1

When the congress ended Nadia made plans to get off Pavonis Mons immediately. She was sick of the bickering in the warehouse, of arguments, of politics; sick of violence and the threat of violence; sick of revolution, sabotage, the constitution, the elevator, Earth, and the threat of war. Earth and death, that was Pavonis Mons— Peacock Mountain, with all the peacocks preening and strutting and crying Me Me Me. It was the last place on Mars Nadia wanted to be.

She wanted to get off the mountain and breathe the open air. She wanted to work on tangible things; she wanted to build, with her nine fingers and her back and her mind, build anything and everything, not just structures, although those would be wonderful of course, but also things like air or dirt, parts of a construction project new to her, which was simply terraforming itself. Ever since her first walk in the open air down at DuMartheray Crater, free of everything but a little CO2 filter mask, Sax’s obsession had finally made sense to her. She was ready to join him and the rest of them in that project, and more than ever now, as the removal of the orbiting mirrors had kicked off a long winter and threatened a full ice age. Build air, build dirt, move water, introduce plants and animals: all that kind of work sounded fascinating to her now. And of course the more conventional construction projects beckoned as well. When the new North Sea melted and its shoreline stabilized, there would be harbor towns to be inlaid everywhere, scores of them no doubt, each with jetties and seafronts, channels, wharves and docks, and the towns behind them rising into the hills. At the higher altitudes there would be more tent towns to be erected, and covered canyons. There was even talk of covering some of the big calderas, and of running cable cars between the three prince volcanoes, or bridging the narrows south of Elysium; there was talk of inhabiting the polar island continent; there were new concepts in biohousing, plans to grow homes and buildings directly out of engineered trees, as Hiroko has used bamboo, but on a bigger scale. Yes, a builder ready to learn some of the latest techniques had a thousand years of lovely projects ahead of her. It was a dream come true.

• • •

Then a small group came to her and said they were exploring possibilities for the first executive council of the new global government.

Nadia stared at them. She could see their import like a big slow-moving trap, and she tried her best to run out of it before it snapped shut. “There are lots of possibilities,” she said. “About ten times more good people than council positions.”

Yes, they said, looking thoughtful. But we were wondering if you had ever thought about it.

“No,” she said.

Art was grinning, and seeing that she began to get worried. “I plan to build things,” she said firmly.

“You could do that too,” Art said. “The council is a part-time job.”

“The hell it is.”

“No, really.”

It was true that the concept of citizen government was written everywhere into the new constitution, from the global legislature to the courts to the tents. People would presumably do a good deal of this work part-time. Nadia was quite sure, however, that the executive council was not going to be in that category. “Don’t executive council members have to be elected out of the legislature?” she asked.

Elected by the legislature, they told her happily. Usually fellow legislators would be elected, but not necessarily. “Well there’s a mistake in the constitution for you!” Nadia said. “Good thing that you caught it so soon. Restrict it to elected legislators and you’ll cut your pool way down—”

Way down—

“And still have lots of good people,” she backpedaled.

But they were persistent. They kept coming back, in different combinations, and Nadia kept running toward that narrowing gap between the teeth of the trap. In the end they begged. A whole little delegation of them. This was the crucial time for the new government, they needed an executive council trusted by all, it would be the one to get things started, etc. etc. The senate had been elected, the duma had been drafted. Now the two houses were electing the seven executive council members. People mentioned as candidates included Mikhail, Zeyk, Peter, Marina, Etsu, Nanao, Ariadne, Marion, Irishka, Antar, Rashid, Jackie, Charlotte, the four ambassadors to Earth, and several others Nadia had first met in the warehouse. “Lots of good people,” Nadia reminded them. This was the polycephalous revolution.

But people were uneasy at the list, they told Nadia repeatedly. They had become used to her providing a balanced center, both during the congress and during the revolution, and before that at Dorsa Brevia, and for that matter throughout the underground years, and right back to the beginning. People wanted her on the council as a moderating influence, a calm head, a neutral party, etc. etc.

“Get out,” she said, suddenly angry, though she did not know why. They were concerned to see her anger, upset by it. “I’ll think about it,” she said as she shooed them out, to keep them moving.

Eventually only Charlotte and Art were left, looking serious, looking as if they had not conspired to bring all this about.

“They seem to want you on the executive council,” Art said.

“Oh shut up.”

“But they do. They want someone they can trust.”

“They want someone they’re not afraid of, you mean. They want an old babushka who won’t try to do anything, so they can keep their opponents off the council and pursue their own agendas.”

Art frowned; he had not considered this, he was too naive.

“You know a constitution is kind of like a blueprint,” Charlotte said thoughtfully. “Getting a real working government out of it is the true act of construction.”

“Out,” Nadia said.

• • •

But in the end she agreed to stand. They were relentless, there were a surprisingly large number of them, and they would not give up. She didn’t want to seem like a shirker. And so she let the trap close down on her leg.

The legislatures met, the ballots were cast. Nadia was elected one of the seven, along with Zeyk, Ariadne, Marion, Peter, Mikhail, and Jackie. That same day Irishka was elected the first chief justice of the Global Environmental Court, a real coup for her personally and the Reds generally; this was part of the “grand gesture” Art had brokered at the congress’s end, to gain the Reds’ support. About half the new justices were Reds of one shade or another, making for a gesture just a bit too grand, in Nadia’s opinion.

Immediately after these elections another delegation came to her, led this time by her fellow councillors. She had gotten the highest ballot total in the two houses, they told her, and so the others wanted to elect her president of the council.

“Oh no,” she said.

They nodded gravely. The president was just another member of the council, they told her, one among equals. A ceremonial position only. This arm of the government was modeled on Switzerland’s, and the Swiss didn’t usually even know who their president was. And so on. Though of course they would need her permission (Jackie’s eyes glittered slightly at this), her acceptance of the post.

“Out,” she said.

After they had left Nadia sat slumped in her chair, feeling stunned.

“You’re the only one on Mars that everyone trusts,” Art said gently. He shrugged, as if to say he hadn’t been involved, which she knew was a lie. “What can you do?” he said, rolling his eyes with a child’s exaggerated theatricality. “Give it three years and then things’ll be on track, and you can say you did your part and retire. Besides, the first president of Mars! How could you resist?”

“Easy.”

Art waited. Nadia glared at him.

Finally he said, “But you’ll do it anyway, right?”

“You’ll help me?”

“Oh yes.” He put a hand on her clenched fist. “All you want. I mean— I’m at your disposal.”

“Is that an official Praxis position?”

“Why yes, I’m sure it could be. Praxis adviser to the Martian president? You bet.”

So possibly she could make him do it.

She heaved a big sigh. Tried to feel less tight in her stomach. She could take the job, and then turn most of the work over to Art, and to whatever staff they gave her. She wouldn’t be the first president to do that, nor the last.

“Praxis adviser to the Martian president,” Art was announcing, looking pleased.

“Oh shut up!” she said.

“Of course.”

He left her alone to get used to it, came back with a steaming pot of kava and two little cups. He poured; she took one from him, and sipped the bitter fluid.

He said, “Anyway I’m yours, Nadia. You know that.”

“Mm-hmm.”

She regarded him as he slurped his kava. He meant it more than politically, she knew. He was fond of her. All that time working together, living together, traveling together; sharing space. And she liked him. A bear of a man, graceful on his feet, full of high spirits. Fond of kava, as was obvious in his slurping, in his squinched face. He had carried the whole congress, she felt, on the strength of those high spirits, spreading like an epidemic— the feeling that there was nothing so fun as writing a constitution— absurd! But it had worked. And during the congress they had become a kind of couple. Yes, she had to admit it.

But she was now 159 years old. Another absurdity, but it was true. And Art was, she wasn’t sure, somewhere in his seventies or eighties, although he looked fifty, as they often did when they got the treatment early. “I’m old enough to be your great-grandmother,” she said.

Art shrugged, embarrassed. He knew what she was talking about. “I’m old enough to be that woman’s great-grandfather,” he said, pointing at a tall native girl passing by their office door. “And she’s old enough to have kids. So, you know. At some point it just doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe not to you.”

“Well, yeah. But that’s half of the opinions that count.”

Nadia said nothing.

“Look,” Art said, “we’re going to live a long time. At some point the numbers have to stop mattering. I mean, I wasn’t with you in the first years, but we’ve been together a long time now, and gone through a lot.”

“I know.” Nadia looked down at the table, remembering some of those times. There was the stump of her long-lost finger. All that life was gone. Now she was president of Mars. “Shit.”

Art slurped his kava, watched her sympathetically. He liked her, she liked him. They were already a kind of couple. “You help me with this damned council stuff!” she said, feeling bleak as all her technofantasies slipped away.

“Oh I will.”

“And then, well. We’ll see.”

“We’ll see,” he said, and smiled.

• • •

So there she was, stuck on Pavonis Mons. The new government was assembling up there, moving from the warehouses into Sheffield proper, occupying the blocky polished stone-faced buildings abandoned by the metanats; there was an argument of course over whether they were going to be compensated for these buildings and the rest of their infrastructure, or whether it had all been “globalized” or “co-opted” by independence and the new order. “Compensate them,” Nadia growled at Charlotte, glowering. But it did not appear that the presidency of Mars was the kind of presidency that caused people to jump at her word.

In any case the government was moving in, Sheffield becoming, if not the capital, then at least the temporary seat of the global government. With Burroughs drowned and Sabishii burned, there was no other obvious place to put it, and in truth it didn’t look to Nadia like any of the other tent towns wanted to have it. People spoke of building a new capital city, but that would take time, and meanwhile they had to meet somewhere. So around the piste to Sheffield they retired, inside its tent, under its dark sky. In the shadow of the elevator cable, rising from its eastern neighborhood straight and black, like a flaw in reality.

Nadia found an apartment in the westernmost tent, behind the rim park, up on the fourth floor where she had a fine view down into Pavonis’s awesome caldera. Art took an apartment in the ground floor of the same building, at the back; apparently the caldera gave him vertigo. But there he was, and the Praxis office was in a nearby office building, a cube of polished jasper as big as a city block, lined with chrome blue windows.

Fine. She was there. Time to take a deep breath and do the work asked of her. It was like a bad dream in which the constitutional congress had suddenly been extended for three years, three m-years.

She began with the intention of getting off the mountain occasionally and joining some construction project or other. Of course she would perform her duties on the council, but working on an increase in greenhouse gas output, for instance, looked good, combining as it did technical problems and the politics of conforming to the new environmental regulatory regime. It would get her out into the back country, where a lot of the feedstocks for the greenhouse gases were located. From there she could do her council business over the wrist.

But events conspired to keep her in Sheffield. It was one thing after another— nothing particularly important or interesting, compared to the congress itself, but the details necessary to get things rolling. It was somewhat as Charlotte had said; after the design phase, the endless minutiae of construction. Detail after detail.

She had to expect this, she had to be patient. She would work through the first rush and then get away. In the meantime, along with the start-up process, the media wanted her, the new UN Martian Office wanted her, very interested in the new immigration policies and procedures; the other council members wanted her. Where would the council meet? How often? What were its rules of operation? Nadia convinced the other six councillors to hire Charlotte to be council secretary and protocol chief, and after that Charlotte hired a big crew of assistants from Dorsa Brevia. So they had the start of a staff. And Mikhail also had a great fund of practical experience in government from Bogdanov Vishniac. So there were people better suited than Nadia to do this work; but still she was called in a million times a day to confer, discuss, decide, appoint, adjudicate, arbitrate, administrate. It was endless.

And then when Nadia did clear time for herself, forcibly, it turned out that being president made it very difficult to join any particular project. Everything going on was now part of a tent or a co-op; very often they were commercial enterprises, involved in transactions that were part nonprofit public works, part competitive market. So to have the president of Mars join any given co-op would be a sign of official patronage, and couldn’t be allowed if one wanted to be fair. It was a conflict of interest.

“Shit!” she said to Art, accusingly.

He shrugged, tried to pretend he hadn’t known.

But there was no way out. She was a prisoner of power. She had to study the situation as if it were an engineering problem, like trying to exert force in some difficult medium. Say she wanted to build greenhouse-gas factories. She was constrained from joining any factory co-op in particular. Therefore she had to do it some other way. Emergence at a higher level: she could perhaps coordinate co-ops.

There seemed to her good reasons to promote the building of greenhouse-gas factories. The Year Without Summer had extended to include a series of violent storms that had dropped off the Great Escarpment into the north, and most meteorologists agreed these “Hadley cross-equatorial storms” had been caused by the orbital mirrors’ removal, and the resulting sudden drop in insolation. A full ice age was deemed a distinct possibility; and pumping up greenhouse gases seemed to be one of the best ways to counter it. So Nadia asked Charlotte to initiate a conference to come back with recommendations for forestalling an ice age. Charlotte contacted people in Da Vinci and Sabishii and elsewhere, and soon she had a conference scheduled to take place in Sabishii, named, by some Da Vinci saxaclone no doubt, the “Insolation Loss Effects Abatement Meeting M-53.”