The woman who had been holding the girl came out and told Nirgal that Jackie would like to speak with him. He followed the woman into the next room.
The room had a picture window overlooking Nilus Noc-tis. Jackie was seated in a window seat, nursing the child and looking at the view. The child was hungry; eyes closed, latched on, sucking hard, squeaking. Tiny fists clenched in some kind of arboreal remnant behavior, clutching to branch or fur. That was all culture, right there in that clutch. Jackie was issuing instructions, to aides both in the room and on her wrist. “No matter what they say in Bern, we need to have the flexibility to dampen the quotas if we need to. The Indians and Chinese will just have to get used to it.”
Some things began to clarify for Nirgal. Jackie was on the executive council, but the council was not particularly powerful. She was also still one of the leaders of the Free Mars party; and although Free Mars might have less influence on the planet, as power shifted out into the tents, in Earth-Mars relations it had the potential to become a determining body. Even if it only coordinated policy, it would gain all the power that a coordinator could command, which was considerable — it was all the power Nirgal had ever had, after all. In many situations such coordination could be the equivalent of making Mars’s Terran policy, as all the local governments attended to their local concerns, and the global legislature was more and more dominated by a Free Mars-led supermajority. And of course there was a sense in which the Earth-Mars relationship had the potential to dwarf everything else. So that Jackie might be on the way to becoming an interplanetary power…
Nirgal’s attention returned to the baby at her breast. The princess of Mars. “Have a seat,” Jackie said, indicating the bench beside her with her head. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine,” Nirgal said, but sat. Jackie looked up at one of the aides and jerked her head to the side, and very soon they were alone in the room with the infant.
“The Chinese and Indians are thinking of this as empty new land,” Jackie said. “You can see it in everything they say. They’re too damned friendly.”
“Maybe they like us,” Nirgal said. Jackie smiled, but he went on: “We helped them get the metanats off their backs. And they can’t be thinking of moving their excess population here. There’s just too many of them for emigration to make any difference.”
“Maybe so, but they can dream. And with space elevators they can send a steady stream. It adds up quicker than you would think.” Nirgal shook his head. “It’ll never be enough.”
“How do you know? You didn’t go to either place.”
“A billion is a big number, Jackie. Too big a number for us to properly imagine. And Earth has got seventeen billion. They can’t send a significant fraction of that number here, there aren’t the shuttles to do it.”
“They might try anyway. The Chinese flooded Tibet with Han Chinese, and it didn’t do a thing to relieve their population problems, but they kept doing it anyway.”
Nirgal shrugged. “Tibet is right there. We’ll keep our distance.”
“Yes,” Jackie said impatiently, “but that’s not going to be easy when there is no we. If they go out to Margaritifer, and cut a deal with the Arab caravans out there, who’s going to stop it from happening?”
“The environmental courts?”
Jackie blew air between her lips, and the baby pulled off and whimpered. Jackie shifted the infant to the other breast. Blue-veined olive curve. “ Antar doesn’t think the environmental courts will be able to function for long. We had a fight with them while you were gone, and we only went along with them to give the process a chance, but they made no sense and they had no teeth. And everything everyone does has an environmental impact, so supposedly they should be judging everything. But tents are coming down in the lower elevations and not one in a hundred is going to the courts to ask permission for what they do once their town is part of the outside. Why should they? Everyone is an ecopoet now. No. The court system isn’t going to work.”
“You can’t be sure,” Nirgal said. “So is Antar the father, then?”
Jackie shrugged.
Anyone could be the father — Antar, Dao, Nirgal himself, hell John Boone could be, if any sample of his sperm had happened to be still in storage. That would be like Jackie; except she would have told everyone. She shifted the infant’s head toward her.
“Do you really think it’s all right to raise a fatherless child?”
“That’s how you were raised, right? And I had no mother. We were all one-parent children.” “But was that good?” “Who knows?”
There was a look on Jackie’s face that Nirgal could not read, her mouth just slightly tight with resentment, defiance… impossible to say. She knew who both her parents were, but only one had stuck around, and Kasei had not been much around at that. And killed in Sheffield, in part because of the brutal response to the Red assault that Jackie herself had advocated.
She said, “You didn’t know about Coyote until you were six or seven, isn’t that right?”
“True, but not right.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t right.” And he looked her in the eye.
But she looked away, down at the baby. “Better than having your parents tearing each other up in front of you.”
“Is that what you would do with the father?”
“Who knows?”
“So it’s safer this way.”
“Maybe it is. Certainly there’s a lot of women doing it this way.”
“In Dorsa Brevia.”
“Everywhere. The biological family isn’t really a Martian institution, is it.”
“I don’t know.” Nirgal considered it. “Actually, I saw a lot of families in the canyons. We come from an unusual group in that respect.”
“In many respects.”
Her child pulled away, and Jackie tucked her breast in her bra and let down her shirt. “Marie?” she called, and her assistant entered. “I think her diaper needs changing.” And she handed the infant up to the woman, who left without a word.
“Servants now?” Nirgal said.
Jackie’s mouth went tight again, and she stood, calling “Mem?”
Another woman came in, and Jackie said, “Mem, we’re going to have to meet with those environmental court people about this Chinese request. It could be that we can use it as leverage to get the Cairo water allotment reconsidered.”
Mem nodded and left the room.
“You just make the decisions?” Nirgal said.
Jackie dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Nice to have you back, Nirgal, but try to catch up, all right?”
Catch up. Free Mars was now a political party, the biggest on Mars. It had not always been that way; it had begun as something more like a network of friends, or the part of the underground that lived in the demimonde. Mostly ex-students of the university in Sabishii, or, later, the members of a very loose association of communities in the tented canyons, and in clandestine clubs in the cities, and so forth. A kind of vague umbrella term for those sympathetic to the underground, but not followers of any more specific political movement or philosophy. Just something they said, in fact — “free Mars.”
In many ways it had been Nirgal’s creation. So many of the natives had been interested in autonomy, and the various issei parties, based on the thoughts of one early settler or another, did not appeal to them; they had wanted something new. And so Nirgal had traveled around the planet, and stayed with people who organized meetings or discussions, and this had gone on for so long that eventually people wanted a name. People wanted names for things.
And so, Free Mars. And in the revolution it had become a rallying point for the natives, rising up out of society as a kind of emergent phenomenon, with many more people declaring themselves members than one would have guessed possible. Millions. The native majority. The very definition of the revolution, in fact; the main reason for its success. Free Mars as a sentence, an imperative; and they had done it.