Blue Mars (49 page)

This surprise brought a double jolt to his memory—of Hiroko,
emerging out of the snow to lead him to his rover— then of Ann, in Antarctica,
striding over rock to meet him— but for what?

Confused, he tried to track the thought. Double image—a fleet
single image—

Then Ann was before him and the memories were gone, forgotten like
a dream.

He had not seen her since forcing the gerontological treatment on
her in Tempe, and he was acutely uncomfortable; possibly this was a fright
reaction. Of course it was unlikely she would physically assault him. Though
she had before. But that was never the kind of assault that worried him. That
time in Antarctica—he grasped for the elusive memory, lost it again. Memories
on the edge of consciousness were certain to be lost if one made any deliberate
effort to retrieve them. Why that should be was a mystery. He didn’t know what
to say.

“Are you immune to carbon dioxide now?” she asked through her face
mask.

He explained about the new hemoglobin treatment, struggling for
each word, in the way he had after his stroke. Halfway through his explanation,
she laughed out loud. “Crocodile blood now, eh?”

“Yes,” he said, guessing her thought. “Crocodile blood, rat mind.”

“A hundred rats.”

“Yes. Special rats,” he said, striving for accuracy. Myths after
all had their own rigorous logic, as Levi-Strauss had shown. They had been
genius rats, he wanted to say, a hundred of them and geniuses every one. Even
his miserable graduate students had had to admit that.

“Minds altered,” she said, following his drift.

“Yes.”

“So, after your brain damage, altered twice,” she noted.

“That’s right.” Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those
rats were far from home. “Plasticity enhancement. Did you . . . ?”

“No. I did not.”

So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try
the drugs on her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the
woman before him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her
eye; he had gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of
hatred. Ever since their arguments on the Ares, and perhaps before. He had had
time to get used to it. Or at least to learn it.

Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her
eyes, it was almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but
the skin around the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were
both maximally wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed
musculature. It seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn’t know
what to make of it.

“You gave me the gerontological treatment,” she said.

“Yes.”

Should he say he was sorry if he wasn’t? Tongue-tied, lockjawed,
he stared at her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that
it was all right, that he had done the right thing.

She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. “What are you trying
to do now?”

He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as
gnomic as a koan. “I’m out looking,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say.
Language, all those beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like
a flock of startled birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just
two animals, standing there in the sun. Look, look, look!

She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she
looking daggers at him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock;
with Ann that surely indicated progress.

But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the
little seaport at Zed.

Sax returned to Da Vinci Crater
feeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were having their annual
Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year’s representatives to
the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. After the ritual of
names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these jobs for the
previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, and, for
most of them, celebrated once again having been passed over.

The random selection method for Da Vinci’s administrative jobs had
been adapted because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically,
after all their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of
self-management, the Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work
involved. They only wanted to do their research. “We should give the
administration entirely to AIs,” Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year,
between sips from a foaming stein of beer. Aonia, last year’s representative to
the duma, was saying to this year’s selection, “You go to Man-gala and sit
around arguing, and the staff does what work there is. Most of it has been
drained off to the council or the courts or the parties. It’s Free Mars
apparatchiks who are really running this planet. But it’s a really pretty town,
nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the winter.”

Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new
harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, to near them for comfort. Politics
in its most common forn complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happ
to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on fc about half an hour, and
then they would cycle back to tall ing about work. There was one group doing
that ahead; Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered ove and
found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: appeared they were excited
by recent developments in the lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion
engine. Cor tinuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but took extremely
massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages to big and heavy and expensive to be
used in many situation This lab, however, was attempting to implode small
pellei of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusio results to power
things.

“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.

“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk wit us about
plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpfu this is really macro compared to
what she does, but she’s s damn smart, and afterward something she said set
Yanand off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave space for
emission afterward.”

They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides ; once,
but there also had to be a vent for charged partich to escape. Bao had
apparently been interested in the prol lem, and now they returned to a lively
discussion of i which they thought they had solved at last; and whe someone
dropped into the circle and mentioned the day lottery results, they brushed him
off. “Ka, no politic please.”

As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversatior he passed,
he was struck again by the apolitical nature c most scientists and technicians.
There was something aboi politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as
well, he ha to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and comprc mised,
a process that went entirely against the grain of th scientific method. Was
that true? These feelings and pre udices were subjective themselves. One could
try to regar politics as a kind of science—a long series of experiments i
communal living, say, with all the data consistently cor taminated. Thus people
hypothesized a system of gove nance, lived under it, examined how they felt
about it, the changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or
principles seemed to have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their
experiments and paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems
that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality,
stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all. After
repeated experiments it had become clear—on Mars at least—that all these
sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system
in which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory
this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized,
created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by
maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.

Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that
if they believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time
to the exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the
self governed. And that took time. “Those who value freedom must make the
effort necessary to defend it,” as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew
because Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with
such inspirational sentiments printed on them. “Science Is Politics by Other
Means,” another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.

But in Da Vinci most people did not want to spend their time that
way. “Socialism will never succeed,” Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting
on yet another sign), “it takes up too many evenings.” So it did; and the
solution was to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the
lottery method of election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the
job oneself someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for the
gaiety of this -annual party; people were pouring in and out of the French
doors of the commons, onto the open terraces overlooking the crater lake,
talking with great animation. Even the drafted ones were beginning to cheer up
again, after the solace of kavajava and alcohol, and perhaps the thought that
power after all was power; it was an imposition, but the draftees could do some
little things that no doubt were occurring to them even now—make trouble for
rivals, do favors for people they wanted to impress, etc. So once again the
system had worked; they had warm bodies filling the whole polyarchic array, the
neighborhood boards, the ag board, the water board, the architectural review
board, the project review council, the economic coordination group, the crater
council to coordinate all these smaller bodies, the global delegates’ advisory
board—all that network of small management bodies that progressive political
theorists had been suggesting in one variation or another for centuries,
incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain,
Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so
on. An experiment in synthesis. And so far it seemed to be working, in the
sense that the Da Vinci techs seemed about as self-determined and happy as they
had been during the ad hoc underground years, when everything had been done
(apparently) by instinct, or, to be more precise, by the general consensus of
the (much smaller) population in Da Vinci at that time.

They certainly seemed as happy; out on the terraces they were
lining up at big pots of kavajava and Irish coffee, or kegs of beer, clumped in
talkative groups so that the clatter of voices was like the sound of waves, as
at any cocktail party: an amazing sound, those voices all together. A chorus of
talk—it was a music that no one consciously listened to but Sax, as far as he
could tell; but as he listened to it he suspected strongly that the sound of
it, heard unconsciously, was one of the things that made people at parties so
happy and gregarious. Get two hundred people together, talking loudly so that
each conversation could be heard only by its small group: such a music they
made!

So running Da Vinci was a successful experiment, despite the fact
that the citizens showed no interest in it. If they had they might have been
less happy. Maybe ignoring government was a good strategy. Maybe the definition
of good government was the government you could safely ignore, “to finally get
back to my own work!” as one happily buzzed ex-water-board chief was just now
saying. Self-government not being considered part of one’s own work!

Although of course there were those people who did like the work, something
about the interplay of theory and practice, the argument, the problem solving,
the collaboration with other people, the service to others as a kind of gift,
the endless talk; the power. And these people stayed on to serve two terms, or
three if they were allowed, and then took on some other volunteer task that was
going a-begging; indeed, most of these people did more than one task at once.
Bela, for instance, had claimed not to like the chairmanship of the lab of
labs, but now he was going directly into the volunteer advisory group, which
always had a number of spots in danger of being unfilled. Sax wandered over to
him: “Would you agree with Aonia that Free Mars is dominating global policy?”

“Oh undoubtedly, assuredly. They are simply so big. And they have
packed the courts, and rigged some things their way. I think they want to
control all the new asteroid colonies. And to conquer Earth too, for that
matter. All the politically ambitious young natives are joining the party, like
bees to the flower.”

“Trying to dominate other settlements. .. .”

“Yes?”

“It sounds like trouble.”

“Yes it does.”

“Have you heard about this lightweight fusion engine they’re
talking about?”

“Yes, a little.”

“You might look into backing that a bit more. If we could get engines
like that into spaceships. . . .”

“Yes? Sax?”

“Transport that fast might have the effect of cracking domination
by any one party.”

“Do you think so?”

“Well, it would make it a hard situation to control.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Hmm, well, I must think about this further.”

“Yes. Science is politics by other means, remember.”

“Indeed it is! Indeed it is.” And Bela went off to the beer kegs,
muttering to himself, then greeting another group as they approached him.

So spontaneously there emerged that bureaucratic class that had
been the terror of so many political theorists: the experts who took control of
the polity, and supposedly would never relinquish their grip. But to whom would
they relinquish it? Who else wanted it? No one, as far as Sax could tell. Bela
could stay on the advirsory board forever if he wanted to. Expert, from the
Latin experiri, to try. As in experiment. So it was government by the
experimenters.

Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So
yet another kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you
had to draft members into the governing body, then the notion of
self-government as an aspect of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical.

Hector and Sylvia, from Bao’s seminar, broke into Sax’s reverie
and invited him to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs
from Maria dos Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them.

Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to
take place, Sax stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of
kava. The festival spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia
hurried down to get ready, glowing with anticipation. Watching them Sax
remembered his recent encounter with Ann. If only he had been able to think!
Why, he had gone completely incoherent! If only he had thought to become
Stephen Lindholm again, perhaps that would have helped. Where was Ann now, what
was she thinking? What had she been doing? Did she only wander the face of Mars
now, like a ghost, moving from one Red station to another? What were the Reds
doing now, how did they live? Had they been about to bomb Da Vinci, had his
chance encounter stopped a raid? No no. There were ecoteurs still out there
monkey-wrenching projects, but with the legal limits on terraform-ing, most
Reds had rejoined society somehow; it was one mainstream political strand among
the rest, vigilant, quick to litigate—indeed much more interested in taking on
political work than less ideological citizens—but still, and by that very tendency,
normalized. Where then would Ann fit in? With whom did she associate?

Well, he could call her and ask.

But he was afraid to call, afraid to ask. Afraid to talk to her!
At least by wrist. And apparently in person as well. She had not said what she
thought of him giving her the treatment against her will. No thanks, no curse;
nothing. What did she think? What was she thinking?

He sighed, sipped his kava. Down below they were beginning, Hector
rolling out a recitative in Spanish, his voice so musical and expressive it was
almost as if Sax could understand him by tone of voice alone.

Ann, Ann, Ann. This obsessive interest in someone else’s thought
was so uncomfortable. So much easier to concentrate on the planet, on rock and
air, on biology. It was a ploy Ann herself would understand. And there was in
eco-poesis something fundamentally intriguing. The birth of a world. Out of
their control. Still he wondered what she made of it. Perhaps he would run into
her again.

Meanwhile, the world. He went back out on it again. Rumpled land
under the blue dome of the sky. The ordinary sky at the equator in spring
changed color day by day, it took a color chart even to approximate the tone
colors; some days it was a deep violet blue—clematis blue, or hyacinth blue, or
lapis lazuli, or a purplish indigo. Or Prussian blue, a pigment made from
ferric ferrocyanide, interestingly, as there was certainly a lot of ferric
material up there. Iron blue. Slightly more purple than Himalayan skies as seen
in photographs, but otherwise like the Terran skies seen at those high
altitudes. And combined with the rocky indented landscape, it did seem like a
high-altitude place. Everything: the sky color, the rumpled rock, the cold thin
air so pure and chill. Everything so high. He walked into the wind, or across
the wind, or with the wind at his back, and each felt different. In his
nostrils the wind was like a mild intoxicant, flooding the brain. He stepped on
lichen-crusted rocks, from slab to slab, as if walking on a personal sidewalk
appearing magically out of the shatter of the land, up and down, every step
just a step, wandering attentive to the thisness of each moment. Moment to
moment to moment, each one discrete, like Bao’s loops of timespace, like the
successive positions of a finch’s head, the little birds plancking from one
quantum pose to the next. It appeared on close inspection that moments were not
regular units but varied in duration, depending on what was happening in them.
The wind dropped, no birds in sight: everything suddenly still, and oh so
silent, except for the buzzing of insects; those moments could last several
seconds each. Whereas when sparrows were dogfighting a crow, the moments were
nearly instantaneous. Look very closely; sometimes it was a flow, sometimes the
planck-planck-planck of individual stillnesses.