The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

at it. And you know what that means for you.”

      “We’re sick of this!” one man shouted.

      “Of course you are,” he said. He pointed a finger. “So do you have a plan to bring it to an end, or not?”

      It took a while to ratchet them into agreement. Disarm, co-operate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect. Of course it took a while. And along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and did it. He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

      He left to cheers.

      Maya was out there in the station. Exhausted, he could only stare at her in disbelief. She had been watching him over the video, she said. Frank shook his head; the fools inside hadn’t even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their existence. So the world had seen it all. And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism. Which to her it no doubt was. In fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president! So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently.

      She asked him to accompany her, and he was too exhausted to run a cost/benefit analysis of the art. With a twist of the mouth he agreed. It was easier just to tag along.

      They took the train down to the next station, made their way through the police and inside. The Russian tent was packed like a circuit board. “You’re going to have a harder job of it than I did,” Frank said as he looked around.

      “Russians are used to it,” she said. “These tents aren’t that different from Moscow apartments.”

      “Yes, yes.” Russia had become a kind of immense Korea, sporting the same brutal streamlined capitalism, perfectly Taylorized and with a veneer of democracy and consumer goods covering the junta. “It’s amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”

      “Frank, please.”

      “Just remember that and it will go okay.”

      “Are you going to help or not?” she demanded.

      “Yes, yes.”

      The central square smelt of bean curd and borscht and electrical fires, and the crowd was much more unruly and loud than in the American tent, everyone there a defiant leader, ready to unleash a declamation. A lot more of them were women than in the American tent. They had unpisted a train and this had galvanized them, they were anxious for more action. Maya had to use a hand megaphone, and all the time that she stood on a chair and talked, the crowd swirled around them and participants in several loud arguments ignored her, as if she were a cocktail lounge pianist.

      Frank’s Russian was rusty, and he couldn’t understand most of what the crowd shouted at Maya, but he followed her replies pretty well. She was explaining the emigration moratorium, the bottleneck in town robot production and in water supplies, the necessity for discipline, the promise of a better life to come if all was enacted in an orderly fashion. He supposed it was a classic babushka harangue, and it had the effect of pacifying them somewhat, as there was a strong reactionary streak in many Russians now; they remembered what social unrest really meant, and were justifiably afraid of it. And there was a lot to promise, it all seemed plausible: big world, few people, lots of material resources, some good robot designs, computer programs, gene templates…

      In one really loud moment of the discussion he said to her in English, “Remember the stick.”

      “What?” she snapped.

      “The stick. Threaten them. Carrot and stick.”

      She nodded. Into the megaphone again: the never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact of the poisonous air, the deadly cold. They were alive only because of the tents, and the input of electricity and water. Vulnerable in ways they hadn’t fully thought out, in ways that didn’t exist back home.

      She was quick, she always had been. Back to promises. Back and forth, stick and carrot, a jerk on the leash, some niblets. Eventually the Russians too were pacified.

      Afterward on the train up to Sheffield Maya gabbled with nervous relief, face flushed, eyes brilliant, hand clutching his arm as she threw her head back abruptly and laughed. That nervous intelligence, that arresting physical presence… he must have been exhausted himself, or more shaken than he had realized by the time in the tents, or maybe it was the encounter with Phyllis; because he felt himself warming to her, it was like stepping into a sauna after a freezing day outside, with that same sense of relief from vigilance, of penetrating ease. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she was saying rapidly, “really you are so good in those situations, so clear and firm and sharp. They believe you because you don’t try to flatter them or soften the truth.”

      “That’s what works best,” he said, looking out the window at the tents running by. “Especially when you’re flattering them and lying to them.”

      “Oh Frank.”

      “It’s true. You’re good at it yourself.”

      This was an example of the trope under discussion, but Maya didn’t see it. There was a name for that in rhetoric, but he couldn’t recall it. Metonymy? Synecdoche? But she only laughed and squeezed his shoulder, leaning against him. As if the fight in Burroughs had never happened, not to mention everything before that. And in Sheffield she ignored her stop, and got off the train with him at his stop, walking at his shoulder through the spaciousness of the rim station, and then to his rooms, where she stripped and showered and put on one of his jumpers, chattering all the while about the day and the situation at large, as if they did this all the time: went out to dinner, soup, trout, salad, a bottle of wine, every night sure! Leaning back in their chairs, drinking coffee and brandy. Politicians after a day of politics. The leaders.

      She had finally wound down, and was poured into her chair, content just to watch him. And for a wonder it didn’t make him nervous, it was as if some force field protected him from all that. Perhaps the look in her eye. Sometimes it seemed you really could tell if someone liked you.

      She spent the night. And after that she divided her time between her quarters at the MarsFirst office and his rooms, without ever discussing what she was doing, or what it meant. And when it was time for bed, she would take off her clothes and roll in next to him, and then onto him, warm and calm. The touch of a whole body, all at once… And if he ever started things, she was so quick to respond; he only had to touch her arm. Like stepping into a sauna. She was so easy these days, so calm. Like a different person, it was amazing. Not Maya at all; but there she was, whispering Frank, Frank.

      But they never talked about any of that. It was always the situation, the day’s news; and in truth that gave them a lot to talk about. The unrest on Pavonis had gone into abeyance temporarily, but the troubles were planetwide, and getting worse: sabotages, strikes, riots, fights, skirmishes, murder. And the news from Earth had plummeted through even the blackest of gallows humor, into just plain awfulness; Mars was the picture of order in comparison, a little local eddy spun away from the vortex of a giant maelstrom, which looked to Frank like a death spiral for everything that fell into it. Little wars like matchheads were flaring everywhere. India and Pakistan had used nuclear weapons in Kashmir. Africa was dying, and the north bickered over who should help first.

      One day they got word that the mohole town Hephaestus, west of Elysium, manned by Americans and Russians, had been entirely deserted. Radio contact had stopped, and when people went down from Elysium to look, they had found the town empty. All Elysium was in an uproar, and Frank and Maya decided to see if they