She fell asleep with her head on the screen. When she woke again she was on the couch, ravenous, and Sax was reading her screen. “It’s looking bad in Sabishii,” he said when he saw her struggling up. She went to the bathroom, and when she came back she looked over his shoulder and read as he talked. “Security couldn’t deal with the maze. So they’ve left for Burroughs. But look.” He had two images on-screen — on top, one of Sabishii, burning as ferociously as Kasei Vallis had; on bottom, troops flooding into the train station in Burroughs, wearing light body armor and carrying automatic weapons, their fists punching the air. Burroughs was filled with groups of these security forces, it seemed, and they had taken over Branch Mesa and Double Decker Butte for their residential quarters. So along with the UNTA troops in the city, there were now security teams from both Subarashii and Mahjari — in fact all the’big metanats were represented, which caused Nadia to wonder about what was really going on between them on Earth — whether they hadn’t come to some sort of agreement or ad hoc alliance, as a result of the crisis. She called up Art in Burroughs, to ask him what he thought.

“Maybe these Martian units are so cut off that they’re making their own peace,” he said. “They might be completely on their own.”

“But if we’re still in contact with Praxis …”

“Yeah, but we surprised them. They weren’t aware of the extent of sympathy for the resistance, and so we got the drop on them. Maya’s strategy of lying low paid off in that sense. No, these teams could very well be on their own right now. In which case we could consider Mars to be independent already, and in the midst of a civil war over who has control here. I mean, if those people in Burroughs call us up and say okay, Mars is a world, it’s big enough for more than one kind of government, you have yours, and we have Burroughs, don’t try to take ours away from us — what are we going to say?”

“I don’t think anyone in metanat security is thinking that big,” Nadia said. “It’s only been three days since things fell apart on them.” She pointed to the TV screen. “See, look, there’s Derek Hastings, head of the Transitional Authority. He was head of Mission Control in Houston when we flew out, and he’s dangerous — smart, and very stubborn. He’ll just hold on until those reinforcements land.”

“So what do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we just leave Burroughs alone?”

“I don’t think so. We’d be much better off if we came out from behind the sun with a completed takeover. If there are beleaguered Terran troops, holding out heroically in Burroughs, they’re almost sure to come out and save them. Call it a rescue mission and then go for the whole planet.”

“It won’t be easy to take Burroughs, with all those troops in it.”

“I know.”

Sax had been asleep on another couch across the room, and now he opened one eye. “The Reds are talking about flooding it.”

“What?”

“It’s below the level of the Vastitas ice. And there’s water under the ice. Without the dike—”

“No,” Nadia said. “There’s two hundred thousand people in Burroughs, and only a few thousand security troops. What are the people supposed to do? You can’t evacuate that many people. It’s crazy. It’s sixty-one all over again.” The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. “What can they be thinking?”

“Maybe it’s just a threat,” Art said over the screen.

“Threats don’t work unless the people you’re threatening believe you’ll carry them out.”

“Maybe they will believe it.”

Nadia shook her head. “Hasting’s not that stupid. Hell, he could evacuate his troops by way of the spaceport, and let the population drown! And then we become monsters, and Earth would be more certain than ever to come after us! No!”

She got up and went looking for some breakfast; then discovered, looking at the row of pastries in the kitchen, that her appetite was gone. She took a cup of coffee and went back to the office, watching her hands shake.

In 2061 Arkady had been faced with a splinter group, which had sent a small asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. It was meant to be a threat only. But the asteroid had been blown apart, in the biggest human-created explosion in history. And after that the war on Mars had suddenly become deadly in a way that it hadn’t been before. And Arkady had been helpless to stop it.

And it could happen again.

She walked back into the office. “We have to go to Burroughs,” she said to Sax.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

So habits made their first incursions into the new terrain, like bacteria into rock, followed by procedures, protocols, a whole fell-field of social discourse, on its way to the climax forest of law… Nadia saw that people (some people) were indeed coming to her to resolve arguments, deferring to her judgment. She might not have been in control, but she was as close to control as they had: the universal solvent, as Art called her, or General Nadia, as Maya said nastily over the wrist. Which only made Nadia shudder, as Maya knew it would. Nadia preferred something she had heard Sax say over the wrist to his faithful gang of techs, all young Saxes in the making: “Nadia is the designated arbitrator, talk to her about it.” Thus the power of names; arbitrator rather than general. In charge of negotiating what Art was calling the “phase change.” She had heard him use the term in the midst of a long interview on Mangalavid, with that deadpan expression of his that made it very hard to tell if he was joking or not: “Oh I don’t think it’s really a revolution we’re seeing, no. It’s a perfectly natural next step here, so it’s more a kind of evolutionary or developmental thing, or what in physics they call a phase change.”

His subsequent comments indicated to Nadia that he did not in fact know what a phase change was. But she did, and she found the concept intriguing. Vaporization of Terran authority, condensation of local power, the thaw finally come … however you wanted to think about it. Melting occurred when the thermal energy of particles was great enough to overcome the intracrystalline forces that held them in position. So if you considered the metanat order as the crystalline structure… But then it made a huge difference whether the forces holding it together were interionic or intermolecular; sodium chloride, interionic, melted at 801°C; methane, intermolecular, at  –183°C. What kind of forces, then? And how high the temperature?

At this point the analogy itself melted. But names were powerful in the human mind, no doubt about it. Phase change, integrated pest management, selective disemployment; she preferred them all to the old deadly notion revolution, and she was glad they were all in circulation, on Marigalavid and on the streets.

But there were some five thousand heavily armed security troops in Burroughs and Sheffield, she reminded herself, who were still thinking of themselves as police facing armed rioters. And that would have to be dealt with by more than semantics.

For the most part, however, things were going better than she had hoped. It was a matter of demographics, in a way; it appeared that almost every single person who had been born on Mars was now in the streets, or occupying city offices, train stations, spaceports — all of them, to judge by the Mangalavid interviews, completely (and unrealistically, Nadia thought) intolerant of the idea that powers on another planet should control them in any way whatsoever. That was nearly half the current Martian population, right there. And a good percentage of the old-timers were on their side too, as well as some of the new emigrants. “Call them immigrants,” Art advised over the phone. “Or newcomers. Call them settlers or colonialists, depending on whether they’re with us or not. That’s something Nirgal has been doing, and I think it helps people to think about things.”