Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [128]
Later he sat with a few of them in a circle around a single lit lamp, and they stayed up through the night talking. The young Swiss asked him questions about his first trip, and about the first years in Underhill, both of which obviously had mythic dimensions for them, and he told them the real story, sort of, and made them laugh a lot; and asked them questions about Switzerland, how it worked, what they thought of it, why they were here rather than there. A blond woman laughed when he asked that. “Do you know about the Böögen?” she said, and he shook his head. “He’s part of our Christmas. Sami Claus comes to all the houses one by one, you see, and he has an assistant, the Böögen, who wears a cloak and a hood and carries a big bag. Sami Claus asks the parents how the children have been that year, and the parents show him the ledger, the record you know. And if the children have been good, Sami Claus gives them presents. But if the parents say the children have been bad, the Böögen sweeps them up in his bag and carries them away, and they’re never seen again.”
“What!” John cried.
“That is what they tell you. That is Switzerland. And that is why I am here on Mars.”
“The Böögen carried you here?”
They laughed, the woman too. “Yes. I was always bad.” She grew more serious. “But we will have no Böögen here.”
They asked him what he thought of the debate between the reds and the greens, and he shrugged and summarized what he could of Ann and Sax’s positions.
“I don’t think they are either right,” one of them said. His name was Jürgen and he was one of their leaders, an engineer who seemed some kind of cross between a burgermeister and a gypsy king, dark-haired and sharp-faced and serious. “Both sides say they are in favor of nature, of course. One has to say this. The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture. A garden, you know. An artwork. So neither way gets nature. There isn’t such a thing as nature possible on Mars.”
“Interesting!” John said. “I’ll have to tell Ann that, and see what she says. But. . . .” He thought about it. “Then what do you call this? What do you call what you’re doing?”
Jürgen shrugged, grinned. “We don’t call it anything. It is just Mars.”
Perhaps that was being Swiss, John thought. He had been meeting them more and more in his travels, and they all seemed like that. Do things, and don’t worry too much about theory. Whatever seemed right.
Later still, after they had drunk another few bottles of wine, he asked them if they had ever heard of the coyote. They laughed and one said, “He’s the one who came here before you, right?” They laughed again at his expression. “A story only,” one explained. “Like the canals, or Big Man. Or Sami Claus.”
Driving north the next day across Melas Chasma, John wished (as he had before) that everyone on the planet was Swiss, or at least like the Swiss. Or more like the Swiss in certain ways, anyway. Their love of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind of life: rational, just, prosperous, scientific. They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch