I looked down on the Potomac and the mall beyond. A crystalline day with high puffy clouds. Washington DC a tiny village, its monuments and ancient domed Capitol visible only as grains of rice in the general green and brown.
Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic…
A fatuous grin spread across my face. I was a Martian, come to invade Earth.
Alice presented her report. We sat in the living room of our suite and scanned the highlights. Bithras dug deeper on several key points. “It’s not encouraging,” he said.
“The need for central control of all solar resources may be acute within fifteen Earth years,” Alice said. “It is generally recognized that Earth needs a major endeavor to keep up its overall psychological and economic vigor, and that endeavor — that social focus — must be interstellar exploration on a grand scale.”
Allen found that puzzling. “The whole Earth recognizes this? Everybody agrees?”
“Agreement is strong among those groups who make the crucial decisions about the Triple,” Alice said. “Especially the executives of the major alliances.”
“We’ll be pressured to join in the endeavor, whether or not it directly benefits Mars,” Bithras said.
“Such a conclusion is overdetermined by the evidence,” Alice said.
Bithras leaned back on the couch. “Nothing we can’t roll with.” But he seemed troubled. “It’s a bit obvious, don’t you think?”
“Evidence for other conclusions is not clear,” Alice said.
“It’s what some of our fellow passengers were saying,” I said.
“Cut and dried, though, isn’t it?” Bithras said, biting his upper lip. He resembled a bulldog when he did that. “Tomorrow I’ll open the proposals and share them with you. I need you to fully understand what we’re allowed to say, and what we’re allowed to give, at each stage of negotiation.” He sat up. “From now, you are more than apprentices,” he said. “You represent a Mars yet to be born. You are diplomats.”
And we acted the part. We attended receptions and parties, hosted two of our own, visited the offices of major corporations and temp agencies, attended dinners arranged by Mars appreciation societies…
Miriam hosted our private reception in the hotel. I spent hours talking to explanetaries, listening to their stories of old Mars, answering their questions as best I could about the new Mars. Did Mackenzie Frazier ever unite the Canadian BMs in Syrtis? Whatever became of the Prescott and Ware families in Hellas ? My sister still lives on Mars, Mariner Valley South, but she never answers my letters — do you know why?
All too often, I could only smile and plead ignorance. There was no Pan-Martian family message center or database easily accessible from Earth. I took a note on my slate to have Majumdar set one up; good for PR. Ex-Martians on Earth could be valuable allies, I thought, and Miriam excepted, we didn’t use them very often.
During a break at the reception, I asked Miriam how often Martian BMs approached her, directly from Mars. “About once a year,” she said, smiling. I said that was deplorable, and she patted my shoulder. “We are such trusting and insular creatures,” she said. “By the time you leave here, you’ll know only too well what we’re up against, and how far we have to go to get in the spin…”
I made a note on my slate that we should sign Miriam to Majumdar exclusively — but didn’t that contradict the spirit of unity we were working so hard to demonstrate?
Visiting offices of members of Congress, I quickly noticed a remarkable lack of attention to Bithras’s hints at what our proposals might be. Bithras fell into a dark and snappish mood at the end of a grueling day of office-hopping.
“They don’t much care,” he said, accepting a glass of wine from Allen as we rested in our suite. “That is very puzzling.”
Mornings, ex net and LitVid interviews, conducted from a studio in the Capitol; afternoons, more interviews from a studio in the hotel; then lunches with major financiers who listened and smiled, but promised nothing; finally, dinners with congressional staffers, full of curiosity and enthusiasm, but who also revealed little and promised nothing.
Visits to schools in Washington and Virginia, usually over ed-nets from our hotel room… A quick train journey to Pennsylvania to meet with Amish Friends of Sylvan Earth, who had finally accepted the use of computers, but not thinkers. Back to Washington … A guided tour of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum .
The original Library of Congress had been sealed in helium and was accessible now only in pressure suits. We were not offered the chance to go in. Arbeiters roamed its halls, guarding and tracking its countless billions of paper books and periodicals. It had stopped accepting paper copies in 2049; most research was now conducted out of the electronic archives, which filled a small chamber several hundred feet beneath the old library. Alice absorbed as much of the library as she needed, but even her immense reserves of memory would have been taxed by absorbing all.
At the Air and Space Museum , we stood for pictures at the foot of a full-size replica of the first Mars lander, the Captain James Cook. I had seen the original as a preform schoolgirl. To me, the replica seemed larger beneath its dome than the original, sitting in the open air of Elysium.
Earth had too much to show us. We were in danger of becoming exhausted before our most important day arrived…
We entered the hearing chamber, stately stone and warm dark wood, seats upholstered in dark faux leather; Bithras, Allen, and myself, deliberately dressed in conservative Martian fashions, Alice on her freshly polished carriage.
With our synthetic clothing and unaltered physiques, we must have resembled hicks in a LitVid comedy. But we were greeted respectfully by five senators from the Standing Committee on Solar System and Near-Earth Space Affairs. For a few minutes, we gathered in light conversation with the senators and a few of their staff. The air was polite but formal. Again, I sensed something amiss, as did Bithras, whose nostrils flared as he took his seat behind a long maple table. Allen leaned over and asked me, “Why aren’t we testifying before the whole committee?” I did not know.
I sat to the left of Bithras in a hard wooden chair; Allen sat to his right. Alice was connected to the Senate thinker, Harold S., who had served the Senate for sixty years.
The gallery was empty. Obviously, this would be a closed hearing.
Senator Kay Juarez Sommers of New Mexico, chair of the committee, gaveled the hearing into order. “I welcome our distinguished guests from Mars. You don’t know how odd that is for an old Terrie like myself to say, even today. Maybe I need some enhancements to the imagination. Certainly some of my colleagues think so…” She was in her mid-seventies, if I could judge age when appearance seemed an arbitrary choice; small and wiry, clean simple features, smooth-voiced, dressing hard in blacks and grays. Senator Juarez Sommers had not chosen any easy roads in her life, and she had eschewed obvious transform designs.
Also attending the hearing today were Senators John Mendoza of Utah, tall, chocolate-skinned, severely handsome and stocky; Senator David Wang of California, white-blond with golden skin, a fairly obvious transform; and Senator Joe Kim of Green Idaho, of middle height, gray-haired, wearing an expression of perpetual suspicion. Or perhaps it was discernment.
“Mr. Majumdar, as you can see, this is a closed hearing,” Juarez Sommers began. “We’ve chosen key members of the standing committee to hear your testimony. We’ll speak directly, since our time is limited. We’re curious as to how much progress Mars will make toward unification in the next five years. ”