Sax witnessed this in complete disbelief. “What is his problem?” he whispered to Claire.

She shook her head. “He works for Subarashii on the aerial lens, and they don’t like any potential competition for their regolith melting program.”

“My Lord.”

The question-and-answer session staggered on, shaken by this display of rudeness, but Sax slipped out of the room and stared down the hall curiously after the Subarashii scientist. What could he be thinking?

But this miscreant wasn’t the only one acting strange. People were stressed, nerves were on edge. Of course the stakes were high; as the pingo below Moeris Lacus showed in a small-scale way, there were going to be some bad side effects to the procedures being studied and advocated at the conference, side effects which would cost money, time, lives. And then there were financial motivations…

And now that they were entering its final days, the programming was shifting from very specific issues to more general presentations and workshops, including some presentations in the main room on the big new projects, what people were calling the “monster projects.” These were going to have such major impacts that they affected almost everyone else’s programs. So when they discussed them, they were arguing policy, in effect, talking about what to do next rather than about what had already happened. That always made things more of a wrangle-but never more so than now, as people began to try to plug the information from the earlier presentations into advocacy for their own causes, whatever they might be. They were entering that unfortunate zone where science began to drift into politics, where papers became grant proposals; and it was dismaying to see that degraded dark zone invade the heretofore neutral terrain of a conference.

Part of this, Sax reflected over a solitary lunch, was no doubt caused by the big-science nature of the monster projects. They were all so expensive and difficult that they had been contracted out to different transnational. This was a plausible strategy on the face of it, an obvious efficiency move, but unfortunately it meant that the different angles of attack on the terraforming problem now had interested parties defending them as the “best” methods, twisting data in order to defend their own ideas.

Praxis, for instance, was the leader along with Switzerland in the very extensive bioengineering effort, and so its representative theoreticians defended what they called the ecopoesis model, which claimed that no further influx of heat or volatiles was necessary at this point, and that biological processes alone, aided by a minimum of ecological engineering, would be sufficient to terraform the planet to the levels envisioned in the early Russell model. Sax thought they were probably correct in this judgment, given the arrival of the soletta, though he deemed their time scales optimistic. And he worked for Biotique, so possibly his judgment was skewed.

The scientists from Amscor, however, were adamant that the low nitrogen inventory would cripple any ecopoetic hopes. They insisted that continued industrial intervention was necessary; and of course it was Armscor that was building the Titan nitrogen transfer shuttles. People from Consolidated, in charge of the drilling in Vastitas, emphasized the vital importance of an active hydrosphere. And people from Subarashii, in charge of the new mirrors, touted the great power of the soletta and the aerial lens to pump heat and gases into the system, allowing everything else to accelerate. It was always quite obvious why people were advocating one program over another; you could look at people’s name tags and see their institutional affiliation, and predict what they were going to support or attack. To see science twisted so blatantly pained Sax a great deal, and it seemed to him that it distressed everyone there, even the ones doing it, which added to the general irritability and defensiveness. Everyone knew what was going on, and no one liked it, and yet no one would admit it.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the last morning’s panel discussion of the CO₂ question. This quickly became a defense of the soletta and the aerial lens, made very vehemently by the two Subarashii scientists on the panel. Sax sat at the back of the room and listened to their enthusiastic description of the big mirrors, feeling more and more tense and unhappy as they went on. He liked the soletta itself, which was no more than the logical extension of the mirrors he had been putting into orbit from the very beginning. But the low-flying aerial lens was clearly an extremely powerful instrument, and if wielded on the surface to anywhere near its full capacity, it would volatilize hundreds of millibars of gases into the atmosphere, much of it CO₂, which according to Sax’s single-phase model they did not want, and which in any sensible course of action would stay bonded in the regolith. No, there were several hard questions that needed to be asked about the effects of this aerial lens, and the Subarashii people ought to be harshly censured for beginning the melting of the regolith without consulting anyone outside their UNTA rubberstamp committee about it. But Sax did not want to draw attention to himself, and so he could only sit there by Claire and Berkina with his lectern out, squirming in his seat and hoping that someone else would ask the hard questions for him.

And as they were obvious questions as well as hard, they did get asked; a scientist from Mitsubishi, which was in a perpetual hometown feud with Subarashii, stood and inquired very politely about the runaway greenhouse effect that might result from too much CO₂. Sax nodded emphatically. But the Subarashii scientists replied that this was exactly what they were hoping for, that there could not be too much heat, and that an eventual atmospheric pressure of seven or eight hundred millibars would be preferabk to five hundred anyway. “But not if it’s CO₂!” Sax muttered to Claire, who nodded.

H. X. Borazjani stood to say the same. He was followed by others; many in the room were still using Sax’s original model as their template for action, and they insisted in many different ways on the difficulty of scrubbing any great excess of CO₂ from the air. But there were also a good many scientists, from Armscor and Consolidated as well as Subarashii, who either claimed that scrubbing CO₂ would not be difficult, or else that a CO₂-heavy atmosphere would not be so bad. An ecosystem of mostly plants, with CO₂-tolerant insects and perhaps some genetically engineered animals, would flourish in the warm thick air, and people could walk around in their shirtsleeves with nothing more cumbersome than a facemask.

This set Sax’s teeth on edge, and happily he was not the only one, so he could stay in his seat while others rose to their feet to challenge this fundamental shift in the goal of terraforming. The argument quickly became heated, even rancorous.

“It’s not a jungle planet we’re after here!”

“You’re making a hidden assumption that people can be genetically engineered to tolerate higher CO₂ levels, but it’s ridiculous!”

Very soon it became clear that they were accomplishing nothing.

No one was really listening, and everyone had their opinions, which were tightly aligned to their employers’ interests. It was unseemly, really. A mutual distaste for the tone of the debate caused all but the immediate participants to withdraw-around Sax people were folding programs, turning off lecterns, whispering to their companions, all while people were still standing and speaking … bad form, no doubt about it. But it only took a moment’s thought to realize that they were now arguing over policy decisions that were not going to be made at the level of working scientists anyway. No one liked that, and people actually began to get up and leave the room, right in the middle of the discussion. The overwhelmed panel moderator, an overpolite Japanese woman who was looking miserable, spoke over the rising voices, and suggested that they close the session. People trooped into the halls in little knots, some still talking heatedly to their allies, making their cases decisively now that they were only complaining to their friends.