The train skirted the first curved head walls of the Labyrinth of Night’s sapped canyons, and soon it floated into Cairo’s old station. Nirgal walked out into the tented town, looking around curiously. It had been a metanat stronghold, and he had never been in it before; interesting to see the little old buildings. The physical plant had been damaged by the Red Army in the revolution, and was still marked by broken black walls. People waved at him as he walked down the broad central boulevard to the city offices. And there she was, in the concourse of the town hall, by the window walls overlooking the U of Nilus Noctis. Nirgal stopped, breath short. She had not yet seen him. Her face was rounder but otherwise she was as tall and sleek as ever, dressed in a green silk blouse and a darker green skirt of some coarser material, her black hair a shiny mane spilling down her back. He could not stop looking at her.

Then she saw him, and flinched ever so slightly. Perhaps the wrist images had not been enough to tell her how much the Terran illness had hurt him. Her hands extended on their own recognizance, and then she followed them, hands still out even while her eyes were calculating, her grimace at his appearance carefully rearranged for the cameras that were always around her. But he loved her for those hands. He could feel the warmth of his face, blushing as they kissed, cheek to cheek like friendly diplomats. Up close she still looked fifteen m-years old, just past the unblemished bloom of youth — at that point that is even more beautiful than youth. People said she had taken the treatment from the age of ten.

“It’s true then,” she said, “Earth almost killed you.”

“A virus, actually.”

She laughed, but her eyes kept their calculating look. She took him by the arm, led him back to her entourage like a blind man. Though he knew several of them she made introductions anyway, just to emphasize how much the inner circle of the party had changed since he had left. But of course he could not notice that, and so he was busy being cheerful when the proceedings were interrupted by a great wail. There was a baby among them.

“Ah,” Jackie said, checking her wrist. “She’s hungry. Come meet my daughter.” She walked over to a woman holding a swaddled babe. The girl was a few months old, fat-jowled, darker-skinned than Jackie, her whole face bright with squalling. Jackie took her from the woman and carried her off into an adjacent room.

Nirgal, left standing there, saw Tiu and Rachel and Frantz next to the window. He went over to them, glanced in Jackie’s direction; they rolled their eyes, shrugged. Jackie wasn’t saying who the father was, Rachel said in a quick undertone. It was not unique behavior; many women from Dorsa Brevia had done the same.

The woman who had been holding the girl came out and told Nirgal that Jackie would like to speak with him. He followed the woman into the next room.

The room had a picture window overlooking Nilus Noc-tis. Jackie was seated in a window seat, nursing the child and looking at the view. The child was hungry; eyes closed, latched on, sucking hard, squeaking. Tiny fists clenched in some kind of arboreal remnant behavior, clutching to branch or fur. That was all culture, right there in that clutch. Jackie was issuing instructions, to aides both in the room and on her wrist. “No matter what they say in Bern, we need to have the flexibility to dampen the quotas if we need to. The Indians and Chinese will just have to get used to it.”

Some things began to clarify for Nirgal. Jackie was on the executive council, but the council was not particularly powerful. She was also still one of the leaders of the Free Mars party; and although Free Mars might have less influence on the planet, as power shifted out into the tents, in Earth-Mars relations it had the potential to become a determining body. Even if it only coordinated policy, it would gain all the power that a coordinator could command, which was considerable — it was all the power Nirgal had ever had, after all. In many situations such coordination could be the equivalent of making Mars’s Terran policy, as all the local governments attended to their local concerns, and the global legislature was more and more dominated by a Free Mars-led supermajority. And of course there was a sense in which the Earth-Mars relationship had the potential to dwarf everything else. So that Jackie might be on the way to becoming an interplanetary power…

Nirgal’s attention returned to the baby at her breast. The princess of Mars. “Have a seat,” Jackie said, indicating the bench beside her with her head. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” Nirgal said, but sat. Jackie looked up at one of the aides and jerked her head to the side, and very soon they were alone in the room with the infant.

“The Chinese and Indians are thinking of this as empty new land,” Jackie said. “You can see it in everything they say. They’re too damned friendly.”

“Maybe they like us,” Nirgal said. Jackie smiled, but he went on: “We helped them get the metanats off their backs. And they can’t be thinking of moving their excess population here. There’s just too many of them for emigration to make any difference.”

“Maybe so, but they can dream. And with space elevators they can send a steady stream. It adds up quicker than you would think.” Nirgal shook his head. “It’ll never be enough.”

“How do you know? You didn’t go to either place.”

“A billion is a big number, Jackie. Too big a number for us to properly imagine. And Earth has got seventeen billion. They can’t send a significant fraction of that number here, there aren’t the shuttles to do it.”

“They might try anyway. The Chinese flooded Tibet with Han Chinese, and it didn’t do a thing to relieve their population problems, but they kept doing it anyway.”

Nirgal shrugged. “Tibet is right there. We’ll keep our distance.”

“Yes,” Jackie said impatiently, “but that’s not going to be easy when there is no we. If they go out to Margaritifer, and cut a deal with the Arab caravans out there, who’s going to stop it from happening?”

“The environmental courts?”

Jackie blew air between her lips, and the baby pulled off and whimpered. Jackie shifted the infant to the other breast. Blue-veined olive curve. “ Antar doesn’t think the environmental courts will be able to function for long. We had a fight with them while you were gone, and we only went along with them to give the process a chance, but they made no sense and they had no teeth. And everything everyone does has an environmental impact, so supposedly they should be judging everything. But tents are coming down in the lower elevations and not one in a hundred is going to the courts to ask permission for what they do once their town is part of the outside. Why should they? Everyone is an ecopoet now. No. The court system isn’t going to work.”

“You can’t be sure,” Nirgal said. “So is Antar the father, then?”

Jackie shrugged.

Anyone could be the father — Antar, Dao, Nirgal himself, hell John Boone could be, if any sample of his sperm had happened to be still in storage. That would be like Jackie; except she would have told everyone. She shifted the infant’s head toward her.

“Do you really think it’s all right to raise a fatherless child?”

“That’s how you were raised, right? And I had no mother. We were all one-parent children.” “But was that good?” “Who knows?”

There was a look on Jackie’s face that Nirgal could not read, her mouth just slightly tight with resentment, defiance… impossible to say. She knew who both her parents were, but only one had stuck around, and Kasei had not been much around at that. And killed in Sheffield, in part because of the brutal response to the Red assault that Jackie herself had advocated.

She said, “You didn’t know about Coyote until you were six or seven, isn’t that right?”