Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

      Michel shrugged again. ‘I have wondered that for years. I think Mars has helped her. I think Simon helped her, and Peter. But they have all been at some kind of distance. They don’t change that fundamental no in her.’

      ‘But she – she loves all this,’ Sax said, waving at the caldera. ‘She truly does.’ He thought over Michel’s analysis. ‘It’s not just a no. There’s a yes in there as well. A love of Mars.’

      ‘But if you love stones and not people,’ Michel said, ‘it’s somehow a little … unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know—’

      ‘I know—’

      ‘—and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content with it.’

      ‘She doesn’t like what’s happening to her world.’

      ‘No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most? I’m not so sure. It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.’

      Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first … and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure build-up, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like – what? – an ecology – a fellfield – or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well – a bit grandiose, that – really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better – weather-storm fronts of thought, high pressure zones, low pressure cells, hurricanes – the jetstreams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds … life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

      ‘What are you thinking?’ Michel asked.

      ‘Sometimes I worry,’ Sax admitted, ‘about the theoretical basis of these diagnoses of yours.’

      ‘Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very accurate.’

      ‘Both precise and accurate?’

      ‘Well, what, they’re the same, no?’

      ‘No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still being not very precise. Often true values aren’t really determinable, of course.’

      Michel had a curious expression on his face. ‘You’re a very accurate person, Sax.’

      ‘It’s just statistics,’ Sax said defensively. ‘Every once in a while language allows you to say things precisely.’

      ‘And accurately.’

      ‘Sometimes.’

      They looked down into the country of the caldera.

      ‘I want to help her,’ Sax said.

      Michel nodded. ‘You said that. I said I didn’t know how. For her, you are the terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help her. Do you think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?’

      Sax thought about it for a while. ‘It could get her outdoors. Outdoors without helmets, eventually without even masks.’

      ‘You think she wants that?’

      ‘I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum. The animal, you know. It feels right.’

      ‘I don’t know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.’

      Sax considered it.

      Then the whole landscape darkened.

      They looked up. The sun was black. Stars shone in the sky around it. There was a faint glow around the black disc, perhaps the sun’s corona.

      Then a sudden crescent of fire forced them to look away. That was the corona; what they had seen before had probably been the lit exosphere.

      The darkened landscape lightened again, as the artificial eclipse came to an end. But the whole sun that returned was distinctly smaller than what had shone just moments before. The old bronze button of the Martian sun! It was like a friend come back for a visit. The world was dimmer, all the colours of the caldera one shade darker, as if invisible clouds obscured the sunlight. A very familiar sight, in fact – Mars’s natural light, shining on them again for the first time in twenty-eight years.

      ‘I hope Ann saw that,’ Sax said. He felt chilled, although he knew there had not been enough time for the air to have cooled, and he was suited up in any case. But there would be a chill. He thought grimly of the fellfields scattered all over the planet, up at the four or five kilometre elevation, and lower in the mid and high latitudes. Up at the edge of the possible, whole ecosystems would now start dying. Twenty per cent drop in insolation: it was worse than any Terran ice age, more like the darkness after the great extinction events – the KT event, the Ordovician, the Devonian, or the worst one of all, the Permian event two hundred and fifty million years ago, which killed up to ninety-five per cent of all the species alive at the time. Punctuated equilibrium; and very few species survived the punctuations. The ones that did were tough, or just lucky.

      Michel said, ‘I doubt it will satisfy her.’

      This Sax fully believed. But for the moment he was distracted by thinking how best to compensate for the loss of the soletta’s light. It would be better not to have any biomes suffering great losses. If he had his way, those fellfields were just something Ann was going to have to get used to.

      It was Ls 123, right in the middle of the northern summer/southern winter, near aphelion, which along with higher elevation caused the south’s winter to be much colder than the north’s; temperatures regularly dipped to 230° K, not much warmer than the primal colds that had existed before their arrival. Now, with the soletta and annular mirror gone, temperatures would drop further still. No doubt the southern highlands were headed for a record winterkill.

      On the other hand, a lot of snow had already fallen in the south, and Sax had gained a great respect for snow’s ability to protect living things from cold and wind. The subnivean environment was quite stable. It could be that a drop in light, and subsequently in surface temperature, would not do that much harm to snowed-over plants, already shut down by their winter hardening. It was hard to say. He wanted to get into the field and see for himself. Of course it would be months or perhaps years before any difference would be quantifiable. Except in the weather itself, perhaps. And weather could be tracked merely by watching the meteorological data, which he was already doing spending many hours in front of satellite pictures and weather maps, watching for signs. As were many other people, particularly meteorologists. It made for a useful diversion when people came by to remonstrate with him for removing the mirrors, an event so common in the week following the event that it became tiresome.

      Unfortunately weather on Mars was so variable that it was difficult to tell if the removal of the big mirrors was affecting it or not. A very sad admission of the state of their understanding of the atmosphere, in Sax’s opinion. But there it was. Martian weather was a violent, semi-chaotic system. In some ways it resembled Earth’s, not surprising given that it was a matter of air and water moving around the surface of a spinning sphere: Coriolis forces were the same everywhere, and so here as on Earth there were tropical easterlies, temperate westerlies, polar easterlies, Jetstream anchor points and so on; but that was almost all one