Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [232]
The results in Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach got the local NSC larger grants from Washington, and matching grants from participating corporations. At the high point, in 2004, the Pensacola Coast NSC employed 20,000 people, and was one of the main factors responsible for what was called the “Gulf Renaissance.” Chalmers’s marriage to Priscilla Jones, daughter of one of the old money families from Panama City, seemed to symbolize this new synthesis of poverty and privilege in Florida, and the two were a prominent couple in the society of the Gulf Coast for about two years.
The election of 2004 ended this period. The abrupt cancellation of the NSC was one of the new administration’s first acts. Chalmers spent two months in Washington testifying before House and Senate subcommittees, trying to aid the passage of a bill reinstating the program. The bill passed, but the two Democratic Florida senators and the congressman from the Pensacola district did not support it, and Congress was unable to override the executive veto. The NSC “threatened market forces,” the new administration said, and so it came to an end. The indictment and conviction of 19 congressmen (including Pensacola’s representative) for lobbying irregularities originating in the building industry came eight years later, and by that time the NSC was a dead issue, its veterans scattered.
For Frank Chalmers it was a watershed. He retreated into a privacy from which in many respects he never emerged. The marriage did not survive the move to Huntsville, and Priscilla soon remarried a friend of the family she had known before Chalmers’s arrival in the area. In Washington, Chalmers led an austere life in which NASA appeared to be his exclusive interest; he was famous for his 18-hour days, and the enormous impact they had on NASA’s fortunes. These successes made Chalmers nationally famous, but no one at NASA or elsewhere in Washington claimed to know him well. The obsessive overscheduling served again as a mask, behind which the idealistic social worker of the Gulf Coast disappeared for good.
A disturbance at the front of the car caused Maya to look up. The Japanese were standing, pulling down luggage, and it was clear now that they were Burroughs natives; most of them were about two meters tall, gangly kids with toothy laughs and uniformly brilliant black hair. Gravity, diet, whatever it was, people born on Mars grew tall. This group of Japanese reminded Maya of the ectogenes in Zygote, those strange kids who had grown like weeds. . . . Now scattered over the planet, that whole little world gone, like all the others before it.
Maya grimaced, and on an impulse fast-forwarded her lectern to the article’s illustrations. There she found a photo of Frank at age twenty-three, in the beginning of his work with the NSC: a dark-haired kid with a sharp confident smile, looking at the world as if he were ready to tell it something it didn’t know. So young! So young and so knowing. At first glance Maya thought it was the innocence of youth to look so knowing, but in fact the face did not look innocent. His had not been an innocent childhood. But he was a fighter, and he had found his method, and was prevailing. A power that couldn’t be beaten, or so the smile seemed to say.
But kick the world, break your foot. As they said in Kamchatka.
The train slowed and glided to a smooth stop. They were in Fournier Station, where the Sabishii branch met the main Burroughs-to-Hellas piste.
The Burroughs Japanese filed out of the car, and Maya clicked off her lectern and followed. The station was only a small tent, south of Fournier