Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,217

apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

He left to cheers.

Maya was out there in the station. Exhausted, he could only stare at her in disbelief. She had been watching him over the video, she said. Frank shook his head, the fools inside hadn’t even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their existence. So the world had seen it all. And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism. Which to her it no doubt was. In fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president! So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently.

She asked him to accompany her, and he was too exhausted to run a cost/benefit analysis of the act. With a twist of the mouth he agreed. It was easier just to tag along.

They took the train down to the next station, made their way through the police and inside. The Russian tent was packed like a circuit board. “You’re going to have a harder job of it than I did,” Frank said as he looked around.

“Russians are used to it,” she said. “These tents aren’t that different from Moscow apartments.”

“Yes, yes.” Russia had become a kind of immense Korea, sporting the same brutal streamlined capitalism, perfectly Taylorized and with a veneer of democracy and consumer goods covering the junta. “It’s amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”

“Frank, please.”

“Just remember that and it will go okay.”

“Are you going to help or not?” she demanded.

“Yes, yes.”

The central square smelled of bean curd and borscht and electrical fires, and the crowd was much more unruly and loud than in the American tent, everyone there a defiant leader, ready to unleash a declamation. A lot more of them were women than in the American tent. They had unpisted a train and this had galvanized them, they were anxious for more action. Maya had to use a hand megaphone, and all the time that she stood on a chair and talked, the crowd swirled around them and participants in several loud arguments ignored her, as if she were a cocktail-lounge pianist.

Frank’s Russian was rusty, and he couldn’t understand most of what the crowd shouted at Maya, but he followed her replies pretty well. She was explaining the emigration moratorium, the bottleneck in town robot production and in water supplies, the necessity for discipline, the promise of a better life to come if all was enacted in an orderly fashion. He supposed it was a classic babushka harangue, and it had the effect of pacifying them somewhat, as there was a strong reactionary streak in many Russians now; they remembered what social unrest really meant, and were justifiably afraid of it. And there was a lot to promise, it all seemed plausible: big world, few people, lots of material resources, some good robot designs, computer programs, gene templates….

In one really loud moment of the discussion he said to her in English, “Remember the stick.”

“What?” she snapped.

“The stick. Threaten them. Carrot and stick.”

She nodded. Into the megaphone again: the never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact of the poisonous air, the deadly cold. They were alive only because of the tents, and the input of electricity and water. Vulnerable in ways they hadn’t fully thought out, in ways that didn’t exist back home.

She was quick, she always had been. Back to promises. Back and forth, stick and carrot, a jerk on the leash, some niblets. Eventually the Russians too were pacified.

Afterward on the train up to Sheffield Maya gabbled with nervous relief, face flushed, eyes brilliant, hand clutching his arm as she threw her head back abruptly and laughed. That nervous intelligence, that arresting physical presence … He must have been exhausted himself, or more shaken than he had realized by the time in the tents, or maybe it was the encounter with Phyllis; because he felt himself warming to her, it was like stepping into a sauna after a freezing day outside, with that same sense of relief from vigilance, of penetrating ease. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she was saying rapidly, “really you are so