Blue Mars (34 page)

But events conspired to keep her in Sheffield. It was one thing
after another—nothing particularly important or interesting, compared to the
congress itself, but the details necessary to get things rolling. It was
somewhat as Charlotte had said; after the design phase, the endless minutiae of
construction. Detail after detail.

She had to expect this, she had to be patient. She would work
through the first rush and then get away. In the meantime, along with the
start-up process, the media wanted her, the new UN Martian Office wanted her,
very interested in the new immigration policies and procedures; the other
council members wanted her. Where would the council meet? How often? What were
its rules of operation? Nadia convinced the other six councillors to hire
Charlotte to be council secretary and protocol chief, and after that Charlotte
hired a big crew of assistants from Dorsa Brevia. So they had the start of a
staff. And Mikhail also had a great fund of practical experience in government
from Bogdanov Vishniac. So there were people better suited than Nadia to do
this work; but still she was called in a million times a day to confer,
discuss, decide, appoint, adjudicate, arbitrate, administrate. It was endless.

And then when Nadia did clear time for herself, forcibly, it
turned out that being president made it very difficult to join any particular
project. Everything going on was now part of a tent or a co-op; very often they
were commercial enterprises, involved in transactions that were part nonprofit
public works, part competitive market. So to have the president of Mars join
any given co-op would be a sign of official patronage, and couldn’t be allowed
if one wanted to be fair. It was a conflict of interest.

“Shit!” she said to Art, accusingly.

He shrugged, tried to pretend he hadn’t known.

But there was no way out. She was a prisoner of power. She had to
study the situation as if it were an engineering problem, like trying to exert
force in some difficult medium. Say she wanted to build greenhouse-gas
factories. She was constrained from joining any factory co-op in particular.
Therefore she had to do it some other way. Emergence at a higher level: she
could perhaps coordinate co-ops.

There seemed to her good reasons to promote the building of
greenhouse-gas factories. The Year Without Summer had extended to include a
series of violent storms that had dropped off the Great Escarpment into the
north, and most meteorologists agreed these “Hadley cross-equatorial storms”
had been caused by the orbital mirrors’ removal, and the resulting sudden drop
in insolation. A full ice age was deemed a distinct possibility; and pumping up
greenhouse gases seemed to be one of the best ways to counter it. So Nadia
asked Charlotte to initiate a conference to come back with recommendations for
forestalling an ice age. Charlotte contacted people in Da Vinci and Sabishii
and elsewhere, and soon she had a conference scheduled to take place in
Sabishii, named, by some Da Vinci saxaclone no doubt, the “Insolation Loss
Effects Abatement Meeting M-53.”

Nadia, however, never made it
to this conference. She got caught up by affairs in Sheffield
instead, mostly instituting the new economic system, which she thought
important enough to keep her there. The legislature was passing the laws of
eco-economics, fleshing out the bones drawn up in the constitution. They directed
co-ops that had existed before the revolution to help the newly independent
metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative
organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support,
especially from the young natives, and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly.
Every Martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op
could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op
associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms
chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the
cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees
were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent
of about a year’s wages to the firm’s equity fund, wages earned in apprentice
programs of various kinds at the end of schooling. This buy-in fee became the
starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it
was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from
the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then
had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to a yearly review
by the councils. Credit and capital were obtained from central cooperative
banks, or the global government’s start-up fund, or helper organizations such
as Praxis and the Swiss. On the next level up, co-ops in the same industries or
services were associating for larger projects, and also sending representatives
to industry guilds, which established professional practice boards, arbitration
and mediation centers, and trade associations.

The economic commission was also establishing a Martian currency,
for internal use and for exchanges with Terran currencies. The commission
wanted a currency that was resistant to Terran speculation, but in the absence
of a Martian stock market, the full force of Terran investment tended to fall
on the currency itself, as the only investment game being offered. This tended
to inflate the value of the Martian sequin in Terran money markets, and in the
old days it would probably have blown the sequin’s value right through the
roof, to Mars’s disadvantage in trade balances; but as the fracturing metanats continued
to struggle against cooperativization back on Earth, Terran finance remained in
some disarray, and did not have its old house-on-fire intensity. So the sequin
ended up strong on Earth, but not too strong; and on Mars it was just money.
Praxis was very helpful in this process, as they became a kind of federal bank
for the new economy, providing interest-free loans and serving as a mediated
exchange with Terran currencies.

So given all this, the executive council was meeting for long
hours every day to discuss legislation and other government programs. It was so
time-consuming that Nadia almost forgot there was a conference she had
initiated going on at the same time in Sabishii. On good nights, however, she
spent a last hour or two on-screen with friends in Sabishii, and it looked like
things were going fairly well there too. Many of Mars’s environmental
scientists were on hand, and they were in agreement that massively increasing
greenhouse-gas emissions would ease the effects of the mirror loss. Of course
CO2 was the easiest greenhouse gas to emit, but even without using it—as they
were still trying to reduce it in the atmosphere to breathable levels—the
consensus was that the more complex and powerful gases could be created and
released in the quantities needed. And at first they did not think this would
be a problem, politically; the constitution legislated an atmosphere no thicker
than 350 millibars at the six-kilometer contour, but said nothing about what
gases could be used to create this pressure. If the halocarbons and other
greenhouse gases in the Russell cocktail were pumped out until they formed one
hundred parts per million of the atmosphere, rather than the twenty-seven parts
per million that were currently up there, then heat retention would rise by
several degrees K, they calculated, and an ice age would be forestalled, or at
least greatly shortened. So the plan called for production and release of tons
of carbon tetrafluoride, hexafluoroethane, sulfur hex-afluoride, methane,
nitrous oxide, and trace elements of other chemicals which helped to decrease
the rate at which UV radiation destroyed these halocarbons.

Completing the melting of the North Sea ice was the other obvious
abatement strategy most often mentioned at the conference. Until it was all
liquid, the albedo of the ice was bouncing a lot of energy back into space, and
a truly lively water cycle was somewhat capped off. If they could get a liquid
ocean, or, given how far north it was, a summer-liquid ocean, then any ice age
would be done for, and ter-raformation essentially complete: they would have
robust currents, waves, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, melting, streams,
rivers, deltas—the full hydrological cycle. This was a primary goal, and so
there was a variety of methods being proposed to speed the melting of the ice:
feeding nuclear-power-plant exhaust heat into the ocean, scattering black algae
on the ice, deploying microwave and ultrasound transmitters as heaters, even
sailing big icebreakers through the shallow pack to aid the breakup.

Of course the increased greenhouse gases would help here as well;
the ocean’s surface ice would melt on its own, after all, as soon as the air
stayed regularly above 273 K. But as the conference proceeded, more and more
problems with the greenhouse-gas plan were being pointed out. It entailed
another huge industrial effort, almost the equal of the meta-nat monster
projects, like the nitrogen shipments from Titan, or the soletta itself. And it
was not a onetime thing; the gases were constantly destroyed by UV radiation in
the upper atmosphere, so they had to overproduce to reach the desired levels,
and then continue producing for as long as they wanted the gases up there. Thus
mining the raw materials, and constructing the factories to turn those
materials into the desired gases, were enormous projects, and necessarily a
largely robotic effort, with self-guided and replicating miners, self-building
and regulating factories, upper-atmosphere sampler drones—an entire machine
enterprise.

The technical challenge of this was not the issue; as Nadia
pointed out to her friends at the conference, Martian technology had been
highly robotic from the very beginning. In this case, thousands of small
robotic cars would wander Mars on their own, looking for good deposits of
carbon, sulfur, or fluorite, migrating from source to source like the old Arab
mining caravans on the Great Escarpment; then when new feedstocks were found in
high concentrations, the robots could settle down and construct little processing
plants out of clay, iron, magnesium, and trace metals, providing the parts that
could not be constructed on-site, and then assembling the whole. Fleets of
automated diggers and carts would be manufactured to haul the processed
material in to centralized factories, where the material would be gas-sified
and released from tall mobile stacks. It wasn’t that different from the earlier
mining for atmospheric gases; just a larger effort.

But the most obvious deposits had already been mined, as people
were now pointing out. And surface mining couldn’t be done the way it used to
be; there were plants growing almost everywhere now, and in many places a kind
of desert pavement was developing on the surface, as a result of hydration,
bacterial action, and chemical reactions in the clays. This crust helped
greatly to cut down on dust storms, which were still a constant problem; so
ripping it up to get to underlying deposits of feedstock materials was no
longer acceptable, either ecologically or politically. Red members of the
legislature were calling for a ban on just this kind of robotic surface mining,
and for good reasons, even in terraforming terms.

It was hard, Nadia thought one night as she shut down her screen,
to be faced with all the competing effects of their actions. The environmental
issues were so tightly intertwined that it was hard to tease them out and
decide what to do. And it was also hard to stay constrained by their own rules;
individual organizations could no longer act unilat-erally, because so many of
their actions had global ramifications. Thus the necessity for environmental
regulation, and for the global environmental court, already faced with a
caseload running out of control. Eventually it would have to rule on any plans
coming out of this conference as well. The days of unconstrained terraforming
were gone.

And as a member of the executive council, Nadia was restricted to
saying that she thought increased greenhouse gases were a good idea. Other than
that she had to stay out, or appear to be impinging on the environmental
court’s territory, which Irishka was defending very vigorously. So Nadia spent
time visiting on-screen with a group designing new robot miners that would
minimally disrupt the surface, or talking to a group working on dust fixatives
that might be sprayed or grown over the surface, “thin fast pavements” as they
called them; but they were proving to be a knotty problem.

And that was the extent of Nadia’s participation in the Sabishii
conference that she herself had initiated. And since all its technical problems
were enmeshed in political considerations anyway, it might have been said that
she hadn’t missed it at all. Not a bit of real work had been done there, by her
or anyone else. Meanwhile, back in Sheffield, the council was facing any number
of problems of its own: unforeseen difficulties in instituting the eco-economy;
complaints that the GEC was overstepping its authority; complaints about the
new police, and the criminal justice system; unruly and stupid behavior in both
houses of the legislature; Red and other types of resistance in the outback;
and so on. The issues were endless, and spanned the gamut from the profoundly
important to the incredibly petty, until Nadia began to lose all sense of where
on that continuum any individual problem lay.

For instance, she spent a good deal of her time involved in the
council’s own internal struggles, which she considered trivial, but couldn’t
avoid. Most of these struggles involved resisting Jackie’s efforts to put
together a majority that would vote with Jackie every time, so that Jackie
could use the council as a rubber stamp for the Free Mars partyline, or in
other words for Jackie herself. This meant getting to know the rest of the
councillors better, and figuring out how to work with them. Zeyk was an old
acquaintance; Nadia liked him, and he was a power among the Arabs, their
current representative to the general culture, having defeated Antar for that
position; gracious, smart, kind, he was in agreement with Nadia on many issues,
including the core ones, and this made it an easy relationship, even a growing
friendship. Ariadne was one of the goddesses of the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy,
and acted the part to a tee: imperious and rigid in her principles, she was an
ideologue, probably the only thing that kept her from being a serious challenge
to Jackie’s prominence among the natives. Marion was the Red councillor, an
ideologue also, but much changed from her early radical days, although still a
long-winded arguer, not easily beaten. Peter, Ann’s little boy, had grown up to
be a power in several different parts of Martian society, including the space
crew at Da Vinci, the green underground, the cable crowd, and to an extent,
because of Ann, the more moderate Reds. This versatility was part of his
nature, and Nadia had a hard time getting a fix on him; he was private, like
his parents, and seemed wary of Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred; he
wanted a distance from them, he was nisei through and through. Mikhail Yangel
was one of the earliest issei to follow the First Hundred to Mars, and had
worked with Arkady from very early on. He had helped to start the revolt of
2061, and Nadia’s impression was that he had been one of the most extreme Reds
at that time—which fact sometimes made her angry at him still, which was silly,
and impeded her ability to talk to him—but there it was, despite the fact that
he too was much changed, a Bogda-novist willing to compromise. His presence on
the council was a surprise to Nadia—a gesture toward Arkady, one might say,
which she found touching.

And then there was Jackie, very possibly the most popular and
powerful politician on Mars. At least until Nirgal got back.

And so Nadia dealt with these six every day, learning their ways
as they made their way through item after item on their daily agendas. From the
important to the trivial, the abstract to the personal—everything seemed to
Nadia part of a fabric, where everything connected to everything. Not only was
the council not part-time work, it ate up the entirety of every waking day. It
consumed her life. And yet at this point she had only gotten through two months
of a three-m-year term.

Art could see that it was getting to her, and he did what he could
to help. He came up to her apartment every morning with breakfast, like room
service. Often he had cooked it himself, and always it was good. As he came in,
platter held aloft, he called up jazz on her AI to serve as the soundtrack of
their morning together—not just Nadia’s beloved Louis, though he sought out odd
recordings by Satch to amuse her, things like “Give Peace a Chance” or
“Stardust Memories”—but also later styles of jazz that she had never liked
before, because they were so frenetic; but that seemed to be the tempo of these
days. Whatever the reason, Charlie Parker now skittered and zoomed around most
impressively, she thought, and Charles Mingus made his big band sound like Duke
Ellington’s on pandorph, which was just what Ellington and all the rest of
swing needed, in her opinion—very funny, lovely music. And best of all, on many
mornings Art called up Clifford Brown, a discovery Art had made during his
investigations on her behalf, one he was very proud of, and advocated
constantly to her as the logical successor to Armstrong—a vibrant trumpet sound
joyous and positive and melodic like Satch, and also brilliantly fast and
clever and difficult—like Parker, only happy. It was the perfect soundtrack for
these wild times, driving and intense but as positive as one could be.