3

But in the midst of that dream she was awakened roughly by Maya, who said in Russian, “There’s some Terrans here. Americans.”

“Terrans,” Nadia repeated. And was afraid.

She dressed and went out to see. It was true; Art was standing with a small group of Terrans, men and women her own size, and apparently about her own age, unsteady on their feet as they craned their necks, looking at the great cylindrical chamber in amazement. Art was trying to introduce them and explain them at the same time, which was giving even his motor-mouth some difficulty. “I invited them, yes, well, I didn’t know— hi, Nadia— this is my old boss, William Fort.”

“Speak of the devil,” Nadia said, and shook the man’s hand. He had a strong grip; a bald snub-nosed man, tanned and wrinkled, with a pleasant vague expression.

“— They just arrived, the Bogdanovists brought them in. I invited Mr. Fort some while ago, but never heard back from him and didn’t know he was going to come. I’m quite surprised and pleased of course.”

“You invited him?” Maya said.

“Yes you see he’s very interested in helping us that’s the thing.”

Maya was glaring, not at Art but at Nadia. “I told you he was a spy,” she said in Russian.

“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 associates over to the Zakros guest quarters, and when Ariadne arrived, they assigned 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 Sabishiians 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 reassured. 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 embarrassment, shifting 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. Why should you be so upset by that? It’s an 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 assurance of a veteran actor, carrying nicely to everyone there.

“I’d like to thank the people of Subarashii 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 Sabishii,” he said in an undertone to Fort.

“What’s that?”

“Sabishii. You said Subarashii, which is the transnational. The settlement you went through to get here is called Sabishii. Sabishii means ‘lonely.’ Subarashii 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 relationship of Praxis to the other transnationals, Nadia thought there were similarities to the relationship 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 classic 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 crap. 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 classic 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 Subarashii, Mitsubishi, 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 relationship 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 assets 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 Subarashii, when they shifted many of their operations into Brazil. It became clear that this was something new, not like the old flag-of-convenience relationship. 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 relationship 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 relationships a different nature. We’ve dealt with countries large enough to make the partnership 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,” 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.

Sax said, “We have to steal it— to deal with it.”

And he started asking Fort questions. “Which is the boggest— the biggest?” They were halting, ragged, croaking questions— but Fort ignored his difficulties, and answered in great detail, so that most of three consecutive Praxis workshops consisted of an interrogation of Fort by Sax, in which everyone learned a great deal about the other metanationals, their leaders, their internal structures, their client countries, their attitudes toward each other, and their history, particularly the roles taken by their predecessor organizations in the chaos surrounding 2061. “Why respond— why crack the eggs— no, I mean the domes?”

Fort was weak on historical detail, and sighed unhappily at the failures of his personal memory of that period; but his account of the current Terran situation was fuller than any they had gotten before, and it helped clarify questions about metanational activity on Mars that all of them had wondered about. The metanets used the Transitional Authority as a way to mediate their own disagreements. They disagreed over territories. They left the demimonde alone because they felt its underground aspects were negligible and easily monitored. And so on. Nadia could have kissed Sax— she did kiss him— and she kissed Spencer and Michel too for their support of Sax during these sessions, because although Sax doggedly pushed through his speech difficulties, he was often red-faced with frustration, and often hit tables with his fist. Near the end he said to Fort, “What does Praxis want from men—” Bam! “— from Mars, then?”

Fort said, “We feel that what happens here will have effects back home. At this point we’ve identified an emerging coalition of progressive elements on Earth, the biggest of which are China, Praxis, and Switzerland. After that there are scores of smaller elements, but they are less powerful. Which way India goes in this situation could be critical. Most of the metanats seem to regard it as a development sink, meaning that no matter how much they pour into it, nothing there will change. We don’t agree with that. And we think Mars is critical as well, in a different way, as an emergent power. So we wanted to find the progressive elements here too, you see, and show you what we’re doing. And see what you think of it.”

“Interesting,” Sax said.

And so it was. But many people remained adamantly opposed to dealing with a Terran metanational. And meanwhile all the other arguments about all the other issues continued unabated, often becoming more polarized the longer they talked about them.

That night at their patio meeting Nadia shook her head, marveling at the capacity people had for ignoring what they had in common, and fighting bitterly over whatever small differences existed between them. She said to Art and Nirgal, “Maybe the world is simply too complex for any one plan to work. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying for a global plan, but just something to suit us. And then hope Mars can get along using several different systems.”

Art said, “I don’t think that will work either.”

“But what will?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.” And he and Nirgal went off to review tapes, pursuing what suddenly seemed to Nadia an ever-receding mirage.

• • •

Nadia went to bed. If it were a construction project, she thought as she lay falling asleep, she would tear it down and start over again.

The hypnogogic image of a falling building jerked her awake. After a while, sighing, she gave up on sleep, and went out for another night walk. Art and Nirgal were asleep in the tape room, their faces squashed on the tabletop, flickering under the fast-forward light from the screen. Outside the air whooshed north through the gates into Gournia, and she followed it, taking the high trail. Clicking bamboo leaves, stars in the skylights overhead . . . then the faint sounds of laughter, pealing down the tunnel from Phaistos pond.

The pond’s underwater lights were on, and a crowd was bathing again. But now on the far side of the tunnel, about as high on the curved wall as she was on her side, there was a lit platform with perhaps eight people jammed onto it. One of them was getting onto a board of some kind, crouching down; then he dropped away from the platform, crouching down and holding the front of the board, which clearly had very little friction— a naked man with wet hair whipping behind him, flying down the curving black side of the tunnel, accelerating until he shot up a lip of rock and flew out over the pond, cartwheeling, crashing into the water with a great splash, shooting back up with a whoop, to cheers all around.

Nadia walked down to have a look. Someone else was running the board back up a staircase to the platform, and the man who had ridden it down was standing in the shallows, pulling his hair back. Nadia didn’t recognize him until she was at the edge of the pond and he sloshed into the liquid light from below. It was William Fort.

Nadia shed her clothes and walked out into the water, which was very warm, body temperature or a bit higher. With a shout another figure came shooting down the incline, like a surfer on an immense rock wave. “The drop looks severe,” Fort was saying to one of his companions, “but with the gravity so light you can just handle it.”

The woman riding the board was projected out over the water; she arched back in a perfect swan dive until making a final tuck and splash into the pond, and was cheered loudly on emergence. Another woman had retrieved the board and was climbing out of the pond, near the foot of the stairs cut into the slope.

Fort greeted Nadia with a nod, standing waist-deep in the water, his body wiry under ancient wrinkled skin. On his face was the same look of vague pleasure it had worn in the workshops. “Want to try it?” he asked her.

“Maybe later,” she said, looking around at the people in the water, trying to sort out who was there and what parties at the congress they represented. When she realized what she was doing she snorted in disgust, at herself and at the pervasiveness of politics— how it could infect everything if you let it.

But still, she noted that the people in the water were mostly young natives, from Zygote, Sabishii, New Vanuatu, Dorsa Brevia, Vishniac mohole, Christianopolis. Hardly any of them were active speaking delegates, and their power was something Nadia couldn’t gauge. Probably it didn’t signify all that much that they were gathering together here at night, naked in warm water, partying— most of them came from places where public baths were the norm, so they were used to splashing with someone they might fight elsewhere.

Another rider came screaming down the slope, then flying out into the depths of the pond. People swam to her like sharks to blood. Nadia ducked under the water, which tasted slightly salty; opening her eyes she saw crystal bubbles exploding everywhere, then swimming bodies twisting like dolphins over the smooth dark surface of the pond bottom. An unearthly sight. . . .

She came back up, squeezed her hair dry. Fort stood among the youngsters like a decrepit Neptune, surveying them with his curious impassive relaxation. Perhaps, Nadia thought, these natives were in fact the new Martian culture that John Boone had talked about, springing up among them without their actually noticing. Generational transmission of information always contained a lot of error; that was how evolution happened. And even though people had gone underground on Mars for very different reasons, still, they all seemed to be converging here, in a kind of life that had certain paleolithic aspects to it, harking back perhaps to some urculture behind all their differences, or forward to some new synthesis— it did not matter which— it could be both at once. So that there was a possible bond there.

Or so Fort’s mild expression of pleasure seemed to say to Nadia, somehow, as Jackie Boone in all her Valkyrie glory came shooting down the tunnel wall, and flew out over them as if shot from a circus cannon.

• • •

The program devised by the Swiss came to its end. The organizers quickly called for a three-day rest, to be followed by a general meeting.

Art and Nirgal spent these days in their little conference room, going over videotapes twenty hours a days, talking endlessly and typing at their AIs in a kind of hammering desperation. Nadia kept them going, and broke ties when they disagreed, and wrote the sections they deemed too hard. Often when she walked in one of them would be asleep in his chair, the other staring transfixed by his screen. “Look,” he would croak, “what do you think of this?” Nadia would read the screen and make comments while putting food under their noses, which often woke the sleeping one. “Looks promising. Let’s get back to work.”

• • •

And so on the morning of the general meeting Art and Nirgal and Nadia walked out onto the stage of the amphitheater together, and Art took his AI with him to the proscenium. He stood looking out at the assembled crowd, as if stunned by the sight of it, and after a long pause said, “We actually agree on many things.”

This got a laugh. But Art held his AI overhead like the stone tablets, then read aloud from the screen: “Work points for a Martian government!”

He peered over the screen at the crowd, and they subsided into an attentive silence.

“One. Martian society will be composed of many different cultures. It is better to think of it as a world rather than a nation. Freedom of religion and cultural practice must be guaranteed. No one culture or group of cultures should be able to dominate the rest.

“Two. Within this framework of diversity, it still must be guaranteed that all individuals on Mars have certain inalienable rights, including the material basics of existence, health care, education, and legal equality.

“Three. The land, air, and water of Mars are in the common stewardship of the human family, and cannot be owned by any individual or group.

“Four. The fruits of an individual’s labor belong to the individual, and cannot be appropriated by another individual or group. At the same time, human labor on Mars is part of a communal enterprise, given to the common good. The Martian economic system must reflect both these facts, balancing self-interest with the interests of society at large.

“Five. The metanational order ruling Earth is currently incapable of incorporating the previous two principles, and cannot be applied here. In its place we must enact an economics based on ecologic science. The goal of Martian economics is not ‘sustainable development’ but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere.

“Six. The Martian landscape itself has certain ‘rights of place’ which must be honored. The goal of our environmental alterations should therefore be minimalist and ecopoetic, reflecting the values of the areophany. It is suggested that the goal of environmental alterations be to make only that portion of Mars lower than the five-kilometer contour human-viable. Higher elevations, constituting some thirty percent of the planet, would then remain in something resembling their primeval conditions, existing as natural wilderness zones.

“Seven. The habitation of Mars is a unique historical process, as it is the first inhabitation of another planet by humanity. As such it should be undertaken in a spirit of reverence for this planet and for the scarcity of life in the universe. What we do here will set precedents for further human habitation of the solar system, and will suggest models for the human relationship to Earth’s environment as well. Thus Mars occupies a special place in history, and this should be remembered when we make the necessary decisions concerning life here.”

• • •

Art let his AI fall to his side, and stared out at the crowd. They looked down at him in silence. “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat. He gestured at Nirgal, who came up and stood beside him.

Nirgal said, “That’s all that we could pick out from the workshops that it seemed to us everyone here might agree to. There’s lots more that we feel would be accepted by a majority of the groups here, but not by all. We’ve made lists of those partial consensus points as well, and we’ll post them all for your inspection. We feel very strongly that if we can come away from here with even a very general kind of document, then we will have accomplished something significant. The tendency in a congress like this is to become more and more aware of our differences, and I think this tendency is exaggerated in our situation, because at this point a Martian government remains a kind of theoretical exercise. But when it becomes a practical problem— when we have to act— then we’ll be looking for common ground, and a document like this will help us find it.

“We have a lot of specific notes for each of the main points of the document. We’ve talked with Jurgen and Priska about them, and they suggest setting up a week of meetings with a day devoted to each of the seven main points, so that everyone can make comments and revisions. Then at the end we can see if we have anything left.”

There was a weak laugh. A lot of people were nodding.

“What about gaining independence in the first place?” Coyote called from the back.

Art said, “We couldn’t figure out any similar points of agreement to write down. Maybe there can also be a workshop that tries to do that.”

“Maybe there should!” Coyote exclaimed. “Anyone can agree things should be fair, and the world just. The way to get there is always the real problem.”

“Well, yes and no,” Art said. “What we’ve got here is more than a wish that things be fair. As for the methods, maybe if we go at it again with these goals in mind, things will suggest themselves. That is to say, what will get us to these goals most surely? What kind of means do these ends imply?”

He looked around at the crowd, and shrugged. “Look, we’ve tried to compile a composite of what you’ve all been saying here in your different ways, so if there is a lack of specific suggestions for means of achieving independence, it’s perhaps because you’ve all gotten stuck at the level of general philosophies of action, where many of you disagree. The only thing I can think to suggest is that you try to identify the various forces on the planet, and rate how resistant to independence they might be, and tailor your actions to match the resistance. Nadia talked about reconceptualizing the whole methodology of revolution, and some have suggested economic models, the idea of a leveraged buyout or something, but when I was thinking about this notion of a tailored response, it reminded me of integrated pest management, you know— the system in agriculture where a variety of methods of varying severity are used to deal with the pests you have.”

People laughed at this, but Art didn’t seem to notice; he looked taken aback by the lack of approval of the general document. Disappointed. And Nirgal looked angry.

Nadia turned and said loudly, “How about a round of applause for our friends here, for managing to synthesize anything at all out of this!”

People clapped. A few cheered. For a moment it sounded quite enthusiastic. But quickly it ended, and they filed out of the amphitheater, talking among themselves, arguing again already.

• • •

So the debates continued, now structured around Art and Nirgal’s document. Reviewing the tapes, Nadia saw that there was a fair amount of agreement over the substance of all the points except for number six, concerning the level of terraforming. Most of the Reds would not accept the low-elevation viability concept, pointing out that most of the planet lay under the five-kilometer contour, and that the higher elevations would be significantly contaminated if the lower elevations were viable. They spoke of dismantling the industrial terraforming processes that were now under way, of returning to the very slowest biological methods called for in the radical ecopoesis model. Some advocated the growth of a thin CO2 atmosphere, supporting plants but not animals, as being a situation more natural to Mars’s volatile inventory and its past history. Other advocated leaving the surface as close to how they had found it as possible, and keeping a very small population in tented valleys. These people decried the rapid destruction of the surface by the industrial terraforming in outraged tones, condemning particularly the inundation of Vastitas Borealis, and the outright melting of the landscape by use of the soletta and the aerial lens.

But as the seven days passed, it became more and more obvious that this point of the draft declaration was the only one being really debated, while the others were for the most part being subjected to fine-tuning only. A lot of people were pleasantly surprised to find even this much assent to the draft statement, and more than once Nirgal said irritably, “Why be surprised? We didn’t make those points up, we just wrote down what people were saying.”

And people would nod at this, interested, and go back to the meetings, and work on the points again. And it began to seem to Nadia that agreement was popping up everywhere, called out of chaos by Art and Nirgal’s assertion that it existed. Several of the sessions that week ended in a kind of kavajava high of political consensus, the various aspects of a state finally hammered into a shape to which many of the parties could agree.

But the argument over methods only got more vehement. Back and forth it would go, Nadia against Coyote, Kasei, the Reds, the Marsfirsters, and many of the Bogdanovists. “You can’t get to what we want by murder!” “They won’t give this planet up! Political power begins at the end of a gun!”

One night after one of these donnybrooks, a big gathering of them floated in the shallows of the Phaistos pond, trying to relax. Sax sat on an underwater bench and shook his head. “Classic problem of punishment— no— of violence,” he said. “Radical, liberal. Who never managed to agree again. Before.”

Art plunged his head in the water, and pulled it out spluttering. Weary, frustrated, he said, “What about integrated pest management? What about that mandatory retirement idea?”

“Forced disemployment,” Nadia corrected.

“Decapitation,” Maya said.

“Whatever!” Art said, splashing them. “Velvet revolution. Silk revolution.”

“Aerogel,” Sax said. “Light, strong. Invisible.”

“It’s worth a try!” Art said.

Ann shook her head. “It will never work.”

“It’s better than another sixty-one,” Nadia said.

Sax said, “Better if we agree on a play. On a plan.”

“But we can’t,” Maya said.

“The front is broad,” Art insisted. “Let’s go out there and do what we’re comfortable with.”

Sax and Nadia and Maya all shook their heads at once; seeing it, Ann unexpectedly laughed out loud. And then they were all sitting in the pond together, giggling at they knew not what.

• • •

The final general meeting took place in the late afternoon, in the Zakros park where it had all begun. It had a strangely confused air, Nadia felt, with most people only grudgingly satisfied with the Dorsia Brevia Declaration, now several times longer than Art and Nirgal’s original draft. Each point was read aloud by Priska, and each was cheered in a consensual vote of approval; but different groups cheered more loudly for some points than for others, and when the reading was done, the general applause was brief and perfunctory. No one could be happy with that, and Art and Nirgal looked exhausted.

The applause ended, and for a moment everyone just sat there. No one knew what to do next; the lack of agreement on the matter of methods seem to extend right into that very moment. What next? What now? Did they just go home? Did they have a home? The moment stretched out, uncomfortable, even vaguely painful (how they needed John!), so that Nadia was relieved when someone shouted something— an exclamation that seemed to break a malign spell. She looked around as people pointed.

There on a staircase, high on the black tunnel wall, stood a green woman. She was unclothed, green-skinned, glowing in a shaft of afternoon sun that shot down from a skylight— gray-haired, barefoot, without jewelry— completely naked, except for a coat of green paint. And what was common at night in the pond was, in this vivid daylight, dangerous and provocative— a shock to the senses, a challenge to their notion of what a political congress was, or could be.

It was Hiroko. She began to step down the staircase, in a steady measured pace. Ariadne and Charlotte and several other Minoan women stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for her, along with Hiroko’s closest followers from the hidden colony— Iwao, Rya, Evgenia, Michel, all the rest of that little band. As Hiroko descended they started to sing. When she reached them, they draped her with strings of bright red flowers. A fertility rite, Nadia thought, reaching directly into some paleolithic part of their minds, and intermingling there with Hiroko’s areophany.

When Hiroko left the foot of the stairs she had a little train of followers, singing the names of Mars, “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram,” and so on, a great mélange of archaic syllables, into which some of them were interjecting “Ka . . . ka . . . ka . . .”

She led them down the path, through trees, out again onto the grass, into the meeting in the park. She walked right through the middle of the crowd, with a solemn, distant expression on her green face. Many stood as she passed. Jackie Boone came out of the crowd and joined the group of followers, and her green grandmother took her by the hand. The two of them led the way through the crowd, the old matriarch tall, proud, thoroughly ancient, gnarled like a tree, and as green as a tree’s leaves; Jackie taller still, young and graceful as a dancer, her black hair flowing halfway down her back. A rustle went through the crowd, a sigh; and as the two and the group following them walked down to the central path by the canal, people stood and followed, the Sufis among them dancing a braid around their circumference. “Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira . . .” And so a thousand people walked down the canal path after the two women and their train, the Sufis singing, others chanting pieces of Hiroko’s areophany, the rest content to follow.

Nadia walked along holding hands with Nirgal and Art, feeling happy. They were animals, after all, no matter where they chose to live. She felt something like worship, an emotion very rare in her experience— worship for the divinity of life, which took such beautiful forms.

At the pond Jackie took off her rust jumper, and she and Hiroko stood in ankle-deep water, facing each other and holding their clasped hands as far overhead as they could reach. The other Minoan women joined this bridge. Old and young, green and pink. . . .

The hidden colonists passed under the bridge first, among them Maya herself, hand in hand with Michel. And then all kinds of people were filing under the mother bridge, in what felt like the millionth repetition of a million-year-old ritual, something everyone had coded in their genes and had practiced all their life. The Sufis danced under the clasped hands still wearing their white billowing clothes, and this gave a model to others, who stayed clothed but surged right out into the water, ducking under the naked women, Zeyk and Nazik leading the way, chanting, “Ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira, ana el-Haqq,” looking like Hindus in the Ganges, or Baptists in the Jordan. So that in the end many shed their clothes, but all walked into the water. And they stared around at this instinctive and yet highly conscious rebirth, many drumming on the water surface, making rhythmic slapping splashes to accompany the singing and chanting. . . . Nadia saw again and again how beautiful humans were. Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality. They stood before each other with all their imperfections and their sexual characteristics and their intimations of mortality— but most of all with their astonishing beauty, which in the ruddy light of the tunnel sunset could scarcely be believed, could scarcely be comprehended or answered. Skin at sunset had a lot of red in it— but not enough for some of the Reds, apparently, who were sponging one of their women down with a red dye they had located, to make a counter figure to Hiroko, apparently. Political bathing! Nadia groaned. Actually all the colors were coming off in the pond, turning the water brown.

Maya swam through the shallows and knocked Nadia deeper into the pond with an impetuous hug. “Hiroko is a genius,” she said in Russian. “She may be a mad genius, but a genius she is.”

“Mother goddess of the world,” Nadia said, and switched to English as she plowed through the warm water to a little knot of the First Hundred and the Sabishii issei. There were Ann and Sax standing side by side, Ann tall and thin, Sax short and round, looking just as they had in the old days in the baths of Underhill, debating something or other, Sax talking with his face all screwed up in concentration. Nadia laughed at the sight, splashing them.

Fort swam to her side. “Should have run the whole conference like this,” he observed. “Ooh, he’s going to crash.” And indeed a board rider coming down the curved wall slipped off his plummeting board, and slid ignominiously into the pond. “Look, I need to get back home to be able to help. Also a great-great-great-granddaughter is getting married in four months.”

“Can you get back that fast?” Spencer asked.

“Yes, my ship is fast.” A Praxis space division built rockets that used a modified Dyson propulsion to accelerate and then decelerate continuously through the flight, which took a very direct line between the planets.

“Executive style,” Spencer said.

“They’re open for use by anyone in Praxis, if they’re in a hurry. You might want to visit Earth yourself, see what conditions are like firsthand.”

No one took him up on that, though it raised some eyebrows. But there was no more talk of detaining him, either.

People drifted like jellyfish in a slow whirlpool, calmed at last by the warmth, by the water and wine and kava being passed around in bamboo cups, by the accomplishment of finishing what they had come to do. It was not perfect, people said— definitely not perfect— but it was something, especially the remarkable nature of point four, or three— quite a declaration, in fact— a beginning, a real beginning— seriously flawed— especially point six— definitely not perfect— but likely to be remembered. “Well, but this here is religion,” someone sitting in the shallows was saying, “and I like all the pretty bodies, but mixing state and religion is a dangerous business . . .”

Nadia and Maya walked out into deeper water, arm in arm, talking with everyone they knew. A group of the youngsters from Zygote saw them, Rachel and Tiu and Frantz and Steve and the rest, and they cried, “Hey, the two witches!” and came over to squish them together with hugs and kisses. Kinetic reality, Nadia thought, somatic reality, haptic reality— the power of the touch, ah, my . . . her ghost finger was throbbing, which hadn’t happened in ages.

They walked on, trailing the Zygote ectogenes, and came on Art, who was standing with Nirgal and a few other men, all drawn as by magnet to where Jackie still stood by the half-green Hiroko, her wet hair slicked over her bare shoulders, her head thrown back laughing, the sunset glaring off her and giving her a kind of hyperreal, heraldic power. Art was looking happy indeed, and when Nadia hugged him, he put an arm over her shoulder and left it there. Her good friend, a very solid somatic reality.

“It was well done,” Maya told him. “It was like John Boone would have done it.”

“It was not,” Jackie said automatically.

“I knew him,” Maya said, giving her a sharp look, “and you didn’t. And I say it was like John would have done it.”

They stood staring at each other, the ancient white-haired beauty and the young black-haired beauty— and it seemed to Nadia there was something primal in the sight, primal, primeval, primate . . . these are the two witches, she wanted to say to Jackie’s sibs behind her. But then again they no doubt knew that. “No one is like John was,” she said, trying to break the spell. She squeezed Art’s waist. “But it was well done.”

Kasei came splashing up; he had been standing by silently, and Nadia wondered at him a little, the man with the famous father, famous mother, famous daughter. . . . And slowly becoming a power himself, among the Reds and the radical Marsfirsters, out there on the edge in a splinter movement, as the congress had proved. No, it was hard to tell what Kasei thought of his life. He gave Jackie a glance that was too complex to read— pride, jealousy, some sort of rebuke— and said, “We could use John Boone now.” His father— the first man on Mars— her cheery John, who used to love to swim the butterfly in Underhill, in afternoons that had felt like this ceremony, except that it had been their everyday reality, for a year or so there in the beginning. . . .

“And Arkady,” Nadia said, still trying to defuse things. “And Frank.”

“We can do without Frank Chalmers,” Kasei said bitterly.

“Why do you say that?” Maya exclaimed. “We would be lucky to have him here now! He would know how to handle Fort, and Praxis, and the Swiss and you Reds and the greens, all of it. Frank, Arkady, John— we could use all three of them now.” Her mouth was hard and downturned. She glared at Jackie and Kasei as if daring them to speak; then her lip curled, and she looked away.

Nadia said, “This is why we must avoid another sixty-one.”

“We will,” Art said, and gave her another squeeze.

Nadia shook her head sadly. The peak always passed so fast. “It’s not our choice,” she told him. “It’s not something that is entirely in our hands. So we will see.”

“It will be different this time,” Kasei insisted.

“We will see.”