Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [59]
And so now it was Art’s great pleasure to become, in effect, Nadia’s personal assistant. He arranged her days, and did everything he could to make sure they ran smoothly. This included making a good pot of kavajava first thing every morning, for Nadia was one of many of them fond of that initial jolt toward alertness and general goodwill. Yes, Art thought, personal assistant and drug dispenser, that was his destiny at this point in history. And he was happy. Just watching people look at Nadia was a pleasure in itself. And the way she looked back: interested, sympathetic, skeptical, an edge developing quickly if she thought someone was wasting her time, a warmth kindling if she was impressed by their contribution. And people knew this, they wanted to please her. They tried to keep to the point, to make a contribution. They wanted that particular warm look in her eye. Very strange eyes they were, really, when you looked close: hazel, basically, but flecked with innumerable tiny patches of other colors, yellow, black, green, blue. A mesmerizing quality to them. Nadia focused her full attention on people— she was willing to believe you, to take your side, to make sure your case didn’t get lost in the shuffle; even the Reds, who knew she had been fighting with Ann, trusted her to make sure they were heard. So the work coalesced around her; and all Art really had to do was watch her at work, and enjoy it, and help where he could.
And so the debates began.
• • •
In the first week many arguments concerned simply what a constitution was, what form it should take, and whether they should have one at all. Charlotte called this the meta-conflict, the argument about what the argument was about— a very important matter, she said when she saw Nadia squint unhappily, “because in settling it, we set the limits on what we can decide. If we decide to include economic and social issues in the constitution, for instance, then this is a very different kind of thing than if we stick to purely political or legal matters, or to a very general statement of principles.”
To help structure even this debate, she and the Dorsa Brevia scholars had come with a number of different “blank constitutions,” which blocked out different kinds of constitutions without actually filling in their contents. These blanks did little, however, to stop the objections of those who maintained that most aspects of social and economic life ought not to be regulated at all. Support for such a “minimal state” came from a variety of viewpoints that otherwise made strange bedfellows: anarchists, libertarians, neotraditional capitalists, certain greens, and so on. To the most extreme of these antistatists, writing up any government at all was a kind of defeat, and they conceived of their role in the congress as making the new government as small as possible.
Sax heard about this argument in one of the nightly calls from Nadia and Art, and he was as willing to think about it seriously as he was anything else. “It’s been found that a few simple rules can regulate very complex behavior. There’s a classic computer model for flocking birds, for instance, which only has three rules— keep an equal distance from everyone around you— don’t change speed too fast— avoid stationary objects. Those will model the flight of a flock quite nicely.”
“A computer flock maybe,” Nadia scoffed. “Have you ever seen chimney swifts at dusk?”
After a moment Sax’s reply arrived: “No.”
“Well, take a look when you get to Earth. Meanwhile we can’t be having a constitution that says only ‘don’t change speed too fast.’ ”
Art thought this was funny, but Nadia was not amused. In general she had little patience for the minimalist arguments. “Isn’t it the equivalent