Green mars (43 page)

“But Earth—in trouble,” Sax pointed out. “Falling apart.”

“Hmm,” Coyote said, and he sat down by Sax to talk about it. Talking with Sax was still frustrating, but as a result of all his work with Michel, it could be done. It made Nadia happy to see Coyote conferring with him.

The discussion went on around them. People argued theories of revolution, and when they tried to talk about ‘61 itself, they were hampered by old grievances, and a basic lack of understanding of what had happened in those nightmare months. At one point this became especially clear, as Mikhail and some ex-Korolyov inmates began arguing about who had murdered the guards.

Sax stood and waved his AI over his head.

“Need facts—first,” he croaked. “Then the dialysis—the analysis.”

“Good idea,” Art said instantly. “If this group can put together a brief history of the war to give to the congress at large, that would be really useful. We can save the discussion of revolutionary methodology for the general meetings, okay?”

Sax nodded and sat down. Quite a few people left the meeting, and the rest calmed down, and gathered around Sax and Spencer. Now they were mostly veterans of the war, Nadia noticed, but there also were Jackie and Nirgal and some other natives. Nadia had seen some of the work Sax had done in Burroughs on the question of ‘61, and she was hopeful that with eyewitness accounts from other veterans, they could come to some basic understanding of the war and its ultimate causes—nearly half a century after it was over, but as Art said when she mentioned this to him, that was not atypical. He walked with a hand on her shoulder, looking unconcerned by what he had seen that morning, in his first full exposure to the fractious nature of the underground. “They don’t agree about much,” he admitted. “But it always starts that way.”

Late on the second afternoon Nadia dropped in on the workshop devoted to the terraforming question. This was probably the most divisive issue facing them, Nadia judged, and attendance at the workshop reflected it; the room on the border of Lato’s park was packed, and before the meeting began the moderator moved it out into the park, on the grass overlooking the canal.

The Reds in attendance insisted that terraforming itself was an obstruction to their hopes. If the Martian surface became human-viable, they argued, then it would represent an entire Earth’s worth of land, and given the acute population and environmental problems on Earth, and the space elevator currently being constructed there to match the one already on Mars, the gravity wells could be surmounted and mass emigration would certainly follow, and with it the disappearance of any possibility of Martian independence.

People in favor of terraforming, called greens, or just green, as they were not a party as such—argued that with a human-viable surface it would be possible to live anywhere, and at that point the underground would be on the surface, and infinitely less vulnerable to control or attack, and thus in a much better position to take over.

These two views were argued in every possible combination and variation. And Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell were both there, in the center of the meeting, making points more and more frequently—until the others in attendance stopped speaking, silenced by the authority of those two ancient antagonists. Watching them go at it yet again.

Nadia observed this slow-developing collision unhappily, anxious for her two friends. And she wasn’t the only one who found the sight unsettling. Most of the people there had seen the famous videotape of Ann and Sax’s argument in Underbill, and certainly their story was well known, one of the great myths of the First Hundred—a myth from a time when things had been simpler, and distinct personalities could stand for clear-cut issues. Now nothing was simple anymore, and as the old enemies faced off again in the middle of this new hodgepodge group, there was an odd electricity in the air, a mix of nostalgia and tension and collective deja vu, and a wish (perhaps just in herself, Nadia thought bitterly) that the two of them could somehow effect a reconciliation, for their own sakes and for all of them.

But there they were, standing in the center of the crowd. Ann had already lost this argument in the world itself, and. her manner seemed to reflect this; she was subdued, disinterested, almost uninterested; the fiery Ann of the famous tapes was nowhere to be seen. “When the surface is viable,” she said—when, Nadia noted, not if—”they’ll be here by the billions. As long as we have to live in shelters, logistics will keep the population in the millions. And that’s the size it needs to be if you want a successful revolution.” She shrugged. “You could do it today if you wanted. Our shelters are hidden, and theirs aren’t. Break theirs open, they have no one to shoot back at—they die, you take over. Terraforming just takes away that leverage.”

“I won’t be a part of that,” Nadia said promptly, unable to help herself. “You know what it was like in the cities in sixty-one.”

Hiroko was there, sitting at the back observing, and now she spoke out for the first time. “A nation founded in genocide is not what we want.”

Ann shrugged. “You want a bloodless revolution, but it’s not possible.”

“It is,” Hiroko said. “A silk revolution. An aerogel revolution. An integral part of the areophany. That is what I want.”

“Okay,” Ann said. No one could argue with Hiroko, it was impossible. “But even so, it would be easier if you didn’t have a viable surface. This coup you’re talking about—I mean, think about it. If you take over the power plants in the major cities and say, ‘We’re in control now,’ then the population is likely to agree, out of necessity. If there are billions of people here, however, on a viable surface, and you disemploy some people and declare yourself in control, then they’re likely to say, Tn control of what?’ and ignore you.”

“This,” Sax said slowly. “This suggests—take over—while surface nonvivable. Then continue process—as independent.”

“They’ll want you,” Ann said. “When they see the surface open up, they’ll come get you.”

“Not if they collapse,” Sax said.

“The transnational are in firm control,” Ann said. “Don’t think they’re not.”

Sax was watching Ann most intently, and instead of dismissing her points, as he had in the debates of old, he seemed on the contrary hyperfocused on them, observing her every move, blinking as he considered her words, and then replying with even more hesitation than his speech problems would explain. With his altered face it sometimes seemed to Nadia that someone else was arguing with her this time, not Sax but some brother of his, a dance instructor or ex-boxer with a broken nose and a speech impediment, struggling patiently to choose the right words, and often failing.

And yet the effect was the same. “Terraforming—irreversible,” he croaked. “Would be tactically hard—technically hard—to start—to stop. Effort equal to one—made. And might not—. And—environment can be a—a weapon in our case—in our cause. At any stage.”

“How so?” several people asked, but Sax did not elaborate. He was concentrating on Ann, who was looking back at him with a curious expression, as if exasperated.

“If we’re on course to viability,” she said to him, “then Mars represents an incredible prize to the transnational. Maybe even their salvation, if things go really wrong down there. They can come here and take over and have their own new world, and let Earth go to hell. That being the case, we’re out of luck. You saw what happened in sixty-one. They have giant militaries at their disposal, and that’s how they’ll keep their power here.”

She shrugged. Sax blinked as he considered this; he even nodded. Looking at them, Nadia felt her heart wrench; they were so dispassionate it was almost as if they didn’t care, or as if the parts of them that cared just barely outweighed the parts that didn’t, and tipped the balance to speech. Ann like a w^atherbeaten sodbuster from the early daguerreotypes, Sax incongruously charming—they both appeared to be in their early seventies, so that seeing them, and feeling her own nervous pulse, it was hard for Nadia to believe that they were over 120 now, inhumanly ancient, and so ... changed, somehow—worn down, overexperienced, jaded, used up—or at the very least, long past getting too passionate about any mere exchange of words. They knew now how little importance words had in the world. And so they fell silent, still looking into each other’s eyes, locked in a dialectic nearly drained of anger.

But others more than compensated for their thoughtfulness, and the younger hotheads went at it hammer and tongs. The younger Reds regarded terraforming as nothing more than part of the imperial process; Ann was a moderate compared to them, they raged even at Hiroko in their fury—”Don’t call it areoforming,” one of them shouted at her, and Hiroko stared nonplussed at this tall young woman, a blond Valkyrie made nearly rabid by the use of the word—”it’s terraforming you mean and terraforming you’re doing. Calling it areoforming is a sickening lie.”

“We terraform the planet,” Jackie said to the’woman, “but the planet areoforms us.”

“And that’s a lie too!”

Ann stared grimly at Jackie. “Your grandfather said that to me,” she said, “a long time ago. As you may know. But I’m still waiting to see what areoforming is supposed to mean.” ‘

“It’s happened to everyone born here,” Jackie said confidently.

“How so? You were born on Mars—how are you any different?”

Jackie glowered. “Like the rest of the natives, Mars is all I know, and all I care about. I was brought up in a culture made of strands from many different Terran predecessors, mixed to a new Martian thing.”

Ann shrugged. “I don’t see how you’re so different. You remind me of Maya.”

“To hell with you!”

“As Maya would say. And that’s your areoforming. We’re human and human we remain, no matter what John Boone said. He said a lot of things, but none of them ever came true.”

“Not yet,” Jackie said. “But the process is slowed when it’s in the hands of people who haven’t had a new thought for fifty years.” A lot of the younger ones laughed at this. “And who are in the habit of introducing gratuitous personal insults into a political argument.”

And she stood there watching Ann, looking calm and relaxed, except for the flash in her eye, which reminded Nadia again of what a power Jackie was. Almost all the natives there were behind her, no doubt about it.

“If we have not changed here,” Hiroko said to Ann, “how do you explain your Reds? How do you explain the areophany?”

Ann shrugged. “They are the exceptions.”

Hiroko shook her head. “There is a spirit of place in us. Landscape has profound effects on the human psyche. You are a student of landscapes, and a Red. You must acknowledge this to be true.”

“True for some,” Ann replied, “but not for all. Most people obviously don’t feel that spirit of place. One city is much like another—in fact they’re interchangeable in all the important ways. So people come to a city on Mars, and what’s the difference? There isn’t any. So they think no more of destroying the land outside the city than they did back on Earth.”

“These people can be taught to think differently.”

“No, I don’t think they can. You’ve caught them too late. At best you can order them to act differently. But that’s not being areoformed by the planet, that’s indoctrination, reeducation camps, what have you. Fascist areophany.”

“Persuasion,” Hiroko countered. “Advocacy, argument by example, argument by argument. It need not be coercive.”

“The aerogel revolution,” Ann said sarcastically. “But aerogel has very little effect on missiles.”

Several people spoke at once, and for a moment the thread of discourse was lost; the discussion immediately fissioned into a hundred smaller debates, as many there had something to say which they had been holding back. It was obvious they could go on like this for hour after hour, day after day.

Ann and Sax sat back down. Nadia made her way out of the crowd, shaking her head. On the edge of the meeting she ran into Art, who shook his head soberly. “Unbelievable,” he said.

“Believe it.”

The days of the congress
unfolded much as the first few had, with workshops good or bad leading to dinner, and then long evenings of talk or partying. Nadia noticed that while the old emigrants were likely to go back to work after dinner, the young natives tended to regard the conferences as daytime work only, with the nights given over to celebration, often around the big warm pond in Phaistos. Once again this was only a matter of tendencies, with many exceptions either way, but she found it interesting.

She herself spent most of her evenings on the Zakros dining patios, making notes on the day’s meetings, talking to people, thinking things over. Nirgal often worked with her, and Art too, when he was not getting people who had been arguing during the day to drink kava together, and then go up to party in Phaistos.

In the second week she got in the habit of taking an evening walk up the tube, often all the way to Falasarna, after which she would walk back and join Nirgal and Art for their final postmortem on the day, which they convened on a patio set on a little lava knob in Lato. The two men had become good friends during their long trek home from Kasei Vallis, and under the pressure of the congress they were becoming like brothers, talking over everything, comparing impressions, testing theories, laying out plans for Nadia’s judgment, and deciding to take on the task of writing some kincT of congress document. She was part of it—the elder sister perhaps, or maybe just the babushka—and once when they shut down and staggered off to bed Art spoke of “the triumvirate.” With her as Pompey, no doubt. But she did her best to sway them with her analyses of the larger picture.

There were many different kinds of disagreements among the groups there, she told them, but some were basic. There were those for and against terraforming. There were those for and against revolutionary violence. There were those who had gone underground to hold on to cultures under assault, and those who had disappeared in order to create radical new social orders. And it seemed more and more evident to Nadia that there were also significant differences between those who had immigrated from Earth, and those who had been born on Mars.

There were all kinds of disagreements, then, and no obvious alignments to be found among them. One night Michel Duval joined the three of them for a drink, and as Nadia described to him the problem he got out his AI, and began to make diagrams based on what he called the “semantic rectangle.” Using this schema they made a hundred different sketches of the various dichotomies, trying to find a mapping that would help them to understand what alignments and oppositions might exist among them. They made some interesting patterns, but it could not be said that any blinding insights jumped off the screen at them—although one particularly messy semantic rectangle seemed suggestive, at least to Michel: violence and nonviolence, terraforming and antiterraforming formed the initial four corners, and in the secondary combination around this first rectangle he had located Bogdanovists, Reds, Hi-roko’s areophany, and the Muslims and other cultural conservatives. But what this combinatoire indicated in terms of action was not clear.

Nadia began to attend the daily meetings devoted to general questions concerning a possible Martian government. These were just as disorganized as the discussions of revolutionary methods, but less emotional, and often more substantive. They took place every day in a small amphitheater which the Minoans had cut into the side of the tunnel in Malia. From this rising arc of benches the participants looked out over bamboo and pine trees and terra-cotta rooftops all the way up and down the tunnel, from Zakros to Falasarna.

The talks were attended by a somewhat different crowd than the revolutionary debates. A report would come in from the smaller workshops for discussion, and then most of the people who had attended that workshop would join the larger meeting, to see what comments were made on the report. The Swiss had set up workshops for all aspects of politics, economics, and culture generally, and so the general discussions were very wide-ranging indeed.

Vlad and Marina sent over frequent reports from their workshop on finances, each report sharpening and expanding their evolving concept of eco-economics. “It’s very interesting,” Nadia reported to Nirgal and Art in their nightly gathering on the knob patio. “A lot of people are critiquing Vlad and Marina’s original system, including the Swiss and the Bolognese, and they’re basically coming around to the conclusion that the gift system that we first used in the underground is not sufficient by itself, because it’s too hard to keep balanced. There are problems of scarcity and hoarding, and when you start to set standards it’s like compelling gifts from people, which is a contradiction. This is what Coyote always said, and why he set up his barter network. So they’re working toward a more rationalized system, in which basic necessities are distributed in a regulated hydrogen peroxide economy, where things are priced by calculations of their caloric value. Then when you get past the necessities, the gift economy comes into play, using a nitrogen standard. So there are two planes, the need and the gift, or what the Sufis in the workshop call the animal and the human, expressed by the different standards.”

“The green and the white,” Nirgal said to himself.

“And are the Sufis pleased with this dual system?” Art asked.

Nadia nodded. “Today after Marina described the relationship of the two planes, Dhu el-Nun said to her, The Mevlana could not have put it any better.’ “

“A good sign,” Art said cheerfully.

Other workshops were less specific, and therefore less fruitful. One, working on a prospective bill of rights, was surprisingly ill-natured; but Nadia quickly saw that this topic tapped into a huge well of cultural concerns. Many obviously considered the topic an opportunity for one culture to dominate the rest. “I’ve said it ever since Boone,” Zeyk exclaimed. “An attempt to impose one set of values on all of us is nothing but Ataturkism. Everyone must be allowed their own way.”

“But this can only be true up to a point,” said Ariadne. “What if one group here asserts its right to own slaves?”

Zeyk shrugged. “This would be beyond the pale.”

“So you agree there should be some basic bill of human rights?”

“This is obvious,” Zeyk replied coldly.

Mikhail spoke for the Bogdanovists: “All social hierarchy is a kind of slavery,” he said. “Everyone should be completely equal under the law.”

“Hierarchy is a natural fact,” Zeyk said. “It cannot be avoided.”

“Spoken like an Arab man,” Ariadne said. “But we are not natural here, we are Martian. And where hierarchy leads to oppression, it must be abolished.”

“The hierarchy of the right-minded,” Zeyk said.

“Or the primacy of equality and freedom.”

“Enforced if necessary.”

“Yes!”

“Enforced freedom, then.” Zeyk waved a hand, disgusted.

Art rolled a drink cart onto the stage. “Maybe we should focus on some actual rights,” he suggested. “Maybe look at the various declarations of human rights from Earth, and see if they can be adapted to suit us here.”

Nadia moved on to check out some of the other meetings. Land use, property law, criminal law, inheritance ... the Swiss had broken down the matter of government into an amazing number of subcategories. The anarchists were irritated, Mikhail chief among them: “Do we really have to go through all this?” he asked again and again. “None of this should obtain, none of it!”

Nadia would have expected Coyote to be among those arguing with him, but in fact he said, “We have to argue all of it! Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their sla\es. No! If you want to make the minimum-state case, you have to argue it from the ground up.”

“But,” Mikhail said, “I mean, inheritance law?”

“Sure, why not? This is critical stuff! I say there should be no inheritance at all, except for a few personal objects passed on, perhaps. But all the rest should go back to Mars. It’s part of the gift, right?”

“All the rest?” Vlad inquired with interest. “But what would that consist of, exactly? No one will own any of the land, water, air, the infrastructure, the gene stock, the information pool—what’s left to pass on?”

Coyote shrugged. “Your house? Your savings account? I mean, won’t we have money? And won’t people stockpile surpluses of it if they can?”

“You have to come to the finance sessions,” Marina said to Coyote. “We are hoping to base money on units of hydrogen peroxide, and price things by energy values.”

“But money will still exist, right?”

“Yes, but we are considering reverse interest on savings accounts, for instance, so that if you don’t put what you’ve earned back into use, it will be released to the atmosphere as nitrogen. You’d be surprised how hard it is to keep a positive personal balance in this system.”

“But if you did it?”

“Well, then I agree with you—on death it should pass back to Mars, be used for some public purpose.”

Sax haltingly objected that this contradicted the bioethical theory that human beings, like all animals, were powerfully motivated to provide for their own offspring. This urge could be observed throughout nature and in all human cultures, explaining much behavior both self-interested and altruistic. “Try to change the baby logical—the biological—basis of culture—by decree ... Asking for trouble.”

“Maybe there should be a minimal inheritance allowed,” Coyote said. “Enough to satisfy that animal instinct, but not enough to perpetuate a wealthy elite.”

Marina and Vlad clearly found this intriguing, and they began to tap new formulas into their AIs. But Mikhail, sitting by Nadia and flipping through his program for the day, was still frustrated. “Is this really part of a constitutional process?” he said, looking at the list. “Zoning codes, energy production, waste disposal, transport systems—pest management, property law, grievance systems, criminal law—arbitration—health codes?”

Nadia sighed. “I guess so. Remember how Arkady worked so hard on architecture.”

“School schedules? I mean I’ve heard of micropolitics, but this is ridiculous!”

“Nanopolitics,” Art said.

“No, picopolitics! Femtopolitics!”

Nadia got up to help Art push the drink cart to the workshops in the village below the amphitheater. Art was still running from one meeting to the next, wheeling in food and drink, then catching a few minutes of the talk before moving on. There were eight to ten meetings per day, and Art was still dropping in on all of them. In the evenings, while more and more of the delegates spent their time partying, or going for walks up and down the tunnel, Art continued to meet with Nirgal, and they watched tapes at a, moderate fast forward so that everyone spoke like a bird, only slowing them down to take notes, or talk over some point or other. Getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, Nadia would pass the dim lounge where the two of them worked on their write-ups, and see the two of them asleep in their chairs, their slack open-mouthed faces flickering under the light of the Keystone Kops debate on the screen.

But in the mornings Art was up with the Swiss, getting things started. Nadia tried to keep pace with him for a few days, but found that the breakfast workshops were chancy. Sometimes people sat around tables sipping coffee and eating fruit and muffins, staring at each other like zombies: Who are you? their bleary gazes said. What am I doing here? Where are we? Why aren’t I asleep in my bed?

But it could be just the opposite: some mornings people came in showered and refreshed, alert with coffee or kavajava, full of new ideas and ready to work hard, to make progress. If the others there were of like mind, things could really fly. One of the sessions on property went like that, and for an hour it seemed as though they had solved all the problems of reconciling self and society, private opportunity and the common good, selfishness and altruism. ... At the end of the session, however, their notes looked just about as vague and contradictory as those taken at any of the more fractious meetings. “It’s the tape of the whole session that will have to represent it,” Art said, after trying to write down a summary.

The majority of the meetings, however, were not as successful. In fact most of them were merely protracted arguments. One morning Nadia came in on Antar, the young Arab whom Jackie had spent time with during their tour, saying to Vlad, “You will only repeat the socialist catastrophe!”

Vlad shrugged. “Don’t be too hasty to judge that period. The socialist countries were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy. So how can we deal with it without being crushed? We have to look everywhere for answers to this, including the systems that the current order defeated.”

Art was pulling a food cart to the next room, and Nadia left with him.