Red Mars (65 page)

On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new President would give him a meeting as well. Meanwhile message after message, back and forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhausting. The case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and a lot of them were bent.

Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd— it was a physical wave that passed through him. The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.

Once resettled in Sheffield, he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different rates. At one point, late in the northern autumn, he was engaged in about fifty conferences simultaneously; it was like those people who play chess blind with a room full of opponents. Three weeks of this, however, and it began to come around, basically because President Incaviglia himself was extremely interested in getting any leverage he could over Amex and Mitsubishi and Armscor. He was more than willing to leak to the media his intent to look into allegations of treaty violations.

He did that, and stocks fell sharply in the relevant quarters. And two days later, the elevator consortium announced that enthusiasm for Martian opportunities had been so great that demand had exceeded supply for the time being. They would raise prices, of course, as their creed required; but they would also have to slow down emigration temporarily, until more towns and robotic townbuilders had been constructed.

Frank first heard this on a bar TV news report, one evening in a café over his solitary dinner. He grinned wolfishly as he chewed. “So we see who’s better at wrestling in quicksand, you bitch.” He finished eating and went for a walk along the rim concourse. It was only one battle, he knew. And it was going to be a bitter long war. But still, it was nice.

Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted, and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in. The Russians next door did the same.

A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the background. Apparently both groups were employed by the road-building subdivision of Armscor, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric and killed three men in each tent, and knifed a bunch of others. The Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii’s security force, a small army that was mostly Korean. In any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil. They had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside to leave. The inhabitants had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed. The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.

Enraged and disgusted, Frank went down again to deal with it in person. He had to ignore not only the standard objections of his staff, but also the new factor’s prohibition (Helmut had been called back to Earth). Once at the station he also had to face down the UNOMA police head, no easy task. Never before had he tried to rely so heavily on the charisma of the first hundred, and it made him furious. In the end he had to simply walk through the policemen, a crazy old man striding through all civilized restraint. And no one there cared to stop him, not this time.

The crowd inside the tent looked ugly indeed on the monitors, but he banged on their passage lock door and finally was let in, into a crush of angry young men and women. He walked through the inner lock door and breathed hot stale air. So many people were shouting he could make nothing out, but the ones in front recognized him and were clearly surprised to see him there. A couple of them cheered.

“All right! I’m here!” he shouted. “Who speaks for you?”

They had no spokesperson. He swore viciously. “What kind of fools are you? You’d better learn to operate the system, or you’ll be in bags like this one forever. Bags like this or else bodybags.”

Several people shouted things at him, but most wanted to hear what he would say. And still no sign of a spokes-person, so Chalmers shouted, “All right, I’ll talk to all of you! Sit down so I can see who’s speaking!”

They would not sit, but they did stand without moving, in a group around him, there on the tattered astroturf of the tent’s main square. Chalmers balanced himself on an upturned box in the middle of them. It was late afternoon and they cast shadows far down the slope to the east, into the tents below. He asked what had happened, and various voices described the midnight attack, the skirmish in the station.

“You were provoked,” he said when they were done. “They wanted you to make some fool move and you did, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. They’ve gotten you to kill some third parties that had nothing to do with the attack on you, and now you’re the murderers the police have caught! You were stupid!”

The crowd murmured and swore at him angrily, but some were taken aback. “Those so-called police were in on it too!” one of them said loudly.

“Maybe so,” Chalmers said, “but it was corporate troops that attacked you, not some random Japanese on a rampage. You should have been able to tell the difference, you should have bothered to find out! As it is you played into their hands, and the UNOMA police were happy to go along, they’re on the other side right now, at least some of them. But the national armies are shifting over to
your
side! So you’ve got to learn to cooperate with them, you’ve got to figure out who your allies are, and act accordingly! I don’t know why there are so few people on this planet capable of doing that. It’s like the passage from Earth scrambles the brain or something.”

Some laughed a startled laugh. Frank asked them about conditions in the tents. They had the same complaints as the others had, and again he could anticipate, and say it for them. Then he described the result of his trip to Clarke. “I got a moratorium on emigration, and that means more than just time to build more towns. It means the start of a new phase between the U.S. and the U.N. They finally figured it out in Washington that the U.N. is working for the transnationals, and so they need to enforce the treaty themselves. It’s in Washington’s best interest, and they’re the only ones that’ll do it. The treaty is part of the battle now, the battle between people and the transnationals. You’re in that battle and you’ve been attacked, and you have to figure out who to attack back, and how to connect up with your allies!”

They were looking grim at this, which showed sense, and Frank said, “Eventually we’re going to win, you know. There’s more of us than them.”

So much for the carrot, such as it was. As for the stick, that was always easy with people as powerless as these. “Look, if the national governments can’t calm things down quick, if there’s more unrest here and things start coming apart, they’ll say the hell with it— let the transnats solve their labor problems themselves, they’ll be more efficient at it. And you know what that means for you.”

“We’re sick of this!” one man shouted.

“Of course you are,” he said. He pointed a finger. “So do you have a plan to bring it to an end, or not?”

It took a while to rachet them into agreement. Disarm, cooperate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect. Of course it took a while. And along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and did it. He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

He left to cheers.

Maya was out there in the station. Exhausted, he could only stare at her in disbelief. She had been watching him over the video, she said. Frank shook his head, the fools inside hadn’t even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their existence. So the world had seen it all. And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism. Which to her it no doubt was. In fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president! So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently.

She asked him to accompany her, and he was too exhausted to run a cost/benefit analysis of the act. With a twist of the mouth he agreed. It was easier just to tag along.

They took the train down to the next station, made their way through the police and inside. The Russian tent was packed like a circuit board. “You’re going to have a harder job of it than I did,” Frank said as he looked around.

“Russians are used to it,” she said. “These tents aren’t that different from Moscow apartments.”

“Yes, yes.” Russia had become a kind of immense Korea, sporting the same brutal streamlined capitalism, perfectly Taylorized and with a veneer of democracy and consumer goods covering the junta. “It’s amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”

“Frank, please.”

“Just remember that and it will go okay.”

“Are you going to help or not?” she demanded.

“Yes, yes.”

The central square smelled of bean curd and borscht and electrical fires, and the crowd was much more unruly and loud than in the American tent, everyone there a defiant leader, ready to unleash a declamation. A lot more of them were women than in the American tent. They had unpisted a train and this had galvanized them, they were anxious for more action. Maya had to use a hand megaphone, and all the time that she stood on a chair and talked, the crowd swirled around them and participants in several loud arguments ignored her, as if she were a cocktail-lounge pianist.

Frank’s Russian was rusty, and he couldn’t understand most of what the crowd shouted at Maya, but he followed her replies pretty well. She was explaining the emigration moratorium, the bottleneck in town robot production and in water supplies, the necessity for discipline, the promise of a better life to come if all was enacted in an orderly fashion. He supposed it was a classic babushka harangue, and it had the effect of pacifying them somewhat, as there was a strong reactionary streak in many Russians now; they remembered what social unrest really meant, and were justifiably afraid of it. And there was a lot to promise, it all seemed plausible: big world, few people, lots of material resources, some good robot designs, computer programs, gene templates. . . .

In one really loud moment of the discussion he said to her in English, “Remember the stick.”

“What?” she snapped.

“The stick. Threaten them. Carrot and stick.”

She nodded. Into the megaphone again: the never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact of the poisonous air, the deadly cold. They were alive only because of the tents, and the input of electricity and water. Vulnerable in ways they hadn’t fully thought out, in ways that didn’t exist back home.

She was quick, she always had been. Back to promises. Back and forth, stick and carrot, a jerk on the leash, some niblets. Eventually the Russians too were pacified.

Afterward on the train up to Sheffield Maya gabbled with nervous relief, face flushed, eyes brilliant, hand clutching his arm as she threw her head back abruptly and laughed. That nervous intelligence, that arresting physical presence. . . He must have been exhausted himself, or more shaken than he had realized by the time in the tents, or maybe it was the encounter with Phyllis; because he felt himself warming to her, it was like stepping into a sauna after a freezing day outside, with that same sense of relief from vigilance, of penetrating ease. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she was saying rapidly, “really you are so good in those situations, so clear and firm and sharp. They believe you because you don’t try to flatter them or soften the truth.”

“That’s what works best,” he said, looking out the window at the tents running by. “Especially when you’re flattering them and lying to them.”

“Oh Frank.”

“It’s true. You’re good at it yourself.”

This was an example of the trope under discussion, but Maya didn’t see it. There was a name for that in rhetoric, but he couldn’t recall it. Metonymy? Synecdoche? But she only laughed and squeezed his shoulder, leaning against him. As if the fight in Burroughs had never happened, not to mention everything before that. And in Sheffield she ignored her stop, and got off the train with him at his stop, walking at his shoulder through the spaciousness of the rim station, and then to his rooms, where she stripped and showered and put on one of his jumpers, chattering all the while about the day and the situation at large, as if they did this all the time: went out to dinner, soup, trout, salad, a bottle of wine, every night sure! Leaning back in their chairs, drinking coffee and brandy. Politicians after a day of politics. The leaders.