Blue Mars (60 page)

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 Uranus, 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 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 Claybome
proved to be indeed as withered and sun-dried as Russell, but
even more silent and strange— waspish, laconic, prone 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, passing 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 shells 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 space elevator, tenting spaces 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
terra-forming 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.

lo, 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
lo’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
space 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 lo 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, clusters 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 space 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 massive 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 space
mirrors and terraforming techniques generally, through an association of
aerospace co-ops interested in obtaining more projects now that the situation
in Martian space was largely stabilized. They would contribute capital and
expertise, in return for preferential trade agreements, supplies of heliunij
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 association 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 Terfan 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 lo: 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 lo 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 god. 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 cocktail 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 lo, 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
grassy 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 pinprick lanterns.

They passed a line of wooden buildings; the wood came from
forested islands, floating around like rafts on the far side of the lake.
Streetgrass 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 lo 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 assistants 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 canal. “Like some kind of sign. I keep
expecting it to come around into view.”

The air was chill and damp. The people they passed were mostly of
Terran origin, part of the diaspora. Some fliers cut la/y 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.”