Red Mars(155)
“So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and nonrenewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel-drum band is ready to play aren’t you” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.”
Mad cheers. The magnesium-drum band picked them up into its staccato flurry of plinks and plonks, and the crowd heaved into motion again.
They partied all night long. John spent the time wandering from tent to tent, shaking hands and hugging people, “Thanks, thanks, thanks. I don’t know, I don’t remember what I said. But this is what I meant all along, this right here.” His old friends laughed at him. Sax, drinking coffee and looking supremely relaxed, said to him, “Syncretism is it? Very interesting, very well put”— with the tiniest of smiles. Maya kissed him, Vlad and Ursula and Nadia kissed him; Arkady lifted him up and with a great roar swirled him around in the air, giving him a hairy kiss on each cheek and shouting, “Hey, John, could you repeat that please?” hooting at the very thought. “You amaze me, John, you always amaze me!” And Hiroko with her private smile, with Michel and Iwao beside her, grinning at him. . . .
Michel said, “I think this is what Maslow meant by the term peak experience,” and Iwao groaned and elbowed him, while Hiroko reached out and touched John on the arm with her forefinger, as if to pass along a certain animating touch, a power, a gift.
• • •
The next day they sorted and bagged the party wreckage and took down the tents, leaving the flagstone terraces behind, like strands of a cloisonné necklace draped down the side of the old black volcano. They said good-bye to the dirigible crews, and the dirigibles drifted down the slope like balloons slipped from a child’s fist; the sand-colored ones of the hidden colony got hard to see very quickly.
As he got in his rover with Maya John said good-byes, and as they drove around the rim of Olympus Mons they caravanned with rovers containing Arkady and Nadia, and Ann and Simon and their son Peter. In conversations that day John said, “We need to talk to Helmut, and get the U.N. to accept us as speakers at large for the local population. And we need to present the U.N. with a draft of the revised treaty. Around Ls ninety I’m scheduled to go to a dedication ceremony for a new tent city on east Tharsis. Helmut is supposed to be there, maybe we could meet then?”
Only a few of them could make it, but they were named delegates for the rest, and the plan was agreed on. After that they talked about what the contents of the draft treaty should be, calling around to all the caravans and the dirigibles. The next day they came to the ramp down the northern escarpment, and at its foot they took off each in a different direction. “That was a good party!” John said over the radio to each in turn. “See you at the next one!”
The Sufis rolled by while they were stopped, and they waved from their windows and came on the radio to say good-bye as well. John recognized the voice of the old woman who had tended him at the toilet after his dance in the storm; as he was waving at their caravan she said over the radio,
“Whether it be of this world or of that,
Your love will lead us yonder at the last.”
Part 6
Guns Under the Table
The day John Boone was assassinated we were up on east Elysium and it was morning and this meteor shower came raining down on us, there must have been thirty streaks or so and they were all black, I don’t know what those meteorites were made of but they burned black instead of white. Like smoke from crashing planes except straight and fast as lightning. It was so strange to see that we all were amazed and we hadn’t even yet heard the news, but when we did we figured back, and it happened at exactly the same time.We were down in Hellas Lakefront and the sky went dark and a sudden wind whipped over the lake and blew every walktube in that town away, and then we heard.