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, so the colonists learned of them when excerpts were shown on Terran TV. The reaction in the days that followed included debates in government, a rally in Washington that drew 20,000, endless amounts of editorial space, and commentary in the scientific nets. It was a bit shocking to see the strength of these responses, and some colonists felt that Ann had gone behind their backs. Phyllis for one was outraged.
“Besides, it doesn’t make sense,” Sax said, blinking rapidly. “Chernobyl is already releasing almost as much heat into the atmosphere as these windmills, and she never complained about that.”
“Yes she did,” Nadia said. “She just lost the vote.”
Hearings were held at UNOMA, and while they were going on a group of the materials scientists confronted Ann after dinner. A lot of the rest of them were there to witness this confrontation; Underhill’s main dining hall filled four chambers, whose dividing walls had been removed and replaced 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