Читать книгу Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 10

Ants came to Mars as part of the soil project, and soon they were everywhere, as is their way. And so the little red people encountered ants, and they were amazed. These creatures were just the right size to ride; it was like the Native Americans meeting the horse. Tame the things and they would run wild.

Domesticating the ant was no easy matter. The little red scientists had not believed such creatures were even possible, because of surface area-to-volume constraints, but there they were, clumping around like intelligent robots, so the little red scientists had to explain them. To get some help they climbed up into the humans’ reference books, and read up on ants. They learned about the ants’ pheromones, and they synthesized the ones they needed to control the soldier ants of a particularly small docile red species, and after that, they were in business. Little red cavalry. They charged around everywhere on antback, having a fine old time, twenty or thirty of them on each ant, like pashas on elephants. Look close at enough ants and you’ll see them, right there on top.

But the little red scientists continued to read the texts, and learned about human pheromones. They went back to the rest of the little red people, awestruck and appalled. Now we know why these humans are such trouble, they reported. Humans have no more will than these ants we are riding around on. They are giant meat ants.

The little red people tried to comprehend such a travesty of life.

Then a voice said, No they’re not, to all of them at once. The little red people talk to each other telepathically, you see, and this was like a telepathic loudspeaker announcement. Humans are spiritual beings, this voice insisted.

How do you know? the little red people asked telepathically. Who are you? Are you the ghost of John Boone?

I am the Gyatso Rimpoche, the voice answered. The eighteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. I am travelling the Bardo in search of my next reincarnation. I’ve looked everywhere on Earth, but I’ve had no luck, and I decided to look somewhere new. Tibet is still under the thumb of the Chinese, and they show no signs of letting up. The Chinese, although I love them dearly, are hard bastards. And the other governments of the world long ago turned their backs on Tibet. So no one will challenge the Chinese. Something needs to be done. So I came to Mars.

Good idea, the little red people said.

Yes, the Dalai Lama agreed, but I must admit I am having a hard time finding a new body to inhabit. For one thing there are very few children anywhere. Then also it does not look as if anyone is interested. I looked in Sheffield but everyone was too busy talking. I went to Sabishii but everyone there had their heads stuck in the dirt. I went to Elysium but everyone had assumed the lotus position and could not be roused. I went to Christianopolis but everyone there had other plans. I went to Hiranyagarbha but everyone there said we’ve already done enough for Tibet. I’ve gone everywhere on Mars, to every tent and station, and everywhere people are just too busy. No one wants to be the nineteenth Dalai Lama. And the Bardo is getting colder and colder.

Good luck, the little red people said. We’ve been looking ever since John died and we haven’t even found anyone worth talking to, much less living inside. These big people are all messed up.

The Dalai Lama was discouraged by this response. He was getting very tired, and could not last much longer in the Bardo. So he said, What about one of you?

Well, sure, the little red people said. We’d be honoured. Only it will have to be all of us at once. We do everything like that together.

Why not, said the Dalai Lama, and he transmigrated into one of the little red specks, and that same instant he was there in all of them, all over Mars. The little red people looked up at the humans crashing around above them, a sight which before they had tended to regard as some kind of bad wide-screen movie, and now they found they were filled with all the compassion and wisdom of the eighteen previous lives of the Dalai Lama. They said to each other, Ka wow, these people really are messed up. We thought it was bad before, but look at that, it’s even worse than we thought. They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other – they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad.

They need your help, the Dalai Lama said inside them all. Maybe you can help them.

Maybe, the little red people said. They were dubious, to tell the truth. They had been trying to help humans ever since John Boone died, they had set up whole towns in the porches of every ear on the planet, and talked continuously ever since, sounding very much like John had, trying to get people to wake up and act decently, and never with any effect at all, except to send a lot of people to ear, nose and throat specialists. Lots of people on Mars thought they had tinnitus, but no one ever understood their little red people. It was enough to discourage anyone.

But now the little red people had the compassionate spirit of the Dalai Lama infusing them, and so they decided to try one more time. Perhaps it will take more than whispering in their ears, the Dalai Lama pointed out, and they all agreed. We’ll have to get their attention some other way.

Have you tried your telepathy on them? the Dalai Lama asked.

Oh no, they said. No way. Too scary. The ugliness might kill us on the spot. Or at least make us real sick.

Maybe not, the Dalai Lama said. Maybe if you blocked off your reception of what they thought, and just beamed your thoughts at them, it would be all right. Just send lots of good thoughts, like an advice beam. Compassion, love, agreeableness, wisdom, even a little common sense.

We’ll give it a try, the little red people said. But we’re all going to have to shout at the top of our telepathic voices, all in chorus, because these folks just aren’t listening.

I’ve faced that for nine centuries now, the Dalai Lama said. You get used to it. And you little ones have the advantage of numbers. So give it a try.

And so all the little red people all over Mars looked up and took a deep breath.

Art Randolph was having the time of his life.

Not during the battle for Sheffield, of course – that had been a disaster, a breakdown of diplomacy, the failure of everything Art had been trying to do – a miserable few days, in fact, during which he had run around sleeplessly trying to meet with every group he thought might help defuse the crisis, and always with the feeling that it was somehow his fault, that if he had done things right it would not have happened. The fight went right to the brink of torching Mars, as in 2061; for a few hours on the afternoon of the Red assault, it had teetered.

But fallen back. Something – diplomacy, or the realities of battle (a defensive victory for those on the cable), common sense, sheer chance – something had tipped things back from the edge.

And with that nightmare interval past, people had returned to East Pavonis in a thoughtful mood. The consequences of failure had been made clear. They needed to agree on a plan. Many of the radical Reds were dead, or escaped into the outback, and the moderate Reds left in East Pavonis, while angry, were at least there. It was a very uncomfortable and uncertain period. But there they were.

So once again Art began flogging the idea of a constitutional congress. He ran around under the big tent through warrens of industrial warehouses and storage zones and concrete dormitories, down broad streets crowded with a museum’s worth of heavy vehicles, and everywhere he urged the same thing: constitution. He talked to Nadia, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Maya, Peter, Ariadne, Rashid, Tariki, Nanao, Sung and H. X. Bor-azjani. He talked to Vlad and Ursula and Marina, and to the Coyote. He talked to a few score young natives he had never met before, all major players in the recent unrest; there were so many of them it began to seem like a textbook demonstration of the polycephalous nature of mass social movements. And to every head of this new hydra Art made the same case: ‘A constitution would legitimate us to Earth, and it would give us a framework for settling disputes among ourselves. And we’re all gathered here, we could start right away. Some people have plans ready to look at.’ And with the events of the past week fresh in their minds, people would nod and say, ‘Maybe so,’ and wander off thinking about it.

Art called up William Fort and told him what he was doing, and got an answer back later the same day. The old man was at a new refugee town in Costa Rica, looking just as distracted as always. ‘Sounds good,’ he said. And after that Praxis people were checking with Art daily to see what they could do to help organize things. Art became busier than he had ever been, doing what the Japanese there called nema-washi, the preparations for an event: starting strategy sessions for an organizing group, revisiting everyone he had spoken to before, trying, in effect, to talk to every individual on Pavonis Mons. ‘The John Boone method,’ Coyote commented with his cracked laugh. ‘Good luck!’

Sax, packing his few belongings for the diplomatic mission to Earth, said, ‘You should invite the, the United Nations.’

Sax’s adventure in the storm had knocked him back a bit; he tended to stare around at things, as if stunned by a blow to the head. Art said gently, ‘Sax, we just went to a lot of trouble to kick their butts off this planet.’

‘Yes,’ Sax said, staring at the ceiling. ‘But now co-opt them.’

‘Co-opt the UN!’ Art considered it. Co-opt the United Nations: it had a certain ring to it. It would be a challenge, diplomatically speaking.

Just before the ambassadors left for Earth, Nirgal came to the Praxis offices to say goodbye. Embracing his young friend, Art was seized with a sudden irrational fear. Off to Earth!

Nirgal was as blithe as ever, his dark brown eyes alight with anticipation. After saying goodbye to the others in the outer office, he sat with Art in an empty corner room of the warehouse.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Art asked.

‘Very sure. I want to see Earth.’

Art waggled a hand, uncertain what to say.

‘Besides,’ Nirgal added, ‘someone has to go down there and show them who we are.’

‘None better for that than you, my friend. But you’ll have to watch out for the metanats. Who knows what they’ll be up to. And for bad food – those areas affected by the flood are sure to have problems with sanitation. And disease vectors. And you’ll have to be careful about sunstroke, you’ll be very susceptible—’

Jackie Boone walked in. Art stopped his travel advisory; Nirgal was no longer listening in any case, but watching Jackie with a suddenly blank expression, as if he had put on a Nirgal mask. And of course no mask could do justice to Nirgal, because the mobility of his face was its essential characteristic; so he did not look like himself at all.

Jackie, of course, saw this instantly. Shut off from her old partner … naturally she glared at him. Something had gone awry, Art saw. Both of them had forgotten Art, who would have slipped out of the room if he could have, feeling as if he was holding a lightning rod in a storm. But Jackie was still standing in the doorway, and Art did not care to disturb her at that moment.

‘So you’re leaving us,’ she said to Nirgal.

‘It’s just a visit.’

‘But why? Why now? Earth means nothing to us now.’

‘It’s where we came from.’

‘It is not. We came from Zygote.’

Nirgal shook his head. ‘Earth is the home planet. We’re an extension of it, here. We have to deal with it.’

Jackie waved a hand in disgust, or bafflement: ‘You’re leaving just when you’re needed here the most!’

Think of it as an opportunity.’

‘I will,’ she snapped. He had made her angry. ‘And you won’t like it.’

‘But you’ll have what you want.’

Fiercely she said, ‘You don’t know what I want!’

The hair on the back of Art’s neck had raised; lightning was about to strike. He would have said he was an eavesdropper by nature, almost a voyeur in fact; but standing right there in the room was not the same, and he found now there were some things he did not care to witness. He cleared his throat. The other two were startled by his noise. With a waggle of the hand he sidled past Jackie and out of the door. Behind him the voices went on – bitter, accusatory, filled with pain and baffled fury.

Coyote stared gravely out of the windshield as he drove the ambassadors to Earth south to the elevator, with Art sitting beside him. They rolled slowly through the battered neighbourhoods that bordered the Socket, in the southwest part of Sheffield where the streets had been designed to handle enormous freight container gantries, so that things had an ominous Speeresque quality to them, inhuman and gigantic. Sax was explaining once again to Coyote that the trip to Earth would not remove the travellers from the constitutional congress, that they would contribute by vid, that they would not end up like Thomas Jefferson in Paris, missing the whole thing. ‘We’ll be on Pavonis,’ Sax said, ‘in all the senses that matter.’

‘Then everyone will be on Pavonis,’ Coyote said ominously. He didn’t like this trip to Earth for Sax and Maya and Michel and Nirgal; he didn’t seem to like the constitutional congress; nothing these days pleased him, he was jumpy, uneasy, irritable. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ he would mutter, ‘you mark my words.’

Then the Socket stood before them, the cable emerging black and glossy from the great mass of concrete, like a harpoon plunged into Mars by Earthly powers, holding it fast. After identifying themselves the travellers drove right into the complex, down a big, straight passageway to the enormous chamber at the centre where the cable came down through the Socket’s collar, and hovered over a network of pistes crisscrossing the floor. The cable was so exquisitely balanced in its orbit that it never touched Mars at all, but merely hung there with its ten-metre diameter end floating in the middle of the room, the collar in the roof doing no more than stabilizing it; for the rest, its positioning was up to the rockets installed up and down the cable, and, more importantly, to the balance between centrifugal force and gravity which kept it in its areo-synchronous orbit.

A row of elevator cars floated in the air like the cable itself, though for a different reason, as they were electromagnetically suspended. One of them levitated over a piste to the cable, and latched on to the track inlaid in the cable’s west side, and rose up soundlessly through a valve-door in the collar.

The travellers and their escorts got out of their car. Nirgal was withdrawn, already on his way; Maya and Michel excited; Sax his usual self. One by one they hugged Art and Coyote, stretching up to Art, leaning down to Desmond. For a time they all talked at once, staring at each other, trying to comprehend the moment; it was just a trip, but it felt like more than that. Then the four travellers crossed the floor, and disappeared into a jetway leading up into the next elevator car.

After that Coyote and Art stood there, and watched the car float over to the cable and rise through the valve-door and disappear. Coyote’s asymmetrical face clenched into a most uncharacteristic expression of worry, even fear. That was his son, of course, and three of his closest friends, going to a very dangerous place. Well, it was just Earth; but it felt dangerous, Art had to admit. ‘They’ll be okay,’ Art said, giving the little man a squeeze on the shoulder. ‘They’ll be stars down there. It’ll go fine.’ No doubt true. In fact he felt better himself at his own reassurances. It was the home planet, after all. Humans were made for it. They would be fine. It was the home planet. But still …

Back in East Pavonis the congress had begun.

It was Nadia’s doing, really. She simply started working in the main warehouse on draft passages, and people started joining her, and things snowballed. Once the meetings were going people had to attend or risk losing a say. Nadia shrugged if anyone complained that they weren’t ready, that things had to be regularized, that they needed to know more, etc; ‘Come on,’ she said impatiently. ‘Here we are, we might as well get to it.’

So a fluctuating group of about three hundred people began meeting daily in the industrial complex of East Pavonis. The main warehouse, designed to hold piste parts and train cars, was huge, and scores of mobile-walled offices were set up against its walls, leaving the central space open, and available for a roughly circular collection of mismatched tables. ‘Ah,’ Art said when he saw it, ‘the table of tables.’

Of course there were people who wanted a list of delegates, so that they knew who could vote, who could speak, and so on. Nadia, who was quickly taking on the role of chairperson, suggested they accept all requests to become a delegation from any Martian group, as long as the group had had some tangible existence before the conference began. ‘We might as well be inclusive.’

The constitutional scholars from Dorsa Brevia agreed that the congress should be conducted by members of voting delegations, and the final result then voted on by the populace at large. Charlotte, who had helped to draft the Dorsa Brevia document twelve M-years before, had led a group since then in working up plans for a government, in anticipation of a successful revolution. They were not the only ones to have done this; schools in South Fossa and at the university in Sabishii had taught courses in the matter, and many of the young natives in the warehouse were well versed in the issues they were tackling. ‘It’s kind of scary,’ Art remarked to Nadia. ‘Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.’

‘Always.’

Charlotte’s group had made a list of potential delegates to a constitutional congress, including all Martian settlements with populations over five hundred. Quite a few people would therefore be represented twice, Nadia pointed out, once by location and again by political affiliation. The few groups not on the list complained to a new committee, which allowed almost all petitioners to join. And Art made a call to Donald Hastings, and extended an invitation to UNTA to join as a delegation as well; the surprised Hastings got back to them a few days later, with a positive response. He would come down the cable himself.

And so after about a week’s jockeying, with many other matters being worked on at the same time, they had enough agreement to call for a vote of approval of the delegate list; and because it had been so inclusive, it passed almost unanimously. And suddenly they had a real congress. It was made up of the following delegations, with anywhere from one to ten people in each delegation:

 Towns

 Acheron

 Nicosia

 Cairo

 Odessa

 Harmakhis Vallis

 Sabishii

 Christianopolis

 Bogdanov Vishniac

 Hiranyagarbha

 Mauss Hyde

 New Clarke

 Bradbury Point

 Sergei Korolyov

 Dumartheray Crater

 South Station

 Reull Vallis

 southern caravanserai

 Nuova Bologna

 Nirgal Vallis

 Montepulciano

 Sheffield

 Senzeni Na

 Echus Overlook

 Dorsa Brevia

 Dao Vallis

 South Fossa

 Rumi

 New Vanuatu

 Prometheus

 Gramsci

 Mareotis

 Burroughs refugees organization

 Libya Station

 Tharsis Tholus

 Overhangs

 Margaritifer Plinth

 Great Escarpment caravanserai

 Da Vinci

 The Elysian League

 Hell’s Gate

 Political Parties and Other Organizations

 Booneans

 Reds

 Bogdanovists

 Schnellingistas

 Marsfirst

 Free Mars

 TheKa

 Praxis

 Qahiran Majarhi League

 Green Mars

 United Nations Transitional Authority

 Ka Kaze

 Editorial Board of The journal of Areological Studies

 Space Elevator Authority

 Christian Democrats

 The Metanational Economic Activity Co-ordination Committee

 Bolognan Neomarxists

 Friends of the Earth

 Biotique

 Separation de L’Atmosphere

General meetings began in the morning around the table of tables, then moved out in many small working groups to offices in the warehouse, or buildings nearby. Every morning Art showed up early and brewed great pots of coffee, kava and kavajava, his favourite. It perhaps was not much of a job, given the significance of the enterprise, but Art was happy doing it. Every day he was surprised to see a congress convening at all; and observing the size of it, he felt that helping to get it started was probably going to be his principal contribution. He was not a scholar, and he had few ideas about what a Martian constitution ought to include. Getting people together was what he was good at, and he had done that. Or rather he and Nadia had, for Nadia had stepped in and taken the lead just when they had needed her. She was the only one of the First Hundred on hand who had everyone’s trust; this gave her a bit of genuine natural authority. Now, without any fuss, without seeming to notice she was doing it, she was exerting that power.

And so now it was Art’s great pleasure to become, in effect, Nadia’s personal assistant. He arranged her days, and did everything he could to make sure they ran smoothly. This included making a good pot of kavajava first thing every morning, for Nadia was one of many of them fond of that initial jolt toward alertness and general good will. Yes, Art thought, personal assistant and drug dispenser, that was his destiny at this point in history. And he was happy. Just watching people look at Nadia was a pleasure in itself. And the way she looked back: interested, sympathetic, sceptical, an edge developing quickly if she thought someone was wasting her time, a warmth kindling if she was impressed by their contribution. And people knew this, they wanted to please her. They tried to keep to the point, to make a contribution. They wanted that particular warm look in her eye. Very strange eyes they were, really, when you looked close: hazel, basically, but flecked with innumerable tiny patches of other colours, yellow, black, green, blue. A mesmerizing quality to them. Nadia focused her full attention on people – she was willing to believe you, to take your side, to make sure your case didn’t get lost in the shuffle; even the Reds, who knew she had been fighting with Ann, trusted her to make sure they were heard. So the work coalesced around her; and all Art really had to do was watch her at work, and enjoy it, and help where he could.

And so the debates began.

In the first week many arguments concerned simply what a constitution was, what form it should take, and whether they should have one at all. Charlotte called this the metaconflict, the argument about what the argument was about – a very important matter, she said when she saw Nadia squint unhappily, ‘because in settling it, we set the limits on what we can decide. If we decide to include economic and social issues in the constitution, for instance, then this is a very different kind of thing than if we stick to purely political or legal matters, or to a very general statement of principles.’

To help structure even this debate, she and the Dorsa Brevia scholars had come with a number of different ‘blank constitutions’, which blocked out different kinds of constitutions without actually filling in their contents. These blanks did little, however, to stop the objections of those who maintained that most aspects of social and economic life ought not to be regulated at all. Support for such a ‘minimal state’ came from a variety of viewpoints that otherwise made strange bedfellows: anarchists, libertarians, neotraditional capitalists, certain Greens, and so on. To the most extreme of these anti-statists, writing up any government at all was a kind of defeat, and they conceived of their role in the congress as making the new government as small as possible.

Sax heard about this argument in one of the nightly calls from Nadia and Art, and he was as willing to think about it seriously as he was anything else. ‘It’s been found that a few simple rules can regulate very complex behaviour. There’s a classic computer model for flocking birds, for instance, which only has three rules – keep an equal distance from everyone around you – don’t change speed too fast – avoid stationary objects. Those will model the flight of a flock quite nicely.’

‘A computer flock maybe,’ Nadia scoffed. ‘Have you ever seen chimney-swifts at dusk?’

After a moment Sax’s reply arrived: ‘No.’

‘Well, take a look when you get to Earth. Meanwhile we can’t be having a constitution that says only “don’t change speed too fast”.’

Art thought this was funny, but Nadia was not amused. In general she had little patience for the minimalist arguments. ‘Isn’t it the equivalent of letting the metanats run things?’ she would say. ‘Letting might be right?’

‘No, no,’ Mikhail would protest. ‘That’s not what we mean at all!’

‘It seems very like what you are saying. And for some it’s obviously a kind of cover – a pretend principle that is really about keeping the rules that protect their property and privileges, and letting the rest go to hell.’

‘No, not at all.’

Then you must prove it at the table. Everything that government might involve itself in, you have to make the case against. You have to argue it point by point.’

And she was so insistent about this, not scolding like Maya would have but simply adamant, that they had to agree: everything was at least on the table for discussion. Therefore the various blank constitutions made sense, as starting points; and therefore they should get on with it. A vote on it was taken, and the majority agreed to give it a try.

And so there they were, the first hurdle jumped. Everyone had agreed to work according to the same plan. It was amazing, Art thought, zooming from meeting to meeting, filled with admiration for Nadia. She was not your ordinary diplomat, she by no means followed the empty vessel model that Art aspired to; but things got done nevertheless. She had the charisma of the sensible. He hugged her every time he passed her, he kissed the top of her head; he loved her. He ran around with that wealth of good feeling, and dropped in on all the sessions he could, watching to see how he could help keep things going. Often it was just a matter of supplying people with food and drink, so that they could continue through the day without getting irritable.

At all hours the table of tables was crowded; fresh-faced young Valkyries towering over sunbaked old vets; all races, all types; this was Mars, M-year 52, a kind of de facto united nations all on its own. With all the potential fractiousness of that notoriously fractious body; so that sometimes, looking at all their disparate faces and listening to the melange of languages, English augmented by Babel, Art was nearly overwhelmed by their variety. ‘Ka, Nadia,’ he said as they sat eating sandwiches and going over their notes for the day, ‘we’re trying to write a constitution that every Terran culture could agree to!’

She waved the problem away, swallowed. ‘About time,’ she said.

Charlotte suggested that the Dorsa Brevia declaration made a logical starting point for discussing the content that would fill the constitutional forms. This suggestion caused more trouble than even the blanks had, for the Reds and several other delegations disliked various points of the old declaration, and they argued that using it was a way of pisting the congress from the start.

‘So what?’ Nadia said. ‘We can change every word of it if we want, but we have to start with something.’

This view was popular among most of the old underground groups, many of whom had been at Dorsa Brevia in M-39. The declaration that had resulted remained the underground’s best effort to write down what they had agreed on back when they were out of power, so it made sense to start with it; it gave them some precedent, some historical continuity.

When they pulled it out and looked at it, however, they found that the old declaration had become frighteningly radical. No private property? No appropriation of surplus value? Had they really said such things? How were things supposed to work? People pored over the bare uncompromising sentences, shaking their heads. The declaration had not bothered to say how its lofty goals were to be enacted, it had only stated them. ‘The stone tablet routine,’ as Art characterized it. But now the revolution had succeeded, and the time had come to do something in the real world. Could they really stick to concepts as radical as those in the Dorsa Brevia declaration?

Hard to say. ‘At least the points are there to discuss,’ Nadia said. And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their section headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: ‘Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police; Taxation; Election Procedures; Property Law; Economic Systems; Environmental Law; Amendment Procedures’, and so on, in some blanks for pages on end – all being juggled on everyone’s screens, scrambled, formatted, endlessly debated. ‘Just filling in the blanks,’ as Art sang one night, looking over Nadia’s shoulder at one particularly forbidding flowchart pattern, like something out of Michel’s alchemical combinatoires. And Nadia laughed.

The working groups focused on different parts of government as outlined in a new composite blank constitution, now being called the blank of blanks. Political parties and interest groups gravitated to the issues that most concerned them, and the many tent town delegations chose or were assigned to remaining areas. After that it was a matter of work.

For the moment, the Da Vinci Crater technical group was in control of Martian space. They were keeping all space shuttles from docking at Clarke, or aerobraking into Martian orbit. No one believed that this alone made them truly free, but it did give them a certain amount of physical and psychic space to work in – this was the gift of the revolution. They were also driven by the memory of the battle for Sheffield; the fear of civil war was strong among them. Ann was in exile with the Kakaze, and sabotage in the outback was a daily occurrence. There were also tents that had declared independence from anyone, and a few metanat holdouts; there was turmoil generally, and a sense of barely-contained confusion. They were in a bubble in history, a moment only; it could collapse at any time, and if they didn’t act soon, it would collapse. It was, simply put, time to act.

This was the one thing everyone agreed on, but it was a very important thing. As the days passed, a core group of workers slowly emerged, people who recognized each other for their willingness to get the job done, for their desire to finish paragraphs rather than posture. Inside all the rest of the debate these people went at it, guided by Nadia, who was very quick to recognize such people and give them all the help she could.

Art meanwhile ran around in his usual manner. Up early, supply drinks and food, and information concerning the work ongoing in other rooms. It seemed to him that things were going pretty well. Most of the subgroups took the responsibility to fill in their blank seriously, writing and rewriting drafts, hammering them out concept by concept, phrase by phrase. They were happy to see Art when he came by in the course of the day, as he represented a break, some food, some jokes. One judicial group tacked foam wings on his shoes, and sent him with a caustic message along to an executive group with whom they were fighting. Pleased, Art kept the wings on; why not? What they were doing had a kind of ludicrous majesty, or majestic ludicrousness – they were rewriting the rules, he was flying around like Hermes or Puck, it was perfectly appropriate. And so he flew, through the long hours into the night, every night. And after all the sessions had closed down for the evening, he went back to the Praxis offices he shared with Nadia, and they would eat, and talk over the day’s progress, and make a call to the travellers to Earth, and talk with Nirgal and Sax and Maya and Michel. And after that Nadia would go back to work at her screens, usually falling asleep there in her chair. Then Art would often go back out into the warehouse, and the buildings and rovers clustered around it. Because they were holding the congress in a warehouse tent, there was not the same party scene that had existed after hours in Dorsa Brevia; but the delegates often stayed up, sitting on the floors of their rooms drinking and talking about the day’s work, or the revolution just past. Many of the people there had never met before, and they were getting to know each other. Relationships were forming, romances, friendships, feuds. It was a good time to talk, and learn more about what was going on during the daytime congress; it was the underside of the congress, the social hour, out there scattered in concrete rooms. Art enjoyed it. And then the moment would come when he would suddenly hit the wall, a wave of sleepiness would roll over him and sometimes he wouldn’t even have time to stagger back to his offices, to the couch next to Nadia’s; he would simply roll over on the floor and sleep there, waking cold and stiff to hurry off to their bathroom, a shower, and back to the kitchens to start up that day’s kava and Java. Round and round, his days a blur; it was glorious.

In sessions on many different subjects people were having to grapple with questions of scale. Without any nations, without any natural or traditional political units, who governed what? And how were they to balance the local against the global, and past versus future – the many ancestral cultures against the one Martian culture?

Sax, observing this recurring problem from the rocket-ship to Earth, sent back a message proposing that the tent towns and covered canyons become the principal political units: city-states, basically, with no larger political units except for the global government itself, which would regulate only truly global concerns. Thus there would be local and global, but no nation-states in between.

The reaction to this proposal was fairly positive. For one thing it had the advantage of conforming to the situation that already existed. Mikhail, leader of the Bogdanovist party, noted that it was a variant of the old commune of communes, and because Sax had been the source of the suggestion, this quickly got it called the ‘lab of labs’ plan. But the underlying problem still remained, as Nadia quickly pointed out; all Sax had done was to define their particular local and global. They still had to decide just how much power the proposed global confederation was going to have over the proposed semi-autonomous city-states. Too much, and it was back to a big centralized state, Mars itself as a nation, a thought which many delegations abhorred. ‘But too little,’ Jackie said emphatically in the human rights workshop, ‘and there could be tents out there deciding slavery is okay, or female genital mutilation is okay, or any other crime based on some Terran barbarism is okay, excused in the name of “cultural values”. And that is just not acceptable.’

‘Jackie is right,’ Nadia said, which was unusual enough to get people’s attention. ‘People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture – that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.’

Art noticed more than a few delegates frowning at this sentiment, which no doubt struck them as a version of Western secular relativism, or perhaps John Boone’s hyperamericanism. Opposition to the metanats had included many people trying to hold on to older cultures, and these often had their hierarchies pretty well intact; the ones at the top end of the hierarchies liked them that way, and so did a surprisingly large number of people farther down the ladder.

The young Martian natives, however, looked surprised that this was even considered an issue. To them the fundamental rights were innate and irrevocable, and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many emotional scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their traumatic dysfunctional Terran upbringings. Ariadne, one of the most prominent of the young natives, stood up to say that the Dorsa Brevia group had studied many Terran human rights documents, and had written a comprehensive list of their own. The new master list of fundamental individual rights was available for discussion and, she implied, adoption wholesale. Some argued about one point or another; but it was generally agreed that a global bill of rights of some kind should be on the table. So Martian values as they existed in M-year 52 were about to be codified, and made a principal component of the constitution.

The exact nature of these rights was still a matter of controversy. The so-called ‘political rights’ were generally agreed to be ‘self-evident’ – things citizens were free to do, things governments were forbidden to do – habeus corpus, freedom of movement, of speech, of association, of religion, a ban on weapons – all these were approved by a vast majority of Martian natives, though there were some issei from places like Singapore, Cuba, Indonesia, Thailand, China and so on, who looked askance at so much emphasis on individual liberty. Other delegates had reservations about a different kind of right, the so-called ‘social’ or ‘economic’ rights, such as the right to housing, health care, education, employment, a share of the value generated by natural resource use, etc. Many issei delegates with actual experience in Terran government were quite worried about these, pointing out that it was dangerous to enshrine such things in the constitution; it had been done on Earth, they said, and then when it was found impossible to meet such promises, the constitution guaranteeing them was seen as a propaganda device, and flouted in other areas as well, until it became a bad joke.

‘Even so,’ Mikhail said sharply, ‘if you can’t afford housing, then it is your right to vote that is the bad joke.’

The young natives agreed, as did many others there. So economic or social rights were on the table too, and arguments over how actually to guarantee these rights in practice continued through many a long session. ‘Political, social, it’s all one,’ Nadia said. ‘Let’s make all the rights work.’

So the work went on, both around the big table and in the offices where the subgroups were meeting. Even the UN was there, in the person of Donald Hastings himself, who had come down the elevator and was participating vigorously in the debates, his opinion always carrying a peculiar kind of weight. He even began to exhibit symptoms of hostage syndrome, Art thought, becoming more and more sympathetic the more he stood around in the warehouse arguing with people. And this might affect his superiors on Earth as well.

Comments and suggestions were also pouring in from all over Mars, and from Earth as well, filling several screens covering one wall of the big room. Interest in the congress was high everywhere, rivalling even Earth’s great flood in the public’s attention. ‘The soap opera of the moment,’ Art said to Nadia. Every night the two of them met in their little office suite, and put in their call to Nirgal and the rest. The delays in the travellers’ responses got longer and longer, but Art and Nadia didn’t really mind; there was a lot to think about while waiting for Sax and the others’ part of the conversation to arrive.

‘This global versus local problem is going to be hard,’ Art said one night. ‘It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result of confused thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want freedom for the tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in contradiction.’

‘Maybe the Swiss system,’ Nirgal suggested a few minutes later. ‘That’s what John Boone always used to say.’

But the Swiss on Pavonis were not encouraging about this idea. ‘A counter-model rather,’ Jurgen said, making a face. ‘The reason I’m on Mars is the Swiss federal government. It stifles everything. You need a licence to breathe.’

‘And the cantons have no power any more,’ Priska said. ‘The federal government took it away.’

‘In some of the cantons,’ Jurgen added, ‘this was a good thing.’

Priska said, ‘More interesting than Berne might be the Graubunden. That means Grey League. They were a loose confederation of towns in southeast Switzerland, for hundreds of years. A very successful organization.’

‘Could you call up whatever you can get on that?’ Art said.

The next night he and Nadia looked over descriptions of the Graubunden that Priska had sent over. Well … there was a certain simplicity to affairs during the Renaissance, Art thought. Maybe that was wrong, but somehow the extremely loose agreements of the little Swiss mountain towns did not seem to translate well to the densely interpenetrated economies of the Martian settlements. The Graubunden hadn’t had to worry about generating unwanted changes in atmospheric pressure, for instance. No – the truth was, they were in a new situation. There was no historical analogy that would be much help to them now.

‘Speaking of global versus local,’ Irishka said, ‘what about the land outside the tents and covered canyons?’ She was emerging as the leading Red remaining on Pavonis, a moderate who could speak for almost all wings of the Red movement, therefore becoming quite a power as the weeks passed. ‘That’s most of the land on Mars, and all we said at Dorsa Brevia is that no individual can own it, that we are all stewards of it together. That’s good as far as it goes, but as the population rises and new towns are built, it’s going to be more and more of a problem figuring out who controls it.’

Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome. Recently he had made a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to attacking what he and Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they were facing, and so in theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes they were just too hard.

As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the global-local problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent. Still, as it was probably the worst outstanding problem …

Art went to the Reds. The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, one of Nirgal and Jackie’s creche-mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their rover camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he was now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big, empty vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.

The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the caldera. They sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments, in the glare of a late afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant, silhouetted country of the caldera.

‘So what would you like to see in this constitution?’ Art said.

He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each other, somewhat taken aback. ‘Ideally,’ Marion said after a while, ‘we’d like to be living on the primal planet, in caves and cliff-dwellings, or excavated crater rings. No big cities, no terraforming.’

‘You’d have to stay suited all the time.’

‘That’s right. We don’t mind that.’

‘Well.’ Art thought it over. ‘Okay, but let’s start from now. Given the situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?’

‘No further terraforming.’

‘The cable gone, and no more immigration.’

‘In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.’

They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his consternation show.

He said, ‘Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this point?’

‘It’s not clear,’ Tiu said. ‘But if you stopped the industrial pumping, any further growth would certainly be very slow. It might even lose ground, as with this ice age that’s starting.’

‘Isn’t that what some people call ecopoesis?’

‘No. The ecopoets just use biological methods, but they’re very intensive with them. We think they all should stop, ecopoets or industrialists or whatever.’

‘But especially the heavy industrial methods,’ Marion said. ‘And most especially the inundation of the north. That’s simply criminal. We’ll blow up those stations no matter what happens here, if they don’t stop.’

Art gestured out at the huge, stony caldera. ‘The higher elevations look pretty much the same, right?’

They weren’t willing to admit that. Irishka said, ‘Even the high ground shows ice deposition and plant life. The atmosphere lofts high here, remember. No place escapes when the winds are strong.’

‘What if we tented the four big calderas?’ Art said. ‘Kept them sterile underneath, with the original atmospheric pressure and mix? Those would be huge wilderness parks, preserved in the true primal state.’

‘Parks are just what they would be.’

‘I know. But we have to work with what we have now, right? We can’t go back to M-l and rerun the whole thing. And given the current situation, it might be good to preserve three or four big places in the original state, or close to it.’

‘It would be nice to have some canyons protected as well,’ Tiu said tentatively. Clearly they had not considered this kind of possibility before; and it was not really satisfactory to them, Art could see. But the current situation could not be wished away, they had to start from there.

‘Or Argyre Basin.’

‘At the very least, keep Argyre dry.’

Art nodded encouragingly. ‘Combine that kind of preservation with the atmosphere limits set in the Dorsa Brevia document. That’s a five kilometre breathable ceiling, and there’s a hell of a lot of land above five kilometres. It won’t take the northern ocean away, but nothing’s going to do that now. Some form of slow ecopoesis is about the best you can hope for at this point, right?’

Perhaps that was putting it too baldly. The Reds stared down into Pavonis caldera unhappily, thinking their own thoughts.

* * *

‘Say the Reds come on board,’ Art said to Nadia. ‘What do you think the next worst problem is?’

‘What?’ She had been nearly asleep, listening to some tinny old jazz from her AI. ‘Ah. Art.’ Her voice was low and quiet, the Russian accent light but distinct. She sat slumped on the couch. A pile of paper balls lay around her feet, like pieces of some structure she was putting together. The Martian way of life. Her face was oval under a cap of straight white hair, the wrinkles of her skin somehow wearing away, as if she were a pebble in the stream of years. She opened her flecked eyes, luminous and arresting under their Cossack eyelids. A beautiful face, looking now at Art perfectly relaxed. ‘The next worst problem.’

‘Yes.’

She smiled. Where did that calmness come from, that relaxed smile? She wasn’t worried about anything these days. Art found it surprising, given the political highwire act they were performing. But then again it was politics, not war. And just as Nadia had been terribly frightened during the revolution, always tense, always expecting disaster, she was now always relatively calm. As if to say, Nothing that happens here matters all that much – tinker with the details all you want – my friends are safe, the war is over, this that remains is a kind of game, or work like construction work, full of pleasures.

Art moved around to the back of the couch, massaged her shoulders. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Problems. Well, there are a lot of problems that are about equally sticky.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, I wonder if the Mahjaris will be able to adapt to democracy. I wonder if everyone will accept Vlad and Marina’s eco-economics. I wonder if we can make a decent police. I wonder if Jackie will try to create a system with a strong president, and use the natives’ numerical superiority to become queen.’ She looked over her shoulder, laughed at Art’s expression. ‘I wonder about a lot of things. Should I go on?’

‘Maybe not.’

She laughed. ‘You go on. That feels good. These problems – they aren’t so hard. We’ll just keep going to the table and pounding away at them. Maybe you could talk to Zeyk.’

‘Okay.’

‘But now do my neck.’

Art went to talk to Zeyk and Nazik that very night, after Nadia had fallen asleep. ‘So what’s the Mahjari view of all this?’ he asked.

Zeyk growled. ‘Please don’t ask stupid questions,’ he said. ‘Sunnis are fighting Shiites – Lebanon is devastated – the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states – the North African countries are a metanat – Syria and Iraq hate each other – Iraq and Egypt hate each other – we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites – and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians too – and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouin from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?’ He shook his head darkly.

‘I guess you say it’s a stupid question,’ Art said. ‘Sorry. Thinking in constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this – what do you think of it?’

Nazik laughed. ‘You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran Mahjaris think. He knows them only too well.’

‘Too well,’ Zeyk repeated.

‘Do you think the human rights section will go with them?’

Zeyk frowned. ‘No doubt we will sign the constitution.’

‘But these rights … I thought there were no Arab democracies still?’

‘What do you mean? There’s Palestine, Egypt … Anyway it’s Mars we are concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the very beginning.’

‘Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?’

‘Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don’t think the new constitution will end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader yourself, yes?’

Art laughed uncomfortably. ‘I’m just a messenger.’

Zeyk shook his head. ‘Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you should go, if you want to know what the Qahirans think. He is our king now.’

He looked as if he had bitten into something sour, and Art said, ‘So what does he want, do you think?’

‘He is Jackie’s creature,’ Zeyk muttered, ‘nothing more.’

‘I should think that would be a point against him.’

Zeyk shrugged.

‘It depends who you talk to,’ Nazik said. ‘For the older Muslim immigrants, it is a bad association, because although Jackie is very powerful, she has had more than one consort, and so Antar looks …’

‘Compromised,’ Art suggested, forestalling some other word from the glowering Zeyk.

‘Yes,’ Nazik said. ‘But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And all of the people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become even more powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are more native than Arab, I think. It’s Mars that matters to them more than Islam. From that point of view, a close association with the Zygote ectogenes is a good thing. The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new Mars – especially Nirgal, of course, but with him off to Earth, there’s a certain transfer of his influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to Antar.’

‘I don’t like him,’ Zeyk said.

Nazik smiled at her husband. ‘You don’t like how many of the native Muslims are following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It could be time for retirement.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Zeyk objected. ‘If we’re going to live a thousand years, then what difference does a hundred make?’

Art and Nazik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was the first time Art had ever seen him smile.

In fact, age didn’t matter. People wandered around, old or young or somewhere in between, talking and arguing, and it would have been an odd thing for the length of someone’s lifetime to become a factor in such discussions.

And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway. If you were born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a way that no Terran could even imagine – not just because of the whole complex of areorealities they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn’t know. Terrans knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that cultural and biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the screen images, but that wasn’t enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one reason Art was glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth; he would learn what they were up against.

But most of the natives wouldn’t. And the revolution had gone to their heads. Despite their cleverness at the table in working the constitution toward a form that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive; they had no idea how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit – led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic as ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars, and her devotion to her grandfather’s ideals, and her essential good will, even innocence; the college girl who wanted passionately for the world to be just.

Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly seemed to want to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on Mars now, and seven million of those had been born there; and almost every single one of these natives could be counted on to support the native political parties, usually Free Mars.

‘It’s dangerous,’ Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly meeting with Nadia. ‘When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call “census voting”, where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes, and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those circumstances.’

‘So what can we do?’ Nadia asked.

‘Well, some of it we’re doing already, designing structures that spread the power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism. Decentralization is important, because it creates a lot of small local majorities. Another strategy is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and balances, so that the government’s a kind of cat’s cradle of competing forces. This is called polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can.’

‘Maybe we’re a bit too polyarchic right now,’ Art said.

‘Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You make some big part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and then draft ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get professional staff help, but make the decisions themselves.’

‘I’ve never heard of that one,’ Nadia said.

‘No. It’s been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think it’s really worth considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an advantage. You get a letter in the mail; oh no; you’re drafted to do two years in congress. It’s a drag, but on the other hand it’s a kind of distinction too, a chance to add something to the public discourse. Citizen government.’

‘I like that,’ Nadia said.

‘Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some version of the Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates in ranked fashion, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get some points for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to appeal outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation, and in the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed before.’

‘Interesting,’ Nadia exclaimed. ‘Like trusses in a wall’

‘Yes.’ Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran ‘fractured societies’ that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, Armenia … as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit; these had been bloody, bloody lands.

‘It seems like political structures can only do so much,’ he said.

‘True,’ Nadia said, ‘but we don’t have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been marginalized by the terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull even them into the process.’

Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

‘You’re happy,’ Art said.

She didn’t hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the travellers, she said to Sax, ‘It was so nice to find that political science had abstracted something useful in all these years.’

Eight minutes later his reply came in. ‘I never understood why they call it that.’

Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia Cherneshevsky, laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going to pull it off.

So he went back to the big table, ready to tackle the next worst problem. That brought him back to Earth again. There were a hundred next worst problems, all small until you actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In all the squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some areas, in fact, it seemed to be getting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa Brevia document were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and Marina’s eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not something that should be codified in the constitution. Some complained because it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, and people listened. ‘This new economy that’s being proposed,’ he declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, ‘is a radical and unprecedented intrusion of government into business.’

Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over.

Vlad glared at him. Stooped, massive-headed, shaggy-eyebrowed, Vlad rarely if ever spoke in public; he hadn’t said a thing in the congress so far. Slowly the greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art felt a quiver of anticipation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred, Vlad was perhaps the most brilliant – and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic. Old when they had left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron labs early on and stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in seclusion with Ursula Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first ones. No one knew anything for certain about the three of them, they were a limit case illustration of the insular nature of other people’s relationships; but this of course did not stop gossip; on the contrary, people talked about them all the time, saying that Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; or that Ursula had done most of the work on the longevity treatment, and Marina most of the work on eco-economics; or that they were a perfectly balanced equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that emerged from Acheron; or that Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives as fronts for his work in the separate fields of biology and economics. But no one knew for sure, for none of the three ever said a word about it.

Watching him stand there at the table, however, one had to suspect that the theory about him being just a front man was wrong. He was looking around in a fiercely intent, slow glare, capturing them all before he turned his eye again on Antar.

‘What you said about government and business is absurd,’ he stated coldly. It was a tone of voice that had not been heard much at the congress so far, contemptuous and dismissive. ‘Governments always regulate the kinds of business they allow. Economics is a legal matter, a system of laws. So far, we have been saying in the Martian underground that as a matter of law, democracy and self-government are the innate rights of every person, and that these rights are not to be suspended when a person goes to work. You—’ he waved a hand to indicate he did not know Antar’s name ‘—do you believe in democracy and self-rule?’

‘Yes!’ Antar said defensively.

‘Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental values that government ought to encourage?’

‘Yes!’ Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed.

‘Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their work place? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue – control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is – a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labour, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.’

‘Business leaders work,’ Antar said sharply. ‘And they take the financial risks—’

‘The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the privileges of capital.’

‘Management—’

‘Yes yes. Don’t interrupt me. Management is a real thing, a technical matter. But it can be controlled by labour just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past labourers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. That’s why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger. In which one per cent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five per cent of the population owned ninety-five per cent of the wealth. History has shown which values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all.

‘So. We must change. It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if simple justice is a value, then they are values everywhere, including in the work place where we spend so much of our lives. That was what was said in point four of the Dorsa Brevia agreement. It says everyone’s work is their own, and the worth of it cannot be taken away. It says that the various modes of production belong to those who created them, and to the common good of the future generations. It says that the world is something we all steward together. That is what it says. And in our years on Mars, we have developed an economic system that can keep all those promises. That has been our work these last fifty years. In the system we have developed, all economic enterprises are to be small cooperatives, owned by their workers and by no one else. They hire their management, or manage themselves. Industry guilds and co-op associations will form the larger structures necessary to regulate trade and the market, share capital, and create credit.’

Antar said scornfully, ‘These are nothing but ideas. It is utopianism and nothing more.’

‘Not at all.’ Again Vlad waved him away. ‘The system is based on models from Terran history, and its various parts have all been tested on both worlds, and have succeeded very well. You don’t know about this partly because you are ignorant, and partly because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored and denied all alternatives to it. But most of our micro-economy has been in successful operation for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The different parts of the macro-economy have been used in the pseudo-metanat Praxis, in Switzerland, in India’s state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna Italy, and in many other places, including the Martian underground itself. These organizations were the precursors to our economy, which will be democratic in a way capitalism never even tried to be.’

A synthesis of systems. And Vladimir Taneev was a very great synthesist; it was said that all the components of the longevity treatment had already been there, for instance, and that Vlad and Ursula had simply put them together. Now in his economic work with Marina he was claiming to have done the same kind of thing. And although he had not mentioned the longevity treatment in this discussion, nevertheless it lay there like the table itself, a big cobbled-together achievement, part of everyone’s lives. Art looked around and thought he could see people thinking, well, he did it once in biology and it worked; could economics be more difficult?

Against this unspoken thought, this unthought feeling, Antar’s objections did not seem like much. Metanational capitalism’s track record at this point did little to support it; in the last century it had precipitated a massive war, chewed up the Earth, and torn its societies apart. Why should they not try something new, given that record?

Someone from Hiranyagarbha stood and made an objection from the opposite direction, noting that they seemed to be abandoning the gift economy by which the Mars underground had lived.

Vlad shook his head impatiently. ‘I believe in the underground economy, I assure you, but it has always been a mixed economy. Pure gift exchange co-existed with a monetary exchange, in which neoclassical market rationality, that is to say the profit mechanism, was bracketed and contained by society to direct it to serve higher values, such as justice and freedom. Economic rationality is simply not the highest value. It is a tool to calculate costs and benefits, only one part of a large equation concerning human welfare. The larger equation is called a mixed economy, and that is what we are constructing here. We are proposing a complex system, with public and private spheres of economic activity. It may be that we ask people to give, throughout their lives, about a year of their work to the public good, as in Switzerland’s national service. That labour pool, plus taxes on private co-ops for use of the land and its resources, will enable us to guarantee the so-called social rights we have been discussing – housing, health care, food, education – things that should not be at the mercy of market rationality. Because la salute non si paga, as the Italian workers used to say. Health is not for sale!’

This was especially important to Vlad, Art could see. Which made sense – for in the metanational order, health most certainly had been for sale, not only medical care and food and housing, but pre-eminently the longevity treatment itself, which so far had been going only to those who could afford it. Vlad’s greatest invention, in other words, had become the property of the privileged, the ultimate class distinction – long life or early death – a physicalization of class that almost resembled divergent species. No wonder he was angry; no wonder he had turned his efforts to devising an economic system that would transform the longevity treatment from a catastrophic possession to a blessing available to all.

‘So nothing will be left to the market,’ Antar said.

‘No no no,’ Vlad said, waving at Antar more irritably than ever. ‘The market will always exist. It is the mechanism by which things and services are exchanged. Competition to provide the best product at the best price, this is inevitable and healthy. But on Mars it will be directed by society in a more active way. There will be not-for-profit status to vital life support matters, and then the freest part of the market will be directed away from the basics of existence toward nonessentials, where venture enterprises can be undertaken by worker-owned co-ops, who will be free to try what they like. When the basics are secured and when the workers own their own businesses, why not? It is the process of creation we are talking about.’

Jackie, looking annoyed at Vlad’s dismissals of Antar, and perhaps intending to divert the old man, or trip him up, said, ‘What about the ecological aspects of this economy that you used to emphasize?’

They are fundamental,’ Vlad said. ‘Point three of Dorsa Brevia states that the land, air and water of Mars belong to no one, that we are the stewards of it for all the future generations. This stewardship will be everyone’s responsibility, but in case of conflicts we propose strong environmental courts, perhaps as part of the constitutional court, which will estimate the real and complete environmental costs of economic activities, and help to co-ordinate plans that impact the environment.’

‘But this is simply a planned economy!’ Antar cried.

‘Economies are plans. Capitalism planned just as much as this, and metanationalism tried to plan everything. No, an economy is a plan.’

Antar, frustrated and angry, said, ‘It’s simply socialism returned.’

Vlad shrugged. ‘Mars is a new totality. Names from earlier totalities are deceptive. They become little more than theological terms. There are elements one could call socialist in this system, of course. How else remove injustice from economy? But private enterprises will be owned by their workers rather than being nationalized, and this is not socialism, at least not socialism as it was usually attempted on Earth. And all the co-ops are businesses – small democracies devoted to some work or other, all needing capital. There will be a market, there will be capital. But in our system workers will hire capital rather than the other way around. It’s more democratic that way, more just. Understand me – we have tried to evaluate each feature of this economy by how well it aids us to reach the goals of more justice and more freedom. And justice and freedom do not contradict each other as much as has been claimed, because freedom in an unjust system is no freedom at all. They both emerge together. And so it is not so impossible, really. It is only a matter of enacting a better system, by combining elements that have been tested and shown to work. This is the moment for that. We have been preparing for this opportunity for seventy years. And now that the chance has come, I see no reason to back off just because someone is afraid of some old words. If you have any specific suggestions for improvements, we’ll be happy to hear them.’

He stared long and hard at Antar. But Antar did not speak; he had no specific suggestions.

The room was filled with a charged silence. It was the first and only time in the congress that one of the issei had stood up and trounced one of the nisei in public debate. Most of the issei liked to take a more subtle line. But now one of the ancient radicals had become angry and risen up to smite one of the neoconservative young power-mongers – who now looked as if they were advocating a new version of an old hierarchy, for purposes of their own. A thought which was conveyed very well indeed by Vlad’s long look across the table at Antar, full of disgust at his reactionary selfishness, his cowardice in the face of change. Vlad sat down; Antar was dismissed.

But still they argued. Conflict, metaconflict, details, fundamentals; everything was on the table, including a magnesium kitchen sink that someone had placed on one segment of the table of tables, some three weeks into the process.

And really the delegates in the warehouse were only the tip of the iceberg, the most visible part of a gigantic two-world debate. Live transmission of every minute of the conference was available everywhere on Mars and in most places on Earth, and although the actual realtime tape had a certain documentary tediousness to it, Mangalavid concocted a daily highlights film that was shown during the timeslip every night, and sent to Earth for very wide distribution. It became ‘the greatest show on Earth’ as one American programme rather oddly dubbed it. ‘Maybe people are tired of the same old crap on TV,’ Art said to Nadia one night as they watched a brief, weirdly distorted account of the day’s negotiations on American TV.

‘Or in the world.’

‘Yeah, true. They want something else to think about.’

‘Or else they’re thinking about what they might do,’ Nadia suggested. ‘So that we’re a small-scale model. Easier to understand.’

‘Maybe so.’

In any case the two worlds watched, and the congress became, along with everything else that it was, a daily soap opera – a soap opera which however held an extra attraction for its viewers, somehow, as if in some strange way it held the very key to their lives. And perhaps as a result, thousands of spectators did more than watch – comments and suggestions were pouring in, and though it seemed unlikely to most people on Pavonis that something mailed in would contain a startling truth they hadn’t thought of, still all messages were read by groups of volunteers in Sheffield and South Fossa, who passed some proposals ‘up to the table’. Some people even advocated including all these suggestions in the final constitution; they objected to a ‘statist legal document’, they wanted it to be a larger thing, a collaborative philosophical or even spiritual statement, expressing their values, goals, dreams, reflections. ‘That’s not a constitution,’ Nadia objected, ‘that’s a culture. We’re not the damn library here.’ But included or not, long communiques continued to come in, from the tents and canyons and the drowned coastlines of Earth, signed by individuals, committees, entire town populations.

Discussions in the warehouse were just as wide-ranging as in the mail. A Chinese delegate approached Art and spoke in Mandarin to him, and when he paused for a while, his AI began to speak, in a lovely Scottish accent. ‘To tell the truth I’ve begun to doubt that you’ve sufficiently consulted Adam Smith’s important book Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.’

‘You may be right,’ Art said, and referred the man to Charlotte.

Many people in the warehouse were speaking languages other than English, and relying on translation AIs to communicate with the rest. At any given moment there were conversations in a dozen different languages, and AI translators were heavily used. Art still found them a little distracting. He wished it were possible to know all these languages, even though the latest generations of AI translators were really pretty good: voices well-modulated, vocabularies large and accurate, grammar excellent, phrasing almost free of the errors that had made earlier translation programs such a great party game. The new ones had become so good that it seemed possible that the English-language dominance that had created an almost monoglot Martian culture might begin to recede. The issei had of course brought all languages with them, but English had been their lingua franca; the nisei had therefore used English to communicate among themselves, while their ‘primary’ languages were used only to speak to their parents; and so, for a while, English had become the natives’ native tongue. But now with the new AIs, and a continuing stream of new immigrants speaking the full array of Terran languages, it looked as if things might broaden back out again, as new nisei stayed with their primary languages and used AIs as their lingua franca instead of English.

This linguistic matter illustrated to Art a complexity in the native population that he hadn’t noticed before. Some natives were yonsei, fourth generation or younger, and very definitely children of Mars; but other natives the very same age were the nisei children of recent issei immigrants, tending to have closer ties with the Terran cultures they had come from, with all the conservatism that implied. So that there were new native ‘conservatives’ and old settler-family native ‘radicals’, one might say. And this split only occasionally correlated with ethnicity or nationality, when these still mattered to them at all. One night Art was talking with a couple of them, one a global government advocate, the other an anarchist backing all local autonomy proposals, and he asked them about their origins. The globalises father was half Japanese, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Tanzanian; her mother had a Greek mother and a father with parents Colombian and Australian. The anarchist had a Nigerian father and a mother who was from Hawaii, and thus had a mixed ancestry of Filipino, Japanese, Polynesian and Portuguese. Art stared at them: if one were to think in terms of ethnic voting blocks, how would one categorize these people? One couldn’t. They were Martian natives. Nisei, sansei, yonsei – whatever generation, they had been formed in large part by their Martian experience – areo-formed, just as Hiroko had always foretold. Many had married within their own national or ethnic background, but many more had not. And no matter what their ancestry, their political opinions tended to reflect not that background (just what would the Graeco-Colombian-Australian position be? Art wondered), but their own experience. This itself had been quite varied: some had grown up in the underground, others had been born in the UN-controlled big cities, and only come to an awareness of the underground later in life, or even at the moment of the revolution itself. These differences tended to affect them much more than where their Terran ancestors had happened to live.

Art nodded as the natives explained these things to him, in the long kava-buzzed parties running deep into the night. People at these parties were in increasingly high spirits, as the congress was, they felt, going well. They did not take the debates among the issei very seriously; they were confident that their core beliefs would prevail. Mars would be independent, it would be run by Martians, what Earth wanted did not matter; beyond that, it was detail. Thus they went about their work in the committees without much attention paid to the philosophical arguments around the table of tables. ‘The old dogs keep growling,’ said one message on the big message board; this seemed to express a general native opinion. And the work in the committees went on.

The big message board was a pretty good indicator of the mood of the congress. Art read it the way he read fortune cookies, and indeed one day there was one message that said, ‘You like Chinese food.’ Usually the messages were more political than that. Often they were things said in the previous days of the conference: ‘No tent is an island’. ‘If you can’t afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.’ ‘Keep your distance, don’t change speed, don’t run into anything.’ ‘La salute non si paga.’ Then there were things that had not been said: ‘Do unto others.’ ‘The Reds have Green Roots.’ ‘The Greatest Show on Earth.’ ‘No Kings No Presidents.’ ‘Big Man Hates Politics.’ ‘However: We Are The Little Red People.’

So Art was no longer surprised when he was approached by people who spoke in Arabic or Hindi or some language he did not recognize, then looked him in the eye while their AI spoke in English with an accent from the BBC or middle America or the New Delhi civil service, expressing some kind of unpredictable political sentiment. It was encouraging, really – not the translation AIs, which were just another kind of distancing, less extreme than teleparticipation but still not quite ‘talking face to face’ – but the political melange, the impossibility of block-voting, or of even thinking in the normal constituencies.

It was a strange congregation, really. But it went on, and eventually everyone got used to it; it took on that always-already quality that extended events often gain over their duration. But once, very late at night, after a long bizarre translated conversation in which the AI on the wrist of the young woman he was talking to spoke in rhymed couplets (and he never knew what language she was speaking to start with), Art wandered back through the warehouse toward his office suite, around the table of tables, where work was still going on even though it was after the timeslip, and he stopped to say hi to one group; and then, momentum lost, slumped back against a side wall, half watching, half drowsing, his kavajava buzz nearly overwhelmed by exhaustion. And the strangeness came back, all at once. It was a kind of hypnogogic vision. There were shadows in the corners, innumerable flickering shadows; and eyes in the shadows. Shapes, like insubstantial bodies: all the dead, it suddenly seemed, and all the unborn, all there in the warehouse with them, to witness this moment. As if history were a tapestry, and the congress the loom upon which everything was coming together, the present moment with its miraculous thereness, its potential right in their own atoms, their own voices. Looking back at the past, able to see it all, a single, long, braided tapestry of events; looking forward at the future, able to see none of it, though presumably it branched out in an explosion of threads of potentiality, and could become anything: they were two different kinds of unreachable immensity. And all of them travelling together, from the one into the other, through that great loom the present, the now. Now was their chance, for all of them together in this present – the ghosts could watch, from before and after, but this was the moment when what wisdom they could muster had to be woven together, to be passed on to all the future generations.

They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring the congress to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single worldline of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious – the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good governments of all time, combined magically into some superb, as yet unseen synthesis – or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government … To go from that to the mundane problematic of the constitution as written was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

On the other hand, it would certainly be a good thing if their diplomatic team were to arrive on Earth with a completed document to present to the UN and the people of Earth. Really, there was no avoiding it; they needed to finish; not just to present to Earth the united front of an established government, but also to start living their post-crisis life, whatever it might be.

Nadia felt this strongly, and so she began to exert herself. ‘Time to drop the keystone into the arch,’ she said to Art one morning. And from then on she was indefatigable, meeting all the delegations and committees, insisting that they finish whatever they were working on, insisting they get it on the table for a final vote on inclusion. This inexorable insistence of hers revealed something that had not been clear before, which was that most of the issues had been resolved to the satisfaction of most of the delegations. They had concocted something workable, most agreed, or at least worth trying, with amendment procedures prominent in the structure so that they could alter aspects of the system as they went along. The young natives in particular seemed happy – proud of their work, and pleased that they had managed to keep an emphasis on local semi-autonomy, institutionalizing the way most of them had lived under the Transitional Authority.

Thus the many checks against majoritarian rule did not bother them, even though they themselves were the current majority. In order not to look defeated by this development, Jackie and her circle had to pretend they had never argued for a strong presidency and central government in the first place; indeed they claimed that an executive council, elected by the legislature in the Swiss manner, had been their idea all along. A lot of that kind of thing was going on, and Art was happy to agree with all such claims: ‘Yes, I remember, we were wondering what to do about that the night when we stayed up to see the sunrise, it was a good thought you had.’

Good ideas everywhere. And they began to spiral down toward closure.

The global government as they had designed it was to be a confederation, led by an executive council of seven members, elected by a two-housed legislature. One legislative branch, the duma, was composed of a large group of representatives drafted from the populace; the other, the senate, a smaller group elected one from each town or village group larger than five hundred people. The legislature was all in all fairly weak; it elected the executive council and helped select justices of the courts, and left to the towns most legislative duties. The judicial branch was more powerful; it included not only criminal courts, but also a kind of double supreme court, one half a constitutional court, and the other half an environmental court, with members to both appointed, elected and drawn by lottery. The environmental court would rule on disputes concerning terraforming and other environmental changes, while the constitutional court would rule on the constitutionality of all other issues, including challenged town laws. One arm of the environmental court would be a land commission, charged with overseeing the stewardship of the land, which was to belong to all Martians together, in keeping with point three of the Dorsa Brevia agreement; there would not be private property as such, but there would be various tenure rights established in leasing contracts, and the land commission was to work these matters out. A corresponding economic commission would function under the constitutional court, and would be partly composed of representatives from guild co-operatives which would be established for the various professions and industries. This commission was to oversee the establishment of a version of the underground’s eco-economics, including both not-for-profit enterprises concentrating on the public sphere, and taxed for-profit enterprises which had legal size limits, and were by law employee-owned.

This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for a strong global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was also a response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the previous century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or otherwise collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held firm, issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the land, in a mostly-ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the metanats’ depredations; a moral force, which if it had had more teeth, might have done more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle fought, and now they remembered.

Thus the Martian global government. The constitution then also included a long list of human rights, including social rights; guidelines for the land commission and the economics commission; an Australian ballot election system for the elective offices; a system for amendments; and so on. Lastly, to the main text of the constitution they appended the huge collection of materials that had accumulated in the process, calling it Working Notes and Commentary. This was to be used to help the courts interpret the main document, and included everything the delegations had said at the table of tables, or written on the warehouse screens, or received in the mail.

So most of the sticky issues had been resolved, or at least swept under the rug; the biggest outstanding dispute was the Red objection. Art went into action here, orchestrating several late concessions to the Reds, including many early appointments to the environmental courts; these concessions were later termed the ‘Grand Gesture’. In return Irishka, speaking for all the Reds still involved in the political process, agreed that the cable would stay, that UNTA would have a presence in Sheffield, that Terrans would still be able to immigrate, subject to restrictions; and lastly, that terraforming would continue, in slow non-disruptive forms, until the atmospheric pressure at six kilometres above the datum was 350 millibars, this figure to be reviewed every five years. And so the Red impasse was broken, or at least finessed.

Coyote shook his head at the way things had developed. ‘After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up. I think what you should do now is go out to the tents and canyons, and ask them very humbly how they have been running things these past two months, and then throw this fancy constitution away and say, continue.’

‘But that’s what the constitution does say,’ Art joked.

Coyote would not kid about this. ‘You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the centre just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.’

As for UNTA, it was harder to tell what they thought, because opinions back on Earth were divided, with a loud faction calling for the retaking of Mars by force, everyone on Pavonis to be jailed or hanged. Most Terrans were more accommodating, and all of them were still distracted by the ongoing crisis at home. And at the moment, they didn’t matter as much as the Reds; that was the space the revolution had given the Martians. Now they were about to fill it.

Every night of the final week, Art went to bed incoherent with cavils and kava, and though exhausted he would wake fairly often during the night, and roll under the force of some seemingly lucid thought that in the morning would be gone, or revealed as lunatic. Nadia slept just as poorly on the couch next to his, or in her chair. Sometimes they would fall asleep talking over some point or other, and wake up dressed but entangled, holding onto each other like children in a thunderstorm. The warmth of another body was a comfort like nothing else. And once in the dim predawn ultraviolet light they both woke up, and talked for hours in the cold silence of the building, in a little cocoon of warmth and companionship. Another mind to talk to. From colleagues to friends; from there to lovers, maybe; or something like lovers; Nadia did not seem inclined to romanticism of any land. But Art was in love, no doubt about it, and there twinkled in Nadia’s flecked eyes a new fondness for him, he thought. So that at the end of the long final days of the congress, they lay on their couches and talked, and she would knead his shoulders, or he hers, and then they would fall comatose, pounded by exhaustion. There was more pressure to ushering in this document than either one of them wanted to admit, except in these moments, huddling together against the cold big world. A new love: Art, despite Nadia’s unsentimentality, found no other way to put it. He was happy.

And he was amused, but not surprised, when they got up one morning and she said, ‘Let’s put it to a vote.’

So Art talked to the Swiss and the Dorsa Brevia scholars, and the Swiss proposed to the congress that they vote on the version of the constitution currently on the table, voting point by point as they had promised in the beginning. Immediately there was a spasm of vote-trading that made Terran stock exchanges look subtle and slow. Meanwhile the Swiss set up a voting sequence, and over the course of three days they ran through it, allowing one vote to each group on each numbered paragraph of the draft constitution. All eighty-nine paragraphs passed, and the massive collection of ‘explanatory material’ was officially appended to the main text.

After that it was time to put it to the people of Mars for approval. So on Ls 158,1 October 11th, M-year 52 (on Earth, February 27th, 2128), the general populace of Mars, including everyone over five M-years old, voted by wrist on the resulting document. Over ninety-five per cent of the population voted, and the constitution passed seventy-eight per cent to twenty-two per cent, garnering just over nine million votes. They had a government.