Or, suggested her mental Frank, calmly, brutally— Earth had a carrying capacity. People had overshot it. Many of them would therefore die. Everyone knew this. The fight for resources was correspondingly fierce. The fighters, perfectly rational. But desperate.
The musicians played on, their tart nostalgia made even more poignant as the months passed, and the long winter came on, and they played through the snowy dusks with the whole world darkening, entre chien et loup. Something so small and brave in that bandoneon wheeze, in those little tunes pattering on in the face of it all: normal life, clung to so stubbornly, in a patch of light under bare-branched trees.
So familiar, this apprehension. This was how it had felt in the years before ‘61. Even though she could not remember any of the individual incidents and crises that had constituted the prewar period last time around, she could still remember the feel of it as fully as if stimulated by a familiar scent; how nothing seemed to matter, how even the best days were pale and chill under the black clouds that lay massed to the west. How the pleasures of town life took on an antic, desperate edge, everyone with their backs to the bar, so to speak, doing their best to counteract a feeling of diminution, of helplessness. Oh yes, this was déjà vu all right.
So when they traveled around Hellas and met with Free Mars groups, Maya was thankful to see the people who came, who made the effort to believe that their actions could make a difference, even in the face of the great vortex swirling below them. Maya learned from them that everywhere he went, Nirgal was apparently insisting to the other natives that the situation on Earth was critical to their own fortunes, no matter how distant it seemed. And this was having an effect; now the people who came to the meetings were full of the news of Consolidated and Amexx and Subarashii, and of the recent new incursions into the southern highlands by the UNTA police, incursions which had forced the abandonment of Overhangs, and many hidden sanctuaries. The south was being emptied, all the hidden ones flooding into Hiranyagarbha or Sabishii, or Odessa and the east Hellas canyons.Some of the young natives Maya met seemed to think that the UNTA appropriation of the south was basically a good thing, as it began the countdown to action. She was quick to denounce such thinking. “It’s not them who should have control of the timetable,” she told them. “We have to control the timing of this, we have to wait for our moment. And then all act together. If you don’t see that—”
Then you’re fools!
But Frank had always lashed out at his audiences. These people needed something more— or, to be precise, they deserved something more. Something positive, something to draw them as well as to drive them. Frank had said this too, but he had seldom acted on it. They needed to be seduced, like the nightly dancers on the corniche. Probably these people were out on their own waterfronts on all the other nights of the week. And politics needed to co-opt some of that erotic energy, or else it was only a matter of ressentiment and damage control.
So she seduced them. She did it even when she was worried or frightened, or in a bad mood. She stood among them thinking about sex with the tall lithe young men, and then she sat down in their midst, and asked them questions. She caught their gazes one by one, all of them so tall that when she sat on tables she was eye to eye with them as they sat in chairs, and she engaged them in conversation as intimate and pleasurable as she could make it. What did they want from life, from Mars? Often she laughed out loud at their responses, caught unawares by their innocence or their wit. They had themselves already dreamed Marses more radical than any she could believe in, Marses that were truly independent, egalitarian, just and joyous. And in some ways they had already enacted these dreams: many of them now had made their little warrens into extensive communal apartments, and they worked in their alternative economy that had less and less connection with the Transitional Authority or the metanats— an economy governed by Marina’s eco-economics and Hiroko’s areophany, by the Sufis and by Nirgal, by his roving gypsy government of the young. They felt they were going to live forever; they felt they lived in a world of sensuous beauty; their confinement in tents was normality, but a stage only, a confinement in warm womb mesocosms, which would be inevitably followed by their emergence onto a free living surface— by their birth, yes! They were embryo areurges, to use Michel’s term, young gods operating their world, people who knew they were meant to be free, and were confident they would get there, and soon. Bad news would come from Earth and attendance at the meetings would rise— and in these meetings the air was not one of fear but of determination, of the look on Frank’s face in the photo over her sink. A struggle between ex-allies Armscor and Subarishii over Nigeria resulted in the use of biological weapons (both sides disclaimed responsibility) so that the people, animals, and plants of Lagos and the surrounding area were devastated by grotesque diseases; and in the meetings that month, the young Martians spoke angrily, their eyes flashing, of the lack of any rule of law on Earth— the lack of any authority that could be trusted. The metanational global order was too dangerous to be allowed to rule Mars!