Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy, #3)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue—control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.

Yes yes. Don’t interrupt me. Management is a real thing, a technical matter. But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger. In which one percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five percent of the population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth. History has shown which values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all.

But most of our microeconomy has been in successful operation for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The different parts of the macroeconomy have been used in the pseudo-metanat Praxis, in Switzerland, in India’s state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna Italy, and in many other places, including the Martian underground itself.

That labor pool, plus taxes on private co-ops for use of the land and its resources, will enable us to guarantee the so-called social rights we have been discussing—housing, health care, food, education—things that should not be at the mercy of market rationality. Because la salute non si paga, as the Italian workers used to say. Health is not for sale!

Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious—the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good governments of all time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis—or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government

Standing foursquare before the windows, hands clenched to the rails, he looked down through clouds on the brilliant blue of the Caribbean, the intense greens of Venezuela. The Orinoco’s discharge into the sea was a leafy stain. The limb of the sky was composed of curved bands of white and turquoise, with the black of space above. All so glossy. The clouds were the same as on Mars but thicker, whiter, more stuffed with themselves. The intense gravity was perhaps exerting an extra pressure on his retina or optic nerve, to make the colors push and pulse so hard. Sounds were noisier.

Earth and Mars—and there are other habitable worlds in the solar system as well, none as big as our two, but there are a lot of them. And by using them all, and cooperating, we can get through the populated years. And walk out into a golden age.

When they emerged into the light again they were in a little station called the Jungfraujoch, “the highest train station in Europe” as a sign in six languages said—and no wonder, as it was located in an icy pass between the two great peaks the Monch and the Jungfrau, at 3,454 meters above sea level, with no point or destination but its own.

Beyond that were all the big resorts, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes, Nice, his own little Villefranche-sur-mer, and all the fashionable beach resorts in between, big and small, all drowned like the stretch under them: the sea mud brown, lapping against a fringe of pale broken rock and dead yellow trees, with the beach roads dipping into dirty white surf. Dirty surf, washing up into the streets of deserted towns.

Marseilles however had of course survived—the only part of the coast one could not care about, the ugliest part, the city. Of course. Its docks were inundated, and the neighborhoods immediately behind them; but the land rose quickly here, and the higher neighborhoods had gone on living their tough sordid existence, big ships still anchored in the harbor, long floating docks maneuvered out to them to empty their holds, while their sailors flooded the town and went mad in time-honored fashion. Sylvie said that Marseilles was where she had heard most of the hair-raising tales of adventure from the mouth of the Rhone and elsewhere around the Med, where the charts meant nothing anymore: houses of the dead between Malta and Tunisia, attacks by Barbary corsairs…

Michel tried to recall the old sun-beaten blue. There had been varieties of Mediterranean blue, the clear purity of the Adriatic, the Aegean with its Homeric touch of wine…now all brown. Brown sea, beachless sea cliffs, the pale hills rocky, desertlike, deserted. A wasteland. No, nothing was the same, nothing.

The leaves flailed in the gusty north wind. Smell of dust. A haze of brown light, the western sky brassy. The branches rose to twice or three times his height; the underbranches drooped down where they could brush his face. Human scale. The Mediterranean tree, the tree of the Greeks, who had seen so many things so clearly, seen things in their proper proportion, everything in a gauge symmetry to the human scale—the trees, the towns, their whole physical world, the rocky islands in the Aegean, the rocky hills of the Peloponnese—a universe you could walk across in a few days. Perhaps home was the place of human scale, wherever it was. Usually childhood.

Olive grove. Wind. Bright sun in a brass sky. The weight of his body, the sour taste in his mouth: he felt himself root right into the ground. This was his home, this and no other. It had changed and yet it would never change—not this grove, not he himself. Home at last. Home at last. He could live on Mars for ten thousand years and still this place would be his home.

Proust had been perfectly correct to identify taste as the principal agent of involuntary memory, for one’s long-term memories settled or at least were organized in the amygdala, just over the area in the brain concerned with taste and smell—and so smells were intensely intertwined with memories, and also with the emotional network of the limbic system,

She drove onto its lower slopes, gentle and wavy. Ascraeus had been one of the classic albedo feature names, as it was a mountain so big it was easily visible from Earth. Ascraeus Lacus. This was during the canal mania, and so they had decided it was a lake. Pavonis in that era had been called Phoenicus Lacus, Phoenix Lake.

Every Martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year’s wages to the firm’s equity fund, wages earned in apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling.

Why was there increasing order in any part of the cosmos, when one might expect nothing but entropy everywhere? This puzzled him greatly. He had been intrigued when Spencer had offered an offhand explanation, over beer one night on the Odessa corniche—in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.

Some of this math concerning superstrings he had looked into before. The theory had existed for almost two centuries now, but it had been proposed speculatively long before there was either the math or the experimental ability to properly investigate it. The theory described the smallest particles of spacetime not as geometrical points but as ultramicroscopic loops, vibrating in ten dimensions, six of which were compactified around the loops, making them somewhat exotic mathematical objects. The space they vibrated in had been quantized by twenty-first-century theorists, into loop patterns called spin networks, in which lines of force in the finest grain of the gravitational field acted somewhat like the lines of magnetic force around a magnet, allowing the strings to vibrate only in certain harmonics. These supersymmetrical strings, vibrating harmonically in ten-dimensional spin networks, accounted very elegantly and plausibly for the various forces and particles as perceived at the subatomic level, all the bosons and fermions, and their gravitational effects as well. The fully elaborated theory therefore claimed to mesh successfully quantum mechanics with gravity, which had been the problem in physical theory for over two centuries.

It made sense, in a way, to think about that minimum size of things; but actually seeing events at this scale would take experimental energy levels of at least 1019 GeV, and they could not create those. No accelerator would ever come close. The heart of a supernova would be more like it. No. A great divide, like a vast chasm or desert, separated them from the Planck realm. It was a level of reality fated to remain unknown to them in any physical sense.

At the new supercollider in Rutherford Crater’s rim, they had found the second Z particle that string theory had long predicted would be there. And a magnetic monopole detector, orbiting the sun out of the plane of the ecliptic, had captured a trace of what looked to be a fractionally charged unconfined particle with a mass as big as a bacterium—a very rare glimpse of a “weakly interacting massive particle,”

And in labs on Earth and Mars and in the asteroid belt, following her work, unusual gravity waves were noted, in very difficult delicate experiments; particular geometric patterns were revealed in the fine fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation; dark-matter WIMPs and shadow-matter WISPs were being sought out; the various families of leptons and fermions and leptoquarks were explained; galactic clumping in the first inflation was provisionally solved; and so on. It seemed as if physics might be on the brink of the Final Theory at last. Or at least in the midst of the Next Big Step.

As Nirgal ascended he saw that most of the fliers wore birdsuits of one sort or another; it looked like he was flying in a flock of wide-winged flying creatures, which resembled not birds but something more like flying foxes, or some mythic hybrid like the griffin or Pegasus: bird-humans. The birdsuits were of several different kinds, imitating in some respects the configurations of different species—albatross, eagle, swift, lammergeier. Each suit encased its flier in what was in effect an ever-changing exoskeleton, which responded to interior pressure from the flier’s body, to take and then hold positions, or make certain movements, all reinforced in proportion to the pressure exerted inside them, so that a human’s muscles could flap the big wings, or hold them in place against the great torque of the wind’s onslaughts, meanwhile keeping the streamlined helmets and tail feathers in the proper positions.

Sitting in his blimpglider Nirgal watched with both pleasure and trepidation as these bird people shot down past him in terrifying stoops toward the sea, then popped their wings and curved away and gyred back up again on the inner-wall updraft.

This incompatibility of its constituent parts was underlined by the unfortunate experience of capitalism’s critical shadow, socialism, which had theorized true democracy, and called for it, but in the attempt to enact it had used the methods at hand in its time, the same feudal methods so prevalent in capitalism itself; so that both versions of the mix had ended up about as destructive and unjust as their common residual parent. The feudal hierarchies in capitalism had been mirrored in the lived socialist experiments; and so the whole era had remained a highly charged chaotic struggle, exhibiting several different versions of the dynamic struggle between feudalism and democracy.

The combination of these two spins gave Mercury a very slow roll through its solar day, during which the brightside hemisphere became much too hot, while the nightside hemisphere became extremely cold. The lone city currently on the planet was therefore a kind of enormous train, running around the planet on tracks set on the northern forty-fifth latitude. These tracks were made of a metalloceramic alloy that was the first of the Mercurial physicists’ many alchemical tricks, a matrix that withstood the eight-hundred-K heat of midbrightside.

This was the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a mirror of the wind.

The Oresteia, Antigone, Electra, Medea, Agamemnon which should have been called Clytemnestra—those amazing women, re-acting in bitter power to whatever strange fates their men inflicted on them, striking back, as when Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra, then told the audience how she had done it, at the end staring out into the audience, right at Maya: “Enough of misery! Start no more. Our hands are red. Go home and yield to fate in time, In time before you suffer. We have acted as we had to act.” We have acted as we had to act. So true, so true.

It’s an awesome idea when you think of it, she said. Humanity, spreading through the galaxy. Star by star, ever outward. It’s our destiny. It’s what we ought to be doing. In fact I’ve heard people say that that’s where Hiroko is—that she and her people joined one of the first starships, the one to Barnard’s star. To start a new world. Spread viriditas.

So memory was happening at a far smaller level than had been previously imagined, which gave the brain a much higher computational possibility than before, up to perhaps 1024 operations per second—or even 1043 in some calculations, leading one researcher to note that every human mind was in a certain sense more complicated that all the rest of the universe (minus its other consciousnesses, of course).