Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [91]
The UN officials and the metanat advisers frowned at this, but they listened. And the whole world was watching; so that what a cadre of leaders in a European city thought was not as important, Nirgal judged, as the people in their villages, watching the man from Mars on the vid. And as Praxis and the Swiss and their allies worldwide had thrown all their resources into refugee aid and the longevity treatments, people everywhere were joining up. If you could make a living while saving the world— if it represented your best chance for stability and long life and your children’s chances— then why not? Why not? What did most people have to lose? The late metanational period had benefited some, but billions had been left out, in an ever-worsening situation.
So the metanats were losing their workers en masse. They couldn’t imprison them; it was getting hard to scare them; the only way they could keep them was to institute the same sorts of programs that Praxis had started. And this they were doing, or so they said. Maya was sure they were instituting superficial changes meant to resemble Praxis’s only in order to keep their workers and their profits too. But it was possible that Sax was right, and that they would be unable to keep control of the situation, and would usher in a new order despite themselves.
Which is what Nirgal decided to say, during one of his chances to speak, in a press conference in a big side room of the Bundeshaus. Standing at the podium, looking out at a room full of reporters and delegates— so unlike the improvised table in the Pavonis warehouse, so unlike the compound hacked out of the jungle in Trinidad, so unlike the stage in the sea of people during that wild night in Burroughs— Nirgal saw suddenly that his role was to be the young Martian, the voice of the new world. He could leave being reasonable to Maya and Sax, and provide the alien point of view.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said, looking at as many of them as he could. “Every moment in history contains a mix of archaic elements, things from all over the past, right back into prehistory itself. The present is always a melange of these variously archaic elements. There are still knights coming through on horseback and taking the crops of peasants. There are still guilds, and tribes. Now we see so many people leaving their jobs to work in the flood-relief efforts. That’s a new thing, but it’s also a pilgrimage. They want to be pilgrims, they want to have a spiritual purpose, they want to do real work— meaningful work. They won’t tolerate being stolen from anymore. Those of you here who represent the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will have to work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as anyone else. And it’s true— that will happen. But it’s going to be all right, even for you. Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest. This universal distribution of the longevity treatment that we are now seeing is the ultimate meaning of the democratic movement. It’s the physical manifestation of democracy, here at last. Health for all. And when that happens the explosion of positive human energy is going to transform the Earth in just a matter of years.”
Someone in the crowd stood and asked him about the possibility of a population explosion, and he nodded. “Yes of course. This is a real problem. You don’t have to be a demographer to see that if new ones continue being born while the elderly are not