo shrugged. "Come on," she said, "I have another meeting."

"Mafia work never stops, does it." But she followed, peering around like a wizened court jester, dwarfish and oddly dressed in her old-fashioned jumper.

Some Lake Geneva council members greeted them, somewhat nervously, by the docks. They got on a small ferry, which threaded its way out through a fleet of small sailing boats. Out on the lake it was windy. They puttered to one of the forest islands. Vast specimens of balsa and teak stood over the swampy mat of the floating island's heated ground, and on the island's sh.o.r.e loggers were working outside a little sawmill. The mill was soundproofed, nevertheless a m.u.f.fled whine of saw cuts accompanied the conversation. Floating on a lake on a moon of Jupiter, all the colors suffused with the gray of solar distance: Zo felt little bursts of flier's exhilaration, and she said to the locals, "This is so beautiful. I can see why there are people on Europa who talk about making their whole world a water world, sail around and around. They could even ship away water to Venus and get down to some solid land for islands. I don't know if they've mentioned it to you. Maybe it's just all talk, like the idea I heard for creating a small black hole and dropping it into Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Stellarizing Jupiter! You'd have all the light you needed then."

"Wouldn't Jupiter be consumed?" one of the locals asked.

"Oh but it would take ever so long, they said; millions of years."

"And then a nova," Ann pointed out.

"Yes yes. Everything but Pluto destroyed. But by that time we'll be long gone, one way or another. Or if not, they'll figure something out."

Ann laughed harshly. The locals, thinking hard, did not appear to notice.

Back on the lakesh.o.r.e Ann and Zo walked the promenade. "You're so blatant," Ann said.

"On the contrary. It's very subtle. They don't know if I'm speaking for me, or for Jackie, or for Mars. It could be just talk. But it reminds them of the larger context. It's too easy for them to get wrapped up in the Jovian situation and forget all the rest. The solar system entire, as a single political body; people need help thinking about that, they can't conceptualize it."

"You need help yourself. It's not Renaissance Italy, you know."

"Machiavelli will always remain true, if that's what you mean. And they need to be reminded of that here."

"You remind me of Frank."

"Frank?"

"Frank Chalmers."

"Now there's an issei I admire," Zo said. "What I've read about him, anyway. He was the only one of you who wasn't a hypocrite. And he was the one that got the most done."

"You don't know anything about it," Ann said.

Zo shrugged. "The past is the same for all of us. I know as much about it as you do."

A group of the Jovians walked by, pale and big-eyed, utterly absorbed by their own talk. Zo gestured: "Look at them! They're so focused. I admire them too, really- throwing themselves so energetically into a project that won't be completed until long after their death- it's an absurd gesture, a gesture of defiance and freedom, a divine madness, as if they were sperm wiggling madly toward an unknown goal."

"That's all of us," Ann said. "That's evolution. When do we go to Miranda?"