Frank found the party in the park unsettling, there were too many people watching him, too many who wanted to approach him and talk. That was fame: you talked to groups. So he turned around and walked back up the canalside tent.
Two parallel rows of white pillars ran down the side of the canal; each pillar was a Bareiss column, semicircular at top and bottom but with the half-circles rotated 180 degrees to each other. This simple maneuver created pillars that looked completely different depending on where you were when you looked at them, and the two rows of these pillars had a strange tumbledown look, as if they were already ruins, although the smoothness and whiteness of their diamond-coated salt belied that. They stood off the grass as white as sugar cubes, and gleamed as if wet.
Frank walked between the rows, touching each pillar in turn. Above them on each side the valley slopes rose to the window-walled bluffs of mesas. Massed greenery shone behind these cliffs of untinted glass, so that it looked as if the city were rimmed by enormous terrariums. A really elegant ant farm. The part of the valley slope under tenting was dotted with trees and tile roofs, and cut by broad grassy boulevards. The uncovered part was still a red rocky plain. A great number of buildings were just being finished, or still under construction; there were cranes everywhere rearing up toward the tent roofs, a kind of odd colorful skeletal statuary. Also scores of scaffolded buildings, so that Helmut had said the tented hillsides reminded him of Switzerland, no surprise since most of the construction was being done by Swiss. “They scaffold a house to replace a window box.”
Sax Russell was standing at the foot of one of these scaffolded buildings, looking up at it critically. Frank turned and walked up a tube to him, said hello.
“There’s twice as much support as they need,” Sax said. “Maybe more.”
“The Swiss like that.”
Sax nodded. They stared at the building.
“Well?” Frank said. “What do you think?”
“The treaty? It will reduce support for terraforming,” Sax said. “People are more inclined to invest than to give.”
Frank scowled. “Not all investment is good for terraforming, Sax, you have to remember that. A lot of that money is spent on other things entirely.”
“But terraforming is a way to reduce overhead, you see. A certain percentage of the total investment will always be devoted to it. So I want the total as high as possible.”
“Real benefits can only be calculated using real costs,” Frank said. “All the real costs. Terran economics never bothered to do that, but you’re a scientist and you should. You have to judge the environmental damage from higher population and activity, as well as the benefits to terraforming that go along with it. Better to up the investment devoted to pure terraforming, rather than compromising and taking a percentage of a total that in some ways is working against you.”
Sax twitched. “It’s funny to hear you speak against compromise after the last four months, Frank. Anyway, I say it’s better to up both the total and the percentage. The environmental costs are negligible. Managed right they can mostly be turned to benefits. An economy can be measured in terawatts or kilocalories, like John used to say. And that’s energy. And we can use energy here in any form, even a lot of bodies. Bodies are just more work, very versatile, very energetic.”
“Real costs, Sax. All of them. You’re still trying to play at economics, but it isn’t like physics, it’s like politics. Think what will happen when millions of displaced Terran emigrants arrive here, with all their viruses, biological and psychic. Maybe they’ll all join Arkady or Ann, ever thought of that? Epidemics, running through the mob’s body and mind— they could crash your whole system! Look, hasn’t the Acheron group been trying to teach you biology? You should pay attention! This isn’t mechanics, Sax. It’s ecology. And it’s a fragile, managed ecology, so it has to be managed.”
“Maybe,” Sax said. It was one of John’s mannerisms, that phrase. Frank missed what Sax was saying for a minute, then his attention was captured again:
“… this treaty isn’t going to make all that much difference anyway. The transnationals that want to invest will find a way. They’ll make a new flag of convenience and it’ll look like a country staking its claim here, exactly according to the treaty’s quotas. But behind it will be transnational money. There’ll be all kinds of that stuff happening, Frank. You know how it is. Politics, right? Economics, right?”
“Maybe,” Frank said harshly, upset. He walked away.