Now, out in the sun of a perihelion day, it was an invigorating 281 K, and he was walking along the sea-cliff edge of Da Vinci, looking at alpine flowers in the cracks of the rubble, then past them to the distant quantum sheen of the fjord’s sunny surface, when down the cliff edge walking his way came a tall woman, wearing a face mask and jumper, and big hiking boots: Ann. He recognized her instantly — that stride, no doubt about it — Ann Clayborne, in the flesh.

This surprise brought a double jolt to his memory — of Hiroko, emerging out of the snow to lead him to his rover — then of Ann, in Antarctica, striding over rock to meet him — but for what?

Confused, he tried to track the thought. Double image — a fleet single image —

Then Ann was before him and the memories were gone, forgotten like a dream.

He had not seen her since forcing the gerontological treatment on her in Tempe, and he was acutely uncomfortable; possibly this was a fright reaction. Of course it was unlikely she would physically assault him. Though she had before. But that was never the kind of assault that worried him. That time in Antarctica — he grasped for the elusive memory, lost it again. Memories on the edge of consciousness were certain to be lost if one made any deliberate effort to retrieve them. Why that should be was a mystery. He didn’t know what to say.

“Are you immune to carbon dioxide now?” she asked through her face mask.

He explained about the new hemoglobin treatment, struggling for each word, in the way he had after his stroke. Halfway through his explanation, she laughed out loud. “Crocodile blood now, eh?”

“Yes,” he said, guessing her thought. “Crocodile blood, rat mind.”

“A hundred rats.”

“Yes. Special rats,” he said, striving for accuracy. Myths after all had their own rigorous logic, as Levi-Strauss had shown. They had been genius rats, he wanted to say, a hundred of them and geniuses every one. Even his miserable graduate students had had to admit that.

“Minds altered,” she said, following his drift.

“Yes.”

“So, after your brain damage, altered twice,” she noted.

“That’s right.” Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those rats were far from home. “Plasticity enhancement. Did you… ?”

“No. I did not.”

So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try the drugs on her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the woman before him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her eye; he had gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of hatred. Ever since their arguments on the Ares, and perhaps before. He had had time to get used to it. Or at least to learn it.

Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her eyes, it was almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but the skin around the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were both maximally wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed musculature. It seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn’t know what to make of it.

“You gave me the gerontological treatment,” she said.

“Yes.”

Should he say he was sorry if he wasn’t? Tongue-tied, lockjawed, he stared at her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that it was all right, that he had done the right thing.

She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. “What are you trying to do now?”

He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as gnomic as a koan. “I’m out looking,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say. Language, all those beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like a flock of startled birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just two animals, standing there in the sun. Look, look, look!

She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she looking daggers at him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock; with Ann that surely indicated progress.

But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the little seaport at Zed.

Sax returned to Da Vinci Craterfeeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were having their annual Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year’s representatives to the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. After the ritual of names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these jobs for the previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, and, for most of them, celebrated once again having been passed over.

The random selection method for Da Vinci’s administrative jobs had been adapted because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically, after all their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of self-management, the Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work involved. They only wanted to do their research. “We should give the administration entirely to AIs,” Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year, between sips from a foaming stein of beer. Aonia, last year’s representative to the duma, was saying to this year’s selection, “You go to Man-gala and sit around arguing, and the staff does what work there is. Most of it has been drained off to the council or the courts or the parties. It’s Free Mars apparatchiks who are really running this planet. But it’s a really pretty town, nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the winter.”

Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns springing up in the south gulf, to near them for comfort. Politics in its most common forn complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happ to complain about it. This kind of talk would go on fc about half an hour, and then they would cycle back to tall ing about work. There was one group doing that ahead; Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered ove and found they were talking about fusion. Sax stopped: appeared they were excited by recent developments in the lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Cor tinuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but took extremely massive tokamaks to do it, assemblages to big and heavy and expensive to be used in many situation This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellei of fuel many times in rapid sequence, and use the fusio results to power things.

“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.

“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk wit us about plasma patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpfu this is really macro compared to what she does, but she’s s damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yanand off on how we could seal off the implosion and still leave space for emission afterward.”

They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides ; once, but there also had to be a vent for charged partich to escape. Bao had apparently been interested in the prol lem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of i which they thought they had solved at last; and whe someone dropped into the circle and mentioned the day lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no politic please.”

As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversatior he passed, he was struck again by the apolitical nature c most scientists and technicians. There was something aboi politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he ha to admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and comprc mised, a process that went entirely against the grain of th scientific method. Was that true? These feelings and pre udices were subjective themselves. One could try to regar politics as a kind of science — a long series of experiments i communal living, say, with all the data consistently cor taminated. Thus people hypothesized a system of gove nance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, the changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or principles seemed to have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their experiments and paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all. After repeated experiments it had become clear — on Mars at least — that all these sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.