Blue Mars (64 page)

A young woman came up beside her and leaned on the railing. “My
name is Vendana,” she said to Maya, while looking down at the waves. “I’m the
Green party’s local political agent for the year.” She had a beautiful profile,
clean and sharp in a classic Indian look: olive-skinned, black-eyebrowed, long
nose, small mouth. Intelligent subtle brown eyes. It was odd how much one could
tell by faces alone; Maya was beginning to feel she knew everything essential
about a person at first glance. Which was a useful ability, given that so much
of what the young natives said these days baffled her. She needed that first
insight.

Greenness, however, she understood, or thought she did; actually
an archaic political term, she would have thought, given that Mars was fully
green now, and blue as well. “What do you want?”

Vendana said, “Jackie Boone, and the Free Mars slate of candidates
for offices from this area, are traveling around campaigning for the upcoming
elections. If Jackie stays party chair again, and gets back on the executive
council, then she’ll continue working on the Free Mars plan to ban all new
immigration from Earth. It’s her idea, and she’s been pushing it hard. Her
contention is that Terran immigration can all be redirected elsewhere in the
solar system. That isn’t true, but it’s a stance that goes over very well in
certain quarters. The Terrans, of course, don’t like it. If Free Mars wins big
on an isolationist program, we think Earth will react very badly. They’ve
already got problems they can barely handle, they need to have what little out
we provide. And they’ll call it a breaking of the treaty you negotiated. They
might even go to war over it.”

Maya nodded; for years she had felt a heightening tension between
Earth and Mars, no matter Michel’s assurances. She had known this was coming,
she had seen it.

“Jackie has a lot of groups lined up behind her, and Free Mars has
had a supermajority in the global government for years now. They’ve been
packing the environmental courts all the while. The courts will back her in any
immigration ban she cares to propose. We want to maintain the policies as set
by the treaty you negotiated, or even widen immigration quotas a bit, to give
Earth as much help as we can. But Jackie’s going to be hard to stop. To tell
you the truth, I don’t think we know quite how. So I thought I’d ask you.”

Maya was surprised: “How to stop her?”

“Yes. Or more generally, to ask you to help us. I think it will
take unpisting her personally. I thought you might be interested.”

And she turned her head to look at Maya with a knowing smile.

There was something vaguely familiar in the ironic smile lifting
that classic little full-lipped mouth, something which though offensive was
much preferable to the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young historians pestering
Michel. And as Maya considered it, the invitation began to look better and
better; it was contemporary politics, an engagement with the present. The
triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that
the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it
take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. And this
issue could prove to be important, as the young woman had said. And it would
put her back in the midst of things. And of course (she did not think this
consciously) anything that balked Jackie would have its own satisfactions.
“Tell me more about it,” Maya said, moving down the balcony out of earshot of
the others. And the tall ironic young woman followed her.

Michel had always wanted
to take a trip on the Grand Canal, and recently he had talked Maya
into trying a move from Sabishii back to Odessa, as a way to combat Maya’s
various mental afflictions; they might even take an apartment in the same
Praxis complex that they had lived in before the second revolution. That was
the only place Maya thought of as home, aside from Underbill, which she refused
even to visit. And Michel felt that coming back to some kind of home might help
her. So, Odessa. Maya was agreeable; it did not matter to her. And Michel’s
desire to travel there by way of the Grand Canal seemed fine as well. Maya had
not cared. She wasn’t sure of anything these days, she had few opinions, few
preferences; that was the trouble.

Now Vendana was saying that Jackie’s campaign was to proceed along
the Grand Canal, north to south, in a big canal cruiser that doubled as
campaign headquarters. They were there now, at the canal’s north end, getting
ready in the Narrows.

So Maya returned to Michel on the terrace, and when the historians
left them she said, “So let’s go to Odessa by the Grand Canal, like you said.”

Michel was delighted. Indeed it seemed to lift from him a certain
somberness that had followed the dive into drowned Burroughs; he had been
pleased at its effect on Maya, but for himself it had perhaps not been so good.
He had been uncharacteristically reticent about his experience, somehow
oppressed, as if overwhelmed by all that the great sunken capital represented
in his own life. Hard to tell. So that now, to see Maya responding so well to
the experience, and also to suddenly be given the prospect of seeing the Grand
Canal—a kind of giant joke, in Maya’s opinion—it made him laugh. And that she
liked to see. Michel thought that Maya needed a lot of help these days, but she
knew full well that it was Michel who was struggling.

So a few days later they walked up a gangway onto the deck of a
long narrow sailing ship, whose single mast and sail were one curved unit.of
dull white material, shaped like a bird’s wing. This ship was a kind of
passenger ferry, sailing eastward around the North Sea in perpetual
circumnavigations. When everyone was aboard, they motored out of DuMartheray’s
little harbor, and turned east, keeping within sight of land. The ship’s mast
sail proved to be flexible and mobile in many different directions; it shifted
in its curves like a bird’s wing, every moment different as its AI responded
minutely to catch the fitful winds.

On the second afternoon of their voyage into the Narrows, the
Elysium massif came over the horizon ahead of them, bulking alpenglow pink
against the hyacinth sky. The coast of the mainland rose to the south as well,
as if to stretch up and see the great massif across the bay: bluffs alternated
with marshes, and then a long tawny reach was succeeded by an ever-higher sea
cliff. The horizontal red strata of this cliff were all broken by bands of
black and ivory, and the ledges were lined with mats of samphire and grasses,
and streaked with white guano. The waves slammed into the sheer rock at the
bottom of these cliffs and rebounded, the arcs of the backwash intersecting the
oncoming swells in quick points of upshot water. In short, beautiful sailing:
long glides down the swells, the wind an offshore powerhouse, especially in the
afternoons—the spray, the salt tang in the air—for the North Sea was becoming
salty—the wind in her hair, the white V tapestry of the ship’s wake, luminous
over the indigo sea: beautiful days. It made Maya want to stay on board, to
sail around the world and then around again, to never land and never change ..
. there were people doing that now, she had heard, giant greenhouse ships
utterly self-sufficient, sailing the great ocean in their own thalassacracy. .
. .

But there ahead of them were the Narrows, narrowing. The trip from
DuMartheray was already almost over. Why were the good days always so short?
Moment to moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone
forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live
them. Sailing through life looking back at the wake, high seas, flying wind. .
. . Now the sun was low, the light slanting across the sea cliffs, accenting
all their wild irregularities, their overhangs, caves, sheer clean faces
dropping directly into the sea, red rock into blue wa-.ter, all untouched by
human hands (though the sea itself was their work). Sudden shards of splendor,
splintering inside her. But the sun was disappearing, and the break in the sea
cliffs ahead marked the first big harbor of the Narrows, Rhodos, where they
would dock and the evening would come. They would eat in a harbor cafe next to
the water in the long twilight, and that day’s glorious sail would never come
again. This strange nostalgia, for the moment just gone, for the evening yet to
come: “Ah, I’m alive again,” she said to herself, and marveled that it could
have happened. Michel and his tricks—one would think that by now she would have
become impervious to all that psychiatric-alchemical mumbo jumbo. It was too
much for the heart to bear. But—well—better this than the numbness, that was
certain. And it had a certain painful splendor, this acute sensation—and she
could endure it—she could even enjoy it, somehow, in snatches—a sublime
intensity to these late-afternoon colors, everything suffused with them. And
under such a flood of nostalgic light, the harbor of Rhodos looked gorgeous—the
big lighthouse on the western cape, the pair of clanging buoys red and green,
port and starboard. Then in to the calm dark water of an anchorage, and down
into rowboats, in the failing light, across black water through a crowd of
exotic ships at anchor, no two the same as ship design was going through a
period of rapid innovation, new materials making almost anything possible, and
all the old designs being reinvented, drastically altered, then returned to
again; there a clipper ship, there a schooner, there something that looked to
be entirely outrig- ger ... finally to bang into a busy wooden dock, in the
dusk.

Harbor towns at dusk were all alike. A corniche, a curving narrow
park, lines of trees, an arc of ramshackle hotels and restaurants backing the
wharves ... they checked into one of these hotels, and then strolled the dock,
ate under an awning just as Maya had supposed they would. She relaxed in the
grounded stability of her chair, watching liquid light oxbow over the viscous
black water of the harbor, listening to Michel talk to the people sitting at
the next table, tasting the olive oil and bread, the cheeses and ouzo. It was
strange how much beauty hurt, sometimes, and even happiness. And yet she wished
the lazy postprandial sprawl in their hard chairs could go on forever.

Of course it didn’t. They went up to bed, hand in hand, and she
held on to Michel as hard as ever she could. And the next day they hauled their
bags across town to the inner harbor, just north of the first canal lock, and
up into a big canal boat, long and luxurious, like a barge become cruise ship.
They were two of about a hundred passengers coming on board; and among the
others was Vendana and some of her friends. And further on, on a private canal
boat a few locks ahead, were Jackie and her consort of followers, about to
travel south as well. On some nights they would be docked in the same canalside
towns. “Interesting,” Maya drawled, and at the word Michel looked both pleased
and worried.

The Grand Canal’s bed had been cut by an aerial lens,
concentrating sunlight beamed down from the soletta. The lens had flown very
high in the atmosphere, surfing on the thermal cloud of gases thrown up by the
melted and vaporized rock; it had flown in straight lines, and burned its way
across the land without the slightest regard for details of topography. Maya
vaguely remembered seeing vids of the process at the time, but the photos had
necessarily been taken from a distance, and they had not prepared her at all
for the sheer size of the canal. Their long low canal boat motored into the
first lock; was lifted up a short distance on infilling water; motored out of
an opening gate—and there they were, in a wind-rippled lake two kilometers
wide, extending in a straight line directly southwest toward the Hellas Sea,
two thousand kilometers away. A great number of boats large and small were
proceeding in both directions, keeping to the right with the slower ones closer
to the banks, in the standard rules of the road. Almost all the craft were
motorized, although many also sported lines of masts in schooner rig, and some
of the smallest boats had big triangular sails and no engines—”dhows,” Michel
said, pointing. An Arab design, apparently.

Somewhere up ahead was Jackie’s campaign ship. Maya ignored that
and concentrated on the canal, gazing from bank to bank. The absent rock had
not been excavated but vaporized, and looking at the banks one could tell;
temperatures under the concentrated light of the aerial lens had reached five
thousand K, and the rock had simply dissociated into its constituent atoms and
shot into the air. After cooling, some material had fallen back on the banks,
and some back into the trench, pooling there as lava; so the canal had been
left with a flat floor, and banks some hundred meters high, and each over a
kilometer wide: rounded black slag levees, on which very little could grow, so
that they were nearly as bare and black now as when they had cooled forty
m-years before, with only the occasional sand-filled crack bursting with
greenery. The canal water appeared black under the banks, shading to sky color
out in the middle of the canal, or rather to a shade just darker than sky
color, the effect of the dark bottom no doubt; with streaks of green zigzagging
across all.

The obsidian rise of the two banks, the straight gash of dark
water between; boats of all sizes, but many of them long and narrow to maximize
space in the locks; then every few hours a canalside town, hacked into the
bankside and then spreading on top of the levee. Most of the towns had been
named after one of the many canals on the classic Lowell and Antoniadi maps,
and these names had been taken by the canal-besotted astronomers from the
canals and rivers of classical antiquity. The first towns they passed were
quite near the equator, and they were bracketed by groves of palm trees, then
wooden docks, backed by busy little waterside districts; pleasant terrace
neighborhoods above; then the bulk of the towns up on the flats of the levees.
Of course the lens, in cutting a straight line, had carved a canal bed that
rose directly up the Great Escarpment onto the high plain of Hesperia, a
four-kilometer rise in elevation; so every few kilometers the canal was blocked
by a lock dam. These, like dams everywhere these days, were transparent walls,
and looked as thin as cellophane, yet were still many magnitudes stronger than
necessary to hold the water they held, or so people said. Maya found their
windowpane clarity offensive, a bit of whimsical hubris that would surely be
struck down one day, when one of the thin walls would pop like a balloon and
wreak havoc, and people would go back to good old concrete and carbon filament.

For now, however, the approach to a lock involved sailing toward a
wall of water like the Red Sea parted for the passage of the Israelites, fish
darting hither and thither overhead like primitive birds, a surreal sight, like
something out of an Escher print. Then into a lock like a water-walled grave,
surrounded by these bird-fish; and then up, and up, and out onto a new level of
the great straight-sided river, cutting through the black land. “Bizarre,” Maya
said after the first lock, and the second and the third; and Michel could only
grin and nod.

The fourth night of the trip they docked at a small canalside town
called Naarsares. Across the canal was an even smaller town called Naarmalcha.
Mesopotamian names, apparently. A terrace restaurant on top of the levee gave a
view far up and down the canal, and behind the canal to the arid highlands
flanking it. Ahead they could see where the canal cut through the wall of Gale
Crater, floored with water: Gale was now a bulb in the canal, a holding area
for ships and goods.

After dinner Maya stood on the terrace looking through the gap
into Gale. Out of the inky talc of twilight Vendana and some companions
approached her: “How do you like the canal?” they asked.

“Very interesting,” Maya said curtly. She didn’t like being asked
questions, or being at the center of a group; it was too much like being an
exhibit in a museum. They weren’t going to get anything out of her. She stared
at them. One of the young men among them gave up, began to talk to the woman
next to him. He had an extraordinarily beautiful face, features neatly chiseled
under a shock of black hair; a sweet smile, an unselfconscious laugh;
altogether captivating. Young, but not so young as to seem unformed. He looked
Indian perhaps—such dark skin, such white regular teeth—strong, lean as a
whippet, a good bit taller than Maya, but not one of these new giants—human
scale still, unprepossessing but solid, graceful. Sexy.

She moved toward him slowly, as the group shifted into a more
relaxed cocktail-party format, people wandering around to talk and look down at
the canal and the docks. Finally she got a chance to speak with him, and he did
not react as if approached by Helen of Troy or Lucy the habiline fossil. It
would be lovely to kiss such a mouth. Out of the question, of course, and she
didn’t even really want to. But she liked to think about it; and the thought
gave her ideas. Faces were so powerful.

His name was Athos. He was from Licus Vallis, to the west of
Rhodes. Sansei, from a seafaring family, grandparents Greek and Indian. He had
helped to found this new Green party, convinced that helping Earth through its
surge was the only way to stay out of the maelstrom: the controversial
tail-wagging-the-dog approach, as he admitted with an easy beautiful smile. Now
he was running for representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and helping to
coordinate the Green campaigns more generally.