Part 8 (1/2)
”Ann,” she said, as if vomiting.
Ten minutes later he was in her car, reaching up to give her a hug. ”How long have you been here?”
”Not... not long.”
They sat. She collected herself. It was like thinking, it was thinking out loud. Surely she still thought in words.
Coyote talked on, perhaps a bit slower than usual, eyeing her closely.
She asked him about the ice-drilling rig.
”Ah. I wondered if you would run across one of those.”
”How many are there?”
”Fifty.”
Coyote saw her expression, and nodded briefly. He was eating voraciously, and it occurred to her that he had arrived at the cache empty. ”They're putting a lot of money into these big projects. The new elevator, these water rigs, nitrogen from t.i.tan... a big mirror out there between us and the sun, to put more light on us. Have you heard of that?”
She tried to collect herself. Fifty. Ah, G.o.d....
It made her mad. She had been angry at the planet, for not giving her her release. For frightening her, but not backing it up with action. But this was different, a different kind of anger. And now as she sat watching Coyote eat, thinking about the inundation of Vast.i.tas Borealis, she could feel that anger contracting inside her, like a prestellar dustcloud, contracting until it collapsed and ignited. Hot fury- it was painful to feel it. And yet it was the same old thing, anger at the terraforming. That old burnt emotion that had gone nova in the early years, now coalescing and going off again; she didn't want it, she really didn't. But dammit, the planet was melting under her feet. Disintegrating. Reduced to mush in some Terran cartel's mining venture.
Something ought to be done.
And really she had to do something, if only just to fill the hours that she had to fill before some accident had mercy on her. Something to occupy the preposthumous hours. Zombie vengeance- well, why not? p.r.o.ne to violence, p.r.o.ne to despair....
”Who's building them?” she asked.
”Mostly Consolidated. There's factories building them at Mareotis and Bradbury Point.” Coyote wolfed down food for a while more, then eyed her. ”You don't like it.”
”No.”
”Would you like to stop it?”
She didn't reply.
Coyote seemed to understand. ”I don't mean stop the whole terraforming effort. But there are things that can be done. Blow up the factories.”
”They'll just rebuild them.”
”You never can tell. It would slow them down. It might buy enough time for something to happen on a more global scale.”
”Reds, you mean.”
”Yes. I think people would call them Reds.”
Ann shook her head. ”They don't need me.”
”No. But maybe you need them, eh? And you're a hero to them, you know. You would mean more to them than just another body.”
Ann's mind had gone blank again. Reds- she had never believed in them, never believed that mode of resistance would work. But now- well, even if it wouldn't work, it might be better than doing nothing. Poke them in the eye with a stick!
And if it did work....
”Let me think about it.”
They talked about other things. Suddenly Ann was. .h.i.t by a wall of fatigue, which was strange as she had spent so much time doing nothing. But there it was. Talking was exhausting work, she wasn't used to it. And Coyote was a hard man to talk to.
”You should go to bed,” he said, breaking off his monologue. ”You look tired. Your hands-” He helped her up. She lay down on a bed, in her clothes. Coyote pulled a blanket over her. ”You're tired. I wonder if it isn't time for another longevity treatment for you, old girl.”
”I'm not going to take them anymore.”
”No! Well, you surprise me. But sleep, now. Sleep.”
She caravaned with Coyote back south, and in the evenings they ate together, and he told her about the Reds. It was a loose grouping, rather than any rigidly organized movement. Like the underground itself. She knew several of the founders: Ivana, and Gene and Raul from the farm team, who had ended up disagreeing with Hiroko's areophany and its insistence on viriditas; Kasei and Dao and several of the Zygote ectogenes; a lot of Arkady's followers, who had come down from Phobos and then clashed with Arkady over the value of terraforming to the revolution. A good many Bogdanovists, including Steve and Marian, had become Reds in the years since 2061, as had followers of the biologist Schnelling, and some radical j.a.panese nisei and sansei from Sabis.h.i.+, and Arabs who wanted Mars to stay Arabian forever, and escaped prisoners from Korolyov, and so on. A bunch of radicals. Not really her type, Ann thought, feeling a residual sensation that her objection to terraforming was a rational scientific thing. Or at least a defensible ethical or aesthetic position. But then the anger burned through her again in a flash, and she shook her head, disgusted at herself. Who was she to judge the ethics of the Reds? At least they had expressed their anger, they had lashed out. Probably they felt better, even if they hadn't accomplished anything. And maybe they had accomplished something, at least in years past, before the terraforming had entered this new phase of transnat gigantism.
Coyote maintained that the Reds had considerably slowed terraforming. Some of them had even kept records to try to quantify the difference they had made. There was also, he said, a growing movement among some of the Reds to acknowledge reality and admit that terraforming was going to happen, but to work up policy papers advocating various kinds of least-impact terraforming. ”There are some very detailed proposals for a largely carbon dioxide atmosphere, warm but water-poor, which would support plant life, and people with facemasks, but not wrench the world into a Terran model. It's very interesting. There are also several proposals for what they call ecopoesis, or areobiospheres. Worlds in which the low alt.i.tudes are arctic, and just barely livable for us, while the higher alt.i.tudes remain above the bulk of the atmosphere, and thus in a natural state, or close to it. The calderas of the four big volcanoes would stay especially pure in such a world, or so they say.”
Ann doubted most of these proposals were achievable, or would have the effects predicted. But Coyote's accounts intrigued her nevertheless. He was a strong supporter of all Red efforts, apparently, and he had been a big help to them from the start, giving them aid from the underground refuges, connecting them up with each other, and helping them to build their own refuges, which were chiefly in the mesas and fretted terrain of the Great Escarpment, where they remained close to the terraforming action, and could therefore interfere with it more easily. Yes- Coyote was a Red, or at least a sympathizer. ”Really I'm nothing. An old anarchist. I suppose you could call me a Boonean, now, in that I believe in incorporating anything and everything that will help make a free Mars. Sometimes I think the argument that a human-viable surface helps the revolution is a good one. Other times not. Anyway the Reds are such a great guerrilla pool. And I take their point that we're not here to, you know, reproduce Canada reproduce Canada, for G.o.d's sake! So I help. I'm good at hiding, and I like it.”
Ann nodded.
”So do you want to join them? Or at least meet them?”
”I'll think about it.”
Her focus on rock was shattered. Now she could not help noticing how many signs of life there were on the land. In the southern tens and twenties, ice from the outbreak glaciers was melting during summer afternoons, and the cold water was flowing downhill, cutting the land in new primitive watersheds, and turning talus slopes into what ecologists called fellfields, those rocky patches that were the first living communities after ice receded, their living component made of algae and lichens and moss. Sandy regolith, infected by the water and microbacteria flowing through it, became fellfield with shocking speed, she found, and the fragile landforms were quickly destroyed. Much of the regolith on Mars had been superarid, so arid that when water touched it there were powerful chemical reactions- lots of hydrogen peroxide release, and salt crystallizations- in essence the ground disintegrated, flowing away in sandy muds that only set downstream, in loose terraces called solifluction rims, and in frosty new proto-fellfields. Features were disappearing. The land was melting. After one long day's drive through terrain altered like this, Ann said to Coyote, ”Maybe I will talk to them.”
But first they returned to Zygote, or Gamete, where Coyote had some business. Ann stayed in Peter's room, as he was gone, and the room she had shared with Simon had been put to other uses. She wouldn't have stayed in it anyway. Peter's room was under Harmakhis's, a round bamboo segment containing a desk, a chair, a crescent mattress on the floor, and a window looking out at the lake. Everything was the same but different in Gamete, and despite the years she had spent visiting Zygote regularly, she felt no connection with any of it. It was hard, in fact, to remember what Zygote had been like. She didn't want to remember, she practiced forgetting a.s.siduously; any time some image from the past came to her, she would jump up and do something that required concentration, studying rock samples or seismograph readouts, or cooking complex meals, or going out to play with the kids- until the image had faded, and the past was banished. With practice one could dodge the past almost entirely.
One evening Coyote stuck his head in the door of Peter's room. ”Did you know Peter is a Red too?”
”What?”
”He is. But he works on his own, in s.p.a.ce mostly. I think that his ride down from the elevator gave him a taste for it.”
”My G.o.d,” she said, disgusted. That was another random accident; by all rights Peter should have died when the elevator fell. What were the chances of a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p floating by and spotting him, alone in areosynchronous...o...b..t? No, it was ridiculous. Nothing existed but contingency.