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

and his (though he heard anyway); the lab rats, or the
saxaclones. Serious young native Martian scientists, in fact, with just the
same variations of temperament as grad students and postdocs in any lab anywhere,
anytime; but the facts didn’t matter. They worked with him and so they were the
saxaclones. Somehow he had become the very model of the modern Martian
scientist; first as white-coated lab rat, then as full-blown mad scientist,
with a crater-castle full of eager Igors, mad-eyed but measured in manner,
little Mr. Spocks, the men as skinny and awkward as cranes on the ground, the
women drab in their protective noncoloration, their neuter devotion to Science.
Sax was very fond of them. He liked their devotion to science, it made sense to
him—an urge to understand things, to be able to express them mathematically. It
was a sensible desire. In fact it often seemed to him that if everyone were a
physicist then they would be very much better off. “Ah, no, people like the
idea of a flat universe because they find negatively curved space difficult to
deal with.” Well, perhaps not. In any case the young natives at Da Vinci Crater
were a powerful group, strange or not. At this point Da Vinci was in charge of
a lot of the underground’s technological base, and with Spencer fully engaged
there, their production capability was staggering. They had engineered the
revolution, if the truth were told, and were now in de facto control of Martian
orbital space.
    This was one reason why many of them looked displeased or at least
nonplussed when Sax first told them about the removal of the soletta and
annular mirror. He did it in a screen meeting, and their faces squinched into
expressions of alarm: Captain, it is not logical. But neither was civil war.
And the one was better than the other.
    “Won’t people object?” Aonia asked. “The greens?”
    “No doubt,” Sax said. “But right now we exist in, in anarchy. The
group in east Pavonis is a kind of proto-government, perhaps. But we in Da
Vinci control Mars space. And no matter the objections, this might avert civil
war.”
    He explained as best he could. They got absorbed in the technical
challenge, in the problem pure and simple, and quickly forgot their shock at
the idea. In fact giving them a technical challenge of that sort was like
giving a dog a bone. They went away gnawing at the tough parts of the problem,
and just a few days later they were down to the smooth polished gleam of
procedure. Mostly a matter of instructions to AIs, as usual. It was getting to
the point where having conceived a clear idea of what one wanted to do, one
could just say to an AI, “please do thus and such”— please spin the soletta and
annular mirror into Venusian orbit, and adjust the slats of the soletta so that
it becomes a parasol shielding the planet from all of its incoming insolation;
and the AIs would calculate the trajectories and the rocket firings and the
mirror angles necessary, and it would be done.
    People were becoming too powerful, perhaps. Michel always went on
about their godlike new powers, and Hiroko in her actions had implied that
there should be no limit to what they tried with these new powers, ignoring all
tradition. Sax himself had a healthy respect for tradition, as a kind of
default survival behavior. But the techs in Da Vinci cared no more for
tradition than Hiroko had. They were in an open moment in history, accountable
to no one. And so they did it.
     
    Then Sax went to Michel. “I’m worried about Ann.” They were in a
corner of the big warehouse on east Pavonis, and the movement and clangor of
the crowd created a kind of privacy. But after a look around Michel said,
“Let’s go outside.”
    They suited up and went out. East Pavonis was a maze of tents,
warehouses, manufactories, pistes, parking lots, pipelines, holding tanks,
holding yards; also junkyards and scrap heaps, their mechanical detritus
scattered about like volcanic ejecta. But Michel led