Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The sandstorms these days were nothing like the long-forgotten Great Storm of course, but still a factor that had to be considered. Desert pavement formed by microbacteria was one very promising solution, though it tended to fix only the top centimeter of deposits, and if the wind tore the edge of the pavement, what was underneath was then free to be borne away. Not an easy problem. Dust storms would be with them for centuries.

  Still, an active hydrosphere. Meaning life everywhere.

  Bao’s mother died in a small plane crash, and Bao as the youngest daughter had to go home and take care of things, including possession of the family home. Ultimogeniture in action, modeled on the Hopi matriarchy, he was told. Bao wasn’t sure when she would be back; there was even a chance she wouldn’t be. She was matter-of-fact about it, it was just something that had to be done. Withdrawn already into an internal world. Sax could only wave good-bye to her and walk back to his room, shaking his head. They would understand the fundamental laws of the universe before they had even the slightest handle on society. A particularly obdurate subject of study. He called Michel on screen and expressed something like this, and Michel said, “It’s because culture keeps progressing.”

  Sax thought he could see what Michel meant — there were rapid changes in attitudes to many things. Werteswandel, as Bela called it, mutation of values. But they still lived in a society struggling with archaisms of all sorts. Primates banding into tribes, guarding a territory, praying to a god like a cartoon parent… “Sometimes I don’t think there’s been any progress at all,” he said, feeling strangely disconsolate.

  “But Sax,” Michel protested, “right here on Mars we have seen both patriarchy and property brought to an end. It’s one of the greatest achievements in human history.”

  “If true.”

  “Don’t you think women have as much power as men now?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  “Perhaps even more, when it comes to reproduction.”

  “That would make sense.”

  “And the land is in the shared stewardship of everyone.

  We still own personal items as property, but land as property has never happened here. That’s a new social reality, we struggle with it every day.”

  So they did. And Sax remembered how bitter the conflicts had been in the old days, when property and capital had been the order of the day. Yes, perhaps it was true: patriarchy and property were in the process of being dismantled. At least on Mars, at least for now. As with string theory, it might take a long time to work it into any proper state. After all Sax himself, who had no prejudices whatsoever, had been amazed to see a woman mathematician at work. Or, to be more precise, a woman genius. By whom he had been promptly hypnotized, so to speak, along with every other man in the theory group — to the point of being rendered quite distraught by her departure. Uneasily he said, “On Earth people seem to be fighting just as much as before.”

  Even Michel had to admit it. “Population pressures,” he said, trying to wave them away. “There are too many people down there, and more all the time. You saw what it was like during our visit. As long as Earth is in that situation, Mars is under threat. And so we fight up here too.”

  Sax took the point. In a way it was comforting; human behavior not as irreducibly evil or stupid, but as responding, semirationally, to a given historical situation, a danger. Seizing what one could, with the notion that there might not be enough for all; doing everything possible to protect one’s offspring; which of course endangered all offspring, by the aggregate of individual selfish actions. But at least it could be called an attempt at reason, a first approximation.

  “It’s not as bad as it was, anyway,” Michel was saying. “Even on Earth people are having far fewer children. And they’re reorganizing into collectives pretty well, considering the flood and all the trouble that preceded it. A lot of new social movements down there, a lot of them inspired by what we’re doing here. And by what Nirgal does. They’re still watching him and listening to him, even when Tie doesn’t speak. What he said during our visit there is still having a big effect.”

  “I believe it.”

  “Well, there you are! It’s getting better, you have to admit it. And when the longevity treatments stop working, there will come a balance of births and deaths.”

  “We’ll hit that time soon,” Sax predicted glumly.

  “Why do you say so?”

  “Signs of it cropping up. People dying from one thing or other. Senescence is not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have kicked in — it’s a wonder we’ve done as much as we have. There’s probably a purpose in senescence. Avoiding overpopulation, perhaps. Making room for new genetic material.”

  “That bodes poorly for us.”

  “We’re already over two hundred percent the old average lifetime.”

  “Granted, but even so. One doesn’t want it to end just because of that.”

  “No. But we have to focus on the moment. Speaking of which, why don’t you come out into the field with me? I’ll be as upbeat as you want out there. It’s very interesting.”

  “I’ll try to free up some time. I’ve got a lot of clients.”

  “You’ve got a lot of free time. You’ll see.”

  In this particular moment, the sun was high. Rounded white clouds were piling up in the air overhead, forming great masses that would never come again, though at the moment they were as solid as marble, and darkening at their bottoms. Cumulonimbus. He was standing on Da Vinci Peninsula’s western cliff again, looking across Shalbatana Fjord to the cliff edging the east side of Lunae Planum. Behind him rose the flat-topped hill that was the rim of Da Vinci Crater. Home base. He had lived there a long time now. These days their co-op was making many of the satellites being put up into orbit, and the boosters as well, in collaboration with Spencer’s lab in Odessa, and a great number of other places. A Mondragon-style cooperative, operating the ring of labs and homes in the rim, and the fields and lake filling the crater floor. Some of them chafed at restrictions imposed by the courts on projects they had in mind, involving new power plants that would put out too much heat. In the last few years the GEC had been issuing K rations, as they were called, giving communities the right to add some fraction of a degree Kelvin to the global warming. Some Red communities were doing their best to get assigned K rations and then not use them. This action, along with ongoing incidences of ecotage, kept the global temperature from rising very fast no matter what other communities did. Or so the other communities argued. But the ecocourts were still parsimonious with the K rations. Cases were judged by a provincial ecocourt, then the judgment was approved by the GEC, and that was it: no appeals, unless you could get a petition signed by fifty other communities, and even then the appeal was only dropped into the morass of the global legislature, where its fate was up to the undisciplined crowd in the duma.

  Slow progress. Just as well. With the global average temperatures above freezing, Sax was content. Without the constraint of the GEC, things could easily get too warm. No, he was in no further hurry. He had become an advocate of stabilization.

  Now, out in the sun of a perihelion day, it was an invigorating 281 K, and he was walking along the sea-cliff edge of Da Vinci, looking at alpine flowers in the cracks of the rubble, then past them to the distant quantum sheen of the fjord’s sunny surface, when down the cliff edge walking his way came a tall woman, wearing a face mask and jumper, and big hiking boots: Ann. He recognized her instantly — that stride, no doubt about it — Ann Clayborne, in the flesh.

  This surprise brought a double jolt to his memory — of Hiroko, emerging out of the snow to lead him to his rover — then of Ann, in Antarctica, striding over rock to meet him — but for what?

  Confused, he tried to track the thought. Double image — a fleet single image —

  Then Ann was before him and the memories were gone, forgotten like a dream.

  He had not seen her since forcing the gerontological treat
ment on her in Tempe, and he was acutely uncomfortable; possibly this was a fright reaction. Of course it was unlikely she would physically assault him. Though she had before. But that was never the kind of assault that worried him. That time in Antarctica — he grasped for the elusive memory, lost it again. Memories on the edge of consciousness were certain to be lost if one made any deliberate effort to retrieve them. Why that should be was a mystery. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you immune to carbon dioxide now?” she asked through her face mask.

  He explained about the new hemoglobin treatment, struggling for each word, in the way he had after his stroke. Halfway through his explanation, she laughed out loud. “Crocodile blood now, eh?”

  “Yes,” he said, guessing her thought. “Crocodile blood, rat mind.”

  “A hundred rats.”

  “Yes. Special rats,” he said, striving for accuracy. Myths after all had their own rigorous logic, as Levi-Strauss had shown. They had been genius rats, he wanted to say, a hundred of them and geniuses every one. Even his miserable graduate students had had to admit that.

  “Minds altered,” she said, following his drift.

  “Yes.”

  “So, after your brain damage, altered twice,” she noted.

  “That’s right.” Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those rats were far from home. “Plasticity enhancement. Did you… ?”

  “No. I did not.”

  So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try the drugs on her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the woman before him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her eye; he had gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of hatred. Ever since their arguments on the Ares, and perhaps before. He had had time to get used to it. Or at least to learn it.

  Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her eyes, it was almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but the skin around the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were both maximally wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed musculature. It seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn’t know what to make of it.

  “You gave me the gerontological treatment,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Should he say he was sorry if he wasn’t? Tongue-tied, lockjawed, he stared at her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that it was all right, that he had done the right thing.

  She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. “What are you trying to do now?”

  He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as gnomic as a koan. “I’m out looking,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say. Language, all those beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like a flock of startled birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just two animals, standing there in the sun. Look, look, look!

  She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she looking daggers at him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock; with Ann that surely indicated progress.

  But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the little seaport at Zed.

  Sax returned to Da Vinci Craterfeeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were having their annual Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year’s representatives to the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. After the ritual of names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these jobs for the previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, and, for most of them, celebrated once again having been passed over.

  The random selection method for Da Vinci’s administrative jobs had been adapted because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically, after all their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of self-management, the Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work involved. They only wanted to do their research. “We should give the administration entirely to AIs,” Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year, between sips from a foaming stein of beer. Aonia, last year’s representative to the duma, was saying to this year’s selection, “You go to Man-gala and sit around arguing, and the staff does what work there is. Most of it has been drained off to the council or the courts or the parties. It’s Free Mars apparatchiks who are really running this planet. But it’s a really pretty town, nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the winter.”

  Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, to near them for comfort. Politics in its most common forn complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happ to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on fc about half an hour, and then they would cycle back to tall ing about work. There was one group doing that ahead; Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered ove and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: appeared they were excited by recent developments in the lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Cor tinuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but took extremely massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages to big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situation This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellei of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusio results to power things.

  “Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.

  “Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk wit us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpfu this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s s damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yanand off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave space for emission afterward.”

  They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides ; once, but there also had to be a vent for charged partich to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the prol lem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of i which they thought they had solved at last; and whe someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no politic please.”

  As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversatior he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature c most scientists and technicians. There was something aboi politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he ha to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and comprc mised, a process that went entirely against the grain of th scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and pre udices were subjective themselves. One could try to regar politics as a kind of science — a long series of experiments i communal living, say, with all the data consistently cor taminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of gove nance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, the changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or principles seemed to have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their experiments and paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all. After repeated experiments it had become clear — on Mars at least — that all these sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.

  Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that if they believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time to the exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the self governed. And that took time. “Those who value freedom must make the effort necessary to defend it,” as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew because Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with such inspirational sentiments printed on them. “Science Is Politics by Other Means,” another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.

  But in Da Vinci mo
st people did not want to spend their time that way. “Socialism will never succeed,” Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting on yet another sign), “it takes up too many evenings.” So it did; and the solution was to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the lottery method of election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the job oneself someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for the gaiety of this –annual party; people were pouring in and out of the French doors of the commons, onto the open terraces overlooking the crater lake, talking with great animation. Even the drafted ones were beginning to cheer up again, after the solace of kavajava and alcohol, and perhaps the thought that power after all was power; it was an imposition, but the draftees could do some little things that no doubt were occurring to them even now — make trouble for rivals, do favors for people they wanted to impress, etc. So once again the system had worked; they had warm bodies filling the whole polyarchic array, the neighborhood boards, the ag board, the water board, the architectural review board, the project review council, the economic coordination group, the crater council to coordinate all these smaller bodies, the global delegates’ advisory board — all that network of small management bodies that progressive political theorists had been suggesting in one variation or another for centuries, incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on. An experiment in synthesis. And so far it seemed to be working, in the sense that the Da Vinci techs seemed about as self-determined and happy as they had been during the ad hoc underground years, when everything had been done (apparently) by instinct, or, to be more precise, by the general consensus of the (much smaller) population in Da Vinci at that time.