Read Online Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson - Free Book Online

pitcher’s mound and we threw the ball back and forth. “That pitcher really got you yesterday.”
    â€œYeah. Right on my kneecap.”
    Dad grinned. “I saw how you hung in there the next time you got up. I like that.” He caught and threw. “But why did you try to steal third when you had just been hit on the knee?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œYou were out by a mile.” He fielded a low one. “And Sandy had just bunted and got out to get you to second. And once you’re on second you’re in scoring position.”
    â€œI know,” I said. “I just took off when I got a good lead.”
    â€œYou sure did.” Dad was grinning, he threw a hard one at me. “That’s my Emma. You’re awful fast. You could probably steal third, if you worked hard enough. Sure. We work hard at it, you could be a real speedster.…”
    And then I was running, across the open desert, the hard-baked oxidized sand of south Syrtis. In my dream the broad plain was like the Lazuli Canyon, filled with breathable air. I ran barefoot, in my gym shorts and shirt. In Mars’s gentle grasp I bounded forward, arms making a sort of swimming motion, as my father had taught me. No one had really worked on running in Martian gravity; I was working it out for myself, with Dad’s help. I was in some sort of race, far ahead of the others, pushing off the warm gritty sand with great shoves of my thighs; feeling the thin chill air rush by. I could hear my father’s voice: “Run, Emma, run!” And I ran across that red plain, free and powerful, faster and faster, feeling like I could run over the horizon before me and on forever, all the way around the planet.
    Nadezhda and Marie-Anne woke me coming through the door, talking of excess biomass. My heart was thumping, my skin was damp. In my mind I still heard my father’s voice. “Run!”
    *   *   *
    They began working incessantly to complete the starship. Nadezhda and Marie-Anne stayed up to all hours in our room, poring over programs and program results. It was laughable, really, for having missed them the Committee police weren’t likely to pass that way again. Nevertheless they hurried, and my roommates grew more and more serious as days passed.
    â€œâ€¦ Degree of closure of any substance is established by its rate of consumption in the system, E, and the rate of flow in incomplete closure, e,” Nadezhda would mutter, as if praying, glancing balefully at me as I refused to work with them for more than several hours a day. The lights focused on the little desk, Marie-Anne hunched over the computer screen, copying down figures.… “The substance’s closure coefficient K is determined by K equals I minus e over E.…”
    And closure for the whole system was a complex compilation of the degrees of closure for all the substances being recycled. But they could not get that master coefficient high enough, do what they might. I tried hard to figure out something myself. But perfect closure is not natural, it does not exist anywhere, except perhaps in the universe as a whole. Even there, no doubt each big bang is a little bit smaller.… In the starship, the leaks would be in waste recycling. They couldn’t deal with the accumulation of chlorides, or the accumulation of humic matter in the algal reactors. And they wouldn’t be able to completely recycle corpses, neither animal nor human. Certain minerals … if only they could be re-introduced into the system, made useful to something which would transform them into something back in the mainstream of the cycle.… So we worked, for hours and hours, mutating and testing bacteria, juggling the physiochemical processes, trying to make a tail-in-mouth snake that would roll across the galaxy.
    One night when they were gone I typed out the full program and filled in estimated figures of my own, to find