Blue Mars (17 page)

Art went to the Reds.
The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, one of
Nirgal and Jackie’s creche mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their rover
camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he was
now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big empty
vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.

The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the
caldera. They sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments,
in the glare of a late-afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant
silhouetted country of the caldera.

“So what would you like to see in this constitution?” Art said.

He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each
other, somewhat taken aback. “Ideally,” Marion said after a while, “we’d like
to be living on the primal planet, in caves and cliff dwellings, or excavated
crater rings. No big cities, no terraforming.”

“You’d have to stay suited all the time.”

“That’s right. We don’t mind that.”

“Well.” Art thought it over. “Okay, but let’s start from now.
Given the situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?”

“No further terraforming.”

“The cable gone, and no more immigration.”

“In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.”

They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his
consternation show.

He said, “Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this
point?”

“It’s not clear,” Tiu said. “But if you stopped the industrial
pumping, any further growth would certainly be very slow. It might even lose
ground, as with this ice age that’s starting.”

“Isn’t that what some people call ecopoesis?”

“No. The ecopoets just use biological methods to create changes in
the atmosphere and on the surface, but they’re very intensive with them. We
think they all should stop, ecopoets or industrialists or whatever.”

“But especially the heavy industrial methods,” Marion said. “And
most especially the inundation of the north. That’s simply criminal. We’ll blow
up those stations no matter what happens here, if they don’t stop.”

Art gestured out at the huge stony caldera. “The higher elevations
look pretty much the same, right?”

They weren’t willing to admit that. Irishka said, “Even the high
ground shows ice deposition and plant life. The atmosphere lofts high here,
remember. No place escapes when the winds are strong.”

“What if we tented the four big calderas?” Art said. “Kept them
sterile underneath, with the original atmospheric pressure and mix? Those would
be huge wilderness parks, preserved in the true primal state.”

“Parks are just what they would be.”

“I know. But we have to work with what we have now, right? We
can’t go back to m-1 and rerun the whole thing. And given the current
situation, it might be good to preserve three or four big places in the
original state, or close to it.”

“It would be nice to have some canyons protected as well,” Tiu
said tentatively. Clearly they had not considered this kind of possibility
before; and it was not really satisfactory to them, Art could see. But the
current situation could not be wished away, they had to start from there.

“Or Argyre Basin.”

“At the very least, keep Argyre dry.”

Art nodded encouragingly. “Combine that kind of preservation with
the atmosphere limits set in the Dorsa Brevia document. That’s a five-kilometer
breathable ceiling, and there’s a hell of a lot of land above five kilometers
that would remain relatively pristine. It won’t take the northern ocean away,
but nothing’s going to do that now. Some form of slow ecopoesis is about the
best you can hope for at this point, right?”

Perhaps that was putting it too baldly. The Reds stared down into
Pavonis caldera unhappily, thinking their own thoughts.

“Say the Reds come on board,” Art said to Nadia. “What do you
think the next worst problem is?”

“What?” She had been nearly asleep, listening to some tinny old
jazz from her AI. “Ah. Art.” Her voice was low and quiet, the Russian accent
light but distinct. She sat slumped on the couch. A pile of paper balls lay
around her feet, like pieces of some structure she was putting together. The
Martian way of life. Her face was oval under a cap of straight white hair, the
wrinkles of her skin somehow wearing away, as if she were a pebble in the
stream of years. She opened her flecked eyes, luminous and arresting under
their Cossack eyelids. A beautiful face, looking now at Art perfectly relaxed. “The
next worst problem.”

“Yes.”

She smiled. Where did that calmness come from, that relaxed smile?
She wasn’t worried about anything these days. Art found it surprising, given
the political high-wire act they were performing. But then again it was
politics, not war. And just as Nadia had been terribly frightened during the
revolution, always tense, always expecting disaster, she was now always
relatively calm. As if to say, nothing that happens here matters all that
much—tinker with the details all you want—my friends are safe, the war is over,
this that remains is a kind of game, or work like construction work, full of
pleasures.

Art moved around to the back of the couch, massaged her shoulders.
“Ah,” she said. “Problems. Well, there are a lot of problems that are about
equally sticky.” “Like what?”

“Like, I wonder if the Mahjaris will be able to adapt to
democracy. I wonder if everyone will accept Vlad and Marina’s eco-economics. I
wonder if we can make a decent police. I wonder if Jackie will try to create a
system with a strong president, and use the natives’ numerical superiority to
become queen.” She looked over her shoulder, laughed at Art’s expression. “I
wonder about a lot of things. Should I go on?”

“Maybe not.”

She laughed. “You go on. That feels good. These problems—they
aren’t so hard. We’ll just keep going to the table and pounding away at them.
Maybe you could talk to Zeyk.”

“Okay.”

“But now do my neck.”

Art went to talk to Zeyk and Nazik that very night, after Nadia
had fallen asleep. “So what’s the Mahjari view of all this?” he asked.

Zeyk growled. “Please don’t ask stupid questions,” he said.
“Sunnis are fighting Shiites—Lebanon is devastated— the oil-rich states are
hated by the oil-poor states—the North African countries are a metanat—Syria and
Iraq hate each other—Iraq and Egypt hate each other—we all hate the Iranians,
except for the Shiites—and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians
too—and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the
Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouin from
Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So
when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?” He shook his
head darkly.

“I guess you say it’s a stupid question,” Art said. “Sorry.
Thinking in constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this—what do you think
of it?”

Nazik laughed. “You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran
Mahjaris think. He knows them only too well.”

“Too well,” Zeyk repeated.

“Do you think the human-rights section will go with them?”

Zeyk frowned. “No doubt we will sign the constitution.”

“But these rights ... I thought there were no Arab democracies
still?”

“What do you mean? There’s Palestine, Egypt.... Anyway it’s Mars
we are concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the
very beginning.”

“Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?”

“Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don’t think the new
constitution will end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader
yourself, yes?”

Art laughed uncomfortably. “I’m just a messenger.”

Zeyk shook his head. “Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you
should go, if you want to know what the Qah-irans think. He is our king now.”

He looked as if he had bit into something sour, and Art said, “So
what does he want, do you think?”

“He is Jackie’s creature,” Zeyk muttered, “nothingmore.”

“I should think that would be a strike against him.”

Zeyk shrugged.

“It depends who you talk to,” Nazik said. “For the older Muslim
immigrants, it is a bad association, because although Jackie is very powerful,
she has had more than one consort, and so Antar looks....”

“Compromised,” Art suggested, forestalling some other word from
the glowering Zeyk.

“Yes,” Nazik said. “But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And
all of the people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become
even more powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are
more native than Arab, I think. It’s Mars that matters to them more than Islam.
From that point of view, a close association with the Zygote ectogenes is a
good thing. The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new
Mars—especially Nirgal, of course, but with him off to Earth, there’s a certain
transfer of his influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to
Antar.”

“I don’t like him,” Zeyk said.

Nazik smiled at her husband. “You don’t like how many of the
native Muslims are following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It
could be time for retirement.”

“I don’t see why,” Zeyk objected. “If we’re going to live a
thousand years, then what difference does a hundred make?”

Art and Nazik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was, the
first time Art had ever seen him smile.

In fact, age didn’t matter. People wandered around, old or young
or somewhere in between, talking and arguing, and it -would have been an odd
thing for the length of someone’s lifetime to become a factor in such
discussions.

And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway.
If you were born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a
way that no Terran could even imagine—not just because of the whole complex of
areorealities they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn’t
know. Terrans knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that
cultural and biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the
screen images, but that wasn’t enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one
reason Art was glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth;
he would learn what they were up against.

But most of the natives wouldn’t. And the revolution had gone to
their heads. Despite their cleverness at the table in working the constitution
toward a form that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive;
they had no idea how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was
for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to
the limit—led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful
and enthusiastic as ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars,
and her devotion to her grandfather’s ideals, and her essential goodwill, even
innocence; the college girl who wanted passionately for the world to be just.

Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly
seemed to want to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on
Mars now, and seven million of those had been born there; and almost every
single one of these natives could be counted on to support the native political
parties, usually Free Mars.

“It’s dangerous,” Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up
in the nightly meeting with Nadia. “When you have a country formed out of a lot
of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get
what they call ‘census voting/ where politicians represent their groups, and
get their votes; and election results are always just a reflection of
population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the
majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and
eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those
circumstances.”

“So what can we do?” Nadia asked.

“Well, some of it we’re doing already, designing structures that
spread the power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism.
Decentralization is important, because it creates a lot of small local
majorities. Another strategy is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and
balances, so that the government’s a kind of cat’s cradle of competing forces.
This is called polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can.”

“Maybe we’re a bit too polyarchic right now,” Art said.

“Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You
make some big part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and
then draft ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get
professional staff help, but make the decisions themselves.”