“That’s right.” Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those rats were far from home. “Plasticity enhancement. Did you… ?”
“No. I did not.”
So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try the drugs on her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the woman before him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her eye; he had gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of hatred. Ever since their arguments on the Ares, and perhaps before. He had had time to get used to it. Or at least to learn it.
Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her eyes, it was almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but the skin around the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were both maximally wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed musculature. It seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn’t know what to make of it.
“You gave me the gerontological treatment,” she said.
“Yes.”
Should he say he was sorry if he wasn’t? Tongue-tied, lockjawed, he stared at her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that it was all right, that he had done the right thing.
She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. “What are you trying to do now?”
He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as gnomic as a koan. “I’m out looking,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say. Language, all those beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like a flock of startled birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just two animals, standing there in the sun. Look, look, look!
She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she looking daggers at him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock; with Ann that surely indicated progress.
But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the little seaport at Zed.
Sax returned to Da Vinci Craterfeeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were having their annual Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year’s representatives to the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. After the ritual of names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these jobs for the previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, and, for most of them, celebrated once again having been passed over.
The random selection method for Da Vinci’s administrative jobs had been adapted because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically, after all their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of self-management, the Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work involved. They only wanted to do their research. “We should give the administration entirely to AIs,” Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year, between sips from a foaming stein of beer. Aonia, last year’s representative to the duma, was saying to this year’s selection, “You go to Man-gala and sit around arguing, and the staff does what work there is. Most of it has been drained off to the council or the courts or the parties. It’s Free Mars apparatchiks who are really running this planet. But it’s a really pretty town, nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the winter.”
Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, to near them for comfort. Politics in its most common forn complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happ to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on fc about half an hour, and then they would cycle back to tall ing about work. There was one group doing that ahead; Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered ove and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: appeared they were excited by recent developments in the lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Cor tinuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but took extremely massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages to big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situation This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellei of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusio results to power things.
“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.
“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk wit us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpfu this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s s damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yanand off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave space for emission afterward.”
They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides ; once, but there also had to be a vent for charged partich to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the prol lem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of i which they thought they had solved at last; and whe someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no politic please.”
As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversatior he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature c most scientists and technicians. There was something aboi politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he ha to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and comprc mised, a process that went entirely against the grain of th scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and pre udices were subjective themselves. One could try to regar politics as a kind of science — a long series of experiments i communal living, say, with all the data consistently cor taminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of gove nance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, the changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or principles seemed to have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their experiments and paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all. After repeated experiments it had become clear — on Mars at least — that all these sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.
Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that if they believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time to the exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the self governed. And that took time. “Those who value freedom must make the effort necessary to defend it,” as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew because Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with such inspirational sentiments printed on them. “Science Is Politics by Other Means,” another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.
But in Da Vinci most people did not want to spend their time that way. “Socialism will never succeed,” Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting on yet another sign), “it takes up too many evenings.” So it did; and the solution was to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the lottery method of election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the job oneself someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for the gaiety of this –annual party; people were pouring in and out of the French doors of the commons, onto the open terraces overlooking the crater lake, talking with great animation. Even the drafted ones were beginning to cheer up again, after the solace of kavajava and alcohol, and perhaps the thought that power after all was power; it was an imposition, but the draftees could do some little things that no doubt were occurring to them even now — make trouble for rivals, do favors for people they wanted to impress, etc. So once again the system had worked; they had warm bodies filling the whole polyarchic array, the neighborhood boards, the ag board, the water board, the architectural review board, the project review council, the economic coordination group, the crater council to coordinate all these smaller bodies, the global delegates’ advisory board — all that network of small management bodies that progressive political theorists had been suggesting in one variation or another for centuries, incorporating aspects of the almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on. An experiment in synthesis. And so far it seemed to be working, in the sense that the Da Vinci techs seemed about as self-determined and happy as they had been during the ad hoc underground years, when everything had been done (apparently) by instinct, or, to be more precise, by the general consensus of the (much smaller) population in Da Vinci at that time.