Read Online Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson - Free Book Online

she was still angry, still sick at heart. This
concession—now that she had it, it meant nothing. They would figure out other
ways to heat things. Sax would make his argument using that point, no doubt.
Give the soletta to Ann, he would say, as a way of buying off the Reds. Then
forge on.
    She walked out of the big room without a glance at the others. Out
of the warehouses to her rover.
    For a while she drove blindly, without any sense of where she was
going. Just get away, just escape. Thus by accident she headed westward, and in
short order she had to stop or run over the rim’s edge.
    Abruptly she braked the car.
    In a daze she looked out the windshield. Bitter taste in her
mouth, guts all knotted, every muscle tense and aching. The great encircling
rim of the caldera was smoking at several points, chiefly from Sheffield and
Lastflow, but also from a dozen other places as well. No sight of the cable
over Sheffield—but it was still there, marked by a concentration of smoke
around its base, lofting east on the thin hard wind. Another peak banner, blown
on the endless jet stream. Time was a wind sweeping them away. The plumes of
smoke marred the dark sky, obscuring some of the many stars that shone in the
hour before sunset. It looked like the old volcano was waking again, rousing
from its long dormancy and preparing to erupt. Through the thin smoke the sun
was a dark red glowing ball, looking much like an early molten planet must have
looked, its color staining the shreds of smoke maroon and rust and crimson. Red
Mars.
    But red Mars was gone, and gone for good. Soletta or not, ice age
or not, the biosphere would grow and spread until it covered everything, with
an ocean in the north, and lakes in the south, and streams, forests, prairies,
cities and roads, oh she saw it all; white clouds raining mud on the ancient
highlands while the uncaring masses built their cities as fast as they could,
the long run-out of civilization burying her world.

 
     
    PART
TWO
                   ------------
    ---Areophany
                   -----------
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
    To Sax it looked like that least rational of conflicts, civil war.
Two parts of a group shared many more interests than disagreements, but fought
anyway. Unfortunately it was not possible to force people to study cost-benefit
analysis. Nothing to be done. Or—possibly one could identify a crux issue
causing one or both sides to resort to violence. After that, try to defuse that
issue.
    Clearly in this case a crux issue was terraforming. A matter with
which Sax was closely identified. This could be viewed as a disadvantage, as a
mediator ought ideally to be neutral. On the other hand, his actions might
speak symbolically for the terra-forming effort itself. He might accomplish
more with a symbolic gesture than anyone else. What was needed was a concession
to the Reds, a real concession, the reality of which would increase its
symbolic value by some hidden exponential factor. Symbolic value: it was a
concept Sax was trying very hard to understand. Words of all kinds gave him
trouble now, so much so that he had taken to etymology to try to understand
them better. A glance at the wrist: symbol, “something that stands for something
else,” from the Latin symbolum, adopted from a Greek word meaning “throw
together. “Exactly. It was alien to his understanding, this throwing together,
a thing emotional and even unreal, and yet vitally important.
    The afternoon of the battle for Sheffield, he called Ann on the
wrist and got her briefly, and tried to talk to her, and failed. So he drove to
the edge of the city’s wreckage, not knowing what else to do, looking for her.
It was very disturbing to see how much damage a few hours’ fighting could do.
Many years of work lay in smoking shambles, the smoke not fire ash particulates
for the most part but merely disturbed fines, old volcanic ash blown up and
then torn east on the jet stream. The