Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [267]
Maya nodded; for years she had felt a heightening tension between Earth and Mars, no matter Michel’s assurances. She had known this was coming, she had seen it.
“Jackie has a lot of groups lined up behind her, and Free Mars has had a supermajority in the global government for years now. They’ve been packing the environmental courts all the while. The courts will back her in any immigration ban she cares to propose. We want to maintain the policies as set by the treaty you negotiated, or even widen immigration quotas a bit, to give Earth as much help as we can. But Jackie’s going to be hard to stop. To tell you the truth, I don’t think we know quite how. So I thought I’d ask you.”
Maya was surprised: “How to stop her?”
“Yes. Or more generally, to ask you to help us. I think it will take unpisting her personally. I thought you might be interested.”
And she turned her head to look at Maya with a knowing smile.
There was something vaguely familiar in the ironic smile lifting that classic little full-lipped mouth, something which though offensive was much preferable to the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young historians pestering Michel. And as Maya considered it, the invitation began to look better and better; it was contemporary politics, an engagement with the present. The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. And this issue could prove to be important, as the young woman had said. And it would put her back in the midst of things. And of course (she did not think this consciously) anything that balked Jackie would have its own satisfactions. “Tell me more about it,” Maya said, moving down the balcony out of earshot of the others. And the tall ironic young woman followed her.
2
Michel had always wanted to take a trip on the Grand Canal, and recently he had talked Maya into trying a move from Sabishii back to Odessa, as a way to combat Maya’s various mental afflictions; they might even take an apartment in the same Praxis complex that they had lived in before the second revolution. That was the only place Maya thought of as home, aside from Underhill, which she refused even to visit. And Michel felt that coming back to some kind of home might help her. So, Odessa. Maya was agreeable; it did not matter to her. And Michel’s desire to travel there by way of the Grand Canal seemed fine as well. Maya had not cared. She wasn’t sure of anything these days, she had few opinions, few preferences; that was the trouble.
Now Vendana was saying that Jackie’s campaign was to proceed along the Grand Canal, north to south, in a big canal cruiser that doubled as campaign headquarters. They were there now, at the canal’s north end, getting ready in the Narrows.
So Maya returned to Michel on the terrace, and when the historians left them she said, “So let’s go to Odessa by the Grand Canal, like you said.”
Michel was delighted. Indeed it seemed to lift from him a certain somberness that had followed the dive into drowned Burroughs; he had been pleased at its effect on Maya, but for himself it had perhaps not been so good. He had been uncharacteristically reticent about his experience, somehow oppressed, as if overwhelmed by all that the great sunken capital represented in his own life. Hard to tell. So that now, to see Maya responding so well to the experience, and also to suddenly be given