“Those are still coming,” Sax said. “I don’t even know how we could stop them. Shoot them down I guess. But we can always use nitrogen. I’m not sure I’d be happy if they were stopped.”
“But Ann?” Nadia said. “What would Ann like?”
Sax squinted again. When uncertainty squinched his face, it reverted to precisely its old ratlike expression.
“What would you both like?” Art rephrased it.
“Hard to say.” And his face twisted into a grimace of uncertainty, indecision, split motives.
“You want wilderness,” Art suggested.
“Wilderness is a, an idea. Or an ethical position. It can’t be everywhere, it’s not that kind of idea. But . . .” Sax waggled a hand, fell back into his own thoughts. For the first time in the century she had known him, Nadia had the sense that Sax did not know what to do. He solved the problem by sitting down before a screen and typing instructions into it. He appeared to forget their presence.
Nadia squeezed Art’s arm. He enfolded her hand, and squeezed the little finger gently. It was almost three quarters size now, but slowing down as it got closer to full size. A nail had been started, and on the pad, the delicate whorled ridges of a fingerprint. It felt good when it was squeezed. She met Art’s eye briefly, then looked down. He squeezed her whole hand before letting go. After a while, when it was clear Sax was fully distracted, and going to be off in his own world for a long time, they tiptoed off to their room, to the bed.
• • •
They worked by day, went out at night. Sax was blinking around as in his lab-rat days, anxious because there was no news of Ann. Nadia and Art comforted him as best they could, which wasn’t much. In the evenings they went out and joined the promenade. There was a park where parents congregated with their kids, and people walked by as if passing a little open zoo enclosure, grinning at the sight of the little primates at play. Sax spent hours in this park talking to kids and parents, and then he would wander off to the dance floors, where he danced by himself for hours. Art and Nadia held hands. Her finger got stronger. It was almost full size now, and given that it was the littlest finger anyway, it looked full grown unless she held it against its opposite number. Art nibbled it gently sometimes when they were making love, and the sensation drove her wild. “You’d better not tell people about this effect,” he muttered, “else it could get grisly— people hacking off body parts to grow them back, you know, more sensitive.”
“Sicko.”
“You know how people are. Anything for a thrill.”
“Don’t even talk about it.”
“Okay.”
• • •
But then it was time to get back to a council meeting. Sax left, to find Ann or hide from her, they couldn’t be sure; they flew back up to Sheffield, and then Nadia was back into it again, every day parsed into its thirty-minute units of trivia. Except some of it was important. The Chinese application for another space elevator near Schiaparelli had come up for action, and it was only one of many immigration issues that were facing them. The UN-Mars agreement worked out in Bern stated explicitly that Mars was to take at least ten percent of its population in immigrants every year, with the hope expressed that they would take even more— as many as possible— for as long as the hypermalthusian conditions obtained. Nirgal had made this a kind of promise, had spoken very enthusiastically (and Nadia felt unrealistically) about Mars coming to the rescue, saving Earth from overpopulation with the gift of empty land. But how many people could Mars really hold, when they couldn’t even manufacture topsoil? What was the carrying capacity of Mars, anyway?
No one knew, and there was no good way to calculate it scientifically. Estimates of Terra’s human carrying capacity had ranged from one hundred million to two hundred trillion, and even the seriously defensible estimates ranged from two to thirty billion. In truth carrying capacity was a very fuzzy abstract concept, depending on an entire recombinant host of complexities such as soil biochemistry, ecology, human culture. So it was almost impossible to say how many people Mars could handle. Meanwhile Earth’s population was over fifteen billion, while Mars, with almost as much land surface, had a population a thousand times as small, at right around fifteen million. The disparity was clear. Something would have to be done.
Mass transfer of people from Earth to Mars was certainly one possibility; but the speed of the transfer was limited by the size of the transport system, and the ability of Mars to absorb the immigrants. Now the Chinese, and indeed the UN generally, were arguing that as a beginning step in a process of intensified immigration, they could build up the transport system very substantially. A second space elevator on Mars would be the first step in this multistage project.
Reaction on Mars to this plan was mostly negative. The Reds of course opposed further immigration, and while conceding that some would have to happen, they opposed any specific development of the transfer system just to try to keep the process slowed down as much as possible. That position fit their overall philosphy, and made sense to Nadia. The Free Mars position, however, while more important, was not so clear. Nirgal had come out of Free Mars, and had gone to Earth and issued a general invitation to Terrans to shift as many people over as they could. And historically Free Mars had always argued for strong ties with Earth, to attempt the so-called tail-wagging-dog strategy. The current party leadership, however, no longer seemed very fond of this position. And Jackie was in the middle of this new group. They had been shifting toward a more isolationist stance even during the constitutional congress, Nadia recalled, arguing always for more independence from Earth. On the other hand, they had been apparently cutting deals in private with certain Terran countries. So the Free Mars position was ambiguous, perhaps hypocritical; and seemed designed mainly to increase its own power on the Martian scene.
Even setting aside Free Mars, though, there was a lot of isolationist sentiment out there besides the Reds— anarchists, some Bogdanovists, the Dorsa Brevian matriarchs, the MarsFirsters— all tended to side with the Reds on this issue. If millions and millions of Terrans began to pour up onto Mars, they all argued, what then of Mars— not just of the landscape itself, but of the Martian culture that had been forming over the m-years? Wouldn’t that be drowned in the old ways brought up by the new influx, which might quickly outnumber the native population? Birth rates were dropping everywhere, after all, and childlessness and one-child families were as common on Mars as on Earth— so there wouldn’t be any great multiplication in the native population to look forward to. They would soon be overwhelmed.
So Jackie argued, at least in public, and the Dorsa Brevians and many others agreed with her. Nirgal, just back from Earth, seemed not to be having much effect on that stance. And while Nadia could see the point of her opponents’ arguments, she also felt that given the situation on Earth, they were being unrealistic to think they could close Mars down. Mars could not save Earth, as Nirgal had sometimes seemed to say during his visit there; but an agreement with the UN had been made and ratified, and they were committed to letting up at least as many Terrans as the treaty specified. So the bridge between the worlds had to be expanded if they were to meet that obligation, and keep the treaty viable. If they didn’t stick to the treaty, Nadia thought, anything might happen.
So in the debate over allowing a second cable, Nadia argued for it. It increased the capacity of the transport system, as they had promised to do, if only indirectly. And it would also take some of the pressure off the towns on Tharsis, and that side of Mars generally; population density maps showed that Pavonis was like the bull’s-eye of a target, with people radiating outward from it and settling as near to it as was convenient. Having a cable on the other side of the world would help to equalize things.
But this was a dubious value to the cable’s opponents. They wanted the population localized, contained, slowed. The treaty didn’t matter to them. So when it came to a council vote, which was only an advisory to the legislature in any case, only Zeyk
voted with Nadia. It was Jackie’s biggest victory so far, and put her in a temporary alliance with Irishka and the rest of the environmental courts, which were on principle resistant to all forms of swift development.
Nadia went home to her apartment that day, discouraged and worried. “We’ve promised Earth we’ll take lots of immigrants, then pulled up the drawbridge. It’s going to lead to trouble.”
Art nodded. “We’ll have to work something out.”
Nadia blew out her breath in disgust. “Work. We won’t work anything out. Work isn’t the word for it. We will bicker and dicker and argue and natter.” She sighed a big sigh. “It will go on and on. I thought Nirgal being back would help, but it won’t if he doesn’t join in.”
“He doesn’t have a position,” Art said.
“He could if he wanted one, though.”
“True.”
Nadia thought about it, her mind wandering as her spirits dropped. “You know I’ve only gotten through ten months of my term. There’s over two and a half m-years to go.”
“I know.”
“M-years are so damned long.”
“Yes. But the months are short.”
She made a noise at him. Stared out the window of her apartment, down into Pavonis caldera. “The trouble is that work isn’t work anymore. You know, we go out there and join these projects, and the work on them still isn’t work. I mean I never get to go out and do things. I remember when I was young, in Siberia, work was really work.”
“You might be romanticizing that a bit.”
“Yeah, sure, but even on Mars. I remember putting together Underhill. That was really fun. And one day on our trip to the north pole, installing a permafrost gallery. . . .” She sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for work like that again.”
“There’s still a lot of construction going on,” Art pointed out.
“By robots.”
“Maybe you could go back to something more human. Build something yourself. A house in the country, or a development. Or one of the new harbor towns, hand-built to try out different things, designs, methods, whatever. It would slow the construction process down, the GEC would go for that.”
“Maybe. After my term is over, you mean.”
“Or even before. On breaks, like these other trips. They’ve all been analogs to construction, they haven’t been construction itself. Building actual things. You have to try that, then go back and forth between the two.”
“Conflict of interest.”
“Not if it was a public-works project. What about that proposal to build a global capital down at sea level?”
“Hmm,” Nadia said. She got out a map, and they pored over it. At the zero-longitude line, the south shore of the northern sea bent out in a little round peninsula, with a crater bay at its center. It was about halfway between Tharsis and Elysium. “We’ll have to go take a look.”
“Yes. Here, come to bed. We’ll talk about it more later. Right now I have another idea.”
Some months later they were flying back from Bradbury Point to Sheffield, and Nadia remembered that conversation with Art. She asked the pilot to land at a little station north of Sklodowska Crater, on the slope of Crater Zm, called Zoom. As they descended on the airstrip they saw to the east a big bay, now covered with ice. Across the bay was the rough mountainous country of Mamers Vallis, and the Deuteronilus Mensae. The bay was an incursion into the Great Escarpment, which was here fairly gentle. Longitude zero. Latitude forty-six degrees north, fairly far north; but the northern winters were mild compared to the south. They could see a lot of the icy sea, lying off a long shoreline. The rounded peninsula surrounding Zoom was high and smooth. The little station on the shore was home to about five hundred people, who were out there building with bulldozer and cranes and dredges and draglines. Nadia and Art got out and sent the plane on, and took a boardinghouse room and spent about a week with the people there, talking about the new settlement. The locals had heard of the proposal to build a new capital city here on the bay; some of them liked the idea, some didn’t. They had thought of calling their settlement Greenwich because of its longitude, but they had heard the British didn’t pronounce it “Green Witch,” and they didn’t know how they felt about spelling the town to sound that way and then calling it “Grenich.” Maybe just London, they said. We’ll think of something, they said. The bay itself, they said, had long been called Chalmers Bay.
“Really?” Nadia exclaimed. She laughed. “How perfect.”
She was already very attracted to the landscape: Zoom’s smooth conic apron, the incurve of the big bay; red rock over white ice, and presumably over blue sea, someday. On the days of their visit clouds flowed by constantly, riding the west wind and dappling both land and ice with their shadows— sometimes puffy white cumulus clouds, like galleons, other times scrolled herringbone patterns unrolling overhead, defining the dark dome of sky above them, and the curving rocky land under them. It could be a small handsome city, encircling a bay like San Francisco or Sydney, as beautiful as those two but smaller, human scale— Bogdanovist architecture— hand-built. Well, not exactly hand-built, of course. But they could design it at a human scale. And work on it as a kind of work of art. Walking with Art on the shores of the ice bay, Nadia talked through her CO2 mask about these ideas, while watching the parade of clouds gallop by in the low-rushing air.
“Sure,” Art said. “It would work. It’s going to be a city anyway, that’s the important thing. It’s one of the best bays on this stretch of the coast, so it’s bound to be used as a harbor. So you wouldn’t get the kind of capital city that just sits in the middle of nowhere, like Canberra or Brasilia, or Washington, D.C. It’ll have a whole other life as a seaport.”
“That’s right. That would be great.” Nadia walked on, excited as she thought about it, feeling better than she had in months. The movement to establish a capital somewhere else than Sheffield was strong, supported by almost every party up there. This bay had already been proposed as a site by the Sabishiians, so it would be a matter of supporting an already-existing idea, rather than forcing a new one on people. The support would be there. And as a public-works project, building it would be something she could take full part in. Part of the gift economy. She might even be able to have an influence on the plan of it. The more she thought about it, the more pleased she got.
They had walked far down the shore of the bay; they turned around and began to walk back to the little settlement. Clouds tumbled over them on a stiff wind. The curve of red land made its greeting to the sea. Just under the cloud layer, a ragged V of honking geese fletched the wind, heading north.
• • •
Later that day, as they flew back to Sheffield, Art picked up her hand and held it, inspecting her new finger. He said slowly, “You know, building a family would also be a very hands-on kind of construction.”
“What?”
“And they’ve got reproduction pretty much figured out.”
“What?”
“I said, as long as you’re alive, you can pretty much have children, one way or another.”
“What?”
“That’s what they say. If you wanted to, you could do it.”
“No.”
“That’s what they say.”
“No.”
“It’s a good idea.”
“No.”
“Well, you know, even building . . . it’s great, sure, but you can only go on plumbing for so long. Plumbing, hammering nails, bulldozing— it’s all interesting enough, of course, I guess, but still. We have a lot of time to fill. And the only work really interesting enough to pursue over the long haul would be raising a kid, don’t you think?”
“No I do not!”
“But did you ever have a kid?”
“No.”
“Well there you go.”
“Oh God.”
Her ghost finger was tingling. But now it was really there.
Part Eight
The Green and the White r />
Cadres came to the town Xiazha, in Guangzhou, and said, For the good of China we need you to recreate this village on Moon Plateau, Mars. You’ll go there together, the whole village. You’ll have your family and your friends and neighbors with you. Ten thousand of you all together. In ten years if you decide you want to come back, you can, and replacements will be sent to the new Xiazha. We think you will like it. It’s a few kilometers north of the harbor town of Nilokeras, near the Maumee River delta. The land is fertile. There are other Chinese villages already in that region, and Chinese sections in all the big cities. There are many hectares of empty land. The trip can begin in a month— train to Hong Kong, ferry to Manila, and then up the space elevator into orbit. Six months crossing the space between here and Mars, down their elevator to Pavonis Mons, a party train to Moon Plateau. What do you say? Let’s have a unanimous vote and start things off on the right foot.
Later a clerk in the town called up the Praxis office in Hong Kong, and told an operator there what had happened. Praxis Hong Kong sent the information along to Praxis’s demographic study group in Costa Rica. A planner there named Amy added the report to a long list of similar reports, and sat thinking for a morning. That afternoon she made a call to Praxis chairman emeritus William Fort, who was surfing a new reef in El Salvador. She described the situation to him. “The blue world is full,” he said, “the red world is empty. There’s going to be problems. Let’s talk about them.”
The demographics group and part of the Praxis policy team, including many of the Eighteen Immortals, gathered in Fort’s hillside surf camp. The demographers laid out the situation. “Everyone is getting the longevity treatment now,” Amy said. “We are fully into the hypermalthusian age.”
It was a demographically explosive situation. Naturally emigration to Mars was often seen by Terran government planners as one solution to the problem. Even with its new ocean, Mars still had almost as much land area as Earth, and hardly any people. The really populous nations, Amy told the group, were already sending up as many people as they could. Often the emigrants were members of ethnic or religious minorities who were dissatified with their lack of autonomy in their home countries, and so were happy to leave. In India the elevator cars of the cable that touched down at Suvadiva Atoll, south of the Maldives, were constantly at capacity, full of emigrants all day every day, a stream of Sikhs and Kashmiris and Muslims and also Hindus, ascending into space and moving to Mars. There were Zulus from South Africa. Palestinians from Israel. Kurds from Turkey. Native Americans from the United States. “In that sense,” Amy said, “Mars is becoming the new America.”