“It was since Terminator burned,” the first speaker clarified, looking at her curiously.

Kris filled in the silence that followed, reminding the Vulcans that as the new Lion of Mercury, Kris was now the titular head of their order. But these particular Vulcans were not Greys, as they were quick to inform Kris; they were adherents of some schismatic sect that did not consider the Lion of Mercury to be their head. Nevertheless they were very polite, and Kris continued to try to convince them to keep the deal; but Swan had trouble following the conversation. She was getting angrier at Wahram the longer she considered what he had done, to the point where she wasn’t listening anymore. Right in the time he had said he would work with her, after they had found the ship floating in the clouds of Saturn, he had come down here instead and undermined her cause. It was a hard little sucker punch.

Lists (11)

Annie Oakley Crater, Dorothy Sayers Crater.

Also craters named for:

Madame Sévigné, Shakira (a Bashkir goddess), Martha Graham, Hippolyta, Nina Efimova, Dorothea Erxleben, Lorraine Hansberry, Catherine Beevher;

also the Mesopotamian fertility goddess, the Celtic river goddess, the Woyo rainbow goddess, the Pueblo Indian corn goddess, the Vedic goddess of plenty, the Roman goddess of the hunt (Diana), the Latvian goddess of fate;

also Anna Comnena, Charlotte Corday, Mary Queen of Scots, Madame de Staël, Simone de Beauvoir, Josephine Baker.

Also Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar. Tezan, the Etruscan goddess of the dawn. Alice B. Toklas. Xantippe. Empress Wuhou. Virginia Woolf. Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Evangeline, Fátima, Gloria, Gaia, Helen, Heloise.

Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston.

Guinevere, Nell Gwyn, Martine de Beausoleil.

Sophia Jex-Blake, Jerusha Jirad, Angelica Kauffman.

Maria Merian, Maria Montessori, Marianne Moore.

Mu Guiying. Vera Mukhina. Aleksandra Potanina.

Margaret Sanger. Sappho. Zoya. Sarah Winnemucca. Seshat. Jane Seymour. Rebecca West. Marie Stopes. Alfonsina Storni. Anna Volkova. Sabina Steinbach. Mary Wollstonecraft. Anna von Schuurman. Jane Austen. Wang Zenyi. Karen Blixen.

Sojourner Truth. Harriet Tubman.

Hera. Emily Dickinson.

WAHRAM ON VENUS

Wahram was in the city of Colette, trying to get at least some of the Venus Working Group to support the plan to intervene on Earth; also to ask certain Venusian friends for help in Genette’s plan to deal with the strange qubes. Neither project was going particularly well, even though Shukra seemed willing to help; but he wanted help in return, in dealing with his local conflicts, and Wahram didn’t see how that could be done. More would be needed from the Mondragon and Saturn both if they were going to entrain any of the Venusians in the upcoming Terran effort.

Then during a welcome break in the negotiations there was a knock at the conference chamber door, and Swan came in. He was shocked to see her, and shocked again when she saw him, strode across the room, crashed right into him, and struck him on the chest with the back of her fists. “You bastard!” she exclaimed, not very quietly. “You lied to me, you lied!”

He stepped back, hands up, looking around for a place to retreat where the conversation could continue a bit more privately. “I did not! What do you mean!”

“You went to the Vulcanoids and made a deal with them and you didn’t tell me about it!”

“That isn’t lying,” he said, feeling like he was splitting hairs, but it was true, and gave him time to back out into a passageway, then around a corner, where he could stop and defend himself: “I was down there doing my job for the Saturn League, it was nothing to do with you, and you have to admit we are not in the habit of sharing our complete work schedules with each other. I haven’t seen you in a year.”

“That’s because you’ve been on Earth, making deals there too. Which you didn’t tell me about either. What didyou tell me about? Nothing!”

Wahram had been worried about this, had ignored the problem and done his job; but now here it was, the reckoning. “I was away,” he said feebly.

“ Away—what’s away?” she demanded. “Look, were you in the tunnel or not? Were we in the tunnel together or not?”

“We were,” he said, putting his hands up in defense, or protest. “I was there.” I wasn’t the one who claimed notto be there, he didn’t say.

In any case she had stopped and was staring at him. They stared at each other for a while.

“Listen,” Wahram said. “I work for Saturn. I’m the league’s ambassador to the inner planets, doing my job here. It’s not—it’s not something I can automatically share. I do it in a different sphere.”

“But we just suffered an attack and lost our city right down to the framing. We need to keep what gifts we have to give. And part of that was light.”

“Those were not useful amounts of light. The entirety of what you could send from Mercury meant little around Saturn. With the Vulcanoids it’s different. They can send out enough to make a real difference. We needit for Titan. So, I’m charged with arranging that. It’s like bidding for futures shares. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it myself. I guess I was… I was afraid. I didn’t want you mad at me. But now you are anyway.”

“Even worse,” she assured him. But now she was piling on, he saw, for the theater of it. He played to that:

“It was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I’m a bad man.”

That almost made her laugh, he could see. “Fucking bastard,” she said instead, continuing her play. “The stuff you did on Earth is even worse anyway. You cut a deal with the rich nations of Earth, that’s what it comes down to and you know it. Which is a disgrace. There are people down there living in cardboard shacks. You know how it is. It’s always that way, and it looks like it’ll go on forever. So they’ll always hate us, and some will attack us. And we pop like soap bubbles. There’s no solution but justice for everyone. It’s the only thing that will make us safe. Until then some group will always conclude that killing spacers is the only way to get our attention. And the sad thing is that they may be right.”

“Because now you’re paying attention?”

She glared at him. “Because the situation down there has gone on too long!”

He tilted his head side to side, trying to figure out how to say what he felt. He walked her down the passageway a little farther, to a long table covered with little cookies and big coffee tanks. He poured them cups of coffee. “So… to protect ourselves, you’re saying, we have to orchestrate a global revolution on Earth.”

“Yes.”

“And how? I mean, people have been trying that for centuries now.”

“That’s no excuse to stop! I mean here we are on Venus, on Titan, out here doing everything. There are things that could work down there. Spread something through their cell phones. Give them a stake in the Mondragon. Build housing or do land work. Make it that kind of revolution, one of the nonviolent ones. If something happens fast enough they call it a revolution whether guns go off or not.”

“But the guns are there.”

“Maybe they are, but what if no one dares to shoot them? What if what we did was always too innocuous? Or even invisible?”

“These kinds of actions are never invisible. No—there would be resistance. Don’t fool yourself.”

“So all right, we press on against resistance, see what happens. We’re resource rich, and we’re growing a lot of their food. We have the leverage.”

He thought it over. “Maybe we do, but they play by their rules there.”