Of course whether a handsome prospect mattered to city formation was an open question, but there were historians who asserted that many ancient Greek cities were sited principally for their view, in the face of other inconveniences, so it was at least a possible factor. And in any case Burroughs was now a bustling little metropolis of some 150,000 people, the biggest city on Mars. And it was still growing. Near the end of his afternoon’s sightseeing, Sax rode one of the big exterior elevators up the side of Branch Mesa, centrally located north of Canal Park, and from its plateau he could see that the northern outskirts of town were studded with construction sites all the way to the tent wall. There was even work going on around some of the distant mesas outside the tent. Clearly critical mass had been reached in some kind of group psychology — some herding instinct, which had made this place the capital, the social magnet, the heart of the action. Group dynamics were complex at best, even (he grimaced) unexplainable.

Which was unfortunate, as always, because Biotique Burroughs was a very dynamic group indeed, and in the days that followed Sax found that determining his place in the crowd of scientists working on the project was no easy thing. He had lost the skill of finding his way in a new group, assuming he had ever had it. The formula governing the number of possible relationships in a group was n(n — 1)/2, where n is the number of individuals in the group; so that, for the 1,000 people at Biotique Burroughs, there were 499,500 possible relationships. This seemed to Sax well beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend — even the 4,950 possible relationships in a group of 100, the hypothesized “design limit” of human group size, seemed unwieldy. Certainly it had been at Underbill, when they had had a chance to test it.

So it was important to find a smaller group at Biotique, and Sax set about doing so. It certainly made sense to concentrate at first on his lab. He had joined them as a biophysicist, which was risky, but put him where he wanted to be in the company; and he hoped he could hold his own. If not, then he could claim to have come to biophysics from physics, which was true. His boss was a Japanese woman named Claire, middle-aged in appearance, a very congenial woman who was good at running their lab. On his arrival she put him to work with the team designing second- and third-generation plants for the glaciated regions of the northern hemisphere. These newly hydrated environments represented tremendous new possibilities for botanical design, as the designers no longer had to base all species on desert xerophytes. Sax had seen this coming from the very first moment he had spotted the flood roaring down lus Chasma into Melas, in 2061. And now forty years later he could actually do something about it.

So he very happily joined in the work. First he had to bring himself up to date on what had already been put out there in the glacial regions. He read voraciously in his usual manner, and viewed videotapes, and learned that with the atmosphere still so thin and cold, all the new ice released on the surface was subliming until its exposed surfaces were fretted to a minute lacework. This meant there were billions of pockets large and small for life to grow in, directly on the ice; and so one of the first forms to have been widely distributed were varieties of snow and ice algae. These algae had been augmented with phreatophytic traits, because even when the ice started pure it became salt-encrusted by way of the ubiquitous windblown fines. The genetically engineered salt-tolerant algaes had done very well, growing in the pitted surfaces of the glaciers, and sometimes right into the ice. And because they were darker than the ice, pink or red or black or green, the ice under them had a tendency to melt, especially during summer days, when temperatures were well above freezing. So small diurnal streams had begun to run off the glaciers, and along their edges. These wet morainelike regions were similar to some Terran polar and mountain environments. Bacteria and larger plants from these Terran environments, genetically altered to help them survive the pervasive saltiness, had first been seeded by teams from Biotique several M-years before, and for the most part these plants were prospering as the algae had.

Now the design teams were trying to build on these early successes and introduce a wider array of larger plants, and some insects bred to tolerate the high CO₂ levels in the air. Biotique had an extensive inventory of template plants to take chromosome sequences from, and 17 M-years of field experimental records, so Sax had a lot of catching up to do. In his first weeks at the lab, and in the company arboretum on Hunt plateau, he focused on the new plant species to the exclusion of everything else, content to work his way up to the bigger picture in due time.

Meanwhile, when he was not at his desk reading, or looking through the microscopes or into the various Mars jars in the labs, or up in the arboretum, there was the daily work of being Stephen Lindholm to keep him busy as well. In the lab it was not all that different from being Sax Russell. But at the end of the workdays he would often make a conscious effort and join the group that went upstairs to one of the plateau cafes, to have a drink and talk about the day’s work, and then everything else.

Even there he found it surprisingly easy to “be” Lindholm, who, he discovered, asked a lot of questions, and laughed frequently; whose mouth somehow made laughter easier. Questions from the others — usually from Claire, and an English immigrant named Jessica, and a Kenyan man named Berkina — very rarely had anything to do with Lindholm’s Terran past. When they did, Sax found it was easy to give a minimal response — Desmond had given Lindholm a past in Sax’s own home town of Boulder, Colorado, a sensible move — and then he could turn things around on the questioner, in a technique he had often observed Michel using. People were so happy to talk. And Sax himself had never been a particularly quiet one, like Simon. He had always pitched in his conversational ante, and if he had contributed infrequently thereafter, it was because he was only interested when the stakes reached a certain minimum level. Small talk was usually a waste of time. But it did in fact pass that time, which otherwise might be irritat-ingly blank. It also seemed to ameliorate feelings of solitude. And his new colleagues usually engaged in pretty interesting shop talk, anyway. And so he did his part, and told them about his walks around Burroughs, and asked them many questions about what he had seen, and about their past, and Biotique, and the Martian situation, and so on. It made as much sense for Lindholrn as for Sax.

In these conversations his colleagues, especially Claire and Ber-kina, confirmed what was obvious in his walks — that Burroughs was in some sense becoming the de facto capital of Mars, in that the headquarters for all of the biggest transnationals were located there. The transnationals were at this point the effective rulers of Mars. They had enabled the Group of Eleven and the other wealthy industrial nations to win or at least survive the war of 2061, and now they were all intertwined in a single power structure, so that it wasn’t clear who on Earth was calling the shots, the countries or the supracorporations. On Mars, however, it was obvious. UNOMA had been shattered in 2061 like one of the domed cities, and the agency that had taken its place, the United Nations Transitional Authority, was an administrative group staffed by transnat executives, its decrees enforced by transnat security forces. “The UN has nothing to do with it, really,” Berkina said. “The UN is just as dead on Earth as UNOMA is here. So the name is just a cover.”

Claire said, “Everyone calls it just the Transitional Authority anyway.”