Blue Mars (22 page)

It was likely, however, that the Martians were being screened from
people who had a more hostile attitude toward them. Maya was quite certain this
was the case. She pointed out how often the negotiators and interviewers
revealed what she called their “terracentricity.” Nothing mattered to them,
really, but things Earthly; Mars was interesting in some ways, but not actually
important. Once this attitude was pointed out to Nirgal, he saw it again and
again. And in fact he found it comforting. The corresponding attitude existed
on Mars, certainly, as the natives were inevitably areocentric; and it made
sense, it was a kind of realism.

Indeed it began to seem to him that it was precisely the Terrans
who showed an intense interest in Mars who were the most troubling to
contemplate: certain metanat executives whose corporations had invested heavily
in Martian terraformation; also certain national representatives from heavily
populated countries, who would no doubt be very happy to have a place to send
large numbers of their people. So he sat in meetings with people from Armscor,
Subarashii, China, Indonesia, Ammex, India, Japan, and the Japanese metanat
council; and he listened most carefully, and did his best to ask questions
rather than talk overmuch; and he saw that some of their staunchest allies up
to that point, especially India and China, were likely in the new dispensation
to become their most serious problem. Maya nodded emphatically when he made
this observation to her, her face grim. “We can only hope that sheer distance
will save us,” she said. “How lucky we are that it takes space travel to reach
us. That should be a bottleneck for emigration no matter how advanced transport
methods become. But we will have to keep our guard up, forever. In fact, don’t
speak much of these things here. Don’t speak much at all.”

During lunch breaks Nirgal asked his escort group—a dozen or more
Swiss who stayed with him every waking hour—to walk with him over to the cathedral,
which someone told Nirgal was called in Swiss the monster. It had a tower at
one end, containing a tight spiral staircase one could ascend, and almost every
day Nirgal took several deep breaths and then pushed on up this staircase,
gasping and sweating as he neared the top. On clear days, which were not
frequent, he could see out the open arches of the top room to the distant
abrupt wall of the Alps, a wall he had learned to call the Berner Oberland.
This jagged white wall ran from horizon to horizon, like one of the great
Martian escarpments, only covered everywhere with snow, everywhere except for
on triangular north faces of exposed rock, rock of a light gray color, unlike
anything on Mars: granite.

Granite mountains, raised by tectonic-plate collision. And the
violence of these origins showed.

Between this majestic white range and Bern lay a number of lower
ranges of green hills, the grassy alps similar to the greens in Trinidad, the
conifer forests a darker green. So much green—again Nirgal was astounded by how
much of Earth was covered with plant life, the lithosphere smothered in a thick
ancient blanket of biosphere. “Yes,” Michel said, along one day to view the
prospect with him. “The biosphere at this point has even formed a great deal of
the upper layer of rock. Everywhere life teems, it teems.”

Michel was dying to get to Provence. They were near it, an hour’s
flight or a night’s train; and everything that was going on in Berne seemed to
Michel only the endless wrangling of politics. “Flood or revolution or the sun
going nova, it will still go on! You and Sax can deal with it, you can do what
needs doing better than I.”

“And Maya even more so.”

“Well, yes. But I want her to come with me. She has to see it, or
she won’t understand.”

Maya, however, was absorbed in the negotiations with the UN, which
were getting serious now that the Martians back home had approved the new
constitution. The UN was turning out to still be very much a metanat
mouthpiece, just as the World Court continued to support the new “co-op
democracies”; and so the arguments in the various meeting rooms, and via video
transmission, were vigorous, volatile, sometimes hostile. Important, in a word,
and Maya went out to do battle every day; so she had no patience at all for the
idea of Provence. She had visited the south of France in her youth, she said,
and was not greatly interested in seeing it again, even with Michel. “She says
the beaches are all gone!” Michel complained. “As if the beaches were what
mattered to Provence!”

In any case, she wouldn’t go. Finally, after a few weeks had
passed, Michel shrugged and gave up, unhappily, and decided to visit Provence
on his own.

On the day he left, Nirgal walked him down to the train station at
the end of the main street, and stood waving at the slowly accelerating train
as it left the station. At the last moment Michel stuck his head out a window,
waving back at Nirgal with a huge grin. Nirgal was shocked to see this
unprecedented expression, so quickly replacing the discouragement at Maya’s
absence; then he felt happy for his friend; then he felt a flash of envy. There
was no place that would make him feel so good to be going to, not anywhere in
the two worlds.

After the train disappeared, Nirgal walked back down Kramgasse in
the usual cloud of escorts and media eyes, and hauled his two and a half bodies
up the 254 spiral stairs of the Monster, to stare south at the wall of the
Berner Ober-land. He was spending a lot of time up there; sometimes he missed
early-afternoon meetings, let Sax and Maya take care of it. The Swiss were
running things in their usual businesslike fashion. The meetings had agendas,
and started on time, and if they didn’t get through the agenda, it wasn’t
because of the Swiss in the room. They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like
Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of
appropriate action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort,
of predictable decency. It was an attitude that Coyote laughed at, or disdained
as life-threatening; but seeing the results in the elegant stone city below
him, overflowing with flowers and people as prosperous as flowers, Nirgal
thought there must be something to be said for it. He had been homeless for so
long. Michel had his Provence to go to, but for Nirgal no place endured. His
hometown was crushed under a polar cap, his mother had disappeared without a
trace, and every place since then had been just a place, and everything
everywhere always changing. Mutability was his home. And looking over Switzerland,
it was a hard thing to realize. He wanted a home place that had something like
these tile roofs, these stone walls, here and solid these last thousand years.

He tried to focus on the meetings in the World Court, and in the
Swiss Bundeshaus. Praxis was still leading the way in the response to the
flood, it was good at working without plans, and it had already been a
cooperative concentrating on the production of basic goods and services,
including the longevity treatment. So it only had to accelerate that process to
take the lead in showing what could be done in the emergency. The four
travelers had seen the results in Trinidad; local movements did most of it, but
Praxis was helping projects like that all over the world. William Fort was said
to have been critical in leading the fluid response of the “collective
transnat,” as he called Praxis.

And his mutant metanational was only one of hundreds of service
agencies that had come to the fore. All over the world they were taking on the
problem of relocating the coastal populations, and building or relocating a new
coastal infrastructure on higher ground.

This loose network of reconstruction efforts, however, was running
into some resistance from the metanats, who complained that a good deal of
their infrastructure, capital and labor were being nationalized, localized,
appropriated, salvaged, or stolen outright. Fighting was not infrequent,
especially where fights had already been ongoing; the flood, after all, had
arrived right in the middle of one of the world’s paroxysms of breakdown and
reordering, and although it had altered everything, that struggle was often
still happening, sometimes under the cover of the relief efforts.

Sax Russell was particularly aware of this context, convinced as
he was that the global wars of 2061 had never resolved the basic inequities of
the Terran economic system. In his own peculiar fashion he was insistent on
this point in the meetings, and over time it seemed to Nirgal that he was
managing to convince the skeptical listeners of the UN and the metanats that
they all needed to pursue something like the Praxis method if they wanted
themselves and civilization to survive. It did not matter much which of the two
they really cared about, he said to Nirgal in private, themselves or
civilization; it didn’t matter if they only instituted some Machiavellian
simulacrum of the Praxis program; the effect would be much the same in the
short term, and everyone needed that grace period of peaceful cooperation.

So in every meeting he was painfully focused, and fairly coherent
and engaged, especially compared to his deep abstraction during the voyage to
Earth. And Sax Russell was after all The Terraformer Of Mars, the current
living avatar of The Great Scientist, a very powerful position in Terran
culture, Nirgal thought—something like the Dalai Lama of science, a continuing
reincarnation of the embodiment of the spirit of science, created for a culture
that only seemed to be able to handle one scientist at a time. Also, to the
metanats Sax was the principal creator of the biggest new market in history—not
an inconsiderable part of his aura. And, as Maya had pointed out, he was one of
that group that had returned from the dead, one of the leaders of the First
Hundred.

As all these things, his odd halting style actually helped to
build the Terrans’ image of him. Simple verbal difficulty turned him into a
kind of oracle; the Terrans seemed to believe that he thought on such a lofty
plane that he could only speak in riddles. This was what they wanted, perhaps.
This was what science meant to them—after all, current physical theory spoke of
ultimate reality as ultramicro-scopic loops of string, moving
supersymmetrically in ten dimensions. That kind of thing had inured people to
strangeness from physicists. And the increasing use of translation AIs was
getting everyone used to odd locutions of all types; almost everyone Nirgal met
spoke English, but they were all slightly different Englishes, so that Earth
seemed to Nirgal an explosion of idiolects, no two persons employing the same
tongue.

In that context, Sax was listened to with the utmost seriousness.
“The flood marks a break point in history,” he said one morning, to a large
general meeting in the Bun-deshaus’s National Council Chamber. “It was a
natural revolution. Weather on Earth is changed, also the land, the sea’s
currents. The distribution of human and animal populations. There is no reason,
in this situation, to try to reinstate the antediluvian world. It’s not
possible. And there are many reasons to institute an improved social order. The
old one was—flawed. Resulting in bloodshed, hunger, servitude, and war.
Suffering. Unnecessary death. There will always be death. But it should come
for every person as late as possible. At the end of a good life. This is the
goal of any rational social order. So we see the flood as an opportunity—here
as it was on Mars—to—break the mold.”

The UN officials and the metanat advisers frowned at this, but
they listened. And the whole world was watching; so that what a cadre of
leaders in a European city thought was not as important, Nirgal judged, as the
people in their villages, watching the man from Mars on the vid. And as Praxis
and the Swiss and their allies worldwide had thrown all their resources into refugee
aid and the longevity treatments, people everywhere were joining up. If you
could make a living while saving the world—if it represented your best chance
for stability and long life and your children’s chances—then why not? Why not?
What did most people have to lose? The late metanational period had benefited
some, but billions had been left out, in an ever-worsening situation.

So the metanats were losing their workers en masse. They couldn’t
imprison them; it was getting hard to scare them; the only way they could keep
them was to institute the same sorts of programs that Praxis had started. And
this they were doing, or so they said. Maya was sure they were instituting
superficial changes meant to resemble Praxis’s only in order to keep their
workers and their profits too. But it was possible that Sax was right, and that
they would be unable to keep control of the situation, and would usher in a new
order despite themselves.

Which is what Nirgal decided to say, during one of his chances to
speak, in a press conference in a big side room of the Bundeshaus. Standing at
the podium, looking out at a room full of reporters and delegates—so unlike the
improvised table in the Pavonis warehouse, so unlike the compound hacked out of
the jungle in Trinidad, so unlike the stage in the sea of people during that
wild night in Burroughs—Nirgal saw suddenly that his role was to be the young
Martian, the voice of the new world. He could leave being reasonable to Maya
and Sax, and provide the alien point of view.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, looking at as many of them
as he could. “Every moment in history contains a mix of archaic elements,
things from all over the past, right back into prehistory itself. The present
is always a melange of these variously archaic elements. There are still
knights coming through on horseback and taking the crops of peasants. There are
still guilds, and tribes. Now we see so many people leaving their jobs to work
in the flood-relief efforts. That’s a new thing, but it’s also a pilgrimage.
They want to be pilgrims, they want to have a spiritual purpose, they want to
do real work—meaningful work. They won’t tolerate being stolen from anymore.
Those of you here who represent the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will
have to work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as
anyone else. And it’s true—that will happen. But it’s going to be all right,
even for you. Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal
that your kids are safest. This universal distribution of the longevity
treatment that we are now seeing is the ultimate meaning of the democratic
movement. It’s the physical manifestation of democracy, here at last. Health
for all. And when that happens the explosion of positive human energy is going
to transform the Earth in just a matter of years.”