Part 29 (1/2)

He decided to wait until Peter had talked to her, and see if that made any difference. He waited. Nowadays if he didn't talk no one bothered him. Advantages everywhere.

She came back from a talk with Peter, to eat a meal with the other Reds in their little commons, and yes she stared at him curiously. Looking over the heads of the others at him as if inspecting a new cliff on the Martian landscape. Intent and objective. Evaluative. A status change in a dynamic system is a data point that speaks to a theory. Supporting or troubling. What are you? Why are you doing this?

He met her stare calmly, tried to field it, to turn it around. Yes I am still Sax. I have changed. Who are you? Why haven't you changed? Why do you still look at me like that? I have experienced an injury. The premorbid individual is not there anymore, not quite. I have been given an experimental treatment, I feel fine, I am not the man you knew. And why haven't you changed?

If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.

She sat down to eat. It was doubtful she had read his mind in that much detail. But a great pleasure nevertheless, to be able to meet her eye!

He got in the little c.o.c.kpit with Peter and just after the timeslip they bounced down the bedrock runway, accelerating hard and tilting up at the black sky, the big streamlined s.p.a.ce plane vibrating under them. Sax lay back, crushed into his seat, and waited for the plane to curve over that asymptotic hill at the top of its course, slowing as it rose less steeply, until it was in a gentle rise through the high stratosphere, making the transition from plane to rocket as the atmosphere thinned to its last attenuated level, a hundred kilometers high, where the gases of the Russell c.o.c.ktail were annihilated daily by incoming UV rays. The plane's skin was glowing with heat. Through the filtered gla.s.s of the c.o.c.kpit it was the color of the sun at sunset. No doubt it was affecting their night vision. Below the planet was all dark, except for very faint patches of starlit glaciers in h.e.l.las Basin. They were rising still. A widening gyre. Stars packed the blackness of what looked like an enormous black hemisphere, standing on an enormous black plane. Night sky, night Mars. They rose and rose again. The incandescent rocket was translucent yellow, hallucinatorily bright and sleek. The latest thing from Vishniac, designed in part by Spencer, and made of an intermetallic compound, chiefly gamma t.i.tanium aluminum, rendered superplastic for the manufacture of heat-resistant engine parts as well as the exterior skin, which dimmed a bit as they rose higher and it cooled. He could imagine the beautiful latticework of the gamma t.i.tanium aluminum, patterned in a tapestry of nodoids and catenoids like hooks and eyes, vibrating madly with the heat. They were building such things these days. Ground-to-s.p.a.ce planes. Walk out into your backyard and fly to Mars in an aluminum can.

Sax described what he wanted to do next after this. Peter laughed.

”Do you think Vishniac can do it?”

”Oh yeah.”

”There are some design problems.”

”I know, I know. But they'll solve them. I mean you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist.”

”That's very true.”

Peter sang to pa.s.s the hours. Sax joined in when he knew the words- as in ”Sixteen Tons,” a satisfying song. Peter told the story of how he had escaped from the falling elevator. What it had been like to float in an EVA suit, alone for two days. ”Somehow it gave me a taste for it, that's all. I know that sounds strange.”

”I understand.” The shapes out here were so big and pure. The color of things.

”What was it like to learn to talk again?”

”I have to concentrate to do it. I have to think hard. Things surprise me all the time. Things I used to know and forgot. Things I never knew. Things I learned just before the injury. That period is usually occluded forever. But it was so important. When I was working around the glacier. I have to talk to your mom about that. It isn't like she thinks. You know, the land. The new plants out there. The yellow b.u.t.terfly sun. It doesn't have to be...”

”You should talk to her.”

”She doesn't like me.”

”Talk to her when we get back.”

The altimeter indicated 250 kilometers above the surface. The plane plowed up toward Ca.s.siopeia. Every star had a distinct color, different from any other. Or there were at least fifty of them. Below them, on the eastern edge of the black disk, the terminator appeared, zebra-banded sandy ochre and shadowy black. The thin crescent of sunlit Mars gave him the sudden clear perception of the disk as a great spheroid. A ball spinning through the galaxy of stars. The great huge continent-mountain of Elysium bulked over the horizon, its shape perfectly delineated by the horizontal shadows. They were looking down the length of its long saddleback, Hecates Tholus almost hidden behind the cone of Elysium Mons, Albor Tholus off to the side.

”There it is,” Peter said, and pointed up through the clear c.o.c.kpit. Above them, to the east, the eastern edge of the aerial lens was silver in the morning light, the rest of it still in the planet's shadow.

”Are we close enough yet?” Sax asked.

”Almost.”

Sax looked down again at the thickening crescent of the morning. There on the dark rough highlands of Hesperia, a cloud of smoke was billowing up from the dark surface just beyond the terminator, into the morning light. Even at their height they were in that cloud still, in the part that was no longer visible. The lens itself was surfing on that invisible thermal, using its lift and the pressure of sunlight to hold its position over the burn zone.

Now the entire lens was in the sunlight, looking like an enormous silver parachute with nothing underneath it. Its silver was also violet, sky-colored. The cup was a section of a sphere, a thousand kilometers across, its center some fifty kilometers above its rim. Spinning like a Frisbee. There was a hole at the peak, where the sunlight poured straight through. Everywhere else the circular mirror strips that made up the cup were reflecting the light from the sun and the soletta, inward and down onto a moving point on the surface below, bringing to bear so much light that it was igniting basalt. The lens mirrors heated up to almost 900K, and the liquefied rock down there was reaching 5,000K. Dega.s.sing volatiles.

Into Sax's mind, as he considered the great object flying over them, came the image of a magnifying gla.s.s, held over dry weeds and an aspen branch. Smoke, flame, fire. The concentrated rays of the sun. Photon a.s.sault. ”Aren't we close enough yet? It looks like it's right over us.”

”No, we're well out from under the edge. It wouldn't do to get under that thing, although I suppose the focus wouldn't be right to fry us. Anyway it's moving over the burn zone at almost a thousand kilometers an hour.”

”Like jets when I was young.”

”Uh.” Green lights blinked on one of his consoles. ”Okay, here we go.”

He pulled back on the stick and the plane stood on its tail, rising straight at the lens, which was still another hundred kilometers higher than they were, and well to the west of them. Peter pushed a b.u.t.ton on the console. The whole plane jerked as a bank of fletched missiles appeared from under the plane's stubby wings, lofting with them and then igniting like magnesium flares and shooting up and away, toward the lens. Pinp.r.i.c.ks of yellow fire against that huge silvery UFO, eventually disappearing from sight. Sax waited, lips pursed, and tried to stop his blinking.

The front edge of the lens began to unravel. It was a flimsy thing, nothing but a great spinning cup of solar sail bands, and it came apart with startling rapidity, its front edge rolling under it until it was tumbling forward and down, trailing long looping streamers which looked like the tangled tails of several broken kites, all falling together. A billion and a half kilograms of solar sail material, in fact, all unraveling as it fluttered down in its long trajectory, looking slow because it was so big, though probably the great ma.s.s of material was still moving at well above terminal velocity. A good portion of it would burn up before it hit the surface. Silica rain.

Peter turned and followed it in its descent, keeping well to the east of it. And so they could still see it below them, there in the violet morning sky, as the main ma.s.s of it heated to an incandescent glare and caught fire, like a great yellow comet with a hairy tangled silver tail, dropping down to the tawny planet. All fall down.

”Good shot,” Sax said.

Back in Wallace Crater they were welcomed as heroes. Peter deflected all congratulations: ”It was Sax's idea, the flight itself was no big deal, just another reconnaissance except for the firing, I don't know why we didn't think of it before.”

”They'll just drop another one into position,” Ann said from the edge of the crowd, staring at Sax with a very curious expression.

”But they're so vulnerable,” Peter said.

”Surface-to-s.p.a.ce missiles,” Sax said, feeling nervous. ”Can you invent- can you inventory inventory all orbiting objects?” all orbiting objects?”

”We already have,” Peter said. ”Some of them we don't have ID'd, but most are obvious.”

”I'd like to see the list.”

”I'd like to talk to you,” Ann told him darkly.

And the rest quickly left the room, wagging their eyebrows at each other like a bunch of Art Randolphs.

Sax sat down in a bamboo chair. It was a little room, without a window. It could have been one of the barrel vaults in Underhill, back in the beginning. The shape was right. The textures. Brick was such a stable staple. Ann pulled a chair over and sat across from him, leaning forward to stare in his face. She looked older. The vaunted Red leader, vaunted, gaunted, haunted. He smiled. ”Are you about due for a gerontological treatment?” his mouth said, surprising them both.

Ann brushed the question off as an impertinence. ”Why did you want to bring down the lens?” she said, her gaze boring into him.

”I didn't like it.”

”I know that that,” she said. ”But why?”

”It wasn't necessary. Things are warming up fast enough. There's no reason to go faster. We don't even need much more heat. And it was releasing very large amounts of carbon dioxide. That will be hard to scrub. And it was very nicely stuck- it's hard to get CO2 out of carbonates. As long as one doesn't melt the rock, it stays.” He shook his head. ”It was stupid. They were just doing it because they could. Ca.n.a.ls. I don't believe in ca.n.a.ls.”

”So it just wasn't the right kind of terraforming for you.”

”That's right.” He met her stare calmly. ”I believe in the terraforming outlined in Dorsa Brevia. You signed off too. As I recall.”

She shook her head.