Blue Mars(190)
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The rest of Earth, however, was Calcutta. Well, that wasn’t really fair. But Calcutta itself was definitely Calcutta. Fetid humanity at its most compacted; whenever she went out of her room Zo had at least five hundred people in her field of vision, and often a few thousand. There was a frightful exhilaration in the sight of all this life in the streets, a world of dwarfs and midgets and other assorted small people, all of whom saw her and clumped like baby birds to a parent who could feed them. Although Zo had to admit that the clumping was friendlier than that, composed more of curiosity than hunger— indeed they seemed more interested in her exoskeleton than her. And they seemed happy enough, thin but not emaciated, even when they were clearly permanently camped on the streets. The streets themselves were co-ops now, people had tenure, swept them, regulated the millions of little markets, grew crops in every plaza, and slept among them too. That was life on Earth in the late Holocene. After Ariadne it had been downhill all the way.
Zo went up to Prahapore, an enclave in the hills to the north of the city. This was where one of Jackie’s Terran spies lived, in the midst of a jammed dorm of harried civil servants, all living at their screens and sleeping under their desks. Jackie’s contact was a translator programmer, a woman who understood Mandarin, Urdu, Dravidian and Vietnamese, as well as her Hindu and English; she also was important in an extensive eavesdropping network, and could keep Jackie informed concerning some of the Indian-Chinese conversations about Mars.
“Of course they both will send more people to Mars,” the heavyset woman said to Zo, after they were out in the compound’s little herb garden. “That’s a given. But it does look like both governments feel they have their populations in a long-term solution. No one expects to have more than one child anymore. It’s not only the law, it’s the tradition.”
“The uterine law,” Zo said.
The woman shrugged. “Possibly so. A very strong tradition, in any case. People look around, they see the problem. They expect to get the longevity treatment, and they expect to have a sterility implant at that time. And in India, anyway, they feel lucky if they get the permits to remove the implants. And after having one child, people expect to be sterilized for good. Even the Hindu fundamentalists have changed on this, the social pressure on them was so great. And the Chinese have been doing this for centuries. The longevity treatment only reinforced what they had already been doing.”
“So Mars has less to fear from them than Jackie thinks.”
“Well, they still want to send up emigrants, that’s part of the overall strategy. And resistance to the one-child rule has been stronger in some Catholic and Muslim countries, and several of those nations would like to colonize Mars as if it were empty. The threat shifts now, from India and China to the Philippines, Brazil, Pakistan.”
“Hmm,” Zo said. Talk of immigration always made her feel oppressed. Threatened by lemmings. “What about the exmetas?”
“The old Group of Eleven is rebanding in support of the strongest of the old metanats. They will be looking for places to develop. They’re much weaker than before the flood, but they still have a lot of influence in America, Russia, Europe, South America. Tell Jackie to watch what Japan does in the next few months, she’ll see what I mean.” They connected up wristpads so that the woman could make a secure transfer of detailed information for Jackie.
“Okay,” Zo said. Suddenly she was tired, as if a heavy man had crawled into the exoskeleton with her and were dragging her down. Earth, what a drag. Some people said they liked the weight, as if they needed that pressure to be convinced of their own reality. Zo wasn’t like that. Earth was the very definition of exoticism, which was fine, but suddenly she longed to be home. She unplugged her wristpad from the translator’s, imagining all the while that perfect middle way, that perfect test of will and flesh: the exquisite gravity of Mars.
Then it was down the space elevator from Clarke, a trip that took longer than the flight from Earth; and she was back in the world, the only real world, Mars the magnificent. “There’s no place like home,” Zo said to the train-station crowd in Sheffield, and then she sat happily in the trains as they flowed over the pistes down Tharsis, then north to Echus Overlook.The little town had grown since its early days as the terraforming headquarters, but not much; it was out of the way, and built into the steep east wall of Echus Chasma, so that there wasn’t much of it to be seen— a bit on the plateau at the top of the cliff, a bit at the bottom, but with three vertical kilometers between the two, so that they were not visible one from the other— more like two separate villages, connected by a vertical subway. Indeed if it weren’t for the fliers, Echus Overlook might have subsided into sleepy historic-monument status, like Underhill or Senzeni Na, or the icy hideouts in the south. But the eastern wall of Echus Chasma stood right in the path of the prevailing westerlies that came pouring down the Tharsis Bulge, causing them to shoot up in the most astonishingly powerful updrafts. Which made it a birding paradise.