Blue Mars m-3
Page 56
Nevertheless people had come, people had settled. This was no surprise to Zo; there were people exploring and starting to build on Triton, on Pluto, on Charon, and if a tenth planet were discovered and an expedition sent out to it, they would no doubt find a tent town already there, its citizens already squabbling with each other, already bristling at any suggestion of outside interference in their affairs. This was life in the diaspora.
The major tent town in the Uranian system was on Oberon, the biggest and farthest out of the fifteen moons. Zo and Ann and the rest of the travelers from Mars parked in a planetary orbit just outside Oberon, and took a ferry down to the moon to make a brief visit to the main settlement.
This town, Hippolyta, spanned one of the big groove valleys that were common to all the larger Uranian moons. Because the gravity was even more meager than the light was dim, the town had been designed as a fully three-dimensional space, with railings and glide ropes and flying dumbbell waiters, cliffside balconies and elevators, chutes and ladders, diving boards and trampolines, hanging restaurants and plinth pavilions, all illuminated by bright white floating lamp globes. Zo saw immediately that so much paraphernalia in the air made flying inside the tent impossible; but in this gravity daily life was a kind of flight, and as she bounded in the air with a flex of her foot, she decided to join those residents who treated daily life that way; she danced. And in fact very few people tried to walk in the Terran way; here human movement was naturally airborne, sinuous, full of vaulting leaps and spinning dives and long Tarzan loops. The lowest level of the city was netted.
The people who lived out here came from everywhere else in the system, although of course they were mostly Martian or Terran. At this point there were no native Uranians, except for a single creche of young children who had been born to mothers building the settlement. Six moons were now occupied, and recently they had dropped a number of gas lanterns into the upper atmosphere of Uranus, to swim in rings around its equator; these now burned in the planet’s blue-green like pinpricks of sunlight, forming a kind of diamond necklace around the middle of the giant. These lanterns had increased the system’s light enough so that everyone they met in Oberon remarked on how much more color there was in things, but Zo was not impressed. “I’d hate to have seen it before,” she said to one of the local enthusiasts, “it’s Monochromomundos.” Actually all the buildings in the town were brightly painted in broad swaths of color, but which color a swath happened to be was sometimes beyond Zo’s telling. She needed a pupil dilator.
But the locals seemed to like it. Of course some of them spoke of moving on after the Uranian towns were finished, out to Triton, “the next great problem,” or Pluto or Charon; they were builders. But others were settling in here for good, giving themselves drugs and genetic transcriptions to adapt to the low g, to increase the sensitivity of their eyes, etc. They spoke of guiding in comets from the Oort cloud to provide water, and perhaps forcing two or three of the smaller uninhabited moons to collide, to create larger and warmer bodies to work with, “artificial Mirandas” as one person called them.
Ann walked out of that meeting, or rather pulled herself along a railing, unable to cope with the mini-g. After a while Zo followed her, onto streets covered with luxuriant green grass. She looked up: aquamarine giant, slender dim rings; a cold fey sight, unappealing by any previous human standard, and perhaps untenable in the long run because of the moonlet gravity. But back in the meeting there had been Uranians praising the planet’s subtle beauties, inventing an aesthetics to appreciate it, even as they planned to modify everything they could. They emphasized the subtle shades of the colors, the cool warmth of the tented air, the movement so like flight, like dance in a dream… Some of them had even become patriots to the point of arguing against radical transformation; they were as preservationist as this inhospitable place could logically sustain.
And now some of these preservationists found Ann. They came up to Ann in a group, standing in a circle around her to shake her hand, hug her, kiss the top of her head; one got down on his knees to kiss her feet. Zo saw the look on Ann’s face and laughed. “Come on,” she said to the group, who apparently had been assigned a kind of guardian status for the moon Miranda. The local version of Reds, sprung into existence out here where it made no sense at all, and long after redness had ceased to be much of an issue even on Mars. But they flowed or pulled themselves into position around a table set out in the middle of the tent on a tall slender column, and ate a meal as the discussion rangecTall over the system. The table was an oasis in the dim air of the tent, with the diamond necklace in its round jade setting shining down on them; it seemed the center of town, but Zo saw suspended in the air other such oases, and no doubt they seemed like the center as well. Hippolyta was a real town, but Oberon could hold scores of towns like it, and so would Titania, Ariel, Miranda; small as they were, these satellites all had surfaces covering hundreds of square kilometers. This was the attraction of these sun-forsaken moons: free land, open space — a new world, a frontier, with its ever-receding chance to start new, to found a society from scratch. For the Uranians this freedom was worth more than light or gravity. And so they had gathered the programs and the starter robots, and taken off for the high frontier with plans for a tent and a constitution, to be their own first hundred.
But these were precisely the kind of people least interested in hearing about Jackie’s plans for a systemwide alliance. And already there had been local disagreements strong enough to have caused trouble; among the people sitting around the table were some serious enemies, Zo could tell. She watched their faces closely as the head of their delegation, Marie, laid out the Martian proposal in the most general terms: an alliance designed to deal with the massive’ historical-economic-numerical gravity well of Earth, which was huge, teeming, flooded, mired in its past like a pig in a sty, and still the dominant force in the diaspora. It was in the best interests of all the other settlements to band with Mars and present a united front, in control of their own immigration, trade, growth — in control of their destinies.
Except none of the Uranians, despite their arguments with each other, looked at all convinced. An elderly woman who was the mayor of Hippolyta spoke, and even the Mir-andan “Reds” nodded: they would deal with Earth on their own. Earth or Mars was equally dangerous to freedom. Out here they planned on dealing with all potential alliances or confrontations as free agents, in temporary collusion or opposition with equals, depending on circumstances. There was simply no need for any more formal arrangements to be made. “All that alliance stuff smacks of control from above,” the woman concluded. “You don’t do it on Mars, why try it out here?”
“We do do it on Mars,” Marie said. “That level of control is emergent from the complex of smaller systems below it, and it’s useful for dealing with problems at the holistic level. And now at the interplanetary level. You’re confusing totalization with totalitarianism, a very serious error.”
They did not look convinced. Reason had to be backed with leverage; that was why Zo was along. And the application of leverage would go easier with the reasoning laid out like this beforehand.
Throughout the dinner Ann remained silent, until the general discussion ended and the Miranda group began to ask her questions. Then she came alive, as if switched on, and asked them in return about current local planetology: the classification of different regions of Miranda as parts of the two colliding planetessimals, the recent theory that identified the tiny moons Ophelia, Desdemona, Bianca, and Puck as ejected pieces of the Mirandan collision, and so on. Her questions were detailed and knowledgeable; the guardians were thrilled, in transports, their eyes as big as lemurs’ eyes. The rest of the Uranians were likewise pleased to see Ann’s interest. She was The Red; now Zo saw what that really meant; she was one of the most famous people in history. And it seemed possible that all the Uranians had a little Red in them; unlike the settlers of the Jovian and Saturnian systems, they had no plans for large-scale terra
forming, they planned to live in tents and go out on the primal rock for the rest of their lives. And they felt — at least its guardian group felt — that Miranda was so unusual that it had to be left entirely alone. That was a red idea, of course. Nothing humans did there, one of the Uranian Reds said, would do anything but reduce what was most valuable about it. It had an intrinsic worth that transcended even its value as a pla-netological specimen. It had its dignity. Ann watched them carefully as they said this, and Zo saw in her eyes that she did not agree, or even quite understand. For her it was a matter of science — for these people, a matter of spirit. Zo actually sympathized more with the locals’ view than Ann’s, with its cramped insistence on the object. But the result was the same, they both had the Red ethic in its pure form: no terraforming on Miranda, of course, also no domes, no tents, no mirrors; only a single visitor’s station and a few rocket pads (though this too appeared to be controversial within the guardian group); a ban on anything except no-impact foot travel, and rocket hops high enough over the surface to avoid disturbing the dust. The guardian group conceived of Miranda as wilderness, to be walked through but never lived on, never changed. A climber’s world, or even better, a flier’s world. Looked at and nothing more. A natural work of art.
Ann nodded at all this.: And there — there it was, something more in her than the crimping fear: a passion for rock, in a world of rock. Fetishes could fix on anything. And all these people shared the fetish. Zo found it peculiar to be among them, peculiar and intriguing. Certainly her leverage point was coming clear. The guardian group had arranged a special ferry to Miranda, to show it to Ann. No one else would be there. A private tour of the strangest moon of all, for the strangest Red. Zo laughed. “I’d like to come along,” she said earnestly.
And the Great No said yes. That was Ann on Miranda.
It was the smallest of Uranus’s five big moons, only 470 kilometers in diameter. In its early years, some 3.5 billion years before the present, its smaller precursor had run into another moon of about the same size; the two had shattered, then clumped, then, in the heat of the collision, coalesced into a single ball. But the new moon had cooled before the coalescing was quite finished.
The result was a landscape out of a dream, violently divergent and disarranged. Some regions were as smooth as skin, others were ripped raw; some were metamorphosed surfaces of two proto-moons, others were exposed interior material. And then there were the deeply grooved rift zones, where the fragments met, imperfectly. In these zones extensive parallel groove systems bent at acute angles, in dramatic chevron formations, a clear sign of the tremendous torques involved in the collision. The big rifts were so large that they were visible from space as hack marks, incised scores of kilometers deep into the side of the gray sphere.
They came down on a plateau next to the biggest of these hacked chasms, called Prospero’s Rift. They suited up, then left the spacecraft, and walked out to the rift’s edge. A dim abyss, so deep that the bottom looked to be on a different world. Combined with the airy micro-g, the sight gave Zo the distinct feeling of flying, flying however as she sometimes did in dreams, all Martian conditions suspended in favor of some sky of the spirit. Overhead Uranus floated full and green, giving all of Miranda a jade tinge. Zo danced along the rim, pushing off on her toes and floating, floating, coming down in little plies, her heart full of beauty. So strange, the diamond sparks of the gas lanterns, surfing on Uranus’s stratosphere; the eldritch jade. Lights hung across a round green paper lantern. The depths of the abyss only suggested. Everything glowing with its own internal greenness, viriditas bursting out of every thing — and yet everything still and motionless forever, except for them, the intruders, the observers. Zo danced.
Ann hiked along much more comfortably than she had in Hippolyta, with the unconscious grace of someone who has spent a lot of time walking on rock. Boulder ballet; she carried a long angular hammer in her thick glove, and her thigh pockets bulged with specimens. She didn’t respond to the exclamations of Zo or the guardian group, she was oblivious to them. Like an actor playing the part of Ann Clayborne. Zo laughed: that one could become such a cliche!
“If they domed this dark backward and abysm of time, it would make a beautiful place to live,” she said. “Lots of land for the amount of tent needed, eh? And such a view. It would be a wonder.”
No response to such a blunt provocation, of course. But it would set them thinking. Zo followed the guardian group like an albatross. They had started descending a broken staircase of rock that lined the edge of a slim buttress, extending far out from the chasm wall, like a fold of drapery in a marble statue. This feature ended in a flat swirl several kilometers out from the wall, and a kilometer or more lower than the rim. After the flat spot the buttress fell away abruptly, in a sheer drop to the chasm floor, some twenty kilometers straight down. Twenty kilometers! Twenty thousand meters, some seventy thousand feet… Even great Mars itself could boast no such wall.
There were a number of buttresses and other deformations on the wall similar to the one they were hiking out on: flutings and draperies, as in a limestone cavern, but formed all at once; the wall had been melted, molten rock had dripped into the abyss until the chill of space had frozen it forever. Everything was visible from every point of their descent. A railing had been bolted to the buttress’s edge, and they were all clipped to this railing by lines, connected to harnesses in their spacesuits; a good thing, as the edge of the buttress was narrow, and the slightest slip sideways could launch one out into the space of the chasm. The spidery little spacecraft that had dropped them off was going to fly down and take them off at the bottom of the staircase, from the flat spot at the end of the buttress promontory. So they could descend without a worry for the return; and descend they did, for minute after minute, in a silence that was not at all companionable. Zo had to grin; you could almost hear them thinking black thoughts at her, the grinding was palpable. Except for Ann, who was stopping every few meters to inspect the cracks between their rough stairs.
“This obsession with rock is so pathetic,” Zo said to her on a private band. “To be so old and still so small. To limit yourself to the world of inert matter, a world that will never surprise you, never do a single thing. So that you won’t be hurt. Areology as a kind of cowardice. Sad, really.”
A noise on the intercom: air shot between front teeth. Disgust.
Zo laughed.
“You’re an impertinent girl,” Ann said.
“Yes I am.”
“And stupid as well.”
“That I am not!” Zo was surprised at her own vehemence. And then she saw Ann’s face was twisted with anger behind her faceplate, and her voice hissed in the intercom over sharp heavy breaths.‘
“Don’t ruin the walk,” Ann snapped.
“I was tired of being ignored.”
“So who’s afraid now?”
“Afraid of the boredom.”
Another disgusted hiss. “You’ve been very poorly brought up.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Oh yours. Yours. But we have to suffer the results.”
“Suffer on. I’m the one that got you here, remember.”
“Sax is the one who got me here, bless his little heart.”
“Everyone’s little to you.”
“Compared to this…” The movement of her helmet showed she had glanced down into the rift.
“This speechless immobility that you’re so safe in.”
“This is the wreckage of a collision very similar to other planetessimal collisions in the early solar system. Mars had some, Earth too. That’s the matrix life emerged out of. This is a window into that time, understand?”
“I understand, but I don’t care.”
“You don’t think it matters.”
“Nothing matters, in the sense you mean. There is no meaning to all this. It’s just an accident of the Big Bang.”
“Oh please,” Ann said. “Nihilism is so ridiculous.”
“My brave little nihilist.”
“Yes — I face it. And then enjoy what can be enjoyed.”
“Which is?”
“Pleasure. The senses and their input. I’m a sensualist, really. It takes some courage, I think. To face pain, to risk death to get the senses really roaring…”
“You think you’ve faced pain?”
Zo remembered a stalled landing at Overlook, the pain-beyond-pain of broken legs and ribs. “Yes. I have.”
Radio silence. The static of the Uranian magnetic field. Perhaps Ann was allowing her the experience of pain, which given its omnipresence was no great generosity. In fact it made Zo furious. “Do you really think it takes centuries to become human, that no one was human until you geriatrics came along? Keats died at twenty-five, have you read Hyperion? Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase ofHyperionl Really, you issei are so horrible. And you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven’t changed from the moment you touched Mars…”
“Quite an accomplishment, eh?”
“An accomplishment in playing dead. Ann Clayborne, the greatest dead person who ever lived.”
“And an impertinent girl. But look at the grain of this rock, twisted like a pretzel.”
“Fuck the rocks.”
“I’ll leave that to the sensualist. No, look. This rock hasn’t changed in three-point-five billion years. And when it did change, my Lord what a change.”