Blue Mars Part 9

"Say the Reds come on board," Art said to Nadia. "What do you think the next worst problem is?"

"What?" She had been nearly asleep, listening to some tinny old jazz from her AI. "Ah. Art." Her voice was low and quiet, the Russian accent light but distinct. She sat slumped on the couch. A pile of paper b.a.l.l.s lay around her feet, like pieces of some structure she was putting together. The Martian way of life. Her face was oval under a cap of straight white hair, the wrinkles of her skin somehow wearing away, as if she were a pebble in the stream of years. She opened her flecked eyes, luminous and arresting under their Cossack eyelids. A beautiful face, looking now at Art perfectly relaxed. "The next worst problem."

"Yes."

She smiled. Where did that calmness come from, that relaxed smile? She wasn't worried about anything these days. Art found it surprising, given the political high-wire act they were performing. But then again it was politics, not war. And just as Nadia had been terribly frightened during the revolution, always tense, always expecting disaster, she was now always relatively calm. As if to say, nothing that happens here matters all that much- tinker with the details all you want- my friends are safe, the war is over, this that remains is a kind of game, or work like construction work, full of pleasures.

Art moved around to the back of the couch, ma.s.saged her shoulders. "Ah," she said. "Problems. Well, there are a lot of problems that are about equally sticky."

"Like what?"

"Like, I wonder if the Mahjaris will be able to adapt to democracy. I wonder if everyone will accept Vlad and Marina's eco-economics. I wonder if we can make a decent police. I wonder if Jackie will try to create a system with a strong president, and use the natives' numerical superiority to become queen." She looked over her shoulder, laughed at Art's expression. "I wonder about a lot of things. Should I go on?"

"Maybe not."

She laughed. "You go on. That feels good. These problems- they aren't so hard. We'll just keep going to the table and pounding away at them. Maybe you could talk to Zeyk."

"Okay."

"But now do my neck."

Art went to talk to Zeyk and n.a.z.ik that very night, after Nadia had fallen asleep. "So what's the Mahjari view of all this?" he asked.

Zeyk growled. "Please don't ask stupid questions," he said. "Sunnis are fighting s.h.i.+tes- Lebanon is devastated- the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states- the North African countries are a metanat- Syria and Iraq hate each other- Iraq and Egypt hate each other- we all hate the Iranians, except for the s.h.i.+tes- and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians too- and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don't get along well with the Bedouin from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?" He shook his head darkly.

"I guess you say it's a stupid question," Art said. "Sorry. Thinking in const.i.tuencies, it's a bad habit. How about this- what do you you think of it?" think of it?"

n.a.z.ik laughed. "You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran Mahjaris think. He knows them only too well."

"Too well," Zeyk repeated.

"Do you think the human-rights section will go with them?"

Zeyk frowned. "No doubt we will sign the const.i.tution."

"But these rights... I thought there were no Arab democracies still?"

"What do you mean? There's Palestine, Egypt.... Anyway it's Mars we are concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the very beginning."

"Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?"

"Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don't think the new const.i.tution will end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader yourself, yes?"

Art laughed uncomfortably. "I'm just a messenger."

Zeyk shook his head. "Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you should go, if you want to know what the Qahirans think. He is our king now."

He looked as if he had bit into something sour, and Art said, "So what does he he want, do you think?" want, do you think?"

"He is Jackie's creature," Zeyk muttered, "nothing more."

"I should think that would be a strike against him."

Zeyk shrugged.

"It depends who you talk to," n.a.z.ik said. "For the older Muslim immigrants, it is a bad a.s.sociation, because although Jackie is very powerful, she has had more than one consort, and so Antar looks...."

"Compromised," Art suggested, forestalling some other word from the glowering Zeyk.

"Yes," n.a.z.ik said. "But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And all of the people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become even more powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are more native than Arab, I think. It's Mars that matters to them more than Islam. From that point of view, a close a.s.sociation with the Zygote ectogenes is a good thing. The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new Mars- especially Nirgal, of course, but with him off to Earth, there's a certain transfer of his influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to Antar."

"I don't like him," Zeyk said.

n.a.z.ik smiled at her husband. "You don't like how many of the native Muslims are following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It could be time for retirement."

"I don't see why," Zeyk objected. "If we're going to live a thousand years, then what difference does a hundred make?"

Art and n.a.z.ik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was the first time Art had ever seen him smile.

In fact, age didn't matter. People wandered around, old or young or somewhere in between, talking and arguing, and it would have been an odd thing for the length of someone's lifetime to become a factor in such discussions.

And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway. If you were born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a way that no Terran could even imagine- not just because of the whole complex of areorealities they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn't know. Terrans knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that cultural and biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the screen images, but that wasn't enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one reason Art was glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth; he would learn what they were up against.

But most of the natives wouldn't. And the revolution had gone to their heads. Despite their cleverness at the table in working the const.i.tution toward a form that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive; they had no idea how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit- led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic as ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars, and her devotion to her grandfather's ideals, and her essential goodwill, even innocence; the college girl who wanted pa.s.sionately for the world to be just.

Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly seemed to want to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on Mars now, and seven million of those had been born there; and almost every single one of these natives could be counted on to support the native political parties, usually Free Mars.

"It's dangerous," Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly meeting with Nadia. "When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don't trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call 'census voting,' where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes, and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those circ.u.mstances."

"So what can we do?" Nadia asked.

"Well, some of it we're doing already, designing structures that spread the power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism. Decentralization is important, because it creates a lot of small local majorities. Another strategy is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and balances, so that the government's a kind of cat's cradle of competing forces. This is called polyarchy polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can."

"Maybe we're a bit too polyarchic right now," Art said.

"Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You make some big part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and then draft ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get professional staff help, but make the decisions themselves."

"I've never heard of that one," Nadia said.

"No. It's been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think it's really worth considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an advantage. You get a letter in the mail; oh no; you're drafted to do two years in congress. It's a drag, but on the other hand it's a kind of distinction too, a chance to add something to the public discourse. Citizen government."

"I like that," Nadia said.

"Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some version of the Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates in ranked fas.h.i.+on, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get some points for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to appeal outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation, and in the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed before."

"Interesting," Nadia exclaimed. "Like trusses in a wall."

"Yes." Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran "fractured societies" that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, Armenia... as she described them Art's heart sank a bit; these had been b.l.o.o.d.y, b.l.o.o.d.y lands.

"It seems like political structures can only do so much," he said.

"True," Nadia said, "but we don't have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they've been marginalized by the terraforming that's already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull even them into the process."

Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

"You're happy," Art said.

She didn't hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the travelers, she said to Sax, "It was so nice to find that political science had abstracted something something useful in all these years." useful in all these years."

Eight minutes later his reply came in. "I never understood why they call it that."

Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia Cherneshevsky, laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going to pull it off.

So he went back to the big table, ready to tackle the next-worst problem. That brought him back to earth again. There were a hundred next-worst problems, all small until you actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In all the squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some areas, in fact, it seemed to be getting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa Brevia doc.u.ment were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and Marina's eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not something that should be codified in the const.i.tution. Some complained because it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, and people listened. "This new economy that's being proposed," he declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, "is a radical and unprecedented intrusion of government into business."

Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over.

Vlad glared at him. Stooped, ma.s.sive-headed, s.h.a.ggy-eyebrowed, Vlad rarely if ever spoke in public; he hadn't said a thing in the congress so far. Slowly the greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art felt a quiver of antic.i.p.ation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred, Vlad was perhaps the most brilliant- and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic. Old when they had left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron labs early on and stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in seclusion with Ursula Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first ones. No one knew anything for certain about the three of them, they were a limit-case ill.u.s.tration of the insular nature of other people's relations.h.i.+ps; but this of course did not stop gossip, on the contrary, people talked about them all the time, saying that Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; or that Ursula had done most of the work on the longevity treatment, and Marina most of the work on eco-economics; or that they were a perfectly balanced equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that emerged from Acheron; or that Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives as fronts for his work in the separate fields of biology and economics. But no one knew for sure, for none of the three ever said a word about it.

Watching him stand there at the table, however, one had to suspect that the theory about him being just a front man was wrong. He was looking around in a fiercely intent, slow glare, capturing them all before he turned his eye again on Antar.

"What you said about government and business is absurd," he stated coldly. It was a tone of voice that had not been heard much at the congress so far, contemptuous and dismissive. "Governments always regulate the kinds of business they allow. Economics is a legal matter, a system of laws. So far, we have been saying in the Martian underground that as a matter of law, democracy and self-government are the innate rights of every person, and that these rights are not to be suspended when a person goes to work. You"- he waved a hand to indicate he did not know Antar's name-"do you believe in democracy and self-rule?"

"Yes!" Antar said defensively.

"Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental values that government ought to encourage?"

"Yes!" Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed.

"Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue- control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is- a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives' labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work."

"Business leaders work," Antar said sharply. "And they take the financial risks-"

"The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the privileges privileges of capital." of capital."

"Management-"

"Yes yes. Don't interrupt me. Management is a real thing, a technical matter. But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny n.o.bility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger. In which one percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five percent of the population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth. History has shown which values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all.

"So. We must change. It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if simple justice is a value, then they are values everywhere, including in the workplace where we spend so much of our lives. That was what was said in point four of the Dorsa Brevia agreement. It says everyone's work is their own, and the worth of it cannot be taken away. It says that the various modes of production belong to those who created them, and to the common good of the future generations. It says that the world is something we all steward together. That is what it says. And in our years on Mars, we have developed an economic system that can keep all those promises. That has been our work these last fifty years. In the system we have developed, all economic enterprises are to be small cooperatives, owned by their workers and by no one else. They hire their management, or manage themselves. Industry guilds and co-op a.s.sociations will form the larger structures necessary to regulate trade and the market, share capital, and create credit."

Antar said scornfully, "These are nothing but ideas. It is utopianism and nothing more."

"Not at all." Again Vlad waved him away. "The system is based on models from Terran history, and its various parts have all been tested on both worlds, and have succeeded very well. You don't know about this partly because you are ignorant, and partly because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored and denied all alternatives to it. But most of our microeconomy has been in successful operation for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The different parts of the macroeconomy have been used in the pseudometanat Praxis, in Switzerland, in India's state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna Italy, and in many other places, including the Martian underground itself. These organizations were the precursors to our economy, which will be democratic in a way capitalism never even tried to be."

A synthesis of systems. And Vladimir Taneev was a very great synthesist; it was said that all the components of the longevity treatment had already been there, for instance, and that Vlad and Ursula had simply put them together. Now in his economic work with Marina he was claiming to have done the same kind of thing. And although he had not mentioned the longevity treatment in this discussion, nevertheless it lay there like the table itself, a big cobbled-together achievement, part of everyone's lives. Art looked around and thought he could see people thinking, well, he did it once in biology and it worked; could economics be more difficult?

Against this unspoken thought, this unthought feeling, Antar's objections did not seem like much. Metanational capitalism's track record at this point did little to support it; in the last century it had precipitated a ma.s.sive war, chewed up the Earth, and torn its societies apart. Why should they not try something new, given that record?

Someone from Hiranyagarba stood and made an objection from the opposite direction, noting that they seemed to be abandoning the gift economy by which the Mars underground had lived.

Vlad shook his head impatiently. "I believe in the underground economy, I a.s.sure you, but it has always been a mixed economy. Pure gift exchange coexisted with a monetary exchange, in which neocla.s.sical market rationality, that is to say the profit mechanism, was bracketed and contained by society to direct it to serve higher values, such as justice and freedom. Economic rationality is simply not the highest value. It is a tool to calculate costs and benefits, only one part of a larger equation concerning human welfare. The larger equation is called a mixed economy, and that is what we are constructing here. We are proposing a complex system, with public and private spheres of economic activity. It may be that we ask people to give, throughout their lives, about a year of their work to the public good, as in Switzerland's national service. That labor pool, plus taxes on private co-ops for use of the land and its resources, will enable us to guarantee the so-called social rights we have been discussing- housing, health care, food, education- things that should not be at the mercy of market rationality. Because la salute non si paga la salute non si paga, as the Italian workers used to say. Health is not for sale!"

This was especially important to Vlad, Art could see. Which made sense- for in the metanational order, health most certainly had been for sale, not only medical care and food and housing, but preeminently the longevity treatment itself, which so far had been going only to those who could afford it. Vlad's greatest invention, in other words, had become the property of the privileged, the ultimate cla.s.s distinction- long life or early death- a physicalization of cla.s.s that almost resembled divergent species. No wonder he was angry; no wonder he had turned all his efforts to devising an economic system that would transform the longevity treatment from a catastrophic possession to a blessing available to all.

"So nothing will be left to the market," Antar said.

"No no no," Vlad said, waving at Antar more irritably than ever. "The market will always exist. It is the mechanism by which things and services are exchanged. Compet.i.tion to provide the best product at the best price, this is inevitable and healthy. But on Mars it will be directed by society in a more active way. There will be not-for-profit status to vital life-support matters, and then the freest part of the market will be directed away from the basics of existence toward nonessentials, where venture enterprises can be undertaken by worker-owned co-ops, who will be free to try what they like. When the basics are secured and when the workers own their own businesses, why not? It is the process of creation we are talking about."

Jackie, looking annoyed at Vlad's dismissals of Antar, and perhaps intending to divert the old man, or trip him up, said, "What about the ecological aspects of this economy that you used to emphasize?"

"They are fundamental," Vlad said. "Point three of Dorsa Brevia states that the land, air, and water of Mars belong to no one, that we are the stewards of it for all the future generations. This stewards.h.i.+p will be everyone's responsibility, but in case of conflicts we propose strong environmental courts, perhaps as part of the const.i.tutional court, which will estimate the real and complete environmental costs of economic activities, and help to coordinate plans that impact the environment."

"But this is simply a planned economy!" Antar cried.

"Economies are plans. Capitalism planned just as much as this, and metanationalism tried to plan everything. No, an economy is is a plan." a plan."

Antar, frustrated and angry, said, "It's simply socialism returned."

Vlad shrugged. "Mars is a new totality. Names from earlier totalities are deceptive. They become little more than theological terms. There are elements one could call socialist in this system, of course. How else remove injustice from economy? But private enterprises will be owned by their workers rather than being nationalized, and this is not socialism, at least not socialism as it was usually attempted on Earth. And all the co-ops are businesses- small democracies devoted to some work or other, all needing capital. There will be a market, there will be capital. But in our system workers will hire capital rather than the other way around. It's more democratic that way, more just. Understand me- we have tried to evaluate each feature of this economy by how well it aids us to reach the goals of more justice and more freedom. And justice and freedom do not contradict each other as much as has been claimed, because freedom in an injust system is no freedom at all. They both emerge together. And so it is not so impossible, really. It is only a matter of enacting a better system, by combining elements that have been tested and shown to work. This is the moment for that. We have been preparing for this opportunity for seventy years. And now that the chance has come, I see no reason to back off just because someone is afraid of some old words. If you have any specific specific suggestions for improvements, we'll be happy to hear them." suggestions for improvements, we'll be happy to hear them."

He stared long and hard at Antar. But Antar did not speak; he had no specific suggestions.

The room was filled with a charged silence. It was the first and only time in the congress that one of the issei had stood up and trounced one of the nisei in public debate. Most of the issei liked to take a more subtle line. But now one of the ancient radicals had gotten mad and risen up to smite one of the neoconservative young power mongers- who now looked like they were advocating a new version of an old hierarchy, for purposes of their own. A thought which was conveyed very well indeed by Vlad's long look across the table at Antar, full of disgust at his reactionary selfishness, his cowardice in the face of change. Vlad sat down; Antar was dismissed.

But still they argued. Conflict, metaconflict, details, fundamentals; everything was on the table, including a magnesium kitchen sink that someone had placed on one segment of the table of tables, some three weeks into the process.

And really the delegates in the warehouse were only the tip of the iceberg, the most visible part of a gigantic two-world debate. Live transmission of every minute of the conference was available everywhere on Mars and in most places on Earth, and although the actual realtime tape had a certain doc.u.mentary tediousness to it, Mangalavid concocted a daily highlights film that was shown during the timeslip every night, and sent to Earth for very wide distribution. It became "the greatest show on Earth" as one American program rather oddly dubbed it. "Maybe people are tired of the same old c.r.a.p on TV," Art said to Nadia one night as they watched a brief, weirdly distorted account of the day's negotiations on American TV.

"Or in the world."

"Yeah true. They want something else to think about."

"Or else they're thinking about what they might do," Nadia suggested. "So that we're a small-scale model. Easier to understand."

"Maybe so."