Текст книги "2312"

Автор книги: Kim Stanley Robinson

Соавторы: Kim Stanley Robinson
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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

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 didyou 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 notto 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 needit 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 situation 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 arehuge 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 different 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.

KIRAN IN VINMARA

Kiran’s new work unit began regularly driving a rover back and forth from one of Lakshmi’s locked compounds in Cleopatra to the new town Vinmara, always passing Stupid Harbor on the way. Vinmara was still growing like a mussel bed around its shallow empty bay, and off to the south through the drifting snowfall they could see the silver glitter of the dry ice sea.

After one of these runs, when they were back in Cleopatra, Kiran ran into Kexue in a game bar they both frequented, and the voluble small said, “Come meet a friend of mine. You’ll like him.”

It turned out to be Shukra, beard and hair long and gray; he looked like a wandering mendicant. Kexue grinned as Kiran recognized the man. “I told you you’d like him.”

Kiran mumbled something awkward.

“It’s all right,” Shukra said, staring hard at him. “You were bait, I told you that. And you got taken. So now I’m here to tell you what to do next. Lakshmi’s got you on the route between her compound here and that coastal town, right?”

“That’s right,” Kiran said. He could see how he probably still owed his first Venusian contact his services, but it was becoming all too clear to him how dangerous it was to play both sides. He didn’t want to cross Lakshmi in any way; on the other hand, this man did not seem like someone to be trifled with either. Indeed at the moment there was no way to deny him. “There’s shipments going both directions, but we don’t see what gets loaded.”

“I want you to find out what it is. Insinuate yourself further into the situation, and then let me know what you find.”

“How will I contact you?”

“You won’t. I’ll contact you.”

So after that, feeling deeply uneasy, Kiran kept his eye out when they were making the Vinmara run. It became clearer than ever to him that the transport crew was not intended to know the contents of their rovers; there were guards on every run, and the office in central Vinmara was as closed to outsiders as the various facilities in Cleopatra. The rovers backed up to a loading dock and interfaced with the building, and after a while drove away, and that was it. Once, when an exceptionally deep snowfall delayed them mid-route, Kiran listened without watching as the guard in their cab had a phone conversation that seemed to be with people in the storage compartment of the rover; they spoke Chinese, and later Kiran had his translation spectacles translate the recording it had made:

“Are you okay back there?”

“We’re fine. They’re fine.”

They? Anyway, it was something to tell Shukra, if he reappeared.

As it happened, they were down in Vinmara when the big blizzard finally stopped. The skies cleared; the stars in all their glory punctured the black dome of the sky. Naturally they joined the whole town in suiting up and going out the city gates onto the bare hills above the town. The continuous deluge of snow and sleet and hail and rain had gone on for three years and three months. Now everyone wanted to see what things looked like under the stars.

Almost all the landscape they could see was covered by snow, gleaming in the starlight. Many spiky points of black rock broke through this gleaming white—the land surrounding the town must have been a devil’s golf course of aaor something like it—and the result was that over their heads the black sky spangled with brilliant stars, while under their feet the white hills were spattered by spiky black outcroppings, so that the two together looked like photographic negatives of each other.

And now they could breathe the open air. It was screamingly cold, of course, so as people pulled off their helmets they did scream, casting brief plumes of frost from their open mouths. Breathable air—a nitrogen-argon-oxygen mix, at seven hundred millibars, and ten degrees below. It was like breathing vodka.

The snow underfoot was too hard to dig out snowballs, and people were falling as they skidded this way and that. Out on the hilltop above the town they could see for huge distances in all directions.

It was around noon, and among the stars overhead hung the black circle of the eclipsed sun. A black cutout in the sky—the sunshield, letting through no sunlight—except for today, when there was a scheduled uneclipse. These uneclipses had been happening once a month for a while now, to help heat things back up to a more human-friendly level, but no one on the planet had been able to see them because the rain and snow had blocked the view. Now there would be one they would be able to see.

Many people were putting their helmets back on; the reality of the cold was setting in. Kiran’s nose was numb, while his ears were still burning as they froze. People said you could break frozen ears right off, and now he believed it. Music was playing from loudspeakers down in the town, something clangorous with cymbals and bells, very Slavic, very violent and loud.

Then directly overhead the sunshield was suddenly marked by a perfectly circular thread of diamond light, blazing near the edge of the black disk. Though this annular ring was a mere wire of brilliant yellow, a delicate hoop of fire, it still lit up the white hills and the scalloped town, and the silver sea to the south, and the plumes of frost pouring from their cheering throats, all glowing now with a bronze light that brought back memories of all the sunniness they had ever known or dreamed of. The burnished tinge was like the light of life itself, a light they had almost forgot, all brought back now by the yellow air.

After a frigid hour the ring of fire grew thinner and thinner, eclipsing from its inside out, until the disk of the sun became completely black again. The circular venetian blind had closed its opened slat. The snowy land darkened to its usual pale luminosity; the stars grew big again. Full night was back, in all its grim familiarity. Just above the black disk of the sun a bright white planet gleamed, small but steady: Mercury, Kiran was told. They were seeing Mercury from Venus, and it gleamed like a pearl made of diamond. And there over the western horizon hung Earth and Luna too, a double star with a blue tinge. “Wow,” Kiran said; something in him seemed to be blowing up like a balloon. Had to breathe deep or he might pop.

But his teammates were tugging at his arm. “Earth boy! Earth boy! Bye-bye miss America pie! We must get back in town fast, there’s a rover broken down, Lakshmi want us right now!”

“Lead on!” Kiran cried, and followed them back down the hillside to the open gates of Vinmara.

Just inside the city gate they followed phone instructions to the rover that was in distress. It looked exactly like their own. The driver and a trio of security people were standing by it, very unhappy; the rover had lost all power, and some packages needed to be run over to the office in the town center as quickly and discreetly as possible. Kiran stood in a short line with his teammates and took a big flat box passed down from one of the security people, thinking that this might be his opportunity to find out what was being transported. Then they were off across town in a little line, like porters.

The town was almost empty, its residents still out on the hill celebrating. The box Kiran was carrying weighed about five kilos; it was not exceptionally heavy for its size. There was a keypad lock on it, near the hasp, that made it look like a reinforced briefcase. They were not far from the office. The actual hinges of the case looked little and flimsy, and he wondered what would happen if he accidentally dropped it on its hinge side.

But then the security trio from the disabled rover appeared, crying, “Run! Run! Get to the office now!” looking over their shoulders fearfully with their guns drawn. Everyone bolted, and Kiran, following the others, seeing they were rattled, shifted the briefcase in his hands so that its hinges were out to his side. When his mates turned a corner to run down a narrow alley, he pretended to trip, and slammed the case hard into the corner of a wall, right against the hinges.

The case held solid.

“Oh shit! Did you break them?” someone exclaimed from behind him—one of the security guards—a Chinese tall, standing over him now, looking horrified.

“What, are they eggs?” Kiran asked as he got up.

“Like eggs,” the guard said, taking the box up and punching away at its keypad. “And if they’re broken, we better leave town.” The top of the box lifted, and there in individual clear containers lay a dozen human eyeballs—all of them, by coincidence, Kiran assumed, staring right at him.