Blue Mars (3 page)

Kasei, in excellent spirits, as he had been ever since the
revolution began, said “We’re going to bring down the cable in about a week.”

“Oh you are!” Ann said. “Why wait so long?”

Dao missed her sarcasm. “It’s a matter of warning people, so they
have time to get off the equator.” Though normally a sour man, today he was as
cheery as Kasei.

“And off the cable too?”

“If they feel like it. But even if they evacuate it and give it to
us, it’s still coming down.”

“How? Are those really rocket launchers out there?”

“Yes. But those are there in case they come down and try to retake
Sheffield. As for bringing down the cable, breaking it here at the base isn’t
the way to do it.”

“The control rockets might be able to adjust to disruptions at the
bottom,” Kasei explained. “Hard to say what would happen, really. But a break
just above the areosyn-chronous point would decrease damage to the equator, and
keep New Clarke from flying off as fast as the first one did. We want to
minimize the drama of this, you know, avoid any martyrs we can. Just the
demolition of a building, you know. Like a building past its usefulness.”

“Yes,” Ann said, relieved at this sign of good sense. But it was
curious how hearing her idea expressed as someone else’s plan disturbed her.
She located the main source of her concern: “What about the others—the greens?
What if they object?”

“They won’t,” Dao said.

“They are!” Ann said sharply.

Dao shook his head. “I’ve been talking to Jackie. It may be that
some of the greens are truly opposed to it, but her group is just saying that
for public consumption, so that they look moderate to the Terrans, and can
blame the dangerous stuff on radicals out of their control.”

“On us,” Ann said.

They both nodded. “Just like with Burroughs,” Kasei said with a
smile.

Ann considered it. No doubt it was true. “But some of them are
genuinely opposed. I’ve been arguing with them about it, and it’s no publicity
stunt.”

“Uh-huh,” Kasei said slowly.

Both he and Dao watched her.

“So you’ll do it anyway,” she said at last.

They continued to watch her. She saw all of a sudden that they
would no more do what she told them to do than would boys ordered about by a
senile grandmother. They were humoring her. Figuring out how they could best
put her to use.

“We have to,” Kasei said. “It’s in the best interest of Mars. Not
just for Reds, but all of us. We need some distance between us and Terra, and
the gravity well reestablishes that distance. Without it we’ll be sucked down
into the maelstrom.”

It was Ann’s argument, it was just what she had been saying in the
meetings in east Pavonis. “But what if they try to stop you?”

“I don’t think they can,” Kasei said.

“But if they try?”

The two men glanced at each other. Dao shrugged.

So, Ann thought, watching them. They were willing to start a civil
war.

People were still coming up the slopes of Pavonis to the summit,
filling up Sheffield, east Pavonis, Lastflow and the other rim tents. Among
them were Michel, Spencer, Vlad, Marina, and Ursula; Mikhail and a whole
brigade of Bog-danovists; Coyote, on his own; a group from Praxis; a large
train of Swiss; rover caravans of Arabs, both Sufi and secular; natives from
other towns and settlements on Mars. All coming up for the endgame. Everywhere
else on Mars, the natives had consolidated their control; all the physical
plants were being operated by local teams, in cooperation with Separation de
I’Atmosphere. There were some small pockets of metanat resistance, of course,
and there were some Kakaze out there systematically destroying terraform-ing
projects; but Pavonis was clearly the crux of the remaining problem—either the
endgame of the revolution or, as Ann was beginning to fear, the opening moves
of a civil war. Or both. It would not be the first time.

So she went to the meetings, and slept poorly at night, waking
from troubled sleep, or from naps in the transit between one meeting and the
next. The meetings were beginning to blur: all contentious, all pointless. She
was getting tired, and the broken sleep did not help. She was nearly 150 years
old, after all, and had not had a gerontological treatment in 25 years, and she
felt weary all through, all the time. So she watched from a well of growing
indifference as the others chewed over the situation. Earth was still in
disarray; the great flood caused by the collapse of the west Antarctic ice
sheet was indeed proving to be the ideal trigger mechanism for which General
Sax had waited. Sax felt no remorse for taking advantage of Earth’s trouble,
Ann could see; he never thought once about the many deaths the flood had caused
down there. She could read his face thought by thought as he talked about
it—what would be the point of remorse? The flood was an accident, a geological
catastrophe like an ice age or a meteor impact. No one should waste time
feeling remorse for it, not even if they were taking advantage of it for their
own purposes. Best to take what good one possibly could from the chaos and
disorder, and not worry. All this was right on Sax’s face as he discussed what
they should do next vis-a-vis Earth. Send a delegation, he suggested.
Diplomatic mission, personal appearance, something about throwing things
together; incoherent on the surface, but she could read him like a brother,
this old enemy! Well, Sax—the old Sax anyway—was nothing if not rational.
Therefore easy to read. Easier than the young fanatics of the Kakaze, now that
she thought of it.

And one could only meet him on his own ground, speak to him on his
own terms. So she sat across from him in the meetings and tried to concentrate,
even though her mind seemed to be hardening somehow, petrifying right inside
her head. Round and round the arguments went: what to do on Pavonis? Pavonis
Mons, Peacock Mountain. Who would ascend the Peacock Throne? There were
potential shahs everywhere—Peter, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Kasei, Maya, Nadia,
Mikhail, Ariadne, the invisible Hiroko.. ..

Now someone was invoking the Dorsa Brevia conference as the
framework for discussion they should use. All very well, but without Hiroko
among them the moral center was gone, the one person in all Martian history,
aside from John Boone, to whom everyone would defer. But Hiroko and John were
gone, along with Arkady, and Frank, who would have come in useful now, if he
had been on her side, which he wouldn’t have been. All gone. And they were left
with anarchy. Curious how at a crowded table those absent could be more visible
than those present. Hiroko, for instance; people referred to her frequently;
and no doubt she was somewhere in the outback, deserting them as usual in their
hour of need. Pissing them out of the nest.

Curious too how the only child of their lost heroes, Kasei the son
of John and Hiroko, should be the most radical leader there, a disquieting man
even though he was on her side. There he sat, shaking his gray head at Art, a
small smile twisting his mouth. He was nothing like either John or Hiroko—well,
he had some of Hiroko’s arrogance, some of John’s simplicity. The worst of
both. And yet he was a power, he did what he wanted, and a lot of people
followed him. But he was not like his parents had been.

And Peter, sitting just two seats away from Kasei, was nothing
like her or Simon. It was hard to see what blood relationships meant; nothing,
obviously. Though it did twist her heart to hear Peter speak, as he argued with
Kasei and opposed the Reds at every point, making a case for some kind of
interplanetary collaborationism. And never in these sessions addressing her, or
even looking at her. It was perhaps intended as some kind of courtesy—I will
not argue with you in public. But it looked like a slight—I will not argue with
you because you don’t matter.

He continued to argue for keeping the cable, and agreed with Art
about the Dorsa Brevia document, naturally, given the green majority that had
existed then and persisted now. Using Dorsa Brevia as a guide would assure the
cable’s survival. Meaning the continued presence of the United Nations
Transitional Authority. And indeed some of them around Peter were talking about
“semiautonomy” in relation to Terra, instead of independence, and Peter went
along with that; it made her sick. And all without meeting her eye. It was
Simon-like, somehow, a kind of silence. It made her angry.

“We have no reason to talk about long-term plans until we have
solved the cable problem,” she said, interrupting him and earning a very black
look indeed, as if she had broken an understanding; but there was no
understanding, and why should they not argue, when they had no real
relationship—nothing but biology . . . ?

Art claimed that the UN was now saying that it would be willing to
agree to Martian semiautonomy, as long as Mars remained in “close consultation”
with Earth, and an active aid in Earth’s crisis. Nadia said she was in
communication with Derek Hastings, who was now up in New Clarke. Hastings had
abandoned Burroughs without a bloody battle, it was true; and now she claimed
he was willing to compromise. No doubt; his next retreat would not be so easy,
nor would it take him to a very pleasant place, for despite all the emergency
action, Earth was now a world of famine, plague, looting—breakdown of the
social contract, which was so fragile after all. It could happen here too; she
had to remember that fragility when she got angry enough, as now, to want to
tell Kasei and Dao to abandon the discussions and fire away. If she did that it
very likely would happen; a strange sensation of her own power came over her
then, as she looked around the table at the anxious angry unhappy faces. She
could tip the balance; she could knock this table right over.

Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way
or the other. More were in favor of cutting the cable than Ann would have
guessed, not just Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt
most threatened by the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth:
Bedouins, the Polynesians, the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier
natives. Still, they were in the minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority.
Isolationist versus interactive; yet another fracture to add to all the others
rending the Martian independence movement.

Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favor of
keeping the cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with
expulsion from Martian’society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular,
and afterward Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtle.
It made Ann so angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to
argue for bringing the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from
Peter, but it scarcely registered—she talked in a white heat, forgetting all
about the five-minute limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and
on, though she had no idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of
what she had already said. Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a
lawyer’s brief—hopefully so—on the other hand, a part of her thought as her
mouth ran on, perhaps she was just saying the word Mars over and over again, or
babbling, and the audience simply humoring her, or else miraculously
comprehending her in a moment of glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their
heads like caps of jewels—and indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal,
the old men’s bald pates like chunks of jasper, inside which all languages dead
and living were understood equally; and for a moment they appeared all caught
up together with her, all inside an epiphany of red Mars, free of Earth, living
on the primal planet that had been and could be again.

She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate her, as
it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration,
looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They
stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking
she had no idea. She only knew she had gotten his attention at last.

This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing
slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran
situation. Despite the great flood, Earth’s nations and metanationals were
still incredibly powerful, and in some ways the crisis of the flood had drawn
them together, making them even more powerful. So Nadia spoke of the need to
compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply
contradictory, Ann thought; because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they
could not afford to offend, and therefore they must change all Terran social
reality.

“But how!” Ann cried. “When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a
world! No fulcrum, no lever, no force—”

“It isn’t just Earth,” Nadia replied. “There are going to be other
settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the
asteroids. We’ve got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re
the natural leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all
that—a reduction in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.”

“Getting in the way of progress,” Ann said bitterly. “Think what Arkady
would have said to that. No, look. We had a chance here to make something
different. That was the whole point. We still have that chance. Everything that
increases the space within which we can create a new society is a good thing.
Everything that reduces our space is a bad thing. Think about it!”