Of course there were people who wanted a list of delegates, so that they knew who could vote, who could speak, and so on. Nadia, who was quickly taking on the role of chairperson, suggested they accept all requests to become a delegation from any Martian group, as long as the group had had some tangible existence before the conference began. We might as well be inclusive.
The constitutional scholars from Dorsa Brevia agreed that the congress should be conducted by members of voting delegations, and the final result then voted on by the populace at large. Charlotte, who had helped to draft the Dorsa Brevia document twelve M-years before, had led a group since then in working up plans for a government, in anticipation of a successful revolution. They were not the only ones to have done this; schools in South Fossa and at the university in Sabishii had taught courses in the matter, and many of the young natives in the warehouse were well versed in the issues they were tackling. Its kind of scary, Art remarked to Nadia. Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.
Always.
Charlottes group had made a list of potential delegates to a constitutional congress, including all Martian settlements with populations over five hundred. Quite a few people would therefore be represented twice, Nadia pointed out, once by location and again by political affiliation. The few groups not on the list complained to a new committee, which allowed almost all petitioners to join. And Art made a call to Donald Hastings, and extended an invitation to UNTA to join as a delegation as well; the surprised Hastings got back to them a few days later, with a positive response. He would come down the cable himself.
And so after about a weeks jockeying, with many other matters being worked on at the same time, they had enough agreement to call for a vote of approval of the delegate list; and because it had been so inclusive, it passed almost unanimously. And suddenly they had a real congress. It was made up of the following delegations, with anywhere from one to ten people in each delegation:
Towns
Acheron
Nicosia
Cairo
Odessa
Harmakhis Vallis
Sabishii
Christianopolis
Bogdanov Vishniac
Hiranyagarbha
Mauss Hyde
New Clarke
Bradbury Point
Sergei Korolyov
Dumartheray Crater
South Station
Reull Vallis
southern caravanserai
Nuova Bologna
Nirgal Vallis
Montepulciano
Sheffield
Senzeni Na
Echus Overlook
Dorsa Brevia
Dao Vallis
South Fossa
Rumi
New Vanuatu
Prometheus
Gramsci
Mareotis
Burroughs refugees organization
Libya Station
Tharsis Tholus
Overhangs
Margaritifer Plinth
Great Escarpment caravanserai
Da Vinci
The Elysian League
Hells Gate
Political Parties and Other Organizations
Booneans
Reds
Bogdanovists
Schnellingistas
Marsfirst
Free Mars
TheKa
Praxis
Qahiran Majarhi League
Green Mars
United Nations Transitional Authority
Ka Kaze
Editorial Board of The journal of Areological Studies
Space Elevator Authority
Christian Democrats
The Metanational Economic Activity Co-ordination Committee
Bolognan Neomarxists
Friends of the Earth
Biotique
Separation de LAtmosphere
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 everyones 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 Arts great pleasure to become, in effect, Nadias 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 didnt 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. Its been found that a few simple rules can regulate very complex behaviour. Theres a classic computer model for flocking birds, for instance, which only has three rules keep an equal distance from everyone around you dont 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 Saxs reply arrived: No.
Well, take a look when you get to Earth. Meanwhile we cant be having a constitution that says only dont change speed too fast.
Art thought this was funny, but Nadia was not amused. In general she had little patience for the minimalist arguments. Isnt it the equivalent of letting the metanats run things? she would say. Letting might be right?
No, no, Mikhail would protest. Thats not what we mean at all!
It seems very like what you are saying. And for some its 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, were 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 undergrounds 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 radical as those in the Dorsa Brevia declaration?
Hard to say. At least the points are there to discuss, Nadia said. And along with them, on everyones screen, were the blank constitutions with their section headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police; Taxation; Election Procedures; Property Law; Economic Systems; Environmental Law; Amendment Procedures, and so on, in some blanks for pages on end all being juggled on everyones screens, scrambled, formatted, endlessly debated. Just filling in the blanks, as Art sang one night, looking over Nadias shoulder at one particularly forbidding flowchart pattern, like something out of Michels alchemical combinatoires. And Nadia laughed.
The working groups focused on different parts of government as outlined in a new composite blank constitution, now being called the blank of blanks. Political parties and interest groups gravitated to the issues that most concerned them, and the many tent town delegations chose or were assigned to remaining areas. After that it was a matter of work.
For the moment, the Da Vinci Crater technical group was in control of Martian space. They were keeping all space shuttles from docking at Clarke, or aerobraking into Martian orbit. No one believed that this alone made them truly free, but it did give them a certain amount of physical and psychic space to work in this was the gift of the revolution. They were also driven by the memory of the battle for Sheffield; the fear of civil war was strong among them. Ann was in exile with the Kakaze, and sabotage in the outback was a daily occurrence. There were also tents that had declared independence from anyone, and a few metanat holdouts; there was turmoil generally, and a sense of barely-contained confusion. They were in a bubble in history, a moment only; it could collapse at any time, and if they didnt act soon, it would collapse. It was, simply put, time to act.
This was the one thing everyone agreed on, but it was a very important thing. As the days passed, a core group of workers slowly emerged, people who recognized each other for their willingness to get the job done, for their desire to finish paragraphs rather than posture. Inside all the rest of the debate these people went at it, guided by Nadia, who was very quick to recognize such people and give them all the help she could.
Art meanwhile ran around in his usual manner. Up early, supply drinks and food, and information concerning the work ongoing in other rooms. It seemed to him that things were going pretty well. Most of the subgroups took the responsibility to fill in their blank seriously, writing and rewriting drafts, hammering them out concept by concept, phrase by phrase. They were happy to see Art when he came by in the course of the day, as he represented a break, some food, some jokes. One judicial group tacked foam wings on his shoes, and sent him with a caustic message along to an executive group with whom they were fighting. Pleased, Art kept the wings on; why not? What they were doing had a kind of ludicrous majesty, or majestic ludicrousness they were rewriting the rules, he was flying around like Hermes or Puck, it was perfectly appropriate. And so he flew, through the long hours into the night, every night. And after all the sessions had closed down for the evening, he went back to the Praxis offices he shared with Nadia, and they would eat, and talk over the days progress, and make a call to the travellers to Earth, and talk with Nirgal and Sax and Maya and Michel. And after that Nadia would go back to work at her screens, usually falling asleep there in her chair. Then Art would often go back out into the warehouse, and the buildings and rovers clustered around it. Because they were holding the congress in a warehouse tent, there was not the same party scene that had existed after hours in Dorsa Brevia; but the delegates often stayed up, sitting on the floors of their rooms drinking and talking about the days work, or the revolution just past. Many of the people there had never met before, and they were getting to know each other. Relationships were forming, romances, friendships, feuds. It was a good time to talk, and learn more about what was going on during the daytime congress; it was the underside of the congress, the social hour, out there scattered in concrete rooms. Art enjoyed it. And then the moment would come when he would suddenly hit the wall, a wave of sleepiness would roll over him and sometimes he wouldnt even have time to stagger back to his offices, to the couch next to Nadias; he would simply roll over on the floor and sleep there, waking cold and stiff to hurry off to their bathroom, a shower, and back to the kitchens to start up that days kava and Java. Round and round, his days a blur; it was glorious.