But she was still presidentof the executive council, and despite her resolve, every day they bound her to the job a little more tightly, with “developments” of all kinds. German immigrants wanted to build a new harbor town called Blochs Hoffnung on the peninsula that cut the North Sea in half, and then dig a broad canal through the peninsula. Red eco-teurs objected to this plan, and blew up the piste running down the peninsula. They blew up the piste leading to the top of Biblis Patera as well, to indicate they objected to that as well. Ecopoets in Amazonia wanted to start massive forest fires. Other ecopoets in Kasei wanted to remove the fire-dependent forest that Sax had planted in the great curve of the valley (this petition was the first to receive unanimous approval from the GEC). Reds living around White Rock, an eighteen-kilometer-wide pure white mesa, wanted it declared a “kami site” forbidden to human access. A Sabishii design team was recommending that they build a new capital city on the North-Sea coast at 0 longitude, where there was a deep bay. New Clarke was getting crowded with what looked suspiciously like metanat security snoopertroopers. The Da Vinci techs wanted to give control of Martian space over to an agency of the global government that didn’t exist. Senzeni Na wanted to fill their mohole. The Chinese were requesting permission to build an entirely new space elevator tethered near Schiaparelli Crater, to accommodate their own emigration, and contract out to others. Immigration was growing every month.

Nadia dealt with all these issues in half-hour increments scheduled by Art, and so the days passed in a blur. It got very difficult to stay aware that some of these matters were much more important than others. The Chinese, for instance, would flood Mars with immigrants if they got half a chance… and the Red ecoteurs were getting more outrageous; there had even been death threats made against Nadia herself. She now had escorts when she left her apart> ment, and the apartment was discreetly guarded. Nadia ignored that, and continued to work on the issues, and to work the council to keep a majority on her side in the votes that mattered to her. She established good working relations with Zeyk and Mikhail, and even with Marion. Things never went quite right with Ariadne again, however, which was a lesson learned twice; but learned well because of that.

So she did the job. But all the time she wanted off Pa-vonis. Art saw her patience get shorter by the day; she knew by his look that she was becoming crochety, crabby, dictatorial; she knew it, but could not help it. After meetings with frivolous or obstructionist people she often unleashed a torrent of vicious abuse, in a steady low cursing voice that Art obviously found unnerving. Delegations would come in demanding an end to the death penalty, or the right to build in the Olympus Mons caldera, or a free eighth spot on the executive council, and as soon as the door closed Nadia would say, “Well there’s a bunch of fucking idiots for you, stupid fools never even thought about tie votes, never occurred to them that taking someone else’s life abrogates your own right to live,” and so on. The new police captured a group of Red ecoteurs who had tried to blow up the Socket again, and in the process killed a security guard out of his position, and she was the hardest judge they had: “Execute them!” she exclaimed. “Look, you kill someone, you lose your right to live. Execute them or else exile them from Mars for life — make them pay in a way that really gets the rest of the Reds’ attention.”

“Well,” Art said uneasily. “Well, after all.” But on she raged. She couldn’t stop until she felt less angry. And Art could see that it was getting harder every time.

Flailing a bit himself, he recommended she start another conference, like the one in Sabishii she had missed; and make sure she made this one. Organizing the efforts of different organizations for a single cause; this was not really building, Nadia thought, but it looked like it would have to do.

The fight in Cairo had gotten her thinking about the hy-drological cycle, and what would happen when the ice began to melt. If they could set up some kind of plan for a water cycle, even only an approximation, then it might go far toward reducing conflicts over water. So she decided to see what could be done.

As often happened these days when she thought about global issues, she found herself wanting to talk to Sax about it. The travelers to Earth were almost back now, close enough that transmission delay was insignificant, it was almost like having a normal wrist conversation. So Nadia spent evenings talking with Sax about terraforming. More than once he surprised her utterly; he did not hold the opinions she had imagined he would hold, he seemed always to be changing. “I want to keep things wild,” he said one night.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

His face took on the puzzled expression it wore when he was thinking hard. It was considerably longer than the transmission delay before he replied: “Many things. It’s a complicated word. But — I mean — I want to maintain the primal landscape, as much as possible.”

Nadia could censor out her laughter at this; but still Sax said, “What do you find amusing?”

“Oh nothing. It’s just you sound like, I don’t know, like some of the Reds. Or the people in Christianopolis, they’re not Reds, but they said almost the same thing to me, last week. They want to keep the primal landscape of the far south preserved. I’ve helped them to set up a conference to talk about southern watersheds.”

“I thought you were working on greenhouse gases?”

“They won’t let me work, I have to be president. But I am going to go to this conference.”

“Good idea.”

The Japanese settlers in Messhi Hoko (which meant “self-sacrifice for the sake of the group”) came to the council to demand that more land and water be dedicated to their tent high on south Tharsis. Nadia walked out on them, and flew with Art down to Christianopolis, in the far south.

The little town (and it seemed very little after Sheffield and Cairo) was set in Phillips Rim Crater Four, at latitude sixty-seven degrees south. During the Year Without Summer the far south had experienced many severe storms, dropping about four meters of new snow, an unprecedented amount; the previous record for a year had been less than one. Now it was Ls 281, just after perihelion, and high summer in the south. And the various abatement strategies for avoiding an ice age seemed to be working well; most of the new snow had melted in a hot spring, and now there were round lakes on every crater floor. The pond in the center of Christianopolis was about three meters deep, and three hundred meters across; this was fine with the Christians, as it gave them a nice park pond. But if the same thing happened every winter — and the meteorologists believed that the coming winters would drop even more snow, and the coming summers get ever warmer — then their town would quickly be inundated by snowmelt, and Phillips Rim Crater Four become a lake full to the brim. And this was true for craters all over Mars.

The conference in Christianopolis had been convened to discuss strategies to deal with this situation. Nadia had done what she could to get influential people down to it, including meteorologists, hydrologists, and engineers, and the possibility of Sax, whose return was imminent. The problem of crater flooding was to be only the initial point of discussion for the whole question of watersheds, and the planetary hydrological cycle itself.

The crater problem specifically was to be solved as Nadia had predicted: plumbing. They would treat the craters like bathtubs, and drill drains to empty them. The brecciated pans under the dusty crater floors were extremely hard, but they could be tunneled through robotically; then install pumps and filters and pump the water out, keeping a central pond or lake if one wanted, or draining it dry.