Completing the melting of the North Sea ice was the other obvious abatement strategy most often mentioned at the conference. Until it was all liquid, the albedo of the ice was bouncing a lot of energy back into space, and a truly lively water cycle was somewhat capped off. If they could get a liquid ocean, or, given how far north it was, a summer-liquid ocean, then any ice age would be done for, and terraformation essentially complete: they would have robust currents, waves, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, melting, streams, rivers, deltas — the full hydrological cycle. This was a primary goal, and so there was a variety of methods being proposed to speed the melting of the ice: feeding nuclear-power-plant exhaust heat into the ocean, scattering black algae on the ice, deploying microwave and ultrasound transmitters as heaters, even sailing big icebreakers through the shallow pack to aid the breakup.

Of course the increased greenhouse gases would help here as well; the ocean’s surface ice would melt on its own, after all, as soon as the air stayed regularly above 273 K. But as the conference proceeded, more and more problems with the greenhouse-gas plan were being pointed out. It entailed another huge industrial effort, almost the equal of the meta-nat monster projects, like the nitrogen shipments from Titan, or the soletta itself. And it was not a onetime thing; the gases were constantly destroyed by UV radiation in the upper atmosphere, so they had to overproduce to reach the desired levels, and then continue producing for as long as they wanted the gases up there. Thus mining the raw materials, and constructing the factories to turn those materials into the desired gases, were enormous projects, and necessarily a largely robotic effort, with self-guided and replicating miners, self-building and regulating factories, upper-atmosphere sampler drones — an entire machine enterprise.

The technical challenge of this was not the issue; as Nadia pointed out to her friends at the conference, Martian technology had been highly robotic from the very beginning. In this case, thousands of small robotic cars would wander Mars on their own, looking for good deposits of carbon, sulfur, or fluorite, migrating from source to source like the old Arab mining caravans on the Great Escarpment; then when new feedstocks were found in high concentrations, the robots could settle down and construct little processing plants out of clay, iron, magnesium, and trace metals, providing the parts that could not be constructed on-site, and then assembling the whole. Fleets of automated diggers and carts would be manufactured to haul the processed material in to centralized factories, where the material would be gas-sified and released from tall mobile stacks. It wasn’t that different from the earlier mining for atmospheric gases; just a larger effort.

But the most obvious deposits had already been mined, as people were now pointing out. And surface mining couldn’t be done the way it used to be; there were plants growing almost everywhere now, and in many places a kind of desert pavement was developing on the surface, as a result of hydration, bacterial action, and chemical reactions in the clays. This crust helped greatly to cut down on dust storms, which were still a constant problem; so ripping it up to get to underlying deposits of feedstock materials was no longer acceptable, either ecologically or politically. Red members of the legislature were calling for a ban on just this kind of robotic surface mining, and for good reasons, even in terraforming terms.

It was hard, Nadia thought one night as she shut down her screen, to be faced with all the competing effects of their actions. The environmental issues were so tightly intertwined that it was hard to tease them out and decide what to do. And it was also hard to stay constrained by their own rules; individual organizations could no longer act unilat-erally, because so many of their actions had global ramifications. Thus the necessity for environmental regulation, and for the global environmental court, already faced with a caseload running out of control. Eventually it would have to rule on any plans coming out of this conference as well. The days of unconstrained terraforming were gone.

And as a member of the executive council, Nadia was restricted to saying that she thought increased greenhouse gases were a good idea. Other than that she had to stay out, or appear to be impinging on the environmental court’s territory, which Irishka was defending very vigorously. So Nadia spent time visiting on-screen with a group designing new robot miners that would minimally disrupt the surface, or talking to a group working on dust fixatives that might be sprayed or grown over the surface, “thin fast pavements” as they called them; but they were proving to be a knotty problem.

And that was the extent of Nadia’s participation in the Sabishii conference that she herself had initiated. And since all its technical problems were enmeshed in political considerations anyway, it might have been said that she hadn’t missed it at all. Not a bit of real work had been done there, by her or anyone else. Meanwhile, back in Sheffield, the council was facing any number of problems of its own: unforeseen difficulties in instituting the eco-economy; complaints that the GEC was overstepping its authority; complaints about the new police, and the criminal justice system; unruly and stupid behavior in both houses of the legislature; Red and other types of resistance in the outback; and so on. The issues were endless, and spanned the gamut from the profoundly important to the incredibly petty, until Nadia began to lose all sense of where on that continuum any individual problem lay.

For instance, she spent a good deal of her time involved in the council’s own internal struggles, which she considered trivial, but couldn’t avoid. Most of these struggles involved resisting Jackie’s efforts to put together a majority that would vote with Jackie every time, so that Jackie could use the council as a rubber stamp for the Free Mars partyline, or in other words for Jackie herself. This meant getting to know the rest of the councillors better, and figuring out how to work with them. Zeyk was an old acquaintance; Nadia liked him, and he was a power among the Arabs, their current representative to the general culture, having defeated Antar for that position; gracious, smart, kind, he was in agreement with Nadia on many issues, including the core ones, and this made it an easy relationship, even a growing friendship. Ariadne was one of the goddesses of the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, and acted the part to a tee: imperious and rigid in her principles, she was an ideologue, probably the only thing that kept her from being a serious challenge to Jackie’s prominence among the natives. Marion was the Red councillor, an ideologue also, but much changed from her early radical days, although still a long-winded arguer, not easily beaten. Peter, Ann’s little boy, had grown up to be a power in several different parts of Martian society, including the space crew at Da Vinci, the green underground, the cable crowd, and to an extent, because of Ann, the more moderate Reds. This versatility was part of his nature, and Nadia had a hard time getting a fix on him; he was private, like his parents, and seemed wary of Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred; he wanted a distance from them, he was nisei through and through. Mikhail Yangel was one of the earliest issei to follow the First Hundred to Mars, and had worked with Arkady from very early on. He had helped to start the revolt of 2061, and Nadia’s impression was that he had been one of the most extreme Reds at that time — which fact sometimes made her angry at him still, which was silly, and impeded her ability to talk to him — but there it was, despite the fact that he too was much changed, a Bogdanovist willing to compromise. His presence on the council was a surprise to Nadia — a gesture toward Arkady, one might say, which she found touching.