The Complete Mars Trilogy. Kim Stanley Robinson

by load-bearing pillars; it was a big room, filled with chairs and potted plants and the descendants of the Ares’ birds, and most recently lit by windows installed high across the northern wall, through which they saw the ground level crops of the atrium. A big space; and at least half the colonists were in it eating when the meeting took place.

      “Why didn’t you discuss this with us?” Spencer asked her.

      Ann’s glare forced Spencer to look away. “Why should I discuss it with you?” she said, turning her gaze on Sax. “It’s clear what you all think about this, we’ve gone over it many times before, and nothing I’ve said makes any difference to you. Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it – we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There’s simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see – as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.”

      Her face had gone bright red during this tirade; Nadia had never seen her anywhere near as angry as this. The usual matter-of-fact facade that she placed over her bitter anger had shattered, and she was almost speechless with fury and shuddering. The whole room had gone deadly quiet. “It’s not science, I say! It’s just playing around. And for that game you’re going to wreck the historical record, destroy the polar caps, and the outflow channels, and the canyon bottoms – destroy a beautiful pure landscape, and for nothing at all.”

      The room was as still as a tableau. The ventilators hummed. People began to eye one another warily. Simon took a step toward Ann, his hand outstretched; she stopped him dead with a glance, he might as well have stepped outside in his underwear and frozen stiff. His face reddened, and he cracked his posture and sat back down.

      Sax Russell rose to his feet. He looked the same as ever, perhaps a bit more flushed than usual, but mild, small, blinking owlishly, his voice calm and dry, as if lecturing on some textbook point of thermodynamics, or enumerating the periodic table.

      “The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind,” he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. “Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different from any other random speck of matter in the universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides.”

      He paused to look around at them all. Nadia gulped: it was strange in the extreme to hear these words come out of the mouth of Sax Russell, in the same dry tone that he would use to analyze a graph. Too strange!

      “Now that we are here,” he went on, “it isn’t enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed science too. But science is more than that. Science is part of a larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out. And so now we’re on two, three if you count the moon. And we can change this one to make it safer to live on. Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars’s beauty? I don’t think it does. I think it only enhances it. It adds life, the most beautiful system of all. But nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill Marineris. Mars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wilder. But it can be Mars and ours at the same time. And it will be. There is this about the human mind; if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and to the universe. We can do it, so we will do it. So—” he held up a palm, as if satisfied that the analysis had been supported by the data in the graph – as if he had examined the periodic table, and found that it still held true “ — we might as well start.”

      He looked at Ann, and all eyes followed her. Ann’s mouth was tight, her shoulders slumped. She knew she was beaten.

      She shrugged, as if she were shrugging a hooded cape back over her head and body, a heavy carapace that weighed her down, and covered her entirely from them. In the flat dead tone that she usually employed when she was upset, she said, “I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshipping it with our attention.” She met Sax’s mild gaze, and one final flare of her anger jetted out: “You’ve never even seen Mars.”

      And she left the room.

      Janet had had her camera specs on, and videotaped this exchange. Phyllis sent a copy back to Earth. A week later the UNOMA committee on environmental alterations approved the dissemination of the heater windmills.

      The plan was to drop them from dirigibles. Arkady immediately claimed the right to pilot one, as a sort of reward for his work on Phobos. Maya and Frank were not unhappy at the thought of Arkady disappearing from Underhill for another month or two, so they immediately assigned him one of the craft. He would drift east in the prevailing winds, descending to place windmills in channel beds and on the outer flanks of craters, both places where winds tended to be strong. Nadia first heard of the expedition when Arkady skipped through the chambers to her and told her about it.

      “Sounds nice,” she said.

      “Want to come along?” he asked.

      “Why yes,” she said. Her ghost finger was tingling.

      Their dirigible was the biggest ever made, a planetary model built back in Germany by Friedrichshafen Nach Einmal, and shipped up in 2029, so that it had just recently arrived. It was called the Arrowhead, and it measured 120 meters across the wings, 100 meters front to back, and 40 meters tall. It had an internal ultralite frame, and turboprops at each wingtip and under the gondola; these were driven by small plastic engines whose batteries were powered by solar cells arrayed on the upper surface of the bag. The pencil-shaped gondola extended most of the length of the underside, but it was smaller inside than Nadia had expected, because much of it was temporarily filled with their cargo of windmills; at takeoff their clear space consisted of nothing more than the cockpit, two narrow beds, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet, and the crawlspace necessary to move among these. It was pretty tight, but happily both sides of the gondola were walled with windows, and though somewhat blocked by windmills these still gave them a lot of light, and good visibility.

      Takeoff was slow. Arkady released the lines extending from the three mooring masts with the flip of a cockpit toggle; the turboprops ran hard, but they were dealing with air that was only twelve millibars thick. The cockpit bounced up and down in slow motion, flexing with the internal frame: and every up bounce was a little higher off