Blue Mars (41 page)

And so, Free Mars. And in the revolution it had become a rallying
point for the natives, rising up out of society as a kind of emergent
phenomenon, with many more people declaring themselves members than one would
have guessed possible. Millions. The native majority. The very definition of
the revolution, in fact; the main reason for its success. Free Mars as a
sentence, an imperative; and they had done it.

But then Nirgal had left for Earth, determined to make their case
there. And while he was gone, during the constitutional congress, Free Mars had
gone from a movement to an organization. That was fine, it was the normal
course of events, a necessary part of institutionalizing their independence. No
one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing
nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic—or, along with
heroic, had been also suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No,
Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia—the meaning of life lay not in the past but
in the present, not in resistance but in expression. No—he did not want it to
be like it had been before. He was happy they were in control (at least
partially) of their fate. That wasn’t the problem. Nor was he bothered by the
tremendous growth in the numbers of supporters Free Mars had. The party seemed
on the edge of becoming a supermajority, with three of the seven executive
councillors coming from the party leadership, and most other global positions
filled by other members. And now a fair percentage of new emigrants were
joining the party— and old emigrants as well—and natives who had supported
smaller parties before the revolution—and, last but not least, quite a few
people who had supported the UNTA regime, and were now looking for the new
power to follow. All in all, it made for a huge group. And in the first years
of a new socioeconomic order, this massing of political power, of opinion and
belief, had some advantages, no doubt about it. They could get things done. But
Nirgal wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of it.

One day walking the city wall, looking out through the tenting, he
watched a group of people standing on a launch-pad at the edge of the cliff,
west of town. There were a number of different kinds of single-flier craft:
gliders and ultralites that were shot out of a slingshot launcher, and rose
inside the thermals that formed in the mornings; smaller hang gliders; and then
a variety of new one-person aircraft, which looked like small gliders connected
to the undersides of small blimps. These fliers were only a bit longer than the
people who climbed into the slings or seats under the glider’s wings. Clearly
they were made of ultralight materials; sqme were transparent and nearly invisible,
so that once in the sky it appeared that prone or seated people were floating
around on their own. Other machines had been colored, and were visible from
kilometers away as strokes of green or blue in the air. The stubby wings had
small ultralight jets attached to them, so that the pilots had control of
direction and altitude; they were like planes in that respect, but with the
added loft of a blimp to make them safer and more versatile; their pilots
landed them almost anywhere, and it looked impossible to dive them—to crash, in
other words.

The hang gliders, on the other hand, looked as dangerous as ever.
The people who used those were the rowdiest members of the flying crowd, Nirgal
could see when he went out there—thrill seekers who ran off the edge of the
cliff shouting in an adrenalated exhilaration that crackled over the
intercoms—they were running off a cliff, after all, and no matter what rig they
were strapped to, their bodies still saw what was happening. No wonder their
shouts had that special ring!

Nirgal got on the subway and went out to the launchpad, drawn by
some quality of the sight. All those people, free in the sky.... He was
recognized, of course, he shook hands; and accepted an invitation from a group
of fliers to go up and see what it was like. The hang gliders offered to teach
him to fly, but he laughed and said he would try the little blimpgliders first.
There was a two-person blimpglider tethered there, slightly larger than the
rest, and a woman named Monica invited him up, fueled the thing, and sat him
beside her; and up the launch mast they went, to be released with a jerk into
the strong downslope afternoon winds and over the city, now revealed as a small
tent filled with greenery, perched on the edge of the northwestern-most of the
network of canyons etching the slope of Tharsis.

Flying over Noctis Labyrinthus! The wind keened over the blimp’s
taut transparent material, and they bounced unpre-dictably up and down on the
wind, while also rotating horizontally in what seemed an uncontrolled spin; but
then Monica laughed and began manipulating the controls before her, and quickly
they were proceeding south across the labyrinth, over canyon after canyon
making their irregular X intersections. Then over the Compton Chaos, and the torn
land of the Illyrian Gate, where it dropped into the upper end of the Marineris
Glacier.

“These things’ jets are much more powerful than they need to be,”
Monica told him through their headphones. “You can make headway into the wind
until it reaches something like two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour,
although you wouldn’t want to try that. You also use the jets to counteract the
blimp’s loft, to get us back down. Here, try it. That’s left jet throttle,
that’s right, and here are the stabilizers. The jets are dead easy, it’s using
the stabilizer that needs some practicing.”

In front of Nirgal was a complete second set of controls. He put
his hands on the jet throttles, gave them pushes. The blimp veered right, then
left. “Wow.”

“It’s fly by wire, so if you tell it to do something disastrous,
it’ll just cut out.”

“How many hours flying time do you need to learn this?”

“You’re doing it already, right?” She laughed. “No, it takes a
hundred hours or so. Depends on what you mean by knowing how to do it. There’s
the death mesa between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have
relaxed and before they’re really good, so that they get into trouble. But
that’s mostly hang gliders anyway. With these, the simulators are just like the
real thing, so you can put in your hours on those, and then when you’re
actually up here you’ll have it wired even though you haven’t officially
reached the flying time limit.”

“Interesting!”

And it was. The intersecting sapped canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus,
lying under them like an enormous maze; the sudden lifts and drops as the winds
tossed them; the loud keening of the wind over their partially enclosed gondola
seats... . “It’s like becoming a bird!”

“Exactly.”

And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. The heart
is pleased by one thing after another.

After that he spent time in a flight simulator in the city, “ and
several times a week he made a date with Monica or” one of her friends, and
went out to the cliff’s edge for another lesson. It was not a complicated
business, and soon he felt that he could try a flight on his own. They
cautioned him to be patient. He kept at it. The simulators felt very much like
the real thing; if you tested them by doing something foolish, the seat would
tilt and bounce very convincingly. More than once he was told the story of the
person who had taken an ultralite into such a disastrous death spiral that the
simulator had torn off its mountings and crashed through the glass wall next to
it, cutting some bystanders and breaking the flier’s arm.

Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He
went to Free Mars meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew
every afternoon. As the days , passed he discovered that he was dreading the
morning meetings; he only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no
matter what they said. Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not
politics, not like this. Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly
he had been living his life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the
surface cities about how to live theirs and still have some freedoms, some
pleasures. Okay, it had been political, everything was; but it seemed he was
not really interested in politics. Or perhaps it was government.

It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by
Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from
his first moment back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was
no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time
a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to
them was a threat to Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on
Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the
natives’ leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people
of Mars—son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage—very hard to
oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him
she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their
shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in
Dorsa Brevia. Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense
dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of
it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his
Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.

So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to
ignore their little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from
all over the planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles.
Many tent towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it
possible, and hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an
operation in which the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid
enough that water was the critical issue, and their requests for a water
allotment were pouring in, until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn
down a kilometer merely by pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These
and a thousand more matters tested the constitution’s many networks for
connecting local autonomy to global considerations; the debates would go on
forever.

Nirgal, while fundamentally uninterested in most of these
wrangles, found them yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in
Cairo. He had come back from Earth without any official position in the new
government or the old party, and one thing he saw going on these days was the
struggle to place him—to give him a job with limited power, or, for his backers
(or rather Jackie’s opponents) to put him in a position with some real power to
it. Some friends advised him to wait and run for the senate when the next
elections came, others mentioned the executive council, others party positions,
others a post on the GEC. All these jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or
another, and when he talked to Nadia on the screens, he could see that he would
find them a burden; though she seemed to be hammering away stolidly enough, it
was obvious the executive council was distasteful to her. But he kept a
straight face and listened closely as people offered their advice.

Jackie herself kept her own council. In meetings where people
suggested that Nirgal become a kind of minister-without-portfolio, she regarded
him more blankly than usual, which led Nirgal to think that she liked that
possibility least of all. She wanted him pinned into some position, which given
her current post could not help but be inferior to hers. But if he stayed
outside the system entirely. ...

There she sat, the infant in her arms. It could be his child. And
Antar watched her with the same expression, the same thought. No doubt Dao
would have as well, if he were still alive. Nirgal was suddenly shaken by a
spasm of grief for his half brother, his tormentor, his friend—he and Dao had
fought for as far back as he could remember, but they had been brothers for all
that.

Jackie had apparently forgotten Dao already, and Kasei as well. As
she would forget Nirgal, if he should happen to get killed. She had been among
the greens who had ordered the crushing of the Red assault on Sheffield, she
had advocated the strong response. Perhaps she had to forget the dead.

The infant cried. Face rounded by fat, it was impossible to see
any resemblance to any adult. The mouth looked like Jackie’s. Other than
that... it was frightening, this power created by anonymous parenting. Of
course a man could do the same, obtain an egg, grow it by ectogenesis, raise it
himself. No doubt it would begin to happen, especially if many women took
Jackie’s route. A world without parents. Well, friends were the real family;
but he shuddered nevertheless at what Hiroko had done, what Jackie was doing.

He went flying to clear his mind of all that. One night after a
glorious flight in the clouds, sitting in the launchpad pub, the conversation
turned and someone mentioned Hi-roko’s name. “I hear she’s on Elysium,” someone
said, “working on a new commune of communes up there.”

“How did you hear?” Nirgal demanded of the woman, somewhat sharply
no doubt.

Surprised, she said, “You know those fliers who dropped in last
week who are flying around the world? They were on Elysium last month, and they
said they saw her there.” She shrugged. “That’s all I know. Not much by way of
confirmation, I know.”