Blue Mars

The big message board was a pretty good indicator of the mood of the congress. Art read it the way he read fortune cookies, and indeed one day there was one message that said, ‘You like Chinese food.’ Usually the messages were more political than that. Often they were things said in the previous days of the conference: ‘No tent is an island’. ‘If you can’t afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.’ ‘Keep your distance, don’t change speed, don’t run into anything.’ ‘La salute non si paga.’ Then there were things that had not been said: ‘Do unto others.’ ‘The Reds have Green Roots.’ ‘The Greatest Show on Earth.’ ‘No Kings No Presidents.’ ‘Big Man Hates Politics.’ ‘However: We Are The Little Red People.’

So Art was no longer surprised when he was approached by people who spoke in Arabic or Hindi or some language he did not recognize, then looked him in the eye while their AI spoke in English with an accent from the BBC or middle America or the New Delhi civil service, expressing some kind of unpredictable political sentiment. It was encouraging, really – not the translation AIs, which were just another kind of distancing, less extreme than teleparticipation but still not quite ‘talking face to face’ – but the political melange, the impossibility of block-voting, or of even thinking in the normal constituencies.

It was a strange congregation, really. But it went on, and eventually everyone got used to it; it took on that always-already quality that extended events often gain over their duration. But once, very late at night, after a long bizarre translated conversation in which the AI on the wrist of the young woman he was talking to spoke in rhymed couplets (and he never knew what language she was speaking to start with), Art wandered back through the warehouse toward his office suite, around the table of tables, where work was still going on even though it was after the timeslip, and he stopped to say hi to one group; and then, momentum lost, slumped back against a side wall, half watching, half drowsing, his kavajava buzz nearly overwhelmed by exhaustion. And the strangeness came back, all at once. It was a kind of hypnogogic vision. There were shadows in the corners, innumerable flickering shadows; and eyes in the shadows. Shapes, like insubstantial bodies: all the dead, it suddenly seemed, and all the unborn, all there in the warehouse with them, to witness this moment. As if history were a tapestry, and the congress the loom upon which everything was coming together, the present moment with its miraculous thereness, its potential right in their own atoms, their own voices. Looking back at the past, able to see it all, a single, long, braided tapestry of events; looking forward at the future, able to see none of it, though presumably it branched out in an explosion of threads of potentiality, and could become anything: they were two different kinds of unreachable immensity. And all of them travelling together, from the one into the other, through that great loom the present, the now. Now was their chance, for all of them together in this present – the ghosts could watch, from before and after, but this was the moment when what wisdom they could muster had to be woven together, to be passed on to all the future generations.

They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring the congress to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single worldline of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious – the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good governments of all time, combined magically into some superb, as yet unseen synthesis – or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government … To go from that to the mundane problematic of the constitution as written was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

On the other hand, it would certainly be a good thing if their diplomatic team were to arrive on Earth with a completed document to present to the UN and the people of Earth. Really, there was no avoiding it; they needed to finish; not just to present to Earth the united front of an established government, but also to start living their post-crisis life, whatever it might be.

Nadia felt this strongly, and so she began to exert herself. ‘Time to drop the keystone into the arch,’ she said to Art one morning. And from then on she was indefatigable, meeting all the delegations and committees, insisting that they finish whatever they were working on, insisting they get it on the table for a final vote on inclusion. This inexorable insistence of hers revealed something that had not been clear before, which was that most of the issues had been resolved to the satisfaction of most of the delegations. They had concocted something workable, most agreed, or at least worth trying, with amendment procedures prominent in the structure so that they could alter aspects of the system as they went along. The young natives in particular seemed happy – proud of their work, and pleased that they had managed to keep an emphasis on local semi-autonomy, institutionalizing the way most of them had lived under the Transitional Authority.

Thus the many checks against majoritarian rule did not bother them, even though they themselves were the current majority. In order not to look defeated by this development, Jackie and her circle had to pretend they had never argued for a strong presidency and central government in the first place; indeed they claimed that an executive council, elected by the legislature in the Swiss manner, had been their idea all along. A lot of that kind of thing was going on, and Art was happy to agree with all such claims: ‘Yes, I remember, we were wondering what to do about that the night when we stayed up to see the sunrise, it was a good thought you had.’

Good ideas everywhere. And they began to spiral down toward closure.

The global government as they had designed it was to be a confederation, led by an executive council of seven members, elected by a two-housed legislature. One legislative branch, the duma, was composed of a large group of representatives drafted from the populace; the other, the senate, a smaller group elected one from each town or village group larger than five hundred people. The legislature was all in all fairly weak; it elected the executive council and helped select justices of the courts, and left to the towns most legislative duties. The judicial branch was more powerful; it included not only criminal courts, but also a kind of double supreme court, one half a constitutional court, and the other half an environmental court, with members to both appointed, elected and drawn by lottery. The environmental court would rule on disputes concerning terraforming and other environmental changes, while the constitutional court would rule on the constitutionality of all other issues, including challenged town laws. One arm of the environmental court would be a land commission, charged with overseeing the stewardship of the land, which was to belong to all Martians together, in keeping with point three of the Dorsa Brevia agreement; there would not be private property as such, but there would be various tenure rights established in leasing contracts, and the land commission was to work these matters out. A corresponding economic commission would function under the constitutional court, and would be partly composed of representatives from guild co-operatives which would be established for the various professions and industries. This commission was to oversee the establishment of a version of the underground’s eco-economics, including both not-for-profit enterprises concentrating on the public sphere, and taxed for-profit enterprises which had legal size limits, and were by law employee-owned.

This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for a strong global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was also a response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the previous century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or otherwise collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held firm, issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the land, in a mostly-ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the metanats’ depredations; a moral force, which if it had had more teeth, might have done more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle fought, and now they remembered.

Thus the Martian global government. The constitution then also included a long list of human rights, including social rights; guidelines for the land commission and the economics commission; an Australian ballot election system for the elective offices; a system for amendments; and so on. Lastly, to the main text of the constitution they appended the huge collection of materials that had accumulated in the process, calling it Working Notes and Commentary. This was to be used to help the courts interpret the main document, and included everything the delegations had said at the table of tables, or written on the warehouse screens, or received in the mail.

So most of the sticky issues had been resolved, or at least swept under the rug; the biggest outstanding dispute was the Red objection. Art went into action here, orchestrating several late concessions to the Reds, including many early appointments to the environmental courts; these concessions were later termed the ‘Grand Gesture’. In return Irishka, speaking for all the Reds still involved in the political process, agreed that the cable would stay, that UNTA would have a presence in Sheffield, that Terrans would still be able to immigrate, subject to restrictions; and lastly, that terraforming would continue, in slow non-disruptive forms, until the atmospheric pressure at six kilometres above the datum was 350 millibars, this figure to be reviewed every five years. And so the Red impasse was broken, or at least finessed.

Coyote shook his head at the way things had developed. ‘After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up. I think what you should do now is go out to the tents and canyons, and ask them very humbly how they have been running things these past two months, and then throw this fancy constitution away and say, continue.’

‘But that’s what the constitution does say,’ Art joked.

Coyote would not kid about this. ‘You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the centre just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.’

As for UNTA, it was harder to tell what they thought, because opinions back on Earth were divided, with a loud faction calling for the retaking of Mars by force, everyone on Pavonis to be jailed or hanged. Most Terrans were more accommodating, and all of them were still distracted by the ongoing crisis at home. And at the moment, they didn’t matter as much as the Reds; that was the space the revolution had given the Martians. Now they were about to fill it.

Every night of the final week, Art went to bed incoherent with cavils and kava, and though exhausted he would wake fairly often during the night, and roll under the force of some seemingly lucid thought that in the morning would be gone, or revealed as lunatic. Nadia slept just as poorly on the couch next to his, or in her chair. Sometimes they would fall asleep talking over some point or other, and wake up dressed but entangled, holding onto each other like children in a thunderstorm. The warmth of another body was a comfort like nothing else. And once in the dim predawn ultraviolet light they both woke up, and talked for hours in the cold silence of the building, in a little cocoon of warmth and companionship. Another mind to talk to. From colleagues to friends; from there to lovers, maybe; or something like lovers; Nadia did not seem inclined to romanticism of any land. But Art was in love, no doubt about it, and there twinkled in Nadia’s flecked eyes a new fondness for him, he thought. So that at the end of the long final days of the congress, they lay on their couches and talked, and she would knead his shoulders, or he hers, and then they would fall comatose, pounded by exhaustion. There was more pressure to ushering in this document than either one of them wanted to admit, except in these moments, huddling together against the cold big world. A new love: Art, despite Nadia’s unsentimentality, found no other way to put it. He was happy.

And he was amused, but not surprised, when they got up one morning and she said, ‘Let’s put it to a vote.’

So Art talked to the Swiss and the Dorsa Brevia scholars, and the Swiss proposed to the congress that they vote on the version of the constitution currently on the table, voting point by point as they had promised in the beginning. Immediately there was a spasm of vote-trading that made Terran stock exchanges look subtle and slow. Meanwhile the Swiss set up a voting sequence, and over the course of three days they ran through it, allowing one vote to each group on each numbered paragraph of the draft constitution. All eighty-nine paragraphs passed, and the massive collection of ‘explanatory material’ was officially appended to the main text.

After that it was time to put it to the people of Mars for approval. So on Ls 158,1 October 11th, M-year 52 (on Earth, February 27th, 2128), the general populace of Mars, including everyone over five M-years old, voted by wrist on the resulting document. Over ninety-five per cent of the population voted, and the constitution passed seventy-eight per cent to twenty-two per cent, garnering just over nine million votes. They had a government.

PART FOUR Green Earth (#ulink_e14a3161-e5c9-5692-a424-9adccfdb379f)

On Earth, meanwhile, the great flood dominated everything.

The flood had been caused by a cluster of violent volcanic eruptions under the West Antarctic ice sheet. The land underneath the ice sheet, resembling North America’s basin and range country, had been depressed by the weight of the ice until it lay below sea level. So when the eruptions began the lava and gases had melted the ice over the volcanoes, causing vast slippages overhead; at the same time, ocean water had started to pour in under the ice, at various points around the swiftly eroding grounding line. Destabilized and shattering, enormous islands of ice had broken off all around the edges of the Ross Sea and the Ronne Sea. As these islands of ice floated away on the ocean currents, the break-up continued to move inland, and the turbulence caused the process to accelerate. In the months following the first big breaks, the Antarctic Sea filled with immense tabular icebergs, which displaced so much water that sea level all over the world rose. Water continued to rush into the depressed basin in West Antarctica that the ice had once filled, floating out the rest of it berg by berg, until the ice sheet was entirely gone, replaced by a shallow new sea roiled by the continuing underwater eruptions, which were being compared in their severity to the Deccan Traps eruptions of the late Cretaceous.

And so, a year after the eruptions began, Antarctica was only a bit over half as big as it had been – East Antarctic like a half moon, the Antarctic peninsula like an iced-over New Zealand – in between them, a berg-clotted, bubbling, shallow sea. And around the rest of the world, sea level was seven metres higher than it had been before.

Not since the last ice age, ten thousand years before, had humanity experienced a natural catastrophe of such magnitude. And this time it affected not just a few million hunter-gatherers in nomadic tribes, but fifteen billion civilized citizens, living upon a precarious sociotechnological edifice which had already been in great danger of collapse. All the big coastal cities were inundated, whole countries like Bangladesh and Holland and Belize were awash. The unfortunates who lived in such low-lying regions usually had time to move to higher ground, for the surge was more like a tide than a tidal wave; and then there they all were, somewhere between ten and twenty per cent of the world’s population – refugees.

It goes without saying that human society was not equipped to handle such a situation. Even in the best of times it would not have been easy, and the early twenty-second century had not been the best of times. Populations were still rising, resources were more and more depleted, conflicts between rich and poor, governments and metanats, had been sharpening everywhere: the catastrophe had struck in the midst of a crisis.

Jo a certain extent, the catastrophe cancelled the crisis. In the face of worldwide desperation, power struggles of all kinds were recontextualized, many rendered fantasmagorical; there were whole populations in need, and legalities of ownership and profit paled in comparison to the problem. The United Nations rose like some aquatic phoenix out of the chaos, and became the clearing, house for the vast number of emergency relief efforts: migrations inland across national borders, construction of emergency accommodations, distribution of emergency food and supplies. Because of the nature of this work, with its emphasis on rescue and relief, Switzerland and Praxis were in the forefront of helping the UN. UNESCO returned from the dead, along with the World Health Organization. India and China, as the largest of the badly devastated countries, were also extremely influential in the current situation, because how they chose to cope made a big difference everywhere. They made alliances with each other, and with the UN and its new allies; they refused all help from the Group of Eleven, and the metanationals that were now fully intertwined into the affairs of most of the G-ll governments.

In other ways, however, the catastrophe only exacerbated the crisis. The metanationals themselves were cast into a very curious position by the flood. Before its onset they had been absorbed in what commentators had been calling the metana-tricide, fighting among themselves for final control of the world economy. A few big metanational superclusters had been jockeying for ultimate control of the largest industrial countries, and attempting to subsume the few entities still out of their control: Switzerland, India, China, Praxis, the so called World Court countries, and so on. Now, with much of the population of Earth occupied in dealing with the flood, the metanats were mostly struggling to regain what control they had had of affairs. In the popular mind they were often linked to the flood, as cause, or as punished sinners – a very convenient bit of magical thinking for Mars and the other anti-metanational forces, all of whom were doing their best to seize this chance to beat the metanats to pieces while they were down. The Group of Eleven and the other industrial governments previously associated with the metanats were scrambling to keep their own populations alive, and so could spare little effort to help the great conglomerates. And people everywhere were abandoning their previous jobs to join the various relief efforts; Praxis-style employee-owned enterprises were gaining in popularity as they took on the emergency, at the same time offering all their members the longevity treatment. Some of the metanats held onto their workforce by reconfiguring along these same lines. And so the struggle for power continued on many levels, but everywhere rearranged by the catastrophe.

In that context, Mars to most Terrans was completely irrelevant. Oh it made for an interesting story, of course, and many cursed the Martians as ungrateful children, abandoning their parents in the parents’ hour of need; it was one example among many of bad responses to the flood, to be contrasted to the equally plentiful good responses. There were heroes and villains all over these days, and most regarded the Martians as villains, rats escaping a sinking ship. Others regarded them as potential saviours, in some ill-defined way: another bit of magical thinking, by and large; but there was something hopeful in the notion of a new society forming on the next world out.

Meanwhile, no matter what happened on Mars, the people of Earth struggled to cope with the flood. The damage now began to include rapid climatic changes: more cloud cover, reflecting more sunlight and causing temperatures to drop, also creating torrential rainstorms, which often wrecked much-needed crops, and sometimes fell where rain had seldom fallen before, in the Sahara, the Mojave, northern Chile – bringing the great flood far inland, in effect, bringing its impact everywhere. And with agriculture hammered by these new severe storms, hunger itself became an issue; any general sense of co-operation was therefore threatened, as it seemed that perhaps not everyone could be fed, and the cowardly spoke of triage. And so every part of Terra was in turmoil, like an anthill stirred by a stick.

So that was Earth in the summer of 2128: an unprecedented catastrophe, an ongoing universal crisis. The antediluvian world already seemed like no more than a bad dream from which they had all been rudely awakened, cast into an even more dangerous reality. From the frying pan into the fire, yes; and some people tried to get them back into the frying pan, while others struggled to get them off the stove; and no one could say what would happen next.

An invisible vice clamped down on Nirgal, each day more crushing than the last. Maya moaned and groaned about it, Michel and Sax did not seem to care; Michel was very happy to be making this trip, and Sax was absorbed in watching reports from the congress on Pavonis Mons. They lived in the rotating chamber of the spaceship Atlantis, and over the five months of the trip the chamber would accelerate until the centrifugal force shifted from Mars equivalent to Earth equivalent, remaining there for almost half the voyage. This was a method that had been worked out over the years, to accommodate emigrants who decided they wanted to return home, diplomats travelling back and forth, and the few Martian natives who had made the voyage to Earth. For everyone it was hard. Quite a few of the natives had fallen sick on Earth; some had died. It was important to stay in the gravity chamber, do one’s exercises, take one’s inoculations.

Sax and Michel worked out on exercise machines; Nirgal and Maya sat in the blessed baths, commiserating. Of course Maya enjoyed her misery, as she seemed to enjoy all her emotions, including rage and melancholy; while Nirgal was truly miserable, spacetime bending him in an ever more tortuous torque, until every cell of him cried out with the pain of it. It frightened him – the effort it took just to breathe, the idea of a planet so massive. Hard to believe!

He tried to talk to Michel about it, but Michel was distracted by his anticipation, his preparation; Sax by the events on Mars. Nirgal didn’t care about the meeting back on Pavonis, it would not matter much in the long run, he judged. The natives in the outback had lived the way they wanted to under UNTA, and they would do the same under the new government. Jackie might succeed in making a presidency for herself, and that would be too bad; but no matter what happened, their relationship had gone strange, become a kind of telepathy which sometimes resembled the old passionate love affair but just as often felt like a vicious sibling rivalry, or even the internal arguments of a schizoid self. Perhaps they were twins – who knew what kind of alchemy Hiroko had performed in the ectogene tanks – but no – Jackie had been born of Esther. He knew that. If it proved anything. For to his dismay, she felt like his other self; he did not want that, he did not want the sudden speeding of his heart whenever he saw her. It was one of the reasons he had decided to join the expedition to Earth. And now he was getting away from her at the rate of fifty thousand kilometres an hour, but there she still was on the screen, happy at the ongoing work of the congress, and her part in it. And she would be one of the seven on the new executive council, no doubt about it.

‘She is counting on history to take its usual course,’ Maya said as they sat in the baths watching the news. ‘Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself. This local power, spread out through the tents—’ She shrugged cynically.

‘Perhaps it’s a nova.’ Nirgal suggested.

She laughed. ‘Yes, perhaps. But then it starts clumping again. That’s the gravity of history – power drawn into centres, until there is an occasional nova. Then a new drawing in. We’ll see it on Mars too, you mark my words. And Jackie will be right at the middle of it—’ She stopped before adding the bitch, in respect for Nirgal’s feelings. Regarding him with a curious, hooded gaze, as if wondering what she might do with Nirgal that would advance her never-ending war with Jackie. Little novas of the heart.

The last weeks of one g passed, and never did Nirgal begin to feel comfortable. It was frightening to feel the clamping pressure on his breath and his thinking. His joints hurt. On the screens he saw images of the little blue-and-white marble that was the Earth, with the bone button of Luna looking peculiarly flat and dead beside it. But they were just more screen images, they meant nothing to him compared to his sore feet, his beating heart. Then the blue world suddenly blossomed and filled the screens entirely, its curved limb a white line, the blue water all patterned by white cloud swirls, the continents peeking out from cloud patterns like little rebuses of half-remembered myth: Asia. Africa. Europe. America.

For the final descent and aerobraking the gravity chamber’s rotation was stopped. Nirgal, floating, feeling disembodied and balloonlike, pulled to a window to see it all with his own eyes. Despite the window glass and the thousands of kilometres of distance, the detail was startling in its sharp-edged clarity. ‘The eye has such power.’ he said to Sax.

‘Hmm,’ Sax said, and came to the window to look.

They watched the Earth, blue before them.

‘Are you ever afraid?’ Nirgal asked.

‘Afraid?’

‘You know.’ Sax on this voyage had not been in one of his more coherent phases; many things had to be explained to him. ‘Fear. Apprehension. Fright.’

‘Yes. I think so. I was afraid, yes. Recently. When I found I was … disoriented.’

‘I’m afraid now.’

Sax looked at him curiously. Then he floated over and put a hand to Nirgal’s arm, in a gentle gesture quite unlike him. ‘We’re here,’ he said.

Dropping, dropping. There were ten space elevators stranding out from Earth now. Several of them were what they called split cables, dividing into two branching strands that touched down north and south of the equator, which was woefully short of decent socket locations. One split cable Y-ed down to Virac in the Philippines and Oobagooma in western Australia, another to Cairo and Durban. The one they were descending split some ten thousand kilometres above the Earth, the north line touching down near Port of Spain, Trinidad, while the southern one dropped into Brazil near Aripuana, a boomtown on a tributary of the Amazon called the Theodore Roosevelt River.

They were taking the north fork, down to Trinidad. From their elevator car they looked down on most of the Western Hemisphere, centred over the Amazon basin, where brown water veined through the green lungs of Earth. Down and down; in the five days of their descent the world approached until it eventually filled everything below them, and the crushing gravity of the previous month and a half once again slowly took them in its grasp and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. What little tolerance Nirgal had developed for the weight seemed to have disappeared during the brief return to microgravity, and now he gasped. Every breath an effort. Standing foursquare before the windows, hands clenched to the rails, he looked down through clouds on the brilliant blue of the Caribbean, the intense greens of Venezuela. The Orinoco’s discharge into the sea was a leafy stain. The limb of the sky was composed of curved bands of white and turquoise, with the black of space above. All so glossy. The clouds were the same as on Mars but thicker, whiter, more stuffed with themselves. The intense gravity was perhaps exerting an extra pressure on his retina or optic nerve, to make the colours push and pulse so hard. Sounds were noisier.

In the elevator with them were UN diplomats, Praxis aides, media representatives, all hoping for the Martians to give them some time, to talk to them. Nirgal found it difficult to focus on them, to listen to them. Everyone seemed so strangely unaware of their position in space, there five hundred kilometres over the surface of the Earth, and falling fast.