Blue Mars(201)

The Ganymedans went off to get dinner, looking dismayed. “So subtle,” Ann remarked when they were out of earshot.

“Now we’re being sarcastic,” Zo said.

“You’re a thug. Put it that way.”

“I will have to enroll in the Red school of diplomatic subtlety. Perhaps arrange for assistants to come along with me and blow up some of their property.”

Ann made a noise between her teeth. She continued down the promenade, and Zo kept up with her.

“Strange that the Great Red Spot is gone,” Zo remarked as they crossed a bridge over a white-bottomed canal. “Like some kind of sign. I keep expecting it to come around into view.”

The air was chill and damp. The people they passed were mostly of Terran origin, part of the diaspora. Some fliers cut lazy spirals up near the tent frame. Zo watched them cross the face of the great planet. Ann stopped frequently to inspect cut surfaces of rock, ignoring the town on ice and its crowds, with their tiptoe grace and their rainbow clothing, a gang of young natives greyhounding past—”You really are more interested in rocks than people,” Zo said, half-admiring, half-irritated.

Ann looked at her; such a basilisk glare! But Zo shrugged and took her by the arm, pulled her along. “The young natives out here are less than fifteen m-years old, they’ve lived in point-one g all their lives, they don’t care about Earth or Mars. They believe in the Jovian moons, in water, in swimming and flying. Most of them have altered their eyes for the low light. Some of them are growing gills. They have a plan to terraform these moons that will take them five thousand years. They’re the next step in evolution, for ka’s sake, and here you are staring at rocks that are just the same as rocks everywhere else in this galaxy. You’re just as crazy as they said.”

This bounced off Ann like a thrown pebble. She said, “You sound like me, when I tried to get Nadia away from Underhill.”

Zo shrugged. “Come on,” she said, “I have another meeting.”

“Mafia work never stops, does it.” But she followed, peering around like a wizened court jester, dwarfish and oddly dressed in her old-fashioned jumper.

Some Lake Geneva council members greeted them, somewhat nervously, by the docks. They got on a small ferry, which threaded its way out through a fleet of small sailing boats. Out on the lake it was windy. They puttered to one of the forest islands. Vast specimens of balsa and teak stood over the swampy mat of the floating island’s heated ground, and on the island’s shore loggers were working outside a little sawmill. The mill was soundproofed, nevertheless a muffled whine of saw cuts accompanied the conversation. Floating on a lake on a moon of Jupiter, all the colors suffused with the gray of solar distance: Zo felt little bursts of flier’s exhilaration, and she said to the locals, “This is so beautiful. I can see why there are people on Europa who talk about making their whole world a water world, sail around and around. They could even ship away water to Venus and get down to some solid land for islands. I don’t know if they’ve mentioned it to you. Maybe it’s just all talk, like the idea I heard for creating a small black hole and dropping it into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Stellarizing Jupiter! You’d have all the light you needed then.”

“Wouldn’t Jupiter be consumed?” one of the locals asked.

“Oh but it would take ever so long, they said; millions of years.”

“And then a nova,” Ann pointed out.

“Yes yes. Everything but Pluto destroyed. But by that time we’ll be long gone, one way or another. Or if not, they’ll figure something out.”

Ann laughed harshly. The locals, thinking hard, did not appear to notice.

Back on the lakeshore Ann and Zo walked the promenade. “You’re so blatant,” Ann said.

“On the contrary. It’s very subtle. They don’t know if I’m speaking for me, or for Jackie, or for Mars. It could be just talk. But it reminds them of the larger context. It’s too easy for them to get wrapped up in the Jovian situation and forget all the rest. The solar system entire, as a single political body; people need help thinking about that, they can’t conceptualize it.”

“You need help yourself. It’s not Renaissance Italy, you know.”

“Machiavelli will always remain true, if that’s what you mean. And they need to be reminded of that here.”

“You remind me of Frank.”

“Frank?”

“Frank Chalmers.”

“Now there’s an issei I admire,” Zo said. “What I’ve read about him, anyway. He was the only one of you who wasn’t a hypocrite. And he was the one that got the most done.”