Part 26 (1/2)
”Yes you did,” Nadia said, then spoke to Fort in English. ”Welcome to Mars.”
”I'm happy to be here,” Fort said. And it looked like he meant it; he was grinning goofily, as if too pleased to keep a straight face. His companions did not seem as sure; there were about a dozen of them, both young and old, and some were smiling, but many looked disoriented and cautious.
After an awkward few minutes Nadia took Fort and his little group of a.s.sociates over to the Zakros guest quarters, and when Ariadne arrived, they a.s.signed the visitors rooms. What else could they do? The news had already gone the length of Dorsa Brevia and back, and as people came down to Zakros their faces expressed displeasure as much as curiosity- but there the visitors were, after all, leaders of one of the biggest transnationals, and apparently alone, and without tracking devices on them, or so the Sabis.h.i.+ans had declared. One had to do something with them.
Nadia got the Swiss to call a general meeting at the lunch hour, and then she invited the new guests to freshen up in their rooms and afterward speak at the meeting. The Terrans accepted the invitation gratefully, the uncertain ones among them looking rea.s.sured. Fort himself seemed to be already composing a speech in his mind.
Back outside the Zakros guest quarters, Art was facing a whole crowd of upset people. ”What makes you think you can make decisions like that for us?” Maya demanded, speaking for many of them. ”You, who don't even belong! You, a kind of spy among us! Making friends with us, and then betraying us behind our backs!”
Art spread his hands, red-faced with embarra.s.sment, s.h.i.+fting his shoulders as if dodging abuse, or sliding through it to make an appeal to the people behind Maya, the ones who might just be curious. ”We need help,” he said. ”We can't accomplish what we want all by ourselves. Praxis is different, they're more like us than them, I'm telling you.”
”It is not your right to tell us!” Maya said. ”You are our prisoner!”
Art squinted, waggled his hands. ”You can't be a prisoner and a spy at the same time, can you?”
”You can be every kind of treacherous thing at once!” Maya exclaimed.
Jackie walked up to Art and looked down on him, her face stern and intent. ”You know this Praxis group may have to become permanent Martians now, whether they want to be or not. Just like you.”
Art nodded. ”I told them that might happen. Obviously they didn't care. They want to help, I'm telling you. They represent the only transnational that's doing things differently, that has goals similar to ours. They've come here by themselves to see if they can help. They're interested interested. Why should you be so upset by that? It's an opportunity opportunity.”
”Let's see what Fort says,” Nadia said.
The Swiss had convened the special meeting in the Malia amphitheater, and as the crowd of delegates gathered, Nadia helped guide the newcomers through the segment gates to the site. They were still obviously awestruck at the size of Dorsa Brevia's tunnel. Art was scurrying around them with his eyes bugged out, wiping sweat from his brow with his sleeve, intensely nervous. It made Nadia laugh. Somehow Fort's arrival had put her in a good mood; she did not see how they could lose from it.
So she sat down in the front row with the Praxis group, and watched as Art led Fort onto the stage and introduced him. Fort nodded and spoke a sentence, then tilted his head and looked up at the back row of the amphitheater, realizing that he was unamplified. He took a breath and started again, and his usually quiet voice floated out with the a.s.surance of a veteran actor, carrying nicely to everyone there.
”I'd like to thank the people of Subaras.h.i.+ for bringing me south to this conference.”
Art cringed as he returned to his seat, and turned and cupped a hand by his mouth: ”That's Sabis.h.i.+,” he said in an undertone to Fort.
”What's that?”
”Sabis.h.i.+. You said Subaras.h.i.+, which is the transnational. The settlement you went through to get here is called Sabis.h.i.+. Sabis.h.i.+ means 'lonely.' Subaras.h.i.+ means 'wonderful.'”
”Wonderful,” Fort said, staring curiously at Art. Then he shrugged and was off and running, an old Terran with a quiet but penetrating voice, and a somewhat wandering style. He described Praxis, how it had begun and how it operated now. When he explained the relations.h.i.+p of Praxis to the other transnationals, Nadia thought there were similarities to the relations.h.i.+p on Mars between the underground and the surface worlds, no doubt cleverly highlighted by Fort's description. And it seemed to her from the silence behind her that Fort was doing pretty well at capturing the crowd's interest. But then he said something about ecocapitalism, and regarding Earth as a full world while Mars was still an empty one; and three or four Reds popped to their feet.
”What do you mean by that?” one of them called out. Nadia saw Art's hands clench in his lap, and soon she could see why; Fort's answer was long and strange, describing what he called ecocapitalism, in which nature was referred to as the bioinfrastructure, while people were referred to as human capital. Looking back Nadia saw many people frowning; Vlad and Marina had their heads together, and Marina was tapping away at her wrist. Suddenly Art popped to his feet, and interrupted to ask Fort what Praxis was doing now, and what he thought Praxis's role might be on Mars.
Fort stared at Art as if he didn't recognize him. ”We've been working with the World Court. The UN never recovered from 2061, and is now widely regarded as an artifact of World War Two, just as the League of Nations was an artifact of World War One. So we've lost our best arbitrator of international disputes, and meanwhile conflicts have been ongoing, and some are serious. More and more of these conflicts have been brought before the World Court by one party or another, and Praxis has started a Friends of the Court organization, which tries to give it aid in every way possible. We abide by its rulings, give it money, people, try to work out arbitration techniques, and so on. We've been part of a new technique, where if two international bodies of any kind have a disagreement and decide to submit to arbitration, they enter into a yearlong program with the World Court, and its arbitrators try to find a course of action that satisfies both sides. At the end of the year the World Court rules on any outstanding problems, and if it works, a treaty is signed, and we try to support the treaties any way we can. India has been interested, and went through the program with Sikhs in the Punjab, and it's working so far. Other cases have proved more difficult, but it's been instructive. The concept of semiautonomy is receiving a lot of attention. At Praxis we believe nations were never truly sovereign, but were always semiautonomous in relation to the rest of the world. Metanationals are semiautonomous, individuals are semiautonomous, culture is semiautonomous in relation to the economy, values are semiautonomous in relation to prices... there's a new branch of math that is trying to describe semiautonomy in formal logical terms.”
Vlad and Marina and Coyote were trying to listen to Fort and confer among themselves and write down notes all at once. Nadia stood and waved at Fort.
”Do the other transnationals support the World Court as well?” she asked.
”No. The metanationals avoid the World Court, and use the UN as a rubber stamp. I'm afraid they still believe in the myth of sovereignty.”
”But this sounds like a system that only works when both sides agree to it.”
”Yes. All I can tell you is that Praxis is very interested, and we're trying to build bridges between the World Court and all powers on Earth.”
”Why?” Nadia asked.
Fort raised his hands, in a gesture just like one of Art's. ”Capitalism only works if there is growth. But growth is no longer growth, you see. We need to grow inward, to recomplicate.”
Jackie stood. ”But you could grow on Mars in cla.s.sic capitalist style, right?”
”I suppose, yes.”
”So maybe that's all you want from us, right? A new market? This empty world you spoke of earlier?”
”Well, in Praxis we've been coming to think that the market is only a very small part of a community. And we're interested in all of it.”
”So what do you want from us?” someone yelled from the back.
Fort smiled. ”I want to watch.”
The meeting ended soon after that, and the afternoon's regular sessions took place. Of course in all of them the arrival of the Praxis group dominated at least part of the discussion. Unfortunately for Art, it became evident as they sat around that night reviewing the tapes that Fort and his team affected the congress as a separator rather than a bonding agent. Many could not accept a Terran transnational as a valid member of the congress, and that was that. Coyote came by and said to Art, ”Don't tell me about how different Praxis is. That's the oldest dodge in the book. If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That's c.r.a.p. The system overdetermines everything, and it's the system that has to change.”
”Fort's talking about changing it,” Art objected. But here Fort was his own worst enemy, with his habit of using cla.s.sic economic terms to describe his new ideas. The only ones interested in that approach were Vlad and Marina. For the Bogdanovists, and Reds, and Marsfirsters- for most of the natives, and many of the immigrants- it represented Terran business as usual, and they wanted no part of it. No dealing with a transnat, Kasei exclaimed on one tape to applause, no dealing with Terra however they phrased it! Fort was beyond the pale! The only question for this crowd was whether he and his group were going to be allowed to leave or not; some felt that they, like Art, were now prisoners of the underground.
Jackie, however, stood up in that same meeting, to take the Boonean position that everything ought to be put to use in the cause. She was contemptuous of those rejecting Fort on principle. ”Since you're going to take visitors hostage,” she said sharply to her father, ”why not put them to use? Why not talk to them?”
So in effect they had a new split to add to all their others: isolationists and two-worlders.
In the next few days Fort handled the controversy surrounding him by ignoring it, to the extent that it seemed to Nadia that he might not even be aware of it. The Swiss asked him to run a workshop on the current Terran situation, and this was packed, with Fort and his companions answering questions at length in every session. In these sessions Fort seemed content to accept whatever they told him about Mars, and regarding it he advocated nothing. He stuck to Terra, and he only described. ”The transnationals have collapsed down into the couple dozen largest of them,” he said in response to one question, ”all of which have entered into development contracts with more than one national government. We call those the metanationals. The biggest are Subaras.h.i.+, Mitsubis.h.i.+, Consolidated, Amexx, Armscor, Mahjari, and Praxis. The next ten or fifteen are also quite big, and after that you're back down to transnat size, but these are being quickly incorporated into the metanats. The big metanats are now the major world powers, insofar as they control the IMF, the World Bank, the Group of Eleven, and all their client countries.”
Sax asked him to define a metanational in more detail.
”About a decade ago we at Praxis were asked by Sri Lanka to come into their country and take over the economy and work on arbitration between the Tamils and the Singhalese. We did that and the results were good, but during the time of the arrangement it was clear that our relations.h.i.+p with a national government was a new kind of thing. It got noticed in certain circles. Then some years ago Amexx got into a disagreement with the Group of Eleven, and pulled all of its a.s.sets out of the Eleven and relocated them in the Philippines. The mismatch between Amexx and the Philippines, estimated in gross yearly product to be on the order of a hundred to one, resulted in a situation where Amexx in effect took that country over. That was the first real metanational, though it wasn't clear that it was a new thing until their arrangement was imitated by Subaras.h.i.+, when they s.h.i.+fted many of their operations into Brazil. It became clear that this was something new, not like the old flag-of-convenience relations.h.i.+p. A metanational takes over the foreign debt and the internal economy of its client countries, kind of like the UN did in Cambodia, or Praxis in Sri Lanka, but much more comprehensively. In these arrangements the client government becomes the enforcement agency of the metanational's economic policies. In general they enforce what are called austerity measures, but all government employees are paid much more than they were before, including the army and police and intelligence operations. So at that point, the country is bought. And every metanational has the resources to buy several countries. Amexx has that kind of relations.h.i.+p with the Philippines, the North African countries, Portugal, Venezuela, and five or six smaller countries.”
”Has Praxis done this as well?” Marina asked.
Fort shook his head. ”In a way yes, but we've tried to give the relations.h.i.+ps a different nature. We've dealt with countries large enough to make the partners.h.i.+p more balanced. We've had dealings with India, China, and Indonesia. These were all countries that were shortchanged on Mars by the treaty of 2057, and so they encouraged us to come here and make inquiries like this one. We've also initiated dealings with some other countries that are still independent. But we haven't moved into these countries exclusively, and we haven't tried to dictate their economic policies. We've tried to stick to our version of the transnational format, but on the scale of the metanationals. We hope to function for the countries we deal with as alternatives to metanationalism. A resource, to go along with the World Court, Switzerland, and some other bodies outside the emerging metanational order.”
”Praxis is different different,” Art declared.
”But the system is the system,” Coyote insisted from the back of the room.
Fort shrugged. ”We make the system, I think.”
Coyote only shook his head.