We spoke by satcom while I cleared out the Shinktown room I’d rented for the enhancement operation.

I would be passing through Diane’s home station, Mispec Moor, on a constitutional campaign tour in Mariner Valley . Ilya would be there for me. After meetings with LitVid reporters, we had half a day and an evening free; we gleefully arranged for dinner.

“It’s wonderful to talk to you again!” Diane enthused. “I’ve been so reluctant to drop a note — I thought you’d think I was, you know, peddling influence or something. Casseia, what you’ve done!”

“Not bad for someone who thinks too much, hm?”

Diane laughed. “Not at all like the old student radicals who fought the Statists.”

“Have you changed your tune, Diane?”

“Casseia, I’m so respectable. I’ve even been working on the Mariner Constitutional Committee. Are we really Statists? Is it possible?”

“We’ll use some other name, okay?”

“And I’m married. More than lawbonded… it’s really more. I’ve gone over to Steinburg-Leschke. I’ve converted to New Reform Judaism. You’ll meet Joseph. He’s very special.”

“You’ll love Ilya, too. Things have changed, Diane.”

We completed arrangements and signed off. I sat in the room’s lone chair, packed bags at my feet, and considered the nature of time. I was not very old, just fifteen, but measuring time as a string of memorable events, I seemed positively ancient.

My head filled with time as reflection of motion, arbiter of change, conveyer and dissipater of information; time is what’s left when nothing happens, time is the distance between then and now; time marked in a haze of multi-colored equations, malleable, nonexistent for massless particles, for them an eternal now and the universe as flat and direct as a sheet of paper.

I recognized the signs then: the enhancement was integrating and informing, organizing areas of shared information and ability within my brain. The process was safe — billions on Earth and a few hundred thousand on Mars had gone through it, some, like Orianna, dozens of times. But for me it was unfamiliar and at once unsettling and hypnotic.

I lost an hour in that chair, in that bleak little Shinktown room, simply pondering motion, and gravitation, and how pressing on a wall meant the wall pressed back with equal force. I puzzled through angular momentum and torque as analogs of straightforward linear momentum and force, and thought of how a wheel, subjected to a force perpendicular to its axis, behaves when not spinning, and when spinning. I broke physical systems down into parts, and ran those parts through their paces while tracking the changes in their simplest characteristics, and how the changes affected the larger system.

Staring at the metabolic carpet, I traced in my imagination the path of a photon passing through a translucent fiber, slowing and echoing. I saw all the possible paths of the photon converge on the eventual real path, sum over histories, and the photon emerging on the other side of the fiber with supreme economy of energy and motion, minimum action, shortest time.

The entire room, spare and dreary, became a fog of forces as fascinating as a party filled with talking people. Behind the facade of electromagnetic interactions — all I would ever touch, see, smell, or be sensually connected with — lay a plenipotential void far richer and stranger than matter and energy, the ground on which my being was so lightly painted as to be negligible… and yet I saw, and seeing, I gave the ensemble shape and meaning.

I struggled out of reverie, stood, grabbed my case, and ordered the door to open. As I marched down the corridor, I tried to dam the flood of insight.

Did Charles think and see this way all the time?

The Republic Information Office had scheduled three interviews for me in a six-hour period, beginning fifteen minutes after my arrival in Mispec Moor. Ilya gave me a quick squeeze as we walked onto the shuttle platform, into a blast of warm moist air from the protein farms. Mispec Moor was strictly hardscrabble protein production and carbonifer mining. “You’re on your own,” he whispered in my ear. “I hate the limelight.”

“Thanks,” I said ruefully. “Enjoy the view.” He would be given a tour of Mispec Moor’s rather common fossil formations while I met the reporters. His attendance was as ceremonial and political as mine, but we still pretended Ilya was above the fray.

The info officer accompanying me introduced two reporters from Mars and Triple Squinfo, a moderate but influential LitVid firm that kept a heavy emphasis on substance and revelation. I had only interviewed with reporters from MTS once before. It had been a tough go.

The officer, a pleasant young man connected by marriage to Klein BM, escorted the reporters and me into a threadbare lounge.

The reporters had come in from North Noachis on a mid-speed train, a journey of eight hours through cratered flatness. They did not seem in a good mood.

We sat on the worn couches and the older of the two reporters placed his slate on the table between us, voice and vid active. The younger, a nervous woman with thick black hair, began the questioning.

“Your interim government has two more months to bring Cailetet and the other dissident BMs into the fold,” she said. “There’s been talk by some members of the transition team that Cailetet simply needs to be given incentive, and that you have a personal grudge against Achmed Crown Niger .”

I raised my eyebrows and smiled, then quickly decided to preempt what the young woman must have thought was a terrific bit of research. “Mr. Crown Niger once represented Freechild Dauble, and presided over the incarceration of a group of students at University of Mars Sinai. I suppose that’s what you’re referring to?”

The reporter nodded, eyes intent on the prey.

“That was a long time ago. Mars has changed, I’ve changed — ”

“But do you believe Crown Niger has changed?” the second reporter chimed in. He leaned forward. I felt like a mouse circled by hawks.

“He’s certainly moved up in the world,” I said. “Advancement changes people.”

“And you think your government can work with him, bring him into the fold before the elections?” the first reporter asked. The third seemed content to listen and bide his time.

“We aim for complete participation. We’d hate to have Mars divided any longer than necessary.”

“But Cailetet says that the interim government supports projects that may endanger stability in the Triple,” said the second reporter.

“I haven’t heard that.”

“It’s a general release to the LitVids, dated for spread on the ex net and broadband Squinfo at twenty-two Triple Standard.” He gave me a second slate with the message. I read it quickly.

“Have you made contact with the Olympians?” the first reporter asked.

“That’s not for me to say one way or another.”

“How could they endanger the Triple?”

I laughed. “I don’t know.”

“We’ve actually dug into this a bit,” the first reporter continued, “and we’ve discovered that Cailetet funded these scientists for a while before cutting. The scientists went elsewhere — supposedly to UMS. They’ve actually come to you now, haven’t they?”

“Cailetet seems to know more about this than I do,” I said. “Have you spoken with Crown Niger ?”

“We have,” the third reporter said. “Off the record. He believes the interim government is behaving very foolishly and inviting a lot of pressure from Earth. He sounds frightened.”

“If Mr. Crown Niger wishes to express his views seriously, on whatever matter real or imagined, he should talk to us directly, not through the ex net.”

The first reporter blinked and nodded. “Crown Niger isn’t stupid. What is he trying to do?”

“I can’t begin to guess,” I said. I glanced at the info officer and he efficiently ended the meeting.