“I guess you say it’s a stupid question,” Art said. “Sorry. Thinking in constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this — what do you think of it?”

Nazik laughed. “You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran Mahjaris think. He knows them only too well.”

“Too well,” Zeyk repeated.

“Do you think the human-rights section will go with them?”

Zeyk frowned. “No doubt we will sign the constitution.”

“But these rights … I thought there were no Arab democracies still?”

“What do you mean? There’s Palestine, Egypt… Anyway it’s Mars we are concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the very beginning.”

“Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?”

“Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don’t think the new constitution will end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader yourself, yes?”

Art laughed uncomfortably. “I’m just a messenger.”

Zeyk shook his head. “Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you should go, if you want to know what the Qah-irans think. He is our king now.”

He looked as if he had bit into something sour, and Art said, “So what does he want, do you think?”

“He is Jackie’s creature,” Zeyk muttered, “nothingmore.”

“I should think that would be a strike against him.”

Zeyk shrugged.

“It depends who you talk to,” Nazik said. “For the older Muslim immigrants, it is a bad association, because although Jackie is very powerful, she has had more than one consort, and so Antar looks…”

“Compromised,” Art suggested, forestalling some other word from the glowering Zeyk.

“Yes,” Nazik said. “But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And all of the people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become even more powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are more native than Arab, I think. It’s Mars that matters to them more than Islam. From that point of view, a close association with the Zygote ectogenes is a good thing. The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new Mars — especially Nirgal, of course, but with him off to Earth, there’s a certain transfer of his influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to Antar.”

“I don’t like him,” Zeyk said.

Nazik smiled at her husband. “You don’t like how many of the native Muslims are following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It could be time for retirement.”

“I don’t see why,” Zeyk objected. “If we’re going to live a thousand years, then what difference does a hundred make?”

Art and Nazik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was, the first time Art had ever seen him smile.

In fact, age didn’t matter. People wandered around, old or young or somewhere in between, talking and arguing, and it –would have been an odd thing for the length of someone’s lifetime to become a factor in such discussions.

And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway. If you were born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a way that no Terran could even imagine — not just because of the whole complex of areorealities they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn’t know. Terrans knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that cultural and biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the screen images, but that wasn’t enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one reason Art was glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth; he would learn what they were up against.

But most of the natives wouldn’t. And the revolution had gone to their heads. Despite their cleverness at the table in working the constitution toward a form that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive; they had no idea how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit — led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic as ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars, and her devotion to her grandfather’s ideals, and her essential goodwill, even innocence; the college girl who wanted passionately for the world to be just.

Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly seemed to want to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on Mars now, and seven million of those had been born there; and almost every single one of these natives could be counted on to support the native political parties, usually Free Mars.

“It’s dangerous,” Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly meeting with Nadia. “When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call ‘census voting/ where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes; and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those circumstances.”

“So what can we do?” Nadia asked.

“Well, some of it we’re doing already, designing structures that spread the power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism. Decentralization is important, because it creates a lot of small local majorities. Another strategy is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and balances, so that the government’s a kind of cat’s cradle of competing forces. This is called polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can.”

“Maybe we’re a bit too polyarchic right now,” Art said.

“Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You make some big part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and then draft ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get professional staff help, but make the decisions themselves.”

“I’ve never heard of that one,” Nadia said.

“No. It’s been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think it’s really worth considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an advantage. You get a letter in the mail; oh no; you’re drafted to do two years in congress. It’s a drag, but on the other hand it’s a kind of distinction too, a chance to add something to the public discourse. Citizen government.”

“I like that,” Nadia said.

“Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some version of the Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates in ranked fashion, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get some points for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to appeal outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation, and in the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed before.”

“Interesting,” Nadia exclaimed. “Like trusses in a wall.”

“Yes.” Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran “fractured societies” that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, Armenia … as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit; these had been bloody, bloody lands.

“It seems like political structures can only do so much,” he said.

“True,” Nadia said, “but we don’t have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been marginalized by the terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull even them into the process.”

Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

“You’re happy,” Art said.