Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome. Recently he had made a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to attacking what he and Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they were facing, and so in theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes they were just too hard.

  As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the global-local problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent. Still, as it was probably the worst outstanding problem…

  Art went to the Reds.The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, one of Nirgal and Jackie’s creche mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their rover camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he was now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big empty vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.

  The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the caldera. They sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments, in the glare of a late-afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant silhouetted country of the caldera.

  “So what would you like to see in this constitution?” Art said.

  He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each other, somewhat taken aback. “Ideally,” Marion said after a while, “we’d like to be living on the primal planet, in caves and cliff dwellings, or excavated crater rings. No big cities, no terraforming.”

  “You’d have to stay suited all the time.”

  “That’s right. We don’t mind that.”

  “Well.” Art thought it over. “Okay, but let’s start from now. Given the situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?”

  “No further terraforming.”

  “The cable gone, and no more immigration.”

  “In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.”

  They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his consternation show.

  He said, “Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this point?”

  “It’s not clear,” Tiu said. “But if you stopped the industrial pumping, any further growth would certainly be very slow. It might even lose ground, as with this ice age that’s starting.”

  “Isn’t that what some people call ecopoesis?”

  “No. The ecopoets just use biological methods to create changes in the atmosphere and on the surface, but they’re very intensive with them. We think they all should stop, ecopoets or industrialists or whatever.”

  “But especially the heavy industrial methods,” Marion said. “And most especially the inundation of the north. That’s simply criminal. We’ll blow up those stations no matter what happens here, if they don’t stop.”

  Art gestured out at the huge stony caldera. “The higher elevations look pretty much the same, right?”

  They weren’t willing to admit that. Irishka said, “Even the high ground shows ice deposition and plant life. The atmosphere lofts high here, remember. No place escapes when the winds are strong.”

  “What if we tented the four big calderas?” Art said. “Kept them sterile underneath, with the original atmospheric pressure and mix? Those would be huge wilderness parks, preserved in the true primal state.”

  “Parks are just what they would be.”

  “I know. But we have to work with what we have now, right? We can’t go back to m-1 and rerun the whole thing. And given the current situation, it might be good to preserve three or four big places in the original state, or close to it.”

  “It would be nice to have some canyons protected as well,” Tiu said tentatively. Clearly they had not considered this kind of possibility before; and it was not really satisfactory to them, Art could see. But the current situation could not be wished away, they had to start from there.

  “Or Argyre Basin.”

  “At the very least, keep Argyre dry.”

  Art nodded encouragingly. “Combine that kind of preservation with the atmosphere limits set in the Dorsa Brevia document. That’s a five-kilometer breathable ceiling, and there’s a hell of a lot of land above five kilometers that would remain relatively pristine. It won’t take the northern ocean away, but nothing’s going to do that now. Some form of slow ecopoesis is about the best you can hope for at this point, right?”

  Perhaps that was putting it too baldly. The Reds stared down into Pavonis caldera unhappily, thinking their own thoughts.

  “Say the Reds come on board,” Art said to Nadia. “What do you think the next worst problem is?”

  “What?” She had been nearly asleep, listening to some tinny old jazz from her AI. “Ah. Art.” Her voice was low and quiet, the Russian accent light but distinct. She sat slumped on the couch. A pile of paper balls lay around her feet, like pieces of some structure she was putting together. The Martian way of life. Her face was oval under a cap of straight white hair, the wrinkles of her skin somehow wearing away, as if she were a pebble in the stream of years. She opened her flecked eyes, luminous and arresting under their Cossack eyelids. A beautiful face, looking now at Art perfectly relaxed. “The next worst problem.”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled. Where did that calmness come from, that relaxed smile? She wasn’t worried about anything these days. Art found it surprising, given the political high-wire act they were performing. But then again it was politics, not war. And just as Nadia had been terribly frightened during the revolution, always tense, always expecting disaster, she was now always relatively calm. As if to say, nothing that happens here matters all that much — tinker with the details all you want — my friends are safe, the war is over, this that remains is a kind of game, or work like construction work, full of pleasures.

  Art moved around to the back of the couch, massaged her shoulders. “Ah,” she said. “Problems. Well, there are a lot of problems that are about equally sticky.” “Like what?”

  “Like, I wonder if the Mahjaris will be able to adapt to democracy. I wonder if everyone will accept Vlad and Marina’s eco-economics. I wonder if we can make a decent police. I wonder if Jackie will try to create a system with a strong president, and use the natives’ numerical superiority to become queen.” She looked over her shoulder, laughed at Art’s expression. “I wonder about a lot of things. Should I go on?”

  “Maybe not.”

  She laughed. “You go on. That feels good. These problems — they aren’t so hard. We’ll just keep going to the table and pounding away at them. Maybe you could talk to Zeyk.”

  “Okay.”

  “But now do my neck.”

  Art went to talk to Zeyk and Nazik that very night, after Nadia had fallen asleep. “So what’s the Mahjari view of all this?” he asked.

  Zeyk growled. “Please don’t ask stupid questions,” he said. “Sunnis are fighting Shiites — Lebanon is devastated — the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states — the North African countries are a metanat — Syria and Iraq hate each other — Iraq and Egypt hate each other — we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites — and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians too — and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouin from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?” He shook his head darkly.

  “I guess you say it’s a stupid question,” Art said. “Sorry. Thinking in constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this — what do you think of it?”

  Nazik laughed. “You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran Mahjaris think. He knows them only too well.”

  “Too well,” Zeyk repeated.

  “Do you think the human-rights section will go with them?”

  Zeyk frowned. “No doubt we will sign the constitution.”

  “But these rights … I thought there were no Arab democracies still?”

  “What do you mean? There’s Palestine, Egyp
t… Anyway it’s Mars we are concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the very beginning.”

  “Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?”

  “Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don’t think the new constitution will end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader yourself, yes?”

  Art laughed uncomfortably. “I’m just a messenger.”

  Zeyk shook his head. “Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you should go, if you want to know what the Qah-irans think. He is our king now.”

  He looked as if he had bit into something sour, and Art said, “So what does he want, do you think?”

  “He is Jackie’s creature,” Zeyk muttered, “nothingmore.”

  “I should think that would be a strike against him.”

  Zeyk shrugged.

  “It depends who you talk to,” Nazik said. “For the older Muslim immigrants, it is a bad association, because although Jackie is very powerful, she has had more than one consort, and so Antar looks…”

  “Compromised,” Art suggested, forestalling some other word from the glowering Zeyk.

  “Yes,” Nazik said. “But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And all of the people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become even more powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are more native than Arab, I think. It’s Mars that matters to them more than Islam. From that point of view, a close association with the Zygote ectogenes is a good thing. The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new Mars — especially Nirgal, of course, but with him off to Earth, there’s a certain transfer of his influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to Antar.”

  “I don’t like him,” Zeyk said.

  Nazik smiled at her husband. “You don’t like how many of the native Muslims are following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It could be time for retirement.”

  “I don’t see why,” Zeyk objected. “If we’re going to live a thousand years, then what difference does a hundred make?”

  Art and Nazik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was, the first time Art had ever seen him smile.

  In fact, age didn’t matter. People wandered around, old or young or somewhere in between, talking and arguing, and it –would have been an odd thing for the length of someone’s lifetime to become a factor in such discussions.

  And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway. If you were born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a way that no Terran could even imagine — not just because of the whole complex of areorealities they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn’t know. Terrans knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that cultural and biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the screen images, but that wasn’t enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one reason Art was glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth; he would learn what they were up against.

  But most of the natives wouldn’t. And the revolution had gone to their heads. Despite their cleverness at the table in working the constitution toward a form that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive; they had no idea how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit — led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic as ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars, and her devotion to her grandfather’s ideals, and her essential goodwill, even innocence; the college girl who wanted passionately for the world to be just.

  Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly seemed to want to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on Mars now, and seven million of those had been born there; and almost every single one of these natives could be counted on to support the native political parties, usually Free Mars.

  “It’s dangerous,” Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly meeting with Nadia. “When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call ‘census voting/ where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes; and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those circumstances.”

  “So what can we do?” Nadia asked.

  “Well, some of it we’re doing already, designing structures that spread the power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism. Decentralization is important, because it creates a lot of small local majorities. Another strategy is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and balances, so that the government’s a kind of cat’s cradle of competing forces. This is called polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can.”

  “Maybe we’re a bit too polyarchic right now,” Art said.

  “Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You make some big part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and then draft ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get professional staff help, but make the decisions themselves.”

  “I’ve never heard of that one,” Nadia said.

  “No. It’s been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think it’s really worth considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an advantage. You get a letter in the mail; oh no; you’re drafted to do two years in congress. It’s a drag, but on the other hand it’s a kind of distinction too, a chance to add something to the public discourse. Citizen government.”

  “I like that,” Nadia said.

  “Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some version of the Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates in ranked fashion, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get some points for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to appeal outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation, and in the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed before.”

  “Interesting,” Nadia exclaimed. “Like trusses in a wall.”

  “Yes.” Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran “fractured societies” that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, Armenia … as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit; these had been bloody, bloody lands.

  “It seems like political structures can only do so much,” he said.

  “True,” Nadia said, “but we don’t have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been marginalized by the terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull even them into the process.”

  Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

  “You’re happy,” Art said.

  She didn’t hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the travelers, she said to Sax, “It was so nice to find that political science had abstracted something useful in all these years.”

  Eight minutes later his reply came in. “I never understood why they call it that.”

  Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia Cherneshevsky, laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going to pull it off.

  So he went back to the big table, ready to tackle the next-worst problem. That brought him back to earth again. There were a hundred next-worst problems, all small until you actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In all the squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some areas, in fact, it seemed to be get
ting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa Brevia document were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and Marina’s eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not something that should be codified in the constitution. Some complained because it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, and people listened. “This new economy that’s being proposed,” he declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, “is a radical and unprecedented intrusion of government into business.”

  Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over.

  Vlad glared at him. Stooped, massive-headed, shaggy-eyebrowed, Vlad rarely if ever spoke in public; he hadn’t said a thing in the congress so far. Slowly the greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art felt a quiver of anticipation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred, Vlad was perhaps the most brilliant — and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic. Old when they had left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron labs early on and stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in seclusion with Ursula Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first ones. No one knew anything for certain about the three of them, they were a limit-case illustration of the insular nature of other people’s relationships; but this of course did not stop gossip, on the contrary, people talked about them all the time, saying that Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; or that Ursula had done most of the work on the longevity treatment, and Marina most of the work on eco-economics; or that they were a perfectly balanced equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that emerged from Acheron; or that Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives as fronts for his work in the separate fields of biology and economics. But no one knew for sure, for none of the three ever said a word about it.