So he shrugged, dismissing her pleasure. On the TV wall the crowds boiled up and down the great avenues. He clenched his teeth a few times. “We’d better get to it again.”
Upstairs the conferees were milling about in a sequence of long high rooms that were divided by tall partitions. Sunlight streamed into the big central room from the eastern meeting chambers, throwing a ruddy glare over the white pile carpet and the squarish teak chairs and the dark pink stone of the long table top. Knots of people were chatting casually against the walls. Maya went off to confer with Samantha and Spencer. The three of them were now the leaders of the MarsFirst coalition, and as such had been invited to the conference as non-voting representatives of the Martian population: the people’s party, the tribunes, and the only ones there actually elected to their positions, although they were there only at Helmut’s sufferance. Helmut had been as inclusive as anyone could ask; he had allowed Ann to attend as a non-voting member representing the Reds, even though they were part of the coalition; Sax was there observing for the terraforming team; and any number of mining and development executives were observing as well. There was a whole crowd of observers, in fact; but the voting members were the only ones to sit at the central table, where Helmut was now ringing a small bell. Fifty-three national representatives and eighteenUN officials took their seats; another hundred continued to wander in the eastern rooms, watching the discussion through the open portals or on small TVs. Outside the windows, Burroughs crawled with figures and vehicles, moving around in the clear-walled mesas, and the tents on and between the mesas, and in the network of connecting clear walktubes that lay on the ground or arched through the air, and in the huge valley tent with its wide streetgrass boulevards and its canals. A little metropolis.
Helmut called the session to order. In the eastern rooms people clustered around the TVs. Frank glanced through a portal into the east room nearest him; there would be rooms like that all over Mars and Earth, thousands of them, with millions of observers. Two worlds watching.
The day’s topic, as it had been for the past two weeks, was emigration quotas. China and India had a joint proposal to make; the head of the Indian office rose and read it in his musical Bombay English. Stripped of camoflage it came down to a proportional system, of course. Chalmers shook his head. India and China between them had forty percent of the world’s population, but they were only two votes of fifty-three at this conference, and their proposal would never pass. The Brit in the European delegation rose to point out this fact, not in so many words of course. Wrangling began. It would go on all morning. Mars was a real prize, and the rich and poor nations of Earth were struggling over it as they were over everything else. The rich had the money but the poor had the people, and the weapons were pretty evenly distributed, especially the new viral vectors that could kill everyone on a continent. Yes, the stakes were high, and the situation existed in the most fragile of balances, the poor surging up out of the south and pressing the northern barriers of law and money and pure military force. Gun barrels in their faces, in essence. But now there were so many faces; a human wave attack might explode at any instant, it seemed, just from the expansive pressure of sheer numbers-attackers shoved over the barricades by the press of babies in the rear, raging for their chance at immortality.
At the midmorning break, with nothing more accomplished, Frank rose from his seat. He had heard little of the wrangle, but he had been thinking, and his lectern’s sketchpad was marked up with a rough schematic. Money, people, land, guns. Old equations, old trade-offs. But it wasn’t originality he was after; it was something that would work.
Nothing would happen at the long table itself, that was certain. Someone had to cut the knot. He got up and wandered over to the Indian and Chinese delegation, a group of about ten conferring in a camera-free side room. After the usual exchange of pleasantries he invited the two leaders, Hanavada and Sung, to take a walk on the observation bridge. After a glance at each other, and quick conversations in Chinese and Hindu with their aides, they agreed.
So the three delegates walked out of the rooms and down the corridors to the bridge, a rigid walktube which began at the wall of their mesa and arched out over the valley and into the side of an even taller mesa to the south. The bridge’s height gave it an airy flying magnificence, and there were quite a few people walking its four kilometers, or just standing midway and taking in the view of Burroughs.
“Look,” Chalmers said to his two colleagues, “the expense of emigration is so great that you will never ease your population problems by moving them here. You know that. And you already have lots more reclaimable land in your own countries. So what you want from Mars isn’t land but resources, or money. Mars is leverage to get your share of resources back home. You’re lagging behind the North because of resources that were taken from you without payment during the colonial years, and you should have repayment for that now.”
“I am afraid that in a very real sense the colonial period never ended,” Hanavada said politely.
Chalmers nodded. “That’s what transnational capitalism means; we’re all colonies now. And there’s tremendous pressure on us here, to alter the treaty so that most of the profits from local mining become the property of the transnationals. The developed nations are feeling that very strongly.”
“This we know,” Hanavada said, nodding.
“Okay. And now you’ve made the pitch for proportional emigration, which is just as logical as alloting profits proportional to investment. But neither of these proposals is in your best interest. The emigration would be a drop in the bucket to you, but the money wouldn’t. Meanwhile the developed nations have a new population problem, so a chance at a larger share of emigration would be welcome. And they can spare the money, which would mostly go to transnationals anyway and become free-floating capital, outside any national control. So why shouldn’t the developed nations give you more of it? It wouldn’t really be coming out of their pocket anyway.”
Sung nodded quickly, looking solemn. Perhaps they had foreseen this response, and had made their proposal to stimulate it, and were waiting for him to play his part. But that just made it easier. “Do you think your governments will agree to such a trade?” Sung asked.
“Yes,” Chalmers said. “What is it but governments reassserting their power over the transnationals? Sharing the profits resembles in a way your old nationalization movements, only this time all countries would benefit. Internationalization, if you will.”
“It will cut down on investments by the corporations,” Hanavaba noted.
“Which will please the Reds,” Chalmers said. “Please most of the MarsFirst group, in fact.”
“And your government?” Hanavaba asked.
“I can guarantee it.” Actually the administration would be a problem. But Frank would deal with them when the time came, they were a bunch of Chamber of Commerce kids these days, arrogant but stupid. Tell them it was this or a third world Mars, a Chinese Mars, a Hindu Chinese Mars, with little brown people and cows unmolested in the walktubes. They would come around. In fact they would hide behind his knees yelling for protection, Grandpa Chalmers please save me from the yellow horde.
He watched the Indian and the Chinese look at each other, in a completely scrutable consultation. “Hell,” he said, “this is what you were hoping for, right?”
“Perhaps we should work on some figures,” Hanavaba said.