‘Even so,’ Mikhail said sharply, ‘if you can’t afford housing, then it is your right to vote that is the bad joke.’
The young natives agreed, as did many others there. So economic or social rights were on the table too, and arguments over how actually to guarantee these rights in practice continued through many a long session. ‘Political, social, it’s all one,’ Nadia said. ‘Let’s make all the rights work.’
So the work went on, both around the big table and in the offices where the subgroups were meeting. Even the UN was there, in the person of Donald Hastings himself, who had come down the elevator and was participating vigorously in the debates, his opinion always carrying a peculiar kind of weight. He even began to exhibit symptoms of hostage syndrome, Art thought, becoming more and more sympathetic the more he stood around in the warehouse arguing with people. And this might affect his superiors on Earth as well.
Comments and suggestions were also pouring in from all over Mars, and from Earth as well, filling several screens covering one wall of the big room. Interest in the congress was high everywhere, rivalling even Earth’s great flood in the public’s attention. ‘The soap opera of the moment,’ Art said to Nadia. Every night the two of them met in their little office suite, and put in their call to Nirgal and the rest. The delays in the travellers’ responses got longer and longer, but Art and Nadia didn’t really mind; there was a lot to think about while waiting for Sax and the others’ part of the conversation to arrive.
‘This global versus local problem is going to be hard,’ Art said one night. ‘It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result of confused thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want freedom for the tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in contradiction.’
‘Maybe the Swiss system,’ Nirgal suggested a few minutes later. ‘That’s what John Boone always used to say.’
But the Swiss on Pavonis were not encouraging about this idea. ‘A counter-model rather,’ Jurgen said, making a face. ‘The reason I’m on Mars is the Swiss federal government. It stifles everything. You need a licence to breathe.’
‘And the cantons have no power any more,’ Priska said. ‘The federal government took it away.’
‘In some of the cantons,’ Jurgen added, ‘this was a good thing.’
Priska said, ‘More interesting than Berne might be the Graubunden. That means Grey League. They were a loose confederation of towns in southeast Switzerland, for hundreds of years. A very successful organization.’
‘Could you call up whatever you can get on that?’ Art said.
The next night he and Nadia looked over descriptions of the Graubunden that Priska had sent over. Well … there was a certain simplicity to affairs during the Renaissance, Art thought. Maybe that was wrong, but somehow the extremely loose agreements of the little Swiss mountain towns did not seem to translate well to the densely interpenetrated economies of the Martian settlements. The Graubunden hadn’t had to worry about generating unwanted changes in atmospheric pressure, for instance. No – the truth was, they were in a new situation. There was no historical analogy that would be much help to them now.
‘Speaking of global versus local,’ Irishka said, ‘what about the land outside the tents and covered canyons?’ She was emerging as the leading Red remaining on Pavonis, a moderate who could speak for almost all wings of the Red movement, therefore becoming quite a power as the weeks passed. ‘That’s most of the land on Mars, and all we said at Dorsa Brevia is that no individual can own it, that we are all stewards of it together. That’s good as far as it goes, but as the population rises and new towns are built, it’s going to be more and more of a problem figuring out who controls it.’
Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome. Recently he had made a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to attacking what he and Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they were facing, and so in theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes they were just too hard.
As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the global-local problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent. Still, as it was probably the worst outstanding problem …
Art went to the Reds. The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, one of Nirgal and Jackie’s creche-mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their rover camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he was now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big, empty vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.
The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the caldera. They sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments, in the glare of a late afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant, silhouetted country of the caldera.
‘So what would you like to see in this constitution?’ Art said.
He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each other, somewhat taken aback. ‘Ideally,’ Marion said after a while, ‘we’d like to be living on the primal planet, in caves and cliff-dwellings, or excavated crater rings. No big cities, no terraforming.’
‘You’d have to stay suited all the time.’
‘That’s right. We don’t mind that.’
‘Well.’ Art thought it over. ‘Okay, but let’s start from now. Given the situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?’
‘No further terraforming.’
‘The cable gone, and no more immigration.’
‘In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.’
They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his consternation show.
He said, ‘Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this point?’
‘It’s not clear,’ Tiu said. ‘But if you stopped the industrial pumping, any further growth would certainly be very slow. It might even lose ground, as with this ice age that’s starting.’
‘Isn’t that what some people call ecopoesis?’
‘No. The ecopoets just use biological methods, but they’re very intensive with them. We think they all should stop, ecopoets or industrialists or whatever.’
‘But especially the heavy industrial methods,’ Marion said. ‘And most especially the inundation of the north. That’s simply criminal. We’ll blow up those stations no matter what happens here, if they don’t stop.’
Art gestured out at the huge, stony caldera. ‘The higher elevations look pretty much the same, right?’
They weren’t willing to admit that. Irishka said, ‘Even the high ground shows ice deposition and plant life. The atmosphere lofts high here, remember. No place escapes when the winds are strong.’
‘What if we tented the four big calderas?’ Art said. ‘Kept them sterile underneath, with the original atmospheric pressure and mix? Those would be huge wilderness parks, preserved in the true primal state.’
‘Parks are just what they would be.’
‘I know. But we have to work with what we have now, right? We can’t go back to M-l and rerun the whole thing. And given the current situation, it might be good to preserve three or four big places in the original state, or close to it.’
‘It would be nice to have some canyons protected as well,’ Tiu said tentatively. Clearly they had not considered this kind of possibility before; and it was not really satisfactory to them, Art could see. But the current situation could not be wished