Blue Mars

Art meanwhile ran around in his usual manner. Up early, supply drinks and food, and information concerning the work ongoing in other rooms. It seemed to him that things were going pretty well. Most of the subgroups took the responsibility to fill in their blank seriously, writing and rewriting drafts, hammering them out concept by concept, phrase by phrase. They were happy to see Art when he came by in the course of the day, as he represented a break, some food, some jokes. One judicial group tacked foam wings on his shoes, and sent him with a caustic message along to an executive group with whom they were fighting. Pleased, Art kept the wings on; why not? What they were doing had a kind of ludicrous majesty, or majestic ludicrousness – they were rewriting the rules, he was flying around like Hermes or Puck, it was perfectly appropriate. And so he flew, through the long hours into the night, every night. And after all the sessions had closed down for the evening, he went back to the Praxis offices he shared with Nadia, and they would eat, and talk over the day’s progress, and make a call to the travellers to Earth, and talk with Nirgal and Sax and Maya and Michel. And after that Nadia would go back to work at her screens, usually falling asleep there in her chair. Then Art would often go back out into the warehouse, and the buildings and rovers clustered around it. Because they were holding the congress in a warehouse tent, there was not the same party scene that had existed after hours in Dorsa Brevia; but the delegates often stayed up, sitting on the floors of their rooms drinking and talking about the day’s work, or the revolution just past. Many of the people there had never met before, and they were getting to know each other. Relationships were forming, romances, friendships, feuds. It was a good time to talk, and learn more about what was going on during the daytime congress; it was the underside of the congress, the social hour, out there scattered in concrete rooms. Art enjoyed it. And then the moment would come when he would suddenly hit the wall, a wave of sleepiness would roll over him and sometimes he wouldn’t even have time to stagger back to his offices, to the couch next to Nadia’s; he would simply roll over on the floor and sleep there, waking cold and stiff to hurry off to their bathroom, a shower, and back to the kitchens to start up that day’s kava and Java. Round and round, his days a blur; it was glorious.

In sessions on many different subjects people were having to grapple with questions of scale. Without any nations, without any natural or traditional political units, who governed what? And how were they to balance the local against the global, and past versus future – the many ancestral cultures against the one Martian culture?

Sax, observing this recurring problem from the rocket-ship to Earth, sent back a message proposing that the tent towns and covered canyons become the principal political units: city-states, basically, with no larger political units except for the global government itself, which would regulate only truly global concerns. Thus there would be local and global, but no nation-states in between.

The reaction to this proposal was fairly positive. For one thing it had the advantage of conforming to the situation that already existed. Mikhail, leader of the Bogdanovist party, noted that it was a variant of the old commune of communes, and because Sax had been the source of the suggestion, this quickly got it called the ‘lab of labs’ plan. But the underlying problem still remained, as Nadia quickly pointed out; all Sax had done was to define their particular local and global. They still had to decide just how much power the proposed global confederation was going to have over the proposed semi-autonomous city-states. Too much, and it was back to a big centralized state, Mars itself as a nation, a thought which many delegations abhorred. ‘But too little,’ Jackie said emphatically in the human rights workshop, ‘and there could be tents out there deciding slavery is okay, or female genital mutilation is okay, or any other crime based on some Terran barbarism is okay, excused in the name of “cultural values”. And that is just not acceptable.’

‘Jackie is right,’ Nadia said, which was unusual enough to get people’s attention. ‘People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture – that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.’

Art noticed more than a few delegates frowning at this sentiment, which no doubt struck them as a version of Western secular relativism, or perhaps John Boone’s hyperamericanism. Opposition to the metanats had included many people trying to hold on to older cultures, and these often had their hierarchies pretty well intact; the ones at the top end of the hierarchies liked them that way, and so did a surprisingly large number of people farther down the ladder.

The young Martian natives, however, looked surprised that this was even considered an issue. To them the fundamental rights were innate and irrevocable, and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many emotional scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their traumatic dysfunctional Terran upbringings. Ariadne, one of the most prominent of the young natives, stood up to say that the Dorsa Brevia group had studied many Terran human rights documents, and had written a comprehensive list of their own. The new master list of fundamental individual rights was available for discussion and, she implied, adoption wholesale. Some argued about one point or another; but it was generally agreed that a global bill of rights of some kind should be on the table. So Martian values as they existed in M-year 52 were about to be codified, and made a principal component of the constitution.

The exact nature of these rights was still a matter of controversy. The so-called ‘political rights’ were generally agreed to be ‘self-evident’ – things citizens were free to do, things governments were forbidden to do – habeus corpus, freedom of movement, of speech, of association, of religion, a ban on weapons – all these were approved by a vast majority of Martian natives, though there were some issei from places like Singapore, Cuba, Indonesia, Thailand, China and so on, who looked askance at so much emphasis on individual liberty. Other delegates had reservations about a different kind of right, the so-called ‘social’ or ‘economic’ rights, such as the right to housing, health care, education, employment, a share of the value generated by natural resource use, etc. Many issei delegates with actual experience in Terran government were quite worried about these, pointing out that it was dangerous to enshrine such things in the constitution; it had been done on Earth, they said, and then when it was found impossible to meet such promises, the constitution guaranteeing them was seen as a propaganda device, and flouted in other areas as well, until it became a bad joke.

‘Even so,’ Mikhail said sharply, ‘if you can’t afford housing, then it is your right to vote that is the bad joke.’

The young natives agreed, as did many others there. So economic or social rights were on the table too, and arguments over how actually to guarantee these rights in practice continued through many a long session. ‘Political, social, it’s all one,’ Nadia said. ‘Let’s make all the rights work.’

So the work went on, both around the big table and in the offices where the subgroups were meeting. Even the UN was there, in the person of Donald Hastings himself, who had come down the elevator and was participating vigorously in the debates, his opinion always carrying a peculiar kind of weight. He even began to exhibit symptoms of hostage syndrome, Art thought, becoming more and more sympathetic the more he stood around in the warehouse arguing with people. And this might affect his superiors on Earth as well.

Comments and suggestions were also pouring in from all over Mars, and from Earth as well, filling several screens covering one wall of the big room. Interest in the congress was high everywhere, rivalling even Earth’s great flood in the public’s attention. ‘The soap opera of the moment,’ Art said to Nadia. Every night the two of them met in their little office suite, and put in their call to Nirgal and the rest. The delays in the travellers’ responses got longer and longer, but Art and Nadia didn’t really mind; there was a lot to think about while waiting for Sax and the others’ part of the conversation to arrive.

‘This global versus local problem is going to be hard,’ Art said one night. ‘It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result of confused thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want freedom for the tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in contradiction.’

‘Maybe the Swiss system,’ Nirgal suggested a few minutes later. ‘That’s what John Boone always used to say.’

But the Swiss on Pavonis were not encouraging about this idea. ‘A counter-model rather,’ Jurgen said, making a face. ‘The reason I’m on Mars is the Swiss federal government. It stifles everything. You need a licence to breathe.’

‘And the cantons have no power any more,’ Priska said. ‘The federal government took it away.’

‘In some of the cantons,’ Jurgen added, ‘this was a good thing.’

Priska said, ‘More interesting than Berne might be the Graubunden. That means Grey League. They were a loose confederation of towns in southeast Switzerland, for hundreds of years. A very successful organization.’

‘Could you call up whatever you can get on that?’ Art said.

The next night he and Nadia looked over descriptions of the Graubunden that Priska had sent over. Well … there was a certain simplicity to affairs during the Renaissance, Art thought. Maybe that was wrong, but somehow the extremely loose agreements of the little Swiss mountain towns did not seem to translate well to the densely interpenetrated economies of the Martian settlements. The Graubunden hadn’t had to worry about generating unwanted changes in atmospheric pressure, for instance. No – the truth was, they were in a new situation. There was no historical analogy that would be much help to them now.

‘Speaking of global versus local,’ Irishka said, ‘what about the land outside the tents and covered canyons?’ She was emerging as the leading Red remaining on Pavonis, a moderate who could speak for almost all wings of the Red movement, therefore becoming quite a power as the weeks passed. ‘That’s most of the land on Mars, and all we said at Dorsa Brevia is that no individual can own it, that we are all stewards of it together. That’s good as far as it goes, but as the population rises and new towns are built, it’s going to be more and more of a problem figuring out who controls it.’

Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome. Recently he had made a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to attacking what he and Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they were facing, and so in theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes they were just too hard.

As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the global-local problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent. Still, as it was probably the worst outstanding problem …

Art went to the Reds. The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, one of Nirgal and Jackie’s creche-mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their rover camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he was now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big, empty vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.

The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the caldera. They sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments, in the glare of a late afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant, silhouetted country of the caldera.

‘So what would you like to see in this constitution?’ Art said.

He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each other, somewhat taken aback. ‘Ideally,’ Marion said after a while, ‘we’d like to be living on the primal planet, in caves and cliff-dwellings, or excavated crater rings. No big cities, no terraforming.’

‘You’d have to stay suited all the time.’

‘That’s right. We don’t mind that.’

‘Well.’ Art thought it over. ‘Okay, but let’s start from now. Given the situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?’

‘No further terraforming.’

‘The cable gone, and no more immigration.’

‘In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.’

They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his consternation show.

He said, ‘Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this point?’

‘It’s not clear,’ Tiu said. ‘But if you stopped the industrial pumping, any further growth would certainly be very slow. It might even lose ground, as with this ice age that’s starting.’

‘Isn’t that what some people call ecopoesis?’

‘No. The ecopoets just use biological methods, but they’re very intensive with them. We think they all should stop, ecopoets or industrialists or whatever.’

‘But especially the heavy industrial methods,’ Marion said. ‘And most especially the inundation of the north. That’s simply criminal. We’ll blow up those stations no matter what happens here, if they don’t stop.’

Art gestured out at the huge, stony caldera. ‘The higher elevations look pretty much the same, right?’

They weren’t willing to admit that. Irishka said, ‘Even the high ground shows ice deposition and plant life. The atmosphere lofts high here, remember. No place escapes when the winds are strong.’

‘What if we tented the four big calderas?’ Art said. ‘Kept them sterile underneath, with the original atmospheric pressure and mix? Those would be huge wilderness parks, preserved in the true primal state.’

‘Parks are just what they would be.’

‘I know. But we have to work with what we have now, right? We can’t go back to M-l and rerun the whole thing. And given the current situation, it might be good to preserve three or four big places in the original state, or close to it.’

‘It would be nice to have some canyons protected as well,’ Tiu said tentatively. Clearly they had not considered this kind of possibility before; and it was not really satisfactory to them, Art could see. But the current situation could not be wished away, they had to start from there.

‘Or Argyre Basin.’

‘At the very least, keep Argyre dry.’

Art nodded encouragingly. ‘Combine that kind of preservation with the atmosphere limits set in the Dorsa Brevia document. That’s a five kilometre breathable ceiling, and there’s a hell of a lot of land above five kilometres. It won’t take the northern ocean away, but nothing’s going to do that now. Some form of slow ecopoesis is about the best you can hope for at this point, right?’

Perhaps that was putting it too baldly. The Reds stared down into Pavonis caldera unhappily, thinking their own thoughts.

* * *