Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Art slurped his kava, watched her sympathetically. He liked her, she liked him. They were already a kind of couple. “You help me with this damned council stuff!” she said, feeling bleak as all her technofantasies slipped away.

  “Oh I will.”

  “And then, well. We’ll see.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, and smiled.

  So there she was, stuck on Pavonis Mons. The new government was assembling up there, moving from the warehouses into Sheffield proper, occupying the blocky polished stone-faced buildings abandoned by the metanats; there was an argument of course over whether they were going to be compensated for these buildings and the rest of their infrastructure, or whether it had all been “globalized” or “co-opted” by independence and the new order. “Compensate them,” Nadia growled at Charlotte, glowering. But it did not appear that the presidency of Mars was the kind of presidency that caused people to jump at her word.

  In any case the government was moving in, Sheffield becoming, if not the capital, then at least the temporary seat of the global government. With Burroughs drowned and Sabishii burned, there was no other obvious place to put it, and in truth it didn’t look to Nadia like any of the other tent towns wanted to have it. People spoke of building a new capital city, but that would take time, and meanwhile they had to meet somewhere. So around the piste to Sheffield they retired, inside its tent, under its dark sky. In the shadow of the elevator cable, rising from its eastern neighborhood straight and black, like a flaw in reality.

  Nadia found an apartment in the westernmost tent, behind the rim park, up on the fourth floor where she had a fine view down into Pavonis’s awesome caldera. Art took an apartment in the ground floor of the same building, at the back; apparently the caldera gave him vertigo. But there he was, and the Praxis office was in a nearby office building, a cube of polished jasper as big as a city block, lined with chrome blue windows.

  Fine. She was there. Time to take a deep breath and do the work asked of her. It was like a bad dream in which the constitutional congress had suddenly been extended for three years, three m-years.

  She began with the intention of getting off the mountain occasionally and joining some construction project or other. Of course she would perform her duties on the council, but working on an increase in greenhouse gas output, for instance, looked good, combining as it did technical problems and the politics of conforming to the new environmental regulatory regime. It would get her out into the back country, where a lot of the feedstocks for the greenhouse gases were located. From there she could do her council business over the wrist.

  But events conspired to keep her in Sheffield. It was one thing after another — nothing particularly important or interesting, compared to the congress itself, but the details necessary to get things rolling. It was somewhat as Charlotte had said; after the design phase, the endless minutiae of construction. Detail after detail.

  She had to expect this, she had to be patient. She would work through the first rush and then get away. In the meantime, along with the start-up process, the media wanted her, the new UN Martian Office wanted her, very interested in the new immigration policies and procedures; the other council members wanted her. Where would the council meet? How often? What were its rules of operation? Nadia convinced the other six councillors to hire Charlotte to be council secretary and protocol chief, and after that Charlotte hired a big crew of assistants from Dorsa Brevia. So they had the start of a staff. And Mikhail also had a great fund of practical experience in government from Bogdanov Vishniac. So there were people better suited than Nadia to do this work; but still she was called in a million times a day to confer, discuss, decide, appoint, adjudicate, arbitrate, administrate. It was endless.

  And then when Nadia did clear time for herself, forcibly, it turned out that being president made it very difficult to join any particular project. Everything going on was now part of a tent or a co-op; very often they were commercial enterprises, involved in transactions that were part nonprofit public works, part competitive market. So to have the president of Mars join any given co-op would be a sign of official patronage, and couldn’t be allowed if one wanted to be fair. It was a conflict of interest.

  “Shit!” she said to Art, accusingly.

  He shrugged, tried to pretend he hadn’t known.

  But there was no way out. She was a prisoner of power. She had to study the situation as if it were an engineering problem, like trying to exert force in some difficult medium. Say she wanted to build greenhouse-gas factories. She was constrained from joining any factory co-op in particular. Therefore she had to do it some other way. Emergence at a higher level: she could perhaps coordinate co-ops.

  There seemed to her good reasons to promote the building of greenhouse-gas factories. The Year Without Summer had extended to include a series of violent storms that had dropped off the Great Escarpment into the north, and most meteorologists agreed these “Hadley cross-equatorial storms” had been caused by the orbital mirrors’ removal, and the resulting sudden drop in insolation. A full ice age was deemed a distinct possibility; and pumping up greenhouse gases seemed to be one of the best ways to counter it. So Nadia asked Charlotte to initiate a conference to come back with recommendations for forestalling an ice age. Charlotte contacted people in Da Vinci and Sabishii and elsewhere, and soon she had a conference scheduled to take place in Sabishii, named, by some Da Vinci saxaclone no doubt, the “Insolation Loss Effects Abatement Meeting M-53.”

  Nadia, however, never made itto this conference. She got caught up by affairs in Sheffield instead, mostly instituting the new economic system, which she thought important enough to keep her there. The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics, fleshing out the bones drawn up in the constitution. They directed co-ops that had existed before the revolution to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives, and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every Martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year’s wages to the firm’s equity fund, wages earned in apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling. This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to a yearly review by the councils. Credit and capital were obtained from central cooperative banks, or the global government’s start-up fund, or helper organizations such as Praxis and the Swiss. On the next level up, co-ops in the same industries or services were associating for larger projects, and also sending representatives to industry guilds, which established professional practice boards, arbitration and mediation centers, and trade associations.

  The economic commission was also establishing a Martian currency, for internal use and for exchanges with Terran currencies. The commission wanted a currency that was resistant to Terran speculation, but in the absence of a Martian stock market, the full force of Terran investment tended to fall on the currency itself, as the only investment game being offered. This tended to inflate the value of the Martian sequin in Terran money markets, and in the old days it would probably have blown the sequin’s value right through the roof, to Mars’s disadvantage in trade balances; but as the fracturing metanats continued to struggle against cooperativization back on Earth, Terran finance remained in some disarray, and did not have its old house-on-fire intensity. So the sequin
ended up strong on Earth, but not too strong; and on Mars it was just money. Praxis was very helpful in this process, as they became a kind of federal bank for the new economy, providing interest-free loans and serving as a mediated exchange with Terran currencies.

  So given all this, the executive council was meeting for long hours every day to discuss legislation and other government programs. It was so time-consuming that Nadia almost forgot there was a conference she had initiated going on at the same time in Sabishii. On good nights, however, she spent a last hour or two on-screen with friends in Sabishii, and it looked like things were going fairly well there too. Many of Mars’s environmental scientists were on hand, and they were in agreement that massively increasing greenhouse-gas emissions would ease the effects of the mirror loss. Of course CO2 was the easiest greenhouse gas to emit, but even without using it — as they were still trying to reduce it in the atmosphere to breathable levels — the consensus was that the more complex and powerful gases could be created and released in the quantities needed. And at first they did not think this would be a problem, politically; the constitution legislated an atmosphere no thicker than 350 millibars at the six-kilometer contour, but said nothing about what gases could be used to create this pressure. If the halocarbons and other greenhouse gases in the Russell cocktail were pumped out until they formed one hundred parts per million of the atmosphere, rather than the twenty-seven parts per million that were currently up there, then heat retention would rise by several degrees K, they calculated, and an ice age would be forestalled, or at least greatly shortened. So the plan called for production and release of tons of carbon tetrafluoride, hexafluoroethane, sulfur hex-afluoride, methane, nitrous oxide, and trace elements of other chemicals which helped to decrease the rate at which UV radiation destroyed these halocarbons.

  Completing the melting of the North Sea ice was the other obvious abatement strategy most often mentioned at the conference. Until it was all liquid, the albedo of the ice was bouncing a lot of energy back into space, and a truly lively water cycle was somewhat capped off. If they could get a liquid ocean, or, given how far north it was, a summer-liquid ocean, then any ice age would be done for, and terraformation essentially complete: they would have robust currents, waves, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, melting, streams, rivers, deltas — the full hydrological cycle. This was a primary goal, and so there was a variety of methods being proposed to speed the melting of the ice: feeding nuclear-power-plant exhaust heat into the ocean, scattering black algae on the ice, deploying microwave and ultrasound transmitters as heaters, even sailing big icebreakers through the shallow pack to aid the breakup.

  Of course the increased greenhouse gases would help here as well; the ocean’s surface ice would melt on its own, after all, as soon as the air stayed regularly above 273 K. But as the conference proceeded, more and more problems with the greenhouse-gas plan were being pointed out. It entailed another huge industrial effort, almost the equal of the meta-nat monster projects, like the nitrogen shipments from Titan, or the soletta itself. And it was not a onetime thing; the gases were constantly destroyed by UV radiation in the upper atmosphere, so they had to overproduce to reach the desired levels, and then continue producing for as long as they wanted the gases up there. Thus mining the raw materials, and constructing the factories to turn those materials into the desired gases, were enormous projects, and necessarily a largely robotic effort, with self-guided and replicating miners, self-building and regulating factories, upper-atmosphere sampler drones — an entire machine enterprise.

  The technical challenge of this was not the issue; as Nadia pointed out to her friends at the conference, Martian technology had been highly robotic from the very beginning. In this case, thousands of small robotic cars would wander Mars on their own, looking for good deposits of carbon, sulfur, or fluorite, migrating from source to source like the old Arab mining caravans on the Great Escarpment; then when new feedstocks were found in high concentrations, the robots could settle down and construct little processing plants out of clay, iron, magnesium, and trace metals, providing the parts that could not be constructed on-site, and then assembling the whole. Fleets of automated diggers and carts would be manufactured to haul the processed material in to centralized factories, where the material would be gas-sified and released from tall mobile stacks. It wasn’t that different from the earlier mining for atmospheric gases; just a larger effort.

  But the most obvious deposits had already been mined, as people were now pointing out. And surface mining couldn’t be done the way it used to be; there were plants growing almost everywhere now, and in many places a kind of desert pavement was developing on the surface, as a result of hydration, bacterial action, and chemical reactions in the clays. This crust helped greatly to cut down on dust storms, which were still a constant problem; so ripping it up to get to underlying deposits of feedstock materials was no longer acceptable, either ecologically or politically. Red members of the legislature were calling for a ban on just this kind of robotic surface mining, and for good reasons, even in terraforming terms.

  It was hard, Nadia thought one night as she shut down her screen, to be faced with all the competing effects of their actions. The environmental issues were so tightly intertwined that it was hard to tease them out and decide what to do. And it was also hard to stay constrained by their own rules; individual organizations could no longer act unilat-erally, because so many of their actions had global ramifications. Thus the necessity for environmental regulation, and for the global environmental court, already faced with a caseload running out of control. Eventually it would have to rule on any plans coming out of this conference as well. The days of unconstrained terraforming were gone.

  And as a member of the executive council, Nadia was restricted to saying that she thought increased greenhouse gases were a good idea. Other than that she had to stay out, or appear to be impinging on the environmental court’s territory, which Irishka was defending very vigorously. So Nadia spent time visiting on-screen with a group designing new robot miners that would minimally disrupt the surface, or talking to a group working on dust fixatives that might be sprayed or grown over the surface, “thin fast pavements” as they called them; but they were proving to be a knotty problem.

  And that was the extent of Nadia’s participation in the Sabishii conference that she herself had initiated. And since all its technical problems were enmeshed in political considerations anyway, it might have been said that she hadn’t missed it at all. Not a bit of real work had been done there, by her or anyone else. Meanwhile, back in Sheffield, the council was facing any number of problems of its own: unforeseen difficulties in instituting the eco-economy; complaints that the GEC was overstepping its authority; complaints about the new police, and the criminal justice system; unruly and stupid behavior in both houses of the legislature; Red and other types of resistance in the outback; and so on. The issues were endless, and spanned the gamut from the profoundly important to the incredibly petty, until Nadia began to lose all sense of where on that continuum any individual problem lay.

  For instance, she spent a good deal of her time involved in the council’s own internal struggles, which she considered trivial, but couldn’t avoid. Most of these struggles involved resisting Jackie’s efforts to put together a majority that would vote with Jackie every time, so that Jackie could use the council as a rubber stamp for the Free Mars partyline, or in other words for Jackie herself. This meant getting to know the rest of the councillors better, and figuring out how to work with them. Zeyk was an old acquaintance; Nadia liked him, and he was a power among the Arabs, their current representative to the general culture, having defeated Antar for that position; gracious, smart, kind, he was in agreement with Nadia on many issues, including the core ones, and this made it an easy relationship, even a growing friendship. Ariadne was one of the goddesses of the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, and acted the part to a tee: imperious and rigid in her principles, she was an ideologue, proba
bly the only thing that kept her from being a serious challenge to Jackie’s prominence among the natives. Marion was the Red councillor, an ideologue also, but much changed from her early radical days, although still a long-winded arguer, not easily beaten. Peter, Ann’s little boy, had grown up to be a power in several different parts of Martian society, including the space crew at Da Vinci, the green underground, the cable crowd, and to an extent, because of Ann, the more moderate Reds. This versatility was part of his nature, and Nadia had a hard time getting a fix on him; he was private, like his parents, and seemed wary of Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred; he wanted a distance from them, he was nisei through and through. Mikhail Yangel was one of the earliest issei to follow the First Hundred to Mars, and had worked with Arkady from very early on. He had helped to start the revolt of 2061, and Nadia’s impression was that he had been one of the most extreme Reds at that time — which fact sometimes made her angry at him still, which was silly, and impeded her ability to talk to him — but there it was, despite the fact that he too was much changed, a Bogdanovist willing to compromise. His presence on the council was a surprise to Nadia — a gesture toward Arkady, one might say, which she found touching.

  And then there was Jackie, very possibly the most popular and powerful politician on Mars. At least until Nirgal got back.

  And so Nadia dealt with these six every day, learning their ways as they made their way through item after item on their daily agendas. From the important to the trivial, the abstract to the personal — everything seemed to Nadia part of a fabric, where everything connected to everything. Not only was the council not part-time work, it ate up the entirety of every waking day. It consumed her life. And yet at this point she had only gotten through two months of a three-m-year term.

  Art could see that it was getting to her, and he did what he could to help. He came up to her apartment every morning with breakfast, like room service. Often he had cooked it himself, and always it was good. As he came in, platter held aloft, he called up jazz on her AI to serve as the soundtrack of their morning together — not just Nadia’s beloved Louis, though he sought out odd recordings by Satch to amuse her, things like “Give Peace a Chance” or “Stardust Memories” — but also later styles of jazz that she had never liked before, because they were so frenetic; but that seemed to be the tempo of these days. Whatever the reason, Charlie Parker now skittered and zoomed around most impressively, she thought, and Charles Mingus made his big band sound like Duke Ellington’s on pandorph, which was just what Ellington and all the rest of swing needed, in her opinion — very funny, lovely music. And best of all, on many mornings Art called up Clifford Brown, a discovery Art had made during his investigations on her behalf, one he was very proud of, and advocated constantly to her as the logical successor to Armstrong — a vibrant trumpet sound joyous and positive and melodic like Satch, and also brilliantly fast and clever and difficult — like Parker, only happy. It was the perfect soundtrack for these wild times, driving and intense but as positive as one could be.