But Nirgal wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of it.
• • •
One day walking the city wall, looking out through the tenting, he watched a group of people standing on a launch-pad at the edge of the cliff, west of town. There were a number of different kinds of single-flier craft: gliders and ultralites that were shot out of a slingshot launcher, and rose inside the thermals that formed in the mornings; smaller hang gliders; and then a variety of new one-person aircraft, which looked like small gliders connected to the undersides of small blimps. These fliers were only a bit longer than the people who climbed into the slings or seats under the glider’s wings. Clearly they were made of ultralight materials; some were transparent and nearly invisible, so that once in the sky it appeared that prone or seated people were floating around on their own. Other machines had been colored, and were visible from kilometers away as strokes of green or blue in the air. The stubby wings had small ultralight jets attached to them, so that the pilots had control of direction and altitude; they were like planes in that respect, but with the added loft of a blimp to make them safer and more versatile; their pilots landed them almost anywhere, and it looked impossible to dive them— to crash, in other words.
The hang gliders, on the other hand, looked as dangerous as ever. The people who used those were the rowdiest members of the flying crowd, Nirgal could see when he went out there— thrill seekers who ran off the edge of the cliff shouting in an adrenalated exhilaration that crackled over the intercoms— they were running off a cliff, after all, and no matter what rig they were strapped to, their bodies still saw what was happening. No wonder their shouts had that special ring!
Nirgal got on the subway and went out to the launchpad, drawn by some quality of the sight. All those people, free in the sky. . . . He was recognized, of course, he shook hands; and accepted an invitation from a group of fliers to go up and see what it was like. The hang gliders offered to teach him to fly, but he laughed and said he would try the little blimpgliders first. There was a two-person blimpglider tethered there, slightly larger than the rest, and a woman named Monica invited him up, fueled the thing, and sat him beside her; and up the launch mast they went, to be released with a jerk into the strong downslope afternoon winds and over the city, now revealed as a small tent filled with greenery, perched on the edge of the northwestern-most of the network of canyons etching the slope of Tharsis.
Flying over Noctis Labyrinthus! The wind keened over the blimp’s taut transparent material, and they bounced unpredictably up and down on the wind, while also rotating horizontally in what seemed an uncontrolled spin; but then Monica laughed and began manipulating the controls before her, and quickly they were proceeding south across the labyrinth, over canyon after canyon making their irregular X intersections. Then over the Compton Chaos, and the torn land of the Illyrian Gate, where it dropped into the upper end of the Marineris Glacier.
“These things’ jets are much more powerful than they need to be,” Monica told him through their headphones. “You can make headway into the wind until it reaches something like two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, although you wouldn’t want to try that. You also use the jets to counteract the blimp’s loft, to get us back down. Here, try it. That’s left jet throttle, that’s right, and here are the stabilizers. The jets are dead easy, it’s using the stabilizer that needs some practicing.”
In front of Nirgal was a complete second set of controls. He put his hands on the jet throttles, gave them pushes. The blimp veered right, then left. “Wow.”
“It’s fly by wire, so if you tell it to do something disastrous, it’ll just cut out.”
“How many hours flying time do you need to learn this?”
“You’re doing it already, right?” She laughed. “No, it takes a hundred hours or so. Depends on what you mean by knowing how to do it. There’s the death mesa between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have relaxed and before they’re really good, so that they get into trouble. But that’s mostly hang gliders anyway. With these, the simulators are just like the real thing, so you can put in your hours on those, and then when you’re actually up here you’ll have it wired even though you haven’t officially reached the flying time limit.”
“Interesting!”
And it was. The intersecting sapped canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, lying under them like an enormous maze; the sudden lifts and drops as the winds tossed them; the loud keening of the wind over their partially enclosed gondola seats. . . . “It’s like becoming a bird!”
“Exactly.”
And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. The heart is pleased by one thing after another.
• • •
After that he spent time in a flight simulator in the city, and several times a week he made a date with Monica or one of her friends, and went out to the cliff’s edge for another lesson. It was not a complicated business, and soon he felt that he could try a flight on his own. They cautioned him to be patient. He kept at it. The simulators felt very much like the real thing; if you tested them by doing something foolish, the seat would tilt and bounce very convincingly. More than once he was told the story of the person who had taken an ultralite into such a disastrous death spiral that the simulator had torn off its mountings and crashed through the glass wall next to it, cutting some bystanders and breaking the flier’s arm.
Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He went to Free Mars meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew every afternoon. As the days passed he discovered that he was dreading the morning meetings; he only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no matter what they said. Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not politics, not like this. Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly he had been living his life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the surface cities about how to live theirs and still have some freedoms, some pleasures. Okay, it had been political, everything was; but it seemed he was not really interested in politics. Or perhaps it was government.
It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives’ leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars— son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage— very hard to oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia.
Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.
So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to ignore their little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from all over the planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles. Many tent towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it possible, and hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an operation in which the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid enough that water was the critical issue, and their requests for a water allotment were pouring in, until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn down a kilometer merely by pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These and a thousand more matters tested the constitution’s many networks for connecting local autonomy to global considerations; the debates would go on forever.
Nirgal, while fundamentally uninte
rested in most of these wrangles, found them yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in Cairo. He had come back from Earth without any official position in the new government or the old party, and one thing he saw going on these days was the struggle to place him— to give him a job with limited power, or, for his backers (or rather Jackie’s opponents) to put him in a position with some real power to it. Some friends advised him to wait and run for the senate when the next elections came, others mentioned the executive council, others party positions, others a post on the GEC. All these jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or another, and when he talked to Nadia on the screens, he could see that he would find them a burden; though she seemed to be hammering away stolidly enough, it was obvious the executive council was distasteful to her. But he kept a straight face and listened closely as people offered their advice.
Jackie herself kept her own council. In meetings where people suggested that Nirgal become a kind of minister-without-portfolio, she regarded him more blankly than usual, which led Nirgal to think that she liked that possibility least of all. She wanted him pinned into some position, which given her current post could not help but be inferior to hers. But if he stayed outside the system entirely. . . .
There she sat, the infant in her arms. It could be his child. And Antar watched her with the same expression, the same thought. No doubt Dao would have as well, if he were still alive. Nirgal was suddenly shaken by a spasm of grief for his half brother, his tormentor, his friend— he and Dao had fought for as far back as he could remember, but they had been brothers for all that.
Jackie had apparently forgotten Dao already, and Kasei as well. As she would forget Nirgal, if he should happen to get killed. She had been among the greens who had ordered the crushing of the Red assault on Sheffield, she had advocated the strong response. Perhaps she had to forget the dead.
The infant cried. Face rounded by fat, it was impossible to see any resemblance to any adult. The mouth looked like Jackie’s. Other than that . . . it was frightening, this power created by anonymous parenting. Of course a man could do the same, obtain an egg, grow it by ectogenesis, raise it himself. No doubt it would begin to happen, especially if many women took Jackie’s route. A world without parents. Well, friends were the real family; but he shuddered nevertheless at what Hiroko had done, what Jackie was doing.
He went flying to clear his mind of all that. One night after a glorious flight in the clouds, sitting in the launchpad pub, the conversation turned and someone mentioned Hiroko’s name. “I hear she’s on Elysium,” someone said, “working on a new commune of communes up there.”
“How did you hear?” Nirgal demanded of the woman, somewhat sharply no doubt.
Surprised, she said, “You know those fliers who dropped in last week who are flying around the world? They were on Elysium last month, and they said they saw her there.” She shrugged. “That’s all I know. Not much by way of confirmation, I know.”
Nirgal sat back in his seat. Always thirdhand information. Some of the stories, however, seemed so like Hiroko; and a few, too Hiroko-like to have been made up. Nirgal did not know what to think. Very few people seemed to think she was dead. Sightings of the rest of her group were reported as well.
“They just wish she were here,” Jackie said when Nirgal mentioned it the next day.
“Don’t you wish it?”
“Of course”—(though she didn’t)—”but not enough to make up stories about it.”
“You really think they’re all made up? I mean, who would do that? What would they be telling themselves when they did it? It doesn’t make sense.”
“People don’t make sense, Nirgal. You have to learn that. People see an elderly Japanese woman somewhere, they think, that looks like Hiroko. That night they tell their roommates, I think I saw Hiroko today. She was down in the marketplace buying plums. The roommate goes to his construction site, says my roommate saw Hiroko yesterday, buying plums!”
Nirgal nodded. It was no doubt true, at least for most of the stories. For the rest, though, the few that didn’t fit that pattern. . . .
“Meanwhile, you have to make a decision about this environmental-court position,” Jackie said. It was a province court, one below the global court. “We can arrange it so that Mem gets a position in the party that will actually be more influential, or you could take that one if you wanted, or both, I suppose. But we have to know.”
“Yeah yeah.”
People came in wanting to talk about something else, and Nirgal withdrew to the window, near the nurse and the infant. He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics, Jackie would say. And it was clear she enjoyed it. But Nirgal did not. It was strange; he had worked all his life for this situation, ostensibly, and now that it was here, he did not like it.
Very possibly he could learn enough to do the work. He would have to overcome the hostility of the people who didn’t want him back in the party, he would have to build his own power base, meaning collecting a group of people who would help him in their official positions; do them favors; curry their favor; play them off against each other, so that each would do his bidding in order to establish preeminence over the others. . . . He could see all these processes at work right there in this very room, as Jackie met with one adviser after the next, discussing whatever issue happened to be their bailiwick, then working them to establish more firmly their allegiance to her. Of course, she would say if he pointed out this process. That was politics; they were in control of Mars now, and this work had to be done if they were to create the new world they had hoped for. One couldn’t be overfastidious, one had to be realistic, you held your nose and did it. It had a certain nobility to it, really. It was the necessary work.
Nirgal didn’t know if those justifications were true or not. Had they really worked all their lives to overthrow Terran domination of Mars, only in order to put in place their own local version of the same thing? Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?
He did not know. He sat in the window seat, looking down at Jackie’s daughter’s face, sleeping. Across the room Jackie was intimidating the Free Mars delegates from Elysium. Now that Elysium was an island surrounded by the northern sea, they were more determined than ever to take control of their fate, including immigration limits that would keep the massif from developing much past its current state. “All very well,” Jackie was saying, “but it’s a very large island now, a continent really, surrounded by water so that it will be especially humid, with a coastline of thousands of kilometers, lots of fine harbor sites, fishing harbors no doubt. I can sympathize with your desire to keep a hand on development, we all feel that, but the Chinese have expressed a particular interest in developing some of these sites, and what am I supposed to say to them? That the Elysian locals don’t like Chinese? That we’ll take their help in a crisis, but we don’t want them moving into the neighborhood?”
“It’s not that they’re Chinese!” the delegate said.
“I understand. Really I do. Tell you what— you go back to South Fossa and explain the difficulties we face here, and I’ll do everything I can here to help you. I can’t guarantee results, but I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks,” the delegate said, and left.
Jackie turned to her assistant. “Idiot. Who’s next. Ah, naturally; the Chinese ambassador. Well, let him in.”
The Chinese, a woman, was quite tall. She spoke in Mandarin, and her AI translated into a clear British English. After an exchange of pleasantries, the woman asked about establishing some Chinese settlements, preferably somewhere in the equatorial provinces.
Nirgal stared, fascinated. This was how settlements had been started from the very beginning; groups of Terran nationals had come up, and built a tent town or a cliff dwelling, or domed a crater. . . . Now, however, Jackie looke
d polite and said, “It’s possible. Everything of course will have to be referred to the environmental courts for judgment. However, there is a great deal of empty land on the Elysium massif. Perhaps something could be arranged there, especially if China was willing to contribute to infrastructure and mitigation and the like.”
They discussed details. After a while the ambassador left.
Jackie turned to look at Nirgal. “Nirgal, could you get Rachel in here? And try to decide what you’re going to do soon, please?”
Nirgal walked out of the building, through the city to his room. He packed his little collection of clothes and toiletries, and took the subway out to the launching pad, and asked Monica for the use of one of the single-person blimpgliders. He was ready for soloing, he had put in enough hours in simulators and with teachers. There was another flight school down in Marineris, on Candor Mensa. He talked to the school officials on the launchpad; they were willing to let him take the blimpglider down there, and have it returned by another flier later.
It was midday. The Tharsis downslope winds had started, and would only get stronger as the afternoon progressed. Nirgal suited up, got into the pilot’s seat. The little blimpglider slid up the launching mast, held by the nose; and was let free.
He rose over Noctis Labyrinthus, turned east. He flew east over the maze of interlocking canyons. A land split open by stress from below. Flight out of the labyrinth. An Icarus who had flown too close to the sun, gotten burned, survived the fall— and now flew again, this time down, down, down, ever down. Taking advantage of a hard tailwind. Riding a gale, shooting down over the shattered dirty ice field that marked Compton Chaos, where the great channel outbreak had begun in 2061. That immense flood had run down Ius Chasma; but Nirgal angled north, away from the glacier’s flow, and then flew east again, down into the head of Tithonium Chasma, which paralleled Ius Chasma just to the north.