Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.
So habits made their first incursions into the new terrain, like bacteria into rock, followed by procedures, protocols, a whole fell-field of social discourse, on its way to the climax forest of law… Nadia saw that people (some people) were indeed coming to her to resolve arguments, deferring to her judgment. She might not have been in control, but she was as close to control as they had: the universal solvent, as Art called her, or General Nadia, as Maya said nastily over the wrist. Which only made Nadia shudder, as Maya knew it would. Nadia preferred something she had heard Sax say over the wrist to his faithful gang of techs, all young Saxes in the making: “Nadia is the designated arbitrator, talk to her about it.” Thus the power of names; arbitrator rather than general. In charge of negotiating what Art was calling the “phase change.” She had heard him use the term in the midst of a long interview on Mangalavid, with that deadpan expression of his that made it very hard to tell if he was joking or not: “Oh I don’t think it’s really a revolution we’re seeing, no. It’s a perfectly natural next step here, so it’s more a kind of evolutionary or developmental thing, or what in physics they call a phase change.”
His subsequent comments indicated to Nadia that he did not in fact know what a phase change was. But she did, and she found the concept intriguing. Vaporization of Terran authority, condensation of local power, the thaw finally come … however you wanted to think about it. Melting occurred when the thermal energy of particles was great enough to overcome the intracrystalline forces that held them in position. So if you considered the metanat order as the crystalline structure… But then it made a huge difference whether the forces holding it together were interionic or intermolecular; sodium chloride, interionic, melted at 801°C; methane, intermolecular, at –183°C. What kind of forces, then? And how high the temperature?
At this point the analogy itself melted. But names were powerful in the human mind, no doubt about it. Phase change, integrated pest management, selective disemployment; she preferred them all to the old deadly notion revolution, and she was glad they were all in circulation, on Marigalavid and on the streets.
But there were some five thousand heavily armed security troops in Burroughs and Sheffield, she reminded herself, who were still thinking of themselves as police facing armed rioters. And that would have to be dealt with by more than semantics.
For the most part, however, things were going better than she had hoped. It was a matter of demographics, in a way; it appeared that almost every single person who had been born on Mars was now in the streets, or occupying city offices, train stations, spaceports — all of them, to judge by the Mangalavid interviews, completely (and unrealistically, Nadia thought) intolerant of the idea that powers on another planet should control them in any way whatsoever. That was nearly half the current Martian population, right there. And a good percentage of the old-timers were on their side too, as well as some of the new emigrants. “Call them immigrants,” Art advised over the phone. “Or newcomers. Call them settlers or colonialists, depending on whether they’re with us or not. That’s something Nirgal has been doing, and I think it helps people to think about things.”
On Earth the situation was less clear. The Subarashii metanats were still struggling with the southern metanats, but in the context of the great flood they had become a bitter sideshow. It was hard to tell what Terrans in general thought of the conflict on Mars.
Whatever they thought, a fast shuttle was about to arrive, with reinforcements for security. So resistance groups from all over mobilized to converge on Burroughs. Art did what he could to help this effort from inside Burroughs, locating all the people who had independently thought of coming (it was obvious, after all), telling them their idea was good, and siccing them on people opposed to the plan. He was, Nadia thought, a subtle diplomat — big, mild, unpretentious, unassuming, sympathetic, “undiplomatic” — head lowered as he conferred with people, giving them the impression they were the ones driving the process. Indefatigable, really. And very clever. Soon he had a great number of groups coming, including the Reds and the Marsfirst guerrillas, who still appeared to be thinking of their approach as a kind of assault, or siege. Nadia felt acutely that while the Reds and Marsfirsters she knew — Ivana, Gene, Raul, Kasei — were keeping in touch with her, and agreeing to the use of her as an arbitrator, there were more radical Red and Marsfirst units out there for whom she was irrelevant, or even an obstruction1. This made her angry, because she was sure that if Ann was fully supporting her, the more radical elements would come around. She complained bitterly about this to Art, after seeing a Red communique arranging the western half of the “convergence” on Burroughs, and Art went to work and got Ann to answer a call, then gave her over in a link to Nadia.
And there she was again, like one of the furies of the French Revolution, as bleak and grim as ever. Their last exchange, over Sabishii, lay heavy between them; the issue had become moot when UNTA retook Sabishii and burned it down, but Ann was obviously still angry, which Nadia found irritating.
Brittle greetings over, their conversation degenerated almost instantly into argument. Ann clearly saw the revolt as a chance to wreck all terraforming efforts and to remove as many cities and people as possible from the planet, by direct assault if necessary. Frightened by this apocalyptic vision, Nadia argued with her bitterly, then furiously. But Ann had gone off into a world of her own. “I’d be just as happy if Burroughs did get wrecked,” she declared coldly.
Nadia gritted her teeth. “If you wreck Burroughs you wreck everything. Where are the people inside supposed to go? You’ll be no better than a murderer, a mass murderer. Simon would be ashamed.”
Ann scowled. “Power corrupts, I see. Put Sax on, will you? I’m tired of this hysteria.”
Nadia switched the call to Sax and walked away. It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power. Well, it could be that she had been too quick to anger, too harsh. But she was frightened of that dark place inside Ann, the part that might do anything; and fear corrupted more than power. Combine the two…
Hopefully she had shocked Ann severely enough to squeeze that dark place back into its corner. Bad psychology, as Michel pointed out gently, when Nadia called him in Burroughs to talk about it. A strategy resulting from fear. But she couldn’t help it, she was afraid. Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.
So on Wednesday evening, five days after Nadia’s call from Sax, about a hundred people left for Burroughs in planes, as the pistes were judged too vulnerable to sabotage. They flew overnight to a rocky landing strip next to a large Bogdanovist refuge in the wall of Du Martheray Crater, which was on the Great Escarpment southeast of Burroughs. They landed at dawn, with the sun rising through mist like a blob of mercury, lighting distant ragged white hills to the north, on the low plain of Isidis: another new ice sea, whose progress south had been stopped only by the arcing line of the dike, curving across the land like a long low earthen dam — which was just what it was.
To get a better view Nadia went up to the top floor of the Du Martheray refuge, where an observation window, disguised as a horizontal crack just under the rim, gave a view down the Great Escarpment to the new dike and the ice pressing against it. For a long time she stared down at the sight, sipping coffee mixed with a dose of kava. To the north was the ice sea, with its clustered seracs and long pressure ridges, and the flat white sheets of giant frozen-topped melt lakes. Directly below her lay the first low hills of the Great Escarpment, dotted with spiky expanses of Acheron cacti, sprawling over the rock like coral reefs. Staircased meadows of black-green tund
ra moss followed the courses of small frozen streams dropping down the Escarpment; the streams in the distance looked like long algae diatoms, tucked into creases in the redrock.
And then in the middle distance, dividing desert from ice, ran the new dike, like a raw brown scar, suturing two separate realities together.
Nadia spent a long time studying it through binoculars. Its southern end was a regolith mound, running up the apron of Crater Wg and ending right at Wg’s rim, which was about half a kilometer above the datum, well above the expected sea level. The dike ran northwest from Wg, and from her prospect high on the Escarpment Nadia could see about forty kilometers of it before it disappeared over the horizon, just to the west of Crater Xh. Xh was surrounded by ice almost to its rim, so that its r6und interior was like an odd red sinkhole. Everywhere else the ice had pressed right up against the dike, for as far as Nadia could see. The desert side of the dike appeared to be some two hundred meters high, although it was difficult to judge, as there was a broad trench underneath the dike. On the other side, the ice bulked quite high, halfway up or more.
The dike was about three hundred meters wide at the top. That much displaced regolith — Nadia whistled respectfully — represented several years of work, by a very large team of robot draglines and canal-diggers. But loose regolith! It seemed to her that huge as the dike was on any human scale, it was still not much to contain an ocean of ice. And ice was the easy part — when it became liquid, the waves and currents would tear regolith away like dirt. And the ice was already melting; immense melt pods were said to lie everywhere underneath the dirty white surface, including directly against the dike, seeping into it.
“Aien’t they’re going to have to replace that whole mound with concrete?” she said to Sax, who had joined her, and was looking through his own binoculars at the sight.
“Face it,” he said. Nadia prepared herself for bad news, but he continued by saying, “Face the dike with a diamond coating. That would last fairly long. Perhaps a few million years.”
“Hmm,” Nadia said. It was probably true. There would be seepage from below, perhaps. But in any case, whatever the particulars, they would have to maintain the system in perpetuity, and with no room for error, as Burroughs was just 20 kilometers south of the dike, and some 150 meters lower than it. A strange place to end up. Nadia trained her binoculars in the direction of the city, but it lay just over her horizon, about 70 kilometers to the northwest. Of course dikes could be effective; Holland’s dikes had held for centuries, protecting millions of people and hundreds of square kilometers, right up until the recent flood — and even now those great dikes were holding, and would be broached first by flanking floods through Germany and Belgium. Certainly dikes could be effective. But it was a strange fate nevertheless.
Nadia pointed her binoculars along the ragged rock of the Great Escarpment. What looked like flowers in the distance were actually massive lumps of coral cactus. A stream looked like a staircase made of lily pads. The rough redrock slope made for a very stark, surreal, lovely landscape… Nadia was pierced by an unexpected paroxysm of fear, that something might go wrong and she might suddenly be killed, prevented from witnessing any more of this world and its evolution. It could happen, a missile might burst out of the violet sky at any moment — this refuge was target practice, if some frightened battery commander out at the Burroughs spaceport learned of its presence and decided to deal with the problem preemptively. They could be dead within minutes of such a decision.
But that was life on Mars. They could be dead within minutes of any number of untoward events, as always. She dismissed the thought, and went downstairs with Sax.
She wanted to go into Burroughs and see things, to be on the scene and judge for herself: walk around and observe the citizens of the town, see what they were doing and saying. Late on Thursday she said to Sax, “Let’s go in and have a look.”
But it seemed to be impossible. “Security is heavy at all the gates,” Maya told her over the wrist. “And the trains coming in are checked at the stations very closely. Same with the subway to the spaceport. The city is closed. In effect we’re hostages.”
“We can see what’s happening on-screen,” Sax pointed out. “It doesn’t matter.”
Unhappily Nadia agreed. Shikata ga nai, apparently. But she didn’t like the situation, which seemed to her to be rapidly approaching a stalemate, at least locally. And she was intensely curious about conditions in Burroughs. “Tell me what it’s like,” she asked Maya over their phone link.
“Well, they’ve got control of the infrastructure,” Maya said. “Physical plant, gates, and so on. But there aren’t enough of them to force people to stay indoors, or go to work of course, or anything else. So they don’t seem to know what to do next.”
Nadia could understand that, as she too felt at a loss. More security forces were coming into the city every hour, on trains from tent towns they had given up on. These new arrivals joined their fellow troops, and stayed near the physical plant and the city offices, getting around in heavily armed groups, unmolested. They were housed in residential quarters in Branch Mesa, Double Decker Butte, and Black Syrtis Mesa, and their leaders were meeting more or less continuously at the UNTA headquarters in Table Mountain. But the leaders were issuing no orders.
So things were in an uneasy suspension. The Biotique and Praxis offices in Hunt Mesa were still serving as an information center for all of them, disseminating news from Earth and the rest of the Mars, spreading it through the city on bulletin boards and computer postings. These media, along with Mangalavid and other private channels, meant that everyone was well informed concerning the latest developments. On the great boulevards, and in the parks, some big crowds congregated from time to time, but more often people were scattered in scores of small groups, milling around in a kind of active paralysis, something between a general strike and a hostage crisis. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen next. People seemed in good spirits, many shops and restaurants were still open, and video interviews taped in them were friendly.
Watching them while jamming down a meal, Nadia felt an aching desire to be in there, to talk to people herself. Around ten that night, realizing she was hours from sleep, she called Maya again, and asked her if she would don vidcam glasses, and go on a walk for her around the city. Maya, just as antsy as Nadia if not more so, was happy to oblige.
Soon Maya was out of the safe house, wearing vidspecs and transmitting images of what she looked at to Nadia, who sat apprehensively in a chair before a screen, in the Du Martheray refuge common room. Sax and several others ended up looking overNa-dia’s shoulders, and together they watched the bouncing image Maya got with her vidcam, and listened to her running commentary.
She walked swiftly down Great Escarpment Boulevard, toward the central valley. Once down among the cart vendors in the upper end of Canal Park, she slowed her pace, and looked around slowly to give Nadia a panning shot of the scene. People were out and about everywhere, talking in groups, enjoying a kind of festival atmosphere. Two women next to Maya struck up an animated conversation about Sheffield. A group of newcomers came right up to Maya and asked her what was going to happen next, apparently confident that she would know, “Simply because I am so old!” Maya noted with disgust when they had left. It almost made Nadia smile. But then some young people recognized Maya as herself, and came over to greet her happily. Nadia watched this encounter from Maya’s point of view, noting how starstruck the people seemed. So this is what the world looked like to Maya! No wonder she thought she was so special, with people looking at her like that, as if she were a dangerous goddess, just stepped out of a myth…
It was disturbing in more senses than one. It seemed to Nadia that her old companion was in danger of being arrested by security, and she said as much over the wrist. But the view on-screen waggled from side to side as Maya shook her head. “See how there aren’t any cops in sight?” Maya said. “Security is all concentrated around the gates and the t
rain stations, and I stay away from them. Besides, why should they bother to arrest me? In effect they have this whole city arrested.”
She tracked an armored vehicle as it drove down the grassy boulevard and passed without slowing down, as if to illustrate her point. “That’s so everyone can see the guns,” Maya said darkly.
She walked down to Canal Park, then turned around and went up the path toward Table Mountain. It was cold in the city that night; lights reflecting off the canal showed that the water in it was icing over. But if security had hoped to discourage crowds, it hadn’t worked; the park was crowded, and becoming more crowded all the time. People were clumped around gazebos, or cafes, or big orange heating coils; and everywhere Maya looked more people were coming down into the park. Some listened to musicians, or people speaking with the help of little shoulder amplifiers; others watched the news on their wrists, or on lectern screens. “Rally at midnight!” someone cried. “Rally in the timeslip!”
“I haven’t heard anything about this,” Maya said apprehensively. “This must be Jackie’s doing.”
She looked around so fast that the view on Nadia’s screen was dizzying. People everywhere. Sax went to another screen and called the safe house in Hunt Mesa. Art answered there, but other than him, the safe house was nearly empty. Jackie had indeed called for a mass demonstration in the timeslip, and word had gone out over all the city media. Nirgal was out there with her.
Nadia told Maya about this, and Maya cursed viciously. “It’s much too volatile for this kind of thing! Goddamn her.”
But there was nothing they could do about it now. Thousands of people were pouring down the boulevards into Canal Park and Princess Park, and when Maya looked around, tiny figures could be seen on the rims of the mesas, and crowding the walktube bridges that spanned Canal Park. “The speakers are going to be up in Princess Park,” Art said from Sax’s screen.
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