“Or in the world.”
“Yeah true. They want something else to think about.”
“Or else they’re thinking about what they might do,” Nadia suggested. “So that we’re a small-scale model. Easier to understand.”
“Maybe so.”
In any case the two worlds watched, and the congress became, along with everything else that it was, a daily soap opera— a soap opera which however held an extra attraction for its viewers, somehow, as if in some strange way it held the very key to their lives. And perhaps as a result, thousands of spectators did more than watch— comments and suggestions were pouring in, and though it seemed unlikely to most people on Pavonis that something mailed in would contain a startling truth they hadn’t thought of, still all messages were read by groups of volunteers in Sheffield and South Fossa, who passed some proposals “up to the table.” Some people even advocated including all these suggestions in the final constitution; they objected to a “statist legal document,” they wanted it to be a larger thing, a collaborative philosophical or even spiritual statement, expressing their values, goals, dreams, reflections. “That’s not a constitution,” Nadia objected, “that’s a culture. We’re not the damn library here.” But included or not, long communiqués continued to come in, from the tents and canyons and the drowned coastlines of Earth, signed by individuals, committees, entire town populations.
Discussions in the warehouse were just as wide-ranging as in the mail. A Chinese delegate approached Art and spoke in Mandarin to him, and when he paused for a while, his AI began to speak, in a lovely Scottish accent. “To tell the truth I’ve begun to doubt that you’ve sufficiently consulted Adam Smith’s important book Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
“You may be right,” Art said, and referred the man to Charlotte.
Many people in the warehouse were speaking languages other than English, and relying on translation AIs to communicate with the rest. At any given moment there were conversations in a dozen different languages, and AI translators were heavily used. Art still found them a little distracting. He wished it were possible to know all these languages, even though the latest generations of AI translators were really pretty good: voices well modulated, vocabularies large and accurate, grammar excellent, phrasing almost free of the errors that had made earlier translation programs such a great party game. The new ones had gotten so good that it seemed possible that the English-language dominance that had created an almost monoglot Martian culture might begin to recede. The issei had of course brought all languages with them, but English had been their lingua franca; the nisei had therefore used English to communicate among themselves, while their “primary” languages were used only to speak to their parents; and so, for a while, English had become the natives’ native tongue. But now with the new AIs, and a continuing stream of new immigrants speaking the full array of Terran languages, it looked like things might broaden back out again, as new nisei stayed with their primary languages and used AIs as their lingua franca instead of English.
This linguistic matter illustrated to Art a complexity in the native population that he hadn’t noticed before. Some natives were yonsei, fourth generation or younger, and very definitely children of Mars; but other natives the very same age were the nisei children of recent issei immigrants, tending to have closer ties with the Terran cultures they had come from, with all the conservatism that implied. So that there were new native “conservatives,” and old settler-family native “radicals,” one might say. And this split only occasionally correlated with ethnicity or nationality, when these still mattered to them at all. One night Art was talking with a couple of them, one a global government advocate, the other an anarchist backing all local autonomy proposals, and he asked them about their origins. The globalist’s father was half-Japanese, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Tanzanian; her mother had a Greek mother and a father with parents Colombian and Australian. The anarchist had a Nigerian father and a mother who was from Hawaii, and thus had a mixed ancestry of Filipino, Japanese, Polynesian and Portuguese. Art stared at them: if one were to think in terms of ethnic voting blocks, how would one categorize these people? One couldn’t. They were Martian natives. Nisei, sansei, yonsei— whatever generation, they had been formed in large part by their Martian experience— areoformed, just as Hiroko had always foretold. Many had married within their own national or ethnic background, but many more had not. And no matter what their ancestry, their political opinions tended to reflect not that background (just what would the Graeco-Colombian-Australian position be? Art wondered), but their own experience. This itself had been quite varied: some had grown up in the underground, others had been born in the UN-controlled big cities, and only come to an awareness of the underground later in life, or even at the moment of the revolution itself. These differences tended to affect them much more than where their Terran ancestors had happened to live.