Blue Mars m-3

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Won’t the atmosphere finally hydrate fully?”

  “Maybe. No one is really sure how humid it will get. Climate studies are a joke, if you ask me. The global models are just too complex, there are too many unknown variables. What we do know is that the air is still pretty arid, and it seems likely it will get more humid. So, everybody believes what they want, and goes out there and tries to please themselves, and the environmental courts keep track of it all as best they can.”

  “They don’t forbid anything?”

  “Oh yeah, but only big heat pumpers. The small stuff they don’t mess with. Or at least they didn’t used to. Lately the courts have been getting tougher, and tackling smaller projects.”

  “It’s exactly the smaller projects that would be most calculable, I should think.”

  “Sort of. They tend to cancel each other out. There are a lot of Red projects, you know, to protect the higher altitudes, and any place they can in the south. They’ve got that constitutional height limit to back them, and so they’re always taking their complaints right up to the global court. They win there, and do their thing, and then all the little development projects are somewhat counterbalanced. It’s a nightmare legally.”

  “But they’re managing to hold things steady.”

  “Well, I think the high altitudes are getting a bit more air and water than they’re supposed to. You have to go really high to get away from it.”

  “I thought you said they were winning in court?”

  “In the courts, yes. In the atmosphere, no. There’s too much going on.”

  “You’d think they’d sue the greenhouse-gas factories.”

  “They have. But they’ve lost. Those gases have everyone else’s support. Without them we’d have gone into an ice age and stayed there.”

  “But a reduction in emission levels…”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s still being fought over. It’ll go on forever.”

  “True.”

  Meanwhile the Hellas Sea’s sea level had been agreed on; it was a legislative fact, and efforts all around the basin were coordinated to make sure the sea obeyed the law. The whole matter was fantastically complicated, although simple in principle: they measured the hydrological cycle, with all its storms and variations in rain and snow, melting and seeping into the ground, running over the surface in creeks and rivers, down into lakes and then into the Hellas Sea, there to freeze in the winter, then evaporate in the summer and begin the whole round again… and to this immense cycle they did what was necessary to stabilize the level of the sea, which was about the size of the Caribbean. If there was too much water and they wanted to draw down the sea level, there was the possibility of piping some of it back up into the emptied aquifers in the Amphitrites Mountains to the south. They were fairly limited in this, however, because the aquifers were composed of porous rock which tended to crush down when the water was first removed, making them difficult or impossible to refill. In fact spill-off possibilities were one of the main problems still facing the project. Keeping the balance…

  And this kind of effort was going on all over Mars. It was crazy. But they wanted to do it, and that was that. Diana was talking now about the efforts to keep the Argyre Basin dry, an effort in its way as large as the one to fill Hellas: they had built giant pipelines to evacuate water from Argyre to Hellas if Hellas needed water, or to river systems that led to the North Sea if it didn’t.

  “What about the North Sea itself?” Maya asked.

  Diana shook her head, mouth full. Apparently the consensus was that the North Sea was beyond regulation, but basically stable. They would just have to watch and see what happened, and the seaside towns up there take their chances. Many believed that the North Sea’s level would eventually fall a bit, as water returned to the permafrost or was trapped in one of the thousands of crater lakes in the southern highlands. Then again precipitation and runoff into the North Sea was substantial. The southern highlands were where the issue would be decided, Diana said; she called up a map onto her wristpad screen to show Maya. Watershed construction co-ops were still wandering around installing drainage, running water into highland creeks, reinforcing riverbeds, excavating quicksand, which in some cases revealed the ghost creekbeds of ancient watersheds below the fines; but mostly their new streams had to be based on lava features or fracture canyons, or the occasional short canal. The result was very unlike the venous clarity of Terran watersheds: a confusion of little round lakes, frozen swamps, canyon arroyos, and long straight rivers with abrupt right-angle turns, or sudden disappearances into sinkholes or pipelines. Only the refilled ancient riverbeds looked “right”; everywhere else the terrain looked like a bomb range after a rainstorm.

  Many of the Deep Waters veterans who had not directly joined the Hellas Sea Institute had started an associated coop of their own, which was mapping the groundwater basins around Hellas, measuring the return of water to the aquifers and the underground rivers, figuring out what water could be stored and recovered, and so on. Diana was a member of this co-op, as were many of the people in Maya’s old office. After their lunch Diana went to the rest of the group, and told them about Maya’s return to town; when they heard that Maya was interested in joining them, they offered her a position in the co-op with a reduced joining fee. Pleased at the compliment, she decided to take them up on it.

  So she worked for Aegean Water Table, as the co-op was called. She got up in the mornings and made coffee and ate some toast or a biscuit, or croissant, or muffin, or crumpet. In fine weather she ate out on their balcony; more often she ate in the bay window at the round dining table, reading the Odessa Messenger on the screen, noting every little incident that combined to reveal to her the darkening situation vis a vis Earth. The legislature in Mangala elected the new executive council, and Jackie was not one of the seven; she had been replaced by Nanedi. Maya whooped, and then read all the accounts she could find, and watched the interviews; Jackie claimed to have declined to run, she said she was tired after so many m-years, and would take a break like she had several times before, and be back (a sharp glint to her eye with that last remark). Nanedi kept a discreet silence on that topic, but he had the pleased, slightly amazed look of the man who had killed the dragon; and though Jackie declared that she would continue her work for the Free Mars party apparatus, clearly her influence there had waned, or else she would still be on the council.

  So; she had bowled Jackie off the global playing field; but the anti-immigrant forces were still in power. Free Mars still held its supermajority alliance in uneasy check. Nothing important had changed; life went on; the reports from pullulating Earth were still ominous. Those people were going to come up after them someday, Maya was sure of it. They were getting along among themselves, they could rest, take a look around, make some plans, coordinate their efforts. Better really to eat breakfast without turning the screen on, if she wanted to keep her appetite.

  So she took to going downtown and having a larger breakfast on the corniche, with Diana, or later Nadia and Art, or with visitors to town. After breakfast she would walk down to the AWT offices, near the eastern end of the seafront — a good walk, in air that each year was just the slightest bit saltier. At AWT she had an office with a window, and did what she had done for Deep Waters, serving as liaison with the Hellas Sea Institute, and coordinating a fluctuating team of areologists and hydrologists and engineers, directing their research efforts mostly in the Hellespontus and Amphitrites mountains, where most of the aquifers were. She took trips around the curve of the coast to inspect some of their sites and facilities, going up into the hills, staying often in the little harbor town of Montepulciano, on the southwest shore of the sea. Back in Odessa she worked through the days, and quit early, and wandered around the town, shopping in used-furniture stores, or for clothes; she was getting interested in the new styles and their changes through the seasons; it was a stylish town, people dressed well, and the latest styles suited her, she looked rather like a smallish elder
ly native, with erect regal carriage… Often she arranged to be out on the corniche in the late afternoon, walking home to their apartment, or else sitting below it in the park, or having an early meal in the summers in some seaside restaurant. In the fall a flotilla of ships docked at the wharf and threw out gangplanks between the ships and charged entry for a wine festival, with fireworks over the lake after dark. In the winter the dusk fell on the sea early, and the inshore water was sometimes sheeted with ice, and glowing with a pastel of whatever clear color might be filling the sky that evening, dotted by ice-skaters and swift low iceboats.

  One twilight hour as she was eating by herself, a theater company put on a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in an adjoining alley, and between the dusk and the spots on the planks of the temporary stage, the quality of light was such that Maya was drawn like a moth to watch. She barely followed the play, but some moments struck her with great force, especially the blackouts when the action was supposed to stop, the actors all frozen on stage in the late light. That moment only needed some blue, she thought, to be perfect.

  Afterward the theater company came over to the restaurant to eat, and Maya talked with the director, a middle-aged native woman named Latrobe, who was interested to meet her, to talk about the play, and about Brecht’s theory of political theater. Latrobe proved to be pro-Terran, pro-immigrationist; she wanted to stage plays that made the case for an open Mars, and for assimilating the new immigrants into the areophany. It was frightening, she said, how few plays of the classical repertory reinforced such feelings. They needed new plays. Maya told her about Diana’s political evenings in the UNTA years, how they had sometimes met in the parks. About her notion concerning the blues in the lighting of that night’s production. Latrobe invited Maya to come by and talk to the troupe about politics, and also to help with the lighting if she wanted, which was a weak point in the company, having had its origin in the very same parks Diana’s group had used to meet in. Perhaps they could get out there again, and do some more Brechtian theater.

  And so Maya dropped by and talked with the troupe, and over time, without ever really deciding to, she became one of its lighting crew, helping also with costumes, which was fashion in a different way. She also talked to them long into the nights about the concept of a political theater, and helped them to find new plays; in effect she was a kind of political-aesthetic consultant. But she steadfastly resisted all efforts to get her on stage, not only from the company, but from Michel and Nadia as well. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do that. If I did they would immediately want me to be playing Maya Toitovna, in that play about John.”

  “That’s an opera,” Michel said. “You’d have to be a soprano.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would never return, never be the same. Theater was the most powerful art in town, really, and the same was true in many other Martian cities as well.

  So as the m-years passed, the Odessa troupe mounted any number of political plays, including a complete run-through of the work of the South African Athol Fugard, searing passionate plays anatomizing institutionalized prejudice, the xenophobia of the soul; the best English-language plays since Shakespeare, Maya thought. And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering and making famous what was later called the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young native playwrights as ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play explored the wrenching problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful assimilation into the areophany — a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million little blood knots cut or tied. It was Maya’s best window into the contemporary world, and more and more her way of speaking back to it, doing her best to shape it — very satisfying indeed, as many of the plays caused talk, sometimes even a furor, as new works by the Group attacked the anti-immigrant government that was still in power in Mangala. It was politics in a new mode, the most intriguing she had yet encountered; she longed to tell Frank about it, to show him how it worked.

  In those same years, as the months passed two by two, Latrobe mounted quite a few productions of old classics, and as Maya watched them, she got more and more snared by the power of tragedy. She liked doing the political plays, which angry or hopeful tended to contain an innate uto-pianism, a drive for progress; but the plays that struck her as most true, and moved her most deeply, were the old Terran tragedies. And the more tragic the better. Catharsis as described by Aristotle seemed to work very well for her; she emerged from good performances of the great tragedies shattered, cleansed — somehow happier. They were the replacement for her fights with Michel, she realized one night — a sublimation, he would have said, and a good one at that — easier on him, of course, and more dignified all around, nobler. And there was that connection to the ancient Greeks as well, a connection being made in any number of ways all around Hellas Basin, in the towns and among the ferals, a neoclassicism that Maya felt was good for them all, as they confronted and tried to measure up to the Greeks’ great honesty, their unflinching look at reality. The Oresteia, Antigone, Electra, Medea, Agamemnon which should have been called Clytemnestra — those amazing women, reacting in bitter power to whatever strange fates their men inflicted on them, striking back, as when Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra, then told the audience how she had done it, at the end staring out into the audience, right at Maya:

  “Enough of misery! Start no more. Our hands are red.

  Go home and yield to fate in time,

  In time before you suffer. We have acted as we had to act.”

  We have acted as we had to act. So true, so true. She loved the truth of these things. Sad plays, sad music — threnodies, gypsy tangos, Prometheus Bound, even the Jacobean revenge plays — the darker the better, really. The truer. She did the lighting for Titus Andronicus and people were disgusted, appalled, they said it was just a bloodbath, and by God she certainly used a lot of red spots — but that moment when the handless and tongueless Lavinia tried to indicate who had done it to her, or knelt to carry away Titus’s severed hand in her teeth, like a dog — the audience had been as if frozen; one could not say that Shakespeare had not had his sense of stagecraft right from the start, bloodbath or no. And then with every play he had gotten more powerful, more electifyingly dark and true, even as an old man; she had come out of a long harrowing inspired performance of King Lear in an elation, flushed and laughing, grabbing a young member of the lighting crew by the shoulder, shaking him, shouting “Was that not wonderful, magnificent?”

  “Ka, Maya, I don’t know, I might have preferred the Restoration version myself, the one where Cordelia is saved and marries Edgar, do you know that one?”

  “Bah! Stupid child! We have told the truth tonight, that is what is important! You can go back to your lies in the morning!” Laughing harshly at him and throwing him back to his friends, “Foolish youth!”

  He explained to the friends: “It’s Maya.”

  “Toitovna? The one in the opera?”

  “Yes, but for real.”

  “Real,” Maya scoffed, waving them away. “You don’t even know what real is.” And she felt that she did.

  And friends came to town, visiting for a week or two; and then, as the summers got warmer and warmer, they took to spending one of the Decembers out in a beach village west of the town, in a shack behind the dunes, swimming and sailing and windsurfing and lying on the sand under an umbrella, reading and sleeping through the perihelion. Then back into Odessa, to the familiar comforts of their apartment and the town, in the burni
shed light of the southern autumn which was the longest season of the Martian year, also the approach to aphelion, day after day dimmer and dimmer, until aphelion came, on Ls 70, and between then and the winter solstice at Ls 90 was the Ice Festival, and they ice-skated on the white sea ice right under the corniche, looking up at the town’s seafront all drifted with snow, white under black clouds; or iceboating so far out on the ice that the town was just a break in the white curve of the big rim. Or eating by herself in steamy loud restaurants, waiting for the music to start, wet snow pelting down on the street outside. Walking into a musty little theater and its anticipatory laughter. Eating out on the balcony for the first time in the spring, sweater on against the chill, looking at the new buds on the tips of the tree twigs, a green unlike any other, like little viriditas teardrops. And so around, deep in the folds of habit and its rhythms, happy in the deja vu that one made for oneself.

  Then she turned on her screen one morning and checked the news and found out that a large settlement of Chinese had been discovered already esconced in Huo Hsing Vallis (as if the name justified the intrusion); a surprised global police had ordered them to leave, but now they were calmly defying the order. And the Chinese government was warning Mars that any interference with the settlement would be regarded as an attack on Chinese citizens, with an appropriate response. “What!” Maya shouted. “No!”

  She called up everyone in Mangala she knew; these days there weren’t that many of them in positions of any importance. She asked what they knew, and demanded to be told why the settlers weren’t being escorted back to the elevator and sent home, and so on; “This is simply not acceptable, you have to stop it now!”

  But incursions only a bit less blatant had been happening for some time now, as she had seen herself in occasional news reports. Immigrants were being landed in cheap landing vehicles, bypassing the elevator and the authorities in Sheffield. Rocket-and-parachute landings, as in the old days; and there was little that could be done about it, without provoking an interplanetary incident. People were working hard on the problem behind the scenes. The UN was backing China, so it was hard. Progress was being made, slowly but surely. She was not to worry.