The classical Greeks had certainly gotten the size and proportions right for a single orator; he hardly had to raise his voice, and they all heard him. He told them some of the usual things, his standard address, all chopped and censored, as it was sadly tattered by current events. It didn’t sound very coherent, even to him. “Look,” he said, desperately revising as he spoke, ad libbing, searching through the faces in the crowd, “when we came up here we came to a different place, to a new world, and that necessarily makes us different beings than we were before. None of the old directives from Earth matter. Inevitably we will make a new Martian society, just in the nature of things. It comes out of the decisions we make together, by our collective action. And they are decisions that we’re making in our time, in these years, right now at this very instant. But if you dodge off into the outback and join one of the hidden colonies, you isolate yourself! You remain whatever you were when you came, never metamorphosing into a Martian human. And you also deprive the rest of us of your expertise and your input. I know this personally, believe me.” Pain lanced through him, he was astonished to feel it. “As you know, some of the first hundred were the first to disappear, presumably under the leadership of Hiroko Ai. I still don’t understand why they did it, I really don’t. But how we have missed her genius for systems design in the years since, I can hardly tell you! Why, I think you can accurately say that part of our problems now result from her absence these many years.” He shook his head, tried to gather his thoughts. “The first time I saw this canyon we’re in, I was with her. It was one of the first explorations to this area, and I had Hiroko Ai at my side, and we looked down into this canyon, its floor bare and flat, and she said to me, ‘It’s like the floor of a room.’
” He stared at the audience, trying to remember Hiroko’s face. Yes. . . no. Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you. “I’ve missed her. I come here, and it’s impossible to believe it’s the same place, and so. . . it’s hard to believe I ever really knew her.” He paused, tried to focus on their faces. “Do you understand?”
“No!” someone bellowed.
A flicker of his old anger boiled through his confusion. “I’m saying we have to make a new Mars here! I’m saying we’re completely new beings, that nothing is the same here! Nothing is the same!”
He had to give up, go sit down. Other speakers took over, and their droning voices floated over him as he sat, stunned, looking out the open end of the amphitheater into a park of wide-set sycamore trees. Slender white buildings beyond, trees growing on their roofs and balconies. A green and white vision.
He couldn’t tell them. No one could tell them. Only time, and Mars itself. And in the meantime they would act in obvious contradiction to their own best interests. It happened all the time, but how could it, how? Why were people so stupid?
He left the amphitheater, stalked through the park and the town. “How can people act against their own obvious material interests?” he demanded of Slusinski over his wristpad. “It’s crazy! Marxists were materialists, how did they explain it?”
“Ideology, sir.”
“But if the material world and our method of manipulating it determine everything else, how can ideology happen? Where did they say it comes from?”
“Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation. They acknowledged that imagination was a powerful force in human life.”
“But then they weren’t materialists at all!” He swore with disgust. “No wonder Marxism is dead.”
“Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists.”
“Shit! They might as well call themselves Zoroastrians, or Jansenists, or Hegelians.”
“Marxists are Hegelian, sir.”
“Shut up,” Frank snarled, and broke the connection.
Imaginary beings, in a real landscape. No wonder he had forgotten the carrot and the stick, and wandered off into the realm of new being and radical difference and all that crap. Trying to be John Boone. Yes, it was true! He was trying to do what John had done. But John had been good at it; Frank had seen him work his magic time after time in the old days, changing everything just by the way he talked. While for Frank the words were like rocks in his mouth. Even now, when it was just what they needed, when it was the only thing that would save them.
• • •
Maya met him at the Burroughs station, gave him a hug. He endured it stiffly, his bags hanging from his hand. Outside the tent low chocolate thunderheads billowed in a mauve sky. He couldn’t meet her eye. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Everyone is talking about it.”