Blue Mars
Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that if they believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time to the exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the self governed. And that took time. “Those who value freedom must make the effort necessary to defend it,” as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew because Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with such inspirational sentiments printed on them. “Science Is Politics by Other Means,” another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.
But in Da Vinci most people did not want to spend their time that way. “Socialism will never succeed,” Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting on yet another sign), “it takes up too many evenings.” So it did; and the solution was to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the lottery method of election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the job oneself someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for the gaiety of this annual party; people were pouring in and out of the French doors of the commons, onto the open terraces overlooking the crater lake, talking with great animation. Even the drafted ones were beginning to cheer up again, after the solace of kavajava and alcohol, and perhaps the thought that power after all was power; it was an imposition, but the draftees could do some little things that no doubt were occurring to them even now— make trouble for rivals, do favors for people they wanted to impress, etc. So once again the system had worked; they had warm bodies filling the whole polyarchic array, the neighborhood boards, the ag board, the water board, the architectural review board, the project review council, the economic coordination group, the crater council to coordinate all these smaller bodies, the global delegates’ advisory board— all that network of small management bodies that progressive political theorists had been suggesting in one variation or another for centuries, incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on. An experiment in synthesis. And so far it seemed to be working, in the sense that the Da Vinci techs seemed about as self-determined and happy as they had been during the ad hoc underground years, when everything had been done (apparently) by instinct, or, to be more precise, by the general consensus of the (much smaller) population in Da Vinci at that time.
They certainly seemed as happy; out on the terraces they were lining up at big pots of kavajava and Irish coffee, or kegs of beer, clumped in talkative groups so that the clatter of voices was like the sound of waves, as at any cocktail party: an amazing sound, those voices all together. A chorus of talk— it was a music that no one consciously listened to but Sax, as far as he could tell; but as he listened to it he suspected strongly that the sound of it, heard unconsciously, was one of the things that made people at parties so happy and gregarious. Get two hundred people together, talking loudly so that each conversation could be heard only by its small group: such a music they made!
So running Da Vinci was a successful experiment, despite the fact that the citizens showed no interest in it. If they had they might have been less happy. Maybe ignoring government was a good strategy. Maybe the definition of good government was the government you could safely ignore, “to finally get back to my own work!” as one happily buzzed ex-water-board chief was just now saying. Self-government not being considered part of one’s own work!
Although of course there were those people who did like the work, something about the interplay of theory and practice, the argument, the problem solving, the collaboration with other people, the service to others as a kind of gift, the endless talk; the power. And these people stayed on to serve two terms, or three if they were allowed, and then took on some other volunteer task that was going a-begging; indeed, most of these people did more than one task at once. Bela, for instance, had claimed not to like the chairmanship of the lab of labs, but now he was going directly into the volunteer advisory group, which always had a number of spots in danger of being unfilled. Sax wandered over to him: “Would you agree with Aonia that Free Mars is dominating global policy?”
“Oh undoubtedly, assuredly. They are simply so big. And they have packed the courts, and rigged some things their way. I think they want to control all the new asteroid colonies. And to conquer Earth too, for that matter. All the politically ambitious young natives are joining the party, like bees to the flower.”
“Trying to dominate other settlements. . . .”
“Yes?”
“It sounds like trouble.”
“Yes it does.”
“Have you heard about this lightweight fusion engine they’re talking about?”
“Yes, a little.”
“You might look into backing that a bit more. If we could get engines like that into spaceships. . . .”
“Yes? Sax?”
“Transport that fast might have the effect of cracking domination by any one party.”
“Do you think so?”
“Well, it would make it a hard situation to control.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Hmm, well, I must think about this further.”
“Yes. Science is politics by other means, remember.”
“Indeed it is! Indeed it is.” And Bela went off to the beer kegs, muttering to himself, then greeting another group as they approached him.
So spontaneously there emerged that bureaucratic class that had been the terror of so many political theorists: the experts who took control of the polity, and supposedly would never relinquish their grip. But to whom would they relinquish it? Who else wanted it? No one, as far as Sax could tell. Bela could stay on the advisory board forever if he wanted to. Expert, from the Latin experiri, to try. As in experiment. So it was government by the experimenters. Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So yet another kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you had to draft members into the governing body, then the notion of self-government as an aspect of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical.
Hector and Sylvia, from Bao’s seminar, broke into Sax’s reverie and invited him to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs from Maria dos Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them.
Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to take place, Sax stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of kava. The festival spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia hurried down to get ready, glowing with anticipation. Watching them Sax remembered his recent encounter with Ann. If only he had been able to think! Why, he had gone completely incoherent! If only he had thought to become Stephen Lindholm again, perhaps that would have helped. Where was Ann now, what was she thinking? What had she been doing? Did she only wander the face of Mars now, like a ghost, moving from one Red station to another? What were the Reds doing now, how did they live? Had they been about to bomb Da Vinci, had his chance encounter stopped a raid? No no. There were ecoteurs still out there monkey-wrenching projects, but with the legal limits on terraforming, most Reds had rejoined society somehow; it was one mainstream political strand among the rest, vigilant, quick to litigate— indeed much more interested in taking on political work than less ideological citizens— but still, and by that very tendency, normalized. Where then would Ann fit in? With whom did she associate?
Well, he could call her and ask.
But he was afraid to call, afraid to ask. Afraid to talk to her! At least by wrist. And apparently in person as well. She had not said what she thought of him giving her the treatment against her will. No thanks, no curse; nothing. What did she think? What was she thinking?
He sighed, sipped his kava. Down below they were beginning, Hector rolling out a recitative in Spanish, his voice so musical and expressive it was almost as if Sax could understand him by tone of voice alone.
Ann, Ann, Ann. This obsessive interest in someone else’s thought was so uncomfortable. So much easier to concentrate on the planet, on rock and air, on biology. It w
as a ploy Ann herself would understand. And there was in ecopoesis something fundamentally intriguing. The birth of a world. Out of their control. Still he wondered what she made of it. Perhaps he would run into her again.
• • •
Meanwhile, the world. He went back out on it again. Rumpled land under the blue dome of the sky. The ordinary sky at the equator in spring changed color day by day, it took a color chart even to approximate the tone colors; some days it was a deep violet blue— clematis blue, or hyacinth blue, or lapis lazuli, or a purplish indigo. Or Prussian blue, a pigment made from ferric ferrocyanide, interestingly, as there was certainly a lot of ferric material up there. Iron blue. Slightly more purple than Himalayan skies as seen in photographs, but otherwise like the Terran skies seen at those high altitudes. And combined with the rocky indented landscape, it did seem like a high-altitude place. Everything: the sky color, the rumpled rock, the cold thin air so pure and chill. Everything so high. He walked into the wind, or across the wind, or with the wind at his back, and each felt different. In his nostrils the wind was like a mild intoxicant, flooding the brain. He stepped on lichen-crusted rocks, from slab to slab, as if walking on a personal sidewalk appearing magically out of the shatter of the land, up and down, every step just a step, wandering attentive to the thisness of each moment. Moment to moment to moment, each one discrete, like Bao’s loops of timespace, like the successive positions of a finch’s head, the little birds plancking from one quantum pose to the next. It appeared on close inspection that moments were not regular units but varied in duration, depending on what was happening in them. The wind dropped, no birds in sight: everything suddenly still, and oh so silent, except for the buzzing of insects; those moments could last several seconds each. Whereas when sparrows were dogfighting a crow, the moments were nearly instantaneous. Look very closely; sometimes it was a flow, sometimes the planck-planck-planck of individual stillnesses.
To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses. Out here in the brilliant spring light, and the cold wind, he came to the edge of a cliff, and looked down onto the ultramarine plate of Simud Fjord, silvered by myriad chips of light blazing off the water. Cliffs on the other side were banded by stratification lines, some of which had become green ledges lining the basalt. Gulls, puffins, terns, guillemots, ospreys, all wheeling in the gulfs of air below him.
• • •
As he learned the different fjords, he found he had his favorites. The Florentine, directly southeast of Da Vinci, was a pretty oval of water; a walk along the low bluffs overlooking it was continuously picturesque. Thick grass grew like a mat over these bluffs, they looked like Sax’s image of the Irish coast. The land’s edges were softening as soil and flora began to fill in the cracks, holding to mounds that defied the angle of repose, so that one walked over pads of ground, swelling between the sharp teeth of still-bare rocks.
Clouds poured inland from the sea to the north, and the rain fell, steady deluges that soaked everything. The day after a storm like that the air steamed, the land gurgled and dripped, and every step off bare rock was a boggy squish. Heath, moor, bog. Gnarly little forests in the low grabens. A quick brown fox, seen out of the corner of the eye as it dashed behind a sierra juniper. Away from him, after something? No way to know. On business of its own. Waves striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the heart of the great unexplainable.
Every sunset was different, as a result of the residual fines in the upper atmosphere. These lofted so high that they were often illuminated by the sun long after everything else was in twilight’s great shadow. So Sax would sit on the western sea cliff, rapt through the setting of the sun, then stay through the hour of twilight, watching the sky colors change as the sun’s shadow rose up, until all the sky was black; and then sometimes there would appear noctilucent clouds, thirty kilometers above the planet, broad streaks gleaming like abalone shells.
The pewter sky of a hazy day. The florid sunset in a hard blow. The warmth of the sun on his skin, at peace in a windless late afternoon. The patterns of waves on the sea below. The feel of the wind, the look of it.
But once in an indigo twilight, under the sparkling array of fat blurry stars, he grew uneasy. “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,” Tennyson had written just a few years before the discovery. Moonless Mars. It was in this hour that Phobos had used to shoot up over the western horizon like a flare. A moment of the areophany if ever there was one. Fear and Dread. And he had completed the desatellitization himself. They could have popped any military base built on Deimos, what had he been thinking? He couldn’t remember. Some kind of desire for symmetry; down, up; but symmetry was perhaps a quality prized more by mathematicians than other people. Up. Somewhere Deimos was still orbiting the sun. “Hmm.” He looked it up on the wrist. A lot of new colonies were starting out there: people were hollowing out asteroids, then spinning them to create a gravity effect on their insides, then moving in. New worlds.
A word caught his eye: Pseudophobos. He tracked back, read; informal name for an asteroid that somewhat resembled the lost moon in size and shape. “Hmmm.” Sax tapped around and got a photo. Well, the resemblance was superficial: a triaxial ellipsoid, but weren’t they all. Potatoshaped, right size, banged hard on one end, a Stickneyesque crater. Stickney; there had been a nice little settlement tucked into it. What’s in a name? Say they dropped the pseudo. A couple of mass drivers and Als, some side jets . . . that peculiar moment, when Phobos had shot up over the western horizon. “Hmmmmm,” Sax said.
• • •
The days passed and the seasons. He did field studies and meteorology. Effects of atmospheric pressure on cloud formation. Meaning drives out around the peninsula, then a walk, then out with the balloons and kites. Weather balloons these days were elegant things, instrument packages less than ten grams, lofted by a bag eight meters tall. Capable of rising right into the exosphere.
Sax enjoyed arranging the bag over a smooth patch of sand or grass, the top downwind from him, then sitting and holding the delicate little payload in his fingers, then flicking the toggle that shot compressed hydrogen into the balloon, and watching it fill and yank up at the sky. If he held on to the line he was almost hauled to his feet, and without gloves on the line would cut his palm, as he had quickly learned. Release it then, thump back to the sand, watch the round red dot shimmy up through the wind, until it was a pinprick and then could no longer be seen. That happened at around a thousand meters, depending on the haze in the air; once it had happened as low as 479 meters, once as high as 1,352 meters, a very clear day indeed. After that, he would read some of the data on his wrist, sitting in the sunshine feeling like a little piece of him was sailing up into space. Strange what made one happy.
The kites were just as nice. They were a bit more complex than the balloons, but a special pleasure during the autumn, when the trade winds blew strong and steady every day. Go out to one of the western sea cliffs, take a short run into the wind, get the kite into the air; a big orange box kite, bobbing this way and that; then as it got up into the steadier wind it stabilized, and he reeled it out feeling the shifts in the wind as subtle quiverings in his arms. Or else he wedged a spool pole in a crack, and set the resistance, and watched the kite soar up and away. The line was nearly invisible. When the spool ran out the line hummed, and if he held it between his fingers, the wind’s fluctuations were communicated to him as a kind of music. The kite would stay up for weeks at a time, out of sight or, if he kept it low enough, just within sight, a tiny flaw in the sky. Transmitting data all the while. A square object was visible at a greater distance than a round object of the same area. The mind was a funny animal.
• • • r />
Michel called up to talk about nothing in particular. This was the hardest kind of conversation of all for Sax. The image of Michel would look down and to the right, and it would be very clear as he spoke that his mind was elsewhere, that he was unhappy, that Sax needed to somehow take the lead.
“Come visit and go for a walk with me,” Sax said again. “I really think you should.” How could one emphasize that? “I really think you should.” Throw things together. “Da Vinci is like the west coast of Ireland. The end of Europe, all green sea cliff over a big plate of water.”
Michel nodded uncertainly.
Then a couple of weeks later there he was, walking down a hall in Da Vinci. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of Europe.”
“Good man.”
So they went out together on a day trip. Sax drove him west to the Shalbatana cliffs, then they got out and walked north, toward Simshal Point. Such a pleasure to have his old friend with him in this beautiful place. Seeing any of the First Hundred was a welcome break in his routine, a rare event that he treasured. The weeks would pass in their comfortable round, and then suddenly one of the old family would appear, and it was like a homecoming without the home, making him think he perhaps ought to move to Sabishii or Odessa someday, so that he could experience such a wonderful feeling more often.