But king or not, there was a Red army now converging on Pavonis Mons. They were the strongest military operation left on the planet, and they intended to complete the work begun when Earth had been hit by its great flood. They did not believe in consensus or compromise, and for them, knocking down the cable was killing two birds with one stone: it would destroy the last police stronghold, and it would also sever easy contact between Earth and Mars, a primary Red goal. No, knocking down the cable was the obvious thing to do.
But Peter did not seem to know this. Or perhaps he did not care. Ann tried to tell him, but he just nodded, muttering, ‘Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.’ So arrogant, like all the Greens, so blithe and stupid with all their prevaricating, their dealing with Earth, as if you could ever get anything from such a leviathan. No. It was going to take direct action, as in the drowning of Burroughs, as in all the acts of sabotage that had set the stage for the revolution. Without those the revolution wouldn’t even have begun, or if it had it would have been crushed immediately, as in 2061.
‘Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then’ Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.
‘Yeah yeah,’ Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.
‘I’ll try to set one up,’ Peter said. She had got his attention at last, she saw; but there was an unpleasant look on his face, as if he had been threatened. ‘Before things get out of hand.’
‘Things are already out of hand,’ she told him, and cut the connection.
* * *
She checked the news on the various channels, Mangalavid, the Reds’ private nets, the Terran summaries. Though Pavonis and the elevator were now the focus of everyone on Mars, the physical convergence on the volcano was only partial. It appeared to her that there were more Red guerrilla units on Pavonis than the Green units of Free Mars and their allies; but it was hard to be sure. Kasei and the most radical wing of the Reds, called the Kakaze (‘fire wind’), had recently occupied the north rim of Pavonis, taking over the train station and tent at Lastflow. The Reds Ann had travelled with, most of them from the old Red mainstream, discussed moving around the rim and joining the Kakaze, but decided in the end to stay in East Pavonis. Ann observed this discussion silently but was glad at the result, as she wanted to keep her distance from Kasei and Dao and their crowd. She was pleased to stay in East Pavonis.
Many Free Mars troops were staying there as well, moving out of their cars into the abandoned warehouses. East Pavonis was becoming a major concentration of revolutionary groups of all kinds; and a couple of days after her arrival, Ann went in and walked over compacted regolith to one of the biggest warehouses in the tent, to take part in a general strategy session.
The meeting went about as she expected. Nadia was at the centre of the discussion, and it was useless talking to her now. Ann just sat on a chair against the back wall, watching the rest of them circle the situation. They did not want to say what Peter had already admitted to her in private: there was no way to get UNTA off the space elevator. Before they conceded that they were going to try to talk the problem out of existence.
Late in the meeting, Sax Russell came over to sit by her side.
‘A space elevator,’ he said. ‘It could be … used.’
Now, Ann was not the least bit comfortable talking to Sax. She knew that he had suffered brain damage at the hands of UNTA security, and had taken a treatment that had changed his personality; but somehow this had not helped at all; it only made things very strange, in that sometimes he seemed to her to be the same old Sax, as familiar as a much-hated brother; while at other times he did indeed seem like a completely different person, inhabiting Sax’s body. These two contrary impressions oscillated rapidly, even sometimes co-existed; just before joining her, as he had talked with Nadia and Art, he had looked like a stranger, a dapper old man with a piercing glare, talking in Sax’s voice and Sax’s old style. Now as he sat next to her, she could see that the changes to his face were utterly superficial. But though he looked familiar the stranger was now inside him – for here was a man who halted and jerked as he delved painfully after what he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out with something scarcely coherent.
‘The elevator is a, a device. For … raising up. A … a tool.’
‘Not if we don’t control it,’ Ann said to him carefully, as if instructing a child.
‘Control…’ Sax said, thinking over the concept as if it was entirely new to him. ‘Influence? If the elevator can be brought down by anyone who really wants to, then…’ He trailed away, lost in his thoughts.
‘Then what?’ Ann prompted.
‘Then it’s controlled by all. Consensual existence. It’s obvious?’
It was as if he were translating from a foreign language. This was not Sax; Ann could only shake her head, and try gently to explain. The elevator was the conduit for the metanationals to reach Mars, she told him. It was in the possession of the metanats now, and the revolutionaries had no means to kick their police forces off of it. Clearly the thing to do in such a situation was to bring it down. Warn people, give them a schedule, and then do it. ‘Loss of life would be minimal, and what there was would be pretty much the fault of anyone so stupid as to stay on the cable, or the equator.’
Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and she shook her head so violently that her cropped grey locks flew out like a clown’s ruff. She was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good reason at all, and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said curtly, ‘We need the elevator. It’s our conduit to Terra just as much as it’s their conduit to Mars.’
‘But we don’t need a conduit to Terra,’ Ann said. ‘It’s not a physical relationship for us, don’t you see? I’m not saying we don’t need to have an influence on Terra, I’m not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we need to try to work on them. But it’s not a physical thing, don’t you see? It’s a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It’s an information exchange. At least it is when it’s going right. It’s when it gets into a physical thing – a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police control – that’s when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took it down we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not yours.’
It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn’t imagine.
Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic table style said, ‘If we can bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down,’ blinking and everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again – Saxifrage Russell his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words’ inadequacy right in her mouth.
Still she tried. ‘People act on what’s there, Sax. The metanat directors and the UN and the governments will look up and see what’s there, and act accordingly. If the cable’s gone they just don’t have the resources or the time to mess with us right now. If the cable’s here, then they’ll want us. They’ll think, well, we could do it. And there’ll be people screaming to try.’ ‘They can always come. The cable is only a fuel-saver.’ ‘A fuel-saver which makes mass transfers possible.’ But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about control of orbit and safe conduct passes and the like.
The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said, ‘We’ve promised to … help them out.’
‘By sending them more metals?’ Ann said. ‘Do they really need those?’
‘We could … take people. It might help.’
Ann