Blue Mars(3)

“That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it’s not something for you to take into your own hands. I heard what happened in Burroughs, but it’s different here, you understand? We decide strategy together. It needs to be discussed.”

“It’s a group that’s very good at that,” Ann said bitterly. Everything was always thoroughly discussed and then always she lost. It was past time for that. Someone had to act. But again Peter looked as if he were being taken from his real work. He thought he would be making the decisions about the elevator, she could see that. Part of a more general feeling of ownership of the planet, no doubt, the birthright of the nisei, displacing the First Hundred and all the rest of the issei. If John had lived that would not have been easy, but the king was dead, long live the king— her son, king of the nisei, the first true Martians.

But king or not, there was a Red army now converging on Pavonis Mons. They were the strongest military operation left on the planet, and they intended to complete the work begun when Earth had been hit by its great flood. They did not believe in consensus or compromise, and for them, knocking down the cable was killing two birds with one stone: it would destroy the last police stronghold, and it would also sever easy contact between Earth and Mars, a primary Red goal. No, knocking down the cable was the obvious thing to do.

But Peter did not seem to know this. Or perhaps he did not care. Ann tried to tell him, but he just nodded, muttering “Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.” So arrogant, like all the greens, so blithe and stupid with all their prevaricating, their dealing with Earth, as if you could ever get anything from such a leviathan. No. It was going to take direct action, as in the drowning of Burroughs, as in all the acts of sabotage that had set the stage for the revolution. Without those the revolution wouldn’t even have begun, or if it had it would have been crushed immediately, as in 2061.

“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.

“Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

“I’ll try to set one up,” Peter said. She had gotten his attention at last, she saw; but there was an unpleasant look on his face, as if he had been threatened. “Before things get out of hand.”

“Things are already out of hand,” she told him, and cut the connection.



• • •

She checked the news on the various channels, Mangalavid, the Reds’ private nets, the Terran summaries. Though Pavonis and the elevator were now the focus of everyone on Mars, the physical convergence on the volcano was only partial. It appeared to her that there were more Red guerrilla units on Pavonis than the green units of Free Mars and their allies; but it was hard to be sure. Kasei and the most radical wing of the Reds, called the Kakaze (“fire wind”), had recently occupied the north rim of Pavonis, taking over the train station and tent at Lastflow. The Reds Ann had traveled with, most of them from the old Red mainstream, discussed moving around the rim and joining the Kakaze, but decided in the end to stay in east Pavonis. Ann observed this discussion silently but was glad at the result, as she wanted to keep her distance from Kasei and Dao and their crowd. She was pleased to stay in east Pavonis.

Many Free Mars troops were staying there as well, moving out of their cars into the abandoned warehouses. East Pavonis was becoming a major concentration of revolutionary groups of all kinds; and a couple days after her arrival, Ann went in and walked over compacted regolith to one of the biggest warehouses in the tent, to take part in a general strategy session.

The meeting went about as she expected. Nadia was at the center of the discussion, and it was useless talking to Nadia now. Ann just sat on a chair against the back wall, watching the rest of them circle the situation. They did not want to say what Peter had already admitted to her in private: there was no way to get UNTA off the space elevator. Before they conceded that they were going to try to talk the problem out of existence.

Late in the meeting, Sax Russell came over to sit by her side.

“A space elevator,” he said. “It could be . . . used.”

Ann was not the least bit comfortable talking to Sax. She knew that he had suffered brain damage at the hands of UNTA security, and had taken a treatment that had changed his personality; but somehow this had not helped at all. It only made things very strange, in that sometimes he seemed to her to be the same old Sax, as familiar as a much-hated brother; while at other times he did indeed seem like a completely different person, inhabiting Sax’s body. These two contrary impressions oscillated rapidly, even sometimes coexisted; just before joining her, as he had talked with Nadia and Art, he had looked like a stranger, a dapper old man with a piercing glare, talking in Sax’s voice and Sax’s old style. Now as he sat next to her, she could see that the changes to his face were utterly superficial. But though he looked familiar the stranger was now inside him— for here was a man who halted and jerked as he delved painfully after what he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out with something scarcely coherent.