Kim Stanley Robinson - The Complete Mars Trilogy - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

“What can I say, friends?” he cried. “This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.”

But his blood ran high with adrenalin, with tequila and omegendorph and happiness, and without willing it the words spilled out of him as they so often had before. “Look,” he said, “here we are on Mars!” (Laughter) “That’s our gift and a great gift it is, the reason we have to keep giving all our lives to keep the cycle going, it’s like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home. Now we all know that different people have different reasons for being here and just as important the people who sent us up had different reasons for sending us, and now we’re beginning to see the conflicts caused by those differences, there are storms brewing on the horizon, meteors of trouble flying in and some of them are going to strike dead on rather than skip overhead like that blaze of white ice just did!” (Cheers). “It may get ugly, at times it almost certainly will get ugly, so we have to remember that just as these meteor strikes enrich the atmosphere, thicken it and add the elixir oxygen to the poison soup outside these tents, the human conflicts coming down may do the same, melting the permafrost at our social base, melting all those frozen institutions away and leaving us with the necessity of creation, the imperative to invent a new social order that is purely Martian, as Martian as Hiroko Ai, our own Persephone now come back up out of the regolith to announce the start of this new spring!” (Cheers) “Now I know I used to say that we had to invent it all from scratch but in these last few years traveling around and meeting you all I’ve seen that I was wrong to say that, it’s not like we have nothing and are being forced to conjure forms godlike out of the vacuum – we have the genes you might say, the memes as Vlad says meaning our cultural genes, so that it’s in the nature of an act of genetic engineering what we do here, we have the DNA pieces of culture all made and broken and mixed by history, and we can choose and cut and clip together from what’s best in that gene pool, knit it all together the way the Swiss did their constitution, or the Sufis their worship, or the way the Acheron group made their latest fast lichen, a bit from here and there, whatever’s appropriate, keeping in mind the seven generation rule, thinking seven generations back and seven generations forward, and seven times seven if you ask me because now it’s our lives we’re talking about extending way off into the years, we don’t know how that will affect us yet, but it’s certainly true that altruism and self-interest have collapsed together more tightly than ever before. But also it’s still and always our children’s lives and our children’s children and on down forever that we have to think of, we must act in a way that gives them just as many chances as we have been given and hopefully more, channeling the sun’s energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flow. And I know that’s an awfully general way of putting it when this treaty that orders our lives here is coming up for renewal so soon, but we have to keep that level in mind because what’s coming is not just a treaty but more a kind of constitutional congress, because we’re dealing with the genome of our social organization here – you can do this, you can’t do that, you have to do this, to eat or to give. And we’ve been living by a set of rules established for empty land, the Antarctic treaty so fragile and idealistic which has held that cold continent free of intrusion for so long, up until the last decade in fact when it’s been chipped away at, and that’s a sign of what’s beginning to happen here too. The encroachment on that set of rules has begun everywhere, like a parasite feeding on the edges of its host organism, because that’s what the replacement set of rules is: the old parasitic greed of the kings and their henchmen – this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic – it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!” (Cheers)

“So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and non-renewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel drum band is ready to play, aren’t you?” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.”

Mad cheers. The magnesium drum band picked them up into its staccato flurry of plinks and plonks, and the crowd heaved into motion again.

They partied all night long. John spent the time wandering from tent to tent, shaking hands and hugging people, “Thanks, thanks, thanks. I don’t know, I don’t remember what I said. But this is what I meant all along, this right here.” His old friends laughed at him. Sax, drinking coffee and looking supremely relaxed, said to him, “Syncretism is it? Very interesting, very well put”—with the tiniest of smiles. Maya kissed him, Vlad and Ursula and Nadia kissed him; Arkady lifted him up and with a great roar swirled him around in the air, giving him a hairy kiss on each cheek and shouting, “Hey, John, could you repeat that please?” hooting at the very thought. “You amaze me, John, you always amaze me!” And Hiroko with her private smile, with Michel and Iwao flanking her, grinning at him…

Michel said, “I think this is what Maslow meant by the term peak experience,” and Iwao groaned and elbowed him, while Hiroko reached out and touched John on the arm with her forefinger, as if to pass along a certain animating touch, a power, a gift.

They next day they sorted and bagged the party wreckage and took down the tents, leaving the flagstone terraces behind, like strands of cloisonné necklace draped down the side of the old black volcano. They said good-bye to the dirigible crews, and the dirigibles drifted down the slope like balloons slipped from a child’s fist; the sand-colored ones of the hidden colony got hard to see very quickly.

As he got in his rover with Maya John said good-byes, and as they drove around the rim of Olympus Mons they caravaned with rovers containing Arkady and Nadia, and Ann and Simon and their son Peter. In conversations that day John said, “We need to talk to Helmut, and get the UN to accept us as speakers at large for the local population. And we need to present the UN with a draft of the revised treaty. Around Ls ninety I’m scheduled to go to a dedication ceremony for a new tent city on east Tharsis. Helmut is supposed to be there, maybe we could meet then?”