Zo sat at the back of a room full of diplomats, looking out the window at Terminator as the oval city rolled majestically over the blasted wastelands of Mercury. The hemiellipsoidal space under the city’s high clear dome would have been a pretty airspace to fly in, but the local authorities had banned it as too dangerous— one of many fascist regulations that bound life here— the state as nanny, what Nietzsche so aptly called the slave mentality, still alive and well here at the end of the twenty-second century, in fact popping up everywhere, hierarchy reerecting its comforting structure in all these new provincial settlements, Mercury, the asteroids, the outer systems— everywhere except on noble Mars.Here on Mercury it was particularly bad. Meetings between the Martian delegation and the Mercurians had been going on in Terminator for weeks, and Zo was tired of them, both the meetings and the Mercurial negotiators, a secretive self-important group of oligarchic mullahs haughty and fawning at the same time, who had not yet comprehended the new order of things in the solar system. She wanted to forget them and their little world, to go home and fly.
On the other hand, in her cover as a lowly staff assistant she had up to this point been an entirely minor figure in the proceedings, and now that negotiations were grinding to a halt, stalled on the stubborn incomprehension of these happy slaves, her turn had come at last. As the meeting broke up, she took aside an aide to the highest leader in Terminator, who was called rather picturesquely the Lion of Mercury, and she asked the aide for a private meeting. The young man, an ex-Terran, was agreeable— Zo had made sure of his interest long before— and they retired to a terrace outside the city offices.
Zo put a hand to the man’s arm, said kindly, “We’re very concerned that if Mercury and Mars don’t make a solid partnership, Terra will wedge between us and play us off against each other. We’re the two largest collections of heavy metals left in the solar system, and the more civilization spreads, the more valuable that becomes. And civilization is certainly spreading. This is the Accelerando, after all. Metals are valuable.”
And Mercury’s natural fund of metals, though hard to mine, was truly spectacular; the planet was only a little bigger than Luna and yet its gravity nearly equaled that of Mars, a very tangible sign of its heavy iron core, and its accompanying array of more precious metals, seamed all through the meteor-battered surface.
“Yes . . . ?” the young man said.
“We feel that we need to establish a more explicit. . . . “
“Cartel?”
“Partnership.”
The young Mercurian smiled. “We aren’t worried about being pitted against Mars by anyone.”
“Obviously. But we are.”
For a time there, at the beginning of its colonization, Mercury had seemed to be very flush. Not only did the colonists have metals, but being so close to the sun, they had the possibility of tapping a great deal of solar energy. Just the resistance set up between the city’s sleeves and the expanding tracks they slid over created enormous amounts of it, and there was even more in solar-collection potential; collectors in Mercurial orbit had started lazing some of that sunlight out to the new outer-solar-system colonies. From the first fleet of track-laying cars, in 2142, through the rolling construction of Terminator in the 2150s, and throughout the 2160s and 70s, the Mercurians had thought they were rich.
Now it was 2181, however, and with the successful wide deployment of various kinds of fusion power, energy was cheap, and light was reasonably plentiful. The so-called lamp satellites, and the gas lanterns burning in the upper atmospheres of the gas giants, were being built and lit all over the outer system. As a result Mercury’s copious solar resources had been rendered insignificant. Mercury had become once again nothing more than a metal-rich but dreadfully hot-and-cold place, a hardship assignment. And unterraformable to boot.
Quite a crash in their fortunes, as Zo reminded the young man without much subtlety. Which meant they needed to cooperate with their more conveniently located allies in the system. “Otherwise the risk of Terran return to dominance is very real.”
“Terra is too enmeshed in its own problems to endanger anyone else,” the young man said.
Zo shook her head gently. “The more trouble Terra is in, the worse danger for the rest of us. That’s why we’re worried. That’s why we’re thinking that, if you don’t want to enter into an agreement with us, we may just have to build another city and track system on Mercury, down in the southern hemisphere, and cruise in the terminator down there. Where some of the best metal deposits are.”