He nodded, mouth pursed. He no longer tried to give her therapy, he no longer tried always and ever to put the brightest face on things; he treated her as an equal now, and her moods as some kind of truth, which was only her due. But sometimes she missed being comforted.

Michel offered no rebuttal, however, no hopeful comment. Spencer had been his friend. Before, in the Odessa years, when he and Maya had fought, he had sometimes gone to Spencer’s to sleep, and no doubt to talk late into the night over glasses of whiskey. If anyone could draw out Spencer it would have been Michel. Now he sat on the bed looking out the window, a tired old man. They never fought anymore. Maya felt it would probably do her some good if they did; clear out the cobwebs, get charged again. But Michel would not respond to any provocation. He himself didn’t care to fight, and as he was no longer giving her therapy, he wouldn’t do it for her sake either. No. They sat side by side on the bed. If someone walked in, Maya thought, they would observe a couple so old and worn that they did not even bother to speak anymore. Just sat together, alone in their own thoughts.

“Well,” Michel said after the longest time, “but here we are.”

Maya smiled. The hopeful remark, made at last, at great effort. He was a brave man. And quoting the first words spoken on Mars. John had had a knack, in a funny way, for saying things. “Here we are.” It was stupid, really. And yet might he have meant something more than the John-obvious assertion, had it been more than the thoughtless exclamation that anyone might make? “Here we are,” she repeated, testing the phrase on her tongue. On Mars. First an idea, then a place. And now they were in a nearly empty apartment bedroom, not the one they had lived in before but a corner apartment, with views out big windows to south and west. The great curve of sea and mountains said Odessa, nowhere else. The old plaster walls were stained, the wood floors dark and gleaming; it had taken many years of life to achieve that patination. Living room through one door, hall to the kitchen through the other. They had a mattress on a frame, a couch, some chairs, some unopened boxes — their things from before, pulled out of storage. Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the world. And thank God for that.

Soon after that the global elections were held, and Free Mars and its cluster of small allies were returned as a super-majority in the global legislature. Its victory was not as large as had been expected, however, and some of its allies were grumbling and looking around for better deals. Mangala was a hotbed of rumors, one could have spent days at the screen reading columnists and analysts and provocateurs hashing over the possibilities; with the immigration issue on the table the stakes were higher than they had been in years, and the kicked-anthill behavior of Mangala proved it. The outcome of the election for the next executive council remained very much in doubt, and there were rumors that Jackie was fending off challenges from within the party.

Maya shut off her screen, thinking hard. She gave a call to Athos, who looked surprised to see her, then quickly polite. He had been elected representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and was in Mangala working hard for the Greens, who had made a fairly strong showing and had a solid group of representatives, and many interesting new alliances. “You should run for the executive council,” Maya told him.

Now he was really surprised. “Me?”

“You.” Maya wanted to tell him to go look in a mirror and think it over, but bit her tongue. “You made the best impression in the campaign, and a lot of people want to support a pro-Earth policy, and don’t know who to back. You’re their best bet. You might even go talk to MarsFirst and see if you can pull them out of the Free Mars alliance. Promise them a moderate stance and a voice with a councillor, and long-range Reddish sympathies.”

Now he was looking worried. If he was still involved with Jackie and he ran for the council, then he would be in big trouble on that front. Especially if he went after MarsFirst as well. But after Peter’s visit he might not be as concerned about that as he would have been during the bright nights on the canal. Maya let him go stew about it. There was only so much you could do with these people.

Although she did not want to reconstruct her previous life in Odessa, she did want to work, and at this point hydrology had overtaken ergonomics (and politics, obviously) as her primary area of expertise. And she was interested in the water cycle in the Hellas Basin, curious to see how the work was changing now that the basin was full. Michel had his practice, and was going to get involved with the first settlers’ project that had been mentioned to him in Rhodes; she would have to do something; and so after they had unpacked and furnished the new apartment, she went looking for Deep Waters.

The old offices were now a seafront apartment, very smart. And the name was no longer in the directories. But Diana was, living in one of the big group houses in the upper town; and happy to see Maya show up at her door, happy to go out to lunch with her and tell her all about the current situation in the local water world, which was still her work.

“Most of the Deep Waters people moved straight into the Hellas Sea Institute.” This was an interdisciplinary group, composed of representatives from all the agricultural co-ops and water stations around the basin, as well as fisheries, the University of Odessa, and all the towns on the coast, and all the settlements higher in the the basin’s extensive rim-land watersheds. The seaside towns in particular were intensely interested in stabilizing the sea’s level at just above the old minus-one-kilometer contour, just a few-score meters higher than the North Sea’s current level. “They don’t want sea level to change by even a meter,” Diana said, “if it can be helped. And the Grand Canal is useless as a runoff canal to the North Sea, because the locks need water flowing in both directions. So it’s a matter of balancing the inflow from aquifers and rainfall, with evaporation loss. That’s been fine so far. Evaporation loss is slightly higher than the precipitation into the watershed, so every year they draw down the aquifers a few meters. Eventually that’ll be a problem, but not for a long time, because there’s a good aquifer reserve left, and they’re refilling a bit now, and may more in the future. We’re hoping precipitation levels will also rise over time, and they have been so far, so they probably will continue to, for a while longer anyway. I don’t know. That’s the main worry, anyway; that the atmosphere will suck off more than the aquifers can resupply.”

“Won’t the atmosphere finally hydrate fully?”

“Maybe. No one is really sure how humid it will get. Climate studies are a joke, if you ask me. The global models are just too complex, there are too many unknown variables. What we do know is that the air is still pretty arid, and it seems likely it will get more humid. So, everybody believes what they want, and goes out there and tries to please themselves, and the environmental courts keep track of it all as best they can.”

“They don’t forbid anything?”

“Oh yeah, but only big heat pumpers. The small stuff they don’t mess with. Or at least they didn’t used to. Lately the courts have been getting tougher, and tackling smaller projects.”

“It’s exactly the smaller projects that would be most calculable, I should think.”

“Sort of. They tend to cancel each other out. There are a lot of Red projects, you know, to protect the higher altitudes, and any place they can in the south. They’ve got that constitutional height limit to back them, and so they’re always taking their complaints right up to the global court. They win there, and do their thing, and then all the little development projects are somewhat counterbalanced. It’s a nightmare legally.”