“What will we do?” Art asked.
At first no one answered.
Finally Hiroko said, “We’ll have to ask for shelter. I think Dorsa Brevia has the most room.”
“What about the congress?” Art asked, reminded of it by the mention of Dorsa Brevia.
“I think we need it now more than ever,” Hiroko said.
Maya was frowning. “It could be dangerous to congregate,” she pointed out. “You’ve told a lot of people about this.”
“We had to,” Hiroko said. “That’s the point of it.” She looked around at them all, and even Maya did not dare contradict her. “Now we have to take the risk.”
PART 7
—— What is to Be Done?
The few big buildings in Sabishii were faced with polished stone, picked for colors that were unusual on Mars: alabaster, jade, malachite, yellow jasper, turquoise, onyx, lapis lazuli. The smaller buildings were wooden. After traveling by night and hiding by day, the visitors found it a pleasure to walk in the sunlight between low wooden buildings, under plane trees and fire maples, through stone gardens and across wide boulevards of streetgrass, past canals lined by cypress, which occasionally widened into lily-covered ponds, crossed by high arching bridges. They were almost on the equator here, and winter meant nothing; even at aphelion hibiscus and rhododendron were flowering, and pine trees and many varieties of bamboo shot high into the warm breezy air.
The ancient Japanese greeted their visitors as old and valued friends. The Sabishii issei dressed in copper jumpsuits, went barefoot, and wore long ponytails, and many earrings and necklaces. One of them, bald, with a wispy white beard and a deeply wrinkled face, took the visitors on a walk, to stretch their legs after their long drives. His name was Kenji, and he had been the first Japanese to step on Mars, though no one remembered that anymore.
At the city wail they looked out at enormous boulders balancing on nearby hilltops, carved into one fantastic shape after another.
“Have you ever been to the Medusae Fossae?”
Kenji only smiled and shook his head. The kami stones on the hills were honeycombed with rooms and storage spaces, he told them, and along with the mohole mound maze they now could house a very great number of people, as many as twenty thousand, for as long as a year. The visitors nodded. It seemed possible it might become necessary.
Kenji took them back to the oldest part of town, where the visitors had been given rooms in the original compound. The rooms were smaller and more spare than most of the town’s student apartments, and had a patina of age and use that made them more like nests than rooms. The issei still slept in some of them.
As the visitors walked through these rooms, they did not look at each other. The contrast between their history and those of the Sabishiians was too stark. They stared at the furniture, disturbed, distracted, withdrawn. And after that evening’s meal, after a lot of sake had gone down the hatches, one said, “If only we had done something like this.”
Nanao began to play a bamboo flute.
“It was easier for us,” Kenji said. “We were all Japanese together. We had a model.”
“It doesn’t seem much like the Japan I remember.”
“No. But that isn’t the true Japan.”
They took their cups and a few bottles, and climbed up stairs to a pavilion on top of a wooden tower next to their compound. Up there they could see the trees and rooftops of the city, and the jagged array of boulders standing on the black skysill. It was the last hour of twilight, and except for a wedge of lavender in the west the sky was a rich midnight blue, liberally flecked with stars. A string of paper lanterns hung in a grove of fire maples below.
“We are the true Japanese. What you see in Tokyo today is transnational. There is another Japan. We can never go back to that, of course. It was a feudal culture in any case, and had features we cannot accept. But what we do here has its roots in that culture. We are trying to find a new way, a way which rediscovers the old one, or reinvents it, for this new place.”
“Kasei Nippon.”
“Yes, but not just for Mars! For Japan also. As a model for them, you see? An example of what they can become.”
And so they drank rice wine under the stars. Nanao played his flute, and down in the park under the paper lanterns someone laughed. The visitors sat leaning against each other, thinking. They talked for a while about all the sanctuaries, how different they were and yet how much they had in common.
“This congress is a good idea.”
The visitors nodded, in various degrees of assent.
“It’s just what we need. I mean, we have been getting together to celebrate John’s festival for how many years now? And it’s been good. Very pleasant. Very important. We have needed it, for our own sakes. But now things are changing fast. We cant pretend to be a cabal. We have to deal with the rest of them.”
They talked specifics for a while: attendants at the congress, security measures, problem issues.
“Who attacked the egg—the egg?”
“A security team from Burroughs. Subarashii and Armscor have organized what they call a sabotage investigation unit, and they’ve gotten the Transitional Authority to bless the operation. They’ll be coming south again, no doubt of that. We have almost waited too long.”
“They got the institution—the information—from me?”
A snort. “You should resist thinking you are so important.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the return of the elevator driving all this.”
“And they are building one for Earth as well. And so . . .”
“We had better act.”
Then as the stone sake bottles kept going around, and emptying, they gave up on such seriousness, and talked about the past year, things they had seen in the outback, gossip about mutual acquaintances, new jokes heard. Nanao got out a packet of balloons, and they filled them and tossed them out into the city’s night breeze, and watched them float down onto the trees and the old habitats. They passed around a canister of nitrous oxide, took breaths and laughed. The stars made a thick net overhead. One told stories of space, of the asteroid belt. They tried to nick exposed bits of wood with their pocket knives and failed. “This congress will be what we call nema-washi. Preparing the ground.”
Two stood, arms around each other, and swayed until they had caught their balance, then held out their little cups in a toast.
“Next year on Olympus.”
“Next year on Olympus,” the others repeated, and drank.
It was Ls 180, M-year 40, when they began to arrive at Dorsa Brevia, in small cars and planes from all over the south. A group of Reds and caravan Arabs checked people’s credentials in the wasteland approaches, and more Reds and Bogdanovists were stationed in bunkers located all around the dorsa, armed, in case there was any trouble. The Sabishiian intelligence experts, however, thought that the conference was unknown in Burroughs or Hellas or Sheffield, and when they explained why they thought so, people tended to relax, for clearly they had penetrated far into the hails of UNTA, and indeed throughout the whole structure of transnational power on Mars. That was another advantage to the demimonde; they could work in both directions.
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 canalside 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 assumed 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 canalside row of open-air kitchens, Nadia passed 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 Jürgen and Max and Sibilla and Priska were chatting happily with a group standing around them, switching languages as if they were translation Als, 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 Marseillaise.”
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 classic Bogdanovist style. Nadia felt a prick 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 shirts bare chests, a lot of necklaces and earrings and other jewelry. All the Bogdanovists wore jewelry containing pieces of phobosite, the black chunks shining 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 shirts and pantaloons worked their way around the outer perimeter of the circle, passing 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 passing 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, Goumia, 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 worship.”
She spread her hands wide, and her closest associates walked humming into the center of the circle. Others followed suit, until the space 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 assigned 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 asserted that 2061 taught them that they needed a complete assessment of all the military forces in the Martian system. “This is a necessary precondition 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 mass ecotage, and armed assault 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 bloody mess. Listen to me, now—there can be no such thing as a successful armed revolution on Mars. The life-support systems are to
o vulnerable.”
Sax croaked, “But if the surface is vivable—is 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 leadership and their bodyguards.”
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