Blue Mars (65 page)

“We’ll catch up with the Free Mars campaign in a few days?” Maya
asked Vendana later.

“Yes. We plan to debate them at a meeting in Gale.”

Then as they were walking up the gangplank onto their boat, the
young ones turned away from her, heading together up to the foredeck to
continue partying; Maya was forgotten, she wasn’t part of that. She stared
after them, then joined Michel in their little cabin near the stern. Seething.
She couldn’t help it, even though she was shocked when it occurred: sometimes
she hated the young. “I hate them,” she said to Michel. And simply because they
were young. She might disguise it as hatred of their thoughtlessness,
stupidity, callowness, utter provincialism; that was all true; but beyond that,
she also hated their youth—not just their physical perfection, but simply their
age—sheer chronology—the fact that they had it all in front of them. It was all
best in anticipation, everything. Sometimes she woke from floating dreams in
which she had been looking down on Mars from the Ares, after they had
aerobraked, and were stabilizing their orbit in preparation for the descent;
and shocked at the abrupt fall back into the present, she realized that for her
that had been the best moment of all, that rush of anticipation as it all lay
there below them, anything possible. That was youth.

“Think of them as fellow travelers,” Michel advised now, as he had
several times before when Maya had confessed to this feeling. “They’re only
going to be young for as long as we were—a snap of the fingers, right? And then
they’re old, and then gone. We all go through it. Even a century’s difference
doesn’t matter a damn. And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will
exist, these people are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being
alive at the same time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your
contemporaries are the only ones who are ever going to really understand you.”

“Yes yes,” Maya said. It was true. “But I still hate them.”

The aerial lens’s burn had been about equally deep everywhere, so
when it had blazed across Gale Crater it had cut a wide swath through the rim
on the northeast and southwest sides; but these cuts were higher than the canal
bed elsewhere, so that narrower cuts had been excavated through them, and locks
installed, and the inner crater made into a high lake, a bulb in the canal’s
endless thermometer. The Lowellian system of ancient nomenclature was in
abeyance here for some reason, and the northeastern locks were bracketed by a
little divided town called Birch’s Trenches, while the southwestern locks’
larger town was called Banks. The town Banks covered the meltzone of the burn,
and then rose in broad bending terraces onto the un-melted rim of Gale,
overlooking the interior lake. It was a wild town, crews and passengers of
passing ships pounding down their gangplanks to join a more or less continuous
festival. On this night the party was focused on the arrival of the Free Mars
campaign. A big grassy plaza, perched on a wide bench over the lake lock, was
jammed with people, some attending to the speeches given from a flat rooftop
stage overlooking the plaza, others ignoring the commotion and shopping, or
promenading, or drinking, or sitting over the lock eating food purchased from
small smoky stands, or dancing, or wandering off to explore the upper reaches
of the town.

Throughout the campaign speeches Maya stood on a terrace above the
stage, which gave her a view of the backstage area, where Jackie and the rest
of the Free Mars leadership were milling about, talking or listening as they
waited for their turn in the spotlights. Antar was there, Ariadne, some others
Maya half-recognized from recent news vids. Observation from a distance could
be so revealing; down there she saw all the primate dominance dynamics that
Frank used to go on about. Two or three of the men were fixed on Jackie, and,
in a different way, a couple of the women. One of the men, named Mikka, was on
the global executive council these days, a leader of the MarsFirst party.
MarsFirst was one of the oldest political parties on Mars, formed to contest
terms of the renewal of the first Mars treaty; Maya had been part of that, she
seemed to recall. Now Martian politics had fallen into a pattern somewhat
resembling European parliamentary countries, with a broad spectrum of small
parties bracketing a few centrist coalitions, in this case Free Mars, the Reds,
and the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, with the others latching on, or filling gaps,
or running off to the sides, all of them shifting this way and that in
temporary alliances, to advance their little causes. In this array MarsFirst
had become something like the political wing of the Red ecoteurs still in the
outback, a nasty expedient unscrupulous organization, folded into the Free Mars
super-majority for no good ideological reason; there had to be some kind of
deal going on. Or something more personal; the way that Mikka followed Jackie,
the way he regarded her; a lover, or very recent ex-lover, Maya would have bet
on it. Besides which she had heard rumors to that effect.

Their speeches were all about beautiful wonderful Mars and how it
was going to be ruined by overpopulation, unless they closed it to further
Terran immigration. There was a strong case to be made for that point of view,
actually, as could be told by the cheers and applause from the crowd. Their
attitude was deeply hypocritical, as most of those applauding made their living
from Terran tourists, and all of them were immigrants or the children of
immigrants; but they cheered anyway. It was a good election issue. Especially
if you ignored the risk of war; if you ignored the sheer immensity of Earth,
and its primacy in human civilization. Defying it in this way.... Well, it
didn’t matter; these people didn’t give a damn about Earth, and they didn’t
understand it either. So defiance only made Jackie look more brave and
beautiful, standing up for a free Mars. The ovation for her was loud and
sustained; she had learned a lot since her maladroit speeches during the second
revolution, she had gotten quite good. Very good.

When the Green speakers got up to take their turn, and argue for
an open Mars, they tried to talk about the danger of a closed-Mars policy, but
the response was of course much less enthusiastic than it had been for
Jackie—their position sounded like cowardice, to tell the truth, and the
desirability of an open Mars, naive. Before arriving in Banks Vendana had
offered Maya a chance to speak, but she had declined, and now she was confirmed
in her judgment; she did not envy these speakers their unpopular stance before
a dwindling crowd.

Afterward the Greens held a small party/postmortem, and Maya
critiqued their performance with some severity. “I’ve never seen such
incompetence. You’re trying to scare them, but you only sound fearful. The
stick is necessary, but you need a carrot as well. The possibility of war is
the stick, but you have to tell them why it would be good to keep Terrans
coming up, without sounding like idiots. You have to remind them that we all
have Terran origins, we are always immigrants here. For you can never leave
Earth.”

They nodded at this, Athos among them looking thoughtful. After
that Maya got Vendana to one side, and grilled her about Jackie’s recent
liaisons. Mikka was indeed a recent partner, and probably still was. MarsFirst
was if anything more anti-immigration than the larger party. Maya nodded; she
had begun to see the outlines of a plan.

When the postmortem was over, Maya wandered downtown with Vendana
and Athos and the rest, until they passed a large band playing what they called
Sheffield sound. This music was only noise to Maya: twenty different drum
rhythms at once, on instruments not intended for percussion or even for musical
use. But it suited her purposes, as under the clatter and pounding she was able
to guide the young Greens unobtrusively toward Antar, whom she had spotted
across the dance floor. When they were nearer to him she could say, “Oh,
there’s Antar—hello, Antar! These are the people I’m sailing with. We’re right
behind you, apparently, headed to Hell’s Gate and then Odessa. How’s the
campaign going?”

And Antar was his usual gracious princely self, a man hard to
object to even when you knew how reactionary he was, how much he had been in
the pocket of Earth’s Arab nations. Now he must be turning on those old allies,
another dangerous part of this anti-immigrant strategy. It was curious the way
the Free Mars leadership had decided to defy the Terran powers, and at the same
time to try to dominate all the new settlements in the outer solar system.
Hubris. Or perhaps they just felt threatened; Free Mars had always been the
young natives’ party, and if unrestricted immigration brought in millions of
new issei, then Free Mars’s status would be endangered, not only its
superma-jority but its simple majority as well. These new hordes with all their
old fanaticisms intact—churches and mosques, flags, hidden firearms, open
feuds—there was definitely a case for the Free Mars position to be made, for
during the intensive immigration of the past decade, the new arrivals had
clearly begun to construct another Earth, just as stupid as the first one. John
would have gone crazy, Frank would have laughed. Arkady would have said I told
you so, and suggested yet another revolution.

But Earth had to be dealt with more realistically than that, it
could not be banished or wished away. And here in the moment, Antar was being
gracious, extra gracious, as if he thought Maya might be useful for something.
And as he always followed Jackie around, Maya was not surprised at all when
suddenly Jackie and some others were at his side, and everyone saying hello.
Maya nodded to Jackie, who smiled back flawlessly. Maya gestured to her new
companions, carefully introduced them one by one. When she came to Athos she
saw Jackie watching him, and Athos, as he was introduced, gave a friendly
glance to her. Swiftly but very casually Maya started asking Antar about Zeyk
and Na-zik, who were living on the coast of Acheron Bay, apparently. The two
groups were moving slowly toward the music, and soon, if they kept going, they
would be thoroughly mingled, and it would be too loud to hear any conversation
but one’s own. “I like this Sheffield sound,” Maya said to Antar. “Help me get
through to the dance floor?”

An obvious ploy, as she needed no help getting through crowds. But
Antar took her arm, and did not notice Jackie talking to Athos—or pretended not
to. It was an old story to him anyway. But that Mikka, looking very tall and powerful
up close; Scandinavian ancestry perhaps, looking a bit of a hothead; he was now
trailing the group with a sour expression. Maya pursed her lips, satisfied that
the gambit had started well. If MarsFirst was even more isolationist than Free
Mars, then trouble between them might be all the more useful.

So she danced with more enthusiasm than she had felt in years.
Indeed if you concentrated on the bass drums only, and held to their rhythms,
then it was somewhat like the knocking of an excited heart; and over that
fundamental ground bass the chattering of the various woodblocks and kitchen
implements and round stones was no more than the ephemera of stomach rumbling
or rapid thought. It made a kind of sense; not musical sense as she understood
it, but rhythmic sense, in some way. Dance, sweat, watch Antar shuffle
gracefully about. He must be a fool but it didn’t show. Jackie and Athos had
disappeared. And so had Mikka. Perhaps he would go nova and murder them all.
Maya grinned and spun in the dance.

Michel came over and Maya gave him a big smile, a sweaty hug. He
liked sweaty hugs, and looked pleased but curious: “I thought you didn’t like
this kind of music?”

“Sometimes I do.”

Southwest of Gale the canal rose through lock after lock, up onto
the highlands of Hesperia. As it crossed the highlands, to the east of the
Tyrrhena massif, it remained at about the four-kilometer elevation, now more
often called five kilometers above sea level, and so there was little need for
locks. For days at a time they motored along the canal, or sailed under the
power of the ship’s line of little mast sails, stopping in some bankside towns,
passing others. Oxus, Jaxartes, Scamander, Simois, Xanthus, Steropes,
Polyphemus—they stopped in each, keeping a steady pace with the Free Mars
campaign, and indeed with most of the other Hellas-bound barges and yachts.
Everything stretched out without change to both horizons, although occasionally
in this region the lens had burned through something other than the usual
basaltic regolith, so that in the vaporizing and falling out there had occurred
some variation in the levees, stretches of obsidian or sideromelane, swirls of
brilliant glossy color, of marbled porphyry greens, violent sul-furic yellows,
lumpy conglomerates, even one long section of clear glass banks, clear on both
sides of the canal, distorting the highlands behind them and for long stretches
reflecting the sky. This stretch, called Glass Banks, was of course intensively
developed. Between the canalside towns ran mosaic paths, shaded by palm trees
in giant ceramic pots, and backed by villas complete with grass lawns and
hedges. The Glass Banks towns were whitewashed, bright with pastel shutters and
window boxes and doors, and blue-glazed tile roofs, and long colored neon signs
over blue awnings in the waterfront restaurants. It was a kind of dream Mars, a
canal cliche from the ancient dreamscape, but none the less beautiful for that,
the obviousness of it indeed part of its pleasure. The days of their passage
through this region were warm and windless, the canal surface as smooth as the
banks, and as clear: a glass world. Maya sat on the forward deck under a green
awning, watching the freight barges and the tourist paddle wheelers heading in
the other direction, everyone out on deck to enjoy the sight of the glass banks
and the colorful towns decorating them. This was the heart of the Martian
tourist industry, the favorite destination for off-world visitors; ridiculous,
but true; and one had to admit it was pretty. Gazing at the passing scene it
occurred to Maya that whichever party won the next general election, and
whichever way the immigration battle fell out, this world would probably go on,
gleaming like a toy in the sun. Still, she hoped her gambit would work.