Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson Page B

accepting that if Clayborne
was against them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that—without
Kasei, without Dao— with the bulk of the natives green, and firmly behind the
leadership of Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor. . . .
    “Coyote will get you off Tharsis,” Ann said, feeling sick. She
left the room, walked through the terminal and out the lock, back into her
rover. Kasei’s wristpad lay on the car’s dashboard, and she threw it across the
compartment, sobbed. She sat in the driver’s seat and composed herself, and
then started the car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.
     
    Eventually she found herself back in east Pavonis, and there they
were, all still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they
stared at her as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was
personally responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day
and throughout the revolution—just as they had stared at her after Burroughs,
in fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him,
and ignored the rest, or tried to, Irishka frightened, Jackie red-eyed and furious,
her father killed this day after all, and though she was in Peter’s camp and so
partly responsible for the crushing response to the Red offensive, you could
see with one look at her that someone would pay—but Ann ignored all that, and
walked across the room to Sax—who was in his nook in the far corner of the big
central room, sitting before a screen reading long columns of figures,
muttering things to his AI. Ann waved a hand between his face and his screen
and he looked up, startled.
    Strangely, he was the only one of the whole crowd who did not
appear to blame her. Indeed he regarded her with his head tilted to the side,
with a birdlike curiosity that almost resembled sympathy.
    “Bad news about Kasei,” he said. “Kasei and all the rest. I’m glad
that you and Desmond survived.”
    She ignored that, and told him in a rapid undertone where the Reds
were going, and what she had told them to do. “I think I can keep them from
trying any more direct attacks on the cable,” she said. “And from most acts of
violence, at least in the short term.”
    “Good,” Sax said.
    “But I want something for it,” she said. “I want it and if I don’t
get it, I’ll set them on you forever.”
    “The soletta?” Sax asked.
    She stared at him. He must have listened to her more often than
she had thought. “Yes.”
    His eyebrows came together as he thought it over. “It could cause
a kind of ice age,” he said.
    “Good.”
    He stared at her as he thought about it. She could see him doing
it, in quick flashes or bursts: ice age—thinner atmosphere—terraforming slowed—new
ecosystems destroyed— perhaps compensate—greenhouse gases. And so on and so
forth. It was almost funny how she could read this stranger’s face, this hated
brother looking for a way out. He would look and look, but heat was the main
driver of terraforming, and with the huge orbiting array of mirrors in the
soletta gone, they would be at least restricted to Mars’s normal level of
sunlight, thus slowed to a more “natural” pace. It was possible that the
inherent stability of that approach even appealed to Sax’s conservatism, such
as it was.
    “Okay,” he said.
    “You can speak for these people?” she said, waving disdainfully at
the crowd behind them, as if all her oldest companions were not among them, as
if they were UNTA technocrats or metanat functionaries....
    “No,” he said. “I only speak for me. But I can get rid of the
soletta.”
    “You’d do it against their wishes?”
    He frowned. “I think I can talk them into it. If not, I know I can
talk the Da Vinci team into it. They like challenges.”
    “Okay.”
    It was the best she could get from him, after all. She
straightened up, still nonplussed. She hadn’t expected him to agree. And now
that he had, she discovered that