Blue Mars (70 page)

“But they’re managing to hold things steady.”

“Well, I think the high altitudes are getting a bit more air and
water than they’re supposed to. You have to go really high to get away from
it.”

“I thought you said they were winning in court?”

“In the courts, yes. In the atmosphere, no. There’s too much going
on.”

“You’d think they’d sue the greenhouse-gas factories.”

“They have. But they’ve lost. Those gases have everyone else’s
support. Without them we’d have gone into an ice age and stayed there.”

“But a reduction in emission levels....”

“Yeah, I know. It’s still being fought over. It’ll go on forever.”

“True.”

Meanwhile the Hellas Sea’s sea level had been agreed on; it was a
legislative fact, and efforts all around the basin were coordinated to make
sure the sea obeyed the law. The whole matter was fantastically complicated,
although simple in principle: they measured the hydrological cycle, with all
its storms and variations in rain and snow, melting and seeping into the
ground, running over the surface in creeks and rivers, down into lakes and then
into the Hellas Sea, there to freeze in the winter, then evaporate in the
summer and begin the whole round again . . . and to this immense cycle they did
what was necessary to stabilize the level of the sea, which was about the size of
the Caribbean. If there was too much water and they wanted to draw down the sea
level, there was the possibility of piping some of it back up into the emptied
aquifers in the Amphitrites Mountains to the south. They were fairly limited in
this, however, because the aquifers were composed of porous rock which tended
to crush down when the water was first removed, making them difficult or
impossible to refill. In fact spill-off possibilities were one of the main
problems still facing the project. Keeping the balance. . ..

And this kind of effort was going on all over Mars. It was crazy.
But they wanted to do it, and that was that. Diana was talking now about the
efforts to keep the Argyre Basin dry, an effort in its way as large as the one
to fill Hellas: they had built giant pipelines to evacuate water from Argyre to
Hellas if Hellas needed water, or to river systems that led to the North Sea if
it didn’t.

“What about the North Sea itself?” Maya asked.

Diana shook her head, mouth full. Apparently the consensus was
that the North Sea was beyond regulation, but basically stable. They would just
have to watch and see what happened, and the seaside towns up there take their
chances. Many believed that the North Sea’s level would eventually fall a bit,
as water returned to the permafrost or was trapped in one of the thousands of
crater lakes in the southern highlands. Then again precipitation and runoff
into the North Sea was substantial. The southern highlands were where the issue
would be decided, Diana said; she called up a map onto her wristpad screen to
show Maya. Watershed construction co-ops were still wandering around installing
drainage, running water into highland creeks, reinforcing riverbeds, excavating
quicksand, which in some cases revealed the ghost creekbeds of ancient
watersheds below the fines; but mostly their new streams had to be based on
lava features or fracture canyons, or the occasional short canal. The result
was very unlike the venous clarity of Terran watersheds: a confusion of little
round lakes, frozen swamps, canyon arroyos, and long straight rivers with
abrupt right-angle turns, or sudden disappearances into sinkholes or pipelines.
Only the refilled ancient riverbeds looked “right”; everywhere else the terrain
looked like a bomb range after a rainstorm.

Many of the Deep Waters veterans who had not directly joined the
Hellas Sea Institute had started an associated coop of their own, which was
mapping the groundwater basins around Hellas, measuring the return of water to
the aquifers and the underground rivers, figuring out what water could be
stored and recovered, and so on. Diana was a member of this co-op, as were many
of the people in Maya’s old office. After their lunch Diana went to the rest of
the group, and told them about Maya’s return to town; when they heard that Maya
was interested in joining them, they offered her a position in the co-op with a
reduced joining fee. Pleased at the compliment, she decided to take them up on
it.

So she worked for Aegean Water Table, as the co-op was called. She
got up in the mornings and made coffee and ate some toast or a biscuit, or
croissant, or muffin, or crumpet. In fine weather she ate out on their balcony;
more often she ate in the bay window at the round dining table, reading the
Odessa Messenger on the screen, noting every little incident that combined to
reveal to her the darkening situation vis a vis Earth. The legislature in
Mangala elected the new executive council, and Jackie was not one of the seven;
she had been replaced by Nanedi. Maya whooped, and then read all the accounts
she could find, and watched the interviews; Jackie claimed to have declined to
run, she said she was tired after so many m-years, and would take a break like
she had several times before, and be back (a sharp glint to her eye with that
last remark). Nanedi kept a discreet silence on that topic, but he had the
pleased, slightly amazed look of the man who had killed the dragon; and though
Jackie declared that she would continue her work for the Free Mars party apparatus,
clearly her influence there had waned, or else she would still be on the
council.

So; she had bowled Jackie off the global playing field; but the
anti-immigrant forces were still in power. Free Mars still held its
supermajority alliance in uneasy check. Nothing important had changed; life
went on; the reports from pullulating Earth were still ominous. Those people
were going to come up after them someday, Maya was sure of it. They were
getting along among themselves, they could rest, take a look around, make some
plans, coordinate their efforts. Better really to eat breakfast without turning
the screen on, if she wanted to keep her appetite.

So she took to going downtown and having a larger breakfast on the
corniche, with Diana, or later Nadia and Art, or with visitors to town. After
breakfast she would walk down to the AWT offices, near the eastern end of the
seafront—a good walk, in air that each year was just the slightest bit saltier.
At AWT she had an office with a window, and did what she had done for Deep
Waters, serving as liaison with the Hellas Sea Institute, and coordinating a
fluctuating team of areologists and hydrologists and engineers, directing their
research efforts mostly in the Hellespontus and Am-phitrites mountains, where
most of the aquifers were. She took trips around the curve of the coast to
inspect some of their sites and facilities, going up into the hills, staying
often in the little harbor town of Montepulciano, on the southwest shore of the
sea. Back in Odessa she worked through the days, and quit early, and wandered
around the town, shopping in used-furniture stores, or for clothes; she was
getting interested in the new styles and their changes through the seasons; it
was a stylish town, people dressed well, and the latest styles suited her, she
looked rather like a smallish elderly native, with erect regal carriage.. . .
Often she arranged to be out on the corniche in the late afternoon, walking
home to their apartment, or else sitting below it in the park, or having an
early meal in the summers in some seaside restaurant. In the fall a flotilla of
ships docked at the wharf and threw out gangplanks between the ships and
charged entry for a wine festival, with fireworks over the lake after dark. In
the winter the dusk fell on the sea early, and the inshore water was sometimes
sheeted with ice, and glowing with a pastel of whatever clear color might be
filling the sky that evening, dotted by ice-skaters and swift low iceboats.

One twilight hour as she was eating by herself, a theater company
put on a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in an adjoining alley, and
between the dusk and the spots on the planks of the temporary stage, the
quality of light was such that Maya was drawn like a moth to watch. She barely
followed the play, but some moments struck her with great force, especially the
blackouts when the action was supposed to stop, the actors all frozen on stage
in the late light. That moment only needed some blue, she thought, to be
perfect.

Afterward the theater company came over to the restaurant to eat,
and Maya talked with the director, a middle-aged native woman named Latrobe,
who was interested to meet her, to talk about the play, and about Brecht’s
theory of political theater. Latrobe proved to be pro-Terran, pro-immigrationist;
she wanted to stage plays that made the case for an open Mars, and for
assimilating the new immigrants into the areophany. It was frightening, she
said, how few plays of the classical repertory reinforced such feelings. They
needed new plays. Maya told her about Diana’s political evenings in the UNTA
years, how they had sometimes met in the parks. About her notion concerning the
blues in the lighting of that night’s production. Latrobe invited Maya to come
by and talk to the troupe about politics, and also to help with the lighting if
she wanted, which was a weak point in the company, having had its origin in the
very same parks Diana’s group had used to meet in. Perhaps they could get out
there again, and do some more Brechtian theater.

And so Maya dropped by and talked with the troupe, and over time,
without ever really deciding to, she became one of its lighting crew, helping
also with costumes, which was fashion in a different way. She also talked to
them long into the nights about the concept of a political theater, and helped
them to find new plays; in effect she was a kind of political-aesthetic
consultant. But she steadfastly resisted all efforts to get her on stage, not
only from the company, but from Michel and Nadia as well. “No,” she said. “I
don’t want to do that. If I did they would immediately want me to be playing
Maya Toitovna, in that play about John.”

“That’s an opera,” Michel said. “You’d have to be a soprano.”

“Nevertheless.”

She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did
enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and
changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more
entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa
was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of
screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa
seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the
moment that would never return, never be the same. Theater was the most
powerful art in town, really, and the same was true in many other Martian
cities as well.

So as the m-years passed, the Odessa troupe mounted any number of
political plays, including a complete run-through of the work of the South
African Athol Fugard, searing passionate plays anatomizing institutionalized
prejudice, the xenophobia of the soul; the best English-language plays since
Shakespeare, Maya thought. And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering
and making famous what was later called the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young
native playwrights as ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play
explored the wrenching problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful
assimilation into the areophany—a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million
little blood knots cut or tied. It was Maya’s best window into the contemporary
world, and more and more her way of speaking back to it, doing her best to
shape it—very satisfying indeed, as many of the plays caused talk, sometimes
even a furor, as new works by the Group attacked the anti-immigrant government
that was still in power in Mangala. It was politics in a new mode, the most
intriguing she had yet encountered; she longed to tell Frank about it, to show
him how it worked.

In those same years, as the months passed two by two, Latrobe
mounted quite a few productions of old classics, and as Maya watched them, she
got more and more snared by the power of tragedy. She liked doing the political
plays, which angry or hopeful tended to contain an innate uto-pianism, a drive
for progress; but the plays that struck her as most true, and moved her most
deeply, were the old Ter-ran tragedies. And the more tragic the better.
Catharsis as described by Aristotle seemed to work very well for her; she
emerged from good performances of the great tragedies shattered,
cleansed—somehow happier. They were the replacement for her fights with Michel,
she realized one night—a sublimation, he would have said, and a good one at that—easier
on him, of course, and more dignified all around, nobler. And there was that
connection to the ancient Greeks as well, a connection being made in any number
of ways all around Hellas Basin, in the towns and among the ferals, a
neoclassicism that Maya felt was good for them all, as they confronted and
tried to measure up to the Greeks’ great honesty, their unflinching look at
reality. The Oresteia, Antigone, Electra, Medea, Agamemnon which should have
been called Clytemnestra—those amazing women, reacting in bitter power to
whatever strange fates their men inflicted on them, striking back, as when
Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra, then told the audience how she
had done it, at the end staring out into the audience, right at Maya:

“Enough of misery! Start no more. Our hands are red.

Go home and yield to fate in time,