Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [66]
“I guess you say it’s a stupid question,” Art said. “Sorry. Thinking in constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this— what do you think of it?”
Nazik laughed. “You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran Mahjaris think. He knows them only too well.”
“Too well,” Zeyk repeated.
“Do you think the human-rights section will go with them?”
Zeyk frowned. “No doubt we will sign the constitution.”
“But these rights . . . I thought there were no Arab democracies still?”
“What do you mean? There’s Palestine, Egypt. . . . Anyway it’s Mars we are concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the very beginning.”
“Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?”
“Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don’t think the new constitution will end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader yourself, yes?”
Art laughed uncomfortably. “I’m just a messenger.”
Zeyk shook his head. “Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you should go, if you want to know what the Qahirans think. He is our king now.”
He looked as if he had bit into something sour, and Art said, “So what does he want, do you think?”
“He is Jackie’s creature,” Zeyk muttered, “nothing more.”
“I should think that would be a strike against him.”
Zeyk shrugged.
“It depends who you talk to,” Nazik said. “For the older Muslim immigrants, it is a bad association, because although Jackie is very powerful, she has had more than one consort, and so Antar looks. . . .”
“Compromised,” Art suggested, forestalling some other word from the glowering Zeyk.
“Yes,” Nazik said. “But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And all of the people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become even more powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are more native than Arab, I think. It’s Mars that matters to them more than Islam. From that point of view, a close association with the Zygote ectogenes is a good thing. The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new Mars— especially Nirgal, of course, but with him off to Earth, there’s a certain transfer of his influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to Antar.”
“I don’t like him,” Zeyk said.
Nazik smiled at her husband. “You don’t like how many of the native Muslims are following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It could be time for retirement.”
“I don’t see why,” Zeyk objected. “If we’re going to live a thousand years, then what difference does a hundred make?”
Art and Nazik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was the first time Art had ever seen him smile.
• • •
In fact, age didn’t matter. People wandered around, old or young or somewhere in between, talking and arguing, and it would have been an odd thing for the length of someone’s lifetime to become a factor in such discussions.
And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway. If you were born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a way that no Terran could even imagine— not just because of the whole complex of areorealities they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn’t know. Terrans knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that cultural and biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the screen images, but that wasn’t enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one reason Art was glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth; he would learn what they were up against.
But most of the natives wouldn’t. And the revolution had gone to their heads. Despite their cleverness at the table in working the constitution toward a form that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive; they had no idea how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit— led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic