* * *
And so on the morning of the general meeting Art and Nirgal and Nadia walked out onto the stage of the amphitheater together, and Art took his Al with him to the proscenium. He stood looking out at the assembled crowd, as if stunned by the sight of it, and after a long pause said, “We actually agree on many things.”
This got a laugh. But Art held his AI overhead like the stone tablets, then read aloud from the screen: “Work points for a Martian government!”
He peered over the screen at the crowd, and they subsided into an attentive silence.
“One. Martian society will be composed of many different cultures. It is better to think of it as a world rather than a nation. Freedom of religion and cultural practice must be guaranteed. No one culture or group of cultures should be able to dominate the rest.
“Two. Within this framework of diversity, it still must be guaranteed that all individuals on Mars have certain inalienable rights, including the material basics of existence, health care, education, and legal equality.
“Three. The land, air, and water of Mars are in the common stewardship of the human family, and cannot be owned by any individual or group.
“Four. The fruits of an individual’s labor belong to the individual, and cannot be appropriated by another individual or group. At the same time, human labor on Mars is part of a communal enterprise, given to the common good. The Martian economic system must reflect both these facts, balancing self-interest with the interests of society at large.
“Five. The metanational order ruling Earth is currently incapable of incorporating the previous two principles, and cannot be applied here. In its place we must enact an economics based on ecologic science. The goal of Martian economics is not sustainable development’ but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere.
“Six. The Martian landscape itself has certain rights of place’ which must be honored. The goal of our environmental alterations should therefore be minimalist and ecopoetic, reflecting the values of the areophany. It is suggested that the goal of environmental alterations be to make only that portion of Mars lower than the five-kilometer contour human-viable. Higher elevations, constituting some thirty percent of the planet, would then remain in something resembling their primeval conditions, existing as natural wilderness zones.
“Seven. The habitation of Mars is a unique historical process, as it is the first inhabitation of another planet by humanity. As such it should be undertaken in a spirit of reverence for this planet and for the scarcity of life ;.n the universe. What we do here will set precedents for further human habitation of the solar system, and will suggest models for the human relationship to Earth’s environment as well. Thus Mars occupies a special place in history, and this should be remembered when we make the necessary decisions concerning life here.”
Art let his AI fall to his side, and stared out at the crowd. They looked down at him in silence. “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat. He gestured at Nirgal, who came up and stood beside him. *Nirgal said, “That’s all that we could pick out from the workshops that it seemed to us everyone here might agree to. There’s lots more that we feel would be accepted by a majority of the groups here, but not by all. We’ve made lists of those partial consensus points as well, and we’ll post them all for your inspection. We feel very strongly that if we can come away from here with even a very general kind of document, then we will have accomplished something significant. The tendency in a congress like this is to become more and more aware of our differences, and I think this tendency is exaggerated in our situation, because at this point a Martian government remains a kind of theoretical exercise. But when it becomes a practical problem — when we have to act — then we’ll be looking for common ground, and a document like this will help us find it.
“We have a lot of specific notes for each of the main points of the document. We’ve talked with Jurgen and Priska about them, and they suggest setting up a week of meetings with a day devoted to each of the seven main points, so that everyone can make comments and revisions. Then at the end we can see if we have anything left.”
There was a weak laugh. A lot of people were nodding.
“What about gaining independence in the first place?” Coyote called from the back.
Art said, “We couldn’t figure out any similar points of agreement to write down. Maybe there can also be a workshop that tries to do that.”
“Maybe there should!” Coyote exclaimed. “Anyone can agree things should be fair, and the world just. The way to get there is always the real problem.”
“Well, yes and no,” Art said. “What we’ve got here is more than a wish that things be fair. As for the methods, maybe if we go at it again with these goals in mind, things will suggest themselves. That is to say, what will get us to these goals most surely? What kind of means do these ends imply?”
He looked around at the crowd, and shrugged. “Look, we’ve tried to compile a composite of what you’ve all been saying here in your different ways, so if there is a lack of specific suggestions for means of achieving independence, it’s perhaps because you’ve all gotten stuck at the level of general philosophies of action, where many of you disagree. The only thing I can think to suggest is that you try to identify the various forces on the planet, and rate how resistant to independence they might be, and tailor your actions to match the resistance. Nadia talked about reconceptualizing the whole methodology of revolution, and some have suggested economic models, the idea of a leveraged buyout or something, but when I was thinking about this notion of a tailored response, it reminded me of integrated pest management, you know — the system in agriculture where a variety of methods of varying severity are used to deal with the pests you have.”
People laughed at this, but Art didn’t seem to notice; he looked taken aback by the lack of approval of the general document. Disappointed. And Nirgal looked angry.
Nadia turned and said loudly, “How about a round of applause for our friends here, for managing to synthesize anything at all out of this!”
People clapped. A few cheered. For a moment it sounded quite enthusiastic. But -quickly it ended, and they filed out of the amphitheater, talking among themselves, arguing again already.
So the debates continued, now structured around Art and Nir-gal’s document. Reviewing the tapes, Nadia saw that there was a fair amount of agreement over the substance of all the points except for number six, concerning the level of terraforming. Most of the Reds would not accept the low-elevation viability concept, pointing out that most of the planet lay under the five-kilometer contour, and that the higher elevations would be significantly contaminated if the lower elevations were viable. They spoke of dismantling the industrial terraforming processes that were now under way, of returning to the very slowest biological methods called for in the radical ecopoesis model. Some advocated the growth of a thin CO2 atmospshere, supporting plants but not animals, as being a situation more natural to Mars’s volatile inventory and its past history. Other advocated leaving the surface as close to how they had found it as possible, and keeping a very small population in tented valleys. These people decried the rapid destruction of the surface by the industrial terraforming in outraged tones, condemning particularly tl e inundation of Vastitas Borealis, and the outright melting of the landscape by use of the soletta and the aerial lens.
But as the seven days passed, it became more and more obvious that this point of the draft declaration was the only one being really debated, while the others were for the most part being subjected to fine-tuning only. A lot of people were pleasantly surprised to find even this much assent to the draft statement, and more than once Nirgal said irritably, “Why be surprised? We didn’t make those points up, we just wrote down what people were saying.”
And people would nod at this, interested, and go back to the meetings, and work on the points again. And it began to seem to Nadia that agreement Was popping up everywhere, called out of chaos by Art and Nir
gal’s assertion that it existed. Several of the sessions that week ended in a kind of kavajava high of political consensus, the various aspects of a state finally hammered into a shape to which many of the parties could agree.
But the argument over methods only got more vehement. Back and forth it would go, Nadia against Coyote, Kasei, the Reds, the Marsfirsters, and many of the Bogdanovists. “You can’t get to what we want by murder!” “They won’t give this planet up! Political power begins at the end of a gun!”
One night after one of these donnybrooks, a big gathering of them floated in the shallows of the Phaistos pond, trying to relax. Sax sat on an underwater bench and shook his head. “Classic problem of punishment — no — of violence,” he said. “Radical, liberal. Who never managed to agree again. Before.” . Art plunged his head in the water, and pulled it out spluttering. Weary, frustrated, he said, “What about integrated pest management? What about that mandatory retirement idea?”
“Forced disemployment,” Nadia corrected.
“Decapitation,” Maya said
“Whatever!” Art said, splashing them. “Velvet revolution. Silk revolution.”
“Aerogel,” Sax said. “Light, strong. Invisible.”
“It’s worth a try!” Art said.
Ann shook her head. “It will never work.”
“It’s better than another sixty-one,” Nadia said.
Sax said, “Better if we agree on a play. On a plan.”
“But we can’t,” Maya said.
“The front is broad,” Art insisted. “Let’s go out there and do what we’re comfortable with.”
Sax and Nadia and Maya all shook their heads at once; seeing it, Ann unexpectedly laughed out loud. And then they were all sitting in the pond together, giggling at they knew not what.
The final general meeting took place in the late afternoon, in the Zakros park where it had all begun. It had a strangely confused air, Nadia felt, with most people only grudgingly satisfied with the Dorsia Brevia Declaration, now several times longer than Art and Nirgal’s original draft. Each point was read aloud by Priska, and each was cheered in a consensual vote of approval; but different groups cheered more loudly for some points than for others, and when the reading was done, the general applause was brief and perfunctory. No one could be happy with that, and Art and Nirgal looked exhausted.
The applause ended, and for a moment everyone just sat there. No one knew what to do next; the lack of agreement on the matter of methods seem to extend right into that very moment. What next? What now? Did they just go home? Did they have a home? The moment stretched out, uncomfortable, even vaguely painful (how they needed John!), so that Nadia was relieved when someone shouted something — an exclamation that seemed to break a malign spell. She looked around as people pointed.
There on a staircase, high on the black tunnel wall, stood a green woman. She was unclothed, green-skinned, glowing in a shaft of afternoon sun that shot down from a skylight — gray-haired, barefoot, without jewelry — completely naked, except for a coat of green paint. And what was common at night in the pond was, in this vivid daylight, dangerous and provocative — a shock to the senses, a challenge to their notion of what a political congress was, or could be.
It was Hiroko. She began to step down the staircase, in a steady measured pace. Ariadne and Charlotte and several other Minoan women stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her, along with Hiroko’s closest followers from the hidden colony — Iwao, Rya, Ev-genia, Michel, all the rest of that little band. As Hiroko descended they started to sing. When she reached them, they draped her with strings of bright red flowers. A fertility rite, Nadia thought, reaching directly into some paleolithic part of their minds, and intermingling there with Hiroko’s areophany.
When Hiroko left the foot of the stairs she had a little train of followers, singing the names of Mars, “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram,” and so on, a great melange of archaic syllables, into which some of them were interjecting “Ka … ka … ka …”
She led them down the path, through trees; out again onto the grass, into the meeting in the park. She walked right through the middle of the crowd, with a solemn, distant expression on her green face. Many stood as she passed. Jackie Boone came out of the crowd and joined the group of followers, and her green grandmother took her by the hand. The two of them led the way through the crowd, the old matriarch tall, proud, thoroughly ancient, gnarled like a tree, and as green as a tree’s leaves; Jackie taller still, young and graceful as a dancer, her black hair flowing halfway down her back. A rustle went through the crowd, a sigh; and as the two and the group following them walked down to the central path by the canal, people stood and followed, the Sufis among them dancing a braid around their circumference. “Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira …” And so a thousand people walked down the canal path after the two women and their train, the Sufis singing, others chanting pieces of Hiroko’s areophany, the rest content to follow.
Nadia walked along holding hands with Nirgal and Art, feeling happy. They were animals, after all, no matter where they chose to live. She felt something like worship, an emotion very rare in her experience — worship for the divinity of life, which took such beautiful forms.
At the pond Jackie took off her rust jumper, and she and Hiroko stood in ankle-deep water, facing each other and holding their clasped hands as far overhead as they could reach. The other Minoan women joined this bridge. Old and young, green and pink…
The hidden colonists passed under the bridge first, among them Maya herself, hand in hand with Michel. And then all kinds of people were filing under the mother bridge, in what felt like the millionth repetition of a million-year-old ritual, something everyone had coded in their genes and had practiced all their life. The Sufis danced under the clasped hands still wearing their white billowing clothes, and this gave a model to others, who stayed clothed but surged right out into the water, ducking under the naked women, Zeyk and Nazik leading the way, chanting, “Ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq,” looking like Hindus in the Ganges, or Baptists in the Jordan. So that in the end many shed their clothes, but all walked into the water. And they stared around at this instinctive and yet highly conscious rebirth, many drumming on the water surface, making rhythmic slapping splashes to accompany the singing and chanting… Nadia saw again and again how beautiful humans were. Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality. They stood before each other with all their imperfections and their sexual characteristics and their intimations of mortality — but most of all with their astonishing beauty, which in the ruddy light of the tunnel sunset could scarcely be believed, could scarcely be comprehended or answered. Skin at sunset had a lot of red in it — but not enough for some of the Reds, apparently, who were sponging one of their women down with a red dye they had located, to make a counter figure to Hiroko, apparently. Political bathing? Nadia groaned. Actually all the colors were coming off in the pond, turning the water brown.
Maya swam through the shallows and knocked Nadia deeper into the pond with an impetuous hug. “Hiroko is a genius,” she said in Russian. “She may be a mad genius, but a genius she is.”
“Mother goddess of the world,” Nadia said, and switched to English as she plowed through the warm water to a little knot of the First Hundred and the Sabishii issei. There were Ann and Sax standing side by side, Ann tall and thin, Sax short and round, looking just as they had in the old days in the baths of Underbill, debating something or other, Sax talking with his face all screwed up in concentration. Nadia laughed at the sight, splashing them.
Fort swam to her side. “Should have run the whole conference like this,” he observed. “Ooh, he’s going to crash.” And indeed a board rider coming down the curved wall slipped off his’plummeting board, and slid ignominiously into the pond. “Look, I need to get back home to be able to help. Also a great-great-great-granddaughter is getting married in four months.”
“Can you get back that fast?” Spencer asked.
“Yes, my ship is fast.” A Praxis space division built rockets that used a modified Dyson propulsion to accelerate and then decelerate continuously through the flight, which took a very direct line between the planets.
“Executive style,” Spencer said.
“They’re open for use by anyone in Praxis, if they’re in a hurry. You might want to visit Earth yourself, see what conditions are like firsthand.”
No one took him up on that, though it raised some eyebrows. But there was no more talk of detaining him, either.
People drifted like jellyfish in a slow whirlpool, calmed at last by the warmth, by the water and wine and kava being passed around in bamboo cups, by the accomplishment of finishing what they had come to do. It was not perfect, people said — definitely not perfect — but it was something, especially the remarkable nature of point four, or three — quite a declaration, in fact — a beginning, a real beginning — seriously flawed — especially point six — definitely not perfect — but likely to be remembered. “Well, but this here is religion,” someone sitting in the shallows was saying, “and I like all the pretty bodies, but mixing state and religion is a dangerous business …”
Nadia and Maya walked out into deeper water, arm in arm, talking with everyone they knew. A group of the youngsters from Zygote saw them, Rachel and Tiu and Frantz and, Steve and the rest, and they cried, “Hey, the two witches!” and came over to squish them together with hugs and kisses. Kinetic reality, Nadia thought, somatic reality, haptic reality — the power of the touch, ah, my … her ghost finger was throbbing, which hadn’t happened in ages.
They walked on, trailing the Zygote ectogenes, and came on Art, who was standing with Nirgal and a few other men, all drawn as by magnet to where Jackie still stood by the half-green Hiroko, her wet hair slicked over her bare shoulders, her head thrown back laughing, the sunset glaring off her and giving her a kind of hy-perreal, heraldic power. Art was looking happy indeed, and when Nadia hugged him, he put an arm over her shoulder and left it there. Her good friend, a very solid somatic reality.
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