Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [217]
And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. “God damn it,” Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week back. “Why has UNOMA caved like this?”
Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered no theories. He had definitely been away too long; they were afraid of him now. He had to answer the question himself: “It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”
At dinner that night, in a little café, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev. As they ate they watched the news from Earth on a bar TV. Really it had gotten to be almost too much to watch. Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population-growth slowdown. No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that’s what it was in fact, and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the U.N. resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed. Another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland had all proclaimed immigration illegal, while India was growing by 8 percent a year. Famine would solve that, as it would in a lot of countries. The Four Horsemen were good at population control. Until then. . . The TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. “Eat all you want!”
Janet clicked off the TV. “Let’s change the subject.”
They sat around their table and stared at their plates. It turned out Vlad and Ursula had come from Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Elysium. “The cordon sanitaire has fallen apart,” Ursula said. “Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems.”
Earth again. It was impossible to avoid it. “Things are falling apart down there!” Janet said.
“It’s been coming for years,” Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. “Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in the poor. Think about that! But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole concern. Now every corner shop has a TV and they can see what’s happening— that they’ve got AIDS while the rich have the treatment. It’s gone way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live forever! So why should they hold back? They’ve got nothing to lose.”
“And everything to gain,” Vlad said. “They could live like us.”
They huddled over cups of coffee. The room was dim. The pine furniture had a dark patina; stains, nicks, fines rubbed in by hand.. . . It could have been one of those nights in that distant time when they were the only ones in the world, a few of them up later than the rest, talking. Except Frank blinked and looked around, and saw in his friends’ faces the weariness, the white hair, the turtle faces of the old. Time had passed, they were scattered over the planet, running like he was, or hidden like Hiroko, or dead like John. John’s absence suddenly seemed huge and gaping, a crater on whose rim they huddled glumly, trying to warm their hands. Frank shuddered.
Later Vlad and Ursula went to bed. Frank looked at Janet, feeling immobilized as he sometimes did at the end of a long day, incapable of ever moving again. “Where’s Maya these days?” he asked, to keep Janet from retiring too. She and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years.
“Oh, she’s here in Burroughs,” Janet said. “Didn’t you know?”
“No.”
“She’s got Samantha’s old rooms. She