She tried to concentrate on the composition of the sand grains. Blond was not really a usual colour for sand on Mars. A very rare granitic stuff. She wondered if Hiroko had hunted for it, or else got lucky.
The ectogenes were gone, down by the other side of the lake. She was alone on the beach. Simon somewhere underneath her. It was hard to keep from connecting with any of that.
A man came walking over the dunes toward her. He was short, and at first she thought it was Sax, then Coyote, but he wasn’t either of these. He hesitated when he saw her, and by that motion she saw that it was indeed Sax. But a Sax greatly altered in appearance. Vlad and Ursula had been doing some cosmetic surgery on his face, enough so that he didn’t look like the old Sax. He was going to move to Burroughs, and join a biotech company there, using a Swiss passport and one of Coyote’s viral identities. Getting back into the terraforming effort. She looked out at the water. He came over and tried to talk to her, strangely un-Saxlike, nicer-looking now, a handsome old coot; but it was still the old Sax, and her anger filled her up so much that she could hardly think, hardly remember what they were talking about from one second to the next. “You really do look different,” was all she could recall. Inanities like that. Looking at him she thought, He will never change. But there was something frightening about the stricken look on his new face, something deadly that it would evoke, if she did not stop it … and so she argued with him until he grimaced one last time, and went away.
She sat there for a long time, getting colder and more distraught. Finally she put her head on her knees, and fell into a kind of sleep.
She had a dream. All the First Hundred were standing around her, the living and the dead, Sax at their centre with his old face, and that dangerous new look of distress. He said, “Net gain in complexity.”
Vlad and Ursula said, “Net gain in health.”
Hiroko said, “Net gain in beauty.”
Nadia said, “Net gain in goodness.”
Maya said, “Net gain in emotional intensity,” and behind her John and Frank rolled their eyes.
Arkady said, “Net gain in freedom.”
Michel said, “Net gain in understanding.”
From the back Frank said, “Net gain in power,” and John elbowed him and cried, “Net gain in happiness!”
And then they all stared at Ann. And she stood up, quivering with rage and fear, understanding that she alone among them did not believe in the possibility of the net gain of anything at all, that she was some kind of crazy reactionary; and all she could do was point a shaking finger at them and say, “Mars. Mars. Mars.”
That night after supper, and the evening in the big meeting room, Ann got Coyote alone and said, “When do you go out again?”
“In a few days.”
“Are you still willing to introduce me to those people you talked about?”
“Yeah, sure.” He looked at her with his head cocked. “It’s where you belong.”
She only nodded. She looked around the common room, thinking goodbye, goodbye. Good riddance.
A week later she was flying with Coyote in an ultralite plane. They flew north through the nights, into the equatorial region, then onward to the Great Escarpment, to the Deuteronilus Mensae north of Xanthe—wild fretted terrain, the mensae like an archipelago of stack islands, dotting a sand sea. They would become a real archipelago, Ann thought as Coyote descended between two of them, if the pumping to the north continued.
Coyote landed on a short stretch of dusty sand, and taxied into a hangar cut into the side of one of the mesas. Out of the plane they were greeted by Steve and Ivana and a few others, and taken up in an elevator to a floor just under the top of the mesa. The northern end of this particular mesa came to a sharp rocky point, and high in this point a large triangular meeting room had been excavated. On entering it Ann stopped in surprise; it was jammed with people, several hundred of them at least, all seated at long tables about to start a meal, leaning over the tables to pour each other’s water. The people at one table saw her, and stopped what they were doing, and the people at the next table noticed that and looked around, and saw her and likewise stopped—and so the effect rippled out through the room, until they had all gone still. Then one stood, and another, and in a ragged motion they all rose to their feet. For a moment everything was as if frozen. Then they began to applaud, their hands flailing wildly, their faces gleaming; and then they cheered.
PART FOUR The Scientist As Hero
Hold it between thumb and middle finger. Feel the rounded edge, observe the smooth curves of glass. A magnifying lens: it has the simplicity, elegance and heft of a palaeolithic tool. Sit with it on a sunny day, hold it over a pile of dry twigs. Move it up and down, until you see a spot in the twigs turn bright. Remember that light? It was as if the twigs caged a little sun.
The Amor asteroid that was spun out into the elevator cable was made up mostly of carbonaceous chondrites and water. The two Amor asteroids intercepted by groups of robot landers in the year 2091 were mostly silicates and water.
The material of New Clarke was spun out into a single long strand of carbon. The material of the two silicate asteroids was transformed by their robot crews into sheets of solar sail material. Silica vapour was solidified between rollers ten kilometres long, and pulled out in sheets coated with a thin layer of aluminium, and these vast mirror sheets were unfurled by spacecraft with human crews, into circular arrays which held their shape using spin and sunlight.
From one asteroid, pushed into a Martian polar orbit and called Birch, they teased the mirror sheets out into a ring a hundred thousand kilometres in diameter. This annular mirror spun around Mars in a polar orbit, the mirror ring facing the sun, angled in so that the light reflected from it met at a point inside Mars’s orbit, near its Lagrange One point.
The second silicate asteroid, called Solettaville, had been pushed near this Lagrange point. There the solar sailmakers spun the mirror sheets out into a complex web of slatted rings, all connected and set at angles, so that they looked like a lens made of circular Venetian blinds, spinning around a hub which was a silver cone, with the cone’s open end facing Mars. This huge delicate object, ten thousand kilometres in diameter, bright and stately as it wheeled along between Mars and the sun, was called the soletta.
Sunlight striking the soletta directly bounced through its blinds, hitting the sun side of one, then the Mars side of the next one out, and onward to Mars. Sunlight striking the annular ring in its polar orbit was reflected back and in to the inner cone of the soletta, and then was reflected again, also on to Mars. Thus light struck both sides of the soletta, and these countervailing pressures kept it moving in its position, about a hundred thousand kilometres out from Mars—closer at perihelion, further away at aphelion. The angles of the slats were constantly adjusted by the soletta’s AI, to keep its orbit and its focus.
Through the decade that these two great pinwheels were being constructed out of their asteroids, like silicate webs out of rock spiders, observers on Mars saw almost nothing of them. Occasionally someone would see an arcing white line in the sky, or random glints by day or by night, as if the brilliance of a much vaster universe were shining through loose seams in the fabric of our sphere.
Then, when the two mirrors were completed, the annular mirror’s reflected light was aimed at the cone of the soletta. The soletta’s circular slats were adjusted, and it moved into a slightly different orbit.
And one day people living on the Tharsis side of Mars looked up, for the sky had darkened. They looked up, and saw an eclipse of the sun such as Mars had never seen: the sun bit into, as if there were some Luna-sized moon