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battle, it was true; and now she claimed
he was willing to compromise. No doubt; his next retreat would not be so easy,
nor would it take him to a very pleasant place, for despite all the emergency
action, Earth was now a world of famine, plague, looting—breakdown of the
social contract, which was so fragile after all. It could happen here too; she
had to remember that fragility when she got angry enough, as now, to want to
tell Kasei and Dao to abandon the discussions and fire away. If she did that it
very likely would happen; a strange sensation of her own power came over her
then, as she looked around the table at the anxious angry unhappy faces. She
could tip the balance; she could knock this table right over.
    Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way
or the other. More were in favor of cutting the cable than Ann would have
guessed, not just Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt
most threatened by the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth:
Bedouins, the Polynesians, the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier
natives. Still, they were in the minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority.
Isolationist versus interactive; yet another fracture to add to all the others
rending the Martian independence movement.
    Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favor of
keeping the cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with
expulsion from Martian’society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular,
and afterward Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtle.
It made Ann so angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to
argue for bringing the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from
Peter, but it scarcely registered—she talked in a white heat, forgetting all
about the five-minute limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and
on, though she had no idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of
what she had already said. Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a
lawyer’s brief—hopefully so—on the other hand, a part of her thought as her
mouth ran on, perhaps she was just saying the word Mars over and over again, or
babbling, and the audience simply humoring her, or else miraculously
comprehending her in a moment of glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their
heads like caps of jewels—and indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal,
the old men’s bald pates like chunks of jasper, inside which all languages dead
and living were understood equally; and for a moment they appeared all caught
up together with her, all inside an epiphany of red Mars, free of Earth, living
on the primal planet that had been and could be again.
    She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate her, as
it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration,
looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They
stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking
she had no idea. She only knew she had gotten his attention at last.
    This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing
slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran
situation. Despite the great flood, Earth’s nations and metanationals were
still incredibly powerful, and in some ways the crisis of the flood had drawn
them together, making them even more powerful. So Nadia spoke of the need to
compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply
contradictory, Ann thought; because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they
could not afford to offend, and therefore they must change all Terran social
reality.
    “But how!” Ann cried. “When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a
world! No fulcrum, no lever, no force—”
    “It isn’t just Earth,” Nadia replied. “There are going to be other
settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the
asteroids.