“But Sax,” Coyote complained, “the very concept of the nation-state is a bad one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.”
“Could be,” Sax said. “But as a starting point.”
“All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,” Jackie said.
It was strange how certain elements of the greens were as obsessed by total independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, “In physics I often bracket the problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they don’t get solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that kind of problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.”
But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about the cable, what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds who had apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring all his suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for General Sax in the postrevolutionary world.
Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want to go into the town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of Spencer’s from Dawes’s Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built just before the revolt, in anticipation of the freedom from the need for stealth. As the AI pilot floated the big silver-winged craft over the great maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom of the fuselage which had a large clear floor, so that they could look over the arms of their chairs at the view below; in this case, the immense linked network of troughs which was the Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth plateaus that stood between the canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice places to live, somewhat like Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a model town in a glass bottle.
The plane’s crew started talking about Separation de 1’Atmosphere, and Sax listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the revolution’s armaments and with basic materials research, while “Sep” as they called it had dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they still had a healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them functioning was a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of them said. Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.
Sep was associated with Praxis, apparently, and each tent or covered canyon was run by a separate organization. They pooled information and shared roving consultants and construction teams. Since they deemed themselves necessary services, they ran on a cooperative basis — on the Mondra-gon plan, one said, nonprofit version — though they made sure to provide their members with very nice living situations and lots of free time. “They think they deserve it, too. Because when something goes wrong they have to act fast or else.” Many of the covered canyons had had close calls, sometimes the result of meteor strike or other drama, other times more ordinary mechanical failures. The usual format for covered canyons had the physical plant consolidated at the higher end of the canyon, and this plant sucked in the appropriate amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and trace gases from the surface winds. The proportions of gases and the pressure range they were kept at varied from mesocosm to mesocosm, but they averaged around five hundred millibars, which gave some lift to the tent roofs, and was pretty much the norm for indoor spaces on Mars, in a kind of invocation of the eventual goal for the surface at the datum. On sunny days, however, the expansion of air inside the tents was very significant, and the standard procedures for dealing with it included simply releasing air back into the atmosphere, or else saving it by compressing it into huge container chambers hollowed out of the canyon cliffs. “So one time I was in Dao Vallis,” one of the techs said, “and the excess air chamber blew up, shattering the plateau and causing a big landslide that fell down onto Reullgate and tore open the tent roof. Pressures dropped to the local ambient, which was about two hundred and sixty, and everything started to freeze, and they had the old emergency bulkheads,” which were clear curtains only a few molecules thick but very strong, as Sax recalled, “and when they deployed automatically around the break, this one woman got pinned to the ground by the supersticky at the bottom of the bulkhead, with her head on the wrong side! We ran over to her and did some quick cut and paste and got her loose, but she almost died.”
Sax shivered, thinking of his own recent brush with cold; and 260 millibars was the pressure one would find on the peak of Everest. The others were already talking about other famous blowouts, including the time Hiranyagarba’s dome had fallen in its entirety under an ice rain, despite which no one had died.
Then they were descending over the great cratered high plain of Xanthe, coming down on the Da Vinci crater floor’s big sandy runway, which they had just started using during the revolution. The whole community had been preparing for years for the day when stealthing would become unnecessary, and now a big curve of copper-mirrored windows had been installed in the arc of the southern crater rim. There was a layer of snow in the bottom of the crater, which the central knob broke out of quite dramatically. It was possible they could arrange for a lake in the crater floor, with a central knob island, which would have as its horizon the circling cliffy hills of the crater rim. A circular canal could be built just under the rim cliffs, with radial canals connecting it to the inner lake; the resulting alternation of circular water and land would resemble Plato’s description of Atlantis. In this configuration Da Vinci could support, in near self-sufficiency, some twenty or thirty thousand people, Sax guessed; and there were scores of craters like Da Vinci. A commune of communes, each crater a city-state of sorts, its polls fully capable of supporting itself, of deciding what kind of culture it might have; and then with a vote in a global council of some kind… No regional association larger than the level of the town, except for arrangements of local interchange… might it work?
Da Vinci made it seem like it might. The south arc of the rim was alive with arcades and wedge-shaped pavilions and the like, now all shot through with sunlight. Sax toured the whole complex one morning, visiting one lab after the next, and congratulating the occupants on the success of their preparations for a smooth removal of UNTA from Mars. Some political power came out of the end of a gun, after all, and some out of the look in the eye; and the look in the eye changed depending on whether a gun was pointed at it or not. They had spiked the guns, these people the saxaclones, and so they were in high spirits — happy to see him, and already looking for different work — back to basic research, or figuring out uses for the new materials that Spencer’s alchemists were constantly churning out; or studying the terraforming problem.
They were also paying attention to what was going on in space and on Earth. A fast shuttle from Earth, contents unknown, had contacted them requesting permission to make an orbital insertion without a keg of nails being thrown in its way. So a Da Vinci team was now nervously working out security protocols, in heavy consultation with the Swiss embassy, which had taken an office in a suite of apartments at the northwest end of the arc. From rebels to administrators; it was an awkward transition.
“What political parties do we support?” Sax asked.
“I don’t know. The usual array I guess.”
“No party gets much support. Whatever works, you know.”
Sax knew. That was the old tech position, held ever since scientists had become a class in society, a priest caste almost, intervening between the people and their power. They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants — empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments, and other mass delusional systems of that sort.