its construction. And then you expect concessions to be granted. You expect to make a profit from the venture, isn’t that what venture capitalism is all about?”
“Well, of course,” Phyllis said, looking offended that he had spoken of such things so explicitly. “Everyone on Mars will profit from it, that’s its nature.”
“And you’ll skim a percentage of every percentage.” Predators at the top of the chain. Or else parasites, up and down the length of it…. “How rich did the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge get, do you think? Were there great transnational dynasties formed from the profits of the Golden Gate Bridge? No. It was a public project, wasn’t it. The builders were public employees, making a standard wage for their work. What do you want to bet that the Mars treaty doesn’t stipulate a similar arrangement for infrastructural construction here? I’m pretty sure it does.”
“But the treaty is up for revision in nine years,” Phyllis pointed out, her eyes glittering.
John laughed. “So it is! But you wouldn’t believe the support I see around this planet for a revised treaty that sets even tighter limits on Terran investment and profit. You just haven’t been paying attention. The thing you have to remember is that this is an economic system being built from scratch, on principles that make sense in scientific terms. There’s only a limited carrying capacity here, and to create a sustainable society we’ve got to pay attention to that. You can’t just lift raw materials from here to Earth—the colonial era is over, you have to remember that.” He laughed again at the glinty stares being leveled on him; it was like gun sights had been implanted in their corneas.
And it only occurred to him later, back in his room and remembering those looks, that it probably had not been a very good idea to stick their noses in the situation so hard. The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen: This John Boone was bad news! he had whispered, eyes on John all the while; he had wanted John to see him. Well, another suspect then. But it took John a while to get to sleep that night.
He left Pavonis the next day, and headed east down Tharsis, intending to drive a full 7,000 kilometers to Hellas, to visit Maya. The journey was made strangely solitary by the great storm. He glimpsed the southern highlands in murky snatches only, through billowing sheets of sand, with the ever-shifting whistle of the wind as accompaniment. Maya was pleased he was coming to visit; he had never been to Hellas before, and a lot of people there were looking forward to meeting him. They had discovered a sizable aquifer to the north of Low Point, so their plan was to pump water from that aquifer to the surface, and create a lake in the low point, a lake with a frozen surface which would be continuously subliming into the atmosphere, but which they would keep supplied from below. Sustained in that way it would both enrich the atmosphere, and serve as a reservoir and heat sink for cultivation, in a ring of domed farms built around the lake shore. Maya was very excited at the plans.
John’s long journey toward her passed in a mesmerized state, as he watched crater after crater loom out of the clouds of dust. One evening he stopped at a Chinese settlement where they knew hardly a word of English, and lived in boxes like the trailer park; he and the settlers had to make use of an AI translation program which kept them both laughing for most of the evening. Two days later, he stopped for a day at a huge Japanese air-mining facility in a high pass between craters. Here everyone spoke excellent English, but they were frustrated because the air miners had been brought to a standstill by the storm. The technicians smiled painfully, and escorted him through a nightmare complex of filtering systems that they had set up to try to keep the pumps working—and all for naught.
East three days from the Japanese, he ran across a Sufi caravanserai, located on top of a circular steep-walled mesa. This particular mesa had once been a crater floor, but it had been so hardened by impact metamorphosis that it had resisted the erosion that had cut away the surrounding soft land in the eons that followed,