Fine. She was there. Time to take a deep breath and do the work asked of her. It was like a bad dream in which the constitutional congress had suddenly been extended for three years, three m-years.

She began with the intention of getting off the mountain occasionally and joining some construction project or other. Of course she would perform her duties on the council, but working on an increase in greenhouse gas output, for instance, looked good, combining as it did technical problems and the politics of conforming to the new environmental regulatory regime. It would get her out into the back country, where a lot of the feedstocks for the greenhouse gases were located. From there she could do her council business over the wrist.

But events conspired to keep her in Sheffield. It was one thing after another — nothing particularly important or interesting, compared to the congress itself, but the details necessary to get things rolling. It was somewhat as Charlotte had said; after the design phase, the endless minutiae of construction. Detail after detail.

She had to expect this, she had to be patient. She would work through the first rush and then get away. In the meantime, along with the start-up process, the media wanted her, the new UN Martian Office wanted her, very interested in the new immigration policies and procedures; the other council members wanted her. Where would the council meet? How often? What were its rules of operation? Nadia convinced the other six councillors to hire Charlotte to be council secretary and protocol chief, and after that Charlotte hired a big crew of assistants from Dorsa Brevia. So they had the start of a staff. And Mikhail also had a great fund of practical experience in government from Bogdanov Vishniac. So there were people better suited than Nadia to do this work; but still she was called in a million times a day to confer, discuss, decide, appoint, adjudicate, arbitrate, administrate. It was endless.

And then when Nadia did clear time for herself, forcibly, it turned out that being president made it very difficult to join any particular project. Everything going on was now part of a tent or a co-op; very often they were commercial enterprises, involved in transactions that were part nonprofit public works, part competitive market. So to have the president of Mars join any given co-op would be a sign of official patronage, and couldn’t be allowed if one wanted to be fair. It was a conflict of interest.

“Shit!” she said to Art, accusingly.

He shrugged, tried to pretend he hadn’t known.

But there was no way out. She was a prisoner of power. She had to study the situation as if it were an engineering problem, like trying to exert force in some difficult medium. Say she wanted to build greenhouse-gas factories. She was constrained from joining any factory co-op in particular. Therefore she had to do it some other way. Emergence at a higher level: she could perhaps coordinate co-ops.

There seemed to her good reasons to promote the building of greenhouse-gas factories. The Year Without Summer had extended to include a series of violent storms that had dropped off the Great Escarpment into the north, and most meteorologists agreed these “Hadley cross-equatorial storms” had been caused by the orbital mirrors’ removal, and the resulting sudden drop in insolation. A full ice age was deemed a distinct possibility; and pumping up greenhouse gases seemed to be one of the best ways to counter it. So Nadia asked Charlotte to initiate a conference to come back with recommendations for forestalling an ice age. Charlotte contacted people in Da Vinci and Sabishii and elsewhere, and soon she had a conference scheduled to take place in Sabishii, named, by some Da Vinci saxaclone no doubt, the “Insolation Loss Effects Abatement Meeting M-53.”

Nadia, however, never made itto this conference. She got caught up by affairs in Sheffield instead, mostly instituting the new economic system, which she thought important enough to keep her there. The legislature was passing the laws of eco-economics, fleshing out the bones drawn up in the constitution. They directed co-ops that had existed before the revolution to help the newly independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide support, especially from the young natives, and so it was proceeding fairly smoothly. Every Martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the equivalent of about a year’s wages to the firm’s equity fund, wages earned in apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling. This buy-in fee became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject to a yearly review by the councils. Credit and capital were obtained from central cooperative banks, or the global government’s start-up fund, or helper organizations such as Praxis and the Swiss. On the next level up, co-ops in the same industries or services were associating for larger projects, and also sending representatives to industry guilds, which established professional practice boards, arbitration and mediation centers, and trade associations.

The economic commission was also establishing a Martian currency, for internal use and for exchanges with Terran currencies. The commission wanted a currency that was resistant to Terran speculation, but in the absence of a Martian stock market, the full force of Terran investment tended to fall on the currency itself, as the only investment game being offered. This tended to inflate the value of the Martian sequin in Terran money markets, and in the old days it would probably have blown the sequin’s value right through the roof, to Mars’s disadvantage in trade balances; but as the fracturing metanats continued to struggle against cooperativization back on Earth, Terran finance remained in some disarray, and did not have its old house-on-fire intensity. So the sequin ended up strong on Earth, but not too strong; and on Mars it was just money. Praxis was very helpful in this process, as they became a kind of federal bank for the new economy, providing interest-free loans and serving as a mediated exchange with Terran currencies.

So given all this, the executive council was meeting for long hours every day to discuss legislation and other government programs. It was so time-consuming that Nadia almost forgot there was a conference she had initiated going on at the same time in Sabishii. On good nights, however, she spent a last hour or two on-screen with friends in Sabishii, and it looked like things were going fairly well there too. Many of Mars’s environmental scientists were on hand, and they were in agreement that massively increasing greenhouse-gas emissions would ease the effects of the mirror loss. Of course CO₂ was the easiest greenhouse gas to emit, but even without using it — as they were still trying to reduce it in the atmosphere to breathable levels — the consensus was that the more complex and powerful gases could be created and released in the quantities needed. And at first they did not think this would be a problem, politically; the constitution legislated an atmosphere no thicker than 350 millibars at the six-kilometer contour, but said nothing about what gases could be used to create this pressure. If the halocarbons and other greenhouse gases in the Russell cocktail were pumped out until they formed one hundred parts per million of the atmosphere, rather than the twenty-seven parts per million that were currently up there, then heat retention would rise by several degrees K, they calculated, and an ice age would be forestalled, or at least greatly shortened. So the plan called for production and release of tons of carbon tetrafluoride, hexafluoroethane, sulfur hex-afluoride, methane, nitrous oxide, and trace elements of other chemicals which helped to decrease the rate at which UV radiation destroyed these halocarbons.