Blue Mars (68 page)

“Then I wonder if that’s not the problem with Terran immigration.
Not the numbers themselves, but the fact that so many people arriving from
Earth are coming from older cultures. It’s like they’re arriving out of a time
machine from the Middle Ages, and suddenly here are all these huge Mi-noans,
women and men much the same—”

“And a new collective unconscious.”

“Yes, I suppose. And so the newcomers can’t cope. They cluster in
immigrant ghettos, or new towns entire, and keep their traditions and their
ties to home, and hate everything here, and all the xenophobia and misogyny in
those old cultures breaks out again, against both their own women and the
native girls.” She had heard of problems in the cities, in fact, in Sheffield
and all over east Tharsis. Sometimes young native women beat the shit out of
surprised immigrant assailants; sometimes the opposite occurred. “And the young
natives don’t like it. They feel like they’re letting monsters into their
midst.”

Michel grimaced. “Terran cultures were all neurotic at their core,
and when the neurotic is confronted with the sane, it usually gets more
neurotic than ever. And the sane don’t know what to do.”

“So they press to stop immigration. And put us at risk of another
war.”

But Michel was distracted by the beginning of another race. The
races were fast, but not anywhere near two and a half times as fast as Terra’s,
despite the gravity difference. It was the same problem as the high jumpers’
plants, but continuous through the race: the runners took off with such
acceleration that they had to stay very low to keep from bounding too high away
from the track. In the sprints they stayed canted forward throughout, as if
desperately trying to avoid falling on their faces, their legs pumping furiously.
In the longer dashes they finally straightened up near the end, and began to
scull at the air as if swimming forward from an upright position, their strides
longer and longer until they seemed to be leaping foward like one-leg-at-a-time
kangaroos. The sight reminded Maya of Peter and Jackie, the two speedsters of
Zygote, running the beach under the polar dome; on their own they had developed
a similar style.

Using these techniques, the winner of the fifty-meter dash ran the
race in 4.4 seconds; the winner of the hundred in 8.3; the two hundred in 17.1;
and the four hundred in 37.9; but in each case the balance problems engendered
by their speeds seemed to keep them from a full sprint the way Maya remembered
seeing it in her youth.

In the longer races, the running style was a graceful bounding
pace, similar to what they had called the Martian lope back at Underhill, where
they had tried it without much success in their tight walkers. Now it was like
flight. A young woman led most of the ten-thousand-meter race, and she had
enough in reserve to kick hard at the end, accelerating throughout the entire
last lap, faster and faster until she gazelled around the track only touching
down every few meters, lapping some of the other racers who seemed to toil as she
flew past; it was lovely; Maya shouted herself hoarse. She held to Michel’s
arm, she felt dizzy, tears sprang to her eyes even as she laughed; it was so
strange and so marvelous to see these new creatures, and yet none of them knew,
none of them!

She liked to see women beating men, though they themselves did not
seem to remark it. Women won slightly more often in long distances and hurdles,
men in the sprints. Sax said that testosterone helped with strength but caused
cramping eventually, hampering long-distance efforts. Clearly most of the
events were a matter of technique in any case. And so one saw what one wanted,
she thought. Back on Earth—but these people would have laughed if she had
started a sentence with that phrase. Back on Earth, so what? There had been all
sorts of bizarre and ugly behavior back in the nest world, but why worry about
that when a hurdle was approaching and another runner advancing in your
peripheral vision? Fly, fly! She shouted herself hoarse.

At the end of the day the field athletes, finished with their
events, cleared a passageway into the stadium and around the track; and a
single runner jogged in, to sustained applause and wild cheers. And it was
Nirgal! Starting hoarse already, Maya’s shouting was ragged, almost painful.

The cross-country racers had started at the southern end of Minus
One that morning, barefoot and naked. They had run over a hundred kilometers,
over the heavy corrugations of Minus One’s central moors, a devilish network of
ravines, grabens, pingo holes, alases, escarpments and rockfalls— nothing too
deep, apparently, so that many different routes were possible, making it as
much an orienteering event as a run; but difficult all the way; and to come
jogging in at four P.M. was apparently a phenomenal accomplishment. The next
racer wouldn’t be coming in until after sunset, people said. So Nirgal took a
victory lap, looking dusty and exhausted, like a refugee from a disaster; then
he put on pants, and ducked his head for his laurel wreath, and accepted a
hundred hugs.

Maya was the last of these, and Nirgal laughed happily to see her.
His skin was white with dried sweat, his lips caked and cracking, hair
dust-colored, eyes bloodshot. Ribby and wiry, almost emaciated. He gulped water
from a bottle, drained it, refused another. “Thanks, I’m not that dehydrated, I
hit a reservoir there around Jiri Ki.”

“So which way did you take?” someone called.

“Don’t ask!” he said with a laugh, as if it had been too ugly to
own up to. Later Maya learned that people’s routes were left unobserved and
undescribed, a kind of secret. These cross-country races were popular in a
certain group, and Nirgal was a champion, Maya knew, particularly at the longer
distances; people spoke of his routes as if they involved teleportation. This
was apparently a short race for him to win, so he was especially pleased.

Now he walked over to a bench and sat down. “Let me get myself
together a bit,” he said, and sat watching the last sprints, looking distracted
and happy. Maya sat next to him and stared; she couldn’t get enough of him. He
had been living on the land for the longest time, part of a feral
farmer-and-gatherer co-op ... it was a life Maya could scarcely imagine, and so
she tended to think of Nirgal as in limbo, banished to an outback netherworld,
where he survived like a rat or a plant. But here he was, exhausted but
exclaiming at a four-hundred-meter race’s photo finish, exactly the vital
Nirgal she remembered from that Hell’s Gate tour so long ago—glory years for
him as well as her. But looking at him, it seemed unlikely that he thought of
the past in the same way she did. She felt in thrall to her past, to history;
but something other than history was his fulfillment now— his destiny survived
and put aside like an old book, and now here he was, in the moment, laughing in
the sun, having beat a whole pack of wild young animals at their own game, by
his wits alone and his feel for Mars, and his lung-gom-pa technique and his
hard legs. He had always been a runner, she could see in her mind Jackie and
him dashing over the beach after Peter as if it were yesterday—the other two
had been faster, but he had gone on all day sometimes, round and round the
little lake, for no reason anyone could tell. “Oh Nirgal.” She leaned over and
kissed his dusty hair, felt him hugging her. She laughed, and looked around at
all the beautiful giants around the field, the athletes ruddy in the sunset,
and she felt life slipping into her again. Nirgal could do that.

Late that night, however, she took Nirgal aside, after an outdoor
feast in the cool evening air, and she told him all her fears about the latest
conflict between Earth and Mars. Michel was off talking to people; Sax sat on
the bench across from them, listening silently.

“Jackie and the Free Mars leadership are talking a hard line, but
it won’t work. The Terrans won’t be stopped. It could lead to war, I tell you,
war.”

Nirgal stared at her. He still took her seriously, God bless his
beautiful soul, and Maya put her arm around him like she would have her own
son, and squeezed him hard, hard.

“What do you think we should do?” he asked.

“We have to keep Mars open. We have to fight for that, and you
have to be part of it. We need you more than anyone else. You were the one that
had the greatest impact during our visit to Earth; in essence you’re the most
important Martian in Terran history, because of that visit. They still write
books and articles about what you do, did you know that? There’s a feral
movement getting very strong in North America and Australia, and growing
everywhere. The Turtle Island people have almost entirely reorganized the
American west, it’s scores of feral co-ops now. They’re listening to you. And
it’s the same here. I’ve been doing what I can, we just fought them in the
election campaign for the whole length of the Grand Canal. And I tried to
counter Jackie a bit. That worked a little, I think, but it’s bigger than
Jackie. She’s gone to Irishka, and of course it makes sense for the Reds to
oppose immigration, they think that will help protect their precious rocks. So
Free Mars and the Reds may be in the same camp for the first time, because of
this issue. They’ll be very hard to beat. But if they aren’t... .”

Nirgal nodded. He took her point. She could have kissed him. She
squeezed him across the shoulders, leaned over and kissed his cheek, nuzzled
his neck. “I love you, Nirgal.”

“And I love you,” he said with an easy laugh, looking a bit
surprised. “But look, I don’t want to get involved in a political campaign. No,
listen—I agree that it’s important, and I agree we should keep Mars open, and
help Earth out through the population surge. That’s what I’ve always said,
that’s what I told them when we were there. But I won’t get into the political
institutions. I can’t. I’ll make my contribution the way I did before, do you
understand? I cover a lot of ground, I see a lot of people. I’ll talk to them.
I’ll start giving talks to meetings again. I’ll do what I can at that level.”

Maya nodded. “That would be great, Nirgal. That’s the level we
need to reach anyway.”

Sax cleared his throat. “Nirgal, have you ever met the
mathematician Bao?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Ah.”

Sax slumped back into his reverie. Maya talked for a while about
the problems she and Michel had discussed that day—how immigration worked as a
time machine, bringing up little islands of the past into the present. “That
was John’s worry too, and now it’s happening.”

Nirgal nodded. “We have to have faith in the areophany. And in the
constitution. They have to live by it once they’re here, the government should
insist on that.”

“Yes. But the people, the natives I mean. . . .”

“Some kind of assimilationist ethic. We need to draw everyone in.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Maya. I’ll see what I can do.” He smiled at her; then
suddenly he was falling asleep, right before their eyes. “Maybe we can pull it
off one more time, eh?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve got to get flat. Good night. I love you.”

*
     
*
       
*

They sailed northwest from Minus One, and the island slipped under
the horizon like a dream of ancient Greece, and they were on the open sea
again, with its high broad sloppy groundswell. Hard trade winds poured out of
the northeast for every hour of their passage, tearing off white-caps that made
the dark purple water look even darker. Wind and water made a continuous roar; it
was hard to hear, everything had to be shouted. The crew gave up speech
entirely, and worked on setting the maximum amount of sail possible, forcing
the ship’s AI to deal with their enthusiasm; the mast sails stretched or
tightened with each gust like bird’s wings, so that the wind had a visual
component to match the invisible kinetics of Maya’s buffeted skin, and she
stood in the bow looking up and back, taking it all in.

On the third day the wind blew even harder, and the boat got up to
its hydroplaning speed, the hull lifting up onto a flat section at the stern
and then skipping over the waves, knocking up far more spray than was
comfortable for anyone on deck; Maya retreated to the first cabin, where she
could look out the bow windows and witness the spectacle. Such speed!
Occasionally crew members would come in sopping, to catch their breath and suck
down some Java. One of them told Maya that they were adjusting their course to
take account of the Hellas current; “this sea’s the biggest example ever of the
Coriolis force on a bathtub drain, it being round, and in the latitudes where
trade winds push it the same way as the Coriolis force, so it’s swirling
clockwise around Minus One Island like a great big whirlpool. We have to adjust
for it big time or we’ll make landfall halfway to Hell’s Gate.”

The strong winds held, and flying along like they were,
hydroplaning for most of the day, it took them only four days to sail across
their radius of the Hellas Sea. On the fourth afternoon the mast sails
feathered in, and the hull fell back into the water, rolling in the whitecaps.
To the north land appeared over all the horizon at once; the rim of the great
basin, like a mountain range without any peaks: a giant berm of a slope,
looking like the inner wall of a crater, which of course it was, but so much
bigger than any normal crater that one could only barely see the arcing of the
circle—exactly that big—which struck Maya as beautiful, somehow. And as they
closed on the land, and then coasted westward toward Odessa (their landfall had
still been east of the town, despite their adjustment for the clockwise
current) she could, by climbing up the shrouds into the wind, see the beach
that the sea had created: a wide strand, backed by grass-covered dunes, with
creek mouths cutting through here and there. A handsome coast, and near the
outskirts of Odessa; part of Odessa’s handsomeness then, part of her town.