So when she said “I want something for it,” he thought he knew what she meant, and suggested removing the mirrors before she could. This surprised her. It slowed her down, it took the edge off her terrible anger. Leaving something very much deeper, however— grief, despair— he could not be sure. Certainly a lot of Reds had died that day, and Red hopes as well. “I’m sorry about Kasei,” he said.

She ignored that, and made him promise to remove the space mirrors. He did, meanwhile calculating the loss of light that would result, then trying to keep a wince off his face. Insolation would drop by about twenty percent, a very substantial amount indeed. “It will start an ice age,” he muttered.

“Good,” she said.

But she was not satisfied. And as she left the room, he could see by the set of her shoulders that his concession had done little if anything to comfort her. One could only hope her cohorts were more easily pleased. In any case it would have to be done. It might stop a civil war. Of course a great number of plants would die, mostly at the higher elevations, though it would affect every ecosystem to some extent. An ice age, no doubt about it. Unless they reacted very effectively. But it would be worth it, if it stopped the fighting.

It would have been easy to just cut the great band of the annular mirror and let it fly away into space, right out of the plane of the ecliptic. Same with the soletta: fire a few of its positioning rockets and it would spin away like a Catherine wheel.

But that would be a waste of processed aluminum silicate, which Sax did not like to see. He decided to investigate the possibility of using the mirrors’ directional rockets, and their reflectivity, to propel them elsewhere in the solar system. The soletta could be located in front of Venus, and its mirrors realigned so that the structure became a huge parasol, shading the hot planet and starting the process of freezing out its atmosphere; this was something that had been discussed in the literature for a long time, and no matter what the various plans for terraforming Venus included, this was the standard first step. Then having done that, the annular mirror would have to be placed in the corresponding polar orbit around Venus, as its reflected light helped to hold the soletta/parasol in its position against the push of solar radiation. So the two would still be put to use, and it would also be a gesture, another symbolic gesture, saying Look here— this big world might be terraformable too. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible. Thus some of the psychic pressure on Mars, “the only other possible Earth,” might be relieved. This was not logical, but it didn’t matter; history was strange, people were not rational systems, and in the peculiar symbolic logic of the limbic system, it would be a sign to the people on Earth, a portent, a scattering of psychic seed, a throwing together. Look there! Go there! And leave Mars alone.