“That’s our champion so far,” Vlad said. “But still only slightly areophylic.” They were selecting for a number of extreme characteristics, including resistance to cold and dehydration and UV radiation, tolerance for salts, little need for oxygen, a habitat of rock or soil. No single terran organism had all these traits, and those that had them individually were usually very slow growers; but the engineers had started what Vlad called a mix and match program, and recently they had come up with a variant of the cyanophyte that was sometimes called bluegreen algae. “It is not precisely thriving, but it does not die so fast, let us put it that way.” They had named it cyanophyte primares, its common name becoming Underhill algae. They wanted to make a field trial with it, and had prepared a proposal to send down to UNOMA.
Arkady left the trailer park excited by the visit, Nadia could see; and that night he said to the dinner group, “We should make the decision on our own, and if we decide in favor, act.”
Maya and Frank were outraged by this, and clearly most of the rest were uncomfortable as well. Maya insisted on a change of subject, and awkwardly the dinner conversation shifted. And the next morning Maya and Frank came to Nadia, to talk about Arkady. The two leaders had already tried to reason with him, late the night before. “He laughs in our face!” Maya exclaimed. “It’s useless to try to reason with him!”
“What he proposes could be very dangerous,” Frank said. “If we explicitly disregard a directive from the UN, they could conceivably come here and round us up and ship us home, and replace us with people who will pay attention to the law. I mean, biological contamination of this environment is simply illegal at this point, and we don’t have the right to ignore that. It’s international treaty. It’s how humanity in general wants to treat this planet at this time.”
“Can’t you talk to him?” Maya asked.
“I can talk to him,” Nadia said. “But I can’t say that it will do any good.”
“Please, Nadia. Just try. We’ve got enough problems as it is.”
“I’ll try, sure.”
So that afternoon she talked to Arkady. They were out on Chernobyl Road, walking back toward Underhill. She brought it up, and suggested that patience was in order. “It will only be a matter of time before the UN comes around to your view anyway.”
He stopped and lifted her maimed hand. “How long do you think we have?” he said. He pointed at the setting sun. “How long do you suggest we wait? For our grandchildren? Our great-grandchildren? Our great-great-grandchildren, blind as cave fish?”
“Come on,” Nadia said, pulling her hand free. “Cave fish.”
Arkady laughed. “Still, it’s a serious question. We don’t have forever, and it would be nice to see things start to change.”
“Even so, why not wait a year?”
“A terran year or a martian year?”
“A martian year. Get readings on all the seasons, give the UN time to come around.”
“We don’t need the readings, they’ve been taken now for years.”
“Have you talked to Ann about that?”
“No. Well, sort of. But she doesn’t agree.”
“A lot of people don’t agree. I mean maybe they will eventually, but you have to convince them. You can’t just run roughshod over opposing opinions, otherwise you’re just as bad as the people back home that you’re always criticizing.”
Arkady sighed. “Yeah yeah.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“You damned liberals.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”
But they were now within sight of the low mound of Underhill, looking like a fresh squarish crater, its ejecta scattered around it. Nadia pointed at it. “I did that. You damned radicals” she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard, “you hate liberalism because it works.”
He snorted.
“It does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works.”
“Ah, Nadia.” He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again toward base. “Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”
Still, Nadia seemed to have affected him; he quit calling for a unilateral decision to release the new GEMs onto the surface, and he confined the agitprop to his beautification program, spending much of his time in the Quarter, trying to make colored bricks and glass. Nadia joined him for a swim before breakfast on most days, and they along with John and Maya took over a lane in the shallow pool that filled all of one of the vaulted chambers, and swam a brisk workout of one or two thousand meters. John led the sprint sets, Maya led the distance sets, Nadia followed in everything, hampered by her bad hand, and they churned through the extra-splashy water like a line of dolphins, staring through their goggles down at the sky-blue concrete of the pool bottom. “The butterfly was made for this gee,” John would say, grinning at the way they could practically fly out of the water. Breakfasts afterwards were pleasant if brief, and the rest of the days were the usual round of work; Nadia seldom saw Arkady again till evenings at dinner, or afterward.
Then Sax and Spencer and Rya finished setting up the robot factory for making Sax’s windmill heaters, and they applied to UNOMA for permission to distribute a thousand of them around the equatorial regions, to test their warming effect. All of them together were only expected to add about twice the heat to the atmosphere that Chernobyl did, and there were even questions as to whether they would be able to distinguish the added heat from background seasonal fluctuations; but as Sax said, they wouldn’t know until they tried. And there was no doubt that the heaters would add some heat to the surface, detectable or not.
And so the terraforming argument flared again. And suddenly Ann flew into violent action, taping long messages that she sent to the members of UNOMA’s executive committee, and to the national offices for Martian affairs for all the countries that were currently on the committee; and finally to the UN General Assembly. These appearances were given enormous amounts of attention, from the most serious policy-making levels all the way down to the tabloid press and TV, media that regarded it as the newest episode of the red soap opera. Ann had taped and sent her messages in private, so the colonists learned of them by seeing excerpts on terran TV, and watching the reaction to them in the days that followed: debates in government, a rally in Washington that drew twenty thousand; endless amounts of editorial space, and commentary in the scientific nets. It was a bit shocking to see the strength of these responses, and some of them felt Ann had gone behind their backs. Phyllis for one was outraged.
“Besides, it doesn’t make sense,” Sax said, blinking rapidly. “Chernobyl is already releasing almost as much heat into the atmosphere as these windmills, and she never complained about that.”
“Yes she did,” Nadia said. “She just lost the vote.”
Hearings were held at UNOMA, and while they were going on a group of the materials scientists confronted Ann after dinner. A lot of the rest of them were there to witness this confrontation; Underhill’s main dining hall filled four chambers, whose dividing walls had been removed and replaced by load-bearing pillars; it was a big room, filled with chairs and potted plants and the descendants of the Ares ’ birds, and most recently lit by windows installed high across the northern wall, through which they saw the ground level crops of the atrium. A big space; and at least half the colonists were in it eating when the meeting took place.