The young man was shocked. “You couldn’t do that without our permission.”
“Couldn’t we?”
“No city on Mercury can exist if we don’t want it to.”
“Why, what will you do?”
The young man was silent.
Zo said, “Anyone can do what they want, eh? This is true for everyone ever born.”
The young man thought it over. “There’s not enough water.”
“No.” Mercury’s water supply consisted in its entirety of small ice fields lying inside craters at the two poles, where they remained in permanent shadow. These crater glaciers contained enough water for Terminator’s purposes, but not much more. “A few comets directed at the poles would add more, however.”
“Unless their impact blasted all the water on the poles away! No, that wouldn’t work! The ice in those polar craters is only a tiny fraction of the water from billions of years of comets, hitting all over the planet. Most of the water was lost to space on impact, or burned off. The same thing would happen if comets struck up there now. You’d get a net loss.”
“The AI modelers suggest all kinds of possibilities. We could always try it and see.”
The young man stepped back, affronted. And rightly so; you couldn’t put a threat much more explicitly than that. But in slave moralities the good and the stupid tended to become much the same, so one had to be explicit. Zo held her expression steady, though the young man’s indignation had a commedia dell’arte quality that was quite funny. She stepped closer to him, emphasizing their difference in height; she had half a meter on him.
“I’ll give the Lion your message,” he said through his teeth.
“Thanks,” Zo said, and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.
These slaves had created for themselves a ruling caste of physicist-priests, who were a black box for those on the outside, but like all good oligarchies predictable and powerful in their exterior action. They would take the hint, and be able to act on it. An alliance would follow. So Zo left their offices, and walked happily down the stepped streets of the Dawn Wall. Her work was done, and so very likely the mission would soon return to Mars.
She entered the Martian consulate midway down the wall, sent a call to Jackie letting her know that the next move had been made. After that she walked out onto the balcony to have a smoke.
Her color vision surged under the impact of the chromotropics lacing her cigarette, and the little city below her became quite stunning, a Fauvist fantasia. Against the Dawn Wall the terracing rose in ever-narrower strips, until the highest buildings (the offices of the city rulers, naturally) were a mere line of windows under the Great Gates and the clear dome above it. Tile roofs and balconies were nestled under the green treetops below her, the balconies all floored and walled by mosaics. Down on the oval flat that held the greater part of the city, the roofs were bigger and closer together, the greenery bunched in crops that glowed under the light that bounced down from filtered mirrors in the dome; altogether it looked like a big Fabergé egg, elaborate, colorful, pretty in the way that all cities were. But to be trapped inside one . . . well, there was nothing for it but to pass the hours in as entertaining a manner as possible, until she got the word to go home. Part of one’s nobility was devotion to duty, after all.
So she strode down the wall’s staircase streets to Le Dôme, to party with Miguel and Arlene and Xerxes, and the band of composers, musicians, writers and other artists and aesthetes who hung out at the café. It was a wild bunch. Mercury’s craters had all been named centuries before after the most famous artists in Terran history, and so as Terminator rolled along it passed Dürer and Mozart, Phidias and Purcell, Turgenev and Van Dyke; and elsewhere on the planet were Beethoven, Imhotep, Mahler, Matisse, Murasaki, Milton, Mark Twain; Homer and Holbein touched rims; Ovid starred the rim of the much larger Pushkin, in one of many reversals of true importance; Goya overlapped Sophocles, Van Gogh was inside Cervantes; Chao Meng-fu was full of ice; and so on and so forth, in a most capricious manner, as if the naming committee of the International Astronomical union had one night gotten hilariously drunk and started tossing named darts at a map; there was even a clue commemorating this party, a huge escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.
Zo thoroughly approved the method. But the effect on the artists currently living on Mercury had been catastrophic in the extreme. Constantly confronted as they were with Terra’s unmatchable canon, an overwhelming anxiety of influence had crippled them. But their partying had taken on a corresponding greatness that Zo quite enjoyed.