Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,124

know what to do with. Black pyramids to go along with the white.”

“Pretty.”

“Uhn.” The Crays and the two new Schillers hummed away behind him, providing his monotonal recitative with a ground bass. These computers spent all their time running through one set of conditions after another, Sax said; but the results, while never the same, were seldom encouraging. The air was going to be cold and poisonous for a good while yet.

Sax wandered down the hall, and John followed him into what looked like another lab, although there was a bed and a refrigerator in one corner. Violently disarranged bookscapes were overgrown with potted plants, bizarre Pleistocene growths that looked as deadly as the air outside. John sat in the lone empty chair. Sax stood and looked down at a seashell shrub as John described his meeting with Ann.

“Do you think she’s involved?” Sax said.

“I think she may know who is. She mentioned someone called the coyote.”

“Ah yes.” Sax glanced briefly at John—at his feet, to be precise. “She’s siccing us onto a legendary character. He’s supposed to have been on the Ares with us, you know. Hidden by Hiroko.”

John was so surprised that Sax had heard of the coyote that it took him a while to figure out what else was disturbing about what he had said. But then it came to him. One night Maya had told him that she had seen a face, the face of a stranger. The voyage out had been hard on Maya, and he had discounted the tale. But now …

Sax was wandering around turning on lights, peering at screens, muttering about security measures. He opened the refrigerator door briefly and John caught a glimpse of more spiky growths; either he kept experiments in there, or else his snack food had suffered a truly virulent eruption of mold. John said, “You can see why most of the attacks have been on the moholes. They’re the easiest project to attack.”

Sax tilted his head to the side. “Are they?”

“Think about it. Your little windmills are everywhere, there’s nothing to be done about them.”

“People are disabling them. We’ve had reports.”

“What, a dozen? And how many are out there, a hundred thousand? They’re junk, Sax. Litter. Your worst idea.” And nearly fatal to his project, in fact, because of the algae dishes Sax had hidden in some of them. All of that algae had died, apparently—but if it hadn’t, and if anyone had been able to prove Sax had been responsible for its dissemination, he could have lost his job. It was yet another indication that Sax’s logical manner was a front.

Now his nose was wrinkled. “They add up to a terawatt a year.”

“And knocking a few apart won’t do anything to that. As for the other physical operations, the black snow algae is on the northern polar cap, and can’t be removed. The dawn and dusk mirrors are in orbit, and it’s not so easy to knock them out.”

“Someone did it to Pythagoras.”

“True, but we know who it was, and there’s a security team following her.”

“She may never lead them to anyone else. They may be able to afford to expend a person per act, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Yeah, but some simple changes in screening personnel would make it impossible for anyone to smuggle any tools aboard.”

“They could use what’s out there.” Sax shook his head. “The mirrors are vulnerable.”

“Okay. More than some projects, anyway.”

“Those mirrors are adding thirty calories per square centimeter per sol,” Sax said. “And more all the time.” Almost all the freighters from Earth were sunsailers now, and when they arrived in the Martian system they were linked to large collections of earlier arrivals parked in areosynchronous orbit, and programmed to swivel so that they reflected their light onto the terminators, adding a little bit of energy to each day’s dawn and dusk. The whole arrangement had been coordinated by Sax’s office, and he was proud of it.

“We’ll increase security for all the maintenance crews,” John said.

“So. Increased security on the mirrors and at the moholes.”

“Yes. But that’s not all.”

Sax sniffed. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the problem is that it isn’t just the terraforming projects per se that are potential targets. I mean, the nuclear reactors are part of the project too in their way; they provide a lot of your power, and they’re pumping out heat like the furnaces they are. If one of them were to go, it would cause all kinds of fallout, more political even than physical.”

The vertical

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