Blue Mars Part 27

And they went back to talking about the new results from CERN; about weather; about the sailboat's ability to point to within a few degrees of the wind. And then the following week she went out with him again, on one of his walks on the peninsula's sea cliffs. It was a great pleasure to show her a bit of the tundra. And over time, taking him through it step-by-step, she managed to convince him that they were perhaps coming close to understanding what was happening at the Planck level. A truly amazing thing, he thought, to intuit this level, and then make the speculations and deductions necessary to flesh it out and understand it, creating a very complex powerful physics, for a realm that was so very small, so very far beyond the senses. Awe-inspiring, really. The fabric of reality. Although both of them agreed that just as with all earlier theories, many fundamental questions were left unanswered. It was inevitable. So that they could lie side by side in the gra.s.s in the sun, staring as deeply into the petals of a tundra flower as ever one could, and no matter what was happening at the Planck level, in the here and now the petals glowed blue in the light with a quite mysterious power to catch the eye.

Actually, lying on the gra.s.s made it clear how much the permafrost was melting. And the melt lay on a hardpan of still-frozen ground, so that the surface became saturated and boggy. When Sax stood up, his ventral side chilled instantly in the breeze. He spread his arms to the sunlight. Photon rain, vibrating across the spin networks. In many regions heat exhaust from nuclear power plants was being directed down into capillary galleries in the permafrost, he told Bao as they walked back to the rover. This was causing trouble in some wet areas, which were tending to saturate at the surface. The land melting, so to speak. Instant wetlands. A very active biome, in fact. Though the Reds objected. But most of the land that would have been affected by permafrost melt was now under the North Sea anyway. What little remained above the sea was to be treasured as swamps and marshes.

The rest of the hydrosphere was almost equally transformative of the surface. It couldn't be helped; water was a very effective carver of rock, hard though it was to believe when watching a gossamer waterfall drift down a sea cliff, turning to white mist long before it hit the ocean. Then again there was the sight of the ma.s.sive giant howler waves, battering the cliffs so hard that the ground shook underfoot. A few million years of that and those cliffs would be significantly eroded.

"Have you seen the riverine canyons?" she asked.

"Yes, I saw Nirgal Vallis. Remarkable how satisfying it was to see water down at its bottom. So apt."

"I didn't know there was so much tundra out here."

Tundra was the dominant ecology for much of the southern highlands, he told her. Tundra and desert. In the tundra, fines were fixed very effectively to the ground; no wind could lift mud, or quicksand, of which there was a good quant.i.ty, making it dangerous to travel in certain regions. But in the deserts the powerful winds ripped great quant.i.ties of dust into the sky, cooling temperatures while they darkened the day, and causing problems where they landed, as they had for Nirgal. Suddenly curious, he said, "Have you ever met Nirgal?"

"No."

The sandstorms these days were nothing like the long-forgotten Great Storm of course, but still a factor that had to be considered. Desert pavement formed by microbacteria was one very promising solution, though it tended to fix only the top centimeter of deposits, and if the wind tore the edge of the pavement, what was underneath was then free to be borne away. Not an easy problem. Dust storms would be with them for centuries.

Still, an active hydrosphere. Meaning life everywhere.

Bao's mother died in a small plane crash, and Bao as the youngest daughter had to go home and take care of things, including possession of the family home. Ultimogeniture in action, modeled on the Hopi matriarchy, he was told. Bao wasn't sure when she would be back; there was even a chance she wouldn't be. She was matter-of-fact about it, it was just something that had to be done. Withdrawn already into an internal world. Sax could only wave good-bye to her and walk back to his room, shaking his head. They would understand the fundamental laws of the universe before they had even the slightest handle on society. A particularly obdurate subject of study. He called Michel on screen and expressed something like this, and Michel said, "It's because culture keeps progressing."

Sax thought he could see what Michel meant- there were rapid changes in att.i.tudes to many things. Werteswandel Werteswandel, as Bela called it, mutation of values. But they still lived in a society struggling with archaisms of all sorts. Primates banding into tribes, guarding a territory, praying to a G.o.d like a cartoon parent.... "Sometimes I don't think there's been any progress at all," he said, feeling strangely disconsolate.

"But Sax," Michel protested, "right here on Mars we have seen both patriarchy and property brought to an end. It's one of the greatest achievements in human history."

"If true."

"Don't you think women have as much power as men now?"

"As far as I can tell."

"Perhaps even more, when it comes to reproduction."

"That would make sense."

"And the land is in the shared stewardship of everyone. We still own personal items as property, but land as property has never happened here. That's a new social reality, we struggle with it every day."

So they did. And Sax remembered how bitter the conflicts had been in the old days, when property and capital had been the order of the day. Yes, perhaps it was true: patriarchy and property were in the process of being dismantled. At least on Mars, at least for now. As with string theory, it might take a long time to work it into any proper state. After all Sax himself, who had no prejudices whatsoever, had been amazed to see a woman mathematician at work. Or, to be more precise, a woman genius. By whom he had been promptly hypnotized, so to speak, along with every other man in the theory group- to the point of being rendered quite distraught by her departure. Uneasily he said, "On Earth people seem to be fighting just as much as before."

Even Michel had to admit it. "Population pressures," he said, trying to wave them away. "There are too many people down there, and more all the time. You saw what it was like during our visit. As long as Earth is in that situation, Mars is under threat. And so we fight up here too."

Sax took the point. In a way it was comforting; human behavior not as irreducibly evil or stupid, but as responding, semirationally, to a given historical situation, a danger. Seizing what one could, with the notion that there might not be enough for all; doing everything possible to protect one's offspring; which of course endangered all offspring, by the aggregate of individual selfish actions. But at least it could be called an attempt at reason, a first approximation.

"It's not as bad as it was, anyway," Michel was saying. "Even on Earth people are having far fewer children. And they're reorganizing into collectives pretty well, considering the flood and all the trouble that preceded it. A lot of new social movements down there, a lot of them inspired by what we're doing here. And by what Nirgal does. They're still watching him and listening to him, even when he doesn't speak. What he said during our visit there is still having a big effect."

"I believe it."

"Well, there you are! It's getting better, you have to admit it. And when the longevity treatments stop working, there will come a balance of births and deaths."

"We'll hit that time soon," Sax predicted glumly.

"Why do you say so?"

"Signs of it cropping up. People dying from one thing or other. Senescence is not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have kicked in- it's a wonder we've done as much as we have. There's probably a purpose in senescence. Avoiding overpopulation, perhaps. Making room for new genetic material."

"That bodes poorly for us."

"We're already over two hundred percent the old average lifetime."

"Granted, but even so. One doesn't want it to end just because of that."

"No. But we have to focus on the moment. Speaking of which, why don't you come out into the field with me? I'll be as upbeat as you want out there. It's very very interesting." interesting."

"I'll try to free up some time. I've got a lot of clients."

"You've got a lot of free time. You'll see."

In this particular moment, the sun was high. Rounded white clouds were piling up in the air overhead, forming great ma.s.ses that would never come again, though at the moment they were as solid as marble, and darkening at their bottoms. c.u.mulonimbus. He was standing on Da Vinci Peninsula's western cliff again, looking across Shalbatana Fjord to the cliff edging the east side of Lunae Planum. Behind him rose the flat-topped hill that was the rim of Da Vinci Crater. Home base. He had lived there a long time now. These days their co-op was making many of the satellites being put up into orbit, and the boosters as well, in collaboration with Spencer's lab in Odessa, and a great number of other places. A Mondragon-style cooperative, operating the ring of labs and homes in the rim, and the fields and lake filling the crater floor. Some of them chafed at restrictions imposed by the courts on projects they had in mind, involving new power plants that would put out too much heat. In the last few years the GEC had been issuing K rations, as they were called, giving communities the right to add some fraction of a degree Kelvin to the global warming. Some Red communities were doing their best to get a.s.signed K rations and then not use them. This action, along with ongoing incidences of ecotage, kept the global temperature from rising very fast no matter what other communities did. Or so the other communities argued. But the ecocourts were still parsimonious with the K rations. Cases were judged by a provincial ecocourt, then the judgment was approved by the GEC, and that was it: no appeals, unless you could get a pet.i.tion signed by fifty other communities, and even then the appeal was only dropped into the mora.s.s of the global legislature, where its fate was up to the undisciplined crowd in the duma.

Slow progress. Just as well. With the global average temperatures above freezing, Sax was content. Without the constraint of the GEC, things could easily get too warm. No, he was in no further hurry. He had become an advocate of stabilization.

Now, out in the sun of a perihelion day, it was an invigorating 281 K, and he was walking along the sea-cliff edge of Da Vinci, looking at alpine flowers in the cracks of the rubble, then past them to the distant quantum sheen of the fjord's sunny surface, when down the cliff edge walking his way came a tall woman, wearing a face mask and jumper, and big hiking boots: Ann. He recognized her instantly- that stride, no doubt about it- Ann Clayborne, in the flesh.

This surprise brought a double jolt to his memory- of Hiroko, emerging out of the snow to lead him to his rover- then of Ann, in Antarctica, striding over rock to meet him- but for what?

Confused, he tried to track the thought. Double image- a fleet single image- Then Ann was before him and the memories were gone, forgotten like a dream.

He had not seen her since forcing the gerontological treatment on her in Tempe, and he was acutely uncomfortable; possibly this was a fright reaction. Of course it was unlikely she would physically a.s.sault him. Though she had before. But that was never the kind of a.s.sault that worried him. That time in Antarctica- he grasped for the elusive memory, lost it again. Memories on the edge of consciousness were certain to be lost if one made any deliberate effort to retrieve them. Why that should be was a mystery. He didn't know what to say.

"Are you immune to carbon dioxide now?" she asked through her face mask.

He explained about the new hemoglobin treatment, struggling for each word, in the way he had after his stroke. Halfway through his explanation, she laughed out loud. "Crocodile blood now, eh?"

"Yes," he said, guessing her thought. "Crocodile blood, rat mind."

"A hundred rats."

"Yes. Special rats," he said, striving for accuracy. Myths after all had their own rigorous logic, as Levi-Strauss had shown. They had been genius rats, he wanted to say, a hundred of them and geniuses every one. Even his miserable graduate students had had to admit that.

"Minds altered," she said, following his drift.

"Yes."

"So, after your brain damage, altered twice," she noted.

"That's right." Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those rats were far from home. "Plasticity enhancement. Did you... ?"

"No. I did not."

So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try the drugs on her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the woman before him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her eye; he had gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of hatred. Ever since their arguments on the Ares Ares, and perhaps before. He had had time to get used to it. Or at least to learn it.

Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her eyes, it was almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but the skin around the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were both maximally wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed musculature. It seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn't know what to make of it.

"You gave me the gerontological treatment," she said.

"Yes."

Should he say he was sorry if he wasn't? Tongue-tied, lockjawed, he stared at her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that it was all right, that he had done the right thing.

She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. "What are you trying to do now?"

He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as gnomic as a koan. "I'm out looking," he said. He couldn't think what to say. Language, all those beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like a flock of startled birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just two animals, standing there in the sun. Look, look, look!

She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she looking daggers at him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock; with Ann that surely indicated progress.

But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the little seaport at Zed.

Sax returned to Da Vinci Crater feeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were having their annual Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year's representatives to the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. After the ritual of names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these jobs for the previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, and, for most of them, celebrated once again having been pa.s.sed over.

The random selection method for Da Vinci's administrative jobs had been adapted because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically, after all their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of self-management, the Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work involved. They only wanted to do their research. "We should give the administration entirely to AIs," Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year, between sips from a foaming stein of beer. Aonia, last year's representative to the duma, was saying to this year's selection, "You go to Mangala and sit around arguing, and the staff does what work there is. Most of it has been drained off to the council or the courts or the parties. It's Free Mars apparatchiks who are really running this planet. But it's a really pretty town, nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the winter."

Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, too near them for comfort. Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on for about half an hour, and then they would cycle back to talking about work. There was one group doing that already, Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered over, and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: it appeared they were excited by recent developments in their lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Continuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but it took extremely ma.s.sive tokamaks to do it, a.s.semblages too big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situations. This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellets of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusion results to power things.

"Did Bao talk to you about this?" Sax asked.

"Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk with us about plasma patterns, it wasn't immediately helpful, this is really macro compared to what she does, but she's so d.a.m.n smart, and afterward something she said set Yananda off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave a s.p.a.ce for emission afterward."

They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides at once, but there also had to be a vent for charged particles to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the problem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of it, which they thought they had solved at last; and when someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day's lottery results, they brushed him off. "Ka, no politics, please."

As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversations he pa.s.sed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature of most scientists and technicians. There was something about politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he had to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and compromised, a process that went entirely against the grain of the scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and prejudices were subjective themselves. One could try to regard politics as a kind of science- a long series of experiments in communal living, say, with all the data consistently contaminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of governance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, then changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or principles seemed to have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their experiments and paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compa.s.sion to all. After repeated experiments it had become clear- on Mars at least- that all these sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in which power was distributed out to a great number of inst.i.tutions. In theory this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.

Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that if they believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time to the exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the self governed. And that took time. "Those who value freedom must make the effort necessary to defend it," as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew because Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with such inspirational sentiments printed on them. "Science Is Politics by Other Means," another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.

But in Da Vinci most people did not want to spend their time that way. "Socialism will never succeed," Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting on yet another sign), "it takes up too many evenings." So it did; and the solution was to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the lottery method of election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the job oneself someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for the gaiety of this annual party; people were pouring in and out of the French doors of the commons, onto the open terraces overlooking the crater lake, talking with great animation. Even the drafted ones were beginning to cheer up again, after the solace of kavajava and alcohol, and perhaps the thought that power after all was power; it was an imposition, but the draftees could do some little things that no doubt were occurring to them even now- make trouble for rivals, do favors for people they wanted to impress, etc. So once again the system had worked; they had warm bodies filling the whole polyarchic array, the neighborhood boards, the ag board, the water board, the architectural review board, the project review council, the economic coordination group, the crater council to coordinate all these smaller bodies, the global delegates' advisory board- all that network of small management bodies that progressive political theorists had been suggesting in one variation or another for centuries, incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on. An experiment in synthesis. And so far it seemed to be working, in the sense that the Da Vinci techs seemed about as self-determined and happy as they had been during the ad hoc underground years, when everything had been done (apparently) by instinct, or, to be more precise, by the general consensus of the (much smaller) population in Da Vinci at that time.

They certainly seemed as happy; out on the terraces they were lining up at big pots of kavajava and Irish coffee, or kegs of beer, clumped in talkative groups so that the clatter of voices was like the sound of waves, as at any c.o.c.ktail party: an amazing sound, those voices all together. A chorus of talk- it was a music that no one consciously listened to but Sax, as far as he could tell; but as he listened to it he suspected strongly that the sound of it, heard unconsciously, was one of the things that made people at parties so happy and gregarious. Get two hundred people together, talking loudly so that each conversation could be heard only by its small group: such a music they made!

So running Da Vinci was a successful experiment, despite the fact that the citizens showed no interest in it. If they had they might have been less happy. Maybe ignoring government was a good strategy. Maybe the definition of good government was the government you could safely ignore, "to finally get back to my own work!" as one happily buzzed ex-water-board chief was just now saying. Self-government not being considered part of one's own work!

Although of course there were those people who did like the work, something about the interplay of theory and practice, the argument, the problem solving, the collaboration with other people, the service to others as a kind of gift, the endless talk; the power. And these people stayed on to serve two terms, or three if they were allowed, and then took on some other volunteer task that was going a-begging; indeed, most of these people did more than one task at once. Bela, for instance, had claimed not to like the chairmanship of the lab of labs, but now he was going directly into the volunteer advisory group, which always had a number of spots in danger of being unfilled. Sax wandered over to him: "Would you agree with Aonia that Free Mars is dominating global policy?"

"Oh undoubtedly, a.s.suredly. They are simply so big. And they have packed the courts, and rigged some things their way. I think they want to control all the new asteroid colonies. And to conquer Earth too, for that matter. All the politically ambitious young natives are joining the party, like bees to the flower."

"Trying to dominate other settlements...."

"Yes?"

"It sounds like trouble."

"Yes it does."

"Have you heard about this lightweight fusion engine they're talking about?"

"Yes, a little."

"You might look into backing that a bit more. If we could get engines like that into s.p.a.ceships...."

"Yes? Sax?"

"Transport that fast might have the effect of cracking domination by any one party."

"Do you think so?"

"Well, it would make it a hard situation to control."

"Yes, I suppose so. Hmm, well, I must think about this further."

"Yes. Science is politics by other means, remember."

"Indeed it is! Indeed it is." And Bela went off to the beer kegs, muttering to himself, then greeting another group as they approached him.

So spontaneously there emerged that bureaucratic cla.s.s that had been the terror of so many political theorists: the experts who took control of the polity, and supposedly would never relinquish their grip. But to whom would they relinquish it? Who else wanted it? No one, as far as Sax could tell. Bela could stay on the advisory board forever if he wanted to. Expert, from the Latin experiri experiri, to try. As in experiment. So it was government by the experimenters. Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So yet another kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you had to draft members into the governing body, then the notion of self-government as an aspect of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical.

Hector and Sylvia, from Bao's seminar, broke into Sax's reverie and invited him to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs from Maria dos Buenos Aires Maria dos Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them.

Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to take place, Sax stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of kava. The festival spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia hurried down to get ready, glowing with antic.i.p.ation. Watching them Sax remembered his recent encounter with Ann. If only he had been able to think! Why, he had gone completely incoherent! If only he had thought to become Stephen Lindholm again, perhaps that would have helped. Where was Ann now, what was she thinking? What had she been doing? Did she only wander the face of Mars now, like a ghost, moving from one Red station to another? What were the Reds doing now, how did they live? Had they been about to bomb Da Vinci, had his chance encounter stopped a raid? No no. There were ecoteurs still out there monkey-wrenching projects, but with the legal limits on terraforming, most Reds had rejoined society somehow; it was one mainstream political strand among the rest, vigilant, quick to litigate- indeed much more interested in taking on political work than less ideological citizens- but still, and by that very tendency, normalized. Where then would Ann fit in? With whom did she a.s.sociate?

Well, he could call her and ask.

But he was afraid to call, afraid to ask. Afraid to talk to her! At least by wrist. And apparently in person as well. She had not said what she thought of him giving her the treatment against her will. No thanks, no curse; nothing. What did she think? What was she thinking?

He sighed, sipped his kava. Down below they were beginning, Hector rolling out a recitative in Spanish, his voice so musical and expressive it was almost as if Sax could understand him by tone of voice alone.

Ann, Ann, Ann. This obsessive interest in someone else's thought was so uncomfortable. So much easier to concentrate on the planet, on rock and air, on biology. It was a ploy Ann herself would understand. And there was in ecopoesis something fundamentally intriguing. The birth of a world. Out of their control. Still he wondered what she made of it. Perhaps he would run into her again.