Green Mars

“Interesting,” Sax said.

  And so it was. But many people remained adamantly opposed to dealing with a Terran metanational. And meanwhile all the other arguments about all the other issues continued unabated, often becoming more polarized the longer they talked about them.

  That night at their patio meeting Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them. She said to Art and Nirgal, “Maybe the world is simply too complex for any one plan to work. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying for a global plan, but just something to suit us. And then hope Mars can get along using several different systems.”

  Art said, “I don’t think that will work either.”

  “But what will?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.” And he and Nirgal went off to review tapes, pursuing what suddenly seemed to Nadia an ever-receding mirage.

  Nadia went to bed. If it were a construction project, she thought as she lay falling asleep, she would tear it down and start over again.

  The hypnogogic image of a falling building jerked her awake. After a while, sighing, she gave up on sleep, and went out for another night walk. Art and Nirgal were asleep in the tape room, their faces squashed on the tabletop, flickering under the fast-forward light from the screen. Outside the air whooshed north through the gates into Gournia, and she followed it, taking the high trail. Clicking bamboo leaves, stars in the skylights overhead . . . then the faint sounds of laughter, pealing down the tunnel from Phaistos pond.

  The pond’s underwater lights were on, and a crowd was bathing again. But now on the far side of the tunnel, about as high on the curved wall as she was on her side, there was a lit platform with perhaps eight people jammed onto it. One of them was getting onto a board of some kind, crouching down; then he dropped away from the platform, crouching down and holding the front of the board, which clearly had very little friction—a naked man with wet hair whipping behind him, flying down the curving black side of the tunnel, accelerating until he shot up a lip of rock and flew out over the pond, cartwheeling, crashing into the water with a great splash, shooting back up with a whoop, to cheers all around.

  Nadia walked down to have a look. Someone else was running the board back up a staircase to the platform, and the man who had ridden it down was standing in the shallows, pulling his hair back. Nadia didn’t recognize him until she was at the edge of the pond and he sloshed into the liquid light from below. It was William Fort.

  Nadia shed her clothes and walked out into the water, which was very warm, body temperature or a bit higher. With a shout another figure came shooting down the incline, like a surfer on an immense rock wave. “The drop looks severe,” Fort was saying to one of his companions, “but with the gravity so light you can just handle it.”

  The woman riding the board was projected out over the water; she arched back in a perfect swan dive until making a final tuck and splash into the pond, and was cheered loudly on emergence. Another woman had retrieved the board and was climbing out of the pond, near the foot of the stairs cut into the slope.

  Fort greeted Nadia with a nod, standing waist-deep in the water, his body wiry under ancient wrinkled skin. On his face was the same look of vague pleasure it had worn in the workshops. “Want to try it?” he asked her.

  “Maybe later,” she said, looking around at the people in the water, trying to sort out who was there and what parries at the congress they represented. When she realized what she was doing she snorted in disgust, at herself and at the pervasiveness of politics—how it could infect everything if you let it.

  But still, she noted that the people in the water were mostly young natives, from Zygote, Sabishii, New Vanuatu, Dorsa Brevia, Vishniac mohole, Christianopolis. Hardly any of them were active speaking delegates, and their power was something Nadia couldn’t gauge. Probably it didn’t signify all that much that they were gathering together here at night, naked in warm water, partying—most of them came from places where public baths were the norm, so they were used to splashing with someone they might fight elsewhere.

  Another rider came screaming down the slope, then flying out into the depths of the pond. People swam to her like sharks to blood. Nadia ducked under the water, which tasted slightly salty; opening her eyes she saw crystal bubbles exploding everywhere, then swimming bodies twisting like dolphins over the smooth dark surface of the pond bottom. An unearthly sight. . . .

  She came back up, squeezed her hair dry. Fort stood among the youngsters like a decrepit Neptune, surveying them with his curious impassive relaxation. Perhaps, Nadia thought, these natives were in fact the new Martian culture that John Boone had talked about, springing up among them without their actually noticing. Generational transmission of information always contained a lot of error; that was how evolution happened. And even though people had gone underground on Mars for very different reasons, still, they all seemed to be converging here, in a kind of life that had certain paleolithic aspects to it, harking back perhaps to some ur-culture behind all their differences, or forward to some new synthesis—it did not matter which—it could be both at once. So that there was a possible bond there.

  Or so Fort’s mild expression of pleasure seemed to say to Nadia, somehow, as Jackie Boone in all her Valkyrie glory came shooting down the tunnel wall, and flew out over them as if shot from a circus cannon.

  The program devised by the Swiss came to its end. The organizers quickly called for a three-day rest, to be followed by a general meeting.

  Art and Nirgal spent these days in their little conference room, going over videotapes twenty hours a days, talking endlessly and typing at their Als in a kind of hammering desperation. Nadia kept them going, and broke ties when they disagreed, and wrote the sections they deemed too hard. Often when she walked in one of them would be asleep in his chair, the other staring transfixed by his screen. “Look,” he would croak, “what do you think of this?” Nadia would read the screen and make comments while putting food under their noses, which often woke the sleeping one. “Looks promising. Let’s get back to work.”

  And so on the morning of the general meeting Art and Nirgal and Nadia walked out onto the stage of the amphitheater together, and Art took his AI with him to the proscenium. He stood looking out at the assembled crowd, as if stunned by the sight of it, and after a long pause said, “We actually agree on many things.”

  This got a laugh. But Art held his Al overhead like the stone tablets, then read aloud from the screen: “Work points for a Martian government!”

  He peered over the screen at the crowd, and they subsided into an attentive silence.

  “One. Martian society will be composed of many different cultures. It is better to think of it as a world rather than a nation. Freedom of religion and cultural practice must be guaranteed. No one culture or group of cultures should be able to dominate the rest.

  “Two. Within this framework of diversity, it still must be guaranteed that all individuals on Mars have certain inalienable rights, including the material basics of existence, health care, education, and legal equality.

  “Three. The land, air, and water of Mars are in the common stewardship of the human family, and cannot be owned by any individual or group.

  “Four. The fruits of an individual’s labor belong to the individual, and cannot be appropriated by another individual or group. At the same time, human labor on Mars is part of a communal enterprise, given to the common good. The Martian economic system must reflect both these facts, balancing self-interest with the interests of society at large.

  “Five. The metanational order ruling Earth is currently incapable of incorporating the previous two principles, and cannot be applied here. In its place we must enact an economics based on ecologic science. The goal of Martian economics is not ‘sustainable development’ but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere.

  “Six. The Martian landscape itself has certain ‘rights of pla
ce’ which must be honored. The goal of our environmental alterations should therefore be minimalist and ecopoetic, reflecting the values of the areophany. It is suggested that the goal of environmental alterations be to make only that portion of Mars lower than the five-kilometer contour human-viable. Higher elevations, constituting some thirty percent of the planet, would then remain in something resembling their primeval conditions, existing as natural wilderness zones.

  “Seven. The habitation of Mars is a unique historical process, as it is the first inhabitation of another planet by humanity. As such it should be undertaken in a spirit of reverence for this planet and for the scarcity of life in the universe. What we do here will set precedents for further human habitation of the solar system, and will suggest models for the human relationship to Earth’s environment as well. Thus Mars occupies a special place in history, and this should be remembered when we make the necessary decisions concerning fife here.”

  Art let his Al fall to his side, and stared out at the crowd. They looked down at him in silence. “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat. He gestured at Nirgal, who came up and stood beside him.

  Nirgal said, “That’s all that we could pick out from the workshops that it seemed to us everyone here might agree to. There’s lots more that we feel would be accepted by a majority of the groups here, but not by all. We’ve made lists of those partial consensus points as well, and we’ll post them all for your inspection. We feel very strongly that if we can come away from here with even a very general kind of document, then we will have accomplished something significant. The tendency in a congress like this is to become more and more aware of our differences, and I think this tendency is exaggerated in our situation, because at this point a Martian government remains a kind of theoretical exercise. But when it becomes a practical problem—when we have to act—then we’ll be looking for common ground, and a document like this will help us find it.

  “We have a lot of specific notes for each of the main points of the document. We’ve talked with Jürgen and Priska about them, and they suggest setting up a week of meetings with a day devoted to each of the seven main points, so that everyone can make comments and revisions. Then at the end we can see if we have anything left.”

  There was a weak laugh-A lot of people were nodding.

  “What about gaining independence in the first place?” Coyote called from the back.

  Art said, “We couldn’t figure out any similar points of agreement to write down. Maybe there can also be a workshop that tries to do that.”

  “Maybe there should!” Coyote exclaimed. “Anyone can agree things should be fair, and the world just. The way to get there is always the real problem.”

  “Well, yes and no,” Art said. “What we’ve got here is more than a wish that things be fair. As for the methods, maybe if we go at it again with these goals in mind, things will suggest themselves. That is to say, what will get us to these goals most surely? What kind of means do these ends imply?”

  He looked around at the crowd, and shrugged. “Look, we’ve tried to compile a composite of what you’ve all been saying here in your different ways, so if there is a lack of specific suggestions for means of achieving independence, it’s perhaps because you’ve all gotten stuck at the level of general philosophies of action, where many of you disagree. The only thing I can think to suggest is that you try to identify the various forces on the planet, and rate how resistant to independence they might be, and tailor your actions to match the resistance. Nadia talked about reconceptualizing the whole methodology of revolution, and some have suggested economic models, the idea of a leveraged buyout or something, but when I was thinking about this notion of a tailored response, it reminded me of integrated pest management, you know—the system in agriculture where a variety of methods of varying severity are used to deal with the pests you have.”

  People laughed at this, but Art didn’t seem to notice; he looked taken aback by the lack of approval of the general document. Disappointed. And Nirgal looked angry.

  Nadia turned and said loudly, “How about a round of applause for our friends here, for managing to synthesize anything at all out of this!”

  People clapped. A few cheered. For a moment it sounded quite enthusiastic. But quickly it ended, and they filed out of the amphitheater, talking among themselves, arguing again already.

  So the debates continued, now structured around Art and Nirgal’s document. Reviewing the tapes, Nadia saw that there was a fair amount of agreement over the substance of all the points except for number six, concerning the level of terraforming. Most of the Reds would not accept the low-elevation viability concept, pointing out that most of the planet lay under the five-kilometer contour, and that the higher elevations would be significantly contaminated if the lower elevations were viable. They spoke of dismantling the industrial terraforming processes that were now under way, of returning to the very slowest biological methods called for in the radical ecopoesis model. Some advocated the growth of a thin CO2 atmospshere, supporting plants but not animals, as being a situation more natural to Mars’s volatile inventory and its past history. Other advocated leaving the surface as close to how they had found it as possible, and keeping a very small population in tented valleys. These people decried the rapid destruction of the surface by the industrial terraforming in outraged tones, condemning particularly the inundation of Vastitas Borealis, and the outright melting of the landscape by use of the soletta and the aerial lens.

  But as the seven days passed, it became more and more obvious that this point of the draft declaration was the only one being really debated, while the others were for the most part being subjected to fine-tuning only. A lot of people were pleasantly surprised to find even this much assent to the draft statement, and more than once Nirgal said irritably, “Why be surprised? We didn’t make those points up, we just wrote down what people were saying.”

  And people would nod at this, interested, and go back to the meetings, and work on the points again. And it began to seem to Nadia that agreement was popping up everywhere, called out of chaos by Art and Nirgal’s assertion that it existed. Several of the sessions that week ended in a kind of kavajava high of political consensus, the various aspects of a state finally hammered into a shape to which many of the parties could agree.

  But the argument over methods only got more vehement. Back and forth it would go, Nadia against Coyote, Kasei, the Reds, the Marsfirsters, and many of the Bogdanovists. “You can’t get to what we want by murder!” “They won’t give this planet up! Political power begins at the end of a gun!”

  One night after one of these donnybrooks, a big gathering of them floated in the shallows of the Phaistos pond, trying to relax. Sax sat on an underwater bench and shook his head. “Classic problem of punishment—no—of violence,” he said. “Radical, liberal. Who never managed to agree again. Before.”

  Art plunged his head in the water, and pulled it out spluttering. Weary, frustrated, he said, “What about integrated pest management? What about that mandatory retirement idea?”

  “Forced disemployment,” Nadia corrected.

  “Decapitation,” Maya said.

  “Whatever!” Art said, splashing them. “Velvet revolution. Silk revolution.”

  “Aerogel,” Sax said. “Light, strong. Invisible.”

  “It’s worth a try!” Art said.

  Ann shook her head. “It will never work.”

  “It’s better than another sixty-one,” Nadia said.

  Sax said, “Better if we agree on a play. On a plan.”

  “But we can’t,” Maya said.

  “The front is broad,” Art insisted. “Let’s go out there and do what we’re comfortable with.”

  Sax and Nadia and Maya all shook their heads at once; seeing it, Ann unexpectedly laughed out loud. And then they were all sitting in the pond together, giggling at they knew not what.

  The final general meeting took place in the late afternoon, in the Zakros pa
rk where it had all begun. It had a strangely confused air, Nadia felt, with most people only grudgingly satisfied with the Dorsia Brevia Declaration, now several times longer than Art and Nirgal’s original draft. Each point was read aloud by Priska, and each was cheered in a consensual vote of approval; but different groups cheered more loudly for some points than for others, and when the reading was done, the general applause was brief and perfunctory. No one could be happy with that, and Art and Nirgal looked exhausted.

  The applause ended, and for a moment everyone just sat there. No one knew what to do next; the lack of agreement on the matter of methods seem to extend right into that very moment. What next? What now? Did they just go home? Did they have a home? The moment stretched out, uncomfortable, even vaguely painful (how they needed John!), so that Nadia was relieved when someone shouted something—an exclamation that seemed to break a malign spell. She looked around as people pointed.

  There on a staircase, high on the black tunnel wall, stood a green woman. She was unclothed, green-skinned, glowing in a shaft of afternoon sun that shot down from a skylight—gray-haired, barefoot, without jewelry—completely naked, except for a coat of green paint. And what was common at night in the pond was, in this vivid daylight, dangerous and provocative—a shock to the senses, a challenge to their notion of what a political congress was, or could be.

  It was Hiroko. She began to step down the staircase, in a steady measured pace. Ariadne and Charlotte and several other Minoan women stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her, along with Hiroko’s closest followers from the hidden colony—Iwao, Rya, Evgenia, Michel, all the rest of that little band. As Hiroko descended they started to sing. When she reached them, they draped her with strings of bright red flowers. A fertility rite, Nadia thought, reaching directly into some paleolithic part of their minds, and intermingling there with Hiroko’s areophany.

  When Hiroko left the foot of the stairs she had a little train of followers, singing the names of Mars, “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram,” and so on, a great melange of archaic syllables, into which some of them were interjecting “Ka . . . ka . . . ka . . .”