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.
But then Nirgal had left for Earth, determined to make their case there. And while he was gone, during the constitutional congress, Free Mars had gone from a movement to an organization. That was fine, it was the normal course of events, a necessary part of institutionalizing their independence. No one could complain about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a heroic age that had not actually been heroic— or, along with heroic, had been also suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia— the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression. No— he did not want it to be like it had been before. He was happy they were in control (at least partially) of their fate. That wasn’t the problem. Nor was he bothered by the tremendous growth in the numbers of supporters Free Mars had. The party seemed on the edge of becoming a supermajority, with three of the seven executive councillors coming from the party leadership, and most other global positions filled by other members. And now a fair percentage of new emigrants were joining the party— and old emigrants as well— and natives who had supported smaller parties before the revolution— and, last but not least, quite a few people who had supported the UNTA regime, and were now looking for the new power to follow. All in all, it made for a huge group. And in the first years of a new socioeconomic order, this massing of political power, of opinion and belief, had some advantages, no doubt about it. They could get things done.
But Nirgal wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of it.
• • •
One day walking the city wall, looking out through the tenting, he watched a group of people standing on a launch-pad at the edge of the cliff, west of town. There were a number of different kinds of single-flier craft: gliders and ultralites that were shot out of a slingshot launcher, and rose inside the thermals that formed in the mornings; smaller hang gliders; and then a variety of new one-person aircraft, which looked like small gliders connected to the undersides of small blimps. These fliers were only a bit longer than the people who climbed into the slings or seats under the glider’s wings. Clearly they were made of ultralight materials; some were transparent and nearly invisible, so that once in the sky it appeared that prone or seated people were floating around on their own. Other machines had been colored, and were visible from kilometers away as strokes of green or blue in the air. The stubby wings had small ultralight jets attached to them, so that the pilots had control of direction and altitude; they were like planes in that respect, but with the added loft of a blimp to make them safer and more versatile; their pilots landed them almost anywhere, and it looked impossible to dive them— to crash, in other words.