But after being tabled there was little else at the baths that could appeal. Any more orgasms would hurt. She helped to table Estavan and Xerxes, and then a thin woman she didn’t know, all fun, but then she got bored. Flesh flesh flesh. Sometimes after being tabled one got further and further into it; other times it became just skin and hair and flesh, insides and outsides, who cared.

She went to the changing room and dressed, went outside. It was morning, the sun bright over the bare plains of Lunae. She flowed through the empty streets to her hostel, feeling relaxed and clean and sleepy. A big breakfast, fall into bed, delicious sleep.

But there in the hostel restaurant was Jackie. “If it isn’t our Zoya.” She had always hated the name, which Zo had chosen for herself.

Zo, surprised, said, “Did you follow me here?”

Jackie looked disgusted. “It’s my co-op too, you might recall. Why didn’t you check in when you got back?”

“I wanted to fly.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I didn’t mean it as one.”

Zo went to the buffet table, piled a plate with scrambled eggs and muffins. She returned to Jackie’s table, kissed her mother on the top of the head. “You’re looking good.”

Actually she looked younger than Zo, who was often sunburned and therefore wrinkled — younger but somehow preserved, as if she were a twin sister of Zo’s who had been bottled for a time and only recently decanted. She wouldn’t tell Zo how often she had had the gerontological treatments, but Rachel had said that she was always trying new variants, which were coming out at the rate of two or three a year, and that she got the basic package every three years at the most. So although she was somewhere in her fifth m-decade, she looked almost like Zo’s contemporary, except for that preserved quality, which was not so much body as spirit — a look in the eye, a certain hardening, a tightness, a wariness or weariness. It was hard work being the alpha female year after year, a heroic struggle, it had worn visible tracks in her no matter how baby smooth her skin, no matter how much a beauty she remained — and she was still quite a beauty, no doubt about it. But she was getting old. Soon her young men would unwrap themselves from around her little fingers and drop away.

Meanwhile she still had a great deal of presence, and at the moment she appeared considerably put out. People averted their eyes as if her look might strike them dead, which made Zo laugh. Not the politest way to greet one’s beloved mother, but what else could one do? Zo was too relaxed to be irritated.

Probably a mistake to laugh at her, however. She stared coldly until Zo straightened up.

“Tell me what happened on Mercury.”

Zo shrugged. “I told you. They still think they have the sun to give to the outer solar system, and it’s gone to their heads.”

“I suppose their sunlight would still be useful out there.”

“Energy’s always useful, but the outer satellites should be able to generate what they need, now.”

“So the Mercurians are left with metals.”

“That’s right.”

“But what do they want for them?”

“Everyone wants to be free. None of these new little worlds are big enough to be self-sufficient, so they have to have something to trade if they want to stay free. Mercury has sunlight and metals, the asteroids have metals, the outer satellites have volatiles, if anything. So they package and trade what they have, and try to make alliances to avoid domination by Earth or Mars.”

“It isn’t domination.”

“Of course not.” Zo kept a straight face. “But the big worlds, you know — ”

“Are big.” Jackie nodded. “But add all these little ones together, and they’re big too.”

“Who’s going to add them?” Zo asked.

Jackie ignored the question. The answer was obvious anyway: Jackie would. Jackie was locked into a long-term battle with various forces on Earth, for what came down to the control of Mars; she was trying to keep them from being inundated by the immense home world; and as human civilization continued to spread throughout the solar system, Jackie considered the new little settlements pawns in this great struggle. And indeed if there were enough of them, they might make a difference.

“There’s not much reason to worry about Mercury,” Zo reassured her. “It’s a dead end, a provincial little town, run by a cult. No one can settle very many people there, no one. So even if we do manage to bring them on board, they won’t matter much.”

Jackie’s face took on its world-weary look, as if Zo’s analysis of the situation were the work of a child — as if there were hidden sources of political power on Mercury, of all places. It was irritating, but Zo restrained herself and did not show her irritation.

Antar came in, looking for them; he saw them and smiled, came over and gave Jackie a quick kiss, Zo a longer one. He and Jackie conferred for a while about something or other, in whispers, and then Jackie told him to leave.

There was a great deal of the will to power in Jackie, Zo saw once again. Ordering Antar around gratuitously; it was a flaunting of power that one saw in many nisei women, women who had grown up in patriarchies and therefore reacted virulently against them. They did not fully understand that patriarchy no longer mattered, and perhaps never had — that it had always been caught in the Kegel grip of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological power that could not be controlled by any mere politics. The female hold on male sexual pleasure, on life itself — these were realities for patriarchs as much as anyone, despite all their repression, their fear of the female which had been expressed in so many ways, purdah, clitoridectomy, foot binding and so on — ugly stuff indeed, a desperate ruthless last-ditch defense, successful for a time, certainly — but now blown away without a trace. Now the poor fellows had to fend for themselves, and it was hard. Women like Jackie had them whipped. And women like Jackie liked to whip them.

“I want you to go out to the Uranian system,” Jackie was saying. “They’re just settling out there, and I want to get them early. You can pass along a word to the Galileans as well, they’re getting out of line.”

“I should do a co-op stint,” Zo said, “or it will become too obvious that it’s a front.”

After many years of running with a feral co-op based in Lunae, Zo had joined one of the co-ops that functioned in part as a front for Free Mars, allowing Zo and other operatives to do party work without it becoming obvious that that was their principal activity. The co-op Zo had joined built and installed crater screens, but she hadn’t worked for them in any real job for over a year.

Jackie nodded. “Put in some time, then take another leave. In a month or so.”

“Okay.”

Zo was interested in seeing the outer satellites, so it was easy to agree. But Jackie only nodded, showing no sign of awareness that Zo might not have agreed. Her mother was not a very imaginative person, when all was said and done. No doubt Zo’s father was the source of that quality in Zo, ka bless him. Zo did not want to know his identity, which at this point would only have been an imposition on her freedom, but she felt a surge of gratitude to him for his genes, her salvation from pure Jackieness.

Zo stood, too tired to take her mother any longer. “You look tired, and I’m beat,” she said. She kissed Jackie on the cheek as she went off to her room. “I love you. Maybe you should think about getting the treatment again.”

Her co-op was based in Moreux Crater, in the Protonilus Mensae, between Mangala and Bradbury Point. It was a big crater, puncturing the long slope of the Great Escarpment as it fell down toward the Boone’s Neck peninsula. The coop was always developing new varieties of molecular netting to replace earlier nets, and the old tent fabrics; the mesh they had installed over Moreux was the latest thing, the polyhydroxybutyrate plastic of its fibers harvested from soybean plants, engineered to produce the PHB in the plants’ chlbroplasts. The mesh held in the equivalent of a daily inversion layer, which made the air inside the crater about thirty percent thicker and considerably warmer than the outside air. Nets like this one made it easier to get biomes through the tough transition from tent to open air, and when permanently installed, they created nice meso-climates at higher altitudes or latitudes. Moreux extended up to forty-three degrees north, and winters outside the crater were always going to be fairly severe. With the mesh in place they were able to sustain a warm high-altitude forest, srjorting an exotic array of plants engineered from the East African volcanoes, New Guinea, and the Himalayas. Down on the crater floor in the summer the days were seriously hot, and the weird blooming spiky trees as fragrant as perfume.