In front of Nirgal was a complete second set of controls. He put his hands on the jet throttles, gave them pushes. The blimp veered right, then left. “Wow.”

“It’s fly by wire, so if you tell it to do something disastrous, it’ll just cut out.”

“How many hours flying time do you need to learn this?”

“You’re doing it already, right?” She laughed. “No, it takes a hundred hours or so. Depends on what you mean by knowing how to do it. There’s the death mesa between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have relaxed and before they’re really good, so that they get into trouble. But that’s mostly hang gliders anyway. With these, the simulators are just like the real thing, so you can put in your hours on those, and then when you’re actually up here you’ll have it wired even though you haven’t officially reached the flying time limit.”

“Interesting!”

And it was. The intersecting sapped canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, lying under them like an enormous maze; the sudden lifts and drops as the winds tossed them; the loud keening of the wind over their partially enclosed gondola seats… . “It’s like becoming a bird!”

“Exactly.”

And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. The heart is pleased by one thing after another.

After that he spent time in a flight simulator in the city, “ and several times a week he made a date with Monica or” one of her friends, and went out to the cliff’s edge for another lesson. It was not a complicated business, and soon he felt that he could try a flight on his own. They cautioned him to be patient. He kept at it. The simulators felt very much like the real thing; if you tested them by doing something foolish, the seat would tilt and bounce very convincingly. More than once he was told the story of the person who had taken an ultralite into such a disastrous death spiral that the simulator had torn off its mountings and crashed through the glass wall next to it, cutting some bystanders and breaking the flier’s arm.

Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He went to Free Mars meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew every afternoon. As the days , passed he discovered that he was dreading the morning meetings; he only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no matter what they said. Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not politics, not like this. Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly he had been living his life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the surface cities about how to live theirs and still have some freedoms, some pleasures. Okay, it had been political, everything was; but it seemed he was not really interested in politics. Or perhaps it was government.

It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives’ leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars — son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage — very hard to oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia. Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.

So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to ignore their little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from all over the planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles. Many tent towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it possible, and hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an operation in which the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid enough that water was the critical issue, and their requests for a water allotment were pouring in, until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn down a kilometer merely by pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These and a thousand more matters tested the constitution’s many networks for connecting local autonomy to global considerations; the debates would go on forever.

Nirgal, while fundamentally uninterested in most of these wrangles, found them yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in Cairo. He had come back from Earth without any official position in the new government or the old party, and one thing he saw going on these days was the struggle to place him — to give him a job with limited power, or, for his backers (or rather Jackie’s opponents) to put him in a position with some real power to it. Some friends advised him to wait and run for the senate when the next elections came, others mentioned the executive council, others party positions, others a post on the GEC. All these jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or another, and when he talked to Nadia on the screens, he could see that he would find them a burden; though she seemed to be hammering away stolidly enough, it was obvious the executive council was distasteful to her. But he kept a straight face and listened closely as people offered their advice.

Jackie herself kept her own council. In meetings where people suggested that Nirgal become a kind of minister-without-portfolio, she regarded him more blankly than usual, which led Nirgal to think that she liked that possibility least of all. She wanted him pinned into some position, which given her current post could not help but be inferior to hers. But if he stayed outside the system entirely…

There she sat, the infant in her arms. It could be his child. And Antar watched her with the same expression, the same thought. No doubt Dao would have as well, if he were still alive. Nirgal was suddenly shaken by a spasm of grief for his half brother, his tormentor, his friend — he and Dao had fought for as far back as he could remember, but they had been brothers for all that.

Jackie had apparently forgotten Dao already, and Kasei as well. As she would forget Nirgal, if he should happen to get killed. She had been among the greens who had ordered the crushing of the Red assault on Sheffield, she had advocated the strong response. Perhaps she had to forget the dead.

The infant cried. Face rounded by fat, it was impossible to see any resemblance to any adult. The mouth looked like Jackie’s. Other than that… it was frightening, this power created by anonymous parenting. Of course a man could do the same, obtain an egg, grow it by ectogenesis, raise it himself. No doubt it would begin to happen, especially if many women took Jackie’s route. A world without parents. Well, friends were the real family; but he shuddered nevertheless at what Hiroko had done, what Jackie was doing.

He went flying to clear his mind of all that. One night after a glorious flight in the clouds, sitting in the launchpad pub, the conversation turned and someone mentioned Hi-roko’s name. “I hear she’s on Elysium,” someone said, “working on a new commune of communes up there.”

“How did you hear?” Nirgal demanded of the woman, somewhat sharply no doubt.

Surprised, she said, “You know those fliers who dropped in last week who are flying around the world? They were on Elysium last month, and they said they saw her there.” She shrugged. “That’s all I know. Not much by way of confirmation, I know.”