Blue Mars(165)

Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, too near them for comfort. Politics in its most common form: complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happy to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on for about half an hour, and then they would cycle back to talking about work. There was one group doing that already, Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered over, and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: it appeared they were excited by recent developments in their lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Continuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but it took extremely massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages too big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situations. This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellets of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusion results to power things.

“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.

“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk with us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpful, this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s so damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yananda off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave a space for emission afterward.”

They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides at once, but there also had to be a vent for charged particles to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the problem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of it, which they thought they had solved at last; and when someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day’s lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no politics, please.”

As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversations he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature of most scientists and technicians. There was something about politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he had to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and compromised, a process that went entirely against the grain of the scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and prejudices were subjective themselves. One could try to regard politics as a kind of science— a long series of experiments in communal living, say, with all the data consistently contaminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of governance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, then 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.