We’ll give it a try, the little red people said. But we’re all going to have to shout at the top of our telepathic voices, all in chorus, because these folks just aren’t listening.
I’ve faced that for nine centuries now, the Dalai Lama said. You get used to it. And you little ones have the advantage of numbers. So give it a try.
And so all the little red people all over Mars looked up and took a deep breath.
Art Randolph was having the time of his life.
Not during the battle for Sheffield, of course – that had been a disaster, a breakdown of diplomacy, the failure of everything Art had been trying to do – a miserable few days, in fact, during which he had run around sleeplessly trying to meet with every group he thought might help defuse the crisis, and always with the feeling that it was somehow his fault, that if he had done things right it would not have happened. The fight went right to the brink of torching Mars, as in 2061; for a few hours on the afternoon of the Red assault, it had teetered.
But fallen back. Something – diplomacy, or the realities of battle (a defensive victory for those on the cable), common sense, sheer chance – something had tipped things back from the edge.
And with that nightmare interval past, people had returned to East Pavonis in a thoughtful mood. The consequences of failure had been made clear. They needed to agree on a plan. Many of the radical Reds were dead, or escaped into the outback, and the moderate Reds left in East Pavonis, while angry, were at least there. It was a very uncomfortable and uncertain period. But there they were.
So once again Art began flogging the idea of a constitutional congress. He ran around under the big tent through warrens of industrial warehouses and storage zones and concrete dormitories, down broad streets crowded with a museum’s worth of heavy vehicles, and everywhere he urged the same thing: constitution. He talked to Nadia, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Maya, Peter, Ariadne, Rashid, Tariki, Nanao, Sung and H. X. Bor-azjani. He talked to Vlad and Ursula and Marina, and to the Coyote. He talked to a few score young natives he had never met before, all major players in the recent unrest; there were so many of them it began to seem like a textbook demonstration of the polycephalous nature of mass social movements. And to every head of this new hydra Art made the same case: ‘A constitution would legitimate us to Earth, and it would give us a framework for settling disputes among ourselves. And we’re all gathered here, we could start right away. Some people have plans ready to look at.’ And with the events of the past week fresh in their minds, people would nod and say, ‘Maybe so,’ and wander off thinking about it.
Art called up William Fort and told him what he was doing, and got an answer back later the same day. The old man was at a new refugee town in Costa Rica, looking just as distracted as always. ‘Sounds good,’ he said. And after that Praxis people were checking with Art daily to see what they could do to help organize things. Art became busier than he had ever been, doing what the Japanese there called nema-washi, the preparations for an event: starting strategy sessions for an organizing group, revisiting everyone he had spoken to before, trying, in effect, to talk to every individual on Pavonis Mons. ‘The John Boone method,’ Coyote commented with his cracked laugh. ‘Good luck!’
Sax, packing his few belongings for the diplomatic mission to Earth, said, ‘You should invite the, the United Nations.’
Sax’s adventure in the storm had knocked him back a bit; he tended to stare around at things, as if stunned by a blow to the head. Art said gently, ‘Sax, we just went to a lot of trouble to kick their butts off this planet.’
‘Yes,’ Sax said, staring at the ceiling. ‘But now co-opt them.’
‘Co-opt the UN!’ Art considered it. Co-opt the United Nations: it had a certain ring to it. It would be a challenge, diplomatically speaking.
Just before the ambassadors left for Earth, Nirgal came to the Praxis offices to say goodbye. Embracing his young friend, Art was seized with a sudden irrational fear. Off to Earth!
Nirgal was as blithe as ever, his dark brown eyes alight with anticipation. After saying goodbye to the others in the outer office, he sat with Art in an empty corner room of the warehouse.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Art asked.
‘Very sure. I want to see Earth.’
Art waggled a hand, uncertain what to say.
‘Besides,’ Nirgal added, ‘someone has to go down there and show them who we are.’
‘None better for that than you, my friend. But you’ll have to watch out for the metanats. Who knows what they’ll be up to. And for bad food – those areas affected by the flood are sure to have problems with sanitation. And disease vectors. And you’ll have to be careful about sunstroke, you’ll be very susceptible—’
Jackie Boone walked in. Art stopped his travel advisory; Nirgal was no longer listening in any case, but watching Jackie with a suddenly blank expression, as if he had put on a Nirgal mask. And of course no mask could do justice to Nirgal, because the mobility of his face was its essential characteristic; so he did not look like himself at all.
Jackie, of course, saw this instantly. Shut off from her old partner … naturally she glared at him. Something had gone awry, Art saw. Both of them had forgotten Art, who would have slipped out of the room if he could have, feeling as if he was holding a lightning rod in a storm. But Jackie was still standing in the doorway, and Art did not care to disturb her at that moment.
‘So you’re leaving us,’ she said to Nirgal.
‘It’s just a visit.’
‘But why? Why now? Earth means nothing to us now.’
‘It’s where we came from.’
‘It is not. We came from Zygote.’
Nirgal shook his head. ‘Earth is the home planet. We’re an extension of it, here. We have to deal with it.’
Jackie waved a hand in disgust, or bafflement: ‘You’re leaving just when you’re needed here the most!’
Think of it as an opportunity.’
‘I will,’ she snapped. He had made her angry. ‘And you won’t like it.’
‘But you’ll have what you want.’
Fiercely she said, ‘You don’t know what I want!’
The hair on the back of Art’s neck had raised; lightning was about to strike. He would have said he was an eavesdropper by nature, almost a voyeur in fact; but standing right there in the room was not the same, and he found now there were some things he did not care to witness. He cleared his throat. The other two were startled by his noise. With a waggle of the hand he sidled past Jackie and out of the door. Behind him the voices went on – bitter, accusatory, filled with pain and baffled fury.
Coyote stared gravely out of the windshield as he drove the ambassadors to Earth south to the elevator, with Art sitting beside him. They rolled slowly through the battered neighbourhoods that bordered the Socket, in the southwest part of Sheffield where the streets had been designed to handle enormous freight container gantries, so that things had an ominous Speeresque quality to them, inhuman and gigantic. Sax was explaining once again to Coyote that the trip to Earth would not remove the travellers from the constitutional congress, that they would contribute by vid, that they would not end up like Thomas Jefferson in Paris, missing the whole thing. ‘We’ll be on Pavonis,’ Sax said, ‘in all the senses that matter.’
‘Then everyone will be on Pavonis,’ Coyote said ominously. He didn’t like this trip to Earth for Sax and Maya and Michel and Nirgal; he didn’t seem to like the constitutional congress; nothing these days pleased him, he was jumpy, uneasy, irritable. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ he would mutter, ‘you mark my words.’
Then