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cable stuck out of the ruins like a black
line of carbon nanotube fibers.
    There was no sign of any further Red resistance. Thus no way of
locating Ann. She was not answering her phone. So Sax returned to the warehouse
complex in east Pavonis, feeling balked. He went back inside.
    And then there she was, in the vast warehouse walking through the
others toward him as if about to plunge a knife in his heart. He sank in his
seat unhappily, remembering an overlong sequence of unpleasant interviews
between them. Most recently they had argued on the train ride out of Libya
Station. He recalled her saying something about removing the soletta and the
annular minor; which would be a very powerful symbolic statement indeed. And he
had never been comfortable with such a major element of the terraforming’s heat
input being so fragile.
    So when she said “I want something for it,” he thought he knew
what she meant, and suggested removing the minors before she could. This
surprised her. It slowed her down, it took the edge off her terrible anger.
Leaving something very much deeper, however—grief, despair-—he could not be
sure. Certainly a lot of Reds had died that day, and Red hopes as well. “I’m
sorry about Ka-sei,” he said.
    She ignored that, and made him promise to remove the space minors.
He did, meanwhile calculating the loss of light that would result, then trying
to keep a wince off his face. Insolation would drop by about twenty percent, a
very substantial amount indeed. “It will start an ice age,” he muttered.
    “Good,” she said.
    But she was not satisfied. And as she left the room, he could see
by the set of her shoulders that his concession had done little if anything to
comfort her. One could only hope her cohorts were more easily pleased. In any
case it would have to be done. It might stop a civil war. Of course a great
number of plants would die, mostly at the higher elevations, though it would
affect every ecosystem to some extent. An ice age, no doubt about it. Unless
they reacted very effectively. But it would be worth it, if it stopped the
fighting.

 
    It would have been easy to just cut the great band of the annular mirror and let it fly
away into space, right out of the plane of the ecliptic. Same with the soletta:
fire a few of its positioning rockets and it would spin away like a Catherine
wheel.
    But that would be a waste of processed aluminum silicate, which
Sax did not like to see. He decided to investigate the possibility of using the
mirrors’ directional rockets, and their reflectivity, to propel them elsewhere
in the solar system. The soletta could be located in front of Venus, and its
mirrors realigned so that the structure became a huge parasol, shading the hot
planet and starting the process of freezing out its atmosphere; this was
something that had been discussed in the literature for a long time, and no
matter what the various plans for terraforming Venus included, this was the
standard first step. Then having done that, the annular mirror would have to be
placed in the corresponding polar orbit around Venus, as its reflected light
helped to hold the soletta/parasol in its position against the push of solar
radiation. So the two would still be put to use, and it would also be a
gesture, another symbolic gesture, saying Look here—this big world might be
terraformable too. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible. Thus some of the
psychic pressure on Mars, “the only other possible Earth,”   might be relieved. This was not logical, but
it didn’t matter; history was strange, people were not rational systems, and in
the peculiar symbolic logic of the limbic system, it would be a sign to the
people on Earth, a portent, a scattering of psychic seed, a throwing together.
Look there! Go there! And leave Mars alone.
    So he talked it over with the Da Vinci space scientists, who had
effectively taken over control of the mirrors. The lab rats, people called them
behind their backs,