And then there was Jackie, very possibly the most popular and powerful politician on Mars. At least until Nirgal got back.

And so Nadia dealt with these six every day, learning their ways as they made their way through item after item on their daily agendas. From the important to the trivial, the abstract to the personal — everything seemed to Nadia part of a fabric, where everything connected to everything. Not only was the council not part-time work, it ate up the entirety of every waking day. It consumed her life. And yet at this point she had only gotten through two months of a three-m-year term.

Art could see that it was getting to her, and he did what he could to help. He came up to her apartment every morning with breakfast, like room service. Often he had cooked it himself, and always it was good. As he came in, platter held aloft, he called up jazz on her AI to serve as the soundtrack of their morning together — not just Nadia’s beloved Louis, though he sought out odd recordings by Satch to amuse her, things like “Give Peace a Chance” or “Stardust Memories” — but also later styles of jazz that she had never liked before, because they were so frenetic; but that seemed to be the tempo of these days. Whatever the reason, Charlie Parker now skittered and zoomed around most impressively, she thought, and Charles Mingus made his big band sound like Duke Ellington’s on pandorph, which was just what Ellington and all the rest of swing needed, in her opinion — very funny, lovely music. And best of all, on many mornings Art called up Clifford Brown, a discovery Art had made during his investigations on her behalf, one he was very proud of, and advocated constantly to her as the logical successor to Armstrong — a vibrant trumpet sound joyous and positive and melodic like Satch, and also brilliantly fast and clever and difficult — like Parker, only happy. It was the perfect soundtrack for these wild times, driving and intense but as positive as one could be.

So Art would bring in breakfasts, singing “All of Me” in a pretty good voice, and with Satchmo’s basic insight that American song lyrics could only be treated as silly jokes: “All of me, why not take all of me, Can’t you see, I’m no good without you.” And call up some music, and sit with his back to the window; and the mornings were fun.

But no matter how well the days began, the council was eating her life. Nadia got more and more sick of it — the bickering, negotiating, compromising, conciliating — the dealing with people, minute after minute. She was beginning to hate it.

Art saw this, of course, and began to look worried. And one day after work he brought over Ursula and Vlad. The four of them had dinner together in her apartment, Art cooking. Nadia enjoyed her old friends’ company; they were in town on business, but getting them over for dinner there had been Art’s idea, and a good one. He was a sweet man, Nadia thought as she watched him moving about the kitchen. Canny diplomat as guileless simpleton, or vice versa. Like a benign Frank. Or a mix of Frank’s skill and Arkady’s happiness. She laughed at herself, always thinking of people in terms of the First Hundred — as if everyone was somehow a recombination of the traits of that original family. It was a bad habit of hers.

Vlad and Art were talking about Ann. Sax had apparently called Vlad from the shuttle rocket on its return to Mars, shaken by a conversation with Ann. He was wondering if Vlad and Ursula would consider offering Ann the same brain plasticity treatment that they had given him after his stroke.

“Ann would never do it,” Ursula said.

“I’m glad she won’t,” Vlad said. “That would be too much. Her brain wasn’t injured. We don’t know what that treatment would do in a healthy brain. And you should only undertake what you can understand, unless you are desperate.”

“Maybe Ann is desperate,” Nadia said.

“No. Sax is desperate.” Vlad smiled briefly. “He wants a different Ann before he gets back.”

Ursula said to him, “You didn’t want Sax to try that treatment either.”

“It’s true. I wouldn’t have done it to myself. But Sax is a bold man. An impulsive man.” Now Vlad looked at Nadia: “We should stick to things like your finger, Nadia. Now that we can fix.”

Surprised, Nadia said, “What’s wrong with it?”

They laughed at her. “The one that’s missing!” Ursula said. “We could grow it back, if you wanted.”

“Ka,” Nadia exclaimed. She sat back, looked at her thin left hand, the stump of the missing little finger. “Well. I don’t need it, really.”

They laughed again. “You could have fooled us,” Ursula said. “You’re always complaining about it when you’re working.”

“I am?”

They all nodded.

“It’ll help your swimming,” Ursula said.

“I don’t swim much anymore.”

“Maybe you stopped because of your hand.”

Nadia stared at it again. “Ka. I don’t know what to say. Are you sure it will work?”

“It might grow into an entire other hand,” Art suggested. “Then into another Nadia. You’ll be a Siamese twin.”

Nadia pushed him sideways in his chair. Ursula was shaking her head. “No no. We’ve done it for some other amputees already, and a great number of experimental animals. Hands, arms, legs. We learned it from frogs. Quite wonderful, really. The cells differentiate just like the first time the finger grew.”

“A very literal demonstration of emergence theory,” Vlad said with a small smile. Nadia saw by that smile that he had been instrumental in designing the procedure.

“It works?” she asked him directly.

“It works. We make what is in effect a new finger bud over your stump. It’s a combination of embryonic stem cells with some cells from the base of your other little finger. The combination functions as the equivalent of the homeobox genes you had when you were a fetus. So you’ve got the developmental determiners there to make the new stem cells differentiate properly. Then you ultrasonically inject a weekly dose of fibroblast growth factor, plus a few cells from the knuckle and the nail, at the appropriate times… and it works.”

As he explained Nadia felt a little glow of interest spread through her. A whole person. Art was watching her with his friendly curiosity.

“Well, sure,” she said at last. “Why not.”

So in the following week they took some biopsies from her remaining little finger, and gave her some ultrasonic shots in the stump of the missing finger, and in her arm, and gave her some pills; and that was it. After that it was only a matter of weekly shots, and waiting.

Then she forgot about it, because Charlotte called with a problem; Cairo was ignoring a GEC order concerning water pumping. “You’d better come check it out in person. I think the Cairenes are testing the court, for a faction of Free Mars that wants to challenge the global government.”

“Jackie?” Nadia said.

“I think so.”

Cairo stood on its plateau edge, overlooking the northwestern-most U-valley of Noctis Labyrinthus. Nadia walked out of the train station with Art onto a plaza flanked by tall palm trees. She glared at the scene; some of the worst moments of her life had occurred in this city, during the assault on it in 2061. Sasha had been killed, among many others, and Nadia had blown up Phobos, she herself! — and all just a few days after finding Arkady’s burned remains. She had never returned; she hated this town.

Now she saw that it had been damaged again in the recent unrest. Parts of the tent had been blown, and the physical plant heavily damaged. It was being rebuilt, and new tent segments were being tacked onto the old town, extending west and east far along the plateau’s edge. It looked like a boomtown, which Nadia found peculiar given its altitude, ten kilometers above the datum. They would never be able to take down the tents, or go outside without walkers on, and so Nadia had assumed it would therefore go into decline. But it lay at the intersection of the equatorial piste and the Tharsis piste running north and south, the last place one could cross the equator between here and the chaoses, a full quarter of the planet away. So unless a Trans-marineris bridge were built somewhere, Cairo would always be at a strategic crossroads.