Blue Mars Read Free Page B

paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit. Except once or
twice Ann saw sellers in their aprons shouting red-faced at customers, who
shouted right back, arguing over some point of government policy. As Ann passed
by one of these arguments, which were no different than those going on among
the leaders in east Pavonis, the disputants all stopped and stared at her. She
had been recognized. The vegetable seller said loudly, “If you Reds would lay
off they would just go away!”
    “Ah come on,” someone retorted. “It isn’t her doing it.”
    So true, Ann thought as she walked on.
    A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems
were still running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which
was not something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did;Tjut
every tent’s operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their raw
materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and nuclear
reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were physically fragile,
but if left alone, they could very well become politically autonomous; there
was no reason for them to be owned, no justification for it.
    So the necessities were served. Daily life plodded on, barely
perturbed by revolution.
    Or so it seemed at first glance. But there in the streets also
were armed groups, young natives in threes and fours and fives, standing on
street corners. Revolutionary militias around their missile launchers and
remote sensing dishes— green or red, it didn’t matter, though they were almost
certainly greens. People eyed them as they walked by, or stopped to chat and
find out what they were doing. Keeping an eye on the Socket, the armed natives
said. Though Ann could see that they were functioning as police as well. Part
of the scene, accepted, supported. People grinned as they chatted; these were
their police, they were fellow Martians, here to protect them, to guard
Sheffield for them. People wanted them there, that was clear. If they hadn’t,
then every approaching questioner would have been a threat, every glance of
resentment an attack; which eventually would have forced the militias from the
street corners into some safer place. People’s faces, staring in concert; this
ran the world.
     
    So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she
took a rim train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to
the north arc of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze were occupying
apartments in the little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had forcibly evicted
some noncombatant residents, who naturally had trained down to Sheffield in
fury, demanding to be reinstated in their homes, and reporting to Peter and the
rest of the green leaders that the Reds had set up truck-drawn rocket launchers
on the north rim, with the rockets aimed at the elevator and Sheffield more
generally.
    So Ann walked out into Lastflow’s little station in a bad mood,
angry at the Kakaze’s arrogance, as stupid in its way as the greens’. They had
done well in the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dike very visibly to give
everyone a warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dike after all
the other revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the south,
ready to rescue the city’s civilian population while the metanat security were
forced to retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been needed and they had done
it, without getting bogged down in debate. Without their decisiveness everyone
would still be gathered around Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing
a Terran expeditionary force to relieve it. It had been a perfectly delivered
coup.
    Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.
    Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a
fan-shaped lava flow extending more than a hundred kilometers down the
northeast flank of the mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise
a flawlessly circular summit cone and