2312

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Kris was nodding. “You need our help to coordinate the whole effort. You’re down here peeling around at speed, getting cooked and getting your stations going.”

  They thought that over. Their speaker said, “Maybe so. But when Terminator was out of commission, we had no problems. Now we’re thinking that Mercury should contribute to the Mondragon with things other than light, and leave us to it. You’ve got heavy metals, art history, and Terminator itself as a work of art, a tourist destination for the grand tour and for sun watchers. You’ll be fine.”

  Kris shook her head. “We’re the capital of the inner system. With all due respect, you people operate power stations here. You need administration.”

  “Maybe.”

  Swan said, “Which Saturnians have you been talking to about this?”

  They stared at her. “They speak to us as a league,” one of them replied. “But we have the same Saturnian liaison you do—their inner planets ambassador. You know him better than we do, from what we hear.”

  “You mean Wahram?”

  “Of course. He told us that you Mercurials knew the interplanetary situation, and would understand how important our light is to the Titan project. And to all the other outer planets as well.”

  Swan did not reply.

  Kris began discussing the Triton settlement and the plan there to stellarize Neptune.

  “Yes,” one of the Vulcans replied, “but the Saturnians won’t do that to Saturn.”

  Swan interrupted them: “Tell me more about Wahram; when did he visit you?”

  “A couple years ago, I think.”

  “Two years?”

  “Wait,” another of them put in. “Our year is only six weeks long, so that was a joke there. It was just recently.”

  “It was since Terminator burned,” the first speaker clarified, looking at her curiously.

  Kris filled in the silence that followed, reminding the Vulcans that as the new Lion of Mercury, Kris was now the titular head of their order. But these particular Vulcans were not Greys, as they were quick to inform Kris; they were adherents of some schismatic sect that did not consider the Lion of Mercury to be their head. Nevertheless they were very polite, and Kris continued to try to convince them to keep the deal; but Swan had trouble following the conversation. She was getting angrier at Wahram the longer she considered what he had done, to the point where she wasn’t listening anymore. Right in the time he had said he would work with her, after they had found the ship floating in the clouds of Saturn, he had come down here instead and undermined her cause. It was a hard little sucker punch.

  Lists (11)

  Annie Oakley Crater, Dorothy Sayers Crater.

  Also craters named for:

  Madame Sévigné, Shakira (a Bashkir goddess), Martha Graham, Hippolyta, Nina Efimova, Dorothea Erxleben, Lorraine Hansberry, Catherine Beevher;

  also the Mesopotamian fertility goddess, the Celtic river goddess, the Woyo rainbow goddess, the Pueblo Indian corn goddess, the Vedic goddess of plenty, the Roman goddess of the hunt (Diana), the Latvian goddess of fate;

  also Anna Comnena, Charlotte Corday, Mary Queen of Scots, Madame de Staël, Simone de Beauvoir, Josephine Baker.

  Also Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar. Tezan, the Etruscan goddess of the dawn. Alice B. Toklas. Xantippe. Empress Wuhou. Virginia Woolf. Laura Ingalls Wilder.

  Evangeline, Fátima, Gloria, Gaia, Helen, Heloise.

  Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston.

  Guinevere, Nell Gwyn, Martine de Beausoleil.

  Sophia Jex-Blake, Jerusha Jirad, Angelica Kauffman.

  Maria Merian, Maria Montessori, Marianne Moore.

  Mu Guiying. Vera Mukhina. Aleksandra Potanina.

  Margaret Sanger. Sappho. Zoya. Sarah Winnemucca. Seshat. Jane Seymour. Rebecca West. Marie Stopes. Alfonsina Storni. Anna Volkova. Sabina Steinbach. Mary Wollstonecraft. Anna von Schuurman. Jane Austen. Wang Zenyi. Karen Blixen.

  Sojourner Truth. Harriet Tubman.

  Hera. Emily Dickinson.

  WAHRAM ON VENUS

  Wahram was in the city of Colette, trying to get at least some of the Venus Working Group to support the plan to intervene on Earth; also to ask certain Venusian friends for help in Genette’s plan to deal with the strange qubes. Neither project was going particularly well, even though Shukra seemed willing to help; but he wanted help in return, in dealing with his local conflicts, and Wahram didn’t see how that could be done. More would be needed from the Mondragon and Saturn both if they were going to entrain any of the Venusians in the upcoming Terran effort.

  Then during a welcome break in the negotiations there was a knock at the conference chamber door, and Swan came in. He was shocked to see her, and shocked again when she saw him, strode across the room, crashed right into him, and struck him on the chest with the back of her fists. “You bastard!” she exclaimed, not very quietly. “You lied to me, you lied!”

  He stepped back, hands up, looking around for a place to retreat where the conversation could continue a bit more privately. “I did not! What do you mean!”

  “You went to the Vulcanoids and made a deal with them and you didn’t tell me about it!”

  “That isn’t lying,” he said, feeling like he was splitting hairs, but it was true, and gave him time to back out into a passageway, then around a corner, where he could stop and defend himself: “I was down there doing my job for the Saturn League, it was nothing to do with you, and you have to admit we are not in the habit of sharing our complete work schedules with each other. I haven’t seen you in a year.”

  “That’s because you’ve been on Earth, making deals there too. Which you didn’t tell me about either. What did you tell me about? Nothing!”

  Wahram had been worried about this, had ignored the problem and done his job; but now here it was, the reckoning. “I was away,” he said feebly.

  “Away—what’s away?” she demanded. “Look, were you in the tunnel or not? Were we in the tunnel together or not?”

  “We were,” he said, putting his hands up in defense, or protest. “I was there.” I wasn’t the one who claimed not to be there, he didn’t say.

  In any case she had stopped and was staring at him. They stared at each other for a while.

  “Listen,” Wahram said. “I work for Saturn. I’m the league’s ambassador to the inner planets, doing my job here. It’s not—it’s not something I can automatically share. I do it in a different sphere.”

  “But we just suffered an attack and lost our city right down to the framing. We need to keep what gifts we have to give. And part of that was light.”

  “Those were not useful amounts of light. The entirety of what you could send from Mercury meant little around Saturn. With the Vulcanoids it’s different. They can send out enough to make a real difference. We need it for Titan. So, I’m charged with arranging that. It’s like bidding for futures shares. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it myself. I guess I was… I was afraid. I didn’t want you mad at me. But now you are anyway.”

  “Even worse,” she assured him. But now she was piling on, he saw, for the theater of it. He played to that:

  “It was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I’m a bad man.”

  That almost made her laugh, he could see. “Fucking bastard,” she said instead, continuing her play. “The stuff you did on Earth is even worse anyway. You cut a deal with the rich nations of Earth, that’s what it comes down to and you know it. Which is a disgrace. There are people down there living in cardboard shacks. You know how it is. It’s always that way, and it looks like it’ll go on forever. So they’ll always hate us, and some will attack us. And we pop like soap bubbles. There’s no solution but justice for everyone. It’s the only thing that will make us safe. Until then some group will always conclude that killing spacers is the only way to get our attention. And the sad thing is that they may be right.”

  “Because now you’re paying attention?”

  She glared at him. “Because the situat
ion down there has gone on too long!”

  He tilted his head side to side, trying to figure out how to say what he felt. He walked her down the passageway a little farther, to a long table covered with little cookies and big coffee tanks. He poured them cups of coffee. “So… to protect ourselves, you’re saying, we have to orchestrate a global revolution on Earth.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how? I mean, people have been trying that for centuries now.”

  “That’s no excuse to stop! I mean here we are on Venus, on Titan, out here doing everything. There are things that could work down there. Spread something through their cell phones. Give them a stake in the Mondragon. Build housing or do land work. Make it that kind of revolution, one of the nonviolent ones. If something happens fast enough they call it a revolution whether guns go off or not.”

  “But the guns are there.”

  “Maybe they are, but what if no one dares to shoot them? What if what we did was always too innocuous? Or even invisible?”

  “These kinds of actions are never invisible. No—there would be resistance. Don’t fool yourself.”

  “So all right, we press on against resistance, see what happens. We’re resource rich, and we’re growing a lot of their food. We have the leverage.”

  He thought it over. “Maybe we do, but they play by their rules there.”

  She shook her head violently. “There’s a gift economy in people’s feelings that precedes all the rules. Set one up and people give themselves to it. And we have to do something. If we don’t, they’ll shoot us down. They’ll kill us and eat us.”

  Wahram sipped his coffee, trying to slow her down. She had gone too far, as always. He would like to hear what Pauline would say about all this, but there was no way he was going to be given access to Pauline at this moment. Swan had seized up the cup he had poured for her and slurped it down, then started lecturing him some more, emphasizing her points with the coffee cup so that he was going to be lucky not to have it poured on him.

  And in fact, though she was going too far, as usual, she was also expressing things Wahram had been thinking himself. Really, it was just another articulation of a point that Alex had been making for years. So he seized a moment when she was catching her breath and said, “The problem is that what’s needed to be done has been clear for centuries now, but no one does it because it would take a very large number of people to enact it. Construction work, landscape restoration, decent farming, they all take huge numbers of people.”

  “But there are huge numbers of people! If the unemployed were mobilized, there’s your numbers. The revolution of full employment. The place is trashed, they’re cooked, they need to do it. In effect Earth needs terraforming as much as Venus or Titan! In fact it needs it more, and we’re not doing it.”

  Wahram thought it over. “Could it be sold that way, do you think? As a restoration? Appeal to the conservatives as well as the revolutionaries—or at least confuse the issue as to what is really happening?”

  “I don’t think we need to be confusing.”

  “If you are clear about your intention, Swan, there will be opposition. Don’t be naïve. Any change will be opposed. And by serious opposition. I mean violence.”

  “If they can find the way to apply it. But if there’s no one to arrest, no one to beat back, no one to scare…”

  He shook his head, unconvinced.

  Swan was pacing around him like a comet around the sun; Wahram rotated to face her. Twice she rushed him again and beat him on the chest with the hand not holding her coffee cup. Their voices crossed in an antiphony that anyone listening would have heard as a duet for croak and cheep.

  Finally the dissonant duet came to an end. Swan was winding down at last. She had just arrived on Venus, it was clear, and was beginning to yawn despite the coffee. Wahram sighed with relief, shifted the timbre of his voice to something calmer, changed the subject. They stared out the window at the falling snow, blown by a hard gale into frolic architectures plastered over everything. This world, so new and raw, still emerging, told them with great whacks of wind: things were changing.

  Wahram considered Alex’s two unfinished projects: to deal with Earth; to deal with the qubes. He felt a shiver, as suddenly it seemed to him that these projects were becoming parts of one thing. Very well, but it would take real craft to pull them together; it would take some cleverness in the execution. And Swan was going to keep getting mad at him until he helped to make it happen. But he thought perhaps he could.

  Extracts (13)

  certain metabolic actions accumulate lifetime damage, and each kind of damage has to be treated individually, and the treatments coordinated with each other as well as with the ordinary functioning of the organism

  cell loss or atrophy is ameliorated by exercise, growth factors, and directed stem cells

  cancerous mutations are identified by massively parallel DNA sequencing and transcriptome sequencing and dissolved by targeted gene therapies and telomerase manipulation; chemo and radiation therapies are now highly targeted, using monoclonal antibodies, avimers and designed proteins

  death-resistant cells that are senescent in their function must not be allowed to transform into harmful forms, but must rather be targeted by suicide genes and immune response

  undamaged mitochondria are introduced into cells suffering mitochondrial mutations

  lipofuscin is one kind of accumulated junk inside our cells that can’t be carried away by the immune system. Amyloid plaques are another. Enzymes adapted from bacteria and molds that completely digest animal bodies will upon introduction flourish until their nutrient runs out, and this absence activates inserted suicide genes in the enzymes. Extracellular aggregates are removed by vaccinations that stimulate immune responses, including a state of enhanced phagocytosis. Complications include

  random extracellular cross-linking of cells makes for stiffness, but the links have been successfully broken with enzymes designed to

  the manipulation of telomerase has proved to be a very difficult balancing act in certain cell types: telomeres too long and you get a cancerous immortality, telomeres too short and you quickly hit the Hayflick limit and replication is no longer successful

  while DNA repair involves a DNA polymerase with an exonuclease-proofreading capability, resulting in high-fidelity DNA repair, RNA polymerases do not have this and therefore make many more mistakes during gene transcription; this is a potent driver of evolution

  pleiotropy is the phenomenon of a gene causing good effects in the young organism that turn into bad effects in the same organism when aged. It is very often the source of the problems that bisexual hormone treatments are designed to

  hormesis (eagerness) is an eventually advantageous biological response to low exposures of toxins or stressors. This process, sometimes called eustress, and related to Mithridatism (after King Mithridates, who ate small amounts of poison so that a larger amount would not kill him), has been put forth as explaining in principle why the Earth sabbatical might help maximize longevity

  strongest correlations to longevity include smaller body size and exposure to both androgens and estrogens; these two are also multipliers of each other, to the extent that no small androgyn or gynandromorph has yet been known to die of natural causes. The oldest are over 210 years old, and their potential life span cannot be calculated at this time. There are likely to be more such subjects to study as this finding becomes better known

  actuarial escape velocity is defined as occurring when a year of medical research adds more than a year’s worth of longevity to the total population. Nothing even close to this has ever been achieved, and emerging signs of an asymptotic curve in progress suggest this velocity may never

  premature declaration of huge longevity gains has been called kyriasis or Dorian Gray syndrome or simply the hope for immortality

  lengthen the telomeres in certain cells by temporary increase of telomerase in these cells. As different cells lose telomeres at dif
ferent rates, drug treatments have to be tagged to certain kinds of cells only, and inadvertent cancers

  biogerontology, humbled time and again by unexpected

  the famous calorie-restricted vitamin-enhanced diet acted to feminize gene expression in many ways that proved decisive for the longevity effect, so now gender hormone therapy is tailored to create this feminizing effect without the necessity of the caloric restriction, which never caught on

  if you recall the old comparison of the human body to a Havana Chevolet, with all moving parts replaced when they broke, then the problem could be compared to metal fatigue in the chassis and axles. In other words, the “seven deadly sins” of senescence are not the only sins. Unrepaired DNA damage, noncancerous mutation, the drift of chromatin states—all these eventually create “aging damage” hard to detect or counteract. None are currently amenable to repair. This probably explains the

  take skin cells from people, turn them into pluripotent stem cells, put these in a protein bath of the right kind and they form a neural tube, which is the start of the nervous system that will grow the spinal cord from one end and the brain from the other. Take slices of neural tube and direct them with other protein stimulants to become cells of different parts of the brain, like cortex cells. Test for firing.

  arrhythmia, stroke, sudden collapse, quick decline, immune loophole, brain wave irregularity, superinfection, heart attack, apparently causeless instantaneous death (ACID), etc.