• • •
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 meta-conflict, 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 antistatists, 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 behavior. 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 anytime, 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 travelers 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 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 semiautonomous 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 UNTA chief Derek 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, rivaling even Earth’s great flood in the public’s attention. “The soap opera of the moment,” Art said to Nadia. Every ni
ght the two of them met in their little office suite, and put in their call to Nirgal and the rest. The delays in the travelers’ 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 countermodel rather,” Jurgen said, making a face. “The reason I’m on Mars is the Swiss federal government. It stifles everything. You need a license to breathe.”
“And the cantons have no power anymore,” 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 Gray 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.