It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives’ leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars — son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage — very hard to oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia. Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.
So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to ignore their little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from all over the planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles. Many tent towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it possible, and hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an operation in which the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid enough that water was the critical issue, and their requests for a water allotment were pouring in, until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn down a kilometer merely by pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These and a thousand more matters tested the constitution’s many networks for connecting local autonomy to global considerations; the debates would go on forever.
Nirgal, while fundamentally uninterested in most of these wrangles, found them yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in Cairo. He had come back from Earth without any official position in the new government or the old party, and one thing he saw going on these days was the struggle to place him — to give him a job with limited power, or, for his backers (or rather Jackie’s opponents) to put him in a position with some real power to it. Some friends advised him to wait and run for the senate when the next elections came, others mentioned the executive council, others party positions, others a post on the GEC. All these jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or another, and when he talked to Nadia on the screens, he could see that he would find them a burden; though she seemed to be hammering away stolidly enough, it was obvious the executive council was distasteful to her. But he kept a straight face and listened closely as people offered their advice.
Jackie herself kept her own council. In meetings where people suggested that Nirgal become a kind of minister-without-portfolio, she regarded him more blankly than usual, which led Nirgal to think that she liked that possibility least of all. She wanted him pinned into some position, which given her current post could not help but be inferior to hers. But if he stayed outside the system entirely…
There she sat, the infant in her arms. It could be his child. And Antar watched her with the same expression, the same thought. No doubt Dao would have as well, if he were still alive. Nirgal was suddenly shaken by a spasm of grief for his half brother, his tormentor, his friend — he and Dao had fought for as far back as he could remember, but they had been brothers for all that.
Jackie had apparently forgotten Dao already, and Kasei as well. As she would forget Nirgal, if he should happen to get killed. She had been among the greens who had ordered the crushing of the Red assault on Sheffield, she had advocated the strong response. Perhaps she had to forget the dead.
The infant cried. Face rounded by fat, it was impossible to see any resemblance to any adult. The mouth looked like Jackie’s. Other than that… it was frightening, this power created by anonymous parenting. Of course a man could do the same, obtain an egg, grow it by ectogenesis, raise it himself. No doubt it would begin to happen, especially if many women took Jackie’s route. A world without parents. Well, friends were the real family; but he shuddered nevertheless at what Hiroko had done, what Jackie was doing.
He went flying to clear his mind of all that. One night after a glorious flight in the clouds, sitting in the launchpad pub, the conversation turned and someone mentioned Hi-roko’s name. “I hear she’s on Elysium,” someone said, “working on a new commune of communes up there.”
“How did you hear?” Nirgal demanded of the woman, somewhat sharply no doubt.
Surprised, she said, “You know those fliers who dropped in last week who are flying around the world? They were on Elysium last month, and they said they saw her there.” She shrugged. “That’s all I know. Not much by way of confirmation, I know.”
Nirgal sat back in his seat. Always thirdhand information. Some of the stories, however, seemed so like Hiroko; and a few, too Hiroko-like to have been made up. Nirgal did not know what to think. Very few people seemed to think she was dead. Sightings of the rest of her group were reported as well.
“They just wish she were here,” Jackie said when Nirgal mentioned it the next day.
“Don’t you wish it?”
“Of course” — (though she didn’t) — “but not enough to make up stories about it.”
“You really think they’re all made up? I mean, who would do that? What would they be telling themselves when they did it? It doesn’t make sense.”
“People don’t make sense, Nirgal. You have to learn that. People see an elderly Japanese woman somewhere, they think, that looks like Hiroko. That night they tell their roommates, I think I saw Hiroko today. She was down in the marketplace buying plums. The roommate goes to his construction site, says my roommate saw Hiroko yesterday, buying plums!”
Nirgal nodded. It was no doubt true, at least for most of the stories. For the rest, though, the few that didn’t fit that pattern…
“Meanwhile, you have to make a decision about this environmental-court position,” Jackie said. It was a province court, one below the global court. “We can arrange it so that Mem gets a position in the party that will actually be more influential, or you could take that one if you wanted, or both, I suppose. But we have to know.”
“Yeah yeah.”
People came in wanting to talk about something else, and Nirgal withdrew to the window, near the nurse and the infant. He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it — it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics, Jackie would say. And it was clear she enjoyed it. But Nirgal did not. It was strange; he had worked all his life for this situation, ostensibly, and now that it was here, he did not like it.
Very possibly he could learn enough to do the work. He would have to overcome the hostility of the people who didn’t want him back in the party, he would have to build his own power base, meaning collecting a group of people who would help him in their official positions; do them favors; curry their favor; play them off against each other, so that each would do his bidding in order to establish preeminence over the others… He could see all these processes at work right there in this very room, as Jackie met with one adviser after the next, discussing whatever issue happened to be their bailiwick, then working them to establish more firmly their allegiance to her. Of course, she would say if he pointed out this process. That was politics; they were in control of Mars now, and this work had to be done if they were to create the new world they had hoped for. One couldn’t be overfastidious, one had to be realistic, you held your nose and did it. It had a certain nobility to it, really. It was the necessary work.