Perhaps that was putting it too baldly. The Reds stared down into Pavonis caldera unhappily, thinking their own thoughts.
* * *
‘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 balls 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 highwire 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, massaged 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 Nazik 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 Shiites – 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 Shiites – 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 constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this – what do you think of it?’
Nazik 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 constitution.’
‘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 constitution 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 bitten into something sour, and Art said, ‘So what does he want, do you think?’
‘He is Jackie’s creature,’ Zeyk muttered, ‘nothing more.’
‘I should think that would be a point against him.’
Zeyk shrugged.
‘It depends who you talk to,’ Nazik said. ‘For the older Muslim immigrants, it is a bad association, 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,’ Nazik 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 association 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.
Nazik 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 Nazik 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 constitution 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 good will, even innocence; the college girl