“Ultimately,” Charles said, “we may be able to reduce our knowledge of the universe to one brief equation.”

“Completing physics,” Leander said, nodding as if this were already certain.

“But moving a moon… Where does the energy come from?” I asked. Even with my enhancement, I could not draw a clear answer from the equations in their papers.

“Energy and vector descriptors governing conservation are linked across greater and greater scales,” Charles said. “If we transfer a large object, we draw from an even larger system. If we move Phobos, for example, automatic bookkeeping in the Bell Continuum would adjust descriptors for all particles moving within the galaxy, deducting a tiny amount of their total momentum, angular momentum, and kinetic energy. The net result would be a reduction in the corresponding quantities for the entire galaxy. Nobody would notice.“

“Not for millions of years, anyway,” Royce said. “We’d have to ship thousands of stars back and forth all over the place to make any big difference.”

“It sounds so smooth,” I said. “Could we actually move stars?”

“No,” Leander said. “We think there’s an upper limit.”

“The upper limit seems to be two-thirds of an Earth mass, of any density,” Royce said. “That may not be more than a temporary problem.”

“Some of us think it’s a true limit,” Chinjia Park Amoy said. Danny Pincher and Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta raised their hands in agreement.

“You could do this with the equipment you have now?” I asked.

The Olympians looked to Charles to give a final answer.

“We’d need to expand the thinker capacity,” Charles said. “We’ve been working on that already. We’ll have new thinkers grown and ready at Tharsis in a few weeks. We could do it in a few weeks or months. If we can do it at all.”

“Can you?‘ I persisted.

‘Theoretically, it’s no more difficult than converting matter to mirror matter,“ Charles said. ”But we can’t do it remotely. We have to be sitting on the object to be moved.“

“Can you do it?”

“Yes,” he answered, his tone sharp in response to my own.

“You could move Phobos.”

“We could move Mars, if you tell us to,” Charles said, and his look was a challenge.

What the Olympians had told me filtered down to my mental basement slowly during the next week, fed along the way by a constant stream of facts and interpretations provided by or encouraged by the enhancement. I began to understand — while distracted by official duties — all that the group’s discoveries implied, the certainties, the probabilities, the possibilities… the improbabilities.

Nothing seemed impossible.

At night, lying alone or on one occasion that week, lying beside Ilya after making love, I thought of a thousand things I wanted to say to Charles. First came angry statements of betrayal similar to what I had expressed before — Why now, why me? Why all this responsibility?

Then came horrible speculations. How would Earth react if it knew that Mars had advanced so far? Charles, you can drop moons on Earth. We can. Goofy immature unstable Mars. They don’t trust us. If they know — if they learn — they’ll try to stop us. They may not even try to negotiate. They can’t afford to be cautious and await our political maturity.

All of these possibilities had existed before, when only the matter/mirror matter discovery had played into the political equations. But now, the pressure became so much greater. Impossible pressure, impossible forces building to a head.

The plans for the election proceeded. The interim government implemented a black budget — funds to be allocated purely at the discretion of the office of the President, hidden from all but a select committee in the legislature, not yet chosen. This was clearly beyond the bounds of the constitution, except in times of emergency — yet no emergency had been declared. I persuaded Ti Sandra of the necessity. From this budget came money to build a larger laboratory in Melas Dorsa, for research on constructing larger versions of tweaker mirror matter drives. Also, we would finance the conversion of a small, decrepit D-class freight vessel seized by the government for unpaid orbital fees.

The vessel became the pet project of the Olympians. They renamed it Mercury. It relied, after all, on the Bell Continuum — the pathways traveled by the messenger reserved for the gods.

When I met with Ti Sandra, four weeks before the election, and we began our campaign, she asked about the Mercury. We took a campaign shuttle from Syria to Icaria for a Grange campaign rally.

“Your friends have a toy,” she said when we had settled into the seats and accepted cups of tea from the arbeiter.

“They do,” I said. “It’s going on a test run soon.”

“And you understand how the toy works,” she said. She had lost weight in the past month, and her face seemed less jovial. Her eyes rarely met mine as we talked.

“Better than I did before,” I said.

“Are you satisfied with the arrangements?” she asked. “I really haven’t had time to look them over myself… I trust you on that.”

“The arrangements are fine.”

“Security?”

“If I’m any judge, it’s adequate.”

Ti Sandra nodded. “When you sent me the new briefing… I wanted to withdraw from the campaign,” she said.

“Me, too,” I said. “I mean, that’s how I felt.”

“But you didn’t.”

I shook my head.

“The awful thing is, I don’t believe any of this, not really. Do you?”

I thought for a moment, to answer with complete honesty. “Yes, I do believe it”

“Then you understand what they’re doing.”

“Much of it,” I said.

“I envy you that much. But I’m not going to get an enhancement, unless you want me to… Do you think I should?”

Knowing Ti Sandra, I saw that an enhancement would endlessly irritate her. She operated less on clearly defined thought and more on instinct. “It isn’t necessary,” I said.

“I’ll lean on you,” she warned me. “You’ll be my walking stick — my cudgel and my shield — if there’s trouble.”

“I understand.”

She looked out the window and for the first time that trip, her face relaxed and she let out a deep sigh. “Jesus, Casseia… We could make Mars a paradise. We could do anything we wanted to make life better, not just for Martians. We could all become gods.”

“We’re still children,” I said.

“That is such a cliche!” she said. “We’ll always be children. There must be civilizations out there so much older and more advanced… They know about these things. They could teach us how to use these tools wisely.”

I shook my head dubiously.

“You don’t believe there are greater civilizations?”

“It’s a nice kind of faith,” I said. A few weeks ago, I might have agreed with her.

“Why faith?” Ti Sandra asked.

“I can’t imagine tens of thousands of civilizations knowing what we know,” I said. “The galaxy would look like a busy highway. In a hundred years, what will we be doing? Moving planets, changing stars?”

Ti Sandra mused for a moment. “So you think we really are alone.”

“It seems likely to me,” I said.

“That’s even more frightening,” she said. “But it means we can’t think of ourselves as children. We’re the best and the brightest.”

“The only,” I added.

She smiled and shook her head. “My dear running mate, you need to cheer me up, not walk over my future grave. What can we talk about that’s cheerful?”

I was about to describe the gardens being installed at Many Hills when she lifted a finger and pulled her slate from her pocket. “First, I wanted to give you some answers about Cailetet. You passed on the news of their claims requests.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve advised that every district deny them. No reason not to make Crown Niger squirm and worry he’s going to be left out.”