Separation de L’Atmosphere
General meetings began in the morning around the table of tables, then moved out in many small working groups to offices in the warehouse, or buildings nearby. Every morning Art showed up early and brewed great pots of coffee, kava and kavajava, his favourite. It perhaps was not much of a job, given the significance of the enterprise, but Art was happy doing it. Every day he was surprised to see a congress convening at all; and observing the size of it, he felt that helping to get it started was probably going to be his principal contribution. He was not a scholar, and he had few ideas about what a Martian constitution ought to include. Getting people together was what he was good at, and he had done that. Or rather he and Nadia had, for Nadia had stepped in and taken the lead just when they had needed her. She was the only one of the First Hundred on hand who had everyone’s trust; this gave her a bit of genuine natural authority. Now, without any fuss, without seeming to notice she was doing it, she was exerting that power.
And so now it was Art’s great pleasure to become, in effect, Nadia’s personal assistant. He arranged her days, and did everything he could to make sure they ran smoothly. This included making a good pot of kavajava first thing every morning, for Nadia was one of many of them fond of that initial jolt toward alertness and general good will. Yes, Art thought, personal assistant and drug dispenser, that was his destiny at this point in history. And he was happy. Just watching people look at Nadia was a pleasure in itself. And the way she looked back: interested, sympathetic, sceptical, an edge developing quickly if she thought someone was wasting her time, a warmth kindling if she was impressed by their contribution. And people knew this, they wanted to please her. They tried to keep to the point, to make a contribution. They wanted that particular warm look in her eye. Very strange eyes they were, really, when you looked close: hazel, basically, but flecked with innumerable tiny patches of other colours, yellow, black, green, blue. A mesmerizing quality to them. Nadia focused her full attention on people – she was willing to believe you, to take your side, to make sure your case didn’t get lost in the shuffle; even the Reds, who knew she had been fighting with Ann, trusted her to make sure they were heard. So the work coalesced around her; and all Art really had to do was watch her at work, and enjoy it, and help where he could.
And so the debates began.
In the first week many arguments concerned simply what a constitution was, what form it should take, and whether they should have one at all. Charlotte called this the metaconflict, the argument about what the argument was about – a very important matter, she said when she saw Nadia squint unhappily, ‘because in settling it, we set the limits on what we can decide. If we decide to include economic and social issues in the constitution, for instance, then this is a very different kind of thing than if we stick to purely political or legal matters, or to a very general statement of principles.’
To help structure even this debate, she and the Dorsa Brevia scholars had come with a number of different ‘blank constitutions’, which blocked out different kinds of constitutions without actually filling in their contents. These blanks did little, however, to stop the objections of those who maintained that most aspects of social and economic life ought not to be regulated at all. Support for such a ‘minimal state’ came from a variety of viewpoints that otherwise made strange bedfellows: anarchists, libertarians, neotraditional capitalists, certain Greens, and so on. To the most extreme of these anti-statists, writing up any government at all was a kind of defeat, and they conceived of their role in the congress as making the new government as small as possible.
Sax heard about this argument in one of the nightly calls from Nadia and Art, and he was as willing to think about it seriously as he was anything else. ‘It’s been found that a few simple rules can regulate very complex behaviour. There’s a classic computer model for flocking birds, for instance, which only has three rules – keep an equal distance from everyone around you – don’t change speed too fast – avoid stationary objects. Those will model the flight of a flock quite nicely.’
‘A computer flock maybe,’ Nadia scoffed. ‘Have you ever seen chimney-swifts at dusk?’
After a moment Sax’s reply arrived: ‘No.’
‘Well, take a look when you get to Earth. Meanwhile we can’t be having a constitution that says only “don’t change speed too fast”.’
Art thought this was funny, but Nadia was not amused. In general she had little patience for the minimalist arguments. ‘Isn’t it the equivalent of letting the metanats run things?’ she would say. ‘Letting might be right?’
‘No, no,’ Mikhail would protest. ‘That’s not what we mean at all!’
‘It seems very like what you are saying. And for some it’s obviously a kind of cover – a pretend principle that is really about keeping the rules that protect their property and privileges, and letting the rest go to hell.’
‘No, not at all.’
Then you must prove it at the table. Everything that government might involve itself in, you have to make the case against. You have to argue it point by point.’
And she was so insistent about this, not scolding like Maya would have but simply adamant, that they had to agree: everything was at least on the table for discussion. Therefore the various blank constitutions made sense, as starting points; and therefore they should get on with it. A vote on it was taken, and the majority agreed to give it a try.
And so there they were, the first hurdle jumped. Everyone had agreed to work according to the same plan. It was amazing, Art thought, zooming from meeting to meeting, filled with admiration for Nadia. She was not your ordinary diplomat, she by no means followed the empty vessel model that Art aspired to; but things got done nevertheless. She had the charisma of the sensible. He hugged her every time he passed her, he kissed the top of her head; he loved her. He ran around with that wealth of good feeling, and dropped in on all the sessions he could, watching to see how he could help keep things going. Often it was just a matter of supplying people with food and drink, so that they could continue through the day without getting irritable.
At all hours the table of tables was crowded; fresh-faced young Valkyries towering over sunbaked old vets; all races, all types; this was Mars, M-year 52, a kind of de facto united nations all on its own. With all the potential fractiousness of that notoriously fractious body; so that sometimes, looking at all their disparate faces and listening to the melange of languages, English augmented by Babel, Art was nearly overwhelmed by their variety. ‘Ka, Nadia,’ he said as they sat eating sandwiches and going over their notes for the day, ‘we’re trying to write a constitution that every Terran culture could agree to!’
She waved the problem away, swallowed. ‘About time,’ she said.
Charlotte suggested that the Dorsa Brevia declaration made a logical starting point for discussing the content that would fill the constitutional forms. This suggestion caused more trouble than even the blanks had, for the Reds and several other delegations disliked various points of the old declaration, and they argued that using it was a way of pisting the congress from the start.
‘So what?’ Nadia said. ‘We can change every word of it if we want, but we have to start with something.’
This view was popular among most of the old underground groups, many of whom had been at Dorsa Brevia in M-39. The declaration that had resulted remained the underground’s best effort to write down what they had agreed on back when they were out of power, so it made sense to start with it; it gave them some precedent, some historical continuity.
When they pulled it out and looked at it, however, they found that the old declaration had become frighteningly radical. No private property? No appropriation of surplus value? Had they really said such things? How were things supposed to work? People pored over the bare uncompromising sentences, shaking their heads. The declaration had not bothered to say how its lofty goals were to be enacted, it had only stated them. ‘The stone tablet routine,’ as Art characterized it. But now the revolution had succeeded, and the time had come to do something in the real world. Could they really stick to concepts as