Blue Mars (16 page)

*
     
*
       
*

Charlotte suggested that the Dorsa Brevia declaration made a
logical starting point for discussing the content that would fill the
constitutional forms. This suggestion caused more trouble than even the blanks
had, for the Reds and several other delegations disliked various points of the
old declaration, and they argued that using it was a way of pist-ing the
congress from the start.

“So what?” Nadia said. “We can change every word of it if we want,
but we have to start with something.”

This view was popular among most of the old underground groups,
many of whom had been at Dorsa Brevia in m-39. The declaration that had
resulted remained the underground’s best effort to write down what they had
agreed on back when they were out of power, so it made sense to start with it;
it gave them some precedent, some historical continuity.

When they pulled it out and looked at it, however, they found that
the old declaration had become frighteningly radical. No private property? No
appropriation of surplus value? Had they really said such things? How were things
supposed to work? People pored over the bare uncompromising sentences, shaking
their heads. The declaration had not bothered to say how its lofty goals were
to be enacted, it had only stated them. “The stone-tablet routine,” as Art
characterized it. But now the revolution had succeeded, and the time had come
to do something in the real world. Could they really stick to concepts as
radical as those in the Dorsa Brevia declaration?

Hard to say. “At least the points are there to discuss,” Nadia
said. And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions
with their section headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems
they were going to have to come to grips with: “Structure of Government,
Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government,
Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police; Taxation; Election
Procedures; Property Law; Economic Systems; Environmental Law; Amendment
Procedures,” and so on, in some blanks for pages on end— all being juggled on
everyone’s screens, scrambled, formatted, endlessly debated. “Just filling in
the blanks,” as Art sang one night, looking over Nadia’s shoulder at one
particularly forbidding flowchart pattern, like something out of Michel’s
alchemical combinatoires. And Nadia laughed.

The working groups focused on different parts
of government as outlined in a new
composite blank constitution, now being called the blank of blanks. Political
parties and interest groups gravitated to the issues that most concerned them,
and the many tent-town delegations chose or were assigned to remaining areas.
After that it was a matter of work.

For the moment, the Da Vinci Crater technical group was in control
of Martian space. They were keeping all space shuttles from docking at Clarke,
or aerobraking into Martian orbit. No one believed that this alone made them
truly free, but it did give them a certain amount of physical and psychic space
to work in—this was the gift of the revolution. They were also driven by the
memory of the battle for Sheffield; the fear of civil war was strong among
them. Ann was in exile with the Kakaze, and sabotage in the outback was a daily
occurrence. There were also tents that had declared independence from anyone,
and a few metanat holdouts; there was turmoil generally, and a sense of barely
contained confusion. They were in a bubble in history, a moment only; it could
collapse anytime, and if they didn’t act soon, it would collapse. It was,
simply put, time to act.

This was the one thing everyone agreed on, but it was a very
important thing. As the days passed a core group of workers slowly emerged,
people who recognized each other for their willingness to get the job done, for
their desire to finish paragraphs rather than posture. Inside all the rest of
the debate these people went at it, guided by Nadia, who was very quick to
recognize such people and give them all the help she could.

Art meanwhile ran around in his usual manner. Up early, supply
drinks and food, and information concerning the work ongoing in other rooms. It
seemed to him that things were going pretty well. Most of the subgroups took
the responsibility to fill in their blank seriously, writing and rewriting
drafts, hammering them out concept by concept, phrase by phrase. They were happy
to see Art when he came by in the course of the day, as he represented a break,
some food, some jokes. One judicial group tacked foam wings on his shoes, and
sent him with a caustic message along to an executive group with whom they were
fighting. Pleased, Art kept the wings on; why not? What they were doing had a
kind of ludicrous majesty, or majestic ludicrousness—they were rewriting the
rules, he was flying around like Hermes or Puck, it was perfectly appropriate.
And so he flew, through the long hours into the night, every night. And after
all the sessions had closed down for the evening, he went back to the Praxis
offices he shared with Nadia, and they would eat, and talk over the day’s
progress, and make a call to the travelers to Earth, and talk with Nirgal and
Sax and Maya and Michel. And after that Nadia would go back to work at her
screens, usually falling asleep there in her chair. Then Art would often go
back out into the warehouse, and the buildings and rovers clustered around it.
Because they were holding the congress in a warehouse tent, there was not the
same party scene that had existed after hours in Dorsa Brevia; but the
delegates often stayed up, sitting on the floors of their rooms drinking and
talking about the day’s work, or the revolution just past. Many of the people
there had never met before, and they were getting to know each other.
Relationships were forming, romances, friendships, feuds. It was a good time to
talk, and learn more about what was going on during the daytime congress; it
was the underside of the congress, the social hour, out there scattered in
concrete rooms. Art enjoyed it. And then the moment would come when he would
suddenly hit the wall, a wave of sleepiness would roll over him and sometimes
he wouldn’t even have time to stagger back to his offices, to the couch next to
Nadia’s; he would simply roll over on the floor and sleep there, waking cold
and stiff to hurry off to their bathroom, a shower, and back to the kitchens to
start up that day’s kava and Java. Round and round, his days a blur; it was
glorious.

In sessions on many different subjects people were having to
grapple with questions of scale. Without any nations, without any natural or
traditional political units, who governed what? And how were they to balance
the local against the global, and past versus future—the many ancestral
cultures against the one Martian culture?

Sax, observing this recurring problem from the rocket ship to
Earth, sent back a message proposing that the tent towns and covered canyons
become the principal political units: city-states, basically, with no larger
political units except for the global government itself, which would regulate
only truly global concerns. Thus there would be local and global, but no
nation-states in between.

The reaction to this proposal was fairly positive. For one thing
it had the advantage of conforming to the situation that already existed.
Mikhail, leader of the Bogdanovist party, noted that it was a variant of the
old commune of communes, and because Sax had been the source of the suggestion,
this quickly got it called the “lab of labs” plan. But the underlying problem
still remained, as Nadia quickly pointed out; all Sax had done was define their
particular local and global. They still had to decide just how much power the
proposed global confederation was going to have over the proposed
semiautonomous city-states. Too much, and it was back to a big centralized
state, Mars itself as a nation, a thought which many delegations abhorred. “But
too little,” Jackie said emphatically in the human-rights workshop, “and there
could be tents out there deciding slavery is okay, or female genital mutilation
is okay, or any other crime based on some Terran barbarism is okay, excused in
the name of ‘cultural values.’ And that is just not acceptable.”

“Jackie is right,” Nadia said, which was unusual enough to get
people’s attention. “People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to
their culture—that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs,
Leninists,
 
metanats, I don’t care who.
They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.”

Art noticed more than a few delegates frowning at this sentiment,
which no doubt struck them as a version of Western secular relativism, or
perhaps John Boone’s hyper-americanism. Opposition to the metanats had included
many people trying to hold on to older cultures, and these often had their
hierarchies pretty well intact; the ones at the top end of the hierarchies
liked them that way, and so did a surprisingly large number of people farther
down the ladder.

The young Martian natives, however, looked surprised that this was
even considered an issue. To them the fundamental rights were innate and
irrevocable, and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many
emotional scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their
traumatic dysfunctional Terran upbringings. Ariadne, one of the most prominent
of the young natives, stood up to say that the Dorsa Brevia group had studied many
Terran human-rights documents, and had written a comprehensive list of their
own. The new master list of fundamental individual rights was available for
discussion and, she implied, adoption wholesale. Some argued about one point or
another; but it was generally agreed that a global bill of rights of some kind
should be on the table. So Martian values as they existed in m-year 52 were
about to be codified, and made a principal component of the constitution.

The exact nature of these rights was still a matter of
controversy. The so-called political rights were generally agreed to be
“self-evident”—things citizens were free to do, things governments were
forbidden to do—habeus corpus, freedom of movement, of speech, of association,
of religion, a ban on weapons—all these were approved by a vast majority of
Martian natives, though there were some issei from places like Singapore, Cuba,
Indonesia, Thailand, China, and so on, who looked askance at so much emphasis
on individual liberty. Other delegates had reservations about a different kind
of right, the so-called social or economic rights, such as the right to
housing, health care, education, employment, a share of the value generated by
natural-resource use, etc. Many issei delegates with actual experience in
Terran government were quite worried about these, pointing out that it was
dangerous to enshrine such things in the constitution; it had been done on
Earth, they said, and then when it was found impossible to meet such promises,
the constitution guaranteeing them was seen as a propaganda device, and flouted
in other areas as well, until it became a bad joke.

“Even so,” Mikhail said sharply, “if you can’t afford housing,
then it is your right to vote that is the bad joke.”

The young natives agreed, as did many others there. So economic or
social rights were on the table too, and arguments over how actually to
guarantee these rights in practice continued through many a long session.
“Political, social, it’s all one,” Nadia said. “Let’s make all the rights work.”

So the work went on, both around the big table and in the offices
where the subgroups were meeting. Even the UN was there, in the person of UNTA
chief Derek Hastings himself, who had come down the elevator and was
participating vigorously in the debates, his opinion always carrying a peculiar
kind of weight. He even began to exhibit symptoms of hostage syndrome, Art
thought, becoming more and more sympathetic the more he stood around in the
warehouse arguing with people. And this might affect his superiors on Earth as
well.

Comments and suggestions were also pouring in from all over Mars,
and from Earth as well, filling several screens covering one wall of the big
room. Interest in the congress was high everywhere, rivaling even Earth’s great
flood in the public’s attention. “The soap opera of the moment,” Art said to
Nadia. Every night the two of them met in their little office suite, and put in
their call to Nirgal and the rest. The delays in the travelers’ responses got
longer and longer, but Art and Nadia didn’t really mind; there was a lot to
think about while waiting for Sax and the others’ part of the conversation to
arrive.

“This global versus local problem is going to be hard,” Art said
one night. “It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result
of confused thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want
freedom for the tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in
contradiction.”

“Maybe the Swiss system,” Nirgal suggested a few minutes later.
“That’s what John Boone always used to say.”

But the Swiss on Pavonis were not encouraging about this idea. “A
countermodel rather,” Jurgen said, making a face. “The reason I’m on Mars is
the Swiss federal government. It stifles everything. You need a license to
breathe.”

“And the cantons have no power anymore,” Priska said. “The federal
government took it away.”

“In some of the cantons,” Jurgen added, “this was a good thing.”

Priska said, “More interesting than Berne might be the Graubunden.
That means Gray League. They were a loose confederation of towns in southeast
Switzerland, for hundreds of years. A very successful organization.”

“Could you call up whatever you can get on that?” Art said.

The next night he and Nadia looked over descriptions of the
Graubunden that Priska had sent over. Well. . . there was a certain simplicity
to affairs during the Renaissance, Art thought. Maybe that was wrong, but
somehow the extremely loose agreements of the little Swiss mountain towns did
not seem to translate well to the densely interpenetrated economies of the
Martian settlements. The Graubunden hadn’t had to worry about generating
unwanted changes in atmospheric pressure, for instance. No—the truth was, they
were in a new situation. There was no historical analogy that would be much
help to them now.

“Speaking of global versus local,” Irishka said, “what about the
land outside the tents and covered canyons?” She was emerging as the leading
Red remaining on Pavonis, a moderate who could speak for almost all wings of
the Red movement, therefore becoming quite a power as the weeks passed. “That’s
most of the land on Mars, and all we said at Dorsa Brevia is that no individual
can own it, that we are all stewards of it together. That’s good as far as it
goes, but as the population rises and new towns are built, it’s going to be
more and more of a problem figuring out who controls it.”

Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome.
Recently he had made a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to
attacking what he and Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they
were facing, and so in theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes
they were just too hard.

As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the
global-local problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent.
Still, as it was probably the worst outstanding problem. . . .