Blue Mars (39 page)

Then they came upon an old photo of Arkady himself, framed and
hung on a wall next to a door. Nadia stopped and clutched Art’s arm: “That’s
him! That’s him to the life!”

The photo had caught him talking with someone, standing just
inside a tent wall and gesturing, his hair and beard lofting away from his head
and blending into a landscape exactly the color of his wild curls. A face
coming out of a hillside, it seemed, blue eyes squinting in the glare of all
that red glee. “I’ve never seen a photo that looked so much like him. If he saw
a camera pointed at him he didn’t like it, and the picture came out wrong.”

She stared at the photo, feeling flushed, and strangely happy;
such a lifelike encounter! Like running into someone again after years of not
seeing them. “You’re like him, in some ways, I think. But more relaxed.”

“It looks like it would be hard to get much more relaxed than
that,” Art said, peering closely at the photo.

Nadia smiled. “It was easy for him. He was always sure he was
right.”

“None of the rest of us have that problem.”

She laughed. “You’re cheerful like he was.”

“And why not.”

They walked on. Nadia kept thinking of her old companion, seeing
the photo in her mind’s eye. There was still so much she remembered. The
feelings connected to the memories were fading, however, the pain blunted—the
fixative leached out, all that flesh and trauma now only a pattern of a certain
kind, like a fossil. And very unlike the present moment, which, looking around,
feeling her hand in Art’s, was real, vivid, brief, perpetually changing—alive.
Anything could happen, everything was felt. “Shall we go back to our room?”

The four travelers to Earth returned at last, coming down the
cable to Sheffield. Nirgal and Maya and Michel went their ways, but Sax flew
down and joined Nadia and Art in the south, a move which pleased Nadia no end.
She had come to have the feeling that wherever Sax went was the heart of the
action.

He looked just as he had before the trip to Earth, and was if
anything even more silent and enigmatic. He wanted to see the labs, he said.
They took him through them.

“Interesting, yes,” he said. Then after a while: “But I’m
wondering what else we might do.”

“To terraform?” Art asked.

“Well...”

To please Ann, Nadia thought. That was what he meant. She gave him
a hug, which surprised him, and she kept her hand on his bony shoulder as they
talked. So good to have him there in the flesh! When had she gotten so fond of
Sax Russell, when had she come to rely on him so much?

Art too had figured out what he meant. He said, “You’ve done quite
a bit already, haven’t you? I mean, at this point you’ve dismantled all the
metanats’ monster methods, right? The hydrogen bombs under the permafrost, the
so-letta and aerial lens, the nitrogen shuttles from Titan—”

“Those are still coming,” Sax said. “I don’t even know how we could
stop them. Shoot them down I guess. But we can always use nitrogen. I’m not
sure I’d be happy if they were stopped.”

“But Ann?” Nadia said. “What would Ann like?”

Sax squinted again. When uncertainty squinched his face, it
reverted to precisely its old ratlike expression.

“What would you both like?” Art rephrased it.

“Hard to say.” And his face twisted into a grimace of uncertainty,
indecision, split motives.

“You want wilderness,” Art suggested.

“Wilderness is a, an idea. Or an ethical position. It can’t be
everywhere, it’s not that kind of idea. But...” Sax waggled a hand, fell back
into his own thoughts. For the first time in the century she had known him,
Nadia had the sense that Sax did not know what to do. He solved the problem by
sitting down before a screen and typing instructions into it. He appeared to
forget their presence.

Nadia squeezed Art’s arm. He enfolded her hand, and squeezed the
little finger gently. It was almost three quarters size now, but slowing down
as it got closer to full size. A nail had been started, and on the pad, the
delicate whorled ridges of a fingerprint. It felt good when it was squeezed.
She met Art’s eye briefly, then looked down. He squeezed her whole hand before
letting go. After a while, when it was clear Sax was fully distracted, and
going to be off in his own world for a long time, they tiptoed off to their
room, to the bed.

They worked by day, went out at night. Sax was blinking around as
in his lab-rat days, anxious because there was no news of Ann. Nadia and Art
comforted him as best they could, which wasn’t much. In the evenings they went
out and joined the promenade. There was a park where parents congregated with
their kids, and people walked by as if passing a little open zoo enclosure,
grinning at the sight of the little primates at play. Sax spent hours in this
park talking to kids and parents, and then he would wander off to the dance
floors, where he danced by himself for hours. Art and Nadia held hands. Her
finger got stronger. It was almost full size now, and given that it was the
littlest finger anyway, it looked full grown unless she held it against its
opposite number. Art nibbled it gently sometimes when they were making love,
and the sensation drove her wild. “You’d better not tell people about this effect,”
he muttered, “else it could get grisly—people hacking off body parts to grow
them back, you know, more sensitive.”

“Sicko.”

“You know how people are. Anything for a thrill.”

“Don’t even talk about it.”

“Okay.”

But then it was time to get back to a council meeting. Sax left,
to find Ann or hide from her, they couldn’t be sure; they flew back up to
Sheffield, and then Nadia was back into it again, every day parsed into its
thirty-minute units of trivia. Except some of it was important. The Chinese application
for another space elevator near Schiaparelli had come up for action, and it was
only one of many immigration issues that were facing them. The UN-Mars
agreement worked out in Bern stated explicitly that Mars was to take at least
ten percent of its population in immigrants every year, with the hope expressed
that they would take even more—as many as possible—for as long as the
hypermal-thusian conditions obtained. Nirgal had made this a kind of promise,
had spoken very enthusiastically (and Nadia felt unrealistically) about Mars
coming to the rescue, saving Earth from overpopulation with the gift of empty
land. But how many people could Mars really hold, when they couldn’t even
manufacture topsoil? What was the carrying capacity of Mars, anyway?

No one knew, and there was no good way to calculate it
scientifically. Estimates of Terra’s human carrying capacity had ranged from
one hundred million to two hundred tril-. lion, and even the seriously
defensible estimates ranged from two to thirty billion. In truth carrying
capacity was a very fuzzy abstract concept, depending on an entire recom-binant
host of complexities such as soil biochemistry, ecology, human culture. So it
was almost impossible to say how many people Mars could handle. Meanwhile Earth’s
population was over fifteen billion, while Mars, with almost as much land
surface, had a population a thousand times as small, at right around fifteen
million. The disparity was clear. Something would have to be done.

Mass transfer of people from Earth to Mars was certainly one
possibility; but the speed of the transfer was limited by the size of the
transport system, and the ability of Mars to absorb the immigrants. Now the
Chinese, and indeed the UN generally, were arguing that as a beginning step in
a process of intensified immigration, they could build up the transport system
very substantially. A second space elevator on Mars would be the first step in
this multistage project.

Reaction on Mars to this plan was mostly negative. The Reds of
course opposed further immigration, and while conceding that some would have to
happen, they opposed any specific development of the transfer system just to
try to keep the process slowed down as much as possible. That position fit
their overall philosphy, and made sense to Nadia. The Free Mars position,
however, while more important, was not so clear. Nirgal had come out of Free
Mars, and had gone to Earth and issued a general invitation to Terrans to shift
as many people over as they could. And historically Free Mars had always argued
for strong ties with Earth, to attempt the so-called tail-wagging-dog strategy.
The current party leadership, however, no longer seemed very fond of this
position. And Jackie was in the middle of this new group. They had been
shifting toward a more isolationist stance even during the constitutional
congress, Nadia recalled, arguing always for more independence from Earth. On
the other hand, they had been apparently cutting deals in private with certain
Terran countries. So the Free Mars position was ambiguous, perhaps
hypocritical; and seemed designed mainly to increase its own power on the
Martian scene.

Even setting aside Free Mars, though, there was a lot of
isolationist sentiment out there besides the Reds—anarchists, some Bogdanovists,
the Dorsa Brevian matriarchs, the MarsFirsters—all tended to side with the Reds
on this issue. If millions and millions of Terrans began to pour up onto Mars,
they all argued, what then of Mars—not just of the landscape itself, but of the
Martian culture that had been forming over the m-years? Wouldn’t that be
drowned in the old ways brought up by the new influx, which might quickly
outnumber the native population? Birth rates were dropping everywhere, after
all, and childlessness and one-child families were as common on Mars as on
Earth—so there wouldn’t be any great multiplication in the native population to
look forward to. They would soon be overwhelmed.

So Jackie argued, at least in public, and the Dorsa Brevians and
many others agreed with her. Nirgal, just back from Earth, seemed not to be
having much effect on that stance. And while Nadia could see the point of her
opponents’ arguments, she also felt that given the situation on Earth, they
were being unrealistic to think they could close Mars down. Mars could not save
Earth, as Nirgal had sometimes seemed to say during his visit there; but an
agreement with the UN had been made and ratified, and they were committed to
letting up at least as many Terrans as the treaty specified. So the bridge
between the worlds had to be expanded if they were to meet that obligation, and
keep the treaty viable. If they didn’t stick to the treaty, Nadia thought,
anything might happen.

So in the debate over allowing a second cable, Nadia argued for
it. It increased the capacity of the transport system, as they had promised to
do, if only indirectly. And it would also take some of the pressure off the
towns on Tharsis, and that side of Mars generally; population density maps
showed that Pavonis was like the bull’s-eye of a target, with people radiating
outward from it and settling as near to it as was convenient. Having a cable on
the other side of the world would help to equalize things.

But this was a dubious value to the cable’s opponents. They wanted
the population localized, contained, slowed. The treaty didn’t matter to them.
So when it came to a council vote, which was only an advisory to the
legislature in any case, only Zeyk voted with Nadia. It was Jackie’s biggest
victory so far, and put her in a temporary alliance with Irishka and the rest
of the environmental courts, which were on principle resistant to all forms of
swift development.

Nadia went home to her apartment that day, discouraged and
worried. “We’ve promised Earth we’ll take lots of immigrants, then pulled up
the drawbridge. It’s going to lead to trouble.”

Art nodded. “We’ll have to work something out.”

Nadia blew out her breath in disgust. “Work. We won’t work
anything out. Work isn’t the word for it. We will bicker and dicker and argue
and natter.” She sighed a big sigh. “It will go on and on. I thought Nirgal
being back would help, but it won’t if he doesn’t join in.”

“He doesn’t have a position,” Art said.

“He could if he wanted one, though.”

“True.”

Nadia thought about it, her mind wandering as her spirits dropped.
“You know I’ve only gotten through ten months of my term. There’s over two and
a half m-years to go.”

“I know.”

“M-years are so damned long.”

“Yes. But the months are short.”

She made a noise at him. Stared out the window of her apartment, down
into Pavonis caldera. “The trouble is that work isn’t work anymore. You know,
we go out there and join these projects, and the work on them still isn’t work.
I mean I never get to go out and do things. I remember when I was young, in
Siberia, work was really work.”

“You might be romanticizing that a bit.”

“Yeah, sure, but even on Mars. I remember putting together
Underbill. That was really fun. And one day on our trip to the north pole,
installing a permafrost gallery. . . .” She sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for
work like that again.”

“There’s still a lot of construction going on,” Art pointed out.

“By robots.”

“Maybe you could go back to something more human. Build something
yourself. A house in the country, or a development. Or one of the new harbor towns,
hand-built to try out different things, designs, methods, whatever. It would
slow the construction process down, the GEC would go for that.”