But others more than compensated for their thoughtfulness, and the younger hotheads went at it hammer and tongs. The younger Reds regarded terraforming as nothing more than part of the imperial process; Ann was a moderate compared to them, they raged even at Hiroko in their fury — “Don’t call it areoforming,” one of them shouted at her, and Hiroko stared nonplussed at this tall young woman, a blond Valkyrie made nearly rabid by the use of the word — “it’s terraforming you mean and terraforming you’re doing. Calling it areoforming is a sickening lie.”

“We terraform the planet,” Jackie said to the’woman, “but the planet areoforms us.”

“And that’s a lie too!”

Ann stared grimly at Jackie. “Your grandfather said that to me,” she said, “a long time ago. As you may know. But I’m still waiting to see what areoforming is supposed to mean.” ‘

“It’s happened to everyone born here,” Jackie said confidently.

“How so? You were born on Mars — how are you any different?”

Jackie glowered. “Like the rest of the natives, Mars is all I know, and all I care about. I was brought up in a culture made of strands from many different Terran predecessors, mixed to a new Martian thing.”

Ann shrugged. “I don’t see how you’re so different. You remind me of Maya.”

“To hell with you!”

“As Maya would say. And that’s your areoforming. We’re human and human we remain, no matter what John Boone said. He said a lot of things, but none of them ever came true.”

“Not yet,” Jackie said. “But the process is slowed when it’s in the hands of people who haven’t had a new thought for fifty years.” A lot of the younger ones laughed at this. “And who are in the habit of introducing gratuitous personal insults into a political argument.”

And she stood there watching Ann, looking calm and relaxed, except for the flash in her eye, which reminded Nadia again of what a power Jackie was. Almost all the natives there were behind her, no doubt about it.

“If we have not changed here,” Hiroko said to Ann, “how do you explain your Reds? How do you explain the areophany?”

Ann shrugged. “They are the exceptions.”

Hiroko shook her head. “There is a spirit of place in us. Landscape has profound effects on the human psyche. You are a student of landscapes, and a Red. You must acknowledge this to be true.”

“True for some,” Ann replied, “but not for all. Most people obviously don’t feel that spirit of place. One city is much like another — in fact they’re interchangeable in all the important ways. So people come to a city on Mars, and what’s the difference? There isn’t any. So they think no more of destroying the land outside the city than they did back on Earth.”

“These people can be taught to think differently.”

“No, I don’t think they can. You’ve caught them too late. At best you can order them to act differently. But that’s not being areoformed by the planet, that’s indoctrination, reeducation camps, what have you. Fascist areophany.”

“Persuasion,” Hiroko countered. “Advocacy, argument by example, argument by argument. It need not be coercive.”

“The aerogel revolution,” Ann said sarcastically. “But aerogel has very little effect on missiles.”

Several people spoke at once, and for a moment the thread of discourse was lost; the discussion immediately fissioned into a hundred smaller debates, as many there had something to say which they had been holding back. It was obvious they could go on like this for hour after hour, day after day.

Ann and Sax sat back down. Nadia made her way out of the crowd, shaking her head. On the edge of the meeting she ran into Art, who shook his head soberly. “Unbelievable,” he said.

“Believe it.”

The days of the congress unfolded much as the first few had, with workshops good or bad leading to dinner, and then long evenings of talk or partying. Nadia noticed that while the old emigrants were likely to go back to work after dinner, the young natives tended to regard the conferences as daytime work only, with the nights given over to celebration, often around the big warm pond in Phaistos. Once again this was only a matter of tendencies, with many exceptions either way, but she found it interesting.

She herself spent most of her evenings on the Zakros dining patios, making notes on the day’s meetings, talking to people, thinking things over. Nirgal often worked with her, and Art too, when he was not getting people who had been arguing during the day to drink kava together, and then go up to party in Phaistos.

In the second week she got in the habit of taking an evening walk up the tube, often all the way to Falasarna, after which she would walk back and join Nirgal and Art for their final postmortem on the day, which they convened on a patio set on a little lava knob in Lato. The two men had become good friends during their long trek home from Kasei Vallis, and under the pressure of the congress they were becoming like brothers, talking over everything, comparing impressions, testing theories, laying out plans for Nadia’s judgment, and deciding to take on the task of writing some kincT of congress document. She was part of it — the elder sister perhaps, or maybe just the babushka — and once when they shut down and staggered off to bed Art spoke of “the triumvirate.” With her as Pompey, no doubt. But she did her best to sway them with her analyses of the larger picture.

There were many different kinds of disagreements among the groups there, she told them, but some were basic. There were those for and against terraforming. There were those for and against revolutionary violence. There were those who had gone underground to hold on to cultures under assault, and those who had disappeared in order to create radical new social orders. And it seemed more and more evident to Nadia that there were also significant differences between those who had immigrated from Earth, and those who had been born on Mars.

There were all kinds of disagreements, then, and no obvious alignments to be found among them. One night Michel Duval joined the three of them for a drink, and as Nadia described to him the problem he got out his AI, and began to make diagrams based on what he called the “semantic rectangle.” Using this schema they made a hundred different sketches of the various dichotomies, trying to find a mapping that would help them to understand what alignments and oppositions might exist among them. They made some interesting patterns, but it could not be said that any blinding insights jumped off the screen at them — although one particularly messy semantic rectangle seemed suggestive, at least to Michel: violence and nonviolence, terraforming and antiterraforming formed the initial four corners, and in the secondary combination around this first rectangle he had located Bogdanovists, Reds, Hi-roko’s areophany, and the Muslims and other cultural conservatives. But what this combinatoire indicated in terms of action was not clear.

Nadia began to attend the daily meetings devoted to general questions concerning a possible Martian government. These were just as disorganized as the discussions of revolutionary methods, but less emotional, and often more substantive. They took place every day in a small amphitheater which the Minoans had cut into the side of the tunnel in Malia. From this rising arc of benches the participants looked out over bamboo and pine trees and terra-cotta rooftops all the way up and down the tunnel, from Zakros to Falasarna.

The talks were attended by a somewhat different crowd than the revolutionary debates. A report would come in from the smaller workshops for discussion, and then most of the people who had attended that workshop would join the larger meeting, to see what comments were made on the report. The Swiss had set up workshops for all aspects of politics, economics, and culture generally, and so the general discussions were very wide-ranging indeed.