Green Mars m-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Two stood, arms around each other, and swayed until they had caught their balance, then held out their little cups in a toast.

  “Next year on Olympus.”

  “Next year on Olympus,” the others repeated, and drank.

  It was Ls 180, M-year 40, when they began to arrive at Dorsa Brevia, in small cars and planes from all over the south. A group of Reds and caravan Arabs checked people’s credentials in the wasteland approaches, and more Reds and Bogdanovists were stationed in bunkers located all around the dorsa, armed, in case there was any trouble. The Sabishiian intelligence experts, however, thought that the conference was unknown in Burroughs or Hellas or Sheffield, and when they explained why they thought so, people tended to relax, for clearly they had penetrated far into the halls of UNTA, and indeed throughout the whole structure of transnational power on Mars. That was another advantage to the demimonde; they could work in both directions.

  When Nadia arrived, with Art and Nirgal, they were led to their guest quarters in Zakros, the southernmost segment of the tunnel. Nadia dropped her pack in a little wooden room, and wandered the big park, and then through the segments farther north, finding old friends and meeting strangers, feeling in a mood of good hope. It was encouraging to see all these people milling about the green parks and pavilions, representing so many different groups. She looked around at the crowd thronging the canalside park, perhaps three hundred people in view at that moment, and laughed.

  The Swiss from Overhangs arrived on the day before the conference was supposed to begin; people said they had been camped outside in their rovers, waiting for the date specified. They brought with them a whole set of procedures and protocols for the meeting, and as Nadia and Art listened to a Swiss woman describing their plans, Art elbowed Nadia and whispered, “We’ve created a monster.”

  “No no,” Nadia whispered back, happy as she looked over the big central park in the third-from-the-south segment of the tunnel, called Lato. The skylight overhead was a long bronze crack in the dark roof, and morning light filled the giant cylindrical chamber with the kind of photon rain she had been craving all winter, brown light everywhere, the bamboo and pine and cypress rising over the tile rooftops and blazing like green water. “We need a structure, or it would be a free-for-all. The Swiss are form without content, if you see what I mean.”

  Art nodded. He was very quick, sometimes even hard to understand, because he jumped five or six steps at a time and assumed she had followed him. “Just get them to drink kava with the anarchists,” he muttered, and got up to walk around the edges of the meeting.

  And in fact that night, on her way with Maya through Gournia to a canalside row of open-air kitchens, Nadia passed by Art and saw that he was doing just that, dragging Mikhail and some of the other Bogdanovist hard-liners over to a table of Swiss, where Jurgen and Max and Sibilla and Priska were chatting happily with a group standing around them, switching languages as if they were translation AIs, but in every language exhibiting the same buoyant guttural Swiss accent. “Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.

  “Art is an idiot,” Maya replied.

  By now there were about five hundred visitors in the long sanctuary, representing about fifty groups. The congress was to begin the following morning, so on this night the partying was loud, from Zakros to Falasarna, the timeslip filled with wild shouting and singing, Arab ululations harmonizing with yodels, the strains of “Waltzing Matilda” forming a descant to “The Marseillaise.”

  * * *

  Nadia got up early the next morning. She found Art already out at the pavilion in the Zakros park, rearranging chairs into a circular formation, in classic Bogdanovist style. Nadia felt a prick of pain and regret, as if Arkady’s ghost had walked through her; he would have loved this meeting, it was just what he had often called for. She went to help Art. “You’re up early.”

  “I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep.” He needed a shave. “I’m nervous!”

  She laughed. “This is going to take weeks, Art, you know that.”

  “Yes, but starts are important.”

  By ten all the seats were filled, and behind the chairs the pavilion was crowded with standing observers. Nadia stood at the back of the Zygote wedge of the circle, watching curiously. There appeared to be slightly more men than women in attendance, and slightly more natives than emigrants. Most people wore standard one-piece jumpers — the Reds’ were rust-colored — but a significant number were dressed in a colorful array of ceremonial styles: robes, dresses, pantaloons, suits, embroidered shirts, bare chests, a lot of necklaces and earrings and other jewelry. All the Bogdanovists wore jewelry containing pieces of phobosite, the black chunks shining where they had been cut flat and polished.

  The Swiss stood in the center, somber in gray bankers’ suits, Sibilla and Priska in dark green dresses. Sibilla called the meeting to order, and she and the rest of the Swiss alternated as they explained in excruciating detail the program they had worked out, pausing to answer questions, and asking for comments at every change of speaker. As they did this a group of Sufis in pure white shirts and pantaloons worked their way around the outer perimeter of the circle, passing out jugs of water and bamboo cups, moving with their customary dancelike grace. When everyone had cups, the delegates at the front of each group poured water for the party on their left, and then they all drank. Out in the crowd of spectators the Vanuatuans were at a table filling tiny cups of kava or coffee or tea, and Art was passing these out to those who wanted them. Nadia smiled at the sight of him, shambling through the crowds like a Sufi in slow motion, sipping from the cups of kava he was distributing.

  The Swiss’s program was to begin with a series of workshops on specific topics and problems, working in open rooms scattered through Zakros, Gournia, Lato, and Malta. All of the workshops were to be recorded. Conclusions, recommendations, and questions from the workshops were to serve as the basis for a subsequent day’s discussion at one of the two general ongoing meetings. One of these would focus roughly on the problems of achieving independence, the other on what came after — the means and ends meetings, as Art noted when he stopped briefly at Nadia’s side.

  When the Swiss were done describing the program, they were ready to start; it had not occurred to them to have any ceremonial opening. Werner, speaking last, reminded people that the first workshops would begin in an hour, and that was that. They were done.

  But before the crowd dispersed, Hiroko stood at the back of the Zygote crowd, and walked slowly into the center of the circle. She wore a bamboo-green jumper, and no jewelry — a tall slight figure, white-haired, unprepossessing — and yet every eye there was locked onto her. And when she lifted her hands, everyone seated got to their feet. In the silence that followed, Nadia’s breath caught in her throat. We should stop now, she thought. No meetings — this is it right here, our presence together, our shared reverence for this single person.

  “We are children of Earth,” Hiroko said, loud enough for all to hear. “And yet here we stand, in a lava tunnel on the planet Mars. We should not forget how strange a fate that is. Life anywhere is an enigma and a precious miracle, but here we see even better its sacred power. Let’s remember that now, and make our work our worship.”

  She spread her hands wide, and her closest associates walked humming into the center of the circle. Others followed suit, until the space around the Swiss was full of a milling horde of friends, acquaintances, strangers.

  The workshops were held in gazebos scattered through the parks, or in three-walled rooms in the public buildings that edged these parks. The Swiss had assigned small groups to run the workshops, and the rest of the conferees attended whichever meetings interested them the most, so that some involved five people, others fifty.

  Nadia spent the first day wandering from workshop to workshop, up and down the four southernmost segments of the tunnel.

  She found that quite a few people were doing the same, none more so than Art, who appea
red to be trying to observe all the workshops, so that he caught only a sentence or two at each site.

  She dropped in on a workshop discussing the events of 2061. She was interested, although not surprised, to find in attendance Maya, Ann, Sax, Spencer, and even Coyote, as well as Jackie Boone and Nirgal, and many others. The room was packed. First things first, she supposed, and there were so many nagging questions about ‘61: What had happened? What had gone wrong, and why?

  Ten minutes’ listening, however, arid her heart sank. People were upset, their recriminations heartfelt and bitter. Nadia’s stomach knotted in a way it hadn’t in years, as memories of the failed revolt flooded into her.

  She looked around the room, trying to concentrate on the faces, to distract herself from the ghosts within. Sax was watching birdlike as he sat next to Spencer; he nodded as Spencer asserted that 2061 taught them that they needed a complete assessment of all the military forces in the Martian system. “This is a necessary precondition for any successful action,” Spencer said.

  But this bit of common sense was shouted down by someone who seemed to consider it an excuse to avoid action — a Marsfirster, apparently, who advocated immediate mass ecotage, and armed assault on the cities.

  Quite vividly Nadia recalled an argument with Arkady about this very matter, and suddenly she couldn’t stand it. She walked down to the center of the room.

  After a while everyone went silent, stilled by the sight of her. “I’m tired of this matter being discussed in purely military terms,” she said. “The whole model of revolution has to be rethought. This is what Arkady failed to do in sixty-one, and this is why sixty-one was such a bloody mess. Listen to me, now — there can be no such thing as a successful armed revolution on Mars. The life-support systems are too vulnerable.”

  Sax croaked, “But if the surface is vivable — is viable — then the support systems not so — so …”

  Nadia shook her head. “The surface is not viable, and won’t be for many years. And even when it is, revolution has to be rethought. Look, even when ‘revolutions have been successful, they have caused so much destruction and hatred that there is always some kind of horrible backlash. It’s inherent in the method. If you choose violence, then you create enemies who will resist you forever. And ruthless men become your revolutionary leaders, so when the war is over they’re in power, and likely to be as bad as what they replaced.”

  “Not in — American,” Sax said, cross-eyed with the effort to force the right words out in a timely manner.

  “I don’t know about that. But mostly it’s been true. Violence breeds hatred, and eventually there is a backlash. It’s unavoidable.”

  “Yes,” said Nirgal with his usual intent look, not all that different from Sax’s grimace. “But if people are attacking the sanctuaries and destroying them, then we don’t have much choice.”

  Nadia said, “The question is, who’s sending those forces out? And who are the people actually in these forces? I doubt that those individuals bear us any ill will. At this point they might just as easily be on our side as against us. It’s their commanders and owners we should focus on.”

  “De-cap-i-ta-tion,” Sax said.

  “I don’t like the sound of that. You need a different term.”

  “Mandatory retirement?” Maya suggested acidly. People laughed, and Nadia glared at her old friend.

  “Forced disemployment,” Art said loudly from the back, where he had just appeared.

  “You mean a coup,” Maya said. “Not to fight the entire population on the surface, but just the leadership and their bodyguards.”

  “And maybe their armies,” Nirgal insisted. “We have no sign that they are disaffected, or even apathetic.”

  “No. But would they fight without orders from their leaders?”

  “Some might. It’s their job, after all.”

  “Yes, but they have no great stake beyond that,” Nadia said, thinking it out as she spoke. “Without nationalism or ethnicity, or some other kind of home feeling involved, I don’t think these people will fight to the death. They know they’re being ordered around to protect the powerful. Some more egalitarian system makes an appearance, and they might feel a conflict of loyalties.”

  “Retirement benefits,” Maya mocked, and people laughed again.

  But from the back Art said, “Why not put it in those terms? If you don’t want revolution conceptualized as war, you need something else to replace it, so why not economics? Call it a change in practice. This is what the people in Praxis are doing when they talk about human capital, or bioinfrastructure — modeling everything in economic terms. It’s ludicrous in a way, but it does speak to those for whom economics is the most important paradigm. That certainly includes the transnational.”

  “So,” Nirgal said with a grin, “we disemploy the local leadership, and give their police a raise while job-retraining them.”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  Sax was shaking his head. “Can’t reach them,” he said. “Need force.”

  “Something has to be changed to avoid another sixty-one!” Nadia insisted. “It has to be rethought. Maybe there are historical models, but not the ones you’ve been mentioning. Something more like the velvet revolutions that ended the Soviet era, for instance.”

  “But those involved unhappy populations,” Coyote said from the back, “and took place in a system that was falling apart. The same conditions don’t obtain here. People are pretty well off. They feel lucky to be here.”

  “But Earth — in trouble,” Sax pointed out. “Falling apart.”

  “Hmm,” Coyote said, and he sat down by Sax to talk about it. Talking with Sax was still frustrating, but as a result of all his work with Michel, it could be done. It made Nadia happy to see Coyote conferring with him.

  The discussion went on around them. People argued theories of revolution, and when they tried to talk about ‘61 itself, they were hampered by old grievances, and a basic lack of understanding of what had happened in those nightmare months. At one point this became especially clear, as Mikhail and some ex-Korolyov inmates began arguing about who had murdered the guards.

  Sax stood and waved his AI over his head.

  “Need facts — first,” he croaked. “Then the dialysis — the analysis.”

  “Good idea,” Art said instantly. “If this group can put together a brief history of the war to give to the congress at large, that would be really useful. We can save the discussion of revolutionary methodology for the general meetings, okay?”

  Sax nodded and sat down. Quite a few people left the meeting, and the rest calmed down, and gathered around Sax and Spencer. Now they were mostly veterans of the war, Nadia noticed, but there also were Jackie and Nirgal and some other natives. Nadia had seen some of the work Sax had done in Burroughs on the question of ‘61, and she was hopeful that with eyewitness accounts from other veterans, they could come to some basic understanding of the war and its ultimate causes — nearly half a century after it was over, but as Art said when she mentioned this to him, that was not atypical. He walked with a hand on her shoulder, looking unconcerned by what he had seen that morning, in his first full exposure to the fractious nature of the underground. “They don’t agree about much,” he admitted. “But it always starts that way.”

  Late on the second afternoon Nadia dropped in on the workshop devoted to the terraforming question. This was probably the most divisive issue facing them, Nadia judged, and attendance at the workshop reflected it; the room on the border of Lato’s park was packed, and before the meeting began the moderator moved it out into the park, on the grass overlooking the canal.

  The Reds in attendance insisted that terraforming itself was an obstruction to their hopes. If the Martian surface became human-viable, they argued, then it would represent an entire Earth’s worth of land, and given the acute population and environmental problems on Earth, and the space elevator currently being constructed there to match the one already on Mars, the gravity wel
ls could be surmounted and mass emigration would certainly follow, and with it the disappearance of any possibility of Martian independence.

  People in favor of terraforming, called greens, or just green, as they were not a party as such — argued that with a human-viable surface it would be possible to live anywhere, and at that point the underground would be on the surface, and infinitely less vulnerable to control or attack, and thus in a much better position to take over.

  These two views were argued in every possible combination and variation. And Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell were both there, in the center of the meeting, making points more and more frequently — until the others in attendance stopped speaking, silenced by the authority of those two ancient antagonists. Watching them go at it yet again.

  Nadia observed this slow-developing collision unhappily, anxious for her two friends. And she wasn’t the only one who found the sight unsettling. Most of the people there had seen the famous videotape of Ann and Sax’s argument in Underbill, and certainly their story was well known, one of the great myths of the First Hundred — a myth from a time when things had been simpler, and distinct personalities could stand for clear-cut issues. Now nothing was simple anymore, and as the old enemies faced off again in the middle of this new hodgepodge group, there was an odd electricity in the air, a mix of nostalgia and tension and collective deja vu, and a wish (perhaps just in herself, Nadia thought bitterly) that the two of them could somehow effect a reconciliation, for their own sakes and for all of them.

  But there they were, standing in the center of the crowd. Ann had already lost this argument in the world itself, and. her manner seemed to reflect this; she was subdued, disinterested, almost uninterested; the fiery Ann of the famous tapes was nowhere to be seen. “When the surface is viable,” she said — when, Nadia noted, not if — “they’ll be here by the billions. As long as we have to live in shelters, logistics will keep the population in the millions. And that’s the size it needs to be if you want a successful revolution.” She shrugged. “You could do it today if you wanted. Our shelters are hidden, and theirs aren’t. Break theirs open, they have no one to shoot back at — they die, you take over. Terraforming just takes away that leverage.”