Blue Mars (55 page)

And now their democratic civilization was accomplishing something
that the previous system could never have accomplished, which was simply survival
in the hypermalthusian period. Now they could begin to see that fundamental
shift in systems, in this twenty-second century they were enacting; they had
shifted the balance, in order to survive the new conditions. In the cooperative
democratic economy, everyone saw the stakes were high; everyone felt
responsible for their collective fate; and everyone benefited from the frenetic
burst of coordinated construction that was going on everywhere in the solar
system.

This flowering civilization included not only the solar system
beyond Mars, but the inner planets as well. In the flush of energy and
confidence humanity was working back in to areas previously considered
uninhabitable, and now Venus was attracting a crowd of new terraformers, who
were following up on the gesture made by Sax Russell with the relocation
ofMars’s great mirrors, and had elaborated a grand vision for the eventual
inhabitation of that planet, the sister to Earth in so many ways.

And even Mercury had its settlement. Although it had to be
admitted that for most purposes, Mercury was too close to the sun. Its day
lasted fifty-nine Terran days, its year eighty-eight Terran days, so that three
of its days equaled two years, a pattern that was not a coincidence but a node
on the way to being tidally locked, like Luna around the Earth. The combination
of these two spins gave Mercury a very slow roll through its solar day, during
which the brightside hemisphere became much too hot, while the nightside
hemisphere became extremely cold. The lone city currently on the planet was
therefore a kind of enormous train, running around the planet on tracks set on
the northern forty-fifth latitude. These tracks were made of a metalloceramic
alloy that was the first of the Mercurial physicists’ many alchemical tricks, a
matrix that withstood the eight-hundred-K heat of midbrightside. The city
itself, called Terminator, then ran over these tracks at a speed of about three
kilometers per hour, which kept it within the planet’s terminator, the zone of
predawn shadow that was in most terrain about twenty kilometers wide. A slight
expansion of the tracks exposed to the morning sun farther to the east drove
the city ever westward, as it rested on tightly fitting sleeves shaped to slide
the city away from the expansion. This motion was so inexorable that resistance
to it in another part of the sleeves generated great amounts of electrical
power, as did the solar collectors trailing the city, and set on the very top
of the high Dawn Wall, catching the first blasting rays of sunlight. Even in a
civilization where energy was cheap, Mercury was amazingly blessed. And so it
joined the worlds farther out, and became one of the brightest of all. And a
hundred new floating worlds opened every year—cities in flight, little city-states,
each with its own charter, settler mix, landscape, style.

And yet still, with all the blossoming of human effort and
confidence of the accelerando, there was a sense of tension in the air, of
danger. For despite all the building, emigration, settlement, and inhabitation,
there were still eighteen billion on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars; and
the semipermeable membrane between the two planets was curved taut with the
osmotic pressure of that demographic imbalance. Relations between the two were
tense, and many feared that a prick of the taut membrane could tear everything
asunder. In this pressured situation, history was little comfort; so far they
had dealt with it well, but never before had humanity responded to a crisis of
need with any long-term consistent sensible sanity; mass madness had erupted
before; and they were the exact same animals that in previous centuries, faced
with matters of subsistence and survival, had slaughtered each other
indiscriminately. Presumably it could happen again. So people built, argued,
grew furious; waited, uneasily, for signs that the oldest superelderly were
dying; stared hard at every child they saw. A stressed renaissance, then,
living fast, on the edge, a manic golden age: the Accelerando. And no one could
say what would happen next.

Zo sat at the back of a room
full of diplomats, looking out the window at Terminator as the
oval city rolled majestically over the blasted wastelands of Mercury. The
herni-ellipsoidal space under the city’s high clear dome would have been a
pretty airspace to fly in, but the local authorities had banned it as too
dangerous—one of many fascist regulations that bound life here—the state as
nanny, what Nietzsche so aptly called the slave mentality, still alive and well
here at the end of the twenty-second century, in fact popping up everywhere,
hierarchy reerecting its comforting structure in all these new provincial
settlements, Mercury, the asteroids, the outer systems—everywhere except on
noble Mars.

Here on Mercury it was particularly bad. Meetings between the
Martian delegation and the Mercurians had been going on in Terminator for
weeks, and Zo was tired of them, both the meetings and the Mercurial
negotiators, a secretive self-important group of oligarchic mullahs haughty and
fawning at the same time, who had not yet comprehended the new order of things
in the solar system. She wanted to forget them and their little world, to go
home and fly.

On the other hand, in her cover as a lowly staff assistant she had
up to this point been an entirely minor figure in the proceedings, and now that
negotiations were grinding to a halt, stalled on the stubborn incomprehension
of these happy slaves, her turn had come at last. As the meeting broke up, she
took aside an aide to the highest leader in Terminator, who was called rather
picturesquely the Lion of Mercury, and she asked the aide for a private
meeting. The young man, an ex-Terran, was agreeable—Zo had made sure of his
interest long before—and they retired to a terrace outside the city offices.

Zo put a hand to the man’s arm, said kindly, “We’re very concerned
that if Mercury and Mars don’t make a solid partnership, Terra will wedge
between us and play us off against each other. We’re the two largest
collections of heavy metals left in the solar system, and the more civilization
spreads, the more valuable that becomes. And civilization is certainly
spreading. This is the Accelerando, after all. Metals are valuable.”

And Mercury’s natural fund of metals, though hard to mine, was
truly spectacular; the planet was only a little bigger than Luna and yet its
gravity nearly equaled that of Mars, a very tangible sign of its heavy iron
core, and its accompanying array of more precious metals, seamed all through
the meteor-battered surface.

“Yes ... ?” the young man said.

“We feel that we need to establish a more explicit....”

“Cartel?”

“Partnership.”

The young Mercurian smiled. “We aren’t worried about being pitted
against Mars by anyone.”

“Obviously. But we are.”

For a time there, at the beginning of its colonization, Mercury
had seemed to be very flush. Not only did the colonists have metals, but being
so close to the sun, they had the possibility of tapping a great deal of solar
energy. Just the resistance set up between the city’s sleeves and the expanding
tracks they slid over created enormous amounts of it, and there was even more
in solar-collection potential; collectors in Mercurial orbit had started lazing
some of that sunlight out to the new outer-solar-system colonies. From the first
fleet of track-laying cars, in 2142, through the rolling construction of
Terminator in the 2150s, and throughout the 2160s and 70s, the Mercurians had
thought they were rich.

Now it was 2181, however, and with the successful wide deployment
of various kinds of fusion power, energy was cheap, and light was reasonably
plentiful. The so-called lamp satellites, and the gas lanterns burning in the
uoper atmospheres of the gas giants, were being built and lit all over the
outer system. As a result Mercury’s copious solar resources had been rendered
insignificant. Mercury had become once again nothing more than a metal-rich but
dreadfully hot-and-cold place, a hardship assignment. And unterraformable to
boot.

, Quite a crash in their fortunes, as Zo reminded the young man
without much subtlety. Which meant they needed to cooperate with their more
conveniently located allies in the system. “Otherwise the risk of Terran return
to dominance is very real.”

“Terra is too enmeshed in its own problems to endanger anyone else,”
the young man said.

Zo shook her head gently. “The more trouble Terra is in, the worse
danger for the rest of us. That’s why we’re worried. That’s why we’re thinking
that, if you don’t want to enter into an agreement with us, we may just have to
build another city and track system on Mercury, down in the southern
hemisphere, and cruise in the terminator down there. Where some of the best
metal deposits are.”

The young man was shocked. “You couldn’t do that without our
permission.”

“Couldn’t we?”

“No city on Mercury can exist if we don’t want it to.”

“Why, what will you do?”

The young man was silent.

Zo said, “Anyone can do what they want, eh? This is true for
everyone ever born.”

The young man thought it over. “There’s not enough water.”

“No.” Mercury’s water supply consisted in its entirety of small
ice fields lying inside craters at the two poles, where they remained in
permanent shadow. These crater glaciers contained enough water for Terminator’s
purposes, but not much more. “A few comets directed at the poles would add
more, however.”

“Unless their impact blasted all the water on the poles away! No,
that wouldn’t work! The ice in those polar craters is only a tiny fraction of
the water from billions of years of comets, hitting all over the planet. Most
of the water was lost to space on impact, or burned off. The same thing would
happen if comets struck up there now. You’d get a net loss.”

“The AI modelers suggest all kinds of possibilities. We could
always try it and see.”

The young man stepped back, affronted. And rightly so; you
couldn’t put a threat much more explicitly than that. But in slave moralities
the good and the stupid tended to become much the same, so one had to be
explicit. Zo held her expression steady, though the young man’s indignation had
a commedia dell’arte quality that was quite funny. She stepped closer to him,
emphasizing their difference in height; she had half a meter on him.

“I’ll give the Lion your message,” he said through his teeth.

“Thanks,” Zo said, and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.

These slaves had created for themselves a ruling caste of
physicist-priests, who were a black box for those on the outside, but like all
good oligarchies predictable and powerful in their exterior action. They would
take the hint, and be able to act on it. An alliance would follow. So Zo left
their offices, and walked happily down the stepped streets of the Dawn Wall.
Her work was done, and so very likely the mission would soon return to Mars.

She entered the Martian consulate midway down the wall, sent a
call to Jackie letting her know that the next move had been made. After that
she walked out onto the balcony to have a smoke.

Her color vision surged under the impact of the chrom-otropics
lacing her cigarette, and the little city below her became quite stunning, a
Fauvist fantasia. Against the Dawn Wall the terracing rose in ever-narrower
strips, until the highest buildings (the offices of the city rulers, naturally)
were a mere line of windows under the Great Gates and the clear dome above it.
Tile roofs and balconies were nestled under the green treetops below her, the
balconies all floored and walled by mosaics. Down on the oval flat that held
the greater part of the city, the roofs were bigger and closer together, the
greenery bunched in crops that glowed under the light that bounced down from
filtered mirrors in the dome; altogether it looked like a big Faberge egg,
elaborate, colorful, pretty in the way that all cities were.

But to be trapped inside one . .. well, there was nothing for it
but to pass the hours in as entertaining a manner as possible, until she got
the word to go home. Part of one’s nobility was devotion to duty, after all.

So she strode down the wall’s staircase streets to Le Dome, to
party with Miguel and Arlene and Xerxes, and the band of composers, musicians,
writers and other artists and aesthetes who hung out at the cafe. It was a wild
bunch. Mercury’s craters had all been named centuries before after the most
famous artists in Terran history, and so as Terminator • rolled along it passed
Diirer and Mozart, Phidias and Purcell, Turgenev and Van Dyke; and elsewhere on
the planet were Beethoven, Imhotep, Mahler, Matisse, Murasaki, Milton, Mark
Twain; Homer and Holbein touched rims; Ovid starred the rim of the much larger
Pushkin, in one of many reversals of true importance; Goya overlapped
Sophocles, Van Gogh was inside Cervantes; Chao Meng-fu was full of ice; and so
on and so forth, in a most capricious manner, as if the naming committee of the
International Astronomical Union had one night gotten hilariously drunk and
started tossing named darts at a map; there was even a clue commemorating this
party, a huge escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.

Zo thoroughly approved the method. But the effect on the artists
currently living on Mercury had been catastrophic in the extreme. Constantly
confronted as they were with Terra’s unmatchable canon, an overwhelming anxiety
of influence had crippled them. But their partying had taken on a corresponding
greatness that Zo quite enjoyed.

On this evening, after a considerable amount of drinking in the
Dome, during which time the city rolled between Stravinsky and Vyasa, the group
took off through the narrow alleyways of the city, looking for trouble. A few
blocks away they barged in on a ceremony of Mithraists or Zo-roastrians, sun
worshipers in any case, influential in local government and indeed perhaps the
heart of it, and their catcalls quickly broke up the meeting and stimulated a
fist-fight, and in short order they had to run to avoid arrest by the local
constabulary, the spasspolizei as the Dome crowd called them.

After that they went to the Odeon, but were kicked out for being
unruly; then they cruised the alleyways of the entertainment dfstrict, and
danced outside a bar where loud bad industrial was being played. But there was
something missing. Forced gaiety was so pathetic, Zo thought, looking down at
their sweaty faces. “Let’s go outside,” she suggested. “Let’s go out on the
surface and play piper at the gates of dawn.”

No one except Miguel showed any interest. They were worms in a
bottle, they had forgotten the ground existed. But Miguel had promised to take
her out many times, and now, with her time on Mercury short, he was finally
just bored enough to agree to go.

Terminator’s tracks were numerous, each smooth gray cylinder held
several meters off the ground by an endless row of thick pylons. As the city
slid majestically westward, it passed small stationary platforms leading to
underground transfer bunkers, baked ballardian space-plane runways, and
crater-rim refuges. Leaving the city was a controlled activity, no surprise,
but Miguel had a pass, and so the two of them activated the south city doors
with it, and stepped into the lock and across into an underground station called
Hammersmith. There they suited up, in bulky but flexible spacesuits, and went
out through a lock into a tunnel, and up onto the blasted dust of Mercury.

Nothing could have been more clean and spare than this waste of
black and gray. In such a context Miguel’s drunken giggling bothered Zo more
than usual, and she turned down her helmet intercom until it was no more than a
whisper.

Walking east of the city was dangerous; even standing still was
dangerous; but to see the sun’s edge, that’s what they had to do. Zo kicked at
the rocks as they wandered southwest, to get an angle on their view of the
city. She wished she could fly over this black world; presumably some kind of
rocket backpack would do the trick, but no one had bothered to work it up, as
far as she knew. So they trudged along instead, keeping a sharp eye to the
east. Very soon the sun would rise over that horizon; above them now, in the
ultrathin neon-argon atmosphere, fine dust kicked up by electron bombardment
turning to a faint white mist in the solar bombardment. Behind them the very
top of the Dawn Wall was a blaze of pure white, impossible to look at even
through the heavy differential filtering of their helmet face masks.

Then the rocky flat horizon ahead of them to the east, near
Stravinsky Crater, turned into a silver nitrate image of itself. Zo stared into
the explosive phosphorescent dancing line, rapt: Sol’s corona, like a forest
fire in some silver forest just over the horizon. Zo’s spirit flashed likewise,
she would have flown like Icarus into the sun if she could, she felt like a
moth wanting the flame, a kind of spiritual sexual hunger, and indeed she was
crying out in just the same involuntary orgasmic cries, such a fire, such a
beauty. The solar rapture, they called this back in the city, and well named.
Miguel felt it as well; he was leaping from boulder tops eastward, arms spread
wide, like Icarus trying to launch himself.

Then he came down awkwardly in the dust, and Zo could hear his cry
even with her intercom volume turned almost off. She ran to him and saw the
impossible angle of his left knee, cried out herself and knelt at his side.
Through the suit the ground was frigid. She helped him up, his arm over her
shoulder. She turned up the volume on her intercom, even though he was groaning
loudly. “Shut up,” she said. “Concentrate, pay attention.”