Blue Mars (40 page)

“Maybe. After my term is over, you mean.”

“Or even before. On breaks, like these other trips. They’ve all been
analogs to construction, they haven’t been construction itself. Building actual
things. You have to try that, then go back and forth between the two.”

“Conflict of interest.”

“Not if it was a public-works project. What about that proposal to
build a global capital down at sea level?”

“Hmm,” Nadia said. She got out a map, and they pored over it. At
the zero-longitude line, the south shore of the northern sea bent out in a
little round peninsula, with a crater bay at its center. It was about halfway
between Tharsis and Elysium. “We’ll have to go take a look.”

“Yes. Here, come to bed. We’ll talk about it more later. Right now
I have another idea.”

Some months later they were flying back
from Bradbury Point to Sheffield, and
Nadia remembered that conversation with Art. She asked the pilot to land at a
little station north of Sklodowska Crater, on the slope of Crater Zm, called
Zoom. As they descended on the airstrip they saw to the east a big bay, now
covered with ice. Across the bay was the rough mountainous country of Mamers
Vallis, and the Deuter-onilus Mensae. The bay was an incursion into the Great
Escarpment, which was here fairly gentle. Longitude zero. Latitude forty-six
degrees north, fairly far north; but the northern winters were mild compared to
the south. They could see a lot of the icy sea, lying off a long shoreline. The
rounded peninsula surrounding Zoom was high and smooth. The little station on
the shore was home to about five hundred people, who were out there building
with bulldozer and cranes and dredges and draglines. Nadia and Art got out and
sent the plane on, and took a boardinghouse room and spent about a week with
the people there, talking about the new settlement. The locals had heard of the
proposal to build a new capital city here on the bay; some of them liked the
idea, some didn’t. They had thought of calling their settlement Greenwich
because of its longitude, but they had heard the British didn’t pronounce it
“Green Witch,” and they didn’t know how they felt about spelling the town to
sound that way and then calling it “Grenich.” Maybe just London, they said.
We’ll think of something, they said. The bay itself, they said, had long been
called Chalmers Bay.

“Really?” Nadia exclaimed. She laughed. “How perfect.”

She was already very attracted to the landscape: Zoom’s smooth
conic apron, the incurve of the big bay; red rock over white ice, and
presumably over blue sea, someday. On the days of their visit clouds flowed by
constantly, riding the west wind and dappling both land and ice with their
shadows—sometimes puffy white cumulus clouds, like galleons, other times
scrolled herringbone patterns unrolling overhead, defining the dark dome of sky
above them, and the curving rocky land under them. It could be a small handsome
city, encircling a bay like San Francisco or Sydney, as beautiful as those two
but smaller, human scale— Bogdanovist architecture—hand-built. Well, not
exactly hand-built, of course. But they could design it at a human scale. And
work on it as a kind of work of art. Walking with Art on the shores of the ice
bay, Nadia talked through her CO2 mask about these ideas, while watching the
parade of clouds gallop by in the low-rushing air.

“Sure,” Art said. “It would work. It’s going to be a city anyway,
that’s the important thing. It’s one of the best bays on this stretch of the
coast, so it’s bound to be used as a harbor. So you wouldn’t get the kind of
capital city that just sits in the middle of nowhere, like Canberra or
Brasilia, or Washington, B.C. It’ll have a whole other life as a seaport.”

“That’s right. That would be great.” Nadia walked on, excited as
she thought about it, feeling better than she had in months. The movement to
establish a capital somewhere else than Sheffield was strong, supported by
almost every party up there. This bay had already been proposed as a site by
the Sabishiians, so it would be a matter of supporting an already-existing
idea, rather than forcing a new one on people. The support would be there. And
as a public-works project, building it would be something she could take full
part in. Part of the gift economy. She might even be able to have an influence
on the plan of it. The more she thought about it, the more pleased she got.

They had walked far down the shore of the bay; they turned around
and began to walk back to the little settlement. Clouds tumbled over them on a
stiff wind. The curve of red land made its greeting to the sea. Just under the
cloud layer, a ragged V of honking geese fletched the wind, heading north.

Later that day, as they flew back to Sheffield, Art picked up her
hand and held it, inspecting her new finger. He said slowly, “You know,
building a family would also be a very hands-on kind of construction.”

“What?”

“And they’ve got reproduction pretty much figured out.”

“What?”

“I said, as long as you’re alive, you can pretty much have
children, one way or another.”

“What?”

“That’s what they say. If you wanted to, you could do it.”

“No.”

“That’s what they say.”

“No.”

“It’s a good idea.”

“No.”

“Well, you know, even building ... it’s great, sure, but you can
only go on plumbing for so long. Plumbing, hammering nails, bulldozing—it’s all
interesting enough, of course, I guess, but still. We have a lot of time to
fill. And the only work really interesting enough to pursue over the long haul
would be raising a kid, don’t you think?”

“No I do not!”

“But did you ever have a kid?”

“No.”

“Well there you go.”

“Oh God.”

Her ghost finger was tingling. But now it was really there.

PART
EIGHT

              
--------------

---The
Green

and
theWhite

              
--------------

Cadres came to the town Xiazha, in Guangzhou, and said, For the
good of China we need you to recreate this village on Moon Plateau, Mars.
You’ll go there together, the whole village. You’ll have your family and your
friends and neighbors with you. Ten thousand of you all together. In ten years
if you decide you want to come back, you can, and replacements will be sent to
the new Xiazha. We think you will like it. It’s a few kilometers north of the
harbor town ofNilokeras, near the Maumee River delta. The land is fertile.
There are other Chinese villages already in that region, and Chinese sections
in all the big cities. There are many hectares of empty land. The trip can
begin in a month—train to Hong Kong, ferry to Manila, and then up the space
elevator into orbit. Six months crossing the space between here and Mars, down
their elevator to Pavonis Mons, a party train to Moon Plateau. What do you say?
Let’s have a unanimous vote and start things off on the right foot.

Later a clerk in the town called up the Praxis office in Hong
Kong, and told an operator there what had happened. Praxis Hong Kong sent the
information along to Praxis’s demographic study group in Costa Rica. A planner
there named Amy added the report to a long list of similar reports, and sat
thinking for a morning. That afternoon she made a call to Praxis chairman
emeritus William Fort, who was surfing a new reef in El Salvador. She described
the situation to him. “The blue world is full,” he said, “the red world is empty.
There’s going to be problems. Let’s talk about them.”

The demographics group and part of the Praxis policy team,
including many of the Eighteen Immortals, gathered in Fort’s hillside surf
camp. The demographers laid out the situation. “Everyone is getting the
longevity treatment now,” Amy said. “We are fully into the hypermalthusian
age.”

It was a demographically explosive situation. Naturally emigration
to Mars was often seen by Terran government planners as one solution to the
problem. Even with its new ocean, Mars still had almost as much land area as
Earth, and hardly any people. The really populous nations, Amy told the group,
were already sending up as many people as they could. Often the emigrants were
members of ethnic or religious minorities who were dissatified with their lack
of autonomy in their home countries, and so were happy to leave. In India the
elevator cars of the cable that touched down at Suvadiva Atoll, south of the
Maldives, were constantly at capacity, full of emigrants all day every day, a
stream of Sikhs and Kashmiris and Muslims and also Hindus, ascending into space
and moving to Mars. There were Zulus from South Africa. Palestinians from
Israel. Kurds from Turkey. Native Americans from the United States. “In that
sense,” Amy said, “Mars is becoming the new America.”

“And like the old America,” a woman named Elizabeth added,
“there’s a native population already there to be impacted. Think about the
numbers for a while. If every day the cars of all the space elevators on Earth
are full, then that’s a hundred people per car, therefore twenty-four hundred
per day per elevator taking off, and a different twenty-four hundred leaving
the cars at the top of each elevator, and transferring into shuttles. There are
ten elevators, so that’s twenty-four thousand people a day. Therefore eight
million seven hundred and sixty thousand people every year.”

“Call it ten million a year,” Amy said. “That’s a lot, but at that
rate it will still take a century to transfer just one of Earth’s sixteen billions
to Mars. Which won’t make any difference here to speak of. So it doesn’t really
make sense! No major relocation is possible. We can never move a significant
fraction of the Terran population to Mars. We have to keep our attention on
solving Earth’s problems at home. Mars’s presence can only help as a kind of
psychological vent. In essence, we’re on our own.”

William Fort said, “It doesn’t have to make sense.”

“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “Lots of Terran governments are
trying it, whether it makes sense or not. China, India, Indonesia,
Brazil—they’re all going for it, and if they keep emigration at the system’s
capacity, Mars’s population will double in about two years. So nothing changes
on Earth, but Mars is totally inundated. “

One of the Immortals noted that an emigration surge of a similar
scale had helped to cause the first Martian revolution.

“What about the Earth-Mars treaty,” someone else asked. “I thought
it specifically forbade such overwhelming influxes.”

“It does, “Elizabeth said. “It specifies no more than ten percent
of the Martian population to be added every Terran year. But it also states
that Mars should take more if they can.”

“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped
governments from doing what they wanted to do?”

William Fort said, “We’ll have to send them somewhere else.” The
others looked at him. “Where?” said Amy.

No one replied. Fort waved a hand vaguely. “We’d better think of
somewhere,” Elizabeth said grimly. “The Chinese and Indians have been good
allies of the Martians, so far, and even they aren’t paying much attention to
the treaty. I was sent a tape recording of an Indian policy meeting about this,
and they spoke about running their program at capacity for a couple of
centuries, and then seeing where they stand.”

The elevator car descended
and Mars grew huge beneath their feet. Finally they slowed down,
low over Sheffield, and everything felt normal, Martian gravity again, without
the Coriolis force pulling reality to the side. And then they were in the
Socket, and back home.

Friends, reporters, delegations, Mangalavid. In Sheffield itself
people hurried about their business. Occasionally Nir-gal was recognized, and
waved at happily; some even stopped to shake his hand, or give him a hug,
inquiring about his trip or his health. “We’re glad you’re back!”

Still, in most people’s eyes . . . Illness was so rare. Quite a
few looked away. Magical thinking: Nirgal saw suddenly that for many people the
longevity treatments equaled immortality. They did not want to think otherwise;
they looked away.

But Nirgal had seen Simon die even though Simon’s bones had been
stuffed with Nirgal’s young marrow. He had felt his body unravel, felt the pain
in his lungs, in every cell of him. He knew death was real. Immortality had not
come to them, and never would. Delayed senescence, Sax called it. Delayed
senescence, that was all it was; Nirgal knew that. And people saw that
knowledge in him, and recoiled. He was unclean, and they looked away. It made
him angry.

*
     
*
       
*

He took the train down to Cairo, looking out at the vast tilted
desert of east Tharsis, so dry and ferric, the Ur landscape of red Mars: his
land. His eyes felt it. His brain and body glowed with that recognition. Home.

But the faces on the train, looking at him and then looking away.
He was the man who had not been able to adjust to Earth. The home world had
nearly killed him. He was an alpine flower, unable to withstand the true world,
an exotic to whom Earth was like Venus. This is what their eyes were saying
with their darting glances. Eternal exile.

Well, that was the Martian condition. One out of every five
hundred Martian natives who visited Earth died; it was one of the most
dangerous things a Martian could do, more dangerous than cliff flying, visiting
the outer solar system, childbirth. A kind of Russian roulette, with lots of
empty chambers in the gun to be sure, but the full one was full.

And he had dodged it. Not by much, but he had dodged it. He was
alive, he was home! These faces in the train, what did they know? They thought
he had been defeated by Earth; but they also thought he was Nirgal the Hero,
who had never been defeated before—they thought he was a story, an idea only.
They didn’t know about Simon or Jackie or Dao, or Hiroko. They didn’t know
anything about him. He was twenty-six m-years old now, a middle-aged man who
had suffered all that any middle-aged man might suffer—death of parents, death
of love, betrayal of friends, betrayal by friends. These things happen to
everyone. But that wasn’t the Nirgal that people wanted.

The train skirted the first curved head walls of the Labyrinth of
Night’s sapped canyons, and soon it floated into Cairo’s old station. Nirgal
walked out into the tented town, looking around curiously. It had been a metanat
stronghold, and he had never been in it before; interesting to see the little
old buildings. The physical plant had been damaged by the Red Army in the
revolution, and was still marked by broken black walls. People waved at him as
he walked down the broad central boulevard to the city offices. And there she
was, in the concourse of the town hall, by the window walls overlooking the U
of Nilus Noctis. Nirgal stopped, breath short. She had not yet seen him. Her
face was rounder but otherwise she was as tall and sleek as ever, dressed in a
green silk blouse and a darker green skirt of some coarser material, her black
hair a shiny mane spilling down her back. He could not stop looking at her.

Then she saw him, and flinched ever so slightly. Perhaps the wrist
images had not been enough to tell her how much the Terran illness had hurt
him. Her hands extended on their own recognizance, and then she followed them,
hands still out even while her eyes were calculating, her grimace at his
appearance carefully rearranged for the cameras that were always around her.
But he loved her for those hands. He could feel the warmth of his face,
blushing as they kissed, cheek to cheek like friendly diplomats. Up close she
still looked fifteen m-years old, just past the unblemished bloom of youth—at
that point that is even more beautiful than youth. People said she had taken
the treatment from the age of ten.

“It’s true then,” she said, “Earth almost killed you.”

“A virus, actually.”

She laughed, but her eyes kept their calculating look. She took
him by the arm, led him back to her entourage like a blind man. Though he knew
several of them she made introductions anyway, just to emphasize how much the
inner circle of the party had changed since he had left. But of course he could
not notice that, and so he was busy being cheerful when the proceedings were
interrupted by a great wail. There was a baby among them.

“Ah,” Jackie said, checking her wrist. “She’s hungry. Come meet my
daughter.” She walked over to a woman holding a swaddled babe. The girl was a
few months old, fat-jowled, darker-skinned than Jackie, her whole face bright
with squalling. Jackie took her from the woman and carried her off into an
adjacent room.

Nirgal, left standing there, saw Tiu and Rachel and Frantz next to
the window. He went over to them, glanced in Jackie’s direction; they rolled
their eyes, shrugged. Jackie wasn’t saying who the father was, Rachel said in a
quick undertone. It was not unique behavior; many women from Dorsa Brevia had
done the same.

The woman who had been holding the girl came out and told Nirgal
that Jackie would like to speak with him. He followed the woman into the next
room.

The room had a picture window overlooking Nilus Noc-tis. Jackie
was seated in a window seat, nursing the child and looking at the view. The
child was hungry; eyes closed, latched on, sucking hard, squeaking. Tiny fists
clenched in some kind of arboreal remnant behavior, clutching to branch or fur.
That was all culture, right there in that clutch. Jackie was issuing instructions,
to aides both in the room and on her wrist. “No matter what they say in Bern,
we need to have the flexibility to dampen the quotas if we need to. The Indians
and Chinese will just have to get used to it.”

Some things began to clarify for Nirgal. Jackie was on the
executive council, but the council was not particularly powerful. She was also
still one of the leaders of the Free Mars party; and although Free Mars might
have less influence on the planet, as power shifted out into the tents, in Earth-Mars
relations it had the potential to become a determining body. Even if it only
coordinated policy, it would gain all the power that a coordinator could
command, which was considerable—it was all the power Nirgal had ever had, after
all. In many situations such coordination could be the equivalent of making
Mars’s Terran policy, as all the local governments attended to their local
concerns, and the global legislature was more and more dominated by a Free
Mars-led supermajority. And of course there was a sense in which the Earth-Mars
relationship had the potential to dwarf everything else. So that Jackie might
be on the way to becoming an interplanetary power. . . .

Nirgal’s attention returned to the baby at her breast. The
princess of Mars. “Have a seat,” Jackie said, indicating the bench beside her
with her head. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” Nirgal said, but sat. Jackie looked up at one of the
aides and jerked her head to the side, and very soon they were alone in the
room with the infant.

“The Chinese and Indians are thinking of this as empty new land,”
Jackie said. “You can see it in everything they say. They’re too damned
friendly.”

“Maybe they like us,” Nirgal said. Jackie smiled, but he went on:
“We helped them get the metanats off their backs. And they can’t be thinking of
moving their excess population here. There’s just too many of them for
emigration to make any difference.”

“Maybe so, but they can dream. And with space elevators they can
send a steady stream. It adds up quicker than you would think.” Nirgal shook
his head. “It’ll never be enough.”

“How do you know? You didn’t go to either place.”

“A billion is a big number, Jackie. Too big a number for us to
properly imagine. And Earth has got seventeen billion. They can’t send a
significant fraction of that number here, there aren’t the shuttles to do it.”

“They might try anyway. The Chinese flooded Tibet with Han
Chinese, and it didn’t do a thing to relieve their population problems, but
they kept doing it anyway.”

Nirgal shrugged. “Tibet is right there. We’ll keep our distance.”

“Yes,” Jackie said impatiently, “but that’s not going to be easy
when there is no we. If they go out to Margaritifer, and cut a deal with the
Arab caravans out there, who’s going to stop it from happening?”

“The environmental courts?”

Jackie blew air between her lips, and the baby pulled off and
whimpered. Jackie shifted the infant to the other breast. Blue-veined olive
curve. “ Antar doesn’t think the environmental courts will be able to function
for long. We had a fight with them while you were gone, and we only went along
with them to give the process a chance, but they made no sense and they had no
teeth. And everything everyone does has an environmental impact, so supposedly
they should be judging everything. But tents are coming down in the lower
elevations and not one in a hundred is going to the courts to ask permission
for what they do once their town is part of the outside. Why should they?
Everyone is an ecopoet now. No. The court system isn’t going to work.”

“You can’t be sure,” Nirgal said. “So is Antar the father, then?”

Jackie shrugged.

Anyone could be the father—Antar, Dao, Nirgal himself, hell John
Boone could be, if any sample of his sperm had happened to be still in storage.
That would be like Jackie; except she would have told everyone. She shifted the
infant’s head toward her.

“Do you really think it’s all right to raise a fatherless child?”

“That’s how you were raised, right? And I had no mother. We were
all one-parent children.” “But was that good?” “Who knows?”

There was a look on Jackie’s face that Nirgal could not read, her
mouth just slightly tight with resentment, defiance .. . impossible to say. She
knew who both her parents were, but only one had stuck around, and Kasei had
not been much around at that. And killed in Sheffield, in part because of the
brutal response to the Red assault that Jackie herself had advocated.

She said, “You didn’t know about Coyote until you were six or
seven, isn’t that right?”

“True, but not right.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t right.” And he looked her in the eye.

But she looked away, down at the baby. “Better than having your
parents tearing each other up in front of you.”

“Is that what you would do with the father?”

“Who knows?”

“So it’s safer this way.”

“Maybe it is. Certainly there’s a lot of women doing it this way.”

“In Dorsa Brevia.”

“Everywhere. The biological family isn’t really a Martian
institution, is it.”

“I don’t know.” Nirgal considered it. “Actually, I saw a lot of
families in the canyons. We come from an unusual group in that respect.”

“In many respects.”

Her child pulled away, and Jackie tucked her breast in her bra and
let down her shirt. “Marie?” she called, and her assistant entered. “I think
her diaper needs changing.” And she handed the infant up to the woman, who left
without a word.

“Servants now?” Nirgal said.

Jackie’s mouth went tight again, and she stood, calling “Mem?”

Another woman came in, and Jackie said, “Mem, we’re going to have
to meet with those environmental court people about this Chinese request. It
could be that we can use it as leverage to get the Cairo water allotment
reconsidered.”

Mem nodded and left the room.

“You just make the decisions?” Nirgal said.

Jackie dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Nice to have you
back, Nirgal, but try to catch up, all right?”

*
     
*
       
*

Catch up. Free Mars was now a political party, the biggest on
Mars. It had not always been that way; it had begun as something more like a
network of friends, or the part of the underground that lived in the demimonde.
Mostly ex-students of the university in Sabishii, or, later, the members of a
very loose association of communities in the tented canyons, and in clandestine
clubs in the cities, and so forth. A kind of vague umbrella term for those
sympathetic to the underground, but not followers of any more specific
political movement or philosophy. Just something they said, in fact—”free
Mars.”

In many ways it had been Nirgal’s creation. So many of the natives
had been interested in autonomy, and the various issei parties, based on the
thoughts of one early settler or another, did not appeal to them; they had
wanted something new. And so Nirgal had traveled around the planet, and stayed
with people who organized meetings or discussions, and this had gone on for so
long that eventually people wanted a name. People wanted names for things.