The boat returned to DuMartheray Harbor, which consisted of a little crescent of marina-platted water, curving under part of the apron .of DuMartheray Crater. The slope of the apron was covered with buildings and greenery, right up to the rim.

They disembarked and walked up through the town, had dinner in a rim restaurant, watching sunset flare over the water of Isidis Bay. The evening wind fell down the escarpment and whistled offshore, holding the waves up and tearing spray off their tops, in white plumes crossed by brief rainbow arcs. Maya sat next to Michel, and kept a hand on his thigh or shoulder. “Amazing,” someone said, “to see the row of salt columns still gleaming down there.”

“And the rows of windows in the mesas! Did you see that broken one? I wanted to go in and look, but I was afraid.”

Maya grimaced, concentrated on the moment. People across the table were talking to Michel about a new institute concerning the First Hundred and other early colonists — some kind of museum, a repository of oral histories, committees to protect the earliest buildings from destruction, etc., also a program to provide help for superelderly early settlers. Naturally these earnest young men (and young men could be so earnest) were particularly interested in Michel’s help, and in finding and somehow enlisting all of the First Hundred left alive; twenty-three now, they said. Michel was of course perfectly courteous, and indeed seemed truly interested in the project.

Maya couldn’t have hated the idea more. A dive into the wreckage of the past, as a kind of smelling salts, repellent but invigorating — fine. That was acceptable, even healthy. But to fix on the past, to focus on it; disgusting. She would have happily tossed the earnest young men over the rail. Meanwhile Michel was agreeing to interview all the remaining First Hundred, to help the project get started. Maya stood up and went to the rail, leaned against it. Below on the darkening water luminous plumes of spray were still blowing off the top of every wave.

A young woman came up beside her and leaned on the railing. “My name is Vendana,” she said to Maya, while looking down at the waves. “I’m the Green party’s local political agent for the year.” She had a beautiful profile, clean and sharp in a classic Indian look: olive-skinned, black-eyebrowed, long nose, small mouth. Intelligent subtle brown eyes. It was odd how much one could tell by faces alone; Maya was beginning to feel she knew everything essential about a person at first glance. Which was a useful ability, given that so much of what the young natives said these days baffled her. She needed that first insight.

Greenness, however, she understood, or thought she did; actually an archaic political term, she would have thought, given that Mars was fully green now, and blue as well. “What do you want?”

Vendana said, “Jackie Boone, and the Free Mars slate of candidates for offices from this area, are traveling around campaigning for the upcoming elections. If Jackie stays party chair again, and gets back on the executive council, then she’ll continue working on the Free Mars plan to ban all new immigration from Earth. It’s her idea, and she’s been pushing it hard. Her contention is that Terran immigration can all be redirected elsewhere in the solar system. That isn’t true, but it’s a stance that goes over very well in certain quarters. The Terrans, of course, don’t like it. If Free Mars wins big on an isolationist program, we think Earth will react very badly. They’ve already got problems they can barely handle, they need to have what little out we provide. And they’ll call it a breaking of the treaty you negotiated. They might even go to war over it.”

Maya nodded; for years she had felt a heightening tension between Earth and Mars, no matter Michel’s assurances. She had known this was coming, she had seen it.

“Jackie has a lot of groups lined up behind her, and Free Mars has had a supermajority in the global government for years now. They’ve been packing the environmental courts all the while. The courts will back her in any immigration ban she cares to propose. We want to maintain the policies as set by the treaty you negotiated, or even widen immigration quotas a bit, to give Earth as much help as we can. But Jackie’s going to be hard to stop. To tell you the truth, I don’t think we know quite how. So I thought I’d ask you.”

Maya was surprised: “How to stop her?”

“Yes. Or more generally, to ask you to help us. I think it will take unpisting her personally. I thought you might be interested.”

And she turned her head to look at Maya with a knowing smile.

There was something vaguely familiar in the ironic smile lifting that classic little full-lipped mouth, something which though offensive was much preferable to the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young historians pestering Michel. And as Maya considered it, the invitation began to look better and better; it was contemporary politics, an engagement with the present. The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. And this issue could prove to be important, as the young woman had said. And it would put her back in the midst of things. And of course (she did not think this consciously) anything that balked Jackie would have its own satisfactions. “Tell me more about it,” Maya said, moving down the balcony out of earshot of the others. And the tall ironic young woman followed her.

Michel had always wantedto take a trip on the Grand Canal, and recently he had talked Maya into trying a move from Sabishii back to Odessa, as a way to combat Maya’s various mental afflictions; they might even take an apartment in the same Praxis complex that they had lived in before the second revolution. That was the only place Maya thought of as home, aside from Underbill, which she refused even to visit. And Michel felt that coming back to some kind of home might help her. So, Odessa. Maya was agreeable; it did not matter to her. And Michel’s desire to travel there by way of the Grand Canal seemed fine as well. Maya had not cared. She wasn’t sure of anything these days, she had few opinions, few preferences; that was the trouble.

Now Vendana was saying that Jackie’s campaign was to proceed along the Grand Canal, north to south, in a big canal cruiser that doubled as campaign headquarters. They were there now, at the canal’s north end, getting ready in the Narrows.

So Maya returned to Michel on the terrace, and when the historians left them she said, “So let’s go to Odessa by the Grand Canal, like you said.”

Michel was delighted. Indeed it seemed to lift from him a certain somberness that had followed the dive into drowned Burroughs; he had been pleased at its effect on Maya, but for himself it had perhaps not been so good. He had been uncharacteristically reticent about his experience, somehow oppressed, as if overwhelmed by all that the great sunken capital represented in his own life. Hard to tell. So that now, to see Maya responding so well to the experience, and also to suddenly be given the prospect of seeing the Grand Canal — a kind of giant joke, in Maya’s opinion — it made him laugh. And that she liked to see. Michel thought that Maya needed a lot of help these days, but she knew full well that it was Michel who was struggling.

So a few days later they walked up a gangway onto the deck of a long narrow sailing ship, whose single mast and sail were one curved unit.of dull white material, shaped like a bird’s wing. This ship was a kind of passenger ferry, sailing eastward around the North Sea in perpetual circumnavigations. When everyone was aboard, they motored out of DuMartheray’s little harbor, and turned east, keeping within sight of land. The ship’s mast sail proved to be flexible and mobile in many different directions; it shifted in its curves like a bird’s wing, every moment different as its AI responded minutely to catch the fitful winds.