Green Mars Part 27

So the debates continued, now structured around Art and Nirgal's doc.u.ment. Reviewing the tapes, Nadia saw that there was a fair amount of agreement over the substance of all the points except for number six, concerning the level of terraforming. Most of the Reds would not accept the low-elevation viability concept, pointing out that most of the planet lay under the five-kilometer contour, and that the higher elevations would be significantly contaminated if the lower elevations were viable. They spoke of dismantling the industrial terraforming processes that were now under way, of returning to the very slowest biological methods called for in the radical ecopoesis model. Some advocated the growth of a thin CO2 atmosphere, supporting plants but not animals, as being a situation more natural to Mars's volatile inventory and its past history. Other advocated leaving the surface as close to how they had found it as possible, and keeping a very small population in tented valleys. These people decried the rapid destruction of the surface by the industrial terraforming in outraged tones, condemning particularly the inundation of Vast.i.tas Borealis, and the outright melting of the landscape by use of the soletta and the aerial lens.

But as the seven days pa.s.sed, it became more and more obvious that this point of the draft declaration was the only one being really debated, while the others were for the most part being subjected to fine-tuning only. A lot of people were pleasantly surprised to find even this much a.s.sent to the draft statement, and more than once Nirgal said irritably, "Why be surprised? We didn't make those points up, we just wrote down what people were saying."

And people would nod at this, interested, and go back to the meetings, and work on the points again. And it began to seem to Nadia that agreement was popping up everywhere, called out of chaos by Art and Nirgal's a.s.sertion that it existed. Several of the sessions that week ended in a kind of kavajava high of political consensus, the various aspects of a state finally hammered into a shape to which many of the parties could agree.

But the argument over methods only got more vehement. Back and forth it would go, Nadia against Coyote, Kasei, the Reds, the Marsfirsters, and many of the Bogdanovists. "You can't get to what we want by murder!" "They won't give this planet up! Political power begins at the end of a gun!"

One night after one of these donnybrooks, a big gathering of them floated in the shallows of the Phaistos pond, trying to relax. Sax sat on an underwater bench and shook his head. "Cla.s.sic problem of punishment- no- of violence violence," he said. "Radical, liberal. Who never managed to agree again. Before."

Art plunged his head in the water, and pulled it out spluttering. Weary, frustrated, he said, "What about integrated pest management? What about that mandatory retirement idea?"

"Forced disemployment," Nadia corrected.

"Decapitation," Maya said.

"Whatever!" Art said, splashing them. "Velvet revolution. Silk revolution."

"Aerogel," Sax said. "Light, strong. Invisible."

"It's worth a try!" Art said.

Ann shook her head. "It will never work."

"It's better than another sixty-one," Nadia said.

Sax said, "Better if we agree on a play. On a plan plan."

"But we can't," Maya said.

"The front is broad," Art insisted. "Let's go out there and do what we're comfortable with."

Sax and Nadia and Maya all shook their heads at once; seeing it, Ann unexpectedly laughed out loud. And then they were all sitting in the pond together, giggling at they knew not what.

The final general meeting took place in the late afternoon, in the Zakros park where it had all begun. It had a strangely confused air, Nadia felt, with most people only grudgingly satisfied with the Dorsia Brevia Declaration, now several times longer than Art and Nirgal's original draft. Each point was read aloud by Priska, and each was cheered in a consensual vote of approval; but different groups cheered more loudly for some points than for others, and when the reading was done, the general applause was brief and perfunctory. No one could be happy with that, and Art and Nirgal looked exhausted.

The applause ended, and for a moment everyone just sat there. No one knew what to do next; the lack of agreement on the matter of methods seem to extend right into that very moment. What next? What now? Did they just go home? Did they have a home? The moment stretched out, uncomfortable, even vaguely painful (how they needed John!), so that Nadia was relieved when someone shouted something- an exclamation that seemed to break a malign spell. She looked around as people pointed.

There on a staircase, high on the black tunnel wall, stood a green woman. She was unclothed, green-skinned, glowing in a shaft of afternoon sun that shot down from a skylight- gray-haired, barefoot, without jewelry- completely naked, except for a coat of green paint. And what was common at night in the pond was, in this vivid daylight, dangerous and provocative- a shock to the senses, a challenge to their notion of what a political congress was, or could be.

It was Hiroko. She began to step down the staircase, in a steady measured pace. Ariadne and Charlotte and several other Minoan women stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her, along with Hiroko's closest followers from the hidden colony- Iwao, Rya, Evgenia, Michel, all the rest of that little band. As Hiroko descended they started to sing. When she reached them, they draped her with strings of bright red flowers. A fertility rite, Nadia thought, reaching directly into some paleolithic part of their minds, and intermingling there with Hiroko's areophany.

When Hiroko left the foot of the stairs she had a little train of followers, singing the names of Mars, "Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram," and so on, a great melange of archaic syllables, into which some of them were interjecting "Ka... ka... ka..."

She led them down the path, through trees, out again onto the gra.s.s, into the meeting in the park. She walked right through the middle of the crowd, with a solemn, distant expression on her green face. Many stood as she pa.s.sed. Jackie Boone came out of the crowd and joined the group of followers, and her green grandmother took her by the hand. The two of them led the way through the crowd, the old matriarch tall, proud, thoroughly ancient, gnarled like a tree, and as green as a tree's leaves; Jackie taller still, young and graceful as a dancer, her black hair flowing halfway down her back. A rustle went through the crowd, a sigh; and as the two and the group following them walked down to the central path by the ca.n.a.l, people stood and followed, the Sufis among them dancing a braid around their circ.u.mference. "Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira..." "Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira..." And so a thousand people walked down the ca.n.a.l path after the two women and their train, the Sufis singing, others chanting pieces of Hiroko's areophany, the rest content to follow. And so a thousand people walked down the ca.n.a.l path after the two women and their train, the Sufis singing, others chanting pieces of Hiroko's areophany, the rest content to follow.

Nadia walked along holding hands with Nirgal and Art, feeling happy. They were animals, after all, no matter where they chose to live. She felt something like worship, an emotion very rare in her experience- worship for the divinity of life, which took such beautiful forms.

At the pond Jackie took off her rust jumper, and she and Hiroko stood in ankle-deep water, facing each other and holding their clasped hands as far overhead as they could reach. The other Minoan women joined this bridge. Old and young, green and pink....

The hidden colonists pa.s.sed under the bridge first, among them Maya herself, hand in hand with Michel. And then all kinds of people were filing under the mother bridge, in what felt like the millionth repet.i.tion of a million-year-old ritual, something everyone had coded in their genes and had practiced all their life. The Sufis danced under the clasped hands still wearing their white billowing clothes, and this gave a model to others, who stayed clothed but surged right out into the water, ducking under the naked women, Zeyk and n.a.z.ik leading the way, chanting, "Ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq," "Ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq," looking like Hindus in the Ganges, or Baptists in the Jordan. So that in the end many shed their clothes, but all walked into the water. And they stared around at this instinctive and yet highly conscious rebirth, many drumming on the water surface, making rhythmic slapping splashes to accompany the singing and chanting.... Nadia saw again and again how beautiful humans were. Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality. They stood before each other with all their imperfections and their s.e.xual characteristics and their intimations of mortality- but most of all with their astonishing beauty, which in the ruddy light of the tunnel sunset could scarcely be believed, could scarcely be comprehended or answered. Skin at sunset had a lot of red in it- but not enough for some of the Reds, apparently, who were sponging one of their women down with a red dye they had located, to make a counter figure to Hiroko, apparently. Political bathing! Nadia groaned. Actually all the colors were coming off in the pond, turning the water brown. looking like Hindus in the Ganges, or Baptists in the Jordan. So that in the end many shed their clothes, but all walked into the water. And they stared around at this instinctive and yet highly conscious rebirth, many drumming on the water surface, making rhythmic slapping splashes to accompany the singing and chanting.... Nadia saw again and again how beautiful humans were. Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality. They stood before each other with all their imperfections and their s.e.xual characteristics and their intimations of mortality- but most of all with their astonishing beauty, which in the ruddy light of the tunnel sunset could scarcely be believed, could scarcely be comprehended or answered. Skin at sunset had a lot of red in it- but not enough for some of the Reds, apparently, who were sponging one of their women down with a red dye they had located, to make a counter figure to Hiroko, apparently. Political bathing! Nadia groaned. Actually all the colors were coming off in the pond, turning the water brown.

Maya swam through the shallows and knocked Nadia deeper into the pond with an impetuous hug. "Hiroko is a genius," she said in Russian. "She may be a mad genius, but a genius she is."

"Mother G.o.ddess of the world," Nadia said, and switched to English as she plowed through the warm water to a little knot of the First Hundred and the Sabishii issei. There were Ann and Sax standing side by side, Ann tall and thin, Sax short and round, looking just as they had in the old days in the baths of Underhill, debating something or other, Sax talking with his face all screwed up in concentration. Nadia laughed at the sight, splashing them.

Fort swam to her side. "Should have run the whole conference like this," he observed. "Ooh, he's going to crash." And indeed a board rider coming down the curved wall slipped off his plummeting board, and slid ignominiously into the pond. "Look, I need to get back home to be able to help. Also a great-great-great-granddaughter is getting married in four months."

"Can you get back that fast?" Spencer asked.

"Yes, my ship is fast." A Praxis s.p.a.ce division built rockets that used a modified Dyson propulsion to accelerate and then decelerate continuously through the flight, which took a very direct line between the planets.

"Executive style," Spencer said.

"They're open for use by anyone in Praxis, if they're in a hurry. You might want to visit Earth yourself, see what conditions are like firsthand."

No one took him up on that, though it raised some eyebrows. But there was no more talk of detaining him, either.

People drifted like jellyfish in a slow whirlpool, calmed at last by the warmth, by the water and wine and kava being pa.s.sed around in bamboo cups, by the accomplishment of finishing what they had come to do. It was not perfect, people said- definitely not perfect- but it was something, especially the remarkable nature of point four, or three- quite a declaration, in fact- a beginning, a real beginning- seriously flawed- especially point six- definitely not perfect- but likely to be remembered. "Well, but this here is religion," someone sitting in the shallows was saying, "and I like all the pretty bodies, but mixing state and religion is a dangerous business..."

Nadia and Maya walked out into deeper water, arm in arm, talking with everyone they knew. A group of the youngsters from Zygote saw them, Rachel and Tiu and Frantz and Steve and the rest, and they cried, "Hey, the two witches!" and came over to squish them together with hugs and kisses. Kinetic reality, Nadia thought, somatic reality, haptic reality- the power of the touch, ah, my... her ghost finger was throbbing, which hadn't happened in ages.

They walked on, trailing the Zygote ectogenes, and came on Art, who was standing with Nirgal and a few other men, all drawn as by magnet to where Jackie still stood by the half-green Hiroko, her wet hair slicked over her bare shoulders, her head thrown back laughing, the sunset glaring off her and giving her a kind of hyperreal, heraldic power. Art was looking happy indeed, and when Nadia hugged him, he put an arm over her shoulder and left it there. Her good friend, a very solid somatic reality.

"It was well done," Maya told him. "It was like John Boone would have done it."

"It was not," Jackie said automatically.

"I knew him," Maya said, giving her a sharp look, "and you didn't. And I say it was like John would have done it."

They stood staring at each other, the ancient white-haired beauty and the young black-haired beauty- and it seemed to Nadia there was something primal in the sight, primal, primeval, primate... these these are the two witches, she wanted to say to Jackie's sibs behind her. But then again they no doubt knew that. "No one is like John was," she said, trying to break the spell. She squeezed Art's waist. "But it was well done." are the two witches, she wanted to say to Jackie's sibs behind her. But then again they no doubt knew that. "No one is like John was," she said, trying to break the spell. She squeezed Art's waist. "But it was well done."

Kasei came splashing up; he had been standing by silently, and Nadia wondered at him a little, the man with the famous father, famous mother, famous daughter.... And slowly becoming a power himself, among the Reds and the radical Marsfirsters, out there on the edge in a splinter movement, as the congress had proved. No, it was hard to tell what Kasei thought of his life. He gave Jackie a glance that was too complex to read- pride, jealousy, some sort of rebuke- and said, "We could use John Boone now." His father- the first man on Mars- her cheery John, who used to love to swim the b.u.t.terfly in Underhill, in afternoons that had felt like this ceremony, except that it had been their everyday reality, for a year or so there in the beginning....

"And Arkady," Nadia said, still trying to defuse things. "And Frank."

"We can do without Frank Chalmers," Kasei said bitterly.

"Why do you say that?" Maya exclaimed. "We would be lucky to have him here now! He would know how to handle Fort, and Praxis, and the Swiss and you Reds and the greens, all of it. Frank, Arkady, John- we could use all three of them now." Her mouth was hard and downturned. She glared at Jackie and Kasei as if daring them to speak; then her lip curled, and she looked away.

Nadia said, "This is why we must avoid another sixty-one."

"We will," Art said, and gave her another squeeze.

Nadia shook her head sadly. The peak always pa.s.sed so fast. "It's not our choice," she told him. "It's not something that is entirely in our hands. So we will see."

"It will be different this time," Kasei insisted.

"We will see."

Part Eight

Social Engineering

Where were you born?

Denver.

Where did you grow up?

Rock. Boulder.

What were you like as a child?

I don't know.

Give me your impressions.

I wanted to know why.

You were curious?

Very curious.

Did you play with science kits?

All of them.

And your friends?

I don't remember.

Try for anything.

I don't think I had many friends.

Were you ambidextrous as a child?

I don't remember.

Think about your science experiments. Did you use both hands when you did them?

I believe it was often necessary.

You wrote with your right hand?

I do now. I- I did then as well. Yes. As a child.

And did you do anything with your left hand? Brush your teeth, comb your hair, eat, point at things, throw b.a.l.l.s?

I did all those things with my right hand. Would it matter if I hadn't?

Well, you see, in cases of aphasia, the strong right-handers all conform pretty well to a certain profile. Activities are located, or it is better to say coordinated, at certain places in the brain. When we determine precisely the problems the aphasic is experiencing, we can tell pretty well where the lesions in the brain are located. And vice versa. But with left-handers and ambidextrous people there is no such pattern. One might say that every left-handed and ambidextrous brain is organized differently.

You know most of Hiroko's ectogene children are left-handed.

Yes, I know. I've spoken with her about it, but she claims she doesn't know why. She says it may be a result of being born on Mars.

Do you find this plausible?

Well, handedness is still poorly understood in any case, and the effects of the lighter gravity... we'll be sorting those out for centuries, won't we.

I suppose so.

You don't like the idea of that, do you?

I would rather get answers.

What if all your questions were answered? Would you be happy then?

I find it hard to imagine such a- state. A fairly small percentage of my questions have answers.

But that's rather wonderful, don't you agree?

No. It wouldn't be scientific to agree.

You conceive of science as nothing more than answers to questions?

As a system for generating answers.

And what is the purpose of that?

...To know.

And what will you do with your knowledge?

...Find out more.