Blue Mars (19 page)

He stared long and hard at Antar. But Antar did not speak; he had
no specific suggestions.

The room was filled with a charged silence. It was the first and
only time in the congress that one of the issei had stood up and trounced one
of the nisei in public debate. Most of the issei liked to take a more subtle
line. But now one of the ancient radicals had gotten mad and risen up to smite
one of the neoconservative young power mongers—who now looked like they were
advocating a new version of an old hierarchy, for purposes of their own. A
thought which was conveyed very well indeed by Vlad’s long look across the
table at Antar, full of disgust at his reactionary selfishness, his cowardice
in the face of change. Vlad sat down; Antar was dismissed.

But still they argued
. Conflict, metaconflict, details, fundamentals; everything was on
the table, including a magnesium kitchen sink that someone had placed on one
segment of the table of tables, some three weeks into the process.

And really the delegates in the warehouse were only the tip of the
iceberg, the most visible part of a gigantic two-world debate. Live
transmission of every minute of the conference was available everywhere on Mars
and in most places on Earth, and although the actual realtime tape had a
certain documentary tediousness to it, Mangalavid concocted a daily highlights
film that was shown during the timeslip every night, and sent to Earth for very
wide distribution. It became “the greatest show on Earth” as one American
program rather oddly dubbed it. “Maybe people are tired of the same old crap on
TV,” Art said to Nadia one night as they watched a brief, weirdly distorted
account of the day’s negotiations on American TV.

“Or in the world.”

“Yeah true. They want something else to think about.”

“Or else they’re thinking about what they might do,” Nadia
suggested. “So that we’re a small-scale model. Easier to understand.”

“Maybe so.”

In any case the two worlds watched, and the congress became, along
with everything else that it was, a daily soap opera—a soap opera which however
held an extra attraction for its viewers, somehow, as if in some strange way it
held the very key to their lives. And perhaps as a result, thousands of
spectators did more than watch—comments and suggestions were pouring in, and
though it seemed unlikely to most people on Pavonis that something mailed in
would contain a startling truth they hadn’t thought of, still all messages were
read by groups of volunteers in Sheffield and South Fossa, who passed some
proposals “up to the table.” Some people even advocated including all these
suggestions in the final constitution; they objected to a “statist legal
document,” they wanted it to be a larger thing, a collaborative philosophical
or even spiritual statement, expressing their values, goals, dreams,
reflections. “That’s not a constitution,” Nadia objected, “that’s a culture.
We’re not the damn library here.” But included or not, long communiques
continued to come in, from the tents and canyons and the drowned coastlines of
Earth, signed by individuals, committees, entire town populations.

Discussions in the warehouse were just as wide-ranging as in the
mail. A Chinese delegate approached Art and spoke in Mandarin to him, and when
he paused for a while, his AI began to speak, in a lovely Scottish accent. “To
tell the truth I’ve begun to doubt that you’ve sufficiently consulted Adam
Smith’s important book Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations.”

“You may be right,” Art said, and referred the man to Charlotte.

Many people in the warehouse were speaking languages other than
English, and relying on translation AIs to communicate with the rest. At any
given moment there were conversations in a dozen different languages, and AI
translators were heavily used. Art still found them a little distracting. He
wished it were possible to know all these languages, even though the latest
generations of AI translators were really pretty good: voices well modulated,
vocabularies large and accurate, grammar excellent, phrasing almost free of the
errors that had made earlier translation programs such a great party game. The
new ones had gotten so good that it seemed possible that the English-language
dominance that had created an almost monoglot Martian culture might begin to
receue. The issei had of course brought all languages with them, but English
had been their lingua franca; the nisei had therefore used English to
communicate among themselves, while their “primary” languages were used only to
speak to their parents; and so, for a while, English had become the natives’
native tongue. But now with the new AIs, and a continuing stream of new
immigrants speaking the full array of Terran languages, it looked like things
might broaden back out again, as new nisei stayed with their primary languages
and used AIs as their lingua franca instead of English.

This linguistic matter illustrated to Art a complexity in the
native population that he hadn’t noticed before. Some natives were yonsei,
fourth generation or younger, and very definitely children of Mars; but other
natives the very same age were the nisei children of recent issei immigrants,
tending to have closer ties with the Terran cultures they had come from, with
all the conservatism that implied. So that there were new native
“conservatives,” and old settler-family native “radicals,” one might say. And
this split only occasionally correlated with ethnicity or nationality, when these
still mattered to them at all. One night Art was talking with a couple of them,
one a global government advocate, the other an anarchist backing all local
autonomy proposals, and he asked them about their origins. The globalist’s
father was half-Japanese, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Tan-zanian; her mother
had a Greek mother and a father with parents Colombian and Australian. The
anarchist had a Nigerian father and a mother who was from Hawaii, and thus had
a mixed ancestry of Filipino, Japanese, Polynesian and Portuguese. Art stared
at them: if one were to think in terms of ethnic voting blocks, how would one
categorize these people? One couldn’t. They were Martian natives. Nisei,
sansei, yonsei—whatever generation, they had been formed in large part by their
Martian experience—areoformed, just as Hiroko had always foretold. Many had
married within their own national or ethnic background, but many more had not.
And no matter what their ancestry, their political opinions tended to reflect
not that background (just what would the Graeco-Colombian-Australian position
be? Art wondered), but their own experience. This itself had been quite varied:
some had grown up in the underground, others had been born in the UN-controlled
big cities, and only come to an awareness of the underground later in life, or
even at the moment of the revolution itself. These differences tended to affect
them much more than where their Terran ancestors had happened to live.

Art nodded as the natives explained these things to him, in the
long kava-buzzed parties running deep into the night. People at these parties
were in increasingly high spirits, as the congress was, they felt, going well.
They did not take the debates among the issei very seriously; they were
confident that their core beliefs would prevail. Mars would be independent, it
would be run by Martians, what Earth wanted did not matter; beyond that, it was
detail. Thus they went about their work in the committees without much
attention paid to the philosophical arguments around the table of tables. “The
old dogs keep growling,” said one message on the big message board; this seemed
to express a general native opinion. And the work in the committees went on.

The big message board was a pretty good indicator of the mood of
the congress. Art read it the way he read fortune cookies, and indeed one day
there was one message that said, “You like Chinese food.” Usually the messages
were more political than that. Often they were things said in the previous days
of the conference: “No tent is an island.” “If you can’t afford housing then
the right to vote is a bad joke.” “Keep your distance, don’t change speed,
don’t run into anything.” “La salute non si paga.” Then there were things that
had not been said: “Do unto others.” “The Reds have green roots.” “The Greatest
Show on Earth.” “No Kings No Presidents.” “Big Man Hates Politics.” “However:
We Are the Little Red People.”

So Art was no longer surprised when he was approached by people
who spoke in Arabic or Hindi or some language he did not recognize, then looked
him in the eye while their AI spoke in English with an accent from the BBC or
Middle America or the New Delhi civil service, expressing some kind of
unpredictable political sentiment. It was encouraging, really—not the translation
AIs, which were just another kind of distancing, less extreme than
teleparticipation but still not quite “talking face-to-face”—but the political
melange, the impossibility of block voting, .or of even thinking in the normal
constituencies.

It was a strange congregation, really. But it went on, and
eventually everyone got used to it; it took on that al-ways-already quality
that extended events often gain over their duration. But once, very late at
night, after a long bizarre translated conversation in which the AI on the
wrist of the young woman he was talking to spoke in rhymed couplets (and he
never knew what language she was speaking to start with), Art wandered back
through the warehouse toward his office suite, around the table of tables,
where work was still going even though it was after the timeslip, and he
stopped to say hi to one group; and then, momentum lost, slumped back against a
side wall, half watching, half drowsing, his kavajava buzz nearly overwhelmed
by exhaustion. And the strangeness came back, all at once. It was a kind of
hypnagogic vision. There were shadows in the corners, innumerable flickering
shadows; and eyes in the shadows. Shapes, like insubstantial bodies: all the
dead, it suddenly seemed, and all the unborn all there in the warehouse with
them, to witness this moment. As if history were a tapestry, and the congress
the loom where everything was coming together, the present moment with its
miraculous thereness, its potential right in their own atoms, their own voices.
Looking back at the past, able to see it all, a single long braided tapestry of
events; looking forward at the future, able to see none of it, though
presumably it branched out in an explosion of threads of potentiality, and
could become anything: they were two different kinds of unreachable immensity.
And all of them traveling together, from the one into the other, through that
great loom the present, the now. Now was their chance, for all of them together
in this present—the ghosts could watch, from before and after, but this was the
moment when what wisdom they could muster had to be woven together, to be
passed on to all the future generations.

They could do anything.
That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring the
congress to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of
choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past:
there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this
so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to
reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious—the
way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good governments of
all time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis—or throw
all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government.
... To go from that to the mundane problematic of the constitution as written
was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

On the other hand, it would certainly be a good thing if their
diplomatic team were to arrive on Earth with a completed document to present to
the UN and the people of Earth. Really, there was no avoiding it; they needed
to finish; not just to present to Earth the united front of an established
government, but also to start living their postcrisis life, whatever it might
be.

Nadia felt this strongly, and so she began to exert herself. “Time
to drop the keystone in the arch,” she said to Art one morning. And from then
on she was indefatigable, meeting with all the delegations and committees,
insisting that they finish whatever they were working on, insisting they get it
on the table for a final vote on inclusion. This inexorable insistence of hers
revealed something that had not been clear before, which was that most of the
issues had been resolved to the satisfaction of most of the delegations. They
had concocted something workable, most agreed, or at least worth trying, with
amendment procedures prominent’in the structure so that they could alter
aspects of the system as they went along. The young natives in particular
seemed happy—proud of their work, and pleased that they had managed to keep an
emphasis on local semiautonomy, institutionalizing the way most of them had
lived under the Transitional Authority.

Thus the many checks against majoritarian rule did not bother
them, even though they themselves were the current majority. In order not to
look defeated by this development, Jackie and her circle had to pretend they
had never argued for a strong presidency and central government in the first
place; indeed they claimed that an executive council, elected by the
legislature in the Swiss manner, had been their idea all along. A lot of that
kind of thing was going on, and Art was happy to agree with all such claims:
“Yes, I remember, we were wondering what to do about that the night when we
stayed up to see the sunrise, it was a good thought you had.”

Good ideas everywhere. And they began to spiral down toward
closure.

The global government as they had designed it was to be a
confederation, led by an executive council of seven members, elected by a
two-housed legislature. One legislative branch, the duma, was composed of a
large group of representatives drafted from the populace; the other, the
senate, a smaller group elected one from each town or village group larger than
five hundred people. The legislature was all in all fairly weak; it elected the
executive council and helped select justices of the courts, and left to the
towns most legislative duties. The judicial branch was more powerful; it
included not only criminal courts, but also a kind of double supreme court, one
half a constitutional court, and the other half an environmental court, with
members to both appointed, elected, and drawn by lottery. The environmental
court would rule on disputes concerning ter-raforming and other environmental
changes, while the constitutional court would rule on the constitutionality of
all other issues, including challenged town laws. One arm of the environmental
court would be a land commission, charged with overseeing the stewardship of
the land, which was to belong to all Martians together, in keeping with point
three of the Dorsa Brevia agreement; there would not be private property as
such, but there would be various tenure rights established in leasing
contracts, and the land commission was to work these matters out. A
corresponding economic commission would function under the constitutional
court, and would be partly composed of representatives from guild cooperatives
which would be established for the various professions and industries. This
commission was to oversee the establishment of a version of the underground’s
eco-economics, including both not-for-profit enterprises concentrating on the
public sphere, and taxed for-profit enterprises which had legal size limits,
and were by law employee-owned.

This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for
a strong global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was
also a response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the
previous century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or
otherwise collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held
firm, issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the
land, in a mostly ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the
metanats’ depredations; a moral force, which.if it had had more teeth, might
have done more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle
fought, and now they remembered.

Thus the Martian global government. The constitution then also
included a long list of human rights, including social rights; guidelines for
the land commission and the economics commission; an Australian ballot election
system for the elective offices; a system for amendments; and so on. Lastly, to
the main text of the constitution they appended the huge collection of
materials that had accumulated in the process, calling it Working Notes and Commentary.
This was to be used to help the courts interpret the main document, and
included everything the delegations had said at the table of tables, or written
on the warehouse screens, or received in the mail.

So most of the sticky issues had been resolved, or at least swept
under the rug; the biggest outstanding dispute was the Red objection. Art went
into action here, orchestrating several late concessions to the Reds, including
many early appointments to the environmental courts; these concessions were
later termed the “Grand Gesture.” In return Ir-ishka, speaking for all the Reds
still involved in the political process, agreed that the cable would stay, that
UNTA would have a presence in Sheffield, that Terrans would still be able to
immigrate, subject to restrictions; and lastly, that terra-forming would
continue, in slow nondisruptive forms, until the atmospheric pressure at six
kilometers above the datum was 350 millibars, this figure to be reviewed every
five years. And so the Red impasse was broken, or at least finessed.

Coyote shook his head at the way things had developed. “After
every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves
and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up. I think
what you should do now is go out to the tents and canyons, and ask them very
humbly how they have been running things these past two months, and then throw
this fancy constitution away and say, continue.”

“But that’s what the constitution does say,” Art joked.

Coyote would not kid about this. “You must be Very scrupulous not
to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts,
that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.”

As for UNTA, it was harder to tell what they thought, because
opinions back on Earth were divided, with a loud faction calling for the
retaking of Mars by force, everyone on Pavonis to be jailed or hanged. Most
Terrans were more accommodating, and all of them were still distracted by the
ongoing crisis at home. And at the moment, they didn’t matter as much as the
Reds; that was the space the revolution had given the Martians. Now they were
about to fill it.

Every night of the final week, Art went to bed incoherent with
cavils and kava, and though exhausted he would wake fairly often during the
night, and roll under the force of some seemingly lucid thought that in the
morning would be gone, or revealed as lunatic. Nadia slept just as poorly on
the couch next to his, or in her chair. Sometimes they would fall asleep talking
over some point or other, and wake up dressed but entangled, holding on to each
other like children in a thunderstorm. The warmth of another body was a comfort
like nothing else. And once in the dim predawn ultraviolet light they both woke
up, and talked for hours in the cold silence of the building, in a little
cocoon of warmth and companionship. Another mind to talk to. From colleagues to
friends; from there to lovers, maybe; or something like lovers; Nadia did not
seem inclined to romanticism of any kind. But Art was in love, no doubt about
it, and there twinkled in Nadia’s flecked eyes a new fondness for him, he
thought. So that at the end of the long final days of the congress, they lay on
their couches and talked, and she would knead his shoulders, or him hers, and
then they would fall comatose, pounded by exhaustion. There was more pressure
to ushering in this document than either one of them wanted to admit, except in
these moments, huddling together against the cold big world. A new love: Art,
despite Nadia’s unsentimentality, found no other way to put it. He was happy.

And he was amused, but not surprised, when they got up one morning
and she said, “Let’s put it to a vote.”

So Art talked to the Swiss and the Dorsa Brevia scholars, and the
Swiss proposed to the congress that they vote on the version of the
constitution currently on the table, voting point by point as they had promised
in the beginning. Immediately there was a spasm of vote trading that made
Terran stock exchanges look subtle and slow. Meanwhile the Swiss set up a
voting sequence, and over the course of three days they ran through it,
allowing one vote to each group on each numbered paragraph of the draft
constitution. All eighty-nine paragraphs passed, and the massive collection of
“explanatory material” was officially appended to the main text.

After that it was time to put it to the people of Mars for
approval. So on Ls 158, October llth, m-year 52 (on Earth, February 27, 2128),
the general populace of Mars, including everyone over five m-years old, voted
by wrist on the resulting document. Over ninety-five percent of the population
voted, and the constitution passed seventy-eight percent to twenty-two percent,
garnering just over nine million votes. They had a government.