“School schedules? I mean I’ve heard of micropolitics, but this is ridiculous!”
“Nanopolitics,” Art said.
“No, picopolitics! Femtopolitics!”
Nadia got up to help Art push the drink cart to the workshops in the village below the amphitheater. Art was still running from one meeting to the next, wheeling in food and drink, then catching a few minutes of the talk before moving on. There were eight to ten meetings per day, and Art was still dropping in on all of them. In the evenings, while more and more of the delegates spent their time partying, or going for walks up and down the tunnel, Art continued to meet with Nirgal, and they watched tapes at a, moderate fast forward so that everyone spoke like a bird, only slowing them down to take notes, or talk over some point or other. Getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, Nadia would pass the dim lounge where the two of them worked on their write-ups, and see the two of them asleep in their chairs, their slack open-mouthed faces flickering under the light of the Keystone Kops debate on the screen.
But in the mornings Art was up with the Swiss, getting things started. Nadia tried to keep pace with him for a few days, but found that the breakfast workshops were chancy. Sometimes people sat around tables sipping coffee and eating fruit and muffins, staring at each other like zombies: Who are you? their bleary gazes said. What am I doing here? Where are we? Why aren’t I asleep in my bed?
But it could be just the opposite: some mornings people came in showered and refreshed, alert with coffee or kavajava, full of new ideas and ready to work hard, to make progress. If the others there were of like mind, things could really fly. One of the sessions on property went like that, and for an hour it seemed as though they had solved all the problems of reconciling self and society, private opportunity and the common good, selfishness and altruism… At the end of the session, however, their notes looked just about as vague and contradictory as those taken at any of the more fractious meetings. “It’s the tape of the whole session that will have to represent it,” Art said, after trying to write down a summary.
The majority of the meetings, however, were not as successful. In fact most of them were merely protracted arguments. One morning Nadia came in on Antar, the young Arab whom Jackie had spent time with during their tour, saying to Vlad, “You will only repeat the socialist catastrophe!”
Vlad shrugged. “Don’t be too hasty to judge that period. The socialist countries were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy. So how can we deal with it without being crushed? We have to look everywhere for answers to this, including the systems that the current order defeated.”
Art was pulling a food cart to the next room, and Nadia left with him.
“Man, I wish Fort was here,” Art muttered. “He should be, I really think he should.”
In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyone gave them, and someone shouted, “Tell that to the Muslims!”
Jurgen came out of the room, looking disgusted. He took a roll from the cart and walked with them, talking through his food: “Liberal democracy says that cultural tolerance is.essential, but you don’t have to get very far away from liberal democracy for liberal democrats to get very intolerant.”
“How do the Swiss solve that?” Art asked.
Jurgen shrugged. “I don’t think we do.”
“Man, I wish Fort were here!” Art said. “I tried to reach him a while back and tell him about this, I even used the Swiss government lines, but I never got any reply.”
The congress went on for almost a month. Sleep deprivation, and perhaps an overreliance on kava, made Art and Nirgal increasingly haggard and groggy, until Nadia started coming by at night and putting them to bed, pushing them onto couches and promising to write summaries of the tapes they had not reviewed. They would sleep right there in the room, muttering as they rolled over on the narrow foam-and-bamboo couches. One night Art sat up suddenly from his couch: “I’m losing the content of things,” he said to Nadia seriously, still half dreaming. “I’m just seeing forms now.”
“Becoming Swiss, eh? Go back to sleep.”
He flopped back down. “It was crazy to think you folks could do anything together,” he murmured.
“Go back to sleep.”
Probably it was crazy, she thought as he snuffed and snored. She stood up, went to the door. She felt the mental whirr in her head that told her she was not going to be able to sleep, and walked outside, into the park’.
The air was still warm, the black skylights stuffed with stars. The length of the tunnel suddenly reminded her of one of the full rooms on the Ares, here vastly enlarged, but with the same aesthetics employed: dimly lit pavilions, the dark furry clumps of little forests… A world-building game. But now there was a real world at stake. At first the attendants of the congress had been almost giddy with the enormous potential of it, and some, like Jackie and other natives, were young and irrepressible enough to feel that way still. But for a lot of the older representatives, the intractable problems were beginning to reveal themselves, like knobby bones under shrinking flesh. The remnant of the First Hundred, the old Japanese from Sabishii — they s.at around these days, watching, thinking hard, with attitudes ranging from Maya’s cynicism to Marina’s anxious irritation.
And then there was the Coyote, down below her in the park, strolling tipsily out of the woods with a young woman holding him by the waist. “Ah, love,” he shouted down the long tunnel, throwing his arms wide, “could thou and I with fate conspire — to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire — would we not shatter it to bits, and then — remold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”
Indeed, Nadia thought, smiling, and went back to her room.
There were some reasons for hope. For one thing Hiroko persevered, attending meetings all day long, adding her thoughts and giving people the sense that they had chosen the most important meeting going on at that moment. And Ann worked — though she seemed critical of everything, Nadia thought, blacker than ever — and Spencer, and Sax, and Maya and Michel, and Vlad and Ursula and Marina. Indeed the First Hundred seemed to Nadia more united in this effort than in anything they had done since setting up Underbill — as if this were their last chance to get things right, to recover from the damage done. To make something for their dead friends’ sake.
And they weren’t the only ones to work. As the meetings went on people got a sense of who wanted the congress to achieve something tangible, and these people got in the habit of attending the same meetings, working hard on finding compromises and getting results onto screens, in the form of recommendations and the like. They had to tolerate visits by those who were more interested in grandstanding than results, but they kept hammering away.
Nadia focused on these signs of progress, and worked to keep Nirgal and Art informed, also fed and rested. People dropped by their suite: “We were told to bring this over to the big three.” Many of the serious workers were interesting; one of the women from Dorsa Brevia, .named Charlotte, was a constitutional scholar of some note, and she was building a kind of framework for them, a Swisslike thing in which topics to be dealt with were ordered without being filled in. “Cheer up,” she told the three of them one morning, when they were sitting around looking glum. “A clash of doctrines is an opportunity. The American constitutional congress was one of the most successful ever, and they went into it with several very strong antagonisms. The shape of the government they made reflects the distrust these groups had for each other. Small states came in afraid they were going to be overwhelmed by large states, and so there’s a Senate where all states are equals, and a House where the larger states have
their greater numbers represented. The structure is a response to a specific problem, see? Same with the three-way checks and balances. It’s an institutionalized distrust of authority. The Swiss constitution has a lot of that too. And we can do it here.”
So out they went, ready to work, two sharp young men and one blunt old woman. It was strange, Nadia thought, to see who emerged as leaders in situations like these. It wasn’t necessarily the most brilliant or well-informed, as Marina or Coyote would serve to show, though both qualities helped, and those two people were important. But the leaders were the ones people would listen to. The magnetic ones. And in a crowd of such powerful intellects and personalities, such magnetism was very rare, very elusive. Very powerful
* * *
She attended a meeting devoted to a discussion of Mars-Earth relations in the postindependence period. Coyote was in there, exclaiming, “Let them go to hell! It’s their own doing! Let them pull together if they can, and if they do, we can visit and be neighbors. But without that, if we try to help them it will only destroy us.”
Many of the Reds and Marsfirsters in there nodded emphatically, Kasei prominent among them. Kasei had been coming into his own recently, as a leader of the Marsfirst group, a separatist wing of the Reds, whose members wanted nothing to do with Earth, who were willing to back sabotage, ecotage, terrorism, armed revolt — any means necessary to get what they wanted. One of the least tractable groups there, in fact, and Nadia found it sad to see Kasei seizing their cause, and even leading it.
Now Maya stood to reply to Coyote. “Nice theory,” she said, “but it’s impossible. It’s like Ann’s redness. We’re going to have to deal with Earth, so we might as well figure out how, and not just hide from it.”
“As long as they’re in chaos, we’re in danger,” Nadia said. “We have to do what we can to help. To exert influence in the direction we want them to go.”
Someone else said, “The two planets are one system.”
“What do you mean by that?” Coyote demanded. “They’re different worlds, they could certainly be two systems!”
“Information exchange.”
Maya said, “We exist for Earth as a model or experiment. A thought experiment for humanity to learn from.”
“A real experiment,” Nadia said. “This is no longer a game, we can’t afford to take attractively pure theoretical positions.” She was looking at Kasei and Dao and their comrades as she said this; but it made no impact, she could see.
More meetings, more talk, a quick meal, and another meeting with the Sabishii issei, to discuss the demimonde as a springboard for their efforts. Then it was off to the nightly conference with Art and Nirgal; but the men were beat, and she sent them to bed. “We’ll talk over breakfast.”
She too was tired, but very far from sleepy. So she took her night walk, north from Zakros through the tunnel. She had recently discovered a high trail running along the west wall of the tunnel, cut into the basalt where the curve of the cylinder made the wall about a forty-five-degree slope. From this trail she could look out over the treetops, down into the parks. And where the trail veered out onto a little spur in Knossos, she could see up and down the length of the tunnel all the way to both horizons, the entire lengthy narrow world dimly lit, by streetlights surrounded by irregular green globes of leaves, and by the few windows with lights still on inside, and by a string of paper lanterns hung in the pines of Gbur-nia’s park. It was such an elegant piece of construction, it hurt her slightly to think of the long years spent in Zygote, under ice, in frigid air and artificial light. If only they had known about these lava tunnels…
The next segment, Phaistos, had its floor nearly filled by a long shallow pond, where the canal that coursed slowly down from Zakros widened. Underwater lights at one end of the pond turned its water into a strange sparkling dark crystal, and she could see a group of people splashing about in it, their bodies gleaming in the lit water, disappearing into the dark. Amphibious creatures, salamanders… Once, very long ago on Earth, there had been water animals that had crawled up gasping onto the shore. They must have had some pretty serious policy debates, Nadia thought sleepily, down in that ocean. To emerge or not to emerge, how to emerge, when to emerge… Sound of distant laughter, the stars packing the jagged skylights…
She turned and walked down a staircase to the tunnel floor, then back to Zakros, on the paths and streetgrass, following the canal, thinking in scattered darting images. Back at their suite she lay on her bed and fell asleep instantly, dreaming at dawn of dolphins swimming through the air.
But in the midst of that dream she was awakened roughly by Maya, who said in Russian, “There’s some Terrans here. Americans.”
“Terrans,” Nadia repeated. And was afraid.
She dressed and went out to see. It was true; Art was standing with a small group of Terrans, men and women her own size, and apparently about her own age, unsteady on their feet as they craned their necks, looking at the great cylindrical chamber in amazement. Art was trying to introduce them and explain them at the same time, which was giving even his motor-mouth some difficulty. “I invited them, yes, well, I didn’t know — hi, Nadia — this is my old boss, William Fort.”
“Speak of the devil,” Nadia said, and shook the man’s hand. He had a strong grip; a bald snub-nosed man, tanned and wrinkled, with a pleasant vague expression.
“ — They just arrived, the Bogdanovists brought them in. I invited Mr. Fort some while ago, but never heard back from him and didn’t know he was going to come. I’m quite surprised and pleased of course.”
“You invited him?” Maya said.
“Yes you see he’s very interested in helping us that’s the thing.”
Maya was glaring, not at Art but at Nadia. “I told you he was a spy,” she said in Russian.
“Yes you did,” Nadia said, then spoke to Fort in English. “Welcome to Mars.”
“I’m happy to be here,” Fort said. And it looked like he meant it; he was grinning goofily, as if too pleased to keep a straight face. His companions did not seem as sure; there were about a dozen of them, both young and old, and some were smiling, but many looked disoriented and cautious.
After an awkward few minutes Nadia took Fort and his little group of associates over to the Zakros guest quarters, and when Ariadne arrived, they assigned the visitors rooms. What else could they do? The news had already gone the length of Dorsa Brevia and back, and as people came down to Zakros their faces expressed displeasure as much as curiosity — but there the visitors were, after all, leaders of one of the biggest transnationals, and apparently alone, and without tracking devices on them, or so the Sabishiians had declared. One had to do something with them.
Nadia got the Swiss to call a general meeting at the lunch hour, and then she invited the new guests to freshen up in their rooms and afterward speak at the meeting. The Terrans accepted the invitation gratefully, the uncertain ones among them looking reassured. Fort himself seemed to be already composing a speech in his mind.
Back outside the Zakros guest quarters, Art was facing a whole crowd of upset people. “What makes you think you can make decisions like that for us?” Maya demanded, speaking for many of them. “You, who don’t even belong! You, a kind of spy among us! Making friends with us, and then betraying us behind our backs!”
Art spread his hands, red-faced with embarrassment, shifting his shoulders as if dodging abuse, or sliding through it to make an appeal to the people behind Maya, the ones who might just be curious. “We need help,” he said. “We can’t accomplish what we want all by ourselves. Praxis is different, they’re more like us than them, I’m telling you.”
“It is not your right to tell us!” Maya said. “You are our prisoner!”
Art squinted, waggled his hands. “You can’t be a prisoner and a spy at the same time, can you?”
“You can be every kind of treacherous thing at once!” Maya exclaimed.
Jackie walked up to Art and looked down on him, he
r face stern and intent. “You know this Praxis group may have to become permanent Martians now, whether they want to be or not. Just like you.”
Art nodded-. “I told them that might happen. Obviously they didn’t care. They want to help, I’m telling you. They represent the only transnational that’s doing things differently, that has goals similar to ours. They’ve come here by themselves to see if they can help. They’re interested. Why should you be so upset by that? It’s an opportunity.”
“Let’s see what Fort says,” Nadia said.
The Swiss had convened the special meeting in the Malia amphitheater, and as the crowd of delegates gathered, Nadia helped guide the newcomers through the segment gates to the site. They were still obviously awestruck at the size of Dorsa Rrevia’s tunnel. Art was scurrying around them with his eyes bugged out, wiping sweat from his brow with his sleeve, intensely nervous. It made Nadia laugh. Somehow Fort’s arrival had put her in a good mood; she did not see how they could lose from it.
So she sat down in the front row with the Praxis group, and watched as Art led Fort onto the stage and introduced him. Fort nodded and spoke a sentence, then tilted his head and looked up at the back row of the amphitheater, realizing that he was unam-plified. He took a breath and started again, and his usually quiet voice floated out with the assurance of a veteran actor, carrying nicely to everyone there.
“I’d like to thank the people of Subarashii for bringing me south to this conference.”
Art cringed as he returned to his seat, and turned and cupped a hand by his mouth: “That’s Sabishii,” he said in an undertone to Fort.
“What’s that?”
“Sabishii. You said Subarashii, which is the transnational. The settlement you went through to get here is called Sabishii. Sabishii means lonely.’ Subarashii means wonderful.’ “
“Wonderful,” Fort said, staring curiously at Art. Then he shrugged and was off and running, an old Terran with a quiet but penetrating voice, and a somewhat wandering style. He described Praxis, how it had begun and how it operated now. When he explained the relationship of Praxis to the other transnationals, Nadia i thought there were similarities to the relationship on Mars between , the underground and the surface worlds, no doubt cleverly high-| lighted by Fort’s description. And it seemed to her from the silence behind her that Fort was doing pretty well at capturing the crowd’s I interest. But then he said something about ecocapitalism, and re-| garding Earth as a full world while Mars was still an empty one; and three or four Reds popped to their feet.
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