Back in Wallace Crater they were welcomed as heroes. Peter deflected all congratulations: “It was Sax’s idea, the flight itself was no big deal, just another reconnaissance except for the firing, I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.”
“They’ll just drop another one into position,” Ann said from the edge of the crowd, staring at Sax with a very curious expression.
“But they’re so vulnerable,” Peter said.
“Surface-to-space missiles,” Sax said, feeling nervous. “Can you invent—can you inventory all orbiting objects?”
“We already have,” Peter said. “Some of them we don’t have ID’d, but most are obvious.”
“I’d like to see the list.”
“I’d like to talk to you,” Ann told him darkly.
And the rest quickly left the room, wagging their eyebrows at each other like a bunch of Art Randolphs.
Sax sat down in a bamboo chair. It was a little room, without a window. It could have been one of the barrel vaults in Underhill, back in the beginning. The shape was right. The textures. Brick was such a stable staple. Ann pulled a chair over and sat across from him, leaning forward to stare in his face. She looked older. The vaunted Red leader, vaunted, gaunted, haunted. He smiled. “Are you about due for a gerontological treatment?” his mouth said, surprising them both.
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 terra-forming 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.
As they approached the ridge, the rim of Voltaire disappeared under the black curved horizon. Dust blew away from the ridge as the plane’s rockets shot exhaust over it. There was only a few centimeters of dust covering the bedrock. Carbonaceous chondrite, five billion years old. They docked with a hard thump, bounced away, slowly drifted down again. He could feel the pull toward the floor of the plane, but it was very slight. Probably he didn’t weigh more than a couple of kilograms, if that.
Other rockets began to land on the ridge to either side of them, kicking clouds of dust into the vacuum, where they drifted slowly down. All the planes bounced on impact, then came down gently through their dustclouds. Within half an hour there were eight planes lined up on the ridge, running along it to the tight horizons in both directions. Together they made a weird sight, the inter-metallic compounds of their rounded surfaces gleaming like chitin under the surgical glare of unfiltered sunlight, the clarity of the vacuum making all their edges overfocused. Dreamlike.
Each plane carried a component of the system. Robot drillers and tunnelers and stamps. Water-collection galleries, there to melt the veins of ice in Deimos. A processing plant to separate out heavy water, about one part in 6,000 of the ordinary water. Another plant to process deuterium from the heavy water. A small tokamak, to be powered by a deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction. Lastly guidance jets, though most of these were in planes that had landed on the other sides of the moon.
The Bogdanovist technicians who had come up with the equipment were doing most of the installation. Sax got suited up in one of the bulky pressure suits on board, and went out the lock and onto the surface, thinking to look and see if the plane carrying the guidance jet for the Swift-Voltaire region had landed.
The big heated boots were weighted, and he was glad of it; escape velocity was no more than twenty-five kilometers an hour, meaning that with a running start one coul
d jump right off the moon. It was quite difficult to keep his balance. Millions of tiny motions carried one along. Every step kicked up a healthy cloud of black dust, which slowly fell to the ground. There were rocks scattered on top of the dust, usually in little pockets they had made on landing. Ejecta which had no doubt circled the moonlet many times after ejection, before dropping in again. He picked up one rock like a black baseball. Throw it at the right speed, turn around, wait for it to go around the world, catch it chest high. Out at first. A new sport.
The horizon was only a few hundred meters away, and it changed markedly with every step—crater rims, spallation ridges, and boulders popping up over the dusty edge as he trudged toward it. People back on the ridge, between the planes, already stood at a different upright than he did, and were tilted away from him. Like the Little Prince. The clarity was starting. His footprints made a deep trail through the dust. The dustclouds hanging over the footprints got lower the farther back they were, until they settled, four or five steps back.
Peter came out of the lock and walked in his direction, and Jackie followed. Peter was the only man Sax had ever seen Jackie really attracted to, in that intense helpless manner of the orbiting object, the lovelorn, yearning for orbital decay. Peter was also the only man Sax had ever seen who did not respond to Jackie’s amorous attentions in any way. The perversity of the heart. As in his attraction to Phyllis, a woman he had not liked. Or as in his desire for the approval of Ann, a woman who had not liked him. A woman with crazy views. But perhaps there was a rationality to it. If someone moons over you, you have to wonder at their judgment. Something like that.
Now Jackie trailed Peter like a dog, and though their faceplates were a copper color, Sax could tell just by her movements that she was talking to him, cajoling him somehow. Sax turned to the common band and came in on their conversation.
“—why they’re named Swift and Voltaire,” Jackie said.
“Both of them predicted the existence of the Martian moons,” Peter said, “in books they wrote a century before the moons were seen. In Gulliver’s Travels Swift even gives their distances from the planet and their orbit times, and he wasn’t that far off.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No.”
“How in the world did he do that?”
“I don’t know. Blind luck, I guess.”
Sax cleared his throat. “Sequence.”
“What?” they said.
“Venus had no moon, Earth one, Jupiter four. Mars should have had two. Since they couldn’t see them, they were probably small. And close. Therefore fast.”
Peter laughed. “Swift must have been a smart man.”
“Or his source. But it was still blind luck. The sequence being a coincidence.”
They stopped on another spallation ridge, from which they could see the rim of Swift Crater, as a nearly buried ridge on the next horizon. A small gray rocket plane stood on the black dust like a miracle. Above them Mars filled most of the sky, a vast orange world. Night was falling across the eastern crescent. Isidis was directly above them, and though he could not make out Burroughs, the plains to the north of it were patched with great white splotches. Glaciers meeting up to become ice lakes, and the beginnings of an ice sea. Oceanus Borealis. A corrugated layer of clouds lay pasted right against the land, reminding him suddenly of what Earth had looked like from the Ares. That was a cold front, coming down Syrtis Major. The pattern of white clouds was just what it would have been on Terra. Spiraling waves of condensation particles.
He left the ridge, walked back toward the planes. The tall stiff boots were the only things that kept him upright, and his ankles hurt. Like walking on the sea bottom, only with no resistances. Universe ocean. He reached down and dug in the dust; no bedrock for ten centimeters, then twenty; it could have been five or ten meters deep, or even more. The dustclouds he had kicked up dropped back to the surface in about fifteen seconds. The dust was so fine that in any kind of atmosphere they might have stayed in suspension indefinitely. But in the vacuum they fell like anything else. Ejecta. There simply wasn’t much to pull them back. One might be able to kick dust into space. He crossed a low ridge and abruptly could see over the sloping plain of the next facet. It was so obvious that the moonlet was shaped like some paleolithic hand tool, with facets knapped off by ancient strikes. Triaxial ellipsoid. Curious that it had such a circular orbit, one of the most circular in all the solar system. Not what you would expect of a captured asteroid, nor of ejecta flung up from Mars in one of the big impacts. Leaving what? Very old capture. With other bodies in other orbits, to regularize it. Knapp, knapp. Spall. Spallation. Language was so beautiful. Rocks striking rocks, in the ocean of space. Knocking bits off and flying away. Until they all either fell into the planet or skittered off. All but two. Two out of billions. Moon bomb. Gun stand. Rotating just faster than Mars above, so that any point on the Martian surface had it in the sky for sixty hours at a time. Convenient. The known was more dangerous than the unknown. No matter what Michel said. Clomp, clomp, on the virgin rock, of a virgin moon, with a virgin mind. The Little Prince. The planes rising over the horizon looked absurd, like insects from a dream, chitinous, articulated, colorful, tiny in the starry black, on the dust-blanketed rock. He climbed back into the lock.
It was months later, and he was alone in Echus Chasma, when the robots on Deimos finished their construction, and the starter deuterium ignited the drive engine. One thousand tons of crushed rock were thrown out by the engine every second, at a speed of 200 kilometers per second. All flying out tangent to the orbit and in the orbit plane. In four months, when about a half percent of the moon’s mass had been ejected, the engine would cut off. Deimos would then be 614,287 kilometers away from Mars, according to Sax’s calculations, and on its way completely out of Mars’s influence, to become a free asteroid again.
Now it flew in his night sky, an irregular gray potato, less luminous than Venus or Terra, except that there was a new comet blazing out of its side. Quite a sight. News all over both worlds. Scandalous! Controversial even in the resistance, where people argued pro and con. All that squabbling. Hiroko was going to get tired of it and light out for the territory, he could feel the shape of it. Yes, no, what, where. Who did it? Why?
Ann came on the wrist to ask the same questions, looking furious.
“It was a perfect weapons platform,” Sax said. “If they made it into a military base, like they did Phobos. We would have been helpless under it.”
“So you did this on the off chance it might get turned into a military base?”
“If Arkady and his crew hadn’t fixed Phobos on the off chance, we couldn’t have dealt with it. We would have been killed. Anyway, the Swiss heard it was going to happen.”
Ann was shaking her head, staring at him as if he were mad. A crazed saboteur. Rather a case of the pot calling the kettle black, in his opinion. Resolutely he met the look. When she cut the connection he shrugged and called the Bogdanovists. “The Reds have a catalog of—all the objects in orbit around Mars. Then we need surface-to-space delivery systems. Spencer will help. Equatorial silos. Inactive moholes. Do you understand?”
They said they did. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist. And so if it ever came to it again, they would not be pounded from space.
Sometime later, he could not be sure how long, Peter appeared on the little screen of the boulder car Sax had borrowed from Desmond. “Sax, I’m in contact with some friends who work on the elevator, and with Deimos accelerating, the cable oscillations to dodge it have been thrown off in their timing. It looks like the next pass in its orbit might collide with the elevator, but my friends can’t get the cable’s navigation AI to respond to them. Apparently it’s really hardened to outside input, to prevent sabotage you know, and the idea of Deimos changing speed is something they can’t get it to accept. Do you have any suggestions?”
“Let it see for itself.”
“What?”
“Feed the data o
n Deimos into it. It must get that anyway. And it’s programmed to avoid it. Direct its attention to the data. Explain what happened. Trust it.”
“Trust it?”
“Well, talk to it.”
“We’re trying, Sax. But the antisabotage programming is real strong.”
“It’s running the oscillations to avoid Deimos. As long as that’s in its list of goals, you should be okay. Just give it the data.”
“Okay. We’ll try.”
It was night, and Sax went outside. Wandering in the darkness, under the immense cliff of the Great Escarpment, in the region just north of where Kasei Vallis broke through the wall. Set meant star in Japanese, ka fire. Fire star. It was the same in Chinese, in which huo was the syllable the Japanese pronounced as ka, and hsing, sei. A Chinese word to start with, Huo Hsing: fire star, burning in the sky. They said Ka was what the little red men called it. We live on fire. Sax was distributing seeds in the ground, the hard little nuts pushed just under the surface of the sand flooring the chasm. Johnny Fireseed. There in the southern sky Deimos burned, slowly losing way through the stars, rolling westward at its own slow pace. Now pushed by the pinpoint comet burst on its eastern edge. The elevator rising over Tharsis was invisible, the new Clarke perhaps one of the dimmer stars in the southwest sky, it was impossible to say. He kicked a rock by accident, bent down and planted another seed. After the seeds were all out, there were starter packets of a new lichen to distribute. A chasmoendolithic strain, very hardy, very fast to propagate, very quick to pump out oxygen. Very high surface-to-volume ratio. Very dry.
A bip on the wrist. He switched the voice into his helmet intercom as he continued to take the little nuts out of his thigh pocket and shove them into the sand, careful to avoid damaging the roots of any of the sedges or other ground cover that dotted the ground like furry black rocks.
It was Peter, sounding excited. “Sax, Deimos is coming up on them now, and the AI seems to have acknowledged that it’s not in its usual spot in its orbit. It’s been mulling it over, they say. The attitude jets all through their sector have started a bit early, so we’re hopeful that the system is responding.”