Green mars (27 page)

H. X. Borazjani stood to say the same. He was followed by others; many in the room were still using Sax’s original model as their template for action, and they insisted in many different ways on the difficulty of scrubbing any great excess of CO2 from the air. But there were also a good many scientists, from Armscor and Consolidated as well as Subarashii, who either claimed that scrubbing CO2 would not be difficult, or else that a CO2-heavy atmosphere would not be so bad. An ecosystem of mostly plants, with CO2-tolerant insects and perhaps some genetically engineered animals, would flourish in the warm thick air, and people could walk around in their shirtsleeves with nothing more cumbersome than a facemask.

This set Sax’s teeth on edge, and happily he was not the only one, so he could stay in his seat while others rose to their feet to challenge this fundamental shift in the goal of terraforming. The argument quickly became heated, even rancorous.

“It’s not a jungle planet we’re after here!”

“You’re making a hidden assumption that people can be genetically engineered to tolerate higher CO2 levels, but it’s ridiculous!”

Very soon it became clear that they were accomplishing nothing.

No one was really listening, and everyone had their opinions, which were tightly aligned to their employers’ interests. It was unseemly, really. A mutual distaste for the tone of the debate caused all but the immediate participants to withdraw-around Sax people were folding programs, turning off lecterns, whispering to their companions, all while people were still standing and speaking ... bad form, no doubt about it. But it only took a moment’s thought to realize that they were now arguing over policy decisions that were not going to be made at the level of working scientists anyway. No one liked that, and people actually began to get up and leave the room, right in the middle of the discussion. The overwhelmed panel moderator, an overpolite Japanese woman who was looking miserable, spoke over the rising voices, and suggested that they close the session. People trooped into the halls in little knots, some still talking heatedly to their allies, making their cases decisively now that they were only complaining to their friends.

Sax followed Claire and Jessica and the other Biotique people across the canal and into Hunt Mesa. They took the elevator up to the mesa plateau, and had lunch at Antonio’s.

“They’re going to flood us with CO2,” Sax said, unable to hold his tongue any longer. “I don’t think they understand what a fundamental blow that will be to the standard model.”

“It’s a different model entirely,” Jessica said. “A two-phase, heavy-industrial model.”

“But it will keep people and animals in tents more or less indefinitely,” Sax said.

“Maybe the transnat executives don’t mind that,” Jessica said.

“Maybe they like it,” Berkina said.

Sax made a face.

Claire said, “It could just be that they’ve got this soletta and lens, and they want to use them. Like playing with toys. It’s so much like the magnifying glass you use to start fires with when you’re ten. But this one is so powerful. They can’t stand not to use it. And then calling the burn zones canals, you know...”

“That is so stupid,” Sax said sharply, and when the others stared at him in some surprise, he tried to lighten his tone: “Well, it’s just so silly, you know. It’s such a kind of fuzzy romanticism. They won’t be canals in the sense of usefully connecting one body of

water with another, and even if they tried to use them, the banks would be slag.”

“Glass, they’re claiming,” Claire said. “And it’s just the idea of canals, anyway.”

“But it’s not a game we’re playing here,” Sax said. It was extremely hard to keep Stephen’s sense of humor about it; for some reason it was really irritating to him, really distressing. Here they had started so well, sixty years of solid achievement-and now different people were hacking about with different ideas and different toys, arguing and working against each other, bringing ever more powerful and expensive methods to bear, but with ever less coordination. They were going to ruin his plan!

The afternoon’s closing sessions were perfunctory, and did nothing to restore his faith in the conference as disinterested science. That evening, back in his room, he watched the environmental news on vid more closely than ever, searching for answers to questions he hadn’t quite formulated. Cliffs were falling. Rocks of all sizes were being shoved out of the permafrost by the thaw-freeze cycle, the rocks arranging themselves into characteristic polygonal patterns. Rock glaciers were forming in ravines and chutes, the rocks pried free by ice and then sliding down gorges in masses that behaved much like ice glaciers. Pingos were blistering the northern lowlands, except of course where the frozen seas were pouring out of the drilling platforms, inundating the land.

It was change on a massive scale, becoming apparent everywhere now, and accelerating every year as the summers got warmer, and the submartian biota grew deeper-while everything still froze solid every winter, and froze a little bit almost every summer night. Such an intense freeze-thaw cycle would tear any landscape apart, and the Martian landscape was particularly susceptible to it, having been stalled in a cold arid stasis for millions of years. Mass wasting was causing many landslides a day, and fatalities and unexplained disappearances were not at all uncommon. Cross-country travel was dangerous. Canyons and fresh craters were no longer safe places to locate a town, or even to spend a night.

Sax stood and walked to the window of his room, looked down at the lights of the city. All of this was as Ann had predicted to him, long ago. No doubt she was noting reports of all the changes with disgust, she and all the rest of the Reds. For them every collapse was a sign that things were going wrong rather than right. In the past Sax would have shrugged them off; mass wasting exposed frozen soil to the sun, warming it and revealing potential nitrate sources and the like. Now, with the conference fresh in his mind, he was not so sure.

On the vid no one seemed to be worrying about it. There were no Reds on vid. The collapse of landforms were considered no more than an opportunity, not only for terraforming, which seemed to be considered the exclusive business of the transnats, but for mining. Sax watched a news account of a freshly revealed vein of gold ore with a sinking feeling. It was strange how many people seemed to feel the lure of prospecting. That was Mars as the twenty-second century began; with the elevator returned they were back to the old gold rush mentality, it seemed, as if it really were a manifest destiny, out on the frontier with great tools wielded left and right: cosmic engineers, mining and building. And the terraforming that had been his work, the sole focus of his life, in fact, for sixty years and more, seemed to be turning into something else. ...

Insomnia began to plague Sax
. He had never suffered the phenomenon before, and found it quite uncomfortable. He would wake, roll over, gears in his mind would catch, and everthing would start whirring. When it was clear he was not going to fall back asleep he would get up, and turn on the AI screen and watch video programs, even the news, which he had never watched before. He saw symptoms of some kind of sociological dysfunction on Earth. It did not appear, for instance, that they had even attempted to adjust their societies to the impact of the population rise caused by the gerontological treatments. That should have been elementary-birth control, quotas, sterilization, the lot-but most countries hadn’t done any of that. Indeed it appeared that a permanent underclass of the untreated was developing, especially in the highly populated poor countries. Statistics were hard to come by now that the UN was moribund, but one World Court study claimed that seventy percent of the population of the developed nations had gotten the treatment, while only twenty percent had in the poor countries. If that trend held for long, Sax thought, it would lead to a kind of physicalization of class-a late emergence or retroactive unveiling of Marx’s bleak vision-only more extreme than Marx, because now class distinctions would be exhibited as an actual physiological difference caused by a bimodal distribution, something almost akin to speciation…

This divergence between rich and poor was obviously dangerous, but it seemed to be taken on Earth as something of a given, as if it were part of nature. Why couldn’t they see the danger?

He no longer understood Earth, if he ever had. He sat there shivering through the dregs of his insomniac nights, too tired to read or to work; he could only call up one Terran news program after another, trying to understand better what was happening down there. He would have to if he wanted to understand Mars, for the transnational’ Martian behavior was being driven by Terran ultimate causes. He needed to understand. But the news vids seemed beyond rational comprehension. Down there, even more dramatically than on Mars, there was no plan.

He needed a science of history, but unfortunately there was no such thing. History is Lamarckian, Arkady used to say, a notion that was ominously suggestive given the pseudospeciation caused by the unequal distribution of the gerontological treatments; but it was no real help. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, they were all suspect. The scientific method could not be applied to human beings in any way that yielded useful Information. It was the fact-value problem stated in a different way; human reality could only be explained in terms of values. And values were very resistant to scientific analysis: Isolation of factors for study, falsifiable hypotheses, repeatable experiments-the entire apparatus as practiced in lab physics simply could not be brought to bear. Values drove history, which was whole, nonrepeatable, and contingent. It might be characterized as Lamarckian, or as a chaotic system, but even those were guesses, because what factors were they talking about, what aspects might be acquired by learning and passed on, or cycling in some nonrepetitive but patterned way?

No one could say.

He began to think again about the discipline of natural history which had so captivated him on Arena Glacier. It used scientific methods to study the natural world’s history, and in many ways that history was just as problematic a methodological problem.as human history, being likewise nonrepeatable and resistant to experiment. And with human consciousness out of the picture, natural history was often fairly successful, even if it was based mostly on observation and hypothesis that could be tested only by further observation. It was a real science; it had discovered, there among the contingency and disorder, some valid general principles of evolution-development, adaptation, complexification, and many more specific pri’nciples as well, confirmed by the various subdis-ciplines.

What he needed were similar principles influencing human history. The little reading he did in historiography was not encouraging; it was either a sad imitation of the scientific method, or art pure and simple. About every decade a new historical explanation revised all that had come before, but clearly revisionism held pleasures that had nothing to do with the actual justice of the case being made. Sociobiology and bioethics were more promising, but they tended to explain things best when working on evolutionary time scales, and he wanted something for the past hundred years, and the next hundred. Or even the past fifty and the next five.

Night after night he woke, failed to fall back asleep, got up, sat at the screen and puzzled over these matters, too tired to think well. And as these night watches kept happening, he found himself returning more and more to shows about 2061. There were any number of video compilations on the events of that year, and some of them were not shy about naming it: World War Three! was the title of the longest series, some sixty hours’ worth of video from that year, poorly edited and sequenced.

One only had to watch the series for a while to realize that the title was not entirely sensationalist. Wars had raged all over Terra in that fateful year, and the analysts reluctant to call it the Third World War seemed to think that it simply hadn’t gone on long enough to qualify. Or that it hadn’t been the contest of two great global alliances, but was much more confused and complex: different sources would claim it was north against south, or young against old, or UN against nations, or nations against transnation-als, or transnationals against flags of convenience, or armies against police, or police against citizens-so that it began to seem every kind of conflict at once. For a matter of six or eight months the world had descended into chaos. In the course of his wanderings through “political science” Sax had stumbled across a pseudo-scientific chart by a Herman Kahn, called an “Escalation Ladder,” which attempted to categorize conflicts according to their nature and severity. There were forty-four steps in Kahn’s ladder, going from the first, Ostensible Crisis, up gradually through categories like Political and Diplomatic Gestures, Solemn and Formal Declarations, and Significant Mobilization, then more steeply through steps like Show of Force, Harassing Acts of Violence, Dramatic Military Confrontations, Large Conventional War, and then off into the unexplored zones of Barely Nuclear War, Exemplary Attacks Against Property, Civilian Devastation Attack, and right on up to number forty-four, Spasm or Insensate War. It was certainly an interesting attempt at taxonomy and logical sequence, and although there were obviously elements of fetishization in the excessive detail, Sax could see that the categories had been abstracted from many wars of the past. And by the definitions of the table, 2061 had shot right up the ladder to number forty-four.

In that maelstrom, Mars had been no more than one spectacular war among fifty. Very few general programs about ‘61 devoted more than a few minutes to it, and these merely collected clips Sax had seen at the time: the frozen guards at Korolyov, the broken domes, the fall of the elevator, and then that of Phobos. Attempts at analysis of the Martian situation were shallow at best; Mars had been an exotic sideshow, with some good vid, but nothing else to distinguish it from the general morass. No. One sleepless dawn it came to him; if he wanted to understand 2061, he was going to have to piece it together himself, from the primary sources of the videotapes, from all the bouncing shots of enraged crowds torching cities, and the occasional press conferences with desperate, frustrated leaders.

Even getting these in chronological order was no easy task. And indeed this became (in his Echus style) his only interest for a few weeks, as slotting events into a chronology was the first step in piecing together what had happened-which had to precede figuring out why.

Over the weeks he began to get a sense of it. Certainly the common wisdom was correct; the emergence of the transnationals in the 2040s had set the stage, and was the ultimate cause of the war. In that decade, while Sax had been devoting every bit of his attention to terraforming Mars, a new Terran order had come into being, shaped as the thousands of multinational corporations began to coalesce into the scores of colossal transnationals. Something like planetary formation, he thought one night, planetesimals becoming planets.

It was not entirely a new order, however. The multinationals had mostly originated in the wealthy industrial nations, and so in certain senses the transnationals were expressions of these nations-extensions of their power into the rest of the world, in a way that reminded Sax of what little he knew of the imperial and colonial systems that had preceded them. Frank had said something like that: colonialism had never died, he used to declare, it just changed names and hired local cops. We’re all colonies of the transnats.

This was Frank’s cynicism, Sax decided (wishing that he had that hard bitter mind on hand to instruct him), because all colonies were not equal. It was true that transnats were so powerful that they had rendered national governments little more than toothless servants. And no transnat had shown any particular loyalty to any given government, or the UN. But they were children of the West- children who no longer cared for their parents, yet still supported them. For the record showed that the industrial nations had prospered under the transnats, while the developing nations had had no recourse but to fight each other for flag-of-convenience status. And thus in 2060 when the transnats had come under fire from desperate poor countries, it had been the Group of Seven and its military might that had come to their defense.

But the proximate cause? Night after night he sifted through vid of the 2040s and ‘50s, looking for traces of patterns. Eventually he decided that it was the longevity treatment which had pushed things over the edge. Through the 2050s the treatment had spread through the rich countries, illustrating the gross economic inequality in the world like a color stain in a microscope sample. And as the treatment spread, the situation had gotten increasingly tense, rising steadily up the steps of Kahn’s ladder of crises.

The immediate cause of the explosion of ‘61, strangely enough, appeared to be a squabble concerning the Martian space elevator. The elevator had been operated by Praxis, but after it had started operations, in February of 2061 to be precise, it had been taken over by Subarashii, in a clearly hostile takeover. Subarashii at that time was a conglomeration of most of the Japanese corporations that had not folded into Mitsubishi, and it was a rising power, very aggressive and ambitious. Upon acquisition of the elevator-a takeover approved by UNOMA-Subarashii had immediately increased the emigration quotas, causing the situation on Mars to go critical. At the same time on Earth, Subarashii’s competitors had objected to what was effectively an economic conquest of Mars, and though Praxis had confined its objections to legal action at the hapless UN, one of Subarashii’s flags of convenience, Malaysia, had been attacked by Singapore, which was a base for Shellalco. By April of 2061 much of south Asia was at war. Most of the fights were long-standing conflicts, such as Cambodia versus Vietnam, or Pakistan versus India; but some were attacks on Subarashii flags, as in Burma and Bangladesh. Events in the region had shot up the escalation ladder with deadly speed as old enmities joined the new transnat conflicts, and by June wars had spread all over Terra, and then to Mars. By October fifty million people had died, and another fifty million were to die in the aftermath, as many basic services had been interrupted or destroyed, and a newly released malaria v ctor remained without an effective prevention or cure.

That seemed enough to qualify it as a world war to Sax, brevity nonwithstanding. It had been, he concluded, a deadly synergistic combination of fights among the transnats, and revolutions by a wide array of disenfranchised groups against the transnat order. But the chaotic violence had convinced the transnats to resolve their disputes, or at least table them, and all the revolutions had failed, especially after the militaries of the Group of Seven intervened to rescue the transnats from dismemberment in their flags of convenience. All the giant military-industrial nations had ended up on the same side, which had helped to make it a very short world war compared to the first two. Short, but terrible-about as many people had died in 2061. as in the first two world wars together.

Mars had been a minor campaign in this Third World War, a campaign in which certain of the transnats had overreacted to a flamboyant but disorganized revolt. When it was over, Mars had been seized firmly in the grip of the major transnationals, with the blessing of the Group of Seven and the transnats’ other clients. And Terra had staggered on, a hundred million people fewer.

But nothing else had changed. None of its problems had been addressed. So it all might happen again. It was perfectly possible. One might even say that it was likely.

Sax continued to sleep poorly. And though he spent his days in the ordinary routines of work and habit, it seemed that he saw things differently than he had before the conference. Another proof, he supposed glumly, of the notion of vision as a paradigm construct. But now it was so obvious the transnationals were everywhere. In terms of authority, there was hardly anything else. Burroughs was a transnat town, and from what Phyllis had said, Sheffield was too. There were none of the national scientific teams that had proliferated in the years before the treaty conference; and with the First Hundred dead or in hiding, the whole tradition of Mars as a research station was extinct. What science there was was devoted to the terraforming project, and he had seen what kind of science that was becoming. No, the research was applied only, these days.