Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [86]
Arkady left the trailer park excited by the visit, Nadia could see, and that night he said to the dinner group, “We should make the decision on our own, and if we decide in favor, act.”
Maya and Frank were outraged by this, and clearly most of the rest were uncomfortable as well. Maya insisted on a change of subject, and awkwardly the dinner conversation shifted. The next morning Maya and Frank came to Nadia, to talk about Arkady. The two leaders had already tried to reason with him, late the night before. “He laughs in our face!” Maya exclaimed. “It’s useless to try to reason with him!”
“What he proposes could be very dangerous,” Frank said. “If we explicitly disregard a directive from the U.N., they could conceivably come here and round us up and ship us home, and replace us with people who will pay attention to the law. I mean, biological contamination of this environment is simply illegal at this point, and we don’t have the right to ignore that. It’s international treaty. It’s how humanity in general wants to treat this planet at this time.”
“Can’t you talk to him?” Maya asked.
“I can talk to him,” Nadia said. “But I can’t say that it will do any good.”
“Please, Nadia. Just try. We’ve got enough problems as it is.”
“I’ll try, sure.”
So that afternoon she talked to Arkady. They were out on Chernobyl Road, walking back toward Underhill. She brought it up, and suggested that patience was in order. “It will only be a matter of time before the U.N. comes around to your view anyway.”
He stopped and lifted her maimed hand. “How long do you think we have?” he said. He pointed at the setting sun. “How long do you suggest we wait? For our grandchildren? Our great-grandchildren? Our great-great-grandchildren, blind as cave fish?”
“Come on,” Nadia said, pulling her hand free. “Cave fish.”
Arkady laughed. “Still, it’s a serious question. We don’t have forever, and it would be nice to see things start to change.”
“Even so, why not wait a year?”
“A Terran year or a Martian year?”
“A Martian year. Get readings on all the seasons, give the U.N. time to come around.”
“We don’t need the readings, they’ve been taken now for years.”
“Have you talked to Ann about that?”
“No. Well, sort of. But she doesn’t agree.”
“A lot of people don’t agree. I mean maybe they will eventually, but you have to convince them. You can’t just run roughshod over opposing opinions, otherwise you’re just as bad as the people back home that you’re always criticizing.”
Arkady sighed. “Yeah yeah.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“You damned liberals.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”
But they were now within sight of the low mound of Underhill, looking like a fresh squarish crater, its ejecta scattered around it. Nadia pointed at it. “I did that. You damned radicals—” she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard—”you hate liberalism because it works.”
He snorted.
“It does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works.”
“Ah, Nadia.” He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again toward base. “Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally.”
• • •
Still, Nadia seemed to have affected him. He quit calling for a unilateral decision to release the new GEMs