Green Mars (Mars Trilogy, #2)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. It’s a holy feeling, and our task in this world is to do everything we can to foster it. And one way to do that is to spread life everywhere. To aid it into existence where it was not before, as here on Mars.”

“We understand the world through paradigms. The change from empty-world economics to full-world economics is a major paradigm shift. Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.”

He concluded that strictly speaking, there was no such thing as altruism. It was only selfishness taking the long view, acknowledging the real costs of behavior and making sure to pay them in order not to run up any long-term debts.

“We want you to acquire Mars.” “Acquire Mars,” Art repeated. “Yes. In the sense that I spoke about this morning. These national-transnational partnerships are the coming thing, there’s no doubt about it. The old flag-of-convenience relationships were suggestive, but they need to be taken further, so that we have more control over our investment. We did that with Sri Lanka, and we’ve had so much success in our deal there that the other big transnats are all imitating us, actively recruiting countries in trouble.”

They don’t see the possibilities.” “The possibilities for …” “For development! Mars isn’t just an empty world, Randolph—in economic terms, it’s nearly a nonexistent world. Its bioinfrastructure has to be constructed, you see. I mean one could just extract the metals and move on, which is what Subarashii and the others seem to have in mind. But that’s treating it like nothing more than a big asteroid. Which is stupid, because its value as a base of operations, as a planet so to speak, far surpasses the value of its metals. All its metals together total about twenty trillion dollars, but the value of a terraformed Mars is more in the neighborhood of two hundred trillion dollars. That’s about one third of the current Gross World Value, and even that doesn’t make proper assessment of its scarcity value, if you ask me. No, Mars is bioinfrastructure investment, just like I was talking about. Exactly the kind of thing Praxis is looking for.”

This huge delicate object, ten thousand kilometers 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 kilometers out from Mars—closer at perihelion, farther away at aphelion. The angles of the slats were constantly adjusted by the soletta’s AI, to keep its orbit and its focus.

And then, as when one tugs open venetian blinds, the sun came back all at once. Blinding light! And now more blinding than ever, as the sun was noticeably brighter than it had been before the strange eclipse had begun. Now they walked under an augmented sun, the disk appearing about the same size as it did from Earth, the light some twenty percent greater than before—noticeably brighter, warmer on the back on the neck—the red expanse of the plains more brilliantly lit. As if floodlights had suddenly been turned on, and all of them were now walking a great stage.

The formula governing the number of possible relationships in a group was n(n–1)/2, where n is the number of individuals in the group; so that, for the 1,000 people at Biotique Burroughs, there were 499,500 possible relationships.

This is why groups of 50 are supposed to be best - only 1,000 relationships.

Indeed the most giddy of high school cheerleaders, say, managing to be friendly with everyone and therefore universally popular, seemed to Sax to be exercising an intelligence at least as powerful as any awkward brilliant mathematician’s—the calculus of human interaction being so much more subtle and variable than any physics, somewhat like the emerging field of math called cascading recombinant chaos, only less simple.

So that there were at least two kinds of intelligence, and probably many more: spatial, aesthetic, moral or ethical, interactional, analytic, synthetic, and so forth. And it was those people who were intelligent in a number of different ways who were truly exceptional, who stood out as something special.

Polyploidy was fairly frequent at high altitudes on Earth, so it was not surprising. It was an odd phenomenon—a doubling or tripling or even quadrupling of the original chromosome number in a plant. Diploid plants, with ten chromosomes, would be succeeded by polyploids with twenty or thirty or even forty chromosomes.

Hybridizers had used the phenomenon for years to develop fancy garden plants, because polyploids were usually larger—larger leaves, flowers, fruits, cell sizes—and they often had a wider range than their parents.

wondering why the transnat executive teams were so fiercely competitive, given that they already ruled the world, and had everything they could conceivably want in their personal lives.

There is always more

In one or two places the jade ice sat exposed in suncups turned pink with snow algae; the effect was strange, like a vast field of pistachio ice cream.

Yum

What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it.

“The problem is that people with a hypertrophied regard for wealth and power achieve positions that give them these gifts in excess, and then they find that they’re as much slaves to them as masters. And then they become dissatisfied and bitter.”

Thus they had invented the demimonde, the most sophisticated and complex society on Mars, full of people who passed each other on the street like strangers but met at night in rooms, to talk, and make music, and make love.

“But childhood isn’t just those years. It’s also the opinions you form about them afterward. That’s why our childhoods are so long.”

And Peter and Kasei and the rest of the nisei generation were nearing seventy, and in the ordinary course of things should have long since become the leaders of their world; and yet here they were always in the shadow of their undying parents, and how did that make them feel?

Then Diana described another rule of thumb which caused Maya to free-associate analogies to human history: the bigger an impactor, the less of it survived the impact. Thus almost every bit of this one had vaporized in the cataclysmic strike—though

What is the analogy?

“I don’t give a damn about Earth,” she said.

How quickly loyalty shifts when your basic needs no longer need a thing.

There she worked through the days

Why does she work?

On Earth, riots, arson, and sabotage were becoming daily weapons of the people who had not gotten the treatment—the mortals, as they were called.

And it came to her that it was precisely in the moments of greatest need when people could do the least for each other.