At the midmorning break, with nothing more accomplished, Frank rose from his seat. He had heard little of the wrangle, but he had been thinking, and his lectern’s sketchpad was marked up with a rough schematic. Money, people, land, guns. Old equations, old trade-offs. But it wasn’t originality he was after; it was something that would work.
Nothing would happen at the long table itself, that was certain. Someone had to cut the knot. He got up and wandered over to the Indian and Chinese delegation, a group of about ten conferring in a camera-free side room. After the usual exchange of pleasantries he invited the two leaders, Hanavada and Sung, to take a walk on the observation bridge. After a glance at each other, and quick conversations in Mandarin and Hindi with their aides, they agreed.
So the three delegates walked out of the rooms and down the corridors to the bridge, a rigid walktube which began at the wall of their mesa and arched out over the valley and into the side of an even taller mesa to the south. The bridge’s height gave it an airy flying magnificence, and there were quite a few people walking its four kilometers, or just standing midway and taking in the view of Burroughs.
“Look,” Chalmers said to his two colleagues, “the expense of emigration is so great that you will never ease your population problems by moving them here. You know that. And you already have lots more reclaimable land in your own countries. So what you want from Mars isn’t land but resources, or money. Mars is leverage to get your share of resources back home. You’re lagging behind the North because of resources that were taken from you without payment during the colonial years, and you should have repayment for that now.”
“I am afraid that in a very real sense the colonial period never ended,” Hanavada said politely.
Chalmers nodded. “That’s what transnational capitalism means— we’re all colonies now. And there’s tremendous pressure on us here to alter the treaty so that most of the profits from local mining become the property of the transnationals. The developed nations are feeling that very strongly.”
“This we know,” Hanavada said, nodding.
“Okay. And now you’ve made the pitch for proportional emigration, which is just as logical as allotting profits proportional to investment. But neither of these proposals is in your best interest. The emigration would be a drop in the bucket to you, but the money wouldn’t. Meanwhile the developed nations have a new population problem, so a chance at a larger share of emigration would be welcome. And they can spare the money, which would mostly go to transnationals anyway and become free-floating capital, outside any national control. So why shouldn’t the developed nations give you more of it? It wouldn’t really be coming out of their pocket anyway.”
Sung nodded quickly, looking solemn. Perhaps they had foreseen this response, and had made their proposal to stimulate it, and were waiting for him to play his part. But that just made it easier. “Do you think your governments will agree to such a trade?” Sung asked.
“Yes,” Chalmers said. “What is it but governments reasserting their power over the transnationals? Sharing the profits resembles in a way your old nationalization movements, only this time all countries would benefit. Internationalization, if you will.”
“It will cut down on investments by the corporations,” Hanavada noted.
“Which will please the Reds,” Chalmers said. “Please most of the MarsFirst group, in fact.”
“And your government?” Hanavada asked.
“I can guarantee it.” Actually the administration would be a problem. But Frank would deal with them when the time came, they were a bunch of Chamber of Commerce kids these days, arrogant but stupid. Tell them it was this or a Third World Mars, a Chinese Mars, a Hindu-Chinese Mars, with little brown people and cows unmolested in the walktubes. They would come around. In fact they would hide behind his knees yelling for protection, Grandpa Chalmers please save me from the yellow horde.
He watched the Indian and the Chinese look at each other, in a completely scrutable consultation. “Hell,” he said, “this is what you were hoping for, right?”
“Perhaps we should work on some figures,” Hanavada said.
• • •
It took much of the next month to implement the compromise, as it entailed a whole set of corollary compromises to get all the voting delegations to accept it. Every nation’s delegate had to get a cut to show the folks back home. And there was Washington to be convinced as well; in the end Frank had to go over the heads of the kids right to the President, who was only a bit older than them, but could see a deal when it was poking him in the sternum. So Frank was busy, meetings nearly sixteen hours a day in his old pattern, as familiar as the sunrise. In the end, mollifying transnat lobbyists like Andy Jahns was the hardest part— essentially impossible, as the deal was being made at their expense and they knew it. They put all the pressure they could on the northern governments and on their flags of convenience, and that was considerable, as evidenced by the President’s scared irritability, and the defection of Singapore and Sofia from the deal. But Frank convinced the President, even across all that space, even across the deep psychological barrier of the time lag. And he used the same arguments with every other northern government. If you give in to the transnationals, he would say, then they’re the real government of the world. This is the chance to assert the interests of you and your population over those free-floating accumulations of capital which are very near to holding the ultimate power on earth! You need to get them on the leash somehow!
And it was the same at the U.N., for every official there. “Who do you want to be the real world government? You or them?”
Still, it was a close thing. The pressures the transnats could bring to bear were awesome, it was impressive to watch. Subarashii and Armscor and Shellalco were each bigger than all but the ten largest countries or commonwealths, and they really put out the funds. Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver. They needed a great network of tiny lines, staked into place along every millimeter of the circumference. And as the giant heaved to free itself and start trampling about, they had to rush from side to side, throw new lines over the monster, hammer new little pin stakes into place. Rush around making quarter-hour pin-stake appointments, for sixteen hours a day. Mad Dutch boy juggling.
Andy Jahns, one of Frank’s oldest corporate contacts, took him to dinner one night. Andy was angry with Chalmers, naturally, but tried to hide it, as the evening’s business consisted of the offer of a bribe thinly disguised, accompanied by threats thinly veiled. Business as usual, in other words. He offered Chalmers a position as head of a foundation which was being set up by the Earth-to-Mars transport consortium— the old aerospace industries, with their old Pentagon stash still sloshing around in their pockets. This new foundation would assist the consortium to make policy, and advise the U.N. on Mars-related matters. The position was to begin after his tenure as Secretary for Mars was over, to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.
“It sounds marvelous,” Chalmers said. “I’m very interested indeed.” And over the course of the dinner he convinced Jahns he was sincere. Not only about taking the position in the foundation, but in working for the consortium immediately. This was work indeed, but he was good at it; he could see the suspicion slowly leak out of Jahns as the evening wore on. The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos— idiots, in short. But useful idiots. “I’ll do what I can,” Chalmers promised energetically, and outlined some strategies he would start to pursue at once. Talk to the Chinese about their need for land, get Congress back to the idea of a fair return on investments. Certainly. Make promises here and some of the pressure would subside— meanwhile the work could go on. There was no p
leasure like double-crossing a crook.
So he went back to the conference table and carried on as before. The walk on the bridge, as it was now being called (others called it the Chalmers Shift), had broken the impasse. February 6th, 2057— Ls = 144, M-15: a red-letter date in the history of diplomacy. Now it was a matter of giving everyone else a piece, and fixing the actual numbers. As this process ground along Chalmers talked with all the first hundred observers there, reassuring them and checking their opinions. Sax, it turned out, was upset with him, because he thought that if the transnats ceased investment his terraforming would have to slow considerably. He saw all the arriving business as heat. And yet Ann too was upset with him, because a new treaty based on the shift would allow both emigration and investment, and she and the Reds had been hoping for a treaty that would give Mars a kind of world park status. That kind of disconnection from reality made him crazy. “I’ve just saved you fifty million Chinese immigrants,” he yelled at her, “and you bitch at me because I haven’t managed to send everyone back home. You bitch because I didn’t work a miracle and turn this rock into a holy shrine, right next door to a world that’s beginning to look like Calcutta on a bad day. Ann, Ann, Ann. What would you have done? What would you have done except stalk around glaring at every single fucking thing people said, and convincing everyone that you’re from Mars? Jesus Christ. Go out and play with your rocks and leave the politics to people who can think.”
“Remember what thinking is, Frank,” she said. Somehow he had made her smile for a second there, in the middle of his tirade. But she laid the same old wild glare on him before she left.
But Maya, now— Maya was pleased with him. He could feel her gaze on him when he talked in the public meetings. Millions of people watching, and he felt only that gaze. It made him angry. She was full of admiration for the bridge walk, and he told her only what she would be pleased to hear about the backstage compromises he was making in order to get it accepted. She began joining him every evening during the cocktail hour, approaching him when the first press of critics and supplicants had ebbed, standing by his side through the second and third waves, watching and easing things along with her laugh, and extricating him from time to time with reminders that they had to go out and eat. Then they would go out onto restaurant terraces under the stars, and eat and then sip coffee, looking over the orange tiles and roof gardens under one of the big mesa-topping tents, feeling the evening breeze just as if they were out in the open. The MarsFirst crowd had committed themselves to his plan, so he had most of the locals, and he had the home office, and those were the two most important single parties in the whole process, he judged, aside from the transnational leadership, which he could do little about. So it was only a matter of time before he would work the deal. As he would tell her, sometimes, late in the evenings when he had fallen a bit under her spell. Been calmed by her. “Between us we’ll get it done,” he would say as he looked up at the vivid stars in the sky, unable to meet her penetrating gaze.
And one night she kept returning to his side during the cocktail gathering. With all the others they watched the terran news reports of the day’s progress, and saw again how oddly distorted and flattened they appeared, like tiny players in an incomprehensible soap opera. And then they left together, and ate, and then went walking down the wide grassy boulevards, eventually coming to his room in the lower town. And she accompanied him inside. Without explanation or comment, in Maya’s usual way. As if she always did this. It just happened, was happening. She was in his room, and then in his arms, hugging him. They lay on his bed and she kissed him. The shock of it was such that Frank felt completely removed from his body, his flesh was like rubber. This was beginning to worry him when the sheer animal presence of her broke through the shock, body spoke to body and he suddenly he could feel her again— sensation flooded back into him, and he responded to it with animal intensity. It had been a long time.
Afterward she walked around with a white sheet draped over her like a cape, getting a glass of water. “I like the way you work those people,” she said, her back to him. She drank from the glass, looked over her shoulder with her old affectionate grin, with that full and open gaze of hers— a gaze that seemed so insightful, like lazed light shining right through him, that suddenly he felt not only naked, but exposed. He pulled the remaining sheet up over his hip, then felt that he had given himself away. Surely she would see, see the way the air turned to cold water in his lungs, the way his stomach knotted, the way his feet froze. He blinked, returned her smile. He knew it was a wan and crooked smile, but feeling his face like a stiff mask over his real flesh he took comfort. No one could accurately read emotions from facial expressions, that was all a lie, a bogus relationship as in palm reading or astrology. So he was safe.
But after that night she began spending a lot of time with him, both in public and private. She joined him at the receptions given every night by one or another of the national offices; she sat beside him at many of the group dinners; she sailed the hot sea of conversation with him afterward, as they watched the bad news from Terra, or sat in the close knot of the first hundred. And she went with him to his room at night, or even more disturbing, took him to hers.
And all without any sign of what she wanted from him. He could only conclude that she knew she did not have to speak of it. That just being with him was enough, that he would know what she wanted, and try his best to do it without her ever having to say a word. That she would get what she wanted. For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them— if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful. That was prestige that Maya did not need, but she knew what she wanted. And wasn’t he doing it, after all? Infuriating a large part of his power base, to forge a treaty that would please no one but a handful of locals? Yes, she was getting what she wanted. And all without a word, or without a direct word. Nothing but praise and affection.
So that as he talked in the endless caucus conferences, carefully hammering out the wording of each clause of the new treaty, playing James Madison to this strange simulacrum of a constitutional convention, Spencer and Samantha and Maya would wander around helping him, and Maya would watch him with the most fractional smile, which revealed to him alone her approval, her pride in him. And then, energized by the day’s work, he would roam the evening reception, and she would laugh at him and stand at his side and chatter with all the rest, a kind of consort. Hell, a consort! And at night shower him with kisses, until it was impossible to imagine that she did not like him.
Which was intolerable. That it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best. . . that she should be so stupid.. . . It was shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever before. How hidden the true self is, he thought, under the phenomenological mask. In reality they were all actors all the time, playing their video parts, and there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore; over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten lost. And now they were all hollow.
Or perhaps it was just him. Because she seemed so real! Her laughter, her white hair, her passion, my God: her sweaty skin and the ribs underneath it, ribs that slid back and forth under his fingers like the slats of a fence, ribs that clamped down on the paroxysms of orgasm. A true self, didn’t it have to be so? Didn’t it? He could hardly believe otherwise. A true self.
But sadly deceived. One morning he awoke from a dream of John. It was from their time together on the space station, when they had been young. Except in the dream they had been old, and John had not died and yet he had; he spoke as a ghost, aware that he had died and that Frank had killed him, yet aware also of everything that had happened since, and free of all anger or blame. It was just something that had happened, like the time John had gotten
the first landing assignment, or had taken Maya away on the Ares. A lot of things had happened between them one way and another, but they were still friends, still brothers. They could talk, they understood each other. Feeling the horror of that Frank had groaned through the dream, and tried to fold in on himself, and awakened. It was hot, his skin was sweaty. Maya was sitting up, her hair wild, her breasts swinging loosely between her arms. “What’s wrong!” she was saying. “What’s wrong!”
“Nothing!” he cried, and got up and padded to the bathroom. But she came after him, put her hands on him. “Frank, what was it?”
“Nothing,” he shouted, involuntarily jerking out of her grip. “Can’t you leave me alone!”
“Of course,” she said, hurt. A flush of anger: “Of course I can.” And she walked out of the bathroom.
“Of course you can!” he shouted after her, suddenly furious at her stupidity, to be so ignorant of him, so vulnerable to him, when it was all an act anyway. “Now that you’ve got what you want from me!”
“What does that mean?” she said, reappearing instantly in the bathroom doorway, a sheet around her.
“You know what I mean,” he said bitterly. “You’ve got what you wanted from the treaty, haven’t you. And you never would have, without me.”
She stood there, hands on her hips, watching him. The sheet was loose around her hips and she looked like the French figure of Liberty, very beautiful and very dangerous, her mouth a tight line. She shook her head in disgust and walked away. “You don’t have the faintest idea, do you,” she said.
He followed her. “What do you mean?”
She threw the sheet away and stepped violently into her underwear, yanked it up over her bottom. As she dressed she hurled short sentences at him. “You don’t know anything about what other people think. You don’t even know what you think. What do you want out of the treaty? You, Frank Chalmers? You don’t know. It’s only what I want, what Sax wants, what Helmut wants. What any of them want. You yourself have no opinion. Whatever is easiest to manage. Whatever leaves you in control at the end.
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