Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [198]
Art spread his hands, red-faced with embarrassment, shifting his shoulders as if dodging abuse, or sliding through it to make an appeal to the people behind Maya, the ones who might just be curious. “We need help,” he said. “We can’t accomplish what we want all by ourselves. Praxis is different, they’re more like us than them, I’m telling you.”
“It is not your right to tell us!” Maya said. “You are our prisoner!”
Art squinted, waggled his hands. “You can’t be a prisoner and a spy at the same time, can you?”
“You can be every kind of treacherous thing at once!” Maya exclaimed.
Jackie walked up to Art and looked down on him, her face stern and intent. “You know this Praxis group may have to become permanent Martians now, whether they want to be or not. Just like you.”
Art nodded. “I told them that might happen. Obviously they didn’t care. They want to help, I’m telling you. They represent the only transnational that’s doing things differently, that has goals similar to ours. They’ve come here by themselves to see if they can help. They’re interested. Why should you be so upset by that? It’s an opportunity.”
“Let’s see what Fort says,” Nadia said.
• • •
The Swiss had convened the special meeting in the Malia amphitheater, and as the crowd of delegates gathered, Nadia helped guide the newcomers through the segment gates to the site. They were still obviously awestruck at the size of Dorsa Brevia’s tunnel. Art was scurrying around them with his eyes bugged out, wiping sweat from his brow with his sleeve, intensely nervous. It made Nadia laugh. Somehow Fort’s arrival had put her in a good mood; she did not see how they could lose from it.
So she sat down in the front row with the Praxis group, and watched as Art led Fort onto the stage and introduced him. Fort nodded and spoke a sentence, then tilted his head and looked up at the back row of the amphitheater, realizing that he was unamplified. He took a breath and started again, and his usually quiet voice floated out with the assurance of a veteran actor, carrying nicely to everyone there.
“I’d like to thank the people of Subarashii for bringing me south to this conference.”
Art cringed as he returned to his seat, and turned and cupped a hand by his mouth: “That’s Sabishii,” he said in an undertone to Fort.
“What’s that?”
“Sabishii. You said Subarashii, which is the transnational. The settlement you went through to get here is called Sabishii. Sabishii means ‘lonely.’ Subarashii means ‘wonderful.’ ”
“Wonderful,” Fort said, staring curiously at Art. Then he shrugged and was off and running, an old Terran with a quiet but penetrating voice, and a somewhat wandering style. He described Praxis, how it had begun and how it operated now. When he explained the relationship of Praxis to the other transnationals, Nadia thought there were similarities to the relationship on Mars between the underground and the surface worlds, no doubt cleverly highlighted by Fort’s description. And it seemed to her from the silence behind her that Fort was doing pretty well at capturing the crowd’s interest. But then he said something about ecocapitalism, and regarding Earth as a full world while Mars was still an empty one; and three or four Reds popped to their feet.
“What do you mean by that?” one of them called out. Nadia saw Art’s hands clench in his lap, and soon she could see why; Fort’s answer was long and strange, describing what he called ecocapitalism, in which nature was referred to as the bioinfrastructure, while people were referred to as human capital. Looking back Nadia saw many people frowning; Vlad and Marina had their heads together, and Marina was tapping away at her wrist. Suddenly Art popped to his feet, and interrupted to ask Fort what Praxis was doing now, and what he thought Praxis’s role might be on Mars.
Fort stared at Art as if he didn’t recognize