Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [171]
Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He went to Free Mars meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew every afternoon. As the days passed he discovered that he was dreading the morning meetings; he only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no matter what they said. Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not politics, not like this. Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly he had been living his life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the surface cities about how to live theirs and still have some freedoms, some pleasures. Okay, it had been political, everything was; but it seemed he was not really interested in politics. Or perhaps it was government.
It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives’ leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars— son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage— very hard to oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia.
Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.
So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to ignore their little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from all over the planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles. Many tent towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it possible, and hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an operation in which the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid enough that water was the critical issue, and their requests for a water allotment were pouring in, until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn down a kilometer merely by pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These and a thousand more matters tested the constitution’s many networks for connecting local autonomy to global considerations; the debates would go on forever.
Nirgal, while fundamentally uninterested in most of these wrangles, found them yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in Cairo. He had come back from Earth without any official position in the new government or the old party, and one thing he saw going on these days was the struggle to place him— to give him a job with limited power, or, for his backers (or rather Jackie’s opponents) to put him in a position with some real power to it. Some friends advised him to wait and run for the senate when the next elections came, others mentioned the executive council, others party positions, others a post on the GEC. All these jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or another, and when he talked to Nadia on the screens, he could see that he would find them a burden; though she seemed to be hammering away stolidly enough, it was obvious the executive council was distasteful to her. But he kept a straight face