“The green and the white,” Nirgal said to himself.
“And are the Sufis pleased with this dual system?” Art asked.
Nadia nodded. “Today after Marina described the relationship of the two planes, Dhu el-Nun said to her, The Mevlana could not have put it any better.’”
“A good sign,” Art said cheerfully.
Other workshops were less specific, and therefore less fruitful. One, working on a prospective bill of rights, was surprisingly ill-natured; but Nadia quickly saw that this topic tapped into a huge well of cultural concerns. Many obviously considered the topic an opportunity for one culture to dominate the rest. “I’ve said it ever since Boone,” Zeyk exclaimed. “An attempt to impose one set of values on all of us is nothing but Ataturkism. Everyone must be allowed their own way.”
“But this can only be true up to a point,” said Ariadne. “What if one group here asserts its right to own slaves?”
Zeyk shrugged. “This would be beyond the pale.”
“So you agree there should be some basic bill of human rights?”
“This is obvious,” Zeyk replied coldly.
Mikhail spoke for the Bogdanovists: “All social hierarchy is a kind of slavery,” he said. “Everyone should be completely equal under the law.”
“Hierarchy is a natural fact,” Zeyk said. “It cannot be avoided.”
“Spoken like an Arab man,” Ariadne said. “But we are not natural here, we are Martian. And where hierarchy leads to oppression, it must be abolished.”
“The hierarchy of the right-minded,” Zeyk said.
“Or the primacy of equality and freedom.”
“Enforced if necessary.”
“Yes!”
“Enforced freedom, then.” Zeyk waved a hand, disgusted.
Art rolled a drink cart onto the stage. “Maybe we should focus on some actual rights,” he suggested. “Maybe look at the various declarations of human rights from Earth, and see if they can be adapted to suit us here.”
Nadia moved on to check out some of the other meetings. Land use, property law, criminal law, inheritance . . . the Swiss had broken down the matter of government into an amazing number of subcategories. The anarchists were irritated, Mikhail chief among them: “Do we really have to go through all this?” he asked again and again. “None of this should obtain, none of it!”
Nadia would have expected Coyote to be among those arguing with him, but in fact he said, “We have to argue all of it! Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you—anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. No! If you want to make the minimum-state case, you have to argue it from the ground up.”
“But,” Mikhail said, “I mean, inheritance law?”
“Sure, why not? This is critical stuff! I say there should be no inheritance at all, except for a few personal objects passed on, perhaps. But all the rest should go back to Mars. It’s part of the gift, right?”
“All the rest?” Vlad inquired with interest. “But what would that consist of, exactly? No one will own any of the land, water, air, the infrastructure, the gene stock, the information pool—what’s left to pass on?”
Coyote shrugged. “Your house? Your savings account? I mean, won’t we have money? And won’t people stockpile surpluses of it if they can?”
“You have to come to the finance sessions,” Marina said to Coyote. “We are hoping to base money on units of hydrogen peroxide, and price things by energy values.”
“But money will still exist, right?”
“Yes, but we are considering reverse interest on savings accounts, for instance, so that if you don’t put what you’ve earned back into use, it will be released to the atmosphere as nitrogen. You’d be surprised how hard it is to keep a positive personal balance in this system.”
“But if you did it?”
“Well, then I agree with you—on death it should pass back to Mars, be used for some public purpose.”
Sax haltingly objected that this contradicted the bioethical theory that human beings, like all animals, were powerfully motivated to provide for their own offspring. This urge could be observed throughout nature and in all human cultures, explaining much behavior both self-interested and altruistic. “Try to change the baby logical—the biological—basis of culture—by decree . . . Asking for trouble.”
“Maybe there should be a minimal inheritance allowed,” Coyote said. “Enough to satisfy that animal instinct, but not enough to perpetuate a wealthy elite.”
Marina and Vlad clearly found this intriguing, and they began to tap new formulas into their Als. But Mikhail, sitting by Nadia and flipping through his program for the day, was still frustrated. “Is this really part of a constitutional process?” he said, looking at the list. “Zoning codes, energy production, waste disposed, transport systems—pest managethent, property law, grievance systems, criminal law—arbitration—health codes?”
Nadia sighed, “i guess so. Remember how Arkady worked so hard on architecture.”
“School schedules? I mean I’ve heard of micropolitics, but this is ridiculous!”
“Nanopolitics,” Art said.
“No, picopolitics! Femtopolitics!”
Nadia got up to help Art push the drink cart to the workshops in the village below the amphitheater. Art was still running from one meeting to the next, wheeling in food and drink, then catching a few minutes of the talk before moving on. There were eight to ten meetings per day, and Art was still dropping in on all of them. In the evenings, while more and more of the delegates spent their time partying, or going for walks up and down the tunnel, Art continued to meet with Nirgal, and they watched tapes at a moderate fast forward so that everyone spoke like a bird, only slowing them down to take notes, or talk over some point or other. Getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, Nadia would pass the dim lounge where the two of them worked on their write-ups, and see the two of them asleep in their chairs, their slack open-mouthed faces flickering under the light of the Keystone Kops debate on the screen.
But in the mornings Art was up with the Swiss, getting things started. Nadia tried to keep pace with him for a few days, but found that the breakfast workshops were chancy. Sometimes people sat around tables sipping coffee and eating fruit and muffins, staring at each other like zombies: Who are you? their bleary gazes said. What am I doing here? Where are we? Why aren’t I asleep in my bed?
But it could be just the opposite: some mornings people came in showered and refreshed, alert with coffee or kavajava, full of new ideas and ready to work hard, to make progress. If the others there were of like mind, things could really fly. One of the sessions on property went like that, and for an hour it seemed as though they had solved all the problems of reconciling self and society, private opportunity and the common good, selfishness and altruism. . . . At the end of the session, however, their notes looked just about as vague and contradictory as those taken at any of the more fractious meetings. “It’s the tape of the whole session that will have to represent it,” Art said, after trying to write down a summary.
The majority of the meetings, however, were not as successful. In fact most of them were merely protracted arguments. One morning Nadia came in on Antar, the young Arab whom Jackie had spent time with during their tour, saying to Vlad, “You will only repeat the socialist catastrophe!”
Vlad shrugged. “Don’t be too hasty to judge that period. The socialist countries were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy. So how can we deal with it without being crushed? We have to look everywhere for answe
rs to this, including the systems that the current order defeated.”
Art was pulling a food cart to the next room, and Nadia left with him.
“Man, I wish Fort was here,” Art muttered. “He should be, I really think he should.”
In the next meeting they were arguing about the limits to tolerance, the things that simply wouldn’t be allowed no matter what religious meaning anyone gave them, and someone shouted, “Tell that to the Muslims!”
Jurgen came out of the room, looking disgusted. He took a roll from the cart and walked with them, talking through his food: “Liberal democracy says that cultural tolerance is essential, but you don’t have to get very far away from liberal democracy for liberal democrats to get very intolerant.”
“How do the Swiss solve that?” Art asked.
Jürgen shrugged. “I don’t think we do.”
“Man, I wish Fort were here!” Art said. “I tried to reach him a while back and tell him about this, I even used the Swiss government lines, but I never got any reply.”
The congress went on for almost a month. Sleep deprivation, and perhaps an overreliance on kava, made Art and Nirgal increasingly haggard and groggy, until Nadia started coming by at night and putting them to bed, pushing them onto couches and promising to write summaries of the tapes they had not reviewed. They would sleep right there in the room, muttering as they rolled over on the narrow foam-and-bamboo couches. One night Art sat up suddenly from his couch: “I’m losing the content of things,” he said to Nadia seriously, still half dreaming. “I’m just seeing forms now.”
“Becoming Swiss, eh? Go back to sleep.”
He flopped back down. “It was crazy to think you folks could do anything together,” he murmured.
“Go back to sleep.”
Probably it was crazy, she thought as he snuffed and snored. She stood up, went to the door. She felt the mental whirr in her head that told her she was not going to be able to sleep, and walked outside, into the park.
The air was still warm, the black skylights stuffed with stars. The length of the tunnel suddenly reminded her of one of the full rooms on the Ares, here vastly enlarged, but with the same aesthetics employed: dimly lit pavilions, the dark furry clumps of little forests. . . . A world-building game. But now there was a real world at stake. At first the attendants of the congress had been almost giddy with the enormous potential of it, and some, like Jackie and other natives, were young and irrepressible enough to feel that way still. But for a lot of the older representatives, the intractable problems were beginning to reveal themselves, like knobby bones under shrinking flesh. The remnant of the First Hundred, the old Japanese from Sabishii—they sat around these days, watching, thinking hard, with attitudes ranging from Maya’s cynicism to Marina’s anxious irritation.
And then there was the Coyote, down below her in the park, strolling tipsily out of the woods with a young woman holding him by the waist. “Ah, love,” he shouted down the long tunnel, throwing his arms wide, “could thou and I with fate conspire—to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire—would we not shatter it to bits, and then—remold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”
Indeed, Nadia thought, smiling, and went back to her room.
There were some reasons for hope. For one thing Hiroko persevered, attending meetings all day long, adding her thoughts and giving people the sense that they had chosen the most important meeting going on at that moment. And Ann worked—though she seemed critical of everything, Nadia thought, blacker than ever—and Spencer, and Sax, and Maya and Michel, and Vlad and Ursula and Marina. Indeed the First Hundred seemed to Nadia more united in this effort than in anything they had done since setting up Underhill—as if this were their last chance to get things right, to recover from the damage done. To make something for their dead friends’ sake.
And they weren’t the only ones to work. As the meetings went on people got a sense of who wanted the congress to achieve something tangible, and these people got in the habit of attending the same meetings, working hard on finding compromises and getting results onto screens, in the form of recommendations and the like. They had to tolerate visits by those who were more interested in grandstanding than results, but they kept hammering away.
Nadia focused on these signs of progress, and worked to keep Nirgal and Art informed, also fed and rested. People dropped by their suite: “We were told to bring this over to the big three.” Many of the serious workers were interesting; one of the women from Dorsa Brevia, named Charlotte, was a constitutional scholar of some note, and she was building a kind of framework for them, a Swisslike thing in which topics to be dealt with were ordered without being filled in. “Cheer up,” she told the three of them one morning, when they were sitting around looking glum. “A clash of doctrines is an opportunity. The American constitutional congress was one of the most successful ever, and they went into it with several very strong antagonisms. The shape of the government they made reflects the distrust these groups had for each other. Small states came in afraid they were going to be overwhelmed by large states, and so there’s a Senate where all states are equals, and a House where the larger states have their greater numbers represented. The structure is a response to a specific problem, see? Same with the three-way checks and balances. It’s an institutionalized distrust of authority. The Swiss constitution has a lot of that too. And we can do it here.”
So out they went, ready to work, two sharp young men and one blunt old woman. It was strange, Nadia thought, to see who emerged as leaders in situations like these. It wasn’t necessarily the most brilliant or well-informed, as Marina or Coyote would serve to show, though both qualities helped, and those two people were important. But the leaders were the ones people would listen to. The magnetic ones. And in a crowd of such-powerful intellects and personalities, such magnetism was very rare, very elusive. Very powerful. . . .
She attended a meeting devoted to a discussion of Mars-Earth relations in the postindependence period. Coyote was in there, exclaiming, “Let them go to hell! It’s their own doing! Let them pull together if they can, and if they do, we can visit and be neighbors. But without that, if we try to help them it will only destroy us.”
Many of the Reds and Marsfirsters in there nodded emphatically, Kasei prominent among them. Kasei had been coming into his own recently, as a leader of the Marsfirst group, a separatist wing of the Reds, whose members wanted nothing to do with Earth, who were willing to back sabotage, eco tage, terrorism, armed revolt—any means necessary to get what they wanted. One of the least tractable groups there, in fact, and Nadia found it sad to see Kasei seizing their cause, and even leading it.
Now Maya stood to reply to Coyote. “Nice theory,” she said, “but it’s impossible. It’s like Ann’s redness. We’re going to have to deal with Earth, so we might as well figure out how, and not just hide from it.”
“As long as they’re in chaos, we’re in danger,” Nadia said. “We have to do what we can to help. To exert influence in the direction we want them to go.”
Someone else said, “The two planets are one system.”
“What do you mean by that?” Coyote demanded. “They’re different worlds, they could certainly be two systems!”
“Information exchange.”
Maya said, “We exist for Earth as a model or experiment. A thought experiment for humanity to learn from.”
“A real experiment,” Nadia said. “This is no longer a game, we can’t afford to take attractively pure theoretical positions.” She was looking at Kasei and Dao and their comrades as she said this; but it made no impact, she could see.
More meetings, more talk, a quick meal, and another meeting with the Sabishii issei, to discuss the demimonde as a springboard for their efforts. Then it was off to the nightly conference with Art and Nirgal; but the men were beat, and she sent them to bed. “We’ll talk over breakfast.”
She too was tired, but very far from sleepy. So she took her night walk, north from Zakros through
the tunnel. She had recently discovered a high trail running along the west wall of the tunnel, cut into the basalt where the curve of the cylinder made the wall about a forty-five-degree slope. From this trail she could look out over the treetops, down into the parks. And where the trail veered out onto a little spur in Knossos, she could see up and down the length of the tunnel all the way to both horizons, the entire lengthy narrow world dimly lit, by streetlights surrounded by irregular green globes of leaves, and by the few windows with lights still on inside, and by a string of paper lanterns hung in the pines of Gournia’s park. It was such an elegant piece of construction, it hurt her slightly to think of the long years spent in Zygote, under ice, in frigid air and artificial light. If only they had known about these lava tunnels. . . .
The next segment, Phaistos, had its floor nearly filled by a long shallow pond, where the canal that coursed slowly down from Zakros widened. Underwater lights at one end of the pond turned its water into a strange sparkling dark crystal, and she could see a group of people splashing about in it, their bodies gleaming in the lit water, disappearing into the dark. Amphibious creatures, salamanders. . . . Once, very long ago on Earth, there had been water animals that had crawled up gasping onto the shore. They must have had some pretty serious policy debates, Nadia thought sleepily, down in that ocean. To emerge or not to emerge, how to emerge, when to emerge. . . . Sound of distant laughter, the stars packing the jagged skylights. . . .