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Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way or the other. More were in favor of cutting the cable than A
Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favor of keeping the cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with expulsion from Martian’society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular, and afterward Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtle. It made A
She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate her, as it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no idea. She only knew she had gotten his attention at last.
This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation. Despite the great flood, Earth’s nations and metanationals were still incredibly powerful, and in some ways the crisis of the flood had drawn them together, making them even more powerful. So Nadia spoke of the need to compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply contradictory, A
“But how!” A
“It isn’t just Earth,” Nadia replied. “There are going to be other settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the asteroids. We’ve got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re the natural leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all that — a reduction in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.”
“Getting in the way of progress,” A
Perhaps they did. But it made no difference. Any number of elements on Earth were sending up their arguments for the cable — arguments, threats, entreaties. They needed help down there. Any help. Art Randolph continued energetically lobbying for the cable on behalf of Praxis, which was looking to A
But the natives were being slowly won over by them, intrigued by the possibility of “conquering Earth,” unaware of how impossible this was, incapable of imagining Earth’s vastness and immobility. One could tell them and tell them, but they would never be able to imagine it.
Finally it came time for an informal vote. It was representative voting, they had decided, one vote for each of the signatory groups to the Dorsa Brevia document, one vote also to all the interested parties that had arisen since then — new settlements in the outback, new political parties, associations, labs, companies, guerrilla bands, the several red splinter groups. Before they started some generous naive soul even offered the First Hundred a vote, and everyone there laughed at the idea that the First Hundred might be able to vote the same way on anything. The generous soul, a young woman from Dorsa Brevia, then proposed that each of the First Hundred be given an individual vote, but this was turned down as endangering the tenuous grasp they had on representative governance. It would have made no difference anyway.
So they voted to allow the space elevator to remain standing, for the time being — and in the possession of UNTA, down to and including the Socket, without contestation. It was like King Canute deciding to declare the tide legal after all, but no one laughed except A
A
She was a kilometer or two away from the rim’s edge. She walked slowly east toward it, stumbling once or twice before she started to pay proper attention. The old lava on the flat expanse of the broad rim was smooth and dark in some places, rough and lighter in others. By the time she approached the edge she was in full areologist mode, doing a boulder ballet she could sustain all day, attuned to every knob and crack underfoot. And this was a good thing, because near the rim’s drop-off the land collapsed in a series of narrow curving ledges, the drops sometimes a step, sometimes taller than she was. And always the growing sense of empty air ahead, as the far side of the caldera and the rest of the great circle became visible. And then she was climbing down onto the last ledge, a bench only some five meters wide, with a curved back wall, shoulder-high: and below her dropped the great round chasm of Pavonis.
This caldera was one of the geological marvels of the solar system, a hole forty-five kilometers across and a full five kilometers deep, and almost perfectly regular in everyway — circular, flat-floored, almost vertically walled — a perfect cylinder of space, cut into the volcano like a rock sampler’s coring. None of the other three big calderas even approached this simplicity of form; Ascraeus and Olympus were complicated palimpsests of overlapping rings, while the very broad shallow caldera of Arsia was roughly circular, but shattered in every way. Pavonis alone was a regular cylinder: the Platonic ideal of a volcanic caldera.