Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [76]
Coyote would not kid about this. “You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.”
As for UNTA, it was harder to tell what they thought, because opinions back on Earth were divided, with a loud faction calling for the retaking of Mars by force, everyone on Pavonis to be jailed or hanged. Most Terrans were more accommodating, and all of them were still distracted by the ongoing crisis at home. And at the moment, they didn’t matter as much as the Reds; that was the space the revolution had given the Martians. Now they were about to fill it.
• • •
Every night of the final week, Art went to bed incoherent with cavils and kava, and though exhausted he would wake fairly often during the night, and roll under the force of some seemingly lucid thought that in the morning would be gone, or revealed as lunatic. Nadia slept just as poorly on the couch next to his, or in her chair. Sometimes they would fall asleep talking over some point or other, and wake up dressed but entangled, holding on to each other like children in a thunderstorm. The warmth of another body was a comfort like nothing else. And once in the dim predawn ultraviolet light they both woke up, and talked for hours in the cold silence of the building, in a little cocoon of warmth and companionship. Another mind to talk to. From colleagues to friends; from there to lovers, maybe; or something like lovers; Nadia did not seem inclined to romanticism of any kind. But Art was in love, no doubt about it, and there twinkled in Nadia’s flecked eyes a new fondness for him, he thought. So that at the end of the long final days of the congress, they lay on their couches and talked, and she would knead his shoulders, or him hers, and then they would fall comatose, pounded by exhaustion. There was more pressure to ushering in this document than either one of them wanted to admit, except in these moments, huddling together against the cold big world. A new love: Art, despite Nadia’s unsentimentality, found no other way to put it. He was happy.
And he was amused, but not surprised, when they got up one morning and she said, “Let’s put it to a vote.”
• • •
So Art talked to the Swiss and the Dorsa Brevia scholars, and the Swiss proposed to the congress that they vote on the version of the constitution currently on the table, voting point by point as they had promised in the beginning. Immediately there was a spasm of vote trading that made Terran stock exchanges look subtle and slow. Meanwhile the Swiss set up a voting sequence, and over the course of three days they ran through it, allowing one vote to each group on each numbered paragraph of the draft constitution. All eighty-nine paragraphs passed, and the massive collection of “explanatory material” was officially appended to the main text.
After that it was time to put it to the people of Mars for approval. So on Ls 158, 1 October 11th, m-year 52 (on Earth, February 27, 2128), the general populace of Mars, including everyone over five m-years old, voted by wrist on the resulting document. Over ninety-five percent of the population voted, and the constitution passed seventy-eight percent to twenty-two percent, garnering just over nine million votes. They had a government.
Part Four
Green Earth
Prologue
On Earth, meanwhile, the great flood dominated everything.
The flood had been caused by a cluster of violent volcanic eruptions under the west Antarctic ice sheet. The land underneath the ice sheet, resembling North America’s basin and range country, had been depressed by the weight of the ice until it lay below sea level. So when the eruptions began the lava and gases had melted the ice over the volcanoes, causing vast slippages overhead; at the same time, ocean water had started to pour in under the ice, at various points around the swiftly eroding grounding line. Destabilized and shattering, enormous islands of ice had broken off all around the edges of the