Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Their speeches were all about beautiful wonderful Mars and how it was going to be ruined by overpopulation, unless they closed it to further Terran immigration. There was a strong case to be made for that point of view, actually, as could be told by the cheers and applause from the crowd. Their attitude was deeply hypocritical, as most of those applauding made their living from Terran tourists, and all of them were immigrants or the children of immigrants; but they cheered anyway. It was a good election issue. Especially if you ignored the risk of war; if you ignored the sheer immensity of Earth, and its primacy in human civilization. Defying it in this way… Well, it didn’t matter; these people didn’t give a damn about Earth, and they didn’t understand it either. So defiance only made Jackie look more brave and beautiful, standing up for a free Mars. The ovation for her was loud and sustained; she had learned a lot since her maladroit speeches during the second revolution, she had gotten quite good. Very good.

  When the Green speakers got up to take their turn, and argue for an open Mars, they tried to talk about the danger of a closed-Mars policy, but the response was of course much less enthusiastic than it had been for Jackie — their position sounded like cowardice, to tell the truth, and the desirability of an open Mars, naive. Before arriving in Banks Vendana had offered Maya a chance to speak, but she had declined, and now she was confirmed in her judgment; she did not envy these speakers their unpopular stance before a dwindling crowd.

  Afterward the Greens held a small party/postmortem, and Maya critiqued their performance with some severity. “I’ve never seen such incompetence. You’re trying to scare them, but you only sound fearful. The stick is necessary, but you need a carrot as well. The possibility of war is the stick, but you have to tell them why it would be good to keep Terrans coming up, without sounding like idiots. You have to remind them that we all have Terran origins, we are always immigrants here. For you can never leave Earth.”

  They nodded at this, Athos among them looking thoughtful. After that Maya got Vendana to one side, and grilled her about Jackie’s recent liaisons. Mikka was indeed a recent partner, and probably still was. MarsFirst was if anything more anti-immigration than the larger party. Maya nodded; she had begun to see the outlines of a plan.

  When the postmortem was over, Maya wandered downtown with Vendana and Athos and the rest, until they passed a large band playing what they called Sheffield sound. This music was only noise to Maya: twenty different drum rhythms at once, on instruments not intended for percussion or even for musical use. But it suited her purposes, as under the clatter and pounding she was able to guide the young Greens unobtrusively toward Antar, whom she had spotted across the dance floor. When they were nearer to him she could say, “Oh, there’s Antar — hello, Antar! These are the people I’m sailing with. We’re right behind you, apparently, headed to Hell’s Gate and then Odessa. How’s the campaign going?”

  And Antar was his usual gracious princely self, a man hard to object to even when you knew how reactionary he was, how much he had been in the pocket of Earth’s Arab nations. Now he must be turning on those old allies, another dangerous part of this anti-immigrant strategy. It was curious the way the Free Mars leadership had decided to defy the Terran powers, and at the same time to try to dominate all the new settlements in the outer solar system. Hubris. Or perhaps they just felt threatened; Free Mars had always been the young natives’ party, and if unrestricted immigration brought in millions of new issei, then Free Mars’s status would be endangered, not only its superma-jority but its simple majority as well. These new hordes with all their old fanaticisms intact — churches and mosques, flags, hidden firearms, open feuds — there was definitely a case for the Free Mars position to be made, for during the intensive immigration of the past decade, the new arrivals had clearly begun to construct another Earth, just as stupid as the first one. John would have gone crazy, Frank would have laughed. Arkady would have said I told you so, and suggested yet another revolution.

  But Earth had to be dealt with more realistically than that, it could not be banished or wished away. And here in the moment, Antar was being gracious, extra gracious, as if he thought Maya might be useful for something. And as he always followed Jackie around, Maya was not surprised at all when suddenly Jackie and some others were at his side, and everyone saying hello. Maya nodded to Jackie, who smiled back flawlessly. Maya gestured to her new companions, carefully introduced them one by one. When she came to Athos she saw Jackie watching him, and Athos, as he was introduced, gave a friendly glance to her. Swiftly but very casually Maya started asking Antar about Zeyk and Na-zik, who were living on the coast of Acheron Bay, apparently. The two groups were moving slowly toward the music, and soon, if they kept going, they would be thoroughly mingled, and it would be too loud to hear any conversation but one’s own. “I like this Sheffield sound,” Maya said to Antar. “Help me get through to the dance floor?”

  An obvious ploy, as she needed no help getting through crowds. But Antar took her arm, and did not notice Jackie talking to Athos — or pretended not to. It was an old story to him anyway. But that Mikka, looking very tall and powerful up close; Scandinavian ancestry perhaps, looking a bit of a hothead; he was now trailing the group with a sour expression. Maya pursed her lips, satisfied that the gambit had started well. If MarsFirst was even more isolationist than Free Mars, then trouble between them might be all the more useful.

  So she danced with more enthusiasm than she had felt in years. Indeed if you concentrated on the bass drums only, and held to their rhythms, then it was somewhat like the knocking of an excited heart; and over that fundamental ground bass the chattering of the various woodblocks and kitchen implements and round stones was no more than the ephemera of stomach rumbling or rapid thought. It made a kind of sense; not musical sense as she understood it, but rhythmic sense, in some way. Dance, sweat, watch Antar shuffle gracefully about. He must be a fool but it didn’t show. Jackie and Athos had disappeared. And so had Mikka. Perhaps he would go nova and murder them all. Maya grinned and spun in the dance.

  Michel came over and Maya gave him a big smile, a sweaty hug. He liked sweaty hugs, and looked pleased but curious: “I thought you didn’t like this kind of music?”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  Southwest of Gale the canal rose through lock after lock, up onto the highlands of Hesperia. As it crossed the highlands, to the east of the Tyrrhena massif, it remained at about the four-kilometer elevation, now more often called five kilometers above sea level, and so there was little need for locks. For days at a time they motored along the canal, or sailed under the power of the ship’s line of little mast sails, stopping in some bankside towns, passing others. Oxus, Jaxartes, Scamander, Simois, Xanthus, Steropes, Polyphemus — they stopped in each, keeping a steady pace with the Free Mars campaign, and indeed with most of the other Hellas-bound barges and yachts. Everything stretched out without change to both horizons, although occasionally in this region the lens had burned through something other than the usual basaltic regolith, so that in the vaporizing and falling out there had occurred some variation in the levees, stretches of obsidian or sideromelane, swirls of brilliant glossy color, of marbled porphyry greens, violent sul-furic yellows, lumpy conglomerates, even one long section of clear glass banks, clear on both sides of the canal, distorting the highlands behind them and for long stretches reflecting the sky. This stretch, called Glass Banks, was of course intensively developed. Between the canalside towns ran mosaic paths, shaded by palm trees in giant ceramic pots, and backed by villas complete with grass lawns and hedges. The Glass Banks towns were whitewashed, bright with pastel shutters and window boxes and doors, and blue-glazed tile roofs, and long colored neon signs over blue awnings in the waterfront restaurants. It was a kind of dream Mars, a canal cliche from the ancient dreamscape, but none the less beautiful for that, the obviousness of it indeed part of its pleasure. The days of their passage through this region were warm and windless, the canal surface as smooth as the bank
s, and as clear: a glass world. Maya sat on the forward deck under a green awning, watching the freight barges and the tourist paddle wheelers heading in the other direction, everyone out on deck to enjoy the sight of the glass banks and the colorful towns decorating them. This was the heart of the Martian tourist industry, the favorite destination for off-world visitors; ridiculous, but true; and one had to admit it was pretty. Gazing at the passing scene it occurred to Maya that whichever party won the next general election, and whichever way the immigration battle fell out, this world would probably go on, gleaming like a toy in the sun. Still, she hoped her gambit would work.

  As they barged farther south the southern autumn put a chill in the air. Hardwood trees began to appear on the once-again-basalt banks, their leaves flaring red and yellow; and one morning there was a skim of ice sheeting the smooth water against the shores. When they stood on the top of the western bank, the volcanoes Tyrrhena Patera and Hadriaca Patera loomed on the horizon like flattened Fujis, Hadriaca displaying the banded maypole of white glaciers on black rock which Maya had first seen from the other side, coming up out of Dao Vallis when she had made her tour of the flooding Hellas Basin, so long ago. With that young girl, what was her name? A relative of someone she knew.

  The canal cut through the dragonback mounds of the Hesperia Dorsa. The canalside towns grew less equatorial, more austere, more highland. Volga river towns, New England fishing villages, but with names like Astapus, Aeria, Uchronia, Apis, Eunostos, Agathadaemon, Kaiko … on and on the broad band of water led them, south by west, as straight as a compass bearing for day after day, until it was hard to remember that this was the only one, that such canals were not webbed everywhere, as on the maps of the ancient dream. Oh there was one other big canal, at Boone’s Neck, but it was short and very wide, and getting wider every year, as draglines and the eastward current tore at it; no longer a canal, really, but rather an artificial strait. No, the dream of the canals had been enacted only here, in all the world; and while here, cruising tranquilly over the water, one’s view of everything else cut off by the high banks, there was a sense of romance in the air, a sense that their political and personal squabbles had a kind of Barsoomian grandeur.

  Or so it felt, strolling in the nip of an evening under the pastel neons of a canalside town. In one, called Anteus, Maya was strolling the canalside promenade, looking down into boats large and small, onto beautiful big young people drinking and chatting lazily, sometimes cooking meat on braziers clamped to the railings and hung out over the water. On a wide dock extending into the canal, there was an open-air cafe, from which came the plaintive singing of a gypsy violin; she turned into the cafe instinctively, and only at the last minute saw Jackie and Athos, sitting at a canalside table alone, leaning over until their foreheads almost touched. Maya certainly did not want to interrupt such a promising scene, but the very abruptness of her halt caught Jackie’s eye, so that she looked up, then started. Maya turned to leave, but saw Jackie was getting up to come over.

  Another scene, Maya thought, only partly unhappy at the prospect. But Jackie was smiling, and Athos was coming with her, at her side, watching it all with wide-eyed innocence; either he had no idea of their history, or else he had a good control of his expressions. Maya guessed the latter, simply because of the look in his eye, just that bit too innocent to be real. An actor.

  “It’s beautiful this canal, don’t you think?” Jackie was saying.

  “A tourist trap,” Maya said. “But a pretty one. And it keeps the tourists nicely bunched.”

  “Oh come now,” Jackie said, laughing. She took Athos’s arm. “Where’s your sense of romance?”

  “What sense of romance,” Maya said, pleased at this public display of affection. The old Jackie would not have done it. Indeed it was a shock to see that she was no longer young; stupid of Maya not to have thought of that, but her sense of time was such a mishmash that her own face in the mirror was a perpetual shock to her — every morning she woke up in the wrong century, so seeing Jackie looking matronly with Athos on her arm was only more of the same — an impossibility — this was the fresh dangerous girl of Zygote, the young goddess of Dorsa Brevia!

  “Everyone has a sense of romance,” Jackie said. The years were not making her any wiser. Another chronological discontinuity. Perhaps taking the longevity treatment so often had clogged her brain. Curious that after such assiduous use of the treatments there should be any signs of aging left at all; in the absence of cell-division error, where exactly was it coming from? There were no wrinkles on Jackie’s face, in some ways she could be mistaken for twenty-five; and the look of happy Boonean confidence was as entrenched as ever, the only way really she resembled John — glowing like the neon scrim of the cafe overhead. But despite all that she looked her years, somehow — in her eyes, or in some gestalt at work despite all the medical manipulation.

  And then one of Jackie’s many assistants was there among them, panting, gasping, pulling Jackie’s arm away from Athos, crying “Jackie, I’m so sorry, so sorry, she’s killed, she’s killed — ” — shivering —

  “Who?” Jackie said sharply, like a slap.

  The young woman (but she was aging) said miserably, “Zo.”

  “Zo?”

  “A flying accident. She fell into the sea.”

  This ought to slow her down, Maya thought.

  “Of course,” Jackie said.

  “But the birdsuits,” Athos protested. He was aging too. “Didn’t they…”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said, shutting them up. Later Maya heard an eyewitness account of the accident, and the image stayed etched in her mind forever — the two fliers struggling in the waves like wet dragonflies, staying afloat so that they would have been okay, until one of the North Sea’s big swells picked them up and slammed them into the base of a seastack. After which they had drifted in the foam.

  Now Jackie was withdrawn, remote, thinking things over. She and Zo had not been close, Maya had heard; some said they hated each other. But one’s child. You were not supposed to survive your children, that was something even childless Maya felt instinctively. But they had abrogated all the laws, biology meant nothing to them anymore; and here they were. If Ann had lost Peter on the falling cable; if Nadia and Art ever lost Nikki… even Jackie, as foolish as she was, had to feel it.

  And she did. She was thinking hard, trying to find the way out. But she wasn’t going to; and then she would be a different person. Aging — it had nothing to do with time, nothing. “Oh Jackie,” Maya said, and put a hand forward. Jackie flinched, and Maya pulled the hand back. “I’m sorry.”

  But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme. Maya had learned that on the night of Hiroko’s disappearance, when she had tried to comfort Michel. Nothing could be done.

  Maya almost cuffed the sniffling young aide, restrained herself: “Why don’t you escort Ms. Boone back to your ship. And then keep people away for a while.”

  Jackie was still lost in her thoughts. Her flinch away from Maya had been instinct only, she was stunned — disbelieving — and the disbelief absorbed all her effort. All just as one would expect, from any human being. Maybe it was even worse if you hadn’t gotten along with the child — worse than if you loved them, ah, God — “Go,” Maya said to the aide, and with a look commanded Athos to help. He would certainly make an impression on her, one way or the other. They led her off. She still had the most beautiful back in the world, and held herself like a queen. That would change when the news sank in.

  Later Maya found herself down at the southern edge of town, where the lights left off and the starry sheen of the canal was banked by black berms of slag. It looked like the scroll of a life, someone’s world line: bright neon squiggles, moving across a landscape to the black horizon. Stars overhead and underfoot. A black piste over which they glided soundlessly.

  She walked back to their boat. Stumped down
the gangplank. It was distressing to feel this way for an enemy, to lose an enemy to this kind of disaster. “Who am I going to hate now?” she cried to Michel.

  “Well,” Michel said, shocked. Then, in a comforting tone: “I’m sure you’ll think of someone.”

  Maya laughed shortly, and Michel cracked a brief smile. Then he shrugged, looking grave. He less than any of them had been lulled by the treatment. Immortal stories in mortal flesh, he had always insisted. He was downright morbid about it. And here another illustration of his point.

  “So the all-too-human got hers at last,” he said.

  “She was an idiot with all those risks, she was asking for it.”