Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [185]
“And they are building one for Earth as well. And so . . .”
“We had better act.”
Then as the stone sake bottles kept going around, and emptying, they gave up on such seriousness, and talked about the past year, things they had seen in the outback, gossip about mutual acquaintances, new jokes heard. Nanao got out a packet of balloons, and they filled them and tossed them out into the city’s night breeze, and watched them float down onto the trees and the old habitats. They passed around a canister of nitrous oxide, took breaths and laughed. The stars made a thick net overhead. One told stories of space, of the asteroid belt. They tried to nick exposed bits of wood with their pocket knives and failed. “This congress will be what we call nema-washi. Preparing the ground.”
Two stood, arms around each other, and swayed until they had caught their balance, then held out their little cups in a toast.
“Next year on Olympus.”
“Next year on Olympus,” the others repeated, and drank.
1
It was 180, M-year 40, when they began to arrive at Dorsa Brevia, in small cars and planes from all over the south. A group of Reds and caravan Arabs checked people’s credentials in the wasteland approaches, and more Reds and Bogdanovists were stationed in bunkers located all around the dorsa, armed, in case there was any trouble. The Sabishiian intelligence experts, however, thought that the conference was unknown in Burroughs or Hellas or Sheffield, and when they explained why they thought so, people tended to relax, for clearly they had penetrated far into the halls of UNTA, and indeed throughout the whole structure of transnational power on Mars. That was another advantage to the demimonde; they could work in both directions.
When Nadia arrived, with Art and Nirgal, they were led to their guest quarters in Zakros, the southernmost segment of the tunnel. Nadia dropped her pack in a little wooden room, and wandered the big park, and then through the segments farther north, finding old friends and meeting strangers, feeling in a mood of good hope. It was encouraging to see all these people milling about the green parks and pavilions, representing so many different groups. She looked around at the crowd thronging the canalside park, perhaps three hundred people in view at that moment, and laughed.
• • •
The Swiss from Overhangs arrived on the day before the conference was supposed to begin; people said they had been camped outside in their rovers, waiting for the date specified. They brought with them a whole set of procedures and protocols for the meeting, and as Nadia and Art listened to a Swiss woman describing their plans, Art elbowed Nadia and whispered, “We’ve created a monster.”
“No no,” Nadia whispered back, happy as she looked over the big central park in the third-from-the-south segment of the tunnel, called Lato. The skylight overhead was a long bronze crack in the dark roof, and morning light filled the giant cylindrical chamber with the kind of photon rain she had been craving all winter, brown light everywhere, the bamboo and pine and cypress rising over the tile rooftops and blazing like green water. “We need a structure, or it would be a free-for-all. The Swiss are form without content, if you see what I mean.”
Art nodded. He was very quick, sometimes even hard to understand, because he jumped five or six steps at a time and assumed she had followed him. “Just get them to drink kava with the anarchists,” he muttered, and got up to walk around the edges of the meeting.
And in fact that night, on her way with Maya through Gournia to a canalside row of open-air kitchens, Nadia passed by Art and saw that he was doing just that, dragging Mikhail and some of the other Bogdanovist hard-liners over to a table of Swiss, where Jurgen and Max and Sibilla and Priska were chatting happily with a group standing around them, switching languages as if they were translation AIs, but in every language exhibiting the same buoyant guttural Swiss accent. “Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.
“Art is an idiot,” Maya