They certainly seemed as happy; out on the terraces they were lining up at big pots of kavajava and Irish coffee, or kegs of beer, clumped in talkative groups so that the clatter of voices was like the sound of waves, as at any cocktail party: an amazing sound, those voices all together. A chorus of talk — it was a music that no one consciously listened to but Sax, as far as he could tell; but as he listened to it he suspected strongly that the sound of it, heard unconsciously, was one of the things that made people at parties so happy and gregarious. Get two hundred people together, talking loudly so that each conversation could be heard only by its small group: such a music they made!
So running Da Vinci was a successful experiment, despite the fact that the citizens showed no interest in it. If they had they might have been less happy. Maybe ignoring government was a good strategy. Maybe the definition of good government was the government you could safely ignore, “to finally get back to my own work!” as one happily buzzed ex-water-board chief was just now saying. Self-government not being considered part of one’s own work!
Although of course there were those people who did like the work, something about the interplay of theory and practice, the argument, the problem solving, the collaboration with other people, the service to others as a kind of gift, the endless talk; the power. And these people stayed on to serve two terms, or three if they were allowed, and then took on some other volunteer task that was going a-begging; indeed, most of these people did more than one task at once. Bela, for instance, had claimed not to like the chairmanship of the lab of labs, but now he was going directly into the volunteer advisory group, which always had a number of spots in danger of being unfilled. Sax wandered over to him: “Would you agree with Aonia that Free Mars is dominating global policy?”
“Oh undoubtedly, assuredly. They are simply so big. And they have packed the courts, and rigged some things their way. I think they want to control all the new asteroid colonies. And to conquer Earth too, for that matter. All the politically ambitious young natives are joining the party, like bees to the flower.”
“Trying to dominate other settlements…”
“Yes?”
“It sounds like trouble.”
“Yes it does.”
“Have you heard about this lightweight fusion engine they’re talking about?”
“Yes, a little.”
“You might look into backing that a bit more. If we could get engines like that into spaceships…”
“Yes? Sax?”
“Transport that fast might have the effect of cracking domination by any one party.”
“Do you think so?”
“Well, it would make it a hard situation to control.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Hmm, well, I must think about this further.”
“Yes. Science is politics by other means, remember.”
“Indeed it is! Indeed it is.” And Bela went off to the beer kegs, muttering to himself, then greeting another group as they approached him.
So spontaneously there emerged that bureaucratic class that had been the terror of so many political theorists: the experts who took control of the polity, and supposedly would never relinquish their grip. But to whom would they relinquish it? Who else wanted it? No one, as far as Sax could tell. Bela could stay on the advirsory board forever if he wanted to. Expert, from the Latin experiri, to try. As in experiment. So it was government by the experimenters.
Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So yet another kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you had to draft members into the governing body, then the notion of self-government as an aspect of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical.
Hector and Sylvia, from Bao’s seminar, broke into Sax’s reverie and invited him to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs from Maria dos Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them.
Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to take place, Sax stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of kava. The festival spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia hurried down to get ready, glowing with anticipation. Watching them Sax remembered his recent encounter with Ann. If only he had been able to think! Why, he had gone completely incoherent! If only he had thought to become Stephen Lindholm again, perhaps that would have helped. Where was Ann now, what was she thinking? What had she been doing? Did she only wander the face of Mars now, like a ghost, moving from one Red station to another? What were the Reds doing now, how did they live? Had they been about to bomb Da Vinci, had his chance encounter stopped a raid? No no. There were ecoteurs still out there monkey-wrenching projects, but with the legal limits on terraform-ing, most Reds had rejoined society somehow; it was one mainstream political strand among the rest, vigilant, quick to litigate — indeed much more interested in taking on political work than less ideological citizens — but still, and by that very tendency, normalized. Where then would Ann fit in? With whom did she associate?
Well, he could call her and ask.
But he was afraid to call, afraid to ask. Afraid to talk to her! At least by wrist. And apparently in person as well. She had not said what she thought of him giving her the treatment against her will. No thanks, no curse; nothing. What did she think? What was she thinking?
He sighed, sipped his kava. Down below they were beginning, Hector rolling out a recitative in Spanish, his voice so musical and expressive it was almost as if Sax could understand him by tone of voice alone.
Ann, Ann, Ann. This obsessive interest in someone else’s thought was so uncomfortable. So much easier to concentrate on the planet, on rock and air, on biology. It was a ploy Ann herself would understand. And there was in ecopoesis something fundamentally intriguing. The birth of a world. Out of their control. Still he wondered what she made of it. Perhaps he would run into her again.
Meanwhile, the world. He went back out on it again. Rumpled land under the blue dome of the sky. The ordinary sky at the equator in spring changed color day by day, it took a color chart even to approximate the tone colors; some days it was a deep violet blue — clematis blue, or hyacinth blue, or lapis lazuli, or a purplish indigo. Or Prussian blue, a pigment made from ferric ferrocyanide, interestingly, as there was certainly a lot of ferric material up there. Iron blue. Slightly more purple than Himalayan skies as seen in photographs, but otherwise like the Terran skies seen at those high altitudes. And combined with the rocky indented landscape, it did seem like a high-altitude place. Everything: the sky color, the rumpled rock, the cold thin air so pure and chill. Everything so high. He walked into the wind, or across the wind, or with the wind at his back, and each felt different. In his nostrils the wind was like a mild intoxicant, flooding the brain. He stepped on lichen-crusted rocks, from slab to slab, as if walking on a personal sidewalk appearing magically out of the shatter of the land, up and down, every step just a step, wandering attentive to the thisness of each moment. Moment to moment to moment, each one discrete, like Bao’s loops of timespace, like the successive positions of a finch’s head, the little birds plancking from one quantum pose to the next. It appeared on close inspection that moments were not regular units but varied in duration, depending on what was happening in them. The wind dropped, no birds in sight: everything suddenly still, and oh so silent, except for the buzzing of insects; those moments could last several seconds each. Whereas when sparrows were dogfighting a crow, the moments were nearly instantaneous. Look very closely; sometimes it was a flow, sometimes the planck-planck-planck of individual stillnesses.