Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [359]
Sax and Ann struggled to a sitting position. Sax opened the cockpit shell. Brown water spilled in over the gunwale. A windy hazy day in the Arabian countryside. The water pouring in felt distinctly warm. Ann’s face was wet and her hair stood out in stiff tufts, as if she had been electrocuted. She smiled a crooked smile. “Nicely done,” she said.
Part Fourteen
Phoenix Lake
Prologue
A gun shot, a bell rung, a choir singing counterpoint.
The third Martian revolution was so complex and nonviolent that it was hard to see it as a revolution at all, at the time; more like a shift in a ongoing argument, a change in the tide, a punctuation of equilibrium.
The takeover of the elevator was the seed of the crisis, but then a few weeks later the Terran military came down the cable and the crisis flowered everywhere at once. On the shore of the North Sea, on a small indentation of the coast of Tempe Terra, a cluster of landers dropped out of the sky, swaying under parachutes or shimmering down on plumes of pale fire: a whole new colony, an unauthorized incursion of immigrants. This particular group was from Kampuchea; elsewhere on the planet other landers were descending, with settlers from the Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, Japan, Venezuela, New York. The Martians did not know how to respond. They were a demilitarized society, with no idea that something like this could ever happen, with no way to defend themselves. Or so they thought.
Once again it was Maya who pulled them into action, playing the wrist like Frank used to, calling everyone in the open Mars coalition and many others besides, orchestrating the general response. Come on, she said to Nadia. One more time. And so through the cities and villages the word spread, and people went down into the streets, or got on trains to Mangala.
On the coast of Tempe, the new Kampuchean settlers got out of their landers and went to the little shelters that had been dropped with them, just as the First Hundreds had two centuries before. And out of the hills came people wearing furs, and carrying bows and arrows. They had red stone eyeteeth, and their hair was tied in topknots. Here, they said to the settlers, who had bunched before one of their shelters. Let us help you. Put those guns down. We’ll show you where you are. You don’t need that kind of shelter, it’s an old design. That hill you see to the west is Perepelkin Crater. There’s already apple and cherry orchards on the apron, you can take what you need. Look, here are the plans for a disk house, that’s the best design for this coast. Then you’ll need a marina, and some fishing boats. If you let us use your harbor we’ll show you where the truffles grow. Yes, a disk house, see, a Sattelmeier disk house. It’s lovely to live out in the open air. You’ll see.
All branches of the Martian government had met in the assembly hall in Mangala, to deal with the crisis. The Free Mars majority in the senate, and the executive council, and the Global Environmental Court, all agreed that the illegal incursion of Terrans was an act of aggression the equivalent of war, which had to be responded to in kind. There were suggestions from the floor of the senate that asteroids could be directed at Terra, as bombs that would be diverted only if the immigrants returned home and the elevator went back to a system of dual supervision. It would only take one strike to have a KT event, and so on. UN diplomats on the scene pointed out that this was a sword that could cut both ways.
In these tense days there came a knock on the door of the assembly hall in Mangala, and in walked Maya Toitovna. She said, “We want to speak.” Then she ushered in a crowd waiting outside,