Helen fed my slate background on the subjects to be discussed and filled me in on the itinerary for the two-day visit. “Study it later,” she said. “Right now, Bithras wants to meet his new assistant.”

“Of course.” I detected no envy in Helen Dougal’s face. I wondered why Bithras wasn’t taking her instead of me — wondered if she thought I was moving in on her meal pan. Since I was a little younger in appearance… certainly in age…

With what I had heard, anything might be possible. I must have gone a little distant, for Helen smiled patiently and said, “You’re an apprentice. I have nothing to fear from you, nor you from me.”

How about from Bithras?

“And believe me, a lot of what you’ve heard about our syndic is pure dust.”

“Oh.”

“Advocates and family representatives meet this afternoon at fifteen. First, however, you’re going to join Bithras and me for lunch. Allen Pak-Lee is still in Borealis. He’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”

The lunch was held in a dining hall outside Bithras’s main office. I had expected moderate luxury, but the setting was Spartan: box nano food, hardly inspiring, and packaged tea served from ancient battered carafes in worn cups, on tables that must have had pioneer metal in them.

Bithras entered, clutching his slate and cursing in what I first took to be Hindi; later I learned it was Punjabi. He sat peremptorily at the table — it isn’t easy to sit down hard on Mars, but he did his best. The slate skittered a few centimeters across the table and he apologized in perfect, rapid English.

He was dark, almost purple, with intense eyes and handsome features puffing in his middle years. His head was topped with a short stiff brush of black hair lacking any gray. Thick arms and legs, well-muscled for a Martian, stuck out assertively from a short body. He wore a white cotton shirt and tennis shorts. Low-court tennis was Bithras’s favorite sport.

“It is pressing. It is pressing very hard,” he said, and shook his head in frustration. Then he looked up, his eyes glittering like a little boy’s, and beamed a broad smile. “Getting acquainted! My niece, my new apprentice and assistant?”

I rose from my seat and bowed. He did the same, and reached across the table to shake my hand. His eyes lingered on my chest, which hardly invited scrutiny beneath a loose jumpsuit. “You come highly recommended, Casseia. I have great expectations.”

I blushed.

He nodded briskly. “I had thought we would have time for a lunch alone, but not so — we start work immediately. Where are the advocates?”

The door opened and six of Majumdar BM’s most prominent advocates and managers entered. I had met four of them at social functions over the years. Three male, three female, they, too, wore white shirts and shorts, and towels draped around their necks, as if they had all been playing tennis with Bithras.

I had never seen so many crucial characters assembled in one room: my first taste of being at the center.

Bithras greeted each with a familiar nod. Introductions were ignored. I was here for my own benefit, not theirs. “Now I will begin,” he said. “We are an unhappy planet. We do not satisfy Earth. That is sad enough, but actually our progress is slow from any point of view; nobody can agree how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It has been more than a year since the end of the Statist government, and all we have managed is to patch the Council back together and hold interim meetings. Economics have slid, and we are in worse condition than before Dauble threw her hammers. This has hurt trade. We do not have a single entity governing trade; Earth organizations must work with every BM separately, and contend with zealous district governors. We still run scared of actually cooperating in our own mutual interests, of being caught again in the Statist trap. So…“

He folded his hands. “We are hurting ourselves. There must be an end to recriminations as to who agreed with Dauble and who did not. We must stop punishing Lunar and Earth sympathizers with exclusion from the Council. As you know, I have been meeting with the syndics of the twenty largest Mars-based BMs for the past few months to put together a proposal for Martian unification, working behind and around the Council. I go to Earth with a package to present, and I present it to the Council for debate this evening. You have studied it… It is quick, it is dirty, it has handicaps. I’m giving you a final chance to criticize it, from a selfish perspective. Tell me something I do not know.”

“It curtails the rights of BMs to control their own trade,” said Hetti Bishop, chief advocate. “I know we must organize, but this is too damned Statist.”

“Again I ask, tell me something I don’t know.”

“It gives district governors more power than ever,” said Nils Bodrum from Argyre. “The governors are in love with their duties and their lands. Some of them think Mars is a natural paradise to be preserved. We’ve had six Triple loan deals fall through because we couldn’t guarantee quick answers to resource requests. We strangle in conservationist tape.”

Bithras smiled. “So, get to your point, Nils.”

“If governors keep hewing to a preservation line, and we give them more power, we can say good-bye to billions of Triple dollars. Triple money won’t back our resource digs. We’ll have to curtail settlements and turn down Terrie immigrants. That won’t make anybody happy, least of all Earth. Where will they, send their seekers after eternity? For each Eloi refugee — ”

“Immigrant,” Hattie Bishop said wryly.

“ ‘Immigrant,’ I remind this august assembly, we are paid a million Triple dollars. And that money flows first through Majumdar banks.”

Bithras listened intently.

“I don’t see why Earth wants the governors stronger,” Bodrum concluded, folding his hands.

“They are pushing for a unified government and for BMs to concede power,” said Samuel Washington of Bauxite in the Nereidum Mountains . “That’s been their goal for ten years. And they’re willing to exert considerable pressure.”

“What kind of force can they use?” Hettie Bishop asked.

Beside her, Nance Misra-Majumdar, the eldest of our advocates, chuckled and shook her head. “Two hundred and ninety thousand Terrie immigrants on Mars have arrived in the last ten years. They’ve found their way into high and trusted positions in every BM, some work on the council…”

“What are you getting at, Nance?” Hettie asked.

Nance lifted her shoulders. “They used to be called fifth columnists,” she said.

“All of them?” Bithras asked sardonically.

Nance smiled patiently. “Our thinkers are manufactured on Earth. It may be years before the Tharsis thinkers come on line. All of our nano factories come from Earth, or the designs at least.”

“No one has ever found irregularities in any designs or software,” Hettie said. “Nance, we have no reason to be paranoid.”

Bithras lifted his chin from his hand and spun his chair halfway. “I see no reason to anticipate trouble, but Nance is right. In theory, there are many ways we could be undermined without facing a massive military expedition across space, which at any rate has never been feasible, even for so rich and powerful a world as Earth.”

I could hardly believe such things were being discussed. I was at once dubious, repelled, and fascinated.

Nils Bodrum said, “We have no organized defenses. That much could be said for a central authority — easier to raise an army and defend our planet.”

Bithras was clearly not pleased by the direction the conversation was taking. “Friends, this is not a serious problem, certainly not yet. Earth simply wants us to present a united negotiating front, and they have targeted the largest financial BM — ourselves — to catalyze unification. If you pardon the word.”

“Why should unification be a dirty word?” Hettie said. “My God, as an advocate, I tell you, I’d love to find a way out of the morass of special cases and fooleries we call our Charter.”