Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,81

planet at this time.”

“Can’t you talk to him?” Maya asked.

“I can talk to him,” Nadia said. “But I can’t say that it will do any good.”

“Please, Nadia. Just try. We’ve got enough problems as it is.”

“I’ll try, sure.”

So that afternoon she talked to Arkady. They were out on Chernobyl Road, walking back toward Underhill. She brought it up, and suggested that patience was in order. “It will only be a matter of time before the U.N. comes around to your view anyway.”

He stopped and lifted her maimed hand. “How long do you think we have?” he said. He pointed at the setting sun. “How long do you suggest we wait? For our grandchildren? Our great-grandchildren? Our great-great-grandchildren, blind as cave fish?”

“Come on,” Nadia said, pulling her hand free. “Cave fish.”

Arkady laughed. “Still, it’s a serious question. We don’t have forever, and it would be nice to see things start to change.”

“Even so, why not wait a year?”

“A Terran year or a Martian year?”

“A Martian year. Get readings on all the seasons, give the U.N. time to come around.”

“We don’t need the readings, they’ve been taken now for years.”

“Have you talked to Ann about that?”

“No. Well, sort of. But she doesn’t agree.”

“A lot of people don’t agree. I mean maybe they will eventually, but you have to convince them. You can’t just run roughshod over opposing opinions, otherwise you’re just as bad as the people back home that you’re always criticizing.”

Arkady sighed. “Yeah yeah.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“You damned liberals.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”

But they were now within sight of the low mound of Underhill, looking like a fresh squarish crater, its ejecta scattered around it. Nadia pointed at it. “I did that. You damned radicals—” she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard—“you hate liberalism because it works.”

He snorted.

“It does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works.”

“Ah, Nadia.” He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again toward base. “Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”

Still, Nadia seemed to have affected him. He quit calling for a unilateral decision to release the new GEMs onto the surface, and he confined the agitprop to his beautification program, spending much of his time in the Quarter, trying to make colored bricks and glass. Nadia joined him for a swim before breakfast on most days, and along with John and Maya they took over a lane in the shallow pool that filled all of one of the vaulted chambers, and swam a brisk workout of one or two thousand meters. John led the sprint sets, Maya led the distance sets, Nadia followed in everything, hampered by her bad hand, and they churned through the extra-splashy water like a line of dolphins, staring through their goggles down at the sky-blue concrete of the pool bottom. “The butterfly was made for this g,” John would say, grinning at the way they could practically fly out of the water. Breakfasts afterward were pleasant if brief, and the rest of the days were the usual round of work; Nadia seldom saw Arkady again till evenings at dinner, or afterward.

Then Sax and Spencer and Rya finished setting up the robot factory for making Sax’s windmill heaters, and they applied to UNOMA for permission to distribute a thousand of them around the equatorial regions, to test their warming effect. All of them together were only expected to add about twice the heat to the atmosphere that Chernobyl did, and there were even questions as to whether they would be able to distinguish the added heat from background seasonal fluctuations—but as Sax said, they wouldn’t know until they tried.

And so the terraforming argument flared again. And suddenly Ann flew into violent action, taping long messages that she sent to the members of UNOMA’s executive committee, and to the national offices for Martian affairs for all the countries that were currently on the committee, and finally to the U.N. General Assembly. These appearances were given enormous amounts of attention, from the most serious policy-making levels all the way down to the tabloid press and TV, media that regarded it as the newest episode of the red soap opera. Ann had taped and sent her messages in private,