Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [10]
Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way or the other. More were in favor of cutting the cable than Ann would have guessed, not just Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt most threatened by the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth: Bedouins, the Polynesians, the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier natives. Still, they were in the minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority. Isolationist versus interactive; yet another fracture to add to all the others rending the Martian independence movement.
Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favor of keeping the cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with expulsion from Martian society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular, and afterward Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtle. It made Ann so angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to argue for bringing the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from Peter, but it scarcely registered— she talked in a white heat, forgetting all about the five-minute limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and on, though she had no idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of what she had already said. Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a lawyer’s brief— hopefully so— on the other hand, a part of her thought as her mouth ran on, perhaps she was just saying the word Mars over and over again, or babbling, and the audience simply humoring her, or else miraculously comprehending her in a moment of glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their heads like caps of jewels— and indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal, the old men’s bald pates like chunks of jasper, inside which all languages dead and living were understood equally; and for a moment they appeared all caught up together with her, all inside an epiphany of red Mars, free of Earth, living on the primal planet that had been and could be again.
She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate her, as it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no idea. She only knew she had gotten his attention at last.
This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation. Despite the great flood, Earth’s nations and metanationals were still incredibly powerful, and in some ways the crisis of the flood had drawn them together, making them even more powerful. So Nadia spoke of the need to compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply contradictory, Ann thought; because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they could not afford to offend, and therefore they must change all Terran social reality.
“But how!” Ann cried. “When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a world! No fulcrum, no lever, no force—”
“It isn’t just Earth,” Nadia replied. “There are going to be other settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the asteroids. We’ve got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re the natural leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all that— a reduction in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.”
“Getting in the way of progress,