Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit – led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic as ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars, and her devotion to her grandfather’s ideals, and her essential good will, even innocence; the college girl who wanted passionately for the world to be just.

      Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly seemed to want to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on Mars now, and seven million of those had been born there; and almost every single one of these natives could be counted on to support the native political parties, usually Free Mars.

      ‘It’s dangerous,’ Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly meeting with Nadia. ‘When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call “census voting”, where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes, and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those circumstances.’

      ‘So what can we do?’ Nadia asked.

      ‘Well, some of it we’re doing already, designing structures that spread the power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism. Decentralization is important, because it creates a lot of small local majorities. Another strategy is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and balances, so that the government’s a kind of cat’s cradle of competing forces. This is called polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can.’

      ‘Maybe we’re a bit too polyarchic right now,’ Art said.

      ‘Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You make some big part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and then draft ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get professional staff help, but make the decisions themselves.’

      ‘I’ve never heard of that one,’ Nadia said.

      ‘No. It’s been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think it’s really worth considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an advantage. You get a letter in the mail; oh no; you’re drafted to do two years in congress. It’s a drag, but on the other hand it’s a kind of distinction too, a chance to add something to the public discourse. Citizen government.’

      ‘I like that,’ Nadia said.

      ‘Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some version of the Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates in ranked fashion, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get some points for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to appeal outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation, and in the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed before.’

      ‘Interesting,’ Nadia exclaimed. ‘Like trusses in a wall’

      ‘Yes.’ Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran ‘fractured societies’ that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, Armenia … as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit; these had been bloody, bloody lands.

      ‘It seems like political structures can only do so much,’ he said.

      ‘True,’ Nadia said, ‘but we don’t have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been marginalized by the terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull even them into the process.’

      Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

      ‘You’re happy,’ Art said.

      She didn’t hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the travellers, she said to Sax, ‘It was so nice to find that political science had abstracted something useful in all these years.’

      Eight minutes later his reply came in. ‘I never understood why they call it that.’

      Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia Cherneshevsky, laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going to pull it off.

      So he went back to the big table, ready to tackle the next worst problem. That brought him back to Earth again. There were a hundred next worst problems, all small until you actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In all the squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some areas, in fact, it seemed to be getting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa Brevia document were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and Marina’s eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not something that should be codified in the constitution. Some complained because it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, and people listened. ‘This new economy that’s being proposed,’ he declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, ‘is a radical and unprecedented intrusion of government into business.’

      Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over.

      Vlad glared at him. Stooped, massive-headed, shaggy-eyebrowed, Vlad rarely if ever spoke in public; he hadn’t said a thing in the congress so far. Slowly the greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art felt a quiver of anticipation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred, Vlad was perhaps the most brilliant – and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic. Old when they had left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron labs early on and stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in seclusion with Ursula Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first ones. No one knew anything for certain about the three of them, they were a limit case illustration of the insular nature of other people’s relationships; but this of course did not stop gossip; on the contrary, people talked about them all the time, saying that Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; or that Ursula had done most of the work on the longevity treatment, and Marina most of the work on eco-economics; or that they were a perfectly balanced equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that emerged from Acheron; or that Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives as fronts for his work in the separate fields of biology and economics. But no one knew for sure, for none of the three ever said a word about it.

      Watching him stand there at the table, however, one had to suspect that the theory about him being just a front man was wrong. He was looking around in a fiercely intent, slow glare, capturing them all before he turned his eye again on Antar.

      ‘What you said about government and business is absurd,’ he stated coldly. It was a tone of voice that had not been heard much at the congress so far, contemptuous and dismissive. ‘Governments always regulate the kinds of business they allow. Economics is a legal matter, a system of laws. So far, we have been saying in the Martian underground that as a matter of law, democracy and self-government are the innate rights of every person, and that these rights are not to be suspended when a person goes to work. You—’ he waved a hand to indicate he did not know Antar’s name ‘—do you believe in democracy and self-rule?’

      ‘Yes!’ Antar said defensively.

      ‘Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental values that government ought to encourage?’

      ‘Yes!’ Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed.

      ‘Very well.