Part 1 - Festival night

Het zijn Amerikanen als John Boone, Frank Chalmers die Mars hebben gekoloniseerd. Nu gaat het over een nieuwe stad Nicosia voor 5000 inwoners. We horen ook de namen van Maya Toitovna - Frank had ooit iets met haar, nu lijkt ze de vriendin van John - , Samantha Hoyle, Sax Russell. Ze horen bij de eerste honderd kolonisten, dus worden geïdealiseerd door de nieuwkomers.

"Arabs had arrived on Mars only ten years before, but already they were a force to be reckoned with. They had a lot of money, and they had teamed up with the Swiss to build a number of towns, including this one. And they liked it on Mars. “It’s like a cold day in the Empty Quarter,” as the Saudis said.(...) White teeth flashed under black moustaches. Only men present, as usual. (...) An alien culture, no doubt about it. They weren’t going to change just because they were on Mars, they put the lie to John’s vision. Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate— illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen. Which was one reason Frank liked them." [mijn nadruk] (13-14)

[Blijkbaar een wereld van vrije ondernemingen waarin het allemaal nog steeds draait om geld? En waarom nu net Saoedi's, de meest conservatieve vrouwvijandige Arabieren? Maar Frank vindt het geweldig.]

Aardse tegenstellingen komen hier op Mars dus ook weer terug. Boone wil dat alles op zijn Westers verloopt, lees Amerikaans. Frank vindt dat niks en daarom stookt hij de Arabieren op tegen John. Die overleeft hun aanval niet.

(40) Part 2 - The voyage out

Over het selectieproces van die eerste 100 kolonisten die met de Ares naar Mars zouden vertrekken in 2026.

"And then they left Antarctica, and the team was chosen. There were fifty men and fifty women: thirty-five Americans, thirty-five Russians, and thirty miscellaneous international affiliates, fifteen invited by each of the two big partners. Keeping such perfect symmetries had been difficult, but the selection committee had persevered."(46)

En psychiater Michel Duval. En "Maya Katarina Toitovna, the official leader of the Russian contingent".

"But Maya’s Sunday mornings had never been particularly relaxed. In her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room apartment she had shared with her mother. Her mother had been a doctor and like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work at home. No more waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability lasted. “Everything is on the table,” Maya’s mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners, “everything but food!”
And perhaps they had taken advantage. In the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-contained world had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangers. In the commonwealth this world had consolidated its gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government."(56-57)

[Waarom dit als keuze? In de VS was natuurlijk alles koek en ei?]

"Maya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many times, loved Nadia’s [haar beste vriendin] plainness, which somehow underlined her competence." [mijn nadruk] (58)

"Anyway English was the ship’s lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted. Frank Chalmers was the exception to all that, however. He spoke five languages, more than anyone else aboard."(63)

"His gaze too was sharp, especially when looking at Maya; a matter of evaluating the other leader, she assumed. He acted toward her as if they had an understanding built on long acquaintance, a presumption which made her uneasy given how little they had spoken together in Antarctica. She was used to thinking of women as her allies, and of men as attractive but dangerous problems. So a man who presumed to be her ally was only the more problematic. And dangerous. And . . . something else." [mijn nadruk] (63)

"Of course there had to be sex. Well, it was nothing new. Maya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeed. But now it was different. They were older, they were stuck with each other for good: “Everything is different in a closed system,” as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NASA: out of the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations in Transit to Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised against it. They were, the tome suggested, something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intratribal mating. The Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really. “We are not a tribe,” Arkady said. “We are the world.”" [mijn nadruk] (80)

" ... and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpool bath. Bathing suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happen. She heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations in the quiet hours of the night; many of the cosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away. And every person had a private soundproofed room of their own. With all that, if a couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet." [mijn nadruk] (81)

"And so they [zij met Frank Chalmers] made love, and for a time passion took her away. When it was over she relaxed, enjoying the wash of afterglow. But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn’t know what to say. There was something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when making love. And even worse, what she could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick women into. She closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on his face. Win and lose, what children." [mijn nadruk] (84)

"It was awkward, not what she had wanted at all. She would have preferred not to feel the way she did, and once or twice after that they went off alone again, and when he started things she made love with him again, wanting it to work, feeling that she must have made a mistake or been in a bad mood somehow. But it was always the same, there was always that little smirk of triumph, that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness.
And so she avoided him even more, to keep from getting into the start situation; and quickly enough he caught the drift. One afternoon he asked her to go for a walk in the biome, and when she declined, claiming fatigue, a staccato look of surprise passed over his face, and then it had closed up like a mask. She felt badly, because she couldn’t even explain it to herself."(86)

Er zitten Christenen bij die selectie.

[Vreemd. Ik zou dat meteen als maatstaf nemen om ze niet te selecteren. Wetenschappers die in Jezus geloven ... ugh.]

"“We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them disastrously. It’s why history is such a bloody mess. Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth’s mistakes just because of conventional thinking. We are the first Martian colonists! We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!”"(108)

"One night, lying in bed thinking about it (thinking of wandering over to John’s room) she wondered if that was why they had gotten together: not from love, she still did not love him, she felt no more than friendship for him, charged by lust that was strong but impersonal — but because it was, in fact, a very useful match. Useful to her — but she swerved from that thought, concentrated on the match’s usefulness to the expedition as a whole. Yes, it was politic. Like feudal politics, or the ancient comedies of spring and regeneration. And it felt that way, she had to admit; as if she were acting in response to imperatives stronger than her own desires, acting out the desires of some larger force. Of, perhaps, Mars itself. It was not an unpleasant feeling."(139)

"Sax Russell, blinking mildly, said, “But Arkady, since Mars is going to be ruled by a treaty based on the old Antarctic one, what are you objecting to? The Outer Space Treaty states that no country can claim land on Mars, no military activities are allowed, and all bases are open to inspection by any country. Also no Martian resources can become the property of a single nation. The U.N. is supposed to establish an international regime to govern any mining or other exploitation. If anything is ever done along that line, which I doubt will happen, then it is to be shared among all the nations of the world.” He turned a palm upward. “Isn’t that what you’re agitating for, already achieved?”
“It’s a start,” Arkady said. “But there are aspects of that treaty you haven’t mentioned. Bases built on Mars will belong to the countries that build them, for instance. We will be building American and Russian bases, according to this provision of the law. And that puts us right back into the nightmare of Terran law and Terran history. American and Russian businesses will have the right to exploit Mars, as long as the profits are somehow shared by all the nations signing the treaty. This may only involve some sort of percentage paid to the U.N., in effect no more than a bribe. I don’t believe we should acknowledge these provisions for even a moment!”"(154)

"Phyllis said sharply, “You want some kind of communal utopia, and it’s not possible. I should think Russian history would have taught you something about that.”
“It has,” Arkady said. “Now I put to use what it has taught me.”
“Advocating an ill-defined revolution? Fomenting a crisis situation? Getting everyone upset and at odds with each other?”" [mijn nadruk] (156)

"We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change our selves, or the way we live. To be twenty-first-century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies. It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s— it’s—” he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared “It’s unscientific! And so I say that among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them. We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.”"(157)

(160) Part 3 - The Crucible

"Nadia would have been pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots. These seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mir had made her wary. They were great if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn’t either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya’s emotional life. You got what you put into robots, but even the best were mindless idiots." [mijn nadruk] (198)

"Maya with her beautiful face, always well-groomed, always the latest in chicarnost even in their everyday jumpsuits, looking distraught."(214)

"And Frank — tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal dynamo, the American politician, now wrapped around the finger of a neurotic Russian beauty — Frank nodded humbly and thanked her, looking discouraged. As well he should."(217)

Arkady en Nadia in gesprek.

"He laughed. “Half a year. And for all that time we have had no leaders, really. Those nightly meetings when everyone has their say, and the group decides what needs doing most; that’s how it should be. And no one is wasting time buying or selling, because there is no market. Everything here belongs to all equally. And yet none of us can exploit anything that we own, for there’s no one outside us to sell it to. It’s been a very communal society, a democratic group. All for one and one for all.”"(286)

"“Maybe.” She sighed, thinking of Maya and Frank, of Phyllis and Sax and Ann. “There’s an awful lot of fighting going on.”"(287)

"Having Arkady at Underhill made it like the hour before a thunderstorm. He made people think about what they were doing; habits that they had fallen into without thought came under scrutiny, and under this new pressure some became defensive, others aggressive. All the standing arguments got a bit more intense. Naturally this included the terraforming debate." [mijn nadruk] (288)

"Ann’s glare forced Spencer to look away. “Why should I discuss it with you?” she said, turning her gaze on Sax. “It’s clear what you all think about this, we’ve gone over it many times before, and nothing I’ve said makes any difference to you. Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it— we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There’s simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see— as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.”
Her face had gone bright red during this tirade; Nadia had never seen her anywhere near as angry as this. The usual matter-of-fact facade that she placed over her bitter anger had shattered, and she was almost speechless with fury, she was shuddering. The whole room had gone deadly quiet. “It’s not science, I say! It’s just playing around. And for that game you’re going to wreck the historical record, destroy the polar caps, and the outflow channels, and the canyon bottoms— destroy a beautiful pure landscape, and for nothing at all.”"(305)

(349) Part 4 - Homesick

"He saw again that Maya was a beautiful woman, with wild lustrous hair and a dark charismatic gaze, immediate and direct. It was dismaying to see her this upset, he never got used to it, it contrasted too sharply with her usual vivaciousness, the way she would put a finger to your arm as she rattled on in a confiding tone about one fascinating thing or other. . . ." [mijn nadruk] (355)

"Maya rubbed her eyes, leaned her forehead on his desk, revealing the back of her neck and her broad rangy shoulders. She would never look this distraught in front of most of Underhill; it was an intimacy between them, something she only did with him. It was as if she had taken off her clothes. People didn’t understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life. Although it was true she would be beautiful naked, she had perfect proportions." [mijn nadruk] (357)

"Michel hesitated before continuing, unsure how to say it. Subtlety was dangerous when you were both using a second language, coming at it from different native tongues; possibilities for misunderstanding were all too real. “You must accept the idea that you perhaps do not want to choose between John and Frank. That in fact you want them both. In the context of the first hundred that can only be scandalous. But in a larger world, over time . . .”
“Hiroko keeps ten men!” she exclaimed angrily.
“Yes, and so do you. So do you. And in a larger world, no one will know or care.”
He went on reassuring her, telling her that she was powerful, that (using Frank’s terms) she was the alpha female of the troop. She disagreed and forced more praise from him until finally she was satiated, and he could suggest they return home."(368)

"Except he was in Underhill, in fact, in the atrium, and Frank had gone off to live with the Japanese that had landed in Argyre, and Maya and John were at loggerheads about their rooms, and where to house the UNOMA local headquarters; and Maya, more beautiful than ever, stalked him through the atrium, imploring his aid. He and Marina Tokareva had stopped rooming together nearly a full Martian year before— she had said he was not there— and looking at Maya, Michel found himself imagining her as a lover but of course this was crazy, she was a russalka, she had slept with Glavkosmos bosses and cosmonauts to make her way up through the system and it had made her dissociated and bitter and unpredictable, she used sex to hurt now, sex was just diplomacy by other means to her, it would be insane to have anything to do with her in that mode, to be drawn down into the vortex of her limbs and her limbic system. Why not send crazy people in the first place . . . ." [mijn nadruk] (390)

"Rows of corn rustled, and the air was going to his head like brandy. Little feet were scurrying behind the narrow rice paddies: even in the darkness the rice was an intense blackish green, and there among the paddies were small faces, grinning knee-high and disappearing when he turned to face them. Hot blood flooded his face and hands, his blood turned to fire, and he retreated three steps, then stopped and spun. Two naked little girls were walking down the lane toward him, black-haired, dark-skinned, about three years old. Their oriental eyes were bright in the gloom, their expressions solemn." [mijn nadruk] (395)

"As they walked along other naked toddlers appeared out of the shrubbery and crowded around them, boys and girls both, some a bit darker or lighter than the first two, most the same color, all the same age. Nine or ten of them escorted Michel to the center of the farm, weaving around him in a quick trot. And there at the center of the maze was a small clearing, currently occupied by about a dozen adults, all naked, seated in a rough circle. The children ran to the adults, gave them hugs and sat at their knees. Michel’s pupils opened further in the nimbus of starlight and leaf gleam, and he recognized members of the farm team, Iwao, Raul, Ellen, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all of the farm team except for Hiroko herself."(396)

"All of a sudden the children got up and ran together down one of the aisles, squealing and giggling. They came back in a tight knot around Hiroko, who walked into the middle of the circle, her naked form dark in the darkness."(396)

"They were celebrating the areophany, a ceremony they had created together under Hiroko’s guidance and inspiration. It was a kind of landscape religion, a consciousness of Mars as a physical space suffused with kami, which was the spiritual energy or power that rested in the land itself."(397)

(401) Part 5 - Falling into History

"You only had to look at the first hundred to realize scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so; educations too narrowly focused, perhaps. Hiroko’s team disappearing."(461)

"Now he told John the latest news, in a very urbane British English, eating roast beef and potatoes rapidly between bursts of sentences, holding his silverware in the workmanlike German fashion. “We are going to award a prospecting contract in Elysium to the transnational consortium Armscor. They will be shipping up their own equipment.”
“But Helmut,” John said, “won’t that violate the Mars treaty?”
Helmut made a wide gesture with the hand holding the fork; they were men of the world, his look said, they understood these kinds of things. “The treaty is superannuated, this is obvious to everyone dealing with the situation. But its scheduled revision is ten years away. In the meantime, we have to try to anticipate certain aspects of the revision. That’s why we give some concessions now. There is no rational reason to delay, and if we tried there would be trouble in the General Assembly.”
“But the General Assembly can’t be happy that you’ve given the first concession to an old South African weapons manufacturer!”"(468)

"UNOMA constituted the ultimate authority on Mars these days, at least according to the letter of the law. In practice, as last night had made clear, it had the U.N.’s usual toothlessness before national armies and transnational money. Unless it did their bidding it was helpless, it could not succeed against their desires and probably would never even try, as it was their tool. So what did they want, the national governments and the transnational boards of directors? If enough sabotages occurred, would that constitute a reason to bring in more of their own security? Would it tend to increase their control?" [mijn nadruk] (472)

"And yet how? Social planning of some sort . . . clearly they had to have it. This flailing about without a plan, in violation of even the flimsy plan people had made back at the beginning with the Mars treaty . . . well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoided. No. They needed a plan. They had a chance at a new start here, they needed a vision."(490)

Middelen om de veroudering van cellen tegen te gaan, lichamelijke gezondheid te herstellen.

"It was a good winter. He learned a lot about areobotany and bioengineering, and in many of the evenings, after dinner, he would ask the Acheron people both individually and severally what they thought the eventual Martian society should be like, and how it should be run. At Acheron this usually led directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics; these to them were much more critical than politics, or what Marina called “the supposed decision-making apparatus.” Marina and Vlad were particularly interesting on this topic, as they had worked out a system of equations for what they called “eco-economics,” which always sounded to John like “eco-economics.” (...) “Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is — people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”" [mijn nadruk] (512-513)

"... there’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money— that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.”"(516)

"A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they walked. Investigative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related incidents. There were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young women. Most had been assigned from the American FBI. Their leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone, and John agreed politely."(573)

"Police on Mars, then, as well as a detective. Well, it was to be expected. But it was a nuisance nevertheless. He couldn’t do much with them hanging around watching him, suspicious because he hadn’t given them access to Pauline. And really there wasn’t that much to do in Hellas anyway. There had been no incidents of sabotage there, and it seemed unlikely that any would occur now."(575)

"“You see, John, the economic basis of life on Mars is now changing,” Arkady said. “No, don’t you dare scoff! So far we have not been living in a money economy, that’s the way scientific stations are. It’s like winning a prize that frees you from the economic wheel. We won that prize, and so did a lot of others, and we’ve all been here for years now, living that way. But now more people are flooding onto Mars, thousands of them! And many of them plan to work here, make some money, and return to Earth. They work for the transnationals that have gotten UNOMA concessions. The letter of the Mars treaty is being kept because supposedly UNOMA is in charge of it all, but the spirit of the treaty is being broken left and right, by the U.N. itself.”(...) But listen, when the treaty renewal comes up, they will change the letter of the law to match the new spirit. Or even give themselves license to do more. It’s the discovery of strategic metals, and all the open space. These represent salvation to a lot of countries down there, and new territory for the transnationals.”"(590)

"And with the discovery of strategic metals the application has become clear. And so it all comes back, and we have a return of ownership, and prices, and wages. The whole profit system. The little scientific station is being turned into a mine, with the usual mining attitude toward the land over the treasure. And the scientists are being asked, What you do, how much is it worth? They are being asked to do their work for pay, and the profit of their work is to be given over to the owners of the businesses they are suddenly working for.”"(593)

"“Oh come on,” John said. “You all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American Revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state— it’s all just a false analogy!”(...) The important thing is not to fall into their way of thinking, into all the same old violent mistakes!” And so he argued against revolution, nationalism, religion, economics— against every mode of Terran thought that he could think of, all mashed together in his usual style. “Revolution never even worked on Earth, not really. And here it’s all outmoded. We should be inventing a new program, just like Arkady says, including the ways to take control of our fate. With you all living a fantasy of the past you’re leading us right into the repression you’re complaining about! We need a new Martian way, a new Martian philosophy, economics, religion!”"(603-605)

"“What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?” John asked. “To make our children without asking us— to run away and hide in the first place— why? Why?”
Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. “We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn’t going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life—”
“But don’t you see how selfish that is? We all had a vision, we all wanted it to be different, and we’ve been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you’ve been gone, off creating a little pocket world for your little group! I mean we could have used your help! I wanted to talk to you so often! Here we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven’t talked to me in twenty years!”
“We didn’t mean to be selfish,” Hiroko said slowly. “We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life.”
“But if you do it in secret then no one can see it!”
“We never planned to stay secret forever. The situation has gotten bad, and so we’ve stayed away. But here we are now, after all. And when we are needed, when we can help, we will appear again.”
“You’re needed every day!” John said flatly. “That’s how social life works. You’ve made a mistake, Hiroko. Because while you’ve been hiding, the chances for Mars remaining its own place have gone way down, and a lot of people have been working to speed that disappearance, including some of the first hundred. And what have you done to stop them?”"(648-649)

(663) Part 6 - Guns Under the Table

John Boone wordt nu echt vermoord. Iemand haalt herinneringen op aan hem.

"Oh I don’t know. I saw him punch a man once, it was on the Burroughs train and he was in our car obviously high, and there was this woman who had some kind of deformity, a big nose and no chin and when she went down to the toilets some guy said My Lord that woman has really been beat hard with the ugly stick, and Boone bam! knocks him into the next seat and says, There is no such thing as an ugly woman.
That’s what he thought.
That is what he thought, why he slept with a different woman every night, and he didn’t care what they looked like. Or how old they were, he had to talk fast when they found him with that fifteen-year-old. I don’t suppose Toitovna ever heard of that one or it would have been his balls, and hundreds of women would have gone wanting. He used to like to do it in two-person gliders with the woman on top of him while he piloted." [mijn nadruk] (666)

Politiek over migratie quota's en zo verder.

"Wrangling began. It would go on all morning. Mars was a real prize, and the rich and poor nations of Earth were struggling over it as they were over everything else. The rich had the money but the poor had the people, and the weapons were pretty evenly distributed, especially the new viral vectors that could kill everyone on a continent. Yes, the stakes were high, and the situation existed in the most fragile of balances, the poor surging up out of the south and pressing the northern barriers of law and money and pure military force. Gun barrels in their faces, in essence. But now there were so many faces, a human-wave attack might explode at any instant, it seemed, just from the expansive pressure of sheer numbers— attackers shoved over the barricades by the press of babies in the rear, raging for their chance at immortality."(676)

"And all without any sign of what she wanted from him. He could only conclude that she knew she did not have to speak of it. That just being with him was enough, that he would know what she wanted, and try his best to do it without her ever having to say a word. That she would get what she wanted. For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them— if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful."(687)

"“Live,” as the Japanese said helpfully, “as if you were already dead.”"(707)

"Frank ignored all the little mental explosions, and asked question after question, concentrating on the black and Latino and redneck faces that answered him. He saw that this group was imitating an earlier form of community just like the Arabs did— this was a wildcat oil-field crew, enduring harsh conditions and long hours for big paychecks, all saved for the return to civilization. It was worth it even if Mars sucked, which it did. “I mean even on the Ice you can go outside, but here, fuck.”"(731)

"“We’re here on a deal that the treaty says is illegal, man. And it’s happening all over. Brazil, Georgia, the Gulf States, all the countries that voted against the treaty are letting the transnats in. It’s a contest among the flags of convenience as to how convenient they can be! And UNOMA is flat on its back with its legs spread, saying More, more. Folks are landing by the thousands and most are employed by transnats, they’ve got their government visas and five-year contracts, including rehab time to get you Earth-buffed, things like that.”"(735)

"He was back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paper. They were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the General Assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out “necessary personnel” status to thousands of emigrants. They were ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirst."(741)

"“It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”"(742)

"No, what they minded was the confinement, the lack of privacy, the teleoperation, the crowding together. And the resulting problems: “All my stuff got stole the day after I got here.” “Me too.” “Me too.” Theft, assault, extortion. The criminals all came from other tent towns, they said. Russians, they said. White folks with strange talk. Some black folks too, but not so many here as at home. A woman had been raped the previous week. “You’re kidding!” Frank said. “What do you mean you’re kidding,” one woman said, disgusted with him."(765)

"Once he stopped and looked around at the crowd; there were perhaps 500 people in view at that moment, living their lives. When had it gotten like this? They had been a scientific outpost, a handful of researchers, scattered over a world with as much land surface as the Earth: a whole Eurasia, Africa, America, Australia, and Antarctica, all for them. All that land was still out there, but what percentage of it was under tents and habitable? Much less than 1 percent. And yet what was UNOMA saying? A million people here already, with more on the way. And no police, and crime— or rather, crime without police. A million people and no law, no law but corporate law. The bottom line. Minimize expenses, maximize profits. Run smoothly on ball bearings."(766)

[Het wordt met andere woorden niet anders dan op aarde. De begindroom van de eerste honderd was niet uitgekomen. Vandaar dat iemand als Arkady een nieuwe wereld op wil bouwen door te verdwijnen uit de normale werkelijkheid. En velen met hem. Zoals Hiroko Ai en haar team al deden helemaal in het begin van de kolonisatie.]

"“You can’t send down so many so fast,” he insisted. “There’s no infrastructure for them, physically or culturally. What’s developing are the worst kind of wildcat settlements, they’re like refugee camps or forced labor camps, and it’ll get reported like that back home, you know how they always use analogies to Terran situations. And that’s bound to hurt you.”"(773)

"So. A waste of time. He wasn’t surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being rational. As with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same system. Reason had nothing to do with it. And while she might still believe in America’s power, she certainly didn’t believe in Frank’s ability to wield it. Fair enough. He would prove her wrong."(776)

"He had always thought of the Elysium cities as a counterweight to Tharsis— older, smaller, more manageable and sane. But now people there were disappearing by the hundreds; it was a jump-off point into the unknown nation, hidden out there in the cratered wilderness."(794)

"Burroughs was flooded with bad news; life in the city seemed fairly normal, but the video screens piped in scenes of a world Frank could scarcely believe. Riots in Hellas; the domed crater New Houston declaring itself an independent republic; and that same week, Slusinski sent tape of an American orientation in which all five dorms had voted to leave for Hellas without the proper travel permits. Chalmers contacted the new UNOMA factor, and got a detachment of U.N. security police to go there; and ten men arrested 500, by the simple expedient of overriding the tent’s physical plant computer and ordering the helpless occupants to board a series of train cars before the tent’s air was released. They had then been trained off to Korolyov, which was now in effect a prison city."(806)

"Reason was useless. Also anger, also sarcasm, not to mention irony. He could only try to match them in fantasyland. So he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was, how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically Martian in its nature, “with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world’s only real beauty, damn it!”"(809)

(817) Part 7 - Senzeni Na

"On the fourteenth day of the revolution Arkady Bogdanov dreamed he and his father sat on a wooden box (...) “We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking. “It’s weaker,” Roald said bluntly. He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth."(818-819)

"But that was life in a revolution. No one was in control, no matter what people said. And for the most part it was better that way, especially here on Mars. Fighting had been severe in the first week, UNOMA and the transnationals had beefed up their security forces in the previous year. A lot of the big cities had been instantly seized by them, and it might have happened everywhere except that there turned out to be so many more rebel groups than they or anyone else had known about. Over sixty towns and stations had gotten on the net and declared independence, they had popped out of the labs and the hills and simply taken over. And now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not."(820)

"Nadia’s mind was mostly blank; the thoughts that did occur to her were bleak. She needed more action like the last few hours’, the kind of intense activity that gave her no time to think; even a moment’s pause and the whole miserable situation crashed back in on her, the wrecked cities, the dead everywhere, Arkady’s disappearance. And no one in control, apparently. No plan to any of it. Police troops were wrecking towns to stop the rebellion, and rebels were wrecking towns to keep the rebellion alive. It would end with everything destroyed, her whole life’s work blown up before her eyes; and for no reason! No reason at all."(833)

"Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words rebel or revolutionary, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approve. No, they were isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists. And it didn’t help Nadia’s mood that there was, she felt, some truth to the description; it only made her angrier."(839)

"And yet all of it was as nothing in the face of human destructiveness. The five travelers flew from ruin to ruin, becoming numb to the damage and to the dead."(853)

En dan stort 'de lift' met zijn eindeloos lange dikke kabel nog eens neer, zoals ook satellieten en manen van Mars. De regering van de 7 op aarde is er zo blijkt op uit om de eerste 100 allemaal te elimineren.

(925) Part 8 - Shikata Ga Nai

De laatste van de 100 zijn op weg naar SGN en Hiroko's geheime ondergrondse kolonie.

"Ann stared at him. Had he heard her say that? He had. Concealing data— he was shocked, she could tell. He couldn’t imagine any reason good enough to conceal data. Perhaps this was the root of their inability to understand each other. Value systems based on entirely different assumptions. Completely different kinds of science."(960)