“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 to create changes in the atmosphere and on the surface, 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-1 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 away, they had to start from there.
“Or Argyre Basin.”
“At the very least, keep Argyre dry.”
Art nodded encouragingly. “Combine that kind of preservation with the atmosphere limits set in the Dorsa Brevia document. That’s a five-kilometer breathable ceiling, and there’s a hell of a lot of land above five kilometers that would remain relatively pristine. It won’t take the northern ocean away, but nothing’s going to do that now. Some form of slow ecopoesis is about the best you can hope for at this point, right?”
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 high-wire 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.