Blue Mars(193)

Jackie looked disgusted. “It’s my co-op too, you might recall. Why didn’t you check in when you got back?”

“I wanted to fly.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I didn’t mean it as one.”

Zo went to the buffet table, piled a plate with scrambled eggs and muffins. She returned to Jackie’s table, kissed her mother on the top of the head. “You’re looking good.”

Actually she looked younger than Zo, who was often sun-burned and therefore wrinkled— younger but somehow pre-served, as if she were a twin sister of Zo’s who had been bottled for a time and only recently decanted. She wouldn’t tell Zo how often she had had the gerontological treatments, but Rachel had said that she was always trying new variants, which were coming out at the rate of two or three a year, and that she got the basic package every three years at the most. So although she was somewhere in her fifth m-decade, she looked almost like Zo’s contemporary, except for that preserved quality, which was not so much body as spirit— a look in the eye, a certain hardening, a tightness, a wariness or weariness. It was hard work being the alpha female year after year, a heroic struggle, it had worn visible tracks in her no matter how baby smooth her skin, no matter how much a beauty she remained— and she was still quite a beauty, no doubt about it. But she was getting old. Soon her young men would unwrap themselves from around her little fingers and drop away.

Meanwhile she still had a great deal of presence, and at the moment she appeared considerably put out. People averted their eyes as if her look might strike them dead, which made Zo laugh. Not the politest way to greet one’s beloved mother, but what else could one do? Zo was too relaxed to be irritated.

Probably a mistake to laugh at her, however. She stared coldly until Zo straightened up.

“Tell me what happened on Mercury.”

Zo shrugged. “I told you. They still think they have the sun to give to the outer solar system, and it’s gone to their heads.”

“I suppose their sunlight would still be useful out there.”

“Energy’s always useful, but the outer satellites should be able to generate what they need, now.”

“So the Mercurians are left with metals.”

“That’s right.”

“But what do they want for them?”

“Everyone wants to be free. None of these new little worlds are big enough to be self-sufficient, so they have to have something to trade if they want to stay free. Mercury has sunlight and metals, the asteroids have metals, the outer satellites have volatiles, if anything. So they package and trade what they have, and try to make alliances to avoid domination by Earth or Mars.”

“It isn’t domination.”

“Of course not.” Zo kept a straight face. “But the big worlds, you know—”

“Are big.” Jackie nodded. “But add all these little ones together, and they’re big too.”

“Who’s going to add them?” Zo asked.

Jackie ignored the question. The answer was obvious anyway: Jackie would. Jackie was locked into a long-term battle with various forces on Earth, for what came down to the control of Mars; she was trying to keep them from being inundated by the immense home world; and as human civilization continued to spread throughout the solar system, Jackie considered the new little settlements pawns in this great struggle. And indeed if there were enough of them, they might make a difference.

“There’s not much reason to worry about Mercury,” Zo reassured her. “It’s a dead end, a provincial little town, run by a cult. No one can settle very many people there, no one. So even if we do manage to bring them on board, they won’t matter much.”

Jackie’s face took on its world-weary look, as if Zo’s analysis of the situation were the work of a child— as if there were hidden sources of political power on Mercury, of all places. It was irritating, but Zo restrained herself and did not show her irritation.

Antar came in, looking for them; he saw them and smiled, came over and gave Jackie a quick kiss, Zo a longer one. He and Jackie conferred for a while about something or other, in whispers, and then Jackie told him to leave.

There was a great deal of the will to power in Jackie, Zo saw once again. Ordering Antar around gratuitously; it was a flaunting of power that one saw in many nisei women, women who had grown up in patriarchies and therefore reacted virulently against them. They did not fully understand that patriarchy no longer mattered, and perhaps never had— that it had always been caught in the Kegel grip of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological power that could not be controlled by any mere politics. The female hold on male sexual pleasure, on life itself— these were realities for patriarchs as much as anyone, despite all their repression, their fear of the female which had been expressed in so many ways, purdah, clitoridectomy, foot binding and so on— ugly stuff indeed, a desperate ruthless last-ditch defense, successful for a time, certainly— but now blown away without a trace. Now the poor fellows had to fend for themselves, and it was hard. Women like Jackie had them whipped. And women like Jackie liked to whip them.