Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [203]
Sax thought he could see what Michel meant— there were rapid changes in attitudes to many things. Werteswandel, as Bela called it, mutation of values. But they still lived in a society struggling with archaisms of all sorts. Primates banding into tribes, guarding a territory, praying to a god like a cartoon parent. . . . “Sometimes I don’t think there’s been any progress at all,” he said, feeling strangely disconsolate.
“But Sax,” Michel protested, “right here on Mars we have seen both patriarchy and property brought to an end. It’s one of the greatest achievements in human history.”
“If true.”
“Don’t you think women have as much power as men now?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“Perhaps even more, when it comes to reproduction.”
“That would make sense.”
“And the land is in the shared stewardship of everyone. We still own personal items as property, but land as property has never happened here. That’s a new social reality, we struggle with it every day.”
So they did. And Sax remembered how bitter the conflicts had been in the old days, when property and capital had been the order of the day. Yes, perhaps it was true: patriarchy and property were in the process of being dismantled. At least on Mars, at least for now. As with string theory, it might take a long time to work it into any proper state. After all Sax himself, who had no prejudices whatsoever, had been amazed to see a woman mathematician at work. Or, to be more precise, a woman genius. By whom he had been promptly hypnotized, so to speak, along with every other man in the theory group— to the point of being rendered quite distraught by her departure. Uneasily he said, “On Earth people seem to be fighting just as much as before.”
Even Michel had to admit it. “Population pressures,” he said, trying to wave them away. “There are too many people down there, and more all the time. You saw what it was like during our visit. As long as Earth is in that situation, Mars is under threat. And so we fight up here too.”
Sax took the point. In a way it was comforting; human behavior not as irreducibly evil or stupid, but as responding, semirationally, to a given historical situation, a danger. Seizing what one could, with the notion that there might not be enough for all; doing everything possible to protect one’s offspring; which of course endangered all offspring, by the aggregate of individual selfish actions. But at least it could be called an attempt at reason, a first approximation.
“It’s not as bad as it was, anyway,” Michel was saying. “Even on Earth people are having far fewer children. And they’re reorganizing into collectives pretty well, considering the flood and all the trouble that preceded it. A lot of new social movements down there, a lot of them inspired by what we’re doing here. And by what Nirgal does. They’re still watching him and listening to him, even when he doesn’t speak. What he said during our visit there is still having a big effect.”
“I believe it.”
“Well, there you are! It’s getting better, you have to admit it. And when the longevity treatments stop working, there will come a balance of births and deaths.”
“We’ll hit that time soon,” Sax predicted glumly.
“Why do you say so?”
“Signs of it cropping up. People dying from one thing or other. Senescence is not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have kicked in— it’s a wonder we’ve done as much as we have. There’s probably a purpose in senescence. Avoiding overpopulation,