The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

If you don’t go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all.”

      “Sounds about right to me,” John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him.

      “Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is – people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”

      “Better just to concentrate on what we’re doing here,” Marina put in. “The basic equation is simple, efficiency merely equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in, times one hundred to put it in the form of a percentage. In the classic sense of passing along calories to one’s predator, ten percent was average, and twenty percent doing really well. Most predators at the tops of food chains did more like five percent.”

      “This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers,” Vlad said. “Robber barons are not really very efficient.”

      “So tigers don’t have predators not because they’re so tough, but because it’s not worth the effort,” John said.

      “Exactly!”

      “The problem is in calculating the values,” Marina said. “We have had to simply assign certain calorie-equivalent numerical values to all kinds of activities, and then go on from there.”

      “But we were talking about economics?” John said.

      “But this is economics, don’t you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use – this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South.”

      “They were predators on the South,” John said.

      “Yes, and they will become predators on us too, if we let them. And like all predators their efficiency is low. But here, you see – in this theoretical state of independence that you speak of—” she grinned at John’s look of consternation — “you do, you have to admit that that is ultimately what you talk about all the time, John – well, there it should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the system.”

      Dmitri, coming in the lab, said, “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs!”

      “No, that’s not the same,” Vlad said. “What it means is, You get what you pay for!”

      “But that’s already true,” John said. “How is this different from the economics that already exist?”

      They all scoffed at once, Marina most persistently: “There’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money – that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.

      “Well,” Vlad said, “we can say that their efficiency is very low, and that they predate on the system without having any predators, so that they are either the top of the chain or parasitical, depending on how you define it. Advertising, money brokering, some types of manipulation of the law, some politics …”

      “But all of these are subjective judgements!” John exclaimed. “How have you actually assigned calorific values to such a variety of activities?”

      “Well, we have done our best to calculate what they contribute back to the system in terms of well-being measured as a physical thing. What does the activity equal in terms of food, or water, or shelter, or clothing, or medical aid, or education, or free time? We’ve talked it over, and usually everyone at Acheron has offered a number, and we have taken the mean. Here, let me show you …”

      And they would talk through the evening about it before the computer screen, and John would ask questions, and plug Pauline in to record the screens and tape the discussions, and they would go through the equations and jab their fingers at the flow charts, and then stop for coffee and perhaps take it up to the crest, to pace the length of the greenhouse arguing vehemently about the human value in kilocalories of plumbing, opera, simulation programming and the like. They were up on the crest, in fact, one afternoon near sunset, when John looked up from the equation on his wristpad, and stared up the long slope toward Olympus Mons.

      The sky had darkened. It occurred to him that it might be just another double eclipse: Phobos was so close overhead that it blocked a third of the sun when it crossed in front of it, and Deimos about a ninth, and a couple times a month they crossed at the same time, causing a shadow to be cast across the land, as if a film had got in your eye, or you had had a bad thought.

      But this wasn’t an eclipse; Olympus Mons was hidden from view, and the high southern horizon was a fuzzy bronze bar. “Look at that,” he said to the others, and pointed. “A dust storm.” They hadn’t had a global dust storm in over ten years. John called up the weather satellite photos on his wristpad. The origin of the storm had been near the Thaumasia mohole, Senzeni Na. He called up Sax and found him blinking philosophically, stating his surprise in mild tones.

      “Winds at the edge of the storm were up to six hundred and sixty kilometers an hour,” Sax said. “A new planetary record. It looks like this is going to be a big one. I thought the cryptogamic soils in the storm start-up zones would have dampened them, or even stopped them. Obviously that model had something wrong with it.”

      “Okay, Sax, too bad about that, but it’ll be okay, I gotta go now because it’s rolling right down on us now and I want to watch.”

      “Have fun,” Sax said, deadpan, before John clicked him off. Vlad and Ursula were scoffing at Sax’s model; temperature gradients between biotically-defrosted soil and the remaining frosted areas would be greater than ever, and the winds between the two regions correspondingly fiercer; so that when they finally hit loose fines, off they would go. Totally obvious.

      “Now that it’s happened,” John said. He laughed and moved down the greenhouse to watch the storm’s approach by himself. Scientists could be so catty.

      The wall of dust rolled down the long lava slopes of Olympus Mons’s northern aureole. It had already halved the land visible since John first saw it, and now it approached like a giant breaking wave, a billowy chocolate milk wave ten thousand meters high, with a bronze filigree foaming up and off it, leaving great curved streamers in the pink sky above. “Wow!” John cried. “Here it comes! Here it comes!” Suddenly the crest of the Acheron fin seemed located a great distance above the long narrow canyons of the fossae below them, and lower fin ridges reared like dragon backs out of the cracked lava: a wild place from which to face the onrush of such a storm, too high, too exposed; John laughed again, and pressed himself against the southern windows of the greenhouse, looking down, out, around, shouting, “Wow! Wow! Look at it go! Wow!”

      And then suddenly they were overwhelmed, dust flying over them, darkness, a high whooshing shriek. The first impact against Acheron ridge caused a wild flurry of turbulence, quick cyclonic twisters that appeared and disappeared, horizontal, vertical, at angles up the few steep gullies in the ridge; and the general shriek was punctuated by booms as these disturbances hit the ridge and collapsed. Then with dreamlike rapidity the wind settled into a smooth standing wave, and the dust rushed up past John’s face; the pit of his stomach