Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson
Driving in the storm was like driving at night, except more interesting. The dust rocketed by in gusts, leaving little pockets of visibility that gave him quick dim sepia snatches of a view, the landscape rolling, everything seeming to be moving south. Then blank rushing tempests of dust would return again, flush against the windows. The rover rocked hard on its shock absorbers during the worst gusts, and the dust did indeed get into everything.
On the fourth day of his drive he turned straight south, and began to drive up the northwest slope of the Tharsis Bulge. This was the great escarpment again, but here it was not a cliff, only a slope imperceptible in the storm’s dark, lasting for more than a day, until he was high on the side of Tharsis, five vertical kilometers higher than he had been in Acheron.
He stopped at another mine, located near crater
Pt
(called Pete), located in the upper end of the Tantalus Fossae. Apparently the Tharsis Bulge had initiated the great lava flood covering Alba Patera, and later bulging had then cracked the lava shield; these were the Tantalus canyons. Some of them had cracked over a platinoid-rich mafic igneous intrusion that the miners had named the Merensky Reeflets. The miners were real Azanians this time, but Azanians who called themselves Afrikaaners, and spoke Afrikaaner among themselves; white men who welcomed John with heavy doses of God, volk, and trek. They had named the canyons they worked in Neuw Orange Free State and Neuw Pretoria. And they, like the miners at Bradbury Point, worked for Armscor. “Yes,” the operations head said happily, with an accent like a New Zealander’s. He had a heavily-jowled face, a ski-jump nose and a big crooked smile, and a very intense manner. “We’ve found iron, copper, silver, manganese, aluminum, gold, platinum, titanium, chromium, you name it. Sulfides, oxides, silicates, native metals, you name it. The Great Escarpment has them all.” The mine had been running for about an M-year; it consisted of strip mines on the canyon floors, with a habitat half buried in the mesa between two of the largest canyons, looking like a clear eggshell, packed with a meat of green trees and orange tile roofs.
John spent several days with them, being sociable and asking questions. More than once, thinking of the Acheron group’s eco-economics, he asked them how they were going to get their valuable but heavy product back to Earth. Would the energy cost of the transfer overwhelm the potential profit?
“Of course,” they said, just like the men at Bradbury Point. “It will take the space elevator to make it worthwhile.”
Their chief said, “With the space elevator we are in the Terran market. Without it we will never get off Mars.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” John said. But they didn’t understand him, and when he tried to explain it they only went blank and nodded politely, anxious to avoid thinking about politics. Which was something Afrikaaners were good at. When John realized what was going on, he found he could bring up the topic of politics to get some time to himself; it was, he said to Maya one night on the wrist, like tossing a tear gas canister in the room. It even enabled him to wander into the mining operations center alone for most of an afternoon, linking Pauline to the records and recording everything that she could lift. Pauline noticed no unusual patterns in the operation. But she did flag an exchange of communications with the Armscor home office; the local group wanted a security unit of a hundred persons, and Singapore had agreed to it.
John whistled. “What about UNOMA?” Security was supposed to be entirely their purview, and they gave out approval for private security pretty routinely; but a hundred people? John instructed Pauline to look into the UNOMA dispatches on the subject, and left for dinner with the Afrikaaners.
Again the space elevator was declared a necessity. “They’ll just pass us by if we don’t have it, go straight out to the asteroids and not have any gravity well to worry about, eh?”
Despite the five hundred micrograms of omegendorph in his system, John was not in a happy mood. “Tell me,” he said at one point, “do any women work here?”
They stared at him like fish. They were even worse than Moslems, really.
He left the next day and drove up to Pavonis, intent on looking into the space elevator notion.
Up the long slope of Tharsis. He never saw the steep, blood-colored cone of Ascraeus Mons; it was lost in the dust along with everything else. Travel now consisted of life in a set of small rooms that bumped around a lot. He worked his way around Ascraeus on its west flank, and then motored up onto the crest of Tharsis, between Ascraeus and Pavonis. Here the double-transponder road became an actual concrete ribbon under the wheels— concrete under a rush of dust, concrete that finally tilted up sharply, and led him straight up the northern slope of Pavonis Mons. It went on for so long that it began to feel like a slow blind takeoff into space.
The crater of Pavonis, as the Afrikaaners had reminded him, was amazingly equatorial; the round O of its caldera sat like a ball placed right on the equator line. This apparently made the south rim of Pavonis the perfect tethering point for a space elevator, as it was both directly on the equator, and twenty-seven kilometers above the datum. Phyllis had already arranged for the construction of a preliminary habitat on the south rim; she had thrown herself into work on the elevator, and was one of its chief organizers.
Her habitat was dug into the rim wall of the caldera, in Echus Overlook style, so that windows in several stories of rooms looked out over the caldera, or would when the dust cleared. Photos blown up and stuck on the walls showed that the caldera itself would eventually be revealed as a simple circular depression, with walls 5,000 meters deep, slightly terraced near the bottom; the caldera had slumped often in earlier days, but always in nearly the same place. It was the only one of the great volcanoes to have been so regular; the other three had calderas that were like sets of overlapping circles, with each circle set at a different depth.
The new habitat, nameless at this point, had been built by UNOMA, but the equipment and personnel had been provided by the transnational Praxis, one of the biggest of them all. Currently the rooms that were finished were crowded with Praxis executives, or executives of some of the other transnationals who had subcontracts on the elevator project, among them were representatives of Amex, Oroco, Subarashii, and Mitsubishi. And all their efforts were being coordinated by Phyllis, who was now apparently Helmut Bronski’s assistant in charge of the operation.
Helmut too was there, and after John had greeted him and Phyllis, and been introduced to some of the visiting consultants, John was led into a big high room with a window wall. Outside the window swirled clouds of dark orange dust dropping down into the caldera, so that it seemed that the room ascended, uncertainly, in a dim fluctuating light.
The room’s only furnishing was a globe of Mars one meter in diameter, resting waist-high on a blue plastic stand. Extending from the globe, specifically from the little bump that represented Pavonis Mons, was a silver wire about five meters long. At the end of the thread was a small black dot. The globe was rotating on the stand at about one rpm, and the silver wire and its terminating black dot rotated with it, always remaining above Pavonis.
A group of about eight people ringed this display. “Everything is to scale,” Phyllis said. “The areosynchronous satellite distance is 20,435 kilometers from the center of mass, and the equatorial radius is 3,386 kilometers, so the distance from the surface to the areosynchronous point is 17,049 kilometers; double that and add the radius, and you have 37,484 kilometers. We’ll have a ballast rock at the far end, so the actual cable won’t have to be as long as it would be without it. The diameter of the cable will be about ten meters, and will weigh about six billion tons. The material for it will have been mined from its terminal ballast point, which will be an asteroid that starts at around thirteen-and-a-half billion tons, and ends up when the cable is finished at the proper ballast weight of around seven-and-a-half billion tons. That’s not a very big asteroid, about two kilometers in radius to begin with; there are six Amor asteroids crossing Mars’s orbit that have been identified as candidates for the job. The cable will be manufactured by robots mining and processing the carbon in the asteroid’s chondrites. Then, in the last stages of construction, the cable will be maneuvered to its tethering point, here.” She pointed at the floor of the room in dramatic fashion. “At that point, the cable will be in areosynchronous orbit itself, barely touching down here, its weight suspended between the pull of the planet’s gravity and the centrifugal force of the upper part of the cable, and the terminal ballast rock.”
“What about Phobos?” John asked.
“Phobos is way down there, of course. The cable will be vibrating to avoid it, in what the designers call a Clarke oscillation. It won’t be a problem. Deimos will also have to be avoided by oscillation, but because its orbit is more inclined this won’t be such a frequent problem.”
“And when it’s in position?” Helmut asked, his face bright with pleasure.
“A few hundred elevators at least will be attached to the cable, and loads will be lifted into orbit using a counterweight system. There will be lots of material to load down from Earth as usual, so energy requirements for lifts will be minimized. It will also be possible to use the cable’s rotation as a slingshot; objects released from the ballast asteroid toward Earth will be using the power of Mars’s rotation as their push, and will have an energy-free high-speed takeoff. It’s a clean, efficient, extraordinarily cheap method, both for lifting bulk into space and for accelerating it toward Earth. And given the recent discoveries of strategic metals, which are becoming ever more scarce on Earth, a cheap lift and push like this is literally invaluable. It creates the possibility of an exchange that wasn’t economically viable before; it will be a critical component of the Martian economy, the keystone of its industry. And it won’t be that expensive to build. Once a carbonaceous asteroid is pushed into the proper orbit, and a nuclear-powered robotic cable plant put to work on it, the plant will extrude cable like a spider spinning its thread. There will be very little to do but wait. The cable plant as designed will be able to produce over three thousand kilometers of cable a year— this means we need to start as soon as possible, but after production begins, it will only take ten or eleven years. And the wait will be well worth it.”
Shikata ga nai,
John thought sardonically. Phyllis glanced very briefly at John, as if he had spoken aloud. “We won’t let that happen,” she said. “And best of all, our elevator will serve as an experimental prototype for a Terran one. The transnationals who gain expertise in building this elevator will be in a commanding position when it comes to bidding the contracts for the much larger Terran project that is sure to follow.”
John stared at Phyllis, impressed as always by her fervor. She was like a convert giving witness, a preacher in a pulpit, quietly and confidently triumphant. The miracle of the skyhook. Jack and the Beanstalk, the Ascension to Heaven; it definitely had an air of the miraculous to it. “Really, we don’t have much choice,” Phyllis was saying. “This gets us out of our gravity well, eliminating it as a physical and economic problem. That’s crucial; without that we’ll be bypassed, we’ll be like Australia in the nineteenth century, too far away to be a significant part of the world economy. People will pass us by and mine the asteroids directly, because the asteroids have mineral wealth without gravitational constraints. Without the elevator we could become a backwater.”
On and on she went, outlining every aspect of the plan, and then answering questions from the executives with her usual polished brilliance. She got a lot of laughs— she was flushed, bright-eyed. John could almost see the tongues of fire flickering from her mass of auburn hair, which in the storm light looked like a cap of jewels. The executives and project scientists glowed under her look; they were onto something big, and they knew it. Earth was seriously depleted in many of the metals they were finding on Mars. There were fortunes to be made, enormous fortunes. And someone who owned a piece of the bridge over which every ounce of metal had to pass would make an enormous fortune as well, probably the greatest fortune of all. No wonder Phyllis and the rest of them looked like they were in church.
Before dinner that evening John stood in his bathroom, and without looking at himself in the mirror took out two tabs of omegendorph and swallowed them. He was sick of Phyllis. But the drug made him feel better. Phyllis was just another part of the game, after all; and when he sat down to dinner he was in an expansive mood. Okay, he thought, they have their gold mine of a beanstalk. But it wasn’t clear that they would be able to keep it to themselves— highly unlikely in fact. So that their fat-cat complacency was a bit silly, as well as grating, and he laughed in the middle of one of their enthusiastic exchanges and said, “Don’t you think it unlikely that an elevator like this will stay private property?”
“We don’t intend for it to be private property,” Phyllis said with her brilliant smile.
“But you expect to be paid for its construction. And then you expect concessions to be granted. You expect to make a profit from the venture, isn’t that what venture capitalism is all about?”
“Well, of course,” Phyllis said, looking offended that he had spoken of such things so explicitly. “Everyone on Mars will profit from it, that’s its nature.”
“And you’ll skim a percentage of every percentage.” Predators at the top of the chain. Or else parasites, up and down the length of it. . . .”How rich did the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge get, do you think? Were there great transnational dynasties formed from the profits of the Golden Gate Bridge? No. It was a public project, wasn’t it. The builders were public employees, making a standard wage for their work. What do you want to bet that the Mars treaty doesn’t stipulate a similar arrangement for infrastructural construction here? I’m pretty sure it does.”