Blue Mars (2 page)

Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and
she shook her head so violently that her cropped gray locks flew out like a
clown’s ruff. She was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good
reason at all, and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said
curtly, “We need the elevator. It’s our conduit to Terra just as much as it’s
their conduit to Mars.”

“But we don’t need a conduit to Terra,” Ann said. “It’s not a
physical relationship for us, don’t you see? I’m not saying we don’t need to
have an influence on Terra, I’m not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I
agree we need to try to work on them. But it’s not a physical thing, don’t you
see? It’s a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It’s an
information exchange. At least it is when it’s going right. It’s when it gets
into a physical thing—a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police
control— that’s when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took
it down we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not yours.”

It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn’t
imagine.

Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic-table style said,
“If we can bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down,”
blinking and everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of
the terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again—Saxifrage Russell
his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments
she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words’ inadequacy right in
her mouth.

Still she tried. “People act on what’s there, Sax. The meta-nat
directors and the UN and the governments will look up and see what’s there, and
act accordingly. If the cable’s gone they just don’t have the resources or the
time to mess with us right now. If the cable’s here, then they’ll want us.
They’ll think, well, we could do it. And there’ll be people screaming to try.”

“They can always come. The cable is only a fuel saver.”

“A fuel saver which makes mass transfers possible.”

But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No
one would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about
control of orbit and safe-conduct passes and the like.

The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and
said, “We’ve promised to ... help them out.”

“By sending them more metals?” Ann said. “Do they really need
those?”

“We could ... take people. It might help.”

Ann shook her head. “We could never take enough.”

He frowned. Nadia saw they weren’t listening to her, returned to
the table. Sax and Ann fell into silence.

Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were
made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean
different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been
different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and
understood each other. But that had been so long ago she couldn’t even remember
when exactly it was. In Antarctica? Somewhere. But not on Mars.

“You know,” Sax said in a conversational tone, again very
un-Sax-like but in a different way, “it wasn’t the Red militia that caused the
Transitional Authority to evacuate Burroughs and the rest of the planet. If
guerrillas had been the only factor then the Terrans would have gone after us,
and they might well have succeeded. But those mass demonstrations in the tents
made it clear that almost everyone on the planet was against them. That’s what
governments fear the most; mass protests in the cities. Hundreds of thousands
of people going into the streets to reject the current system. That’s what
Nirgal means when he says political power comes out of the look in people’s
eye. And not out of the end of a gun.”

“And so?” Ann said.

Sax gestured at the people in the warehouse. “They’re all greens.”

The others continued debating. Sax watched her like a bird.

Ann got up and walked out of the meeting, into the strangely
unbusy streets of east Pavonis. Here and there militia bands held posts on
street corners, keeping an eye to the south, toward Sheffield and the cable
terminal. Happy, hopeful, serious young natives. There on one corner a group
was in an animated discussion, and as Ann passed them a young woman, her face
utterly intent, flushed with passionate conviction, cried out “You can’t just
do what you want!”

Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy,
without knowing why. This is how people change— in little quantum jumps when
struck by outer events—no intention, no plan. Someone says “the look in
people’s eye,” and the phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face
glowing with passionate conviction, another phrase: you can’t just do what you
want! And so it occurred to her (the look on that young woman’s face!) that it
was not just the cable’s fate they were deciding—not just “should the cable
come down,” but “how do we decide things?” That was the critical postrevolutionary
question, perhaps more important than any single issue being debated, even the
fate of the cable. Up until now, most people in the underground had operated by
a working method which said if we don’t agree with you we will fight you. That
attitude was what had gotten people into the underground in the first place,
Ann included. And once used to that method, it was hard to get away from it.
After all, they had just proved that it worked. And so there was the
inclination to continue to use it. She felt that herself.

But political power ... say it did come out of the look in
people’s eye. You could fight forever, but if people weren’t behind you. . . .

Ann continued to think about that as she drove down into
Sheffield, having decided to skip the farce of the afternoon strategy session
in east Pavonis. She wanted to have a look at the seat of the action.

It was curious how little seemed to have changed in the day-to-day
life of Sheffield. People still went to work, ate in restaurants, talked on the
grass of the parks, gathered in the public spaces in this most crowded of tent
towns. The shops and restaurants were jammed. Most businesses in Sheffield had
belonged to the metanats, and now people read on their screens long arguments
over what to do—what the employees’ new relationship to their old owners should
be— where they should buy their raw materials, where they should sell—whose
regulations they ought to obey, whose taxes they ought to pay. All very
confusing, as the screen debates and the nightly news vids and the wrist nets
indicated.

The plaza devoted to the food market, however, looked as it always
had. Most food was grown and distributed by co-ops; ag networks were in place,
the greenhouses on Pavonis were still producing, and so in the market things
ran as usual, goods paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit. Except once or
twice Ann saw sellers in their aprons shouting red-faced at customers, who
shouted right back, arguing over some point of government policy. As Ann passed
by one of these arguments, which were no different than those going on among
the leaders in east Pavonis, the disputants all stopped and stared at her. She
had been recognized. The vegetable seller said loudly, “If you Reds would lay
off they would just go away!”

“Ah come on,” someone retorted. “It isn’t her doing it.”

So true, Ann thought as she walked on.

A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems
were still running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which
was not something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did;Tjut
every tent’s operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their raw
materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and nuclear
reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were physically fragile,
but if left alone, they could very well become politically autonomous; there
was no reason for them to be owned, no justification for it.

So the necessities were served. Daily life plodded on, barely
perturbed by revolution.

Or so it seemed at first glance. But there in the streets also
were armed groups, young natives in threes and fours and fives, standing on
street corners. Revolutionary militias around their missile launchers and
remote sensing dishes— green or red, it didn’t matter, though they were almost
certainly greens. People eyed them as they walked by, or stopped to chat and
find out what they were doing. Keeping an eye on the Socket, the armed natives
said. Though Ann could see that they were functioning as police as well. Part
of the scene, accepted, supported. People grinned as they chatted; these were
their police, they were fellow Martians, here to protect them, to guard
Sheffield for them. People wanted them there, that was clear. If they hadn’t,
then every approaching questioner would have been a threat, every glance of
resentment an attack; which eventually would have forced the militias from the
street corners into some safer place. People’s faces, staring in concert; this
ran the world.

So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she
took a rim train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to
the north arc of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze were occupying
apartments in the little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had forcibly evicted
some noncombatant residents, who naturally had trained down to Sheffield in
fury, demanding to be reinstated in their homes, and reporting to Peter and the
rest of the green leaders that the Reds had set up truck-drawn rocket launchers
on the north rim, with the rockets aimed at the elevator and Sheffield more
generally.

So Ann walked out into Lastflow’s little station in a bad mood,
angry at the Kakaze’s arrogance, as stupid in its way as the greens’. They had
done well in the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dike very visibly to give
everyone a warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dike after all
the other revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the south,
ready to rescue the city’s civilian population while the metanat security were
forced to retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been needed and they had done
it, without getting bogged down in debate. Without their decisiveness everyone
would still be gathered around Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing
a Terran expeditionary force to relieve it. It had been a perfectly delivered
coup.

Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.

Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a
fan-shaped lava flow extending more than a hundred kilometers down the
northeast flank of the mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise
a flawlessly circular summit cone and caldera, and clearly it had come very
late in the volcano’s history of eruptions. Standing down in the depression,
one’s view of the rest of the summit was cut off—it was like being in a shallow
hanging valley, with little visible in any direction—until one walked out to
the drop-off at rim’s edge, and saw the huge cylinder of the caldera coring the
planet, and on the far rim the skyline of Sheffield, looking like a tiny
Manhattan over forty kilometers away.

The curtailed view perhaps explained why the depression had been
one of the last parts of the rim to be developed. But now it was filled by a
fair-sized tent, six kilometers in diameter and a hundred meters high, heavily
reinforced as all tents up here had to be. The settlement had been home mostly
to commuter laborers in the rim’s many industries. Now the rimfront district
had been taken over by the Kakaze, and just outside the tent stood a fleet of
large rovers, no doubt the ones that had caused the rumors about rocket
launchers.

As Ann was led to the restaurant that Kasei had made his
headquarters, she was assured by her guides that this was indeed the case; the
rovers did haul rocket launchers, which were ready to flatten UNTA’s last
refuge on Mars. Her guides were obviously happy about this, and happy also to
be able to tell her about it, happy to meet her and guide her around. A varied
bunch—mostly natives, with some Terran newcomers and old-timers, of all ethnic
backgrounds. Among them were a few faces Ann recognized: Etsu Okakura, al-Khan,
Yussuf. A lot of young natives unknown to her stopped them at the restaurant
door to shake her hand, grinning enthusiastically. The Kakaze: they were, she
had to admit to herself, the wing of the Reds for which she felt the least
sympathy. Angry ex-Terrans or idealistic young natives from the tents, their
stone eyeteeth dark in their smiles, their eyes glittering as they got this chance
to meet her, as they spoke of kami, the need for purity, the intrinsic value of
rock, the rights of the planet, and so on. In short, fanatics. She shook their
hands and nodded, trying not to let her discomfort show.

Inside the restaurant Kasei and Dao were sitting by a window,
drinking dark beer. Everything in the room stopped on Ann’s entrance, and it
took a while for people to be introduced, for Kasei and Dao to welcome her with
hugs, for meals and conversations to resume. They got her something to eat from
the kitchen. The restaurant workers came out to meet her; they were Kakaze as
well. Ann waited until they were gone and people had gone back to their tables,
feeling impatient and awkward. These were her spiritual children, the media
always were saying; she was the original Red; but in truth they made her
uncomfortable.