“Kasei Nippon.”

“Yes, but not just for Mars! For Japan also. As a model for them, you see? An example of what they can become.”

And so they drank rice wine under the stars. Nanao played his flute, and down in the park under the paper lanterns someone laughed. The visitors sat leaning against each other, thinking. They talked for a while about all the sanctuaries, how different they were and yet hew much they had in common.

“This congress is a good idea.”

The visitors nodded, in various degrees of assent.

“It’s just what we need. I mean, we have been getting together to celebrate John’s jestival for how many years now? And it’s been good. Very pleasant. Very important. We have needed it, for our own sakes. But now things are changing fast. We can’t pretend to be a cabal. We have to deal with the rest of them.”

They talhed specifics for a while: attendants at the congress, security measures, problem issues.

“Who attacked the egg — the egg?”

“A security team from Burroughs. Subarashii and Armscor have organized what they call a sabotage investigation unit, and they’ve gotten the Transitional Authority to bless the operation. They’ll be coming south again, no doubt of that. We have almost waited too long.”

“They got the institution — the information — -from me?”

A snort. “You should resist thinking you are so important.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the return of the elevator driving all this.”

“And they are building one for Earth as well And so …”

“We had better act.”

Then as the stone sake bottles kept going around, and emptying, they gave up on such seriousness, and talked about the past year, things they had seen in the outback, gossip about mutual acquaintances, new jokes heard. Nanao got out a packet of balloons, and they filled them and tossed them out into the city’s night breeze, and watched them float down onto the trees and the old habitats. They passed around a canister of nitrous oxide, took breaths and laughed. The stars made a thick net overhead. One told stories of space, of the asteroid belt. They tried to nick exposed bits of wood with their pocket knives and failed. “This congress will be what we call nema-washi. Preparing the ground.”

Two stood, arms around each other, and swayed until they had caught their balance, then held out their little cups in a toast.

“Next year on Olympus.”

“Next year on Olympus,” the others repeated, and drank.

It was Ls 180, M-year 40, when they began to arrive at Dorsa Brevia, in small cars and planes from all over the south. A group of Reds and caravan Arabs checked people’s credentials in the wasteland approaches, and more Reds and Bogdanovists were stationed in bunkers located all around the dorsa, armed, in case there was any trouble. The Sabishiian intelligence experts, however, thought that the conference was unknown in Burroughs or Hellas or Sheffield, and when they explained why they thought so, people tended to relax, for clearly they had penetrated far into the halls of UNTA, and indeed throughout the whole structure of transnational power on Mars. That was another advantage to the demimonde; they could work in both directions.

When Nadia arrived, with Art and Nirgal, they were led to their guest quarters in Zakros, the southernmost segment of the tunnel. Nadia dropped her pack in a little wooden room, and wandered the big park, and then through the segments farther north, finding old friends and meeting strangers, feeling in a mood of good hope. It was encouraging to see all these people milling about the green parks and pavilions, representing so many different groups. She looked around at the crowd thronging the canalside park, perhaps three hundred people in view at that moment, and laughed.

The Swiss from Overhangs arrived on the day before the conference was supposed to begin; people said they had been camped outside in their rovers, waiting for the date specified. They brought with them a whole set of procedures and protocols for the meeting, and as Nadia and Art listened to a Swiss woman describing their plans, Art elbowed Nadia and whispered, “We’ve created a monster.”

“No no,” Nadia whispered back, happy as she looked over the big central park in the third-from-the-south segment of the tunnel, called Lato. The skylight overhead was a long bronze crack in the dark roof, and morning light filled the giant cylindrical chamber with the kind of photon rain she had been craving all winter, brown light everywhere, the bamboo and pine and cypress rising over the tile rooftops and blazing like green water. “We need a structure, or it would be a free-for-all. The Swiss are form without content, if you see what I mean.”

Art nodded. He was very quick, sometimes even hard to understand, because he jumped five or six steps at a time and assumed she had followed him. “Just get them to drink kava with the anarchists,” he muttered, and got up to walk around the edges of the meeting.

And in fact that night, on her way with Maya through Gournia to a canalside row of open-air kitchens, Nadia passed by Art and saw that he was doing just that, dragging Mikhail and some of the other Bogdanovist hard-liners over to a table of Swiss, where Jurgen and Max and Sibilla and Priska were chatting happily with a group standing around them, switching languages as if they were translation AIs, but in every language exhibiting the same buoyant guttural Swiss accent. “Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on.

“Art is an idiot,” Maya replied.

By now there were about five hundred visitors in the long sanctuary, representing about fifty groups. The congress was to begin the following morning, so on this night the partying was loud, from Zakros to Falasarna, the timeslip filled with wild shouting and singing, Arab ululations harmonizing with yodels, the strains of “Waltzing Matilda” forming a descant to “The Marseillaise.”

Nadia got up early the next morning. She found Art already out at the pavilion in the Zakros park, rearranging chairs into a circular formation, in classic Bogdanovist style. Nadia felt a prick of pain and regret, as if Arkady’s ghost had walked through her; he would have loved this meeting, it was just what he had often called for. She went to help Art. “You’re up early.”

“I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep.” He needed a shave. “I’m nervous!”

She laughed. “This is going to take weeks, Art, you know that.”

“Yes, but starts are important.”

By ten all the seats were filled, and behind the chairs the pavilion was crowded with standing observers. Nadia stood at the back of the Zygote wedge of the circle, watching curiously. There appeared to be slightly more men than women in attendance, and slightly more natives than emigrants. Most people wore standard one-piece jumpers — the Reds’ were rust-colored — but a significant number were dressed in a colorful array of ceremonial styles: robes, dresses, pantaloons, suits, embroidered shirts, bare chests, a lot of necklaces and earrings and other jewelry. All the Bogdanovists wore jewelry containing pieces of phobosite, the black chunks shining where they had been cut flat and polished.

The Swiss stood in the center, somber in gray bankers’ suits, Sibilla and Priska in dark green dresses. Sibilla called the meeting to order, and she and the rest of the Swiss alternated as they explained in excruciating detail the program they had worked out, pausing to answer questions, and asking for comments at every change of speaker. As they did this a group of Sufis in pure white shirts and pantaloons worked their way around the outer perimeter of the circle, passing out jugs of water and bamboo cups, moving with their customary dancelike grace. When everyone had cups, the delegates at the front of each group poured water for the party on their left, and then they all drank. Out in the crowd of spectators the Vanuatuans were at a table filling tiny cups of kava or coffee or tea, and Art was passing these out to those who wanted them. Nadia smiled at the sight of him, shambling through the crowds like a Sufi in slow motion, sipping from the cups of kava he was distributing.