Ann brushed the question off as an impertinence. “Why did you want to bring down the lens?” she said, her gaze boring into him.
“I didn’t like it.”
“I know that,” she said. “But why?”
“It wasn’t necessary. Things are warming up fast enough. There’s no reason to go faster. We don’t even need much more heat. And it was releasing very large amounts of carbon dioxide. That will be hard to scrub. And it was very nicely stuck— it’s hard to get CO2 out of carbonates. As long as one doesn’t melt the rock, it stays.” He shook his head. “It was stupid. They were just doing it because they could. Canals. I don’t believe in canals.”
“So it just wasn’t the right kind of terraforming for you.”
“That’s right.” He met her stare calmly. “I believe in the terraforming outlined in Dorsa Brevia. You signed off too. As I recall.”
She shook her head.
“No? But the Reds signed?”
She nodded.
“Well . . . it makes sense to me. I said this to you before. Human-viable to a certain elevation. Above that, air too thin and cold. Go slow. Ecopoesis. I don’t like any of the big new heavy-industry methods. Maybe some nitrogen from Titan. But not any of the rest.”
“What about the oceans?”
“I don’t know. See what happens without pumping?”
“What about the soletta?”
“I don’t know. The extra insolation means less warming needed from industrial gassing. Or other methods. But— we could have done without it. I thought the dawn mirrors were enough.”
“But it’s not in your hands anymore.”
“No.”
They sat in silence for a while. Ann appeared to be thinking. Sax watched her weathered face, wondering when she had last had the treatment. Ursula recommended repeating it every forty years, at a minimum.
“I was wrong,” his mouth said. As she stared at him, he tried to follow the thought. It was a matter of shapes, geometries, mathematical elegance. Cascading recombinant chaos. Beauty is the creation of a strange attractor. “We should have waited before we started. A few decades of study of the primal state. It would have told us how to proceed. I didn’t think things would change so fast. My original idea was something more like ecopoesis.”
She pursed her lips. “But now it’s too late.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.” He turned a palm up, inspected it. All the lines there were the same as always. “You ought to get the treatment.”
“I’m not taking the treatment anymore.”
“Oh, Ann. Don’t say that. Does Peter know? We need you. I mean— we need you.”
She got up and left the room.
• • •
His next project was more complex. Although Peter was confident, the Vishniac people were dubious. Sax explained as best he could. Peter helped. Their objections turned to practicalities. Too large? Enlist more Bogdanovists. Impossible to stealth? Interrupt the surveillance network. Science is creation, he told them. This isn’t science, Peter replied. It’s engineering. Mikhail agreed, but liked that part of it. Ecotage, a branch of ecological engineering. But very difficult to arrange. Enlist the Swiss, Sax told them. Or at least let them know. They don’t like surveillance anyway. Tell Praxis.
Things began to shape up. But it was a long time before he and Peter took off in a space plane again. This time they rocketed out of the stratosphere entirely, and then far above it. Twenty thousand kilometers above it, until they were closing on Deimos. And then making a rendezvous with it.
The gravity of the little moon was so slight that it was more a docking than a touchdown. Jackie Boone, who had helped on the project, mostly to be close to Peter (the shape was clear), guided the plane in. As they approached, Sax had an excellent view through the cockpit window. Deimos’s black surface looked to be covered by a thick coat of dusty regolith— all the craters were nearly buried in it, their rims soft round dimples in the blanket of dust. The little oblong moon was not regular, but was rather composed of several rounded facets. A triaxial ellipsoid, almost. An old robot lander sat near the middle of Voltaire Crater, its landing pads buried, its coppery articulated struts and boxes dimmed by a fine dark dust.
They had chosen their own landing site on one of the ridges between facets, where lighter bare rock protruded from the blanket of dust. The ridges were old spallation scars, marking where early impacts had knapped pieces of the moonlet away. Jackie brought them down gently toward a ridge to the west of Swift and Voltaire craters. Deimos was tidally fixed, as Phobos had been, which was convenient for their project. The sub-Mars point served as 0° for both longitude and latitude, a most sensible plan. Their touchdown ridge was near the equator, at 90° longitude. About a ten-kilometer walk from the sub-Mars point.