Free Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson Page B

waving at the cal-dera.
“She truly does.” He thought over Michel’s analysis. “It’s not just a no.
There’s a yes in there as well. A love of Mars.”
    “But if you love stones and not people,” Michel said, “it’s
somehow a little ... unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know—”
    “I know—”
    “—and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content
with it.”
    “She doesn’t like what’s happening to her world.”
    “No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most?
I’m not so sure. It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.”
    Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider
psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing
together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy
most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always
done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological
changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth
century, AIs for the twenty-first. .. and for the Freudian traditionalists,
steam engines. Application of heat, pressure buildup, pressure displacement,
venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed.
Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human
mind. The mind was more like—what?—an ecology—a fell-field—or else a jungle,
populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and
quasars and black holes. Well—a bit grandiose, that—really it was more like a
complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and
yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better—weather—storm fronts of
thought, high-pressure zones, low-pressure cells, hurricanes—the jet streams of
biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds ... life in the
wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.
    “What are you thinking?” Michel asked.
    “Sometimes I worry,” Sax admitted, “about the theoretical basis of
these diagnoses of yours.”
    “Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very
precise, very accurate.”
    “Both precise and accurate?”
    “Well, what, they’re the same, no?”
    “No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are
from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A
hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a
hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite
accurate, while still being not very precise. Often true values aren’t really
determinable, of course.”
    Michel had a curious expression on his face. “You’re a very
accurate person, Sax.”
    “It’s just statistics,” Sax said defensively. “Every once in a while
language allows you to say things precisely.”
    “And accurately.”
    “Sometimes.”
    They looked down into the country of the caldera.
    “I want to help her,” Sax said.
    Michel nodded. “You said that. I said I didn’t know how. For her,
you are the terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help
her. Do you think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?”
    Sax thought about it for a while. “It could get her outdoors.
Outdoors without helmets, eventually without even masks.”
    “You think she wants that?”
    “I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum.
The animal, you know. It feels right.”
    “I don’t know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.”
    Sax considered it.
    Then the whole landscape darkened.
    They looked up. The sun was black. Stars shone in the sky around
it. There was a faint glow around the black disk, perhaps the sun’s corona.
    Then a sudden crescent of fire forced them to look away. That was
the corona; what they had seen before had probably been the lit exosphere.
    The