Blue Mars (86 page)

“Most of the time we sail around the North Sea. There are some
really violent storms sometimes, but we’re so big that we ride them out pretty
easily. Most of us have lived here for all ten years the ship has existed. It’s
a great life. The ship is all you need. Although it’s great fun to make
landfall from time to time. We come down to Nilokeras every Ls zero for the
spring festival. We sell what we’ve made and resupply, and party all night
long. Then back out to sea.”

“We don’t use anything but wind and sunlight, and some fish. The
environmental courts like us, they agree we’re minimum impact. The population
of the North Sea’s area might be even higher now than if it had stayed land.
There are hundreds of townships now.”

“Thousands. And the harbor towns with the shipyards, and the
seaports we visit to do business, they’re doing very well indeed.”

Ann said, “And you think this is one way we can take on some of
Earth’s surplus population.”

“Yes, we do. One of the best ways. It’s a big ocean, it could take
a lot more ships like this.”

“As long as they didn’t rely too much on fishing.”

As they walked on, Sax said to Ann, “That’s another reason that it
just isn’t worth it to force a crisis over the immigration issue.”

Ann didn’t reply. She was staring down at the sun-burnished water,
then up at one of the couple dozen masts, each with its single schooner sail.
The town looked like a tabular iceberg with its surface entirely claimed by
earth. A floating island.

“So many different kinds of nomads,” Sax commented.

“It seems that very few of the natives feel impelled to settle in
a single place.”

“Unlike us.”

“Point taken. But I wonder if this tendency means they are
inclined to a certain redness. If you know what I mean.”

“I do not.”

Sax tried to explain. “It seems to me that nomads in general tend
to make use of the land as they find it. They move around with the seasons, and
live off what they find growing at that time. And seafaring nomads of course
even more so, given that the sea is impervious to most human attempts to change
it.”

“Except for the people trying to regulate sea level, or salt
content. Have you heard about them?”

“Yes. But they’re not going to have much luck with that, I would
guess. The mechanics of saltification are still very poorly understood.”

“If they succeed it will kill a lot of freshwater species.”

“True. But the saltwater species will be happy.”

They walked across the middle of the township toward the plaza
over the dock, passing between long rows of grapevines pruned to the shape of
waist-high T’s, the intermingled horizontal vines heavy with grape clusters of
dusty indigo, and bracken, and clear viridine. Beyond the vineyards the ground
was covered with a mix of plants, like a kind of prairie, with narrow foot
trails cutting through it.

At a restaurant fronting the plaza they were treated to a meal of
pasta and shrimp. The conversation ranged everywhere. But then someone came
rushing out of the kitchen, pointing at his wrist: news had just come in of
trouble on the space elevator. The UN troops who had been sharing the customs
duties on New Clarke had taken over the whole station, and sent all the Martian
police down, charging them with corruption and declaring that the UN would
administer the upper end of the elevator by itself from now on. The UN’s
Security Council was now saying that their local officers had overstepped their
instructions, but this backpedaling did not include an invitation to the
Martians to come back up the cable again, so it looked like a smoke screen to
Sax. “Oh my,” he said. “Maya will be very angry, I fear.”

Ann rolled her eyes. “That isn’t really the most important
ramification, if you ask me.” She looked shocked, and for the first time since
Sax had found her in Olympus caldera, fully engaged in the current situation.
Drawn out of her distance. It was fairly shocking, now that he thought of it.
Even these seafarers were visibly shaken, though before they like Ann had seem
distanced from whatever circumstances obtained on land. He could see the news
tearing through the restaurant’s conversations, and throwing them all into the
same space: upheaval, crisis, the threat of war. Voices were incredulous, faces
were angry.

The people at their table were also watching Sax and Ann, curious
as to their reaction. “You’ll have to do something about this,” one of their
guides noted.

“Why us?” Ann replied tartly. “It’s you who will have to do
something about it, if you ask me. You’re the ones responsible now. We’re just
a couple of old issei.”

Their dinner companions looked startled, uncertain how to take
her. One laughed. The host who had spoken shook his head. “That’s not true. But
you’re right, we will be watching, and talking with the other townships about
how to respond. We’ll do our part. I was just saying that people will be
looking to you, to both of you, to see what you do. That isn’t so true for us.”

Ann was silenced by this. Sax returned to his meal, thinking
furiously. He found he wanter! to talk to Maya.

The evening continued, the sun fell; the dinner limped on, as they
all tried to return to some sense of normality. Sax repressed a little smile;
there might be an interplanetary crisis and there might not, but meanwhile
dinner had to be gotten through in style. And these seafarers were not the kind
of people who looked inclined to worry about the solar system at large. So the
mood rallied, and they partied over their dessert, still very pleased to have
Clayborne and Russell visiting them. And then in the last light the two of them
made their excuses, and were escorted down to sea level and their boat. The
waves on Chryse Gulf were a lot larger than they had seemed from up above.

Sax and Ann sailed off in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts.
Sax looked back up at the township, thinking about what they had seen that day.
It looked like a good life. But something about... he chased the thought, and
then at the end of the rapid steeplechase he caught it, and still held it all:
no blank-cuts these days. Which was a great satisfaction, although the content
of this particular train of thought was quite melancholy. Should he even try to
share it with Ann? Was it possible to say it?

He said, “Sometimes I regret—when I see those seafarers, and the
lives they lead—it seems ironic that we—that we stand on the brink of a—of a
kind of golden age—” There, he had said it; and felt foolish; “—which will only
come to pass when our generation has died. We’ve worked for it all our lives,
and then we have to die before it will come.”

“Like Moses outside Israel.”

“Yes? Did he not get to go in?” Sax shook his head. “These old
stories—” Such a throwing together, like science at its heart, like the flashes
of insight one got into an experiment when everything about it clarified, and
one understood something. “Well, I can imagine how he felt. It’s— it’s
frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious.
About the history we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the
rest of it. Do you know what I mean?”

Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, “Everything dies
someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to
go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That
you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that
would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.”

“True.”

And this was Ann Clayborne talking. Sax felt that his face was
glowing. That capillary action could be quite a pleasant sensation.

They returned to the Oxia archipelago and sailed through the
islands, talking about them. It was possible to talk. They ate in the cockpit,
and slept each in their own hull cabin, port and starboard. One fresh morning,
with the wind wafting offshore cool and fragrant, Sax said, “I still wonder
about the possibility of some kind of browns.” Ann glanced at him. “And where’s
the red in it?” “Well, in the desire to hold things steady. To keep a lot of
the land untouched. The areophany.”

“That’s always been green. It sounds like green with just a little
touch of red, if you ask me. The khakis.”

“Yes, I suppose. That would be Irishka and the Free Mars
coalition, right? But also burnt umbers, siennas, madder alizarins, Indian
reds.”

“I don’t think there are any Indian reds.” And she laughed darkly.

Indeed she laughed frequently, though the humor expressed seemed
often quite mordant. One evening he was in his cabin, and she up near the bow
of her hull (she took the port, he the starboard) and he heard her laugh out
loud, and coming up and looking around, he thought it must have been caused by
the sight of Pseudophobos (most people just called it Phobos), rising again swiftly
out of the west, in its old manner. The moons of Mars, sailing through the
night again, little gray potatoes of no great distinction, but there they were.
As was that dark laugh at the sight of them.

“Do you think this takeover of Clarke is serious?” Ann asked one
night as they were retiring to their hulls.

“It’s hard to say. Sometimes I think it must be a threatening
gesture only, because if it’s serious it would be so— unintelligent. They must
know that Clarke is very vulnerable to—removal from the scene.”

“Kasei and Dao didn’t find it that easy to remove.”

“No, but—” Sax did not want to say that their attempt had been
botched, but he was afraid that she would read the comment out of his silence.
“We in Da Vinci set up an X-ray laser complex in Arsia Mons caldera, buried
behind a rock curtain in the north wall, and if we set it off the cable will be
melted right at about the areosynchronous point. There isn’t a defensive system
that could stop it.”

Ann stared at him; he shrugged. He wasn’t personally responsible
for Da Vinci actions, no matter what people thought.

“But bringing down the cable,” she said, and shook her head. “It
would kill a lot of people.”

Sax remembered how Peter had survived the fall of the first cable,
by jumping out into space. Rescued by chance. Perhaps Ann was less likely to
write off the lives that would inevitably be lost. “It’s true,” he said. “It
isn’t a good solution. But it could be done, and I would think the Terrans know
that.”

“So it may just be a threat.”

“Yes. Unless they’re prepared to go further.”

North of the Oxia archipelago they passed McLaughlin Bay, the
eastern side of a drowned crater. North again was Mawrth Point, and behind it
the inlet to Mawrth Fjord, one of the narrowest and longest fjords of all. It
was a matter of constant tacking to sail up it, pushed this way and that by
tricky winds, swirling between steep convolute walls; but Sax did it anyway,
because it was a pretty fjord, at the bottom of a very deep and narrow outbreak
channel, widening as one sailed farther into it; and beyond and above the end
of the water, the rock-floored canyon continued inland for as far as one could
see, and many kilometers beyond that. He hoped to show Ann that the existence
of the fjords did not necessarily mean the drowning of all the outbreak
channels; Ares and Kasei also retained very long canyons above sea level, and
Al-Qahira and Ma’adim as well. But he said nothing of this, and Ann made no
comment.

After the maneuvering in Mawrth, he sailed them almost directly
west. To get out of the Chryse Gulf into the Acidalia region of the North Sea,
it was necessary to work around a long arm of land called the Sinai Peninsula,
sticking out into the ocean from the west side of Arabia Terra. The strait
beyond it connecting Chryse Gulf with the North Sea was 500 kilometers wide;
but it would have been 1,500 kilometers wide if it were not for the Sinai
Peninsula.

So they sailed west into the wind, day after day, talking or not
talking. Many times they came back to what it might mean to be brown. “Perhaps
the combination should be called blue,” Ann said one evening, looking over the
side at the water. “Brown isn’t very attractive, and it reeks of compromise.
Maybe we should be thinking of something entirely new.”

“Maybe we should.”

At night after dinner, and some time looking at the stars swimming
over the sloppy sea surface, they said good night, and Sax retired to the
starboard hull cabin, Ann to the port; and the AI sailed them slowly through
the night, dodging the occasional icebergs that began to appear at this
latitude, pushed into the gulf from the North Sea. It was quite pleasant.

One morning Sax woke early, stirred by a strong swell under the
hull, which pitched his narrow bed up and down in a way that his dreaming mind
had interpreted as a giant pendulum, swinging them this way and that. He
dressed with some difficulty and went abovedeck, and Ann, standing at the
shrouds, called out, “It seems the groundswell and the windchop are in a
positive interference pattern.”

“Are they!” He tried to join her, and was slammed down into a
cockpit seat by a sudden rise of the boat. “Ah!”