Blue Mars (54 page)

Nirgal cuffed them along, giggling despite himself. The ranters
were very drunk, and Nirgal was not much more sober himself. When they got to
their hostel he looked into the bar across the street, saw the butcher woman
was sitting in there, and so went in with the rest of the rough boys. He sat
back watching them while he drank a glass of cognac, swishing it over his
tongue. Ferals, the passersby had called them. The butcher woman was eyeing him,
wondering what he thought. Much later he stood, with difficulty, and left the
bar with the others, walking unsteadily across the cobbled street, humming
along with the others as they bellowed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” On the
obsidian water of Kasei Fjord the stars rode up and down. Mind and body full of
feeling, sweet fatigue a state of grace.

The next morning they slept in
and woke up late, dopey and hungover. They lay around for a while
in their dorm room, slurping kavajava. Then they went downstairs, and even
though they claimed to be still stuffed, ate a huge hostel breakfast. While
they ate they decided to go flying. The winds that poured down Kasei Fjord were
as powerful as any on the planet, and windsurfers and fliers of all kinds had
come to Nilokeras to take advantage of them. Of course at any time howlers
could take the situation “off scale” and shut down the fun for everyone except
the big wind riders; but the average day’s hard blow was glorious.

The fliers’ base of operations was an offshore crater rim island,
called Santorini. After breakfast the group went down to the docks together and
got on a ferry, and debarked half an hour later on the little arcuate island,
and trooped with the other passengers up to the gliderport.

Nirgal had not flown for years, and it was a great joy to strap
into a blimpglider’s gondola and rise up the mast, and let loose and soar on
the powerful updrafts pushing off San-torini’s steep inner rim. As Nirgal
ascended he saw that most of the fliers wore birdsuits of one sort or another;
it looked like he was flying in a flock of wide-winged flying creatures, which
resembled not birds but something more like flying foxes, or some mythic hybrid
like the griffin or Pegasus: bird-humans. The birdsuits were of several
different kinds, imitating in some respects the configurations of different
species—albatross, eagle, swift, lammergeier. Each suit encased its flier in
what was in effect an ever-changing exoskeleton, which responded to interior
pressure from the flier’s body, to take and then hold positions, or make
certain movements, all reinforced in proportion to the pressure exerted inside
them, so that a human’s muscles could flap the big wings, or hold them in place
against the great torque of the wind’s onslaughts, meanwhile keeping the
streamlined helmets and tail feathers in the proper positions. Suit AIs helped
fliers who wanted help, and they could even function as automatic pilots; but
most fliers preferred to do the thinking for themselves, and controlled the
suit as a waldo, exaggerating many times the strength of their own muscles.

Sitting in his blimpglider Nirgal watched with both pleasure and
trepidation as these bird people shot down past him in terrifying stoops toward
the sea, then popped their wings and curved away and gyred back up again on the
inner-wall updraft. It looked to Nirgal like the suits took a high level of
skill to fly; they were the opposite of the blimp-gliders, a few of which
soared with Nirgal over the island, rising and falling in much gentler swoops,
taking in the view like agile balloonists.

Then soaring up past him in a rising spiral, Nirgal spotted the
face of the diana, the woman who had led the ferals’ hunt. She recognized him
too, raised her chin and bared her teeth in a quick smile, then pulled her
wings in and tipped over, dropping away with a tearing sound. Nirgal watched
her from above with fearful excitement, then a moment of terror as she dove
right past the edge of Santo-rini’s cliff; from his vantage point it had looked
like she was going to hit. Then she was back up, soaring on the updraft in
tight spirals. It looked so graceful he wanted to learn to fly in a birdsuit,
even as he felt his pulse still hammering at the sight of her dive. Stoop and
soar, stoop and soar; no blimpglider could fly like that, not even close. Birds
were the greatest fliers, and the diana flew like a bird. Now, along with
everything else, people were birds.

With him, past him, around him, as if performing one of those
darting courtships that members of some species put on for each other; after
about an hour of this, she smiled at him one last time and tipped away, then
drifted in lazy circles down to the gliderport at Phira. Nirgal followed her
down, landing half an hour later with a swoop into the wind, running and then
stopping just short of her. She had been waiting, wings spread around her on
the ground.

She stepped in a circle around him, as if still doing a courtship
dance. She walked toward him, pulling her hood back and offering her head, her
black hair spilling out in the light like a crow’s wing. The diana. She
stretched up on her toes and kissed him full on the mouth, then stood back,
watching him gravely. He remembered her running naked ahead of the hunt, a
green sash bouncing from one hand.

“Breakfast?” she said.

It was midafternoon, and he was famished. “Sure.”

They ate at the gliderport restaurant, looking out at the arc of
the island’s little bay, and the immensity of the Shar-anov cliffs, and the
acrobatics of the fliers still in the air. They talked about flying, and
running the land; about the hunt for the three antelope, and the islands of the
North Sea, and the great fjord of Kasei, pouring its wind over them. They
flirted; and Nirgal felt the pleasant anticipation of where they were headed,
he luxuriated in it. It had been a long time. This too was part of the descent
into the city, into civilization. Flirting, seduction—how wonderful all that
was when one was interested, when one saw that the other was interested! She
was fairly young, he judged, but her face was sunburned, skin lined around the
eyes—not a youth—she had been to the Jovian moons, she said, and had taught at
the new university in Nilokeras, and was now running with the ferals for a
time. Twenty m-years old, perhaps, or older—hard to tell these days. An adult,
in any case; in those first twenty m-years people got most of whatever
experience was ever going to give them, after that it was only a matter of
repetition. He had met old fools and young sages almost as often as the
reverse. They were both adults, contemporaries. And there they were, in the
shared experience of the present.

Nirgal watched her face as she talked. Careless, smart, confident.
A Minoan: dark-skinned, dark-eyed, aquiline nose, dramatic lower lip; Mediterranean
ancestry, perhaps, Greek, Arabic, Indian; as with most of the yonsei, it” was
impossible to tell. She was simply a Martian woman, with Dorsa Brevia English,
and that look in the eye as she watched him—ah yes—how many times in his
wandering had it happened, a conversation turning at some point, and then
suddenly he was flying with some woman in the long glide of seduction, the
courtship leading to some bed or hidden dip in the hills....

“Hey Zo,” the butcher woman said in passing. “Going with us to the
ancestral neck?”

“No,” Zo said.

“The ancestral neck?” Nirgal inquired.

“Boone’s Neck,” Zo said. “The town up on the polar peninsula.”

“Ancestral?”

“She’s John Boone’s great-grandaughter,” the butcher woman
explained.

“By way of?” Nirgal asked, looking at Zo.

“Jackie Boone,” she said. “My mother.”

“Ah,” Nirgal managed to say.

He sat back in his seat. The baby he had seen Jackie nursing, in
Cairo. The similarity to her mother was obvious once he knew. His skin was
goose-pimpling, the hairs lifting from the skin of his forearms. He hugged
himself, shivered. “I must be getting old,” he said.

She smiled, and he saw suddenly that she had known who he was. She
had been toying with him, laying a little trap—as an experiment, perhaps, or to
displease her mother, or for some other reason he could not imagine. For fun.

Now she was frowning at him, trying to look serious. “It doesn’t
matter,” she said.

“No,” he said. For there were other ferals out there.

PART
ELEVEN

        
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---Viriditas

        
------

It was a disordered time. Population pressures now drove
everything. The general plan to get through the hypermalthusian years was
obvious, and holding up fairly well; each generation got smaller; nevertheless,
there were now eighteen billion people on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars;
and more being bom all the time; and more moving from Earth to Mars all the
time; and people on both worlds crying enough, enough!

When Terrans heard Martians crying enough, some of them became
enraged. The concept of carrying capacity meant nothing before the sheer
numbers, the images on the screens. Uneasily the Martian global government did
what it could to deal with this anger. It explained that Mars with its thin new
biosphere could not sustain as many people as the fat old Earth. It also set
the Martian rocket industry into the shuttle business, and rapidly expanded a
program to turn asteroids into floating cities. This program was an unexpected
offshoot of what had been serving as part of their prison system. For many years
now the punishment for conviction of serious crimes on Mars had been permanent
exile from the planet, begun by some years of confinement and servitude on some
new asteroid settlement. After they had served their sentence it was a matter
of indifference to the Martian government where the exiles went, as long as
they did not return to Mars. So inevitably a steady stream of people arrived on
Hebe, shipped out and did their time, and then moved somewhere else, sometimes
out to the still thinly populated outer satellites, sometimes back into the
inner system; but often to one of the many hollowed-asteroid colonies that were
being established. Da Vinci and several other co-ops made and distributed
shareware for starting up these settlements, and many other organizations did
the same, for in truth the program was simple. Surveying teams had found
thousands of candidates in the asteroid belt for the treatment, and on the best
of them they left behind the equipment to transform them. A team of
self-reproducing digging robots went to work on one end of the asteroid, boring
into the rock like dogs, tossing most of the rubble into space, and using the
rest to make and fuel more diggers. When the rock was hollowed out, the open
end was capped and the whole thing was spun, so that centrifugal force provided
a gravity equivalent inside. Powerful lamps called sunlines or sunspots were
fired up in the centers of these hollowed-out cylinders, and they provided
light levels equivalent to the Terran or Martian day, with the g usually
adjusted accordingly, so that there were little Mars-equivalent cities, and
little Earth-equivalent cities, and cities all across the range in between, and
beyond, at least to the light side; many of the little worlds were
experimenting with quite low gs.

There were some alliances between these little new city-states,
and often ties to founder organizations back on a home world, but there was no
overall organization. From the independents, especially those occupied mostly
by Martian exiles, there had been in the early days some fairly hostile
behavior to passersby, including attempts to impose passage tolls on
spaceships, tolls so blatant as to resemble piracy. But now shuttles passing
through the belts were moving at very high speeds, and slightly above or below
the plane of the ecliptic, to avoid the dust and rubble that was only getting
worse with the hollowing of so many rocks. It was difficult to demand a toll
from these ships without threatening their total destruction, which invited
heavy retribution; and so the trend in tolls had proved to be short-lived.

Now, with both Earth and Mars feeling population pressures that
were more and more intense, the Martian co-ops were doing everything they could
to encourage the rapid development of new asteroid cities. They were also
building large new tented settlements on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and
most recently Uranus, with Neptune and perhaps even Pluto to follow. The big
satellites of the inner gas giants were very large moons, really little planets,
and all of them now had inhabitants who were beginning terraformingprojects
that were more or less long-range, depending on the local situation. None of
them could be terra-formed quickly, but all of them appeared to be possible, at
least to an extent; and some offered the tantalizing opportunity of a complete
new world. Titan, for instance, was beginning to come out of its nitrogen haze,
as settlers living in tents on the smaller moons nearby heated and pumped the
big moon’s surface oxygen into its atmosphere. Titan had the right volatiles
for terrafor-mation, and though it was at great distance from the sun,
receiving only one percent the insolation that Earth did, an extensive series
of mirrors was adding light, more all the time, and the locals were looking
into the possibility of free-hanging deuterium fusion lanterns, orbiting Titan
and illuminating it further. This would be an alternative to another device
that so far the Saturnians had been averse to using, called a gas lantern.
These gas lanterns were now flying through the upper atmospheres of Jupiter and
Uranus, collecting and burning helium3 and other gases in flares whose light
was reflected outward by electromagnetic disks. But the Saturnians had refused
to allow them, because they did not want to disturb the ringed planet’s
appearance.

So in all these outer orbits the Martian co-ops were extremely
busy, helping Martians and Terrans to emigrate to one of the new little worlds.
And as the process continued, and a hundred and then a thousand asteroids and
moonlets were given a local habitation and a name, the process took fire,
becoming what some called the explosive diaspora, others simply the
accelerando. People took to the idea, and the project gathered an energy that
was felt everywhere, expressing a growing sense of humanity’s power to create,
its vitality and variety. And the accelerando was also understood to be
humanity’s response to the supreme crisis of the population surge, a crisis so
severe that it made the Terran flood of 2129 look in comparison like no more
than a bad high tide. It was a crisis which could have triggered a terminal
disaster, a descent into chaos and barbarity; and instead it was being met
head-on by the greatest efflorescence of civilization in history, a new renaissance.

Many historians, sociologists, and other social observers
attempted to explain the vibrant nature of this most self-conscious age. One
school of historians, called the Deluge Group, looked back to the great Terran
flood, and declared that it had been the cause of the new renaissance: a forced
jump to a higher level. Another school of thought put forth the so-called
Technical Explanation; humanity had passed through one of the transitions to a
new level of technological competence, they maintained, as it had every half
century or so right back to the first industrial revolution. The Deluge Group
tended to use the term diaspora, the Technics the term accelerando. Then in the
2170s the Martian historian Charlotte Dorsa Brevia wrote and published a dense
multivolumed analytical metahistory, as she called it, which maintained that
the great flood had indeed served as a trigger point, and technical advances as
the enabling mechanism, but that the specific character of the new renaissance
had been caused by something much more fundamental, which was the shift from
one kind of global socioeconomic system to the next. She described what she
called a “residual/emergent complex of overlapping paradigms,” in which each
great socioeconomic era was composed of roughly equal parts of the systems
immediately adjacent to it in past and future. The periods immediately before
and after were not the only ones involved, however; they formed the bulk of a
system, and comprised its most contradictory components, but additional
important features came from particularly persistent aspects of more archaic
systems, and also faint hesitant intuitions of developments that would not
flower until much later.

Feudalism, therefore, to take one example, was for Charlotte made
up of a clash of the residual system of absolute religious monarchy, and the
emergent system of capitalism—with important echoes of more archaic tribal
caste, and faint foreshadow-ings of later individualist humanisms. The clashing
of these forces shifted over time, until the Renaissance of the sixteenth
century ushered in the age of capitalism. Capitalism then was composed of
clashing elements of the residual feudalism, and an emergent future order that
was only now being defined in their own time, which Charlotte called democracy.
And now, Charlotte claimed, they were, on Mars at least, in the democratic age
itself. Capitalism had therefore, like all other ages, been the combination of
two systems in very sharp opposition to each other. This incompatibility of its
constituent parts was underlined by the unfortunate experience of capitalism’s
critical shadow, socialism, which had theorized true democracy, and called for
it, but in the attempt to enact it had used the methods at hand in its time,
the same feudal methods so prevalent in capitalism itself; so that both
versions of the mix had ended up about as destructive and unjust as their
common residual parent. The feudal hierarchies in capitalism had been mirrored
in the lived socialist experiments; and so the whole era had remained a highly
charged chaotic struggle, exhibiting several different versions of the dynamic
struggle between feudalism and democracy.

But the democratic age had finally, on Mars, emerged from the
capitalist age. And this age too, following the logic of Charlotte’s paradigm,
was necessarily a dash of residual and emergent— between the contentious,
competitive residuals of the capitalist system, and some emergent aspects of an
order beyond democracy—one that could not be fully characterized yet, as it had
never existed, but which Charlotte ventured to call Harmony, or General
Goodwill. This speculative leap she made partly by studying closely how
different cooperative economics was from capitalism, and partly by taking an
even larger metahistorical perspective, and identifying a broad general
movement in history which commentators called her Big Seesaw, a movement from
the deep residuals of the dominance hierarchies of our primate ancestors on the
savanna, toward the very slow, uncertain, difficult, unpredetermined, free
emergence of a pure harmony and equality which would then characterize the very
truest democracy. Both of these long-term clashing elements had always existed,
Charlotte maintained, creating the big seesaw, with the balance between them
slowly and irregularly shifting, over all human history: dominance hierarchies
had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time
democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every
primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be
imposed, by force. And so as the seesaw of this meta-metahistory had shifted
balance over the centuries, the noticeably imperfect attempts to institute
democracy had slowly gained power. Thus a very small percentage of humans had
counted as true equals in slave-holding societies like ancient Greece or
revolutionary America, and the circle of true equals had only enlarged a bit
more in the later “capitalist democracies.” But as each system passed on to the
next, the circle of equal citizens had bloomed wider, by a slight or great
margin, until now not only were all humans (in theory, anyway) equal, but
consideration was beinggiven to other animals, andeven to plants, ecosystems,
and the elements themselves. These last extensions of “citizenship” Charlotte
considered to be among the foreshadowings of the emergent system that might
come after democracy per se, Charlotte’s postulated period of Utopian
“harmony.” These glimmerings were faint, and Charlotte’s distant hoped-for
system a vague hypothesis; when Sax Russell read the later volumes of her work,
poring avidly over the endless examples and arguments (for this account is a
severe abridgment of her work, a mere abstract only), reading in an excited
state at finding a general paradigm that might clarify history for him at last,
he wondered if this putative age of universal harmony and goodwill would ever
actually come about; it seemed to him possible or even likely that there was
some sort of asymptotic curve in the human story— the ballast of the body,
perhaps—which would keep civilization struggling there in the age of
.democracy, struggling always upward, also away from relapse, and never getting
much further along; but it also seemed to him that this state itself would be
good enough to call a successful civilization. Enough was as good as a feast,
after all.

In any case, Charlotte’s metahistory was very influential,
providing for the explosively accelerating diaspora a kind of master narrative,
by which they could orient themselves; and so she joined the small list of
historians whose analyses had affected the flow of their own time, people like
Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Gibbon, Chamfort, Carlyle, Emerson, Marx, Spengler—and
on Mars before Charlotte, Michel Duval. People now ordinarily understood
capitalism to have been the clash of feudalism and democracy, and the present
to be the democratic age, the clash of capitalism and harmony. And they also
understood that their own era could still become anything else as
well—Charlotte was insistent that there was no such thing as historical
determinism, but only people’s repeated efforts to enact their hopes; then the
analyst’s retroactive recognition of such hopes as came true created an
illusion of determinism. Anything could have happened; they could have fallen
apart into general anarchy, they could have become a universal police state to
“control” the crisis years; but as the great metanationals of Terra had in
reality all mutated into Praxis-like worker-owned cooperatives, with people in
control of their own work—democracy it was, for the moment. They had enacted
that hope.