Green Mars Part 24

When Nadia arrived, with Art and Nirgal, they were led to their guest quarters in Zakros, the southernmost segment of the tunnel. Nadia dropped her pack in a little wooden room, and wandered the big park, and then through the segments farther north, finding old friends and meeting strangers, feeling in a mood of good hope. It was encouraging to see all these people milling about the green parks and pavilions, representing so many different groups. She looked around at the crowd thronging the ca.n.a.lside park, perhaps three hundred people in view at that moment, and laughed.

The Swiss from Overhangs arrived on the day before the conference was supposed to begin; people said they had been camped outside in their rovers, waiting for the date specified. They brought with them a whole set of procedures and protocols for the meeting, and as Nadia and Art listened to a Swiss woman describing their plans, Art elbowed Nadia and whispered, "We've created a monster."

"No no," Nadia whispered back, happy as she looked over the big central park in the third-from-the-south segment of the tunnel, called Lato. The skylight overhead was a long bronze crack in the dark roof, and morning light filled the giant cylindrical chamber with the kind of photon rain she had been craving all winter, brown light everywhere, the bamboo and pine and cypress rising over the tile rooftops and blazing like green water. "We need a structure, or it would be a free-for-all. The Swiss are form without content, if you see what I mean."

Art nodded. He was very quick, sometimes even hard to understand, because he jumped five or six steps at a time and a.s.sumed she had followed him. "Just get them to drink kava with the anarchists," he muttered, and got up to walk around the edges of the meeting.

And in fact that night, on her way with Maya through Gournia to a ca.n.a.lside row of open-air kitchens, Nadia pa.s.sed by Art and saw that he was doing just that, dragging Mikhail and some of the other Bogdanovist hard-liners over to a table of Swiss, where Jurgen and Max and Sibilla and Priska were chatting happily with a group standing around them, switching languages as if they were translation AIs, but in every language exhibiting the same buoyant guttural Swiss accent. "Art is an optimist," Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.

"Art is an idiot," Maya replied.

By now there were about five hundred visitors in the long sanctuary, representing about fifty groups. The congress was to begin the following morning, so on this night the partying was loud, from Zakros to Falasarna, the timeslip filled with wild shouting and singing, Arab ululations harmonizing with yodels, the strains of "Waltzing Matilda" forming a descant to "The Ma.r.s.eillaise."

Nadia got up early the next morning. She found Art already out at the pavilion in the Zakros park, rearranging chairs into a circular formation, in cla.s.sic Bogdanovist style. Nadia felt a p.r.i.c.k of pain and regret, as if Arkady's ghost had walked through her; he would have loved this meeting, it was just what he had often called for. She went to help Art. "You're up early."

"I woke up and couldn't fall back asleep." He needed a shave. "I'm nervous!"

She laughed. "This is going to take weeks, Art, you know that."

"Yes, but starts are important."

By ten all the seats were filled, and behind the chairs the pavilion was crowded with standing observers. Nadia stood at the back of the Zygote wedge of the circle, watching curiously. There appeared to be slightly more men than women in attendance, and slightly more natives than emigrants. Most people wore standard one-piece jumpers- the Reds' were rust-colored- but a significant number were dressed in a colorful array of ceremonial styles: robes, dresses, pantaloons, suits, embroidered s.h.i.+rts, bare chests, a lot of necklaces and earrings and other jewelry. All the Bogdanovists wore jewelry containing pieces of phobosite, the black chunks s.h.i.+ning where they had been cut flat and polished.

The Swiss stood in the center, somber in gray bankers' suits, Sibilla and Priska in dark green dresses. Sibilla called the meeting to order, and she and the rest of the Swiss alternated as they explained in excruciating detail the program they had worked out, pausing to answer questions, and asking for comments at every change of speaker. As they did this a group of Sufis in pure white s.h.i.+rts and pantaloons worked their way around the outer perimeter of the circle, pa.s.sing out jugs of water and bamboo cups, moving with their customary dancelike grace. When everyone had cups, the delegates at the front of each group poured water for the party on their left, and then they all drank. Out in the crowd of spectators the Vanuatuans were at a table filling tiny cups of kava or coffee or tea, and Art was pa.s.sing these out to those who wanted them. Nadia smiled at the sight of him, shambling through the crowds like a Sufi in slow motion, sipping from the cups of kava he was distributing.

The Swiss's program was to begin with a series of workshops on specific topics and problems, working in open rooms scattered through Zakros, Gournia, Lato, and Malia. All of the workshops were to be recorded. Conclusions, recommendations, and questions from the workshops were to serve as the basis for a subsequent day's discussion at one of the two general ongoing meetings. One of these would focus roughly on the problems of achieving independence, the other on what came after- the means and ends meetings, as Art noted when he stopped briefly at Nadia's side.

When the Swiss were done describing the program, they were ready to start; it had not occurred to them to have any ceremonial opening. Werner, speaking last, reminded people that the first workshops would begin in an hour, and that was that. They were done.

But before the crowd dispersed, Hiroko stood at the back of the Zygote crowd, and walked slowly into the center of the circle. She wore a bamboo-green jumper, and no jewelry- a tall slight figure, white-haired, unprepossessing- and yet every eye there was locked onto her. And when she lifted her hands, everyone seated got to their feet. In the silence that followed, Nadia's breath caught in her throat. We should stop now, she thought. No meetings- this is it right here, our presence together, our shared reverence for this single person.

"We are children of Earth," Hiroko said, loud enough for all to hear. "And yet here we stand, in a lava tunnel on the planet Mars. We should not forget how strange a fate that is. Life anywhere is an enigma and a precious miracle, but here we see even better its sacred power. Let's remember that now, and make our work our wors.h.i.+p."

She spread her hands wide, and her closest a.s.sociates walked humming into the center of the circle. Others followed suit, until the s.p.a.ce around the Swiss was full of a milling horde of friends, acquaintances, strangers.

The workshops were held in gazebos scattered through the parks, or in three-walled rooms in the public buildings that edged these parks. The Swiss had a.s.signed small groups to run the workshops, and the rest of the conferees attended whichever meetings interested them the most, so that some involved five people, others fifty.

Nadia spent the first day wandering from workshop to workshop, up and down the four southernmost segments of the tunnel. She found that quite a few people were doing the same, none more so than Art, who appeared to be trying to observe all the workshops, so that he caught only a sentence or two at each site.

She dropped in on a workshop discussing the events of 2061. She was interested, although not surprised, to find in attendance Maya, Ann, Sax, Spencer, and even Coyote, as well as Jackie Boone and Nirgal, and many others. The room was packed. First things first, she supposed, and there were so many nagging questions about '61: What had happened? What had gone wrong, and why?

Ten minutes' listening, however, and her heart sank. People were upset, their recriminations heartfelt and bitter. Nadia's stomach knotted in a way it hadn't in years, as memories of the failed revolt flooded into her.

She looked around the room, trying to concentrate on the faces, to distract herself from the ghosts within. Sax was watching birdlike as he sat next to Spencer; he nodded as Spencer a.s.serted that 2061 taught them that they needed a complete a.s.sessment of all the military forces in the Martian system. "This is a necessary precondition necessary precondition for any successful action," Spencer said. for any successful action," Spencer said.

But this bit of common sense was shouted down by someone who seemed to consider it an excuse to avoid action- a Marsfirster, apparently, who advocated immediate ma.s.s ecotage, and armed a.s.sault on the cities.

Quite vividly Nadia recalled an argument with Arkady about this very matter, and suddenly she couldn't stand it. She walked down to the center of the room.

After a while everyone went silent, stilled by the sight of her. "I'm tired of this matter being discussed in purely military terms," she said. "The whole model of revolution has to be rethought. This is what Arkady failed to do in sixty-one, and this is why sixty-one was such a b.l.o.o.d.y mess. Listen to me, now- there can be no such thing as a successful armed revolution on Mars. The life-support systems are too vulnerable."

Sax croaked, "But if the surface is vivable- is viable viable- then the support systems not so- so..."

Nadia shook her head. "The surface is not viable, and won't be for many years. And even when it is, revolution has to be rethought. Look, even when revolutions have been successful, they have caused so much destruction and hatred that there is always some kind of horrible backlash. It's inherent in the method. If you choose violence, then you create enemies who will resist you forever. And ruthless men become your revolutionary leaders, so when the war is over they're in power, and likely to be as bad as what they replaced."

"Not in-American," Sax said, cross-eyed with the effort to force the right words out in a timely manner.

"I don't know about that. But mostly it's been true. Violence breeds hatred, and eventually there is a backlash. It's unavoidable."

"Yes," said Nirgal with his usual intent look, not all that different from Sax's grimace. "But if people are attacking the sanctuaries and destroying them, then we don't have much choice."

Nadia said, "The question is, who's sending those forces out? And who are the people actually in these forces? I doubt that those individuals bear us any ill will. At this point they might just as easily be on our side as against us. It's their commanders and owners we should focus on."

"De-cap-i-ta-tion," Sax said.

"I don't like the sound of that. You need a different term."

"Mandatory retirement?" Maya suggested acidly. People laughed, and Nadia glared at her old friend.

"Forced disemployment," Art said loudly from the back, where he had just appeared.

"You mean a coup," Maya said. "Not to fight the entire population on the surface, but just the leaders.h.i.+p and their bodyguards."

"And maybe their armies," Nirgal insisted. "We have no sign that they are disaffected, or even apathetic."

"No. But would they fight without orders from their leaders?"

"Some might. It's their job, after all."

"Yes, but they have no great stake beyond that," Nadia said, thinking it out as she spoke. "Without nationalism or ethnicity, or some other kind of home feeling involved, I don't think these people will fight to the death. They know they're being ordered around to protect the powerful. Some more egalitarian system makes an appearance, and they might feel a conflict of loyalties."

"Retirement benefits," Maya mocked, and people laughed again.

But from the back Art said, "Why not put it in those terms? If you don't want revolution conceptualized as war, you need something else to replace it, so why not economics? Call it a change in practice. This is what the people in Praxis are doing when they talk about human capital, or bioinfrastructure- modeling everything in economic terms. It's ludicrous in a way, but it does speak to those for whom economics is the most important paradigm. That certainly includes the transnationals."

"So," Nirgal said with a grin, "we disemploy the local leaders.h.i.+p, and give their police a raise while job-retraining them."

"Yeah, like that."

Sax was shaking his head. "Can't reach them," he said. "Need force."

"Something has to be changed to avoid another sixty-one!" Nadia insisted. "It has to be rethought. Maybe there are historical models, but not the ones you've been mentioning. Something more like the velvet revolutions that ended the Soviet era, for instance."

"But those involved unhappy populations," Coyote said from the back, "and took place in a system that was falling apart. The same conditions don't obtain here. People are pretty well off. They feel lucky to be here."

"But Earth- in trouble," Sax pointed out. "Falling apart."

"Hmm," Coyote said, and he sat down by Sax to talk about it. Talking with Sax was still frustrating, but as a result of all his work with Michel, it could be done. It made Nadia happy to see Coyote conferring with him.

The discussion went on around them. People argued theories of revolution, and when they tried to talk about '61 itself, they were hampered by old grievances, and a basic lack of understanding of what had happened in those nightmare months. At one point this became especially clear, as Mikhail and some ex-Korolyov inmates began arguing about who had murdered the guards.

Sax stood and waved his AI over his head.

"Need facts-first," he croaked. "Then the dialysis- the a.n.a.lysis a.n.a.lysis."

"Good idea," Art said instantly. "If this group can put together a brief history of the war to give to the congress at large, that would be really useful. We can save the discussion of revolutionary methodology for the general meetings, okay?"

Sax nodded and sat down. Quite a few people left the meeting, and the rest calmed down, and gathered around Sax and Spencer. Now they were mostly veterans of the war, Nadia noticed, but there also were Jackie and Nirgal and some other natives. Nadia had seen some of the work Sax had done in Burroughs on the question of '61, and she was hopeful that with eyewitness accounts from other veterans, they could come to some basic understanding of the war and its ultimate causes- nearly half a century after it was over, but as Art said when she mentioned this to him, that was not atypical. He walked with a hand on her shoulder, looking unconcerned by what he had seen that morning, in his first full exposure to the fractious nature of the underground. "They don't agree about much," he admitted. "But it always starts that way."

Late on the second afternoon Nadia dropped in on the workshop devoted to the terraforming question. This was probably the most divisive issue facing them, Nadia judged, and attendance at the workshop reflected it; the room on the border of Lato's park was packed, and before the meeting began the moderator moved it out into the park, on the gra.s.s overlooking the ca.n.a.l.

The Reds in attendance insisted that terraforming itself was an obstruction to their hopes. If the Martian surface became human-viable, they argued, then it would represent an entire Earth's worth of land, and given the acute population and environmental problems on Earth, and the s.p.a.ce elevator currently being constructed there to match the one already on Mars, the gravity wells could be surmounted and ma.s.s emigration would certainly follow, and with it the disappearance of any possibility of Martian independence.

People in favor of terraforming, called greens, or just green, as they were not a party as such- argued that with a human-viable surface it would be possible to live anywhere, and at that point the underground would be on the surface, and infinitely less vulnerable to control or attack, and thus in a much better position to take over.

These two views were argued in every possible combination and variation. And Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell were both there, in the center of the meeting, making points more and more frequently- until the others in attendance stopped speaking, silenced by the authority of those two ancient antagonists. Watching them go at it yet again.

Nadia observed this slow-developing collision unhappily, anxious for her two friends. And she wasn't the only one who found the sight unsettling. Most of the people there had seen the famous videotape of Ann and Sax's argument in Underhill, and certainly their story was well known, one of the great myths of the First Hundred- a myth from a time when things had been simpler, and distinct personalities could stand for clear-cut issues. Now nothing was simple anymore, and as the old enemies faced off again in the middle of this new hodgepodge group, there was an odd electricity in the air, a mix of nostalgia and tension and collective deja vu, and a wish (perhaps just in herself, Nadia thought bitterly) that the two of them could somehow effect a reconciliation, for their own sakes and for all of them.

But there they were, standing in the center of the crowd. Ann had already lost this argument in the world itself, and her manner seemed to reflect this; she was subdued, disinterested, almost uninterested; the fiery Ann of the famous tapes was nowhere to be seen. "When the surface is viable," she said-when, Nadia noted, not if if-"they'll be here by the billions. As long as we have to live in shelters, logistics will keep the population in the millions. And that's the size it needs to be if you want a successful revolution." She shrugged. "You could do it today if you wanted. Our shelters are hidden, and theirs aren't. Break theirs open, they have no one to shoot back at- they die, you take over. Terraforming just takes away that leverage."

"I won't be a part of that," Nadia said promptly, unable to help herself. "You know what it was like in the cities in sixty-one."

Hiroko was there, sitting at the back observing, and now she spoke out for the first time. "A nation founded in genocide is not what we want."

Ann shrugged. "You want a bloodless revolution, but it's not possible."

"It is," Hiroko said. "A silk revolution. An aerogel revolution. An integral part of the areophany. That is what I want."

"Okay," Ann said. No one could argue with Hiroko, it was impossible. "But even so, it would be easier if you didn't have a viable surface. This coup you're talking about- I mean, think about it. If you take over the power plants in the major cities and say, 'We're in control now,' then the population is likely to agree, out of necessity. If there are billions of people here, however, on a viable surface, and you disemploy some people and declare yourself in control, then they're likely to say, 'In control of what?' and ignore you."

"This," Sax said slowly. "This suggests- take over- while surface nonvivable. Then continue process- as independent."

"They'll want you," Ann said. "When they see the surface open up, they'll come get you."

"Not if they collapse," Sax said.

"The transnationals are in firm control," Ann said. "Don't think they're not."

Sax was watching Ann most intently, and instead of dismissing her points, as he had in the debates of old, he seemed on the contrary hyperfocused on them, observing her every move, blinking as he considered her words, and then replying with even more hesitation than his speech problems would explain. With his altered face it sometimes seemed to Nadia that someone else was arguing with her this time, not Sax but some brother of his, a dance instructor or ex-boxer with a broken nose and a speech impediment, struggling patiently to choose the right words, and often failing.

And yet the effect was the same. "Terraforming- irreversible," he croaked. "Would be tactically hard-technically hard- to start- to hard- to start- to stop stop. Effort equal to one- made. And might not- And- environment can be a- a weapon in our case- in our cause cause. At any stage."

"How so?" several people asked, but Sax did not elaborate. He was concentrating on Ann, who was looking back at him with a curious expression, as if exasperated.

"If we're on course to viability," she said to him, "then Mars represents an incredible prize to the transnationals. Maybe even their salvation, if things go really wrong down there. They can come here and take over and have their own new world, and let Earth go to h.e.l.l. That being the case, we're out of luck. You saw what happened in sixty-one. They have giant militaries at their disposal, and that's how they'll keep their power here."

She shrugged. Sax blinked as he considered this; he even nodded. Looking at them, Nadia felt her heart wrench; they were so dispa.s.sionate it was almost as if they didn't care, or as if the parts of them that cared just barely outweighed the parts that didn't, and tipped the balance to speech. Ann like a weatherbeaten sodbuster from the early daguerreotypes, Sax incongruously charming- they both appeared to be in their early seventies, so that seeing them, and feeling her own nervous pulse, it was hard for Nadia to believe that they were over 120 now, inhumanly ancient, and so... changed, somehow- worn down, overexperienced, jaded, used up- or at the very least, long past getting too pa.s.sionate about any mere exchange of words. They knew now how little importance words had in the world. And so they fell silent, still looking into each other's eyes, locked in a dialectic nearly drained of anger.

But others more than compensated for their thoughtfulness, and the younger hotheads went at it hammer and tongs. The younger Reds regarded terraforming as nothing more than part of the imperial process; Ann was a moderate compared to them, they raged even at Hiroko in their fury-"Don't call it areoforming," one of them shouted at her, and Hiroko stared nonplussed at this tall young woman, a blond Valkyrie made nearly rabid by the use of the word-"it's call it areoforming," one of them shouted at her, and Hiroko stared nonplussed at this tall young woman, a blond Valkyrie made nearly rabid by the use of the word-"it's terraforming terraforming you mean and you mean and terraforming terraforming you're doing. Calling it areoforming is a sickening lie." you're doing. Calling it areoforming is a sickening lie."

"We terraform the planet," Jackie said to the woman, "but the planet areoforms us."

"And that's a lie too!"

Ann stared grimly at Jackie. "Your grandfather said that to me," she said, "a long time ago. As you may know. But I'm still waiting to see what areoforming areoforming is supposed to mean." is supposed to mean."

"It's happened to everyone born here," Jackie said confidently.

"How so? You were born on Mars- how are you any different?"

Jackie glowered. "Like the rest of the natives, Mars is all I know, and all I care about. I was brought up in a culture made of strands from many different Terran predecessors, mixed to a new Martian thing."

Ann shrugged. "I don't see how you're so different. You remind me of Maya."

"To h.e.l.l with you!"

"As Maya would say. And that's your areoforming. We're human and human we remain, no matter what John Boone said. He said a lot of things, but none of them ever came true."

"Not yet," Jackie said. "But the process is slowed when it's in the hands of people who haven't had a new thought for fifty years." A lot of the younger ones laughed at this. "And who are in the habit of introducing gratuitous personal insults into a political argument."

And she stood there watching Ann, looking calm and relaxed, except for the flash in her eye, which reminded Nadia again of what a power Jackie was. Almost all the natives there were behind her, no doubt about it.

"If we have not changed here," Hiroko said to Ann, "how do you explain your Reds? How do you explain the areophany?"

Ann shrugged. "They are the exceptions."

Hiroko shook her head. "There is a spirit of place in us. Landscape has profound effects on the human psyche. You are a student of landscapes, and a Red. You must acknowledge this to be true."

"True for some," Ann replied, "but not for all. Most people obviously don't feel that spirit of place. One city is much like another- in fact they're interchangeable in all the important ways. So people come to a city on Mars, and what's the difference? There isn't any. So they think no more of destroying the land outside the city than they did back on Earth."

"These people can be taught to think differently."

"No, I don't think they can. You've caught them too late. At best you can order them to act differently. But that's not being areoformed by the planet, that's indoctrination, reeducation camps, what have you. Fascist areophany."

"Persuasion," Hiroko countered. "Advocacy, argument by example, argument by argument. It need not be coercive."

"The aerogel revolution," Ann said sarcastically. "But aerogel has very little effect on missiles."

Several people spoke at once, and for a moment the thread of discourse was lost; the discussion immediately fissioned into a hundred smaller debates, as many there had something to say which they had been holding back. It was obvious they could go on like this for hour after hour, day after day.