Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [195]
“How do the Swiss solve that?” Art asked.
Jurgen shrugged. “I don’t think we do.”
“Man, I wish Fort were here!” Art said. “I tried to reach him a while back and tell him about this, I even used the Swiss government lines, but I never got any reply.”
• • •
The congress went on for almost a month. Sleep deprivation, and perhaps an overreliance on kava, made Art and Nirgal increasingly haggard and groggy, until Nadia started coming by at night and putting them to bed, pushing them onto couches and promising to write summaries of the tapes they had not reviewed. They would sleep right there in the room, muttering as they rolled over on the narrow foam-and-bamboo couches. One night Art sat up suddenly from his couch: “I’m losing the content of things,” he said to Nadia seriously, still half dreaming. “I’m just seeing forms now.”
“Becoming Swiss, eh? Go back to sleep.”
He flopped back down. “It was crazy to think you folks could do anything together,” he murmured.
“Go back to sleep.”
Probably it was crazy, she thought as he snuffed and snored. She stood up, went to the door. She felt the mental whirr in her head that told her she was not going to be able to sleep, and walked outside, into the park.
The air was still warm, the black skylights stuffed with stars. The length of the tunnel suddenly reminded her of one of the full rooms on the Ares, here vastly enlarged, but with the same aesthetics employed: dimly lit pavilions, the dark furry clumps of little forests. . . . A world-building game. But now there was a real world at stake. At first the attendants of the congress had been almost giddy with the enormous potential of it, and some, like Jackie and other natives, were young and irrepressible enough to feel that way still. But for a lot of the older representatives, the intractable problems were beginning to reveal themselves, like knobby bones under shrinking flesh. The remnant of the First Hundred, the old Japanese from Sabishii— they sat around these days, watching, thinking hard, with attitudes ranging from Maya’s cynicism to Marina’s anxious irritation.
And then there was the Coyote, down below her in the park, strolling tipsily out of the woods with a young woman holding him by the waist. “Ah, love,” he shouted down the long tunnel, throwing his arms wide, “could thou and I with fate conspire— to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire— would we not shatter it to bits, and then— remold it nearer to the heart’s desire!”
Indeed, Nadia thought, smiling, and went back to her room.
• • •
There were some reasons for hope. For one thing Hiroko persevered, attending meetings all day long, adding her thoughts and giving people the sense that they had chosen the most important meeting going on at that moment. And Ann worked— though she seemed critical of everything, Nadia thought, blacker than ever— and Spencer, and Sax, and Maya and Michel, and Vlad and Ursula and Marina. Indeed the First Hundred seemed to Nadia more united in this effort than in anything they had done since setting up Underhill— as if this were their last chance to get things right, to recover from the damage done. To make something for their dead friends’ sake.
And they weren’t the only ones to work. As the meetings went on people got a sense of who wanted the congress to achieve something tangible, and these people got in the habit of attending the same meetings, working hard on finding compromises and getting results onto screens, in the form of recommendations and the like. They had to tolerate visits by those who were more interested in grandstanding than results, but they kept hammering away.
Nadia focused on these signs of progress, and worked to keep Nirgal and Art informed, also fed and rested. People dropped by their suite: “We were told to bring this over to the big three.”