Blue Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson

fortune cookies, and indeed one day there was one message that said, ‘You like Chinese food.’ Usually the messages were more political than that. Often they were things said in the previous days of the conference: ‘No tent is an island’. ‘If you can’t afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.’ ‘Keep your distance, don’t change speed, don’t run into anything.’ ‘La salute non si paga.’ Then there were things that had not been said: ‘Do unto others.’ ‘The Reds have Green Roots.’ ‘The Greatest Show on Earth.’ ‘No Kings No Presidents.’ ‘Big Man Hates Politics.’ ‘However: We Are The Little Red People.’

      So Art was no longer surprised when he was approached by people who spoke in Arabic or Hindi or some language he did not recognize, then looked him in the eye while their AI spoke in English with an accent from the BBC or middle America or the New Delhi civil service, expressing some kind of unpredictable political sentiment. It was encouraging, really – not the translation AIs, which were just another kind of distancing, less extreme than teleparticipation but still not quite ‘talking face to face’ – but the political melange, the impossibility of block-voting, or of even thinking in the normal constituencies.

      It was a strange congregation, really. But it went on, and eventually everyone got used to it; it took on that always-already quality that extended events often gain over their duration. But once, very late at night, after a long bizarre translated conversation in which the AI on the wrist of the young woman he was talking to spoke in rhymed couplets (and he never knew what language she was speaking to start with), Art wandered back through the warehouse toward his office suite, around the table of tables, where work was still going on even though it was after the timeslip, and he stopped to say hi to one group; and then, momentum lost, slumped back against a side wall, half watching, half drowsing, his kavajava buzz nearly overwhelmed by exhaustion. And the strangeness came back, all at once. It was a kind of hypnogogic vision. There were shadows in the corners, innumerable flickering shadows; and eyes in the shadows. Shapes, like insubstantial bodies: all the dead, it suddenly seemed, and all the unborn, all there in the warehouse with them, to witness this moment. As if history were a tapestry, and the congress the loom upon which everything was coming together, the present moment with its miraculous thereness, its potential right in their own atoms, their own voices. Looking back at the past, able to see it all, a single, long, braided tapestry of events; looking forward at the future, able to see none of it, though presumably it branched out in an explosion of threads of potentiality, and could become anything: they were two different kinds of unreachable immensity. And all of them travelling together, from the one into the other, through that great loom the present, the now. Now was their chance, for all of them together in this present – the ghosts could watch, from before and after, but this was the moment when what wisdom they could muster had to be woven together, to be passed on to all the future generations.

      They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring the congress to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single worldline of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious – the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good governments of all time, combined magically into some superb, as yet unseen synthesis – or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government … To go from that to the mundane problematic of the constitution as written was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

      On the other hand, it would certainly be a good thing if their diplomatic team were to arrive on Earth with a completed document to present to the UN and the people of Earth. Really, there was no avoiding it; they needed to finish; not just to present to Earth the united front of an established government, but also to start living their post-crisis life, whatever it might be.

      Nadia felt this strongly, and so she began to exert herself. ‘Time to drop the keystone into the arch,’ she said to Art one morning. And from then on she was indefatigable, meeting all the delegations and committees, insisting that they finish whatever they were working on, insisting they get it on the table for a final vote on inclusion. This inexorable insistence of hers revealed something that had not been clear before, which was that most of the issues had been resolved to the satisfaction of most of the delegations. They had concocted something workable, most agreed, or at least worth trying, with amendment procedures prominent in the structure so that they could alter aspects of the system as they went along. The young natives in particular seemed happy – proud of their work, and pleased that they had managed to keep an emphasis on local semi-autonomy, institutionalizing the way most of them had lived under the Transitional Authority.

      Thus the many checks against majoritarian rule did not bother them, even though they themselves were the current majority. In order not to look defeated by this development, Jackie and her circle had to pretend they had never argued for a strong presidency and central government in the first place; indeed they claimed that an executive council, elected by the legislature in the Swiss manner, had been their idea all along. A lot of that kind of thing was going on, and Art was happy to agree with all such claims: ‘Yes, I remember, we were wondering what to do about that the night when we stayed up to see the sunrise, it was a good thought you had.’

      Good ideas everywhere. And they began to spiral down toward closure.

      The global government as they had designed it was to be a confederation, led by an executive council of seven members, elected by a two-housed legislature. One legislative branch, the duma, was composed of a large group of representatives drafted from the populace; the other, the senate, a smaller group elected one from each town or village group larger than five hundred people. The legislature was all in all fairly weak; it elected the executive council and helped select justices of the courts, and left to the towns most legislative duties. The judicial branch was more powerful; it included not only criminal courts, but also a kind of double supreme court, one half a constitutional court, and the other half an environmental court, with members to both appointed, elected and drawn by lottery. The environmental court would rule on disputes concerning terraforming and other environmental changes, while the constitutional court would rule on the constitutionality of all other issues, including challenged town laws. One arm of the environmental court would be a land commission, charged with overseeing the stewardship of the land, which was to belong to all Martians together, in keeping with point three of the Dorsa Brevia agreement; there would not be private property as such, but there would be various tenure rights established in leasing contracts, and the land commission was to work these matters out. A corresponding economic commission would function under the constitutional court, and would be partly composed of representatives from guild co-operatives which would be established for the various professions and industries. This commission was to oversee the establishment of a version of the underground’s eco-economics, including both not-for-profit enterprises concentrating on the public sphere, and taxed for-profit enterprises which had legal size limits, and were by law employee-owned.

      This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for a strong global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was also a response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the previous century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or otherwise collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held firm, issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the land, in a mostly-ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the metanats’ depredations; a moral force, which if it had had more teeth, might have done more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle fought, and now they remembered.

      Thus the Martian global government. The constitution then also included a long list of human rights, including social rights; guidelines for the land commission and the economics commission; an Australian ballot election system for the elective offices; a system for amendments; and so on. Lastly, to the main text of the constitution they appended the huge collection of materials that had accumulated in the process, calling it Working Notes and Commentary. This was to be used to help the courts interpret the main document, and included everything