Blue Mars Read online

  It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn’t imagine.

  Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic-table style said, “If we can bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down,” blinking and everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again— Saxifrage Russell his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words’ inadequacy right in her mouth.

  Still she tried. “People act on what’s there, Sax. The metanat directors and the UN and the governments will look up and see what’s there, and act accordingly. If the cable’s gone they just don’t have the resources or the time to mess with us right now. If the cable’s here, then they’ll want us. They’ll think, well, we could do it. And there’ll be people screaming to try.”

  “They can always come. The cable is only a fuel saver.”

  “A fuel saver which makes mass transfers possible.”

  But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about control of orbit and safe-conduct passes and the like.

  The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said, “We’ve promised to . . . help them out.”

  “By sending them more metals?” Ann said. “Do they really need those?”

  “We could . . . take people. It might help.”

  Ann shook her head. “We could never take enough.”

  He frowned. Nadia saw they weren’t listening to her, returned to the table. Sax and Ann fell into silence.

  Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. But that had been so long ago she couldn’t even remember when exactly it was. In Antarctica? Somewhere. But not on Mars.

  “You know,” Sax said in a conversational tone, again very un-Sax-like but in a different way, “it wasn’t the Red militia that caused the Transitional Authority to evacuate Burroughs and the rest of the planet. If guerrillas had been the only factor then the Terrans would have gone after us, and they might well have succeeded. But those mass demonstrations in the tents made it clear that almost everyone on the planet was against them. That’s what governments fear the most; mass protests in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of people going into the streets to reject the current system. That’s what Nirgal means when he says political power comes out of the look in people’s eye. And not out of the end of a gun.”

  “And so?” Ann said.

  Sax gestured at the people in the warehouse. “They’re all greens.”

  The others continued debating. Sax watched her like a bird.

  Ann got up and walked out of the meeting, into the strangely unbusy streets of east Pavonis. Here and there militia bands held posts on street corners, keeping an eye to the south, toward Sheffield and the cable terminal. Happy, hopeful, serious young natives. There on one corner a group was in an animated discussion, and as Ann passed them a young woman, her face utterly intent, flushed with passionate conviction, cried out “You can’t just do what you want!”

  Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy, without knowing why. This is how people change— in little quantum jumps when struck by outer events— no intention, no plan. Someone says “the look in people’s eye,” and the phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face glowing with passionate conviction, another phrase: you can’t just do what you want! And so it occurred to her (the look on that young woman’s face!) that it was not just the cable’s fate they were deciding— not just “should the cable come down,” but “how do we decide things?” That was the critical postrevolutionary question, perhaps more important than any single issue being debated, even the fate of the cable. Up until now, most people in the underground had operated by a working method which said if we don’t agree with you we will fight you. That attitude was what had gotten people into the underground in the first place, Ann included. And once used to that method, it was hard to get away from it. After all, they had just proved that it worked. And so there was the inclination to continue to use it. She felt that herself.

  But political power . . . say it did come out of the look in people’s eye. You could fight forever, but if people weren’t behind you. . . .

  • • •

  Ann continued to think about that as she drove down into Sheffield, having decided to skip the farce of the afternoon strategy session in east Pavonis. She wanted to have a look at the seat of the action.

  It was curious how little seemed to have changed in the day-to-day life of Sheffield. People still went to work, ate in restaurants, talked on the grass of the parks, gathered in the public spaces in this most crowded of tent towns. The shops and restaurants were jammed. Most businesses in Sheffield had belonged to the metanats, and now people read on their screens long arguments over what to do— what the employees’ new relationship to their old owners should be— where they should buy their raw materials, where they should sell— whose regulations they ought to obey, whose taxes they ought to pay. All very confusing, as the screen debates and the nightly news vids and the wrist nets indicated.

  The plaza devoted to the food market, however, looked as it always had. Most food was grown and distributed by co-ops; ag networks were in place, the greenhouses on Pavonis were still producing, and so in the market things ran as usual, goods paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit. Except once or twice Ann saw sellers in their aprons shouting red-faced at customers, who shouted right back, arguing over some point of government policy. As Ann passed by one of these arguments, which were no different than those going on among the leaders in east Pavonis, the disputants all stopped and stared at her. She had been recognized. The vegetable seller said loudly, “If you Reds would lay off they would just go away!”

  “Ah come on,” someone retorted. “It isn’t her doing it.”

  So true, Ann thought as she walked on.

  A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems were still running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which was not something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did; but every tent’s operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their raw materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and nuclear reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were physically fragile, but if left alone, they could very well become politically autonomous; there was no reason for them to be owned, no justification for it.

  So the necessities were served. Daily life plodded on, barely perturbed by revolution.

  Or so it seemed at first glance. But there in the streets also were armed groups, young natives in threes and fours and fives, standing on street corners. Revolutionary militias around their missile launchers and remote sensing dishes— green or red, it didn’t matter, though they were almost certainly greens. People eyed them as they walked by, or stopped to chat and find out what they were doing. Keeping an eye on the Socket, the armed natives said. Though Ann could see that they were functioning as police as well. Part of the scene, accepted, supported. People grinned as they chatted; these were their police, they were fellow Martians, here to protect them, to guard Sheffield for them. People wanted them there, that was clear. If they hadn’t, then every approaching questioner would have been a threat, every glance of resentment an attack; which eventually would have forced the militias from the street corners into some safer place. People’s faces, staring in concert; this ran the world.

  • • •

  So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she took a rim train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to the north arc of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze
were occupying apartments in the little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had forcibly evicted some noncombatant residents, who naturally had trained down to Sheffield in fury, demanding to be reinstated in their homes, and reporting to Peter and the rest of the green leaders that the Reds had set up truck-drawn rocket launchers on the north rim, with the rockets aimed at the elevator and Sheffield more generally.

  So Ann walked out into Lastflow’s little station in a bad mood, angry at the Kakaze’s arrogance, as stupid in its way as the greens’. They had done well in the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dike very visibly to give everyone a warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dike after all the other revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the south, ready to rescue the city’s civilian population while the metanat security were forced to retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been needed and they had done it, without getting bogged down in debate. Without their decisiveness everyone would still be gathered around Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing a Terran expeditionary force to relieve it. It had been a perfectly delivered coup.

  Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.

  Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a fan-shaped lava flow extending more than a hundred kilometers down the northeast flank of the mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise a flawlessly circular summit cone and caldera, and clearly it had come very late in the volcano’s history of eruptions. Standing down in the depression, one’s view of the rest of the summit was cut off— it was like being in a shallow hanging valley, with little visible in any direction— until one walked out to the drop-off at rim’s edge, and saw the huge cylinder of the caldera coring the planet, and on the far rim the skyline of Sheffield, looking like a tiny Manhattan over forty kilometers away.

  The curtailed view perhaps explained why the depression had been one of the last parts of the rim to be developed. But now it was filled by a fair-sized tent, six kilometers in diameter and a hundred meters high, heavily reinforced as all tents up here had to be. The settlement had been home mostly to commuter laborers in the rim’s many industries. Now the rimfront district had been taken over by the Kakaze, and just outside the tent stood a fleet of large rovers, no doubt the ones that had caused the rumors about rocket launchers.

  As Ann was led to the restaurant that Kasei had made his headquarters, she was assured by her guides that this was indeed the case; the rovers did haul rocket launchers, which were ready to flatten UNTA’s last refuge on Mars. Her guides were obviously happy about this, and happy also to be able to tell her about it, happy to meet her and guide her around. A varied bunch— mostly natives, with some Terran newcomers and old-timers, of all ethnic backgrounds. Among them were a few faces Ann recognized: Etsu Okakura, al-Khan, Yussuf. A lot of young natives unknown to her stopped them at the restaurant door to shake her hand, grinning enthusiastically. The Kakaze: they were, she had to admit to herself, the wing of the Reds for which she felt the least sympathy. Angry ex-Terrans or idealistic young natives from the tents, their stone eyeteeth dark in their smiles, their eyes glittering as they got this chance to meet her, as they spoke of kami, the need for purity, the intrinsic value of rock, the rights of the planet, and so on. In short, fanatics. She shook their hands and nodded, trying not to let her discomfort show.

  Inside the restaurant Kasei and Dao were sitting by a window, drinking dark beer. Everything in the room stopped on Ann’s entrance, and it took a while for people to be introduced, for Kasei and Dao to welcome her with hugs, for meals and conversations to resume. They got her something to eat from the kitchen. The restaurant workers came out to meet her; they were Kakaze as well. Ann waited until they were gone and people had gone back to their tables, feeling impatient and awkward. These were her spiritual children, the media always were saying; she was the original Red; but in truth they made her uncomfortable.

  Kasei, in excellent spirits, as he had been ever since the revolution began, said “We’re going to bring down the cable in about a week.”

  “Oh you are!” Ann said. “Why wait so long?”

  Dao missed her sarcasm. “It’s a matter of warning people, so they have time to get off the equator.” Though normally a sour man, today he was as cheery as Kasei.

  “And off the cable too?”

  “If they feel like it. But even if they evacuate it and give it to us, it’s still coming down.”

  “How? Are those really rocket launchers out there?”

  “Yes. But those are there in case they come down and try to retake Sheffield. As for bringing down the cable, breaking it here at the base isn’t the way to do it.”

  “The control rockets might be able to adjust to disruptions at the bottom,” Kasei explained. “Hard to say what would happen, really. But a break just above the areosynchronous point would decrease damage to the equator, and keep New Clarke from flying off as fast as the first one did. We want to minimize the drama of this, you know, avoid any martyrs we can. Just the demolition of a building, you know. Like a building past its usefulness.”

  “Yes,” Ann said, relieved at this sign of good sense. But it was curious how hearing her idea expressed as someone else’s plan disturbed her. She located the main source of her concern: “What about the others— the greens? What if they object?”

  “They won’t,” Dao said.

  “They are!” Ann said sharply.

  Dao shook his head. “I’ve been talking to Jackie. It may be that some of the greens are truly opposed to it, but her group is just saying that for public consumption, so that they look moderate to the Terrans, and can blame the dangerous stuff on radicals out of their control.”

  “On us,” Ann said.

  They both nodded. “Just like with Burroughs,” Kasei said with a smile.

  Ann considered it. No doubt it was true. “But some of them are genuinely opposed. I’ve been arguing with them about it, and it’s no publicity stunt.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kasei said slowly.

  Both he and Dao watched her.

  “So you’ll do it anyway,” she said at last.

  They continued to watch her. She saw all of a sudden that they would no more do what she told them to do than would boys ordered about by a senile grandmother. They were humoring her. Figuring out how they could best put her to use.

  “We have to,” Kasei said. “It’s in the best interest of Mars. Not just for Reds, but all of us. We need some distance between us and Terra, and the gravity well reestablishes that distance. Without it we’ll be sucked down into the maelstrom.”

  It was Ann’s argument, it was just what she had been saying in the meetings in east Pavonis. “But what if they try to stop you?”

  “I don’t think they can,” Kasei said.

  “But if they try?”

  The two men glanced at each other. Dao shrugged.

  So, Ann thought, watching them. They were willing to start a civil war.

  • • •

  People were still coming up the slopes of Pavonis to the summit, filling up Sheffield, east Pavonis, Lastflow and the other rim tents. Among them were Michel, Spencer, Vlad, Marina, and Ursula; Mikhail and a whole brigade of Bogdanovists; Coyote, on his own; a group from Praxis; a large train of Swiss; rover caravans of Arabs, both Sufi and secular; natives from other towns and settlements on Mars. All coming up for the endgame. Everywhere else on Mars, the natives had consolidated their control; all the physical plants were being operated by local teams, in cooperation with Séparation de l’Atmosphère. There were some small pockets of metanat resistance, of course, and there were some Kakaze out there systematically destroying terraforming projects; but Pavonis was clearly the crux of the remaining problem— either the endgame of the revolution or, as Ann was beginning to fear, the opening moves of a civil war. Or both. It would not be the first time.

  So she went to the meetings, and slept poorly at night, waking from troubled sleep, or from naps in the transit between one meeting and the next
. The meetings were beginning to blur: all contentious, all pointless. She was getting tired, and the broken sleep did not help. She was nearly 150 years old, after all, and had not had a gerontological treatment in 25 years, and she felt weary all through, all the time. So she watched from a well of growing indifference as the others chewed over the situation. Earth was still in disarray; the great flood caused by the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet was indeed proving to be the ideal trigger mechanism for which General Sax had waited. Sax felt no remorse for taking advantage of Earth’s trouble, Ann could see; he never thought once about the many deaths the flood had caused down there. She could read his face thought by thought as he talked about it— what would be the point of remorse? The flood was an accident, a geological catastrophe like an ice age or a meteor impact. No one should waste time feeling remorse for it, not even if they were taking advantage of it for their own purposes. Best to take what good one possibly could from the chaos and disorder, and not worry. All this was right on Sax’s face as he discussed what they should do next vis-à-vis Earth. Send a delegation, he suggested. Diplomatic mission, personal appearance, something about throwing things together; incoherent on the surface, but she could read him like a brother, this old enemy! Well, Sax— the old Sax anyway— was nothing if not rational. Therefore easy to read. Easier than the young fanatics of the Kakaze, now that she thought of it.

  And one could only meet him on his own ground, speak to him on his own terms. So she sat across from him in the meetings and tried to concentrate, even though her mind seemed to be hardening somehow, petrifying right inside her head. Round and round the arguments went: what to do on Pavonis? Pavonis Mons, Peacock Mountain. Who would ascend the Peacock Throne? There were potential shahs everywhere— Peter, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Kasei, Maya, Nadia, Mikhail, Ariadne, the invisible Hiroko. . . .