The word “they,” tamen, seemed to refer to the Working Group, or some other powerful force behind the scenes. “They” want this, “they” will do that. The Working Group was definitely opaque from below. It was either elected or appointed; no one knew which. There were supposedly about fifty people in it. Some people said it was like the tongs back home, others that they had found their method in the pre-Han ways, or even from the lost Iroquois League of North America.

Zaofan and her unit were full of more stories, told in snatches when out in the streets. Lakshmi was working with others, including Vishnu (naturally), also a Rama and a Krishna. Taking an Indian name was compared to cutting off your queue during the Qing dynasty. So if the people doing this were inthe Working Group, what did that say about Venus-China relations? No one was quite sure.

Vishnu and Rama appeared only at meetings held at the Cleopatra spaceport, so possibly they came from off-planet or were traveling a lot. Krishna lived on Venus, but in Nabuzana, a canyon city on Aphrodite. Once Kiran was called into Lakshmi’s room when Krishna was visiting her, or so Zaofan told him later when he described the visitor, who had not been introduced or said a word.

Shukra’s new building at Cleopatra 123 (if that was what it was) was tightly secured, with a small population living in it full-time, judging by food shipments in and recycling shipments out. Kiran spent a fair amount of time in the neighborhood, wandering around watching the place, sometimes from the rim promenade. Lakshmi’s people also had several closed buildings in Cleopatra, Kiran was learning, so perhaps she felt that Shukra was horning in on her territory by doing the same.

Then one day he went back to Zaofan’s lodge in Cleopatra and found their section of the matrazenlagerwas occupied by an entirely different group of people. Zaofan was gone, Strength of Nation, Great Leap—all the little group that had taken him in. The lodge manager said they had left together after getting a call from somewhere on Aphrodite. The manager shrugged. This was the way on Venus, the shrug said. People got their working orders and moved as a unit. If you weren’t part of the unit, it wasn’t any of your affair; you were xuan, left hanging.

“No!” Kiran cried aloud. “Zaofan!” He had laughed with these people, he had said their names in English and they would laugh!

The new crowd on the matrazenlagerturned their backs to him until he was ready to talk.

After that they introduced themselves, and as he could tell them where the good bars in the neighborhood were and things like that, they folded him into their crowd in much the same way the earlier one had. Still he felt changed, and was reserved with these people as he had not been with the first group—or really they had been the second, now that he thought about it. It was going to keep happening, he could see. You could only give yourself so many times.

The lodge manager, with whom he had become friendly, saw that in him. “Don’t think that way or you cut yourself off! You can give yourself as many times as there are chances to give. It’s not something that runs out.”

“It hurts too much when people go.”

The manager shrugged. “Attachment is fruitless. Release and move on. Your cuois your suo.”

Your place is your-place. A lodge keeper’s philosophy. But every building on Venus was a lodge. Or every building in the solar system.

Meanwhile this new group had some people in it who also worked for Lakshmi, down at the new seacoast being built in the south. They were building cities in advance of the ocean, which was still falling every day as snow. Sea level was going to be a high-stakes game for years to come, with any number of players involved. There was even a futures market of sorts devoted to it, in that you could place bets on the height sea level would ultimately attain. The range being bet on was apparently pretty wide—over two vertical kilometers, which horizontally meant huge stretches of land. Deals in the Working Group or even back in China were apparently being made, broken, remade; new directives followed one after another. Great masses of dry ice that were still not sequestered were being shoved around; then abruptly the shoving would stop, leaving dikes like contour lines on a map, curving all over the dim white landscape. This stuff had to get buried before temperatures rose any higher, or else it would evaporate back into the atmosphere and poison them all. Terraforming, they said, was becoming a murderous business.

All this was news to Kiran, and the next time he saw Lakshmi he told her about his new lodge team, and asked if he could join them the next time they made a trip down to the coast. She shook her head at first, then frowned, then agreed to it.

“Just go down there and see the town, learn the layout. I’ll let you know if I want you to courier anything there.”

So he joined his new team for a rover trip down to Vinmara. On the way down the enormous south slope of Ishtar, they passed another new town that was being built with a harbor on its empty downhill side; then they drove down some giant hairpin turns and descended at least another thousand meters, maybe two, before coming to Vinmara, also being built as a harbor town. This struck Kiran as indicating a pretty serious dispute over the future sea level, but his new team scoffed at the town they had passed as a futile statement, one that would have to install a swimming pool to front its harbor when the time came.

Vinmara itself was being more grown than built, it looked like, as it was made mostly of bioceramics, scalloping in rounded stacks around a waterfront. The seaside promenade or corniche would anchor an urban district, ringing the bay of the ocean that would someday be there. Above and behind the waterfront curve the city rose steeply to a backing ridge, already being covered with seashell shapes mostly white or beige, then trimmed with pastel blue in the Greek style.

“This is Lakshmi’s work, this town?”

Yes, it was a project of her part of the Working Group.

“And someone else is building that harbor town back up the slope?”

Yes, that was Shukra’s people’s town. They were fools and idiots.

“But don’t they know how high the ocean will go?” Kiran asked. “I mean, the water’s already up there in the atmosphere, right?” Gesturing briefly at their eternal blizzard. “Why wouldn’t the models get it right?”

His teammates shrugged. One or two were giving each other looks that indicated to Kiran that this question needed to be added to his Unsolved Mysteries of the Solar System file. It was a big file. One of the mates finally said, “There are choices to be made. Some basins flooded or not flooded.”

They took him to a sidewalk café backing the new seawall, overlooking another little marina standing over black rock. Each round table of the café had its own umbrella, despite the bigger umbrella of the tent over the whole town. They were almost the only ones there, at first; then others began to trickle in, and a trio of guitarists set up and began to play, after which people started dancing. Party in a dry marina, in a night-dark storm by an empty sea. The heat lamps were on, and if you danced long enough, you could even warm your feet up. Kiran kept dancing with someone from his new unit, a young woman—yes, the old male-female magnetism still the most reliable guide to sex, as far as Kiran was concerned; and he could see variants of that being acted out all over the dance floor. Actually it was often hard to tell who was what, and this gal in fact was half a meter taller than he was, and pretty masculine and assertive at that, and in response Kiran was ready to melt like a girl who wants to get pregnant that very night. Whatever! He liked looking up at her face!