• • •
Soon after that the global elections were held, and Free Mars and its cluster of small allies were returned as a super-majority in the global legislature. Its victory was not as large as had been expected, however, and some of its allies were grumbling and looking around for better deals. Mangala was a hotbed of rumors, one could have spent days at the screen reading columnists and analysts and provocateurs hashing over the possibilities; with the immigration issue on the table the stakes were higher than they had been in years, and the kicked-anthill behavior of Mangala proved it. The outcome of the election for the next executive council remained very much in doubt, and there were rumors that Jackie was fending off challenges from within the party.
Maya shut off her screen, thinking hard. She gave a call to Athos, who looked surprised to see her, then quickly polite. He had been elected representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and was in Mangala working hard for the Greens, who had made a fairly strong showing and had a solid group of representatives, and many interesting new alliances. “You should run for the executive council,” Maya told him.
Now he was really surprised. “Me?”
“You.” Maya wanted to tell him to go look in a mirror and think it over, but bit her tongue. “You made the best impression in the campaign, and a lot of people want to support a pro-Earth policy, and don’t know who to back. You’re their best bet. You might even go talk to MarsFirst and see if you can pull them out of the Free Mars alliance. Promise them a moderate stance and a voice with a councillor, and long-range Reddish sympathies.”
Now he was looking worried. If he was still involved with Jackie and he ran for the council, then he would be in big trouble on that front. Especially if he went after MarsFirst as well. But after Peter’s visit he might not be as concerned about that as he would have been during the bright nights on the canal. Maya let him go stew about it. There was only so much you could do with these people.
• • •
Although she did not want to reconstruct her previous life in Odessa, she did want to work, and at this point hydrology had overtaken ergonomics (and politics, obviously) as her primary area of expertise. And she was interested in the water cycle in the Hellas Basin, curious to see how the work was changing now that the basin was full. Michel had his practice, and was going to get involved with the first settlers’ project that had been mentioned to him in Rhodos; she would have to do something; and so after they had unpacked and furnished the new apartment, she went looking for Deep Waters.
The old offices were now a seafront apartment, very smart. And the name was no longer in the directories. But Diana was, living in one of the big group houses in the upper town; and happy to see Maya show up at her door, happy to go out to lunch with her and tell her all about the current situation in the local water world, which was still her work.
“Most of the Deep Waters people moved straight into the Hellas Sea Institute.” This was an interdisciplinary group, composed of representatives from all the agricultural co-ops and water stations around the basin, as well as fisheries, the University of Odessa, and all the towns on the coast, and all the settlements higher in the the basin’s extensive rimland watersheds. The seaside towns in particular were intensely interested in stabilizing the sea’s level at just above the old minus-one-kilometer contour, just a few-score meters higher than the North Sea’s current level. “They don’t want sea level to change by even a meter,” Diana said, “if it can be helped. And the Grand Canal is useless as a runoff canal to the North Sea, because the locks need water flowing in both directions. So it’s a matter of balancing the inflow from aquifers and rainfall, with evaporation loss. That’s been fine so far. Evaporation loss is slightly higher than the precipitation into the watershed, so every year they draw down the aquifers a few meters. Eventually that’ll be a problem, but not for a long time, because there’s a good aquifer reserve left, and they’re refilling a bit now, and may more in the future. We’re hoping precipitation levels will also rise over time, and they have been so far, so they probably will continue to, for a while longer anyway. I don’t know. That’s the main worry, anyway; that the atmosphere will suck off more than the aquifers can resupply.”
“Won’t the atmosphere finally hydrate fully?”
“Maybe. No one is really sure how humid it will get. Climate studies are a joke, if you ask me. The global models are just too complex, there are too many unknown variables. What we do know is that the air is still pretty arid, and it seems likely it will get more humid. So, everybody believes what they want, and goes out there and tries to please themselves, and the environmental courts keep track of it all as best they can.”
“They don’t forbid anything?”
“Oh yeah, but only big heat pumpers. The small stuff they don’t mess with. Or at least they didn’t used to. Lately the courts have been getting tougher, and tackling smaller projects.”
“It’s exactly the smaller projects that would be most calculable, I should think.”
“Sort of. They tend to cancel each other out. There are a lot of Red projects, you know, to protect the higher altitudes, and any place they can in the south. They’ve got that constitutional height limit to back them, and so they’re always taking their complaints right up to the global court. They win there, and do their thing, and then all the little development projects are somewhat counterbalanced. It’s a nightmare legally.”
“But they’re managing to hold things steady.”
“Well, I think the high altitudes are getting a bit more air and water than they’re supposed to. You have to go really high to get away from it.”
“I thought you said they were winning in court?”
“In the courts, yes. In the atmosphere, no. There’s too much going on.”
“You’d think they’d sue the greenhouse-gas factories.”
“They have. But they’ve lost. Those gases have everyone else’s support. Without them we’d have gone into an ice age and stayed there.”
“But a reduction in emission levels. . . .”
“Yeah, I know. It’s still being fought over. It’ll go on forever.”
“True.”
Meanwhile the Hellas Sea’s sea level had been agreed on; it was a legislative fact, and efforts all around the basin were coordinated to make sure the sea obeyed the law. The whole matter was fantastically complicated, although simple in principle: they measured the hydrological cycle, with all its storms and variations in rain and snow, melting and seeping into the ground, running over the surface in creeks and rivers, down into lakes and then into the Hellas Sea, there to freeze in the winter, then evaporate in the summer and begin the whole round again . . . and to this immense cycle they did what was necessary to stabilize the level of the sea, which was about the size of the Caribbean. If there was too much water and they wanted to draw down the sea level, there was the possibility of piping some of it back up into the emptied aquifers in the Amphitrites Mountains to the south. They were fairly limited in this, however, because the aquifers were composed of porous rock which tended to crush down when the water was first removed, making them difficult or impossible to refill. In fact spill-off possibilities were one of the main problems still facing the project. Keeping the balance. . . .
And this kind of effort was going on all over Mars. It was crazy. But they wanted to do it, and that was that. Diana was talking now about the efforts to keep the Argyre Basin dry, an effort in its way as large as the one to fill Hellas: they had built giant pipelines to evacuate water from Argyre to Hellas if Hellas needed water, or to river systems that led to the North Sea if it didn’t.
“What about the North Sea itself?” Maya asked.
Diana shook her head, mouth full. Apparently the consensus was that the North Sea was beyond regulation, but basically stable. They would just have to watch and see what happened, and the seaside towns up there take their chances. Many believed that the North Sea’s level would eventually fall a bit, as wate
r returned to the permafrost or was trapped in one of the thousands of crater lakes in the southern highlands. Then again precipitation and runoff into the North Sea was substantial. The southern highlands were where the issue would be decided, Diana said; she called up a map onto her wristpad screen to show Maya. Watershed construction co-ops were still wandering around installing drainage, running water into highland creeks, reinforcing riverbeds, excavating quicksand, which in some cases revealed the ghost creekbeds of ancient watersheds below the fines; but mostly their new streams had to be based on lava features or fracture canyons, or the occasional short canal. The result was very unlike the venous clarity of Terran watersheds: a confusion of little round lakes, frozen swamps, canyon arroyos, and long straight rivers with abrupt right-angle turns, or sudden disappearances into sinkholes or pipelines. Only the refilled ancient riverbeds looked “right”; everywhere else the terrain looked like a bomb range after a rainstorm.
Many of the Deep Waters veterans who had not directly joined the Hellas Sea Institute had started an associated co-op of their own, which was mapping the groundwater basins around Hellas, measuring the return of water to the aquifers and the underground rivers, figuring out what water could be stored and recovered, and so on. Diana was a member of this co-op, as were many of the people in Maya’s old office. After their lunch Diana went to the rest of the group, and told them about Maya’s return to town; when they heard that Maya was interested in joining them, they offered her a position in the co-op with a reduced joining fee. Pleased at the compliment, she decided to take them up on it.
• • •
So she worked for Aegean Water Table, as the co-op was called. She got up in the mornings and made coffee and ate some toast or a biscuit, or croissant, or muffin, or crumpet. In fine weather she ate out on their balcony; more often she ate in the bay window at the round dining table, reading the Odessa Messenger on the screen, noting every little incident that combined to reveal to her the darkening situation vis à vis Earth. The legislature in Mangala elected the new executive council, and Jackie was not one of the seven; she had been replaced by Nanedi. Maya whooped, and then read all the accounts she could find, and watched the interviews; Jackie claimed to have declined to run, she said she was tired after so many m-years, and would take a break like she had several times before, and be back (a sharp glint to her eye with that last remark). Nanedi kept a discreet silence on that topic, but he had the pleased, slightly amazed look of the man who had killed the dragon; and though Jackie declared that she would continue her work for the Free Mars party apparatus, clearly her influence there had waned, or else she would still be on the council.
So; she had bowled Jackie off the global playing field; but the anti-immigrant forces were still in power. Free Mars still held its supermajority alliance in uneasy check. Nothing important had changed; life went on; the reports from pullulating Earth were still ominous. Those people were going to come up after them someday, Maya was sure of it. They were getting along among themselves, they could rest, take a look around, make some plans, coordinate their efforts. Better really to eat breakfast without turning the screen on, if she wanted to keep her appetite.
So she took to going downtown and having a larger breakfast on the corniche, with Diana, or later Nadia and Art, or with visitors to town. After breakfast she would walk down to the AWT offices, near the eastern end of the seafront— a good walk, in air that each year was just the slightest bit saltier. At AWT she had an office with a window, and did what she had done for Deep Waters, serving as liaison with the Hellas Sea Institute, and coordinating a fluctuating team of areologists and hydrologists and engineers, directing their research efforts mostly in the Hellespontus and Amphitrites mountains, where most of the aquifers were. She took trips around the curve of the coast to inspect some of their sites and facilities, going up into the hills, staying often in the little harbor town of Montepulciano, on the southwest shore of the sea. Back in Odessa she worked through the days, and quit early, and wandered around the town, shopping in used-furniture stores, or for clothes; she was getting interested in the new styles and their changes through the seasons; it was a stylish town, people dressed well, and the latest styles suited her, she looked rather like a smallish elderly native, with erect regal carriage. . . . Often she arranged to be out on the corniche in the late afternoon, walking home to their apartment, or else sitting below it in the park, or having an early meal in the summers in some seaside restaurant. In the fall a flotilla of ships docked at the wharf and threw out gangplanks between the ships and charged entry for a wine festival, with fireworks over the lake after dark. In the winter the dusk fell on the sea early, and the inshore water was sometimes sheeted with ice, and glowing with a pastel of whatever clear color might be filling the sky that evening, dotted by ice-skaters and swift low iceboats.
One twilight hour as she was eating by herself, a theater company put on a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in an adjoining alley, and between the dusk and the spots on the planks of the temporary stage, the quality of light was such that Maya was drawn like a moth to watch. She barely followed the play, but some moments struck her with great force, especially the blackouts when the action was supposed to stop, the actors all frozen on stage in the late light. That moment only needed some blue, she thought, to be perfect.
Afterward the theater company came over to the restaurant to eat, and Maya talked with the director, a middle-aged native woman named Latrobe, who was interested to meet her, to talk about the play, and about Brecht’s theory of political theater. Latrobe proved to be pro-Terran, pro-immigrationist; she wanted to stage plays that made the case for an open Mars, and for assimilating the new immigrants into the areophany. It was frightening, she said, how few plays of the classical repertory reinforced such feelings. They needed new plays. Maya told her about Diana’s political evenings in the UNTA years, how they had sometimes met in the parks. About her notion concerning the blues in the lighting of that night’s production. Latrobe invited Maya to come by and talk to the troupe about politics, and also to help with the lighting if she wanted, which was a weak point in the company, having had its origin in the very same parks Diana’s group had used to meet in. Perhaps they could get out there again, and do some more Brechtian theater.
And so Maya dropped by and talked with the troupe, and over time, without ever really deciding to, she became one of its lighting crew, helping also with costumes, which was fashion in a different way. She also talked to them long into the nights about the concept of a political theater, and helped them to find new plays; in effect she was a kind of political-aesthetic consultant. But she steadfastly resisted all efforts to get her on stage, not only from the company, but from Michel and Nadia as well. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do that. If I did they would immediately want me to be playing Maya Toitovna, in that play about John.”
“That’s an opera,” Michel said. “You’d have to be a soprano.”
“Nevertheless.”
She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would never return, never be the same. Theater was the most powerful art in town, really, and the same was true in many other Martian cities as well. So as the m-years passed, the Odessa troupe mounted any number of political plays, including a complete run through of the work of the South African Athol Fugard, searing passionate plays anatomizing institutionalized prejudice, the xenophobia of the soul; the best English language plays since Shakespeare, Maya thought. And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering and making famous what was later c
alled the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young native playwrights as ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play explored the wrenching problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful assimilation into the areophany— a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million little blood knots cut or tied. It was Maya’s best window into the contemporary world, and more and more her way of speaking back to it, doing her best to shape it— very satisfying indeed, as many of the plays caused talk, sometimes even a furor, as new works by the Group attacked the anti-immigrant government that was still in power in Mangala. It was politics in a new mode, the most intriguing she had yet encountered; she longed to tell Frank about it, to show him how it worked.
In those same years, as the months passed two by two, Latrobe mounted quite a few productions of old classics, and as Maya watched them, she got more and more snared by the power of tragedy. She liked doing the political plays, which angry or hopeful tended to contain an innate utopianism, a drive for progress; but the plays that struck her as most true, and moved her most deeply, were the old Terran tragedies. And the more tragic the better. Catharsis as described by Aristotle seemed to work very well for her; she emerged from good performances of the great tragedies shattered, cleansed— somehow happier. They were the replacement for her fights with Michel, she realized one night— a sublimation, he would have said, and a good one at that— easier on him, of course, and more dignified all around, nobler. And there was that connection to the ancient Greeks as well, a connection being made in any number of ways all around Hellas Basin, in the towns and among the ferals, a neoclassicism that Maya felt was good for them all, as they confronted and tried to measure up to the Greeks’ great honesty, their unflinching look at reality. The Oresteia, Antigone, Electra, Medea, Agamemnon which should have been called Clytemnestra— those amazing women, reacting in bitter power to whatever strange fates their men inflicted on them, striking back, as when Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra, then told the audience how she had done it, at the end staring out into the audience, right at Maya: