But this was a dubious value to the cable’s opponents. They wanted the population localized, contained, slowed. The treaty didn’t matter to them. So when it came to a council vote, which was only an advisory to the legislature in any case, only Zeyk voted with Nadia. It was Jackie’s biggest victory so far, and put her in a temporary alliance with Irishka and the rest of the environmental courts, which were on principle resistant to all forms of swift development.

Nadia went home to her apartment that day, discouraged and worried. “We’ve promised Earth we’ll take lots of immigrants, then pulled up the drawbridge. It’s going to lead to trouble.”

Art nodded. “We’ll have to work something out.”

Nadia blew out her breath in disgust. “Work. We won’t work anything out. Work isn’t the word for it. We will bicker and dicker and argue and natter.” She sighed a big sigh. “It will go on and on. I thought Nirgal being back would help, but it won’t if he doesn’t join in.”

“He doesn’t have a position,” Art said.

“He could if he wanted one, though.”

“True.”

Nadia thought about it, her mind wandering as her spirits dropped. “You know I’ve only gotten through ten months of my term. There’s over two and a half m-years to go.”

“I know.”

“M-years are so damned long.”

“Yes. But the months are short.”

She made a noise at him. Stared out the window of her apartment, down into Pavonis caldera. “The trouble is that work isn’t work anymore. You know, we go out there and join these projects, and the work on them still isn’t work. I mean I never get to go out and do things. I remember when I was young, in Siberia, work was really work.”

“You might be romanticizing that a bit.”

“Yeah, sure, but even on Mars. I remember putting together Underbill. That was really fun. And one day on our trip to the north pole, installing a permafrost gallery…” She sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for work like that again.”

“There’s still a lot of construction going on,” Art pointed out.

“By robots.”

“Maybe you could go back to something more human. Build something yourself. A house in the country, or a development. Or one of the new harbor towns, hand-built to try out different things, designs, methods, whatever. It would slow the construction process down, the GEC would go for that.”

“Maybe. After my term is over, you mean.”

“Or even before. On breaks, like these other trips. They’ve all been analogs to construction, they haven’t been construction itself. Building actual things. You have to try that, then go back and forth between the two.”

“Conflict of interest.”

“Not if it was a public-works project. What about that proposal to build a global capital down at sea level?”

“Hmm,” Nadia said. She got out a map, and they pored over it. At the zero-longitude line, the south shore of the northern sea bent out in a little round peninsula, with a crater bay at its center. It was about halfway between Tharsis and Elysium. “We’ll have to go take a look.”

“Yes. Here, come to bed. We’ll talk about it more later. Right now I have another idea.”

Some months later they were flying backfrom Bradbury Point to Sheffield, and Nadia remembered that conversation with Art. She asked the pilot to land at a little station north of Sklodowska Crater, on the slope of Crater Zm, called Zoom. As they descended on the airstrip they saw to the east a big bay, now covered with ice. Across the bay was the rough mountainous country of Mamers Vallis, and the Deuteronilus Mensae. The bay was an incursion into the Great Escarpment, which was here fairly gentle. Longitude zero. Latitude forty-six degrees north, fairly far north; but the northern winters were mild compared to the south. They could see a lot of the icy sea, lying off a long shoreline. The rounded peninsula surrounding Zoom was high and smooth. The little station on the shore was home to about five hundred people, who were out there building with bulldozer and cranes and dredges and draglines. Nadia and Art got out and sent the plane on, and took a boardinghouse room and spent about a week with the people there, talking about the new settlement. The locals had heard of the proposal to build a new capital city here on the bay; some of them liked the idea, some didn’t. They had thought of calling their settlement Greenwich because of its longitude, but they had heard the British didn’t pronounce it “Green Witch,” and they didn’t know how they felt about spelling the town to sound that way and then calling it “Grenich.” Maybe just London, they said. We’ll think of something, they said. The bay itself, they said, had long been called Chalmers Bay.

“Really?” Nadia exclaimed. She laughed. “How perfect.”

She was already very attracted to the landscape: Zoom’s smooth conic apron, the incurve of the big bay; red rock over white ice, and presumably over blue sea, someday. On the days of their visit clouds flowed by constantly, riding the west wind and dappling both land and ice with their shadows — sometimes puffy white cumulus clouds, like galleons, other times scrolled herringbone patterns unrolling overhead, defining the dark dome of sky above them, and the curving rocky land under them. It could be a small handsome city, encircling a bay like San Francisco or Sydney, as beautiful as those two but smaller, human scale — Bogdanovist architecture — hand-built. Well, not exactly hand-built, of course. But they could design it at a human scale. And work on it as a kind of work of art. Walking with Art on the shores of the ice bay, Nadia talked through her CO₂ mask about these ideas, while watching the parade of clouds gallop by in the low-rushing air.

“Sure,” Art said. “It would work. It’s going to be a city anyway, that’s the important thing. It’s one of the best bays on this stretch of the coast, so it’s bound to be used as a harbor. So you wouldn’t get the kind of capital city that just sits in the middle of nowhere, like Canberra or Brasilia, or Washington, B.C. It’ll have a whole other life as a seaport.”

“That’s right. That would be great.” Nadia walked on, excited as she thought about it, feeling better than she had in months. The movement to establish a capital somewhere else than Sheffield was strong, supported by almost every party up there. This bay had already been proposed as a site by the Sabishiians, so it would be a matter of supporting an already-existing idea, rather than forcing a new one on people. The support would be there. And as a public-works project, building it would be something she could take full part in. Part of the gift economy. She might even be able to have an influence on the plan of it. The more she thought about it, the more pleased she got.

They had walked far down the shore of the bay; they turned around and began to walk back to the little settlement. Clouds tumbled over them on a stiff wind. The curve of red land made its greeting to the sea. Just under the cloud layer, a ragged V of honking geese fletched the wind, heading north.

Later that day, as they flew back to Sheffield, Art picked up her hand and held it, inspecting her new finger. He said slowly, “You know, building a family would also be a very hands-on kind of construction.”

“What?”

“And they’ve got reproduction pretty much figured out.”

“What?”

“I said, as long as you’re alive, you can pretty much have children, one way or another.”

“What?”

“That’s what they say. If you wanted to, you could do it.”

“No.”

“That’s what they say.”

“No.”

“It’s a good idea.”

“No.”

“Well, you know, even building … it’s great, sure, but you can only go on plumbing for so long. Plumbing, hammering nails, bulldozing — it’s all interesting enough, of course, I guess, but still. We have a lot of time to fill. And the only work really interesting enough to pursue over the long haul would be raising a kid, don’t you think?”