Touring the Grand Canal of Mars (Part 3)
Добавлено: 17 апр 2009, 10:09[29 Jan 3072; VOTW] By the time the Terran Alliance began the Schiaparelli Project in the late 23rd Century, humanity’s exploding population and tsunami of new land and resources on interstellar colonies had allowed some individuals to become extremely rich. While any era has what it considers super-rich individuals, the ultra-wealthy of the late Terran Alliance and early Terran Hegemony were proportionally the richest humans to ever live. Though some would be richer in later eras by absolute measures, no one would hold as large a fraction of humanity’s total wealth as the owners of the early interstellar conglomerates and masters of private colonies.
Mars’ Grand Canal exemplified some of the more ostentatious displays of that wealth. It was not simply carved between the Lowell crater chains to link the Hellas Basin and Isidis Planitia Seas. As I took a sedate barge down the canal, I witnessed every architectural style known to man writ giant on the walls of the Grand Canal. The walls hosted terraces large enough for small cities (and some held small cities for the armies of servants who once lived on some estates), gardens grown wild that were better measured in square kilometers than hectares, and even private fjords carved for those who did not want to live on the “crowded” Grand Canal proper.
After passing through kilometers of the Grand Canal carved with 2000-meter high bas-reliefs of long-dead trillionaires, my guide pointed out two opposing fjords formerly owned by the Windsor-Smalls. Not satisfied with Mars’ native seasons, the family had created a year-round winter fjord cooled by subterranean (subarean?) and underwater fusion-powered heat pumps of a scale sufficient to refrigerate many square kilometers despite a lack of roofing. (And my father always yelled at me for leaving the door open because “we can’t air condition the whole outdoors!” He apparently never met the Windsor-Smalls.) The ski slopes, I’m told, hosted some of the best “powder” in the Terran system. Across the Grand Canal, the waste heat of the refrigeration system produced a balmy, tropical fjord with white sand beaches and moderate surf driven by the largest wave generators ever built.
These great estates lay abandoned, stripped by orders of the dysfunctional postbellum Hegemony government, because so very many of the occupants sided with Stephan Amaris during his Coup, which I’ll examine in next week’s column.
Mars’ Grand Canal exemplified some of the more ostentatious displays of that wealth. It was not simply carved between the Lowell crater chains to link the Hellas Basin and Isidis Planitia Seas. As I took a sedate barge down the canal, I witnessed every architectural style known to man writ giant on the walls of the Grand Canal. The walls hosted terraces large enough for small cities (and some held small cities for the armies of servants who once lived on some estates), gardens grown wild that were better measured in square kilometers than hectares, and even private fjords carved for those who did not want to live on the “crowded” Grand Canal proper.
After passing through kilometers of the Grand Canal carved with 2000-meter high bas-reliefs of long-dead trillionaires, my guide pointed out two opposing fjords formerly owned by the Windsor-Smalls. Not satisfied with Mars’ native seasons, the family had created a year-round winter fjord cooled by subterranean (subarean?) and underwater fusion-powered heat pumps of a scale sufficient to refrigerate many square kilometers despite a lack of roofing. (And my father always yelled at me for leaving the door open because “we can’t air condition the whole outdoors!” He apparently never met the Windsor-Smalls.) The ski slopes, I’m told, hosted some of the best “powder” in the Terran system. Across the Grand Canal, the waste heat of the refrigeration system produced a balmy, tropical fjord with white sand beaches and moderate surf driven by the largest wave generators ever built.
These great estates lay abandoned, stripped by orders of the dysfunctional postbellum Hegemony government, because so very many of the occupants sided with Stephan Amaris during his Coup, which I’ll examine in next week’s column.
