“Would we actually isolate them from resources?” I asked.

“You want policy decisions and we’re not even elected?”

“You’ve given it some thought, obviously.”

“Well, flat to the floor, after the elections, when everything stabilizes — and if we’re elected, of course — we treat the dissident BMs as foreign powers with their own territory. The government processes requests from Cailetet and the others, judges on the merits, and considers proper taxes and fees to levy. But no, we won’t cut them off from anything they need.”

“They don’t seem to need any of the claims they’ve requested,” I said.

Ti Sandra closed her eyes again and smiled grimly. ‘The governors don’t need our encouragement to be suspicious.“

“Maybe they’re testing our relations with the governors,” I suggested.

“Crown Niger has better ways of doing that.”

“So we don’t know what he’s really up to,” I said.

“I certainly don’t,” she said.

From my brother I had heard not a whisper for six weeks. To a Martian, raised in the peculiar etiquette of close-knit families and transfers to other BMs, to the mix of family loyalty and business secrets, this was nothing alarming: Cailetet was in dispute with a new and greater kind of family, the government. I didn’t expect Stan to give me substantial help, and the best way to avoid an appearance of impropriety for Stan was silence.

But Stan had not spoken with Father, either. Stan was a very dutiful son, and got along better with Father than I. I knew Stan was healthy, and that no calamity had befallen either him or Jane, but that was all I knew.

The campaign consumed all of my attention now. I lived on the shuttle, or in hastily prepared inns or dorms, surrounded by Point One security and the wits and wizards of Martian politics, our advisors, who were catching on fast.

The head of my personal security detachment was an imposing man named Dandy Breaker. His name suited his physique. Bull shoulders, big thick-fingered hands, close-cut white-blond hair, Dandy seemed out of place in the company of governors and Republic officials. He was nearly always by my side. Fortunately, he and Ilya got along well. Dandy was always ready to ask some question about areology, and Ilya was always ready to answer.

Leander could not grow thinkers fast enough to provide the Republic with replacements for all of our Terrie-grown thinkers. We took the minimal risk, but kept all news of the tweaker projects away from the thinkers.

One of the thinkers — Alice Two, loaned from Majumdar — became our campaign coordinator. Working with Alice again was a pleasure. Ti Sandra and I spent hours talking with her on the endless flights from station to station.

Alice chose our scheduled appearances based on demographics and spot polls. We would drop into a little station at the extreme north, meet with sixty or seventy hard-bitten, dubious, and rather ingrown water harvesters, Ti Sandra would exert her tough yet motherly appeal, and we’d be off in a few hours to skip through half a dozen prosperous lanthanide mines in Amazonis and Arcadia . The toughest sells of the late campaign were the small allied BMs in Terra Sirenum, firmly in the grasp of our chief opponents.

Our opponents ran vigorous and even acerbic campaigns, but Martians were still too polite to be vicious in politics. Still, everyone was reading about the twentieth-century presidential campaigns in the United States of America , before plebiscite voting, and some of our opponents took their lead from masters such as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Personally, I found both Nixon and Johnson tragically revolting, preferring the style of the rough-and-ready candidates of the Economic Union of the Baltics in twenty-one.

The dustbaths of infant Martian politics actually worked in our favor. Opponents tended to eat each other, barely chewing on us because of Ti Sandra’s status as Mother of the Republic; and we emerged from debates and other encounters ranking higher and higher in the spot polls.

The constant travel wore on us. Ti Sandra expressed a wish in private that Charles and his people could reduce the size of objects they could move instantaneously. “I’m large,” she said, “but not that large. And we do need a break…”

The break did not come.

In my few minutes each day of spare time, I found myself working through math texts and vids available through the ex net, and downloading subscription supplements. Alice put together a curriculum to speed up my “absorption” of the enhancement functions, which was moving along quickly enough anyway. What had once seemed tedious and arbitrary to me became a fascinating game, far neater and more challenging than politics. I worked deeper into accepted dataflow theory, the interaction of neural elements, transvection of information to knowledge, and made the crossovers to what Charles and the Olympians had done with physics… in those spare minutes, lapsing into reverie beside Ti Sandra as she slept, watching dark Mars drift below us like some deep blanket beneath the diamond-rich sky. The steady pumping thrum of the shuttle lifters lulled me into a state where I became the numbers and the graphic depictions.

Yet the one thing I could not do was understand in a linear fashion the leap that Charles had made, from dataflow theory to the nature of the Bell Continuum. The more I understood, the more I marveled at what Charles had done. It seemed supernatural.

Given that leap, it became less and less astonishing that we could move worlds and communicate instantly, that a paradigm would die and a new one be born. Descriptor theory blossomed inside me and sent roots into all the imponderables of physics, eliminating the contradictions and infinities of quantum mechanics.

When there was any free time, I visited Ilya. The Cyane Sulci team had finished a larger test dome for the first big experiment with the intact mother cysts. Ilya gave Ti Sandra and me a tour — as he had four other pairs of presidential candidates earlier. “I certainly need to hedge my bets,” he said with a squint in my direction. “Politics is so uncertain.”

Under the five-hectare dome, we watched gray ice dust seep slowly across the landscape, forming powdery puddles around the exposed cysts. Thus far, nothing had been produced but slime and a few embedded silicate shapes like spicules in sponges. But Ilya’s research team was optimistic. From the control room, we watched the team vary the conditions under the dome by degrees and percentages — turning gray ice dust to muddy rain, then to snow, and changing the concentrations of minerals and atmospheric gases.

“We’re aiming for an election day triumph,” Ilya explained to Ti Sandra. “Just to bump your victory off the LitVid banners…”

Ti Sandra nodded with utmost seriousness. “I’d rather be here,” she said.

“Please,” I said to my husband. “No jokes about growing Martian voters.”

“I wasn’t even suggesting…” Ilya said.

Ti Sandra fixed him with wide eyes and prim lips. “Don’t listen to her. Every little bit helps.”

The cysts lay like great rough black eggs in the red sand, linear invaginations banding their dark surfaces, capped by flakes of snow. Shadows from the dome struts waffled the landscape. From all around came the thin, ghostly sounds of the experimental incubation machinery. Old Mars hatching all over, I thought as we prepared to leave. If we get the right combination.

I hugged and kissed Ilya and followed Ti Sandra. Security guards and two armored arbeiters surrounded us in the tunnel to the shuttle terminal.

We weren’t planning to meet again until the eve of the election. I last saw Ilya on the parapet overlooking the terminal, surrounded by our rear contingent of security. He was waving in our general direction and appeared distracted. I felt a burst of warmth for his patience, for his beauty. I remember that we lingered on that kiss, knowing it might be weeks.