Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

to say. ‘At least the points are there to discuss,’ Nadia said. And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their section headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: ‘Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police; Taxation; Election Procedures; Property Law; Economic Systems; Environmental Law; Amendment Procedures’, and so on, in some blanks for pages on end – all being juggled on everyone’s screens, scrambled, formatted, endlessly debated. ‘Just filling in the blanks,’ as Art sang one night, looking over Nadia’s shoulder at one particularly forbidding flowchart pattern, like something out of Michel’s alchemical combinatoires. And Nadia laughed.

      

      The working groups focused on different parts of government as outlined in a new composite blank constitution, now being called the blank of blanks. Political parties and interest groups gravitated to the issues that most concerned them, and the many tent town delegations chose or were assigned to remaining areas. After that it was a matter of work.

      For the moment, the Da Vinci Crater technical group was in control of Martian space. They were keeping all space shuttles from docking at Clarke, or aerobraking into Martian orbit. No one believed that this alone made them truly free, but it did give them a certain amount of physical and psychic space to work in – this was the gift of the revolution. They were also driven by the memory of the battle for Sheffield; the fear of civil war was strong among them. Ann was in exile with the Kakaze, and sabotage in the outback was a daily occurrence. There were also tents that had declared independence from anyone, and a few metanat holdouts; there was turmoil generally, and a sense of barely-contained confusion. They were in a bubble in history, a moment only; it could collapse at any time, and if they didn’t act soon, it would collapse. It was, simply put, time to act.

      This was the one thing everyone agreed on, but it was a very important thing. As the days passed, a core group of workers slowly emerged, people who recognized each other for their willingness to get the job done, for their desire to finish paragraphs rather than posture. Inside all the rest of the debate these people went at it, guided by Nadia, who was very quick to recognize such people and give them all the help she could.

      Art meanwhile ran around in his usual manner. Up early, supply drinks and food, and information concerning the work ongoing in other rooms. It seemed to him that things were going pretty well. Most of the subgroups took the responsibility to fill in their blank seriously, writing and rewriting drafts, hammering them out concept by concept, phrase by phrase. They were happy to see Art when he came by in the course of the day, as he represented a break, some food, some jokes. One judicial group tacked foam wings on his shoes, and sent him with a caustic message along to an executive group with whom they were fighting. Pleased, Art kept the wings on; why not? What they were doing had a kind of ludicrous majesty, or majestic ludicrousness – they were rewriting the rules, he was flying around like Hermes or Puck, it was perfectly appropriate. And so he flew, through the long hours into the night, every night. And after all the sessions had closed down for the evening, he went back to the Praxis offices he shared with Nadia, and they would eat, and talk over the day’s progress, and make a call to the travellers to Earth, and talk with Nirgal and Sax and Maya and Michel. And after that Nadia would go back to work at her screens, usually falling asleep there in her chair. Then Art would often go back out into the warehouse, and the buildings and rovers clustered around it. Because they were holding the congress in a warehouse tent, there was not the same party scene that had existed after hours in Dorsa Brevia; but the delegates often stayed up, sitting on the floors of their rooms drinking and talking about the day’s work, or the revolution just past. Many of the people there had never met before, and they were getting to know each other. Relationships were forming, romances, friendships, feuds. It was a good time to talk, and learn more about what was going on during the daytime congress; it was the underside of the congress, the social hour, out there scattered in concrete rooms. Art enjoyed it. And then the moment would come when he would suddenly hit the wall, a wave of sleepiness would roll over him and sometimes he wouldn’t even have time to stagger back to his offices, to the couch next to Nadia’s; he would simply roll over on the floor and sleep there, waking cold and stiff to hurry off to their bathroom, a shower, and back to the kitchens to start up that day’s kava and Java. Round and round, his days a blur; it was glorious.

      In sessions on many different subjects people were having to grapple with questions of scale. Without any nations, without any natural or traditional political units, who governed what? And how were they to balance the local against the global, and past versus future – the many ancestral cultures against the one Martian culture?

      Sax, observing this recurring problem from the rocket-ship to Earth, sent back a message proposing that the tent towns and covered canyons become the principal political units: city-states, basically, with no larger political units except for the global government itself, which would regulate only truly global concerns. Thus there would be local and global, but no nation-states in between.

      The reaction to this proposal was fairly positive. For one thing it had the advantage of conforming to the situation that already existed. Mikhail, leader of the Bogdanovist party, noted that it was a variant of the old commune of communes, and because Sax had been the source of the suggestion, this quickly got it called the ‘lab of labs’ plan. But the underlying problem still remained, as Nadia quickly pointed out; all Sax had done was to define their particular local and global. They still had to decide just how much power the proposed global confederation was going to have over the proposed semi-autonomous city-states. Too much, and it was back to a big centralized state, Mars itself as a nation, a thought which many delegations abhorred. ‘But too little,’ Jackie said emphatically in the human rights workshop, ‘and there could be tents out there deciding slavery is okay, or female genital mutilation is okay, or any other crime based on some Terran barbarism is okay, excused in the name of “cultural values”. And that is just not acceptable.’

      ‘Jackie is right,’ Nadia said, which was unusual enough to get people’s attention. ‘People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture – that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.’

      Art noticed more than a few delegates frowning at this sentiment, which no doubt struck them as a version of Western secular relativism, or perhaps John Boone’s hyperamericanism. Opposition to the metanats had included many people trying to hold on to older cultures, and these often had their hierarchies pretty well intact; the ones at the top end of the hierarchies liked them that way, and so did a surprisingly large number of people farther down the ladder.

      The young Martian natives, however, looked surprised that this was even considered an issue. To them the fundamental rights were innate and irrevocable, and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many emotional scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their traumatic dysfunctional Terran upbringings. Ariadne, one of the most prominent of the young natives, stood up to say that the Dorsa Brevia group had studied many Terran human rights documents, and had written a comprehensive list of their own. The new master list of fundamental individual rights was available for discussion and, she implied, adoption wholesale. Some argued about one point or another; but it was generally agreed that a global bill of rights of some kind should be on the table. So Martian values as they existed in M-year 52 were about to be codified, and made a principal component of the constitution.

      The exact nature of these rights was still a matter of controversy. The so-called ‘political rights’ were generally agreed to be ‘self-evident’ – things citizens were free to do, things governments were forbidden to do – habeus corpus, freedom of movement, of speech, of association, of religion, a ban on weapons – all these were approved by a vast majority of Martian natives, though there were some issei from places like Singapore, Cuba, Indonesia, Thailand, China and so on, who looked askance at so much emphasis on individual liberty. Other delegates had reservations about a different kind of right, the so-called ‘social’ or ‘economic’ rights, such as the right to housing, health care, education,