“Can I bring some of my associates?” Sax asked.

Nanao was agreeable.

And all of a sudden Sax found he had plans, like little Athenas jumping out of his head. What would Hiroko do about this possible ice age? That he couldn’t guess. But he had a large group of associates in the labs at Da Vinci who had spent the last decades working on the problem of independence, building weapons and transport and shelters and the like. Now that was a problem solved, and there they were, and an ice age was coming. Many of them had come to Da Vinci from his earlier terraforming effort, and could be talked into returning to it, no doubt. But what to do? Well, Sabishii was four kilometers above the datum, and the Tyrrhena massif went up to five. The scientists there were the best in the world at high-altitude ecology. So: a conference. Another little Utopia enacted. It was obvious.

That afternoon Sax stopped his rover in the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia, at the spot called Four Mountain View — a sublime place, with two of the continent-volcanoes filling the horizons to north and south, and then the distant bump of Olympus Mons off to the northwest, and on clear days (this one was too hazy) a glimpse of Ascraeus, in the distance just to the right of Pavonis. In this spacious sere highland he ate his lunch, then turned east, and drove down toward Nicosia, to catch a flight to Da Vinci, and then on to Sabishii.

He had to spend a lot of screen time with the Da Vinci team and many other people on Pavonis, trying to explain this move, reconciling them to his departure from the warehouse meetings. “I am in the warehouse in every sense that matters,” he said, but they wouldn’t accept that. Their cerebellums wanted him there in the flesh, a touching thought in a way. “Touching” — a symbolic statement that was nevertheless quite literal. He laughed, but Nadia came on and said irritably, “Come on, Sax, you can’t give up just because things are getting sticky, in fact that’s exactly when you’re needed, you’re General Sax now, you’re the great scientist, you have to stay in the game.”

But Hiroko showed just how present an absent person could be. And he wanted to go to Sabishii.

“But what should we do?” Nirgal asked him, and others too in less direct ways.

The situation with the cable was at an impasse; on Earth there was chaos; on Mars there were still pockets of meta-national resistance, and other areas in Red control, where they were systematically tearing out all terraforming projects, and much of the infrastructure as well. There were also a variety of small revolutionary splinter movements that were taking this opportunity to assert their independence, sometimes over areas as small as a tent or a weather station.

“Well,” Sax said, thinking about all this as much as he could bear to, “whoever controls the life-support system is in charge.”

Social structure as life-support system — infrastructure, mode of production, maintenance … he really ought to speak to the folks at Separation de 1’Atmosphere, and to the tentmakers. Many of whom had a close relation to Da Vinci. Meaning that in certain senses he himself was as much in charge as anyone. A bad thought.

“But what do you suggest we do?” Maya demanded; something in her voice made it clear she was repeating the question.

By now Sax was closing in on Nicosia, and impatiently he said, “Send a delegation to Earth? Or convene a constitutional congress, and formulate a first approximation constitution, a working draft.”

Maya shook her head. “That won’t be easy, with this crowd.”

“Take the constitutions of the twenty or thirty most successful Terran countries,” Sax suggested, thinking out loud, “and see how they work. Have an AI compile a composite document, perhaps, and see what it says.”

“How would you define most successful?” Art asked.

“Country Futures Index, Real Values Gauge, Costa Rica Comparisons — even Gross Domestic Product, why not.” Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before. But what the hell — use several different sets of criteria, human welfare, ecologic success, what have you.”

“But Sax,” Coyote complained, “the very concept of the nation-state is a bad one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.”

“Could be,” Sax said. “But as a starting point.”

“All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,” Jackie said.

It was strange how certain elements of the greens were as obsessed by total independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, “In physics I often bracket the problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they don’t get solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that kind of problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.”

But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about the cable, what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds who had apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring all his suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for General Sax in the postrevolutionary world.

Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want to go into the town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of Spencer’s from Dawes’s Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built just before the revolt, in anticipation of the freedom from the need for stealth. As the AI pilot floated the big silver-winged craft over the great maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom of the fuselage which had a large clear floor, so that they could look over the arms of their chairs at the view below; in this case, the immense linked network of troughs which was the Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth plateaus that stood between the canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice places to live, somewhat like Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a model town in a glass bottle.

The plane’s crew started talking about Separation de 1’Atmosphere, and Sax listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the revolution’s armaments and with basic materials research, while “Sep” as they called it had dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they still had a healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them functioning was a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of them said. Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.

Sep was associated with Praxis, apparently, and each tent or covered canyon was run by a separate organization. They pooled information and shared roving consultants and construction teams. Since they deemed themselves necessary services, they ran on a cooperative basis — on the Mondra-gon plan, one said, nonprofit version — though they made sure to provide their members with very nice living situations and lots of free time. “They think they deserve it, too. Because when something goes wrong they have to act fast or else.” Many of the covered canyons had had close calls, sometimes the result of meteor strike or other drama, other times more ordinary mechanical failures. The usual format for covered canyons had the physical plant consolidated at the higher end of the canyon, and this plant sucked in the appropriate amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and trace gases from the surface winds. The proportions of gases and the pressure range they were kept at varied from mesocosm to mesocosm, but they averaged around five hundred millibars, which gave some lift to the tent roofs, and was pretty much the norm for indoor spaces on Mars, in a kind of invocation of the eventual goal for the surface at the datum. On sunny days, however, the expansion of air inside the tents was very significant, and the standard procedures for dealing with it included simply releasing air back into the atmosphere, or else saving it by compressing it into huge container chambers hollowed out of the canyon cliffs. “So one time I was in Dao Vallis,” one of the techs said, “and the excess air chamber blew up, shattering the plateau and causing a big landslide that fell down onto Reullgate and tore open the tent roof. Pressures dropped to the local ambient, which was about two hundred and sixty, and everything started to freeze, and they had the old emergency bulkheads,” which were clear curtains only a few molecules thick but very strong, as Sax recalled, “and when they deployed automatically around the break, this one woman got pinned to the ground by the supersticky at the bottom of the bulkhead, with her head on the wrong side! We ran over to her and did some quick cut and paste and got her loose, but she almost died.”