Moving Mars

Part Four

Outwardly, the social structure of Mars — where people lived, whom they associated with — changed little. The greatest upheavals came for officials in the birthing government, who flocked over Mars like birds in search of a nest. The nest was found, selected without much ceremony by the interim President. Ti Sandra chose Schiaparelli Basin between Arabia Terra and Terra Meridiani, and the tiny station of Many Hills spilled over with activity. This would be the capital of Mars.

Such a grand denomination required more than a digging of tunnels and erection of domes; it required a new architectural renaissance, something that would impress the entire system and serve as symbol for the new Republic. All the families in the Republic wanted to contribute funds and expertise. The difficulty was selecting from a wealth of enthusiasm and advice.

The interim legislature created an agency called Point One, and assigned it twin tasks: security of the executive branch, and gathering of information for the government as a whole. Ti Sandra had mused that the tasks would have to be separated eventually, or a fifth branch of government would arise — “The branch of intrigue and back-stabbing.” So far, however, things were working smoothly.

In the tiny headquarters at Many Hills, I spoke with Ti Sandra about the end of our government and the transition to the elected government. I hoped to continue working with the Olympians, at least until a fully capable Office of Scientific Research could be established; I mentioned acquiring an enhancement. Ti Sandra expressed interest in what sort of enhancement I would employ — I had not decided yet — and then sprung her own surprise.

The President walked along the display that filled an entire wall of the President’s Office. The media links had been established just the day before. On the new display, projected statistics for much of Mars could be called up instantly, as well as ports to all public ex nets. Dedicated thinkers performed image and concept searches on all LitVid communications, and constantly glossed the mood of the planet. We hoped to buy similar (though less comprehensive) services for other parts of the Triple, including Earth.

Our conversation turned to the coming election. “We’re not so bad, you know,” she said. “Have you seen the lists?”

Many candidates had declared, but none seemed especially popular in the pre-campaign polling.

“I’ve seen them,” I said.

“If we declared, we’d probably win,” she said with a deep sigh.

I tensed. “You’re serious?”

Ti Sandra laughed and hugged me. “What should we do, show honorable Martian reserve and retire to our farms, to advise the lesser politicians like elder statesfolk?”

“Sounds fine to me,” I said.

Ti Sandra clucked disapprovingly. “You’ve mapped out your territory. You want to keep track of Charles Franklin.”

I gave her a shocked look.

“I mean, of course, what he’s doing.”

I seldom became angry at the President, but now my blood stirred. “It’s not trivial. If it’s not directed properly, it’s the biggest source of trouble we’ll face for years.”

“I know,” Ti Sandra said, raising her hands in placation. “I shudder when I think about it. And I can’t think of anyone better than you to oversee the project. But… What makes you think a completely fresh batch of elected officials will be so wise?”

“I’ll help them,” I said.

“What if they refuse your help?”

The possibility hadn’t occurred to me.

“Election is a chancy thing,” Ti Sandra said. “We haven’t proven we know how to do it on Mars. The most delicate time is transition.”

“Transition is confounded by leaders who won’t give up power,” I reminded her.

“And muddled by leaders who don’t know how to govern,” she said.

“You’d want me to declare with you?”

“I depend on you,” she said. “And… I’d give you the Olympians as your special problem. It would be a pity to pour all that money into an enhancement and sit on the outside, looking in.”

I considered for a moment. Being a part of history mattered much less to me than pulling Mars through a frightening time. To accept her offer, I would have to give up more time with Ilya, years more of my private life. But Ti Sandra was right. Most of the candidates who had declared were not impressive. At least we had some experience.

Personal considerations had to be put aside; where would I be most effective? I had hoped to be able to offer expertise and keep myself separate from the killing strain of elected office.

“You don’t look enthusiastic,” Ti Sandra said.

“I feel ill,” I said, exaggerating only a little.

“Those leaders are best who least desire to lead,” Ti Sandra said.

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” I said.

“It’s a good slogan,” she said. “Are you with me?”

I considered in silence. Ti Sandra stood patiently, a tall broad tree of a woman whose presence filled the room, and whom I had come to love like a mother.

I nodded, and we shook hands firmly.

Beyond any doubt, I was now a politician.

The best place to choose, purchase, and install an enhancement was Shinktown. I conferred with Charles about which Martian brand was best, and what level would suit my purposes. “Something less than a mini-thinker,” he suggested, “and more than a LitVid download. The best in that category is a design by Marcus Pribiloff, licensed through Wah Ming BM. It’s two hundred thousand Triple dollars, but I can arrange for a discount.”

I asked why he had never had an enhancement installed. “I won’t presume to say I couldn’t use it,” he said. “But for creative work, they’re really not all that useful. Too fixed and linear.”

Shinktown had changed little in the past six years. The atmosphere of cheap entertainment and student food prevailed; the architecture still embodied the worst Mars had to offer. But a new district had grown in the southwest quarter, catering to students and faculty who wished to compete with Earth-based academics.

There had always been those on Mars who used enhancements. Economists had led the population at first, followed by mathematicians, physical scientists, sociologists, and finally physicians. But now Martians with no particular professional need were coming to Shinktown. Sales of enhancements had tripled at UMS in the past three years.

Attitudes were changing. Mars was becoming more like Earth; in twenty years, I thought, we might catch up.

I took time off to travel to Shinktown. There, I visited Pribiloff’s office with trepidation. The decor was Old Settlement Modern, incorporating the ingenuity of Martian design when goods were in very short supply, but with a flip of near-satire. I liked the style, but it didn’t slack my nervousness.

A human secretary, female and motherly, very conservative, gave me a quick med check and verified my stats. Then I was escorted into Doctor Pribiloff’s inner sanctum. He stood by the door as I entered, shook my hand firmly, and sat on a stool, offering me a comfortable chair in a spot of light. The rest of the small room was in shadow, including Pribiloff.

The doctor appeared to be about my age, with earnest features, a high forehead, deeply melanic skin; attractive in a scholarly way. He wore a simple suit and dress tunnel boots. Conspicuous by its absence was a slate pocket; no doubt he carried his slate internally.

“You’ve made an interesting choice, Madam Vice President,” Pribiloff began. “Not many politicians choose a specific science enhancement. You haven’t shown much interest in these subjects before… May I ask why you’re interested now?”

I smiled politely and shook my head. “Actually, it’s personal,” I said.

“Hobby enhancement doesn’t always satisfy,” Pribiloff informed me, shifting on the stool. “State of the art still requires a fair amount of motivation and concentration. The model you’ve requested… I’ve never installed one before. It’s a version of a Terrie enhancement, rarely installed even there.”

“Why do you need to know?” I asked.

“It’s not just curiosity, Miss Majumdar,” Pribiloff said. “We’ll need to match your neural syntax with the enhancement, and this model works best only in a certain range of syntactical complements. I think you’ll match — ”

“I made sure of that before I came here,” I told him.

“Yes. But the enhancement still takes up a fair amount of attention. It’s more aggressive, we say. Some would say it intrudes.”

“How?” I asked.

“For one thing, it will modify your visual cortex by drawing a direct route between mathematical imagination and internal visualization. It’s not a permanent change, but if you keep the enhancement for more than three years, and remove it, you’ll have an awkward period of adjustment.”

“Withdrawal,” I said.

“Some have described it that way. With the enhancement, you’ll think a little differently, a little more analytically, about certain things. Even social relationships may be seen in a new light.”

“You sound uncomfortable with my choice, Doctor,” I said.

“Not at all. I just want my customers to understand the potentials and limits. If you have sufficient motivation, it will work out fine. But if you don’t…”

“I do,” I said.

“All right. Let me describe the levels available. This unit is standard size, but unlike a purely fact-based enhancement, it contains a great many problem-solving algorithms. Concepts and equations for direct memory retrieval, and neural net aids for high-level thinking. You won’t become a scientific genius, but you’ll understand what the geniuses are talking about, and you’ll have a wonderful toolbox for exploring a wide variety of subjects, concentrating on physical theory.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“As you requested, this model will be upgraded to include the latest work, and you can download supplements from the ex net. In fact, we can handle your subscription to a variety of base language services.”

“Good.”

Pribiloff stared at me for a moment, then said, “The procedure is painless, of course. The enhancement is placed subcutaneously near the foramen magnum, in a cushioned hyperimmune sheath. Nano fibers will make neural connections within an hour of the implanting, and you should be able to experience heightened abilities — certainly heightened knowledge — within twenty-four hours. I’ll need multiple consent forms, credit release, and agreement to provide daily reports on your progress for the first ten days. The enhancement carries its own diagnostic, and all you need to do is transfer the report over the ex net. Not reporting nullifies all warranties.“

“I understand.”

“Doctor-patient privilege applies, of course,” Pribiloff said.

“Of course.”

“When would you like the procedure?”

“As soon as possible,” I replied.

“Fine. I perform all insertions and implantings myself. Would tomorrow at fifteen be convenient?”

The next day, more nervous than ever, I returned to the office and lay on my stomach on a comfortable couch in the dim room. A spot of light appeared over my neck and a small arbeiter moved into place, graceful curving arms gently applying themselves to the nape of my neck.

Pribiloff showed me the enhancement, a flat thin jet-black disk, barely a centimeter wide. Other than product ID coded on its face, there were no obvious features. Before insertion, Pribiloff dipped the tiny disk in nano charge and wakeup nutrients, then inserted it into the guide. I closed my eyes and slept for about five minutes. The procedure was swift and did not hurt.

I left the office feeling as if I had lost another kind of virginity, betraying my body and the mother who gave it to me. I wondered if I would tell my father; Ilya would know, and Charles, but why reveal my change to anybody else? After a few hours, I felt ashamed of my silly conservatism; but the dark mood lingered.

And then the way I saw the world began to change.

Old friends, old adversaries, and old acquaintances of much ambiguity, started returning to my life and making fresh marks. I hadn’t seen Diane Johara in three years, but my slate received a message from her while I was in Pribiloff’s office.

We spoke by satcom while I cleared out the Shinktown room I’d rented for the enhancement operation.

I would be passing through Diane’s home station, Mispec Moor, on a constitutional campaign tour in Mariner Valley . Ilya would be there for me. After meetings with LitVid reporters, we had half a day and an evening free; we gleefully arranged for dinner.

“It’s wonderful to talk to you again!” Diane enthused. “I’ve been so reluctant to drop a note — I thought you’d think I was, you know, peddling influence or something. Casseia, what you’ve done!”

“Not bad for someone who thinks too much, hm?”

Diane laughed. “Not at all like the old student radicals who fought the Statists.”

“Have you changed your tune, Diane?”

“Casseia, I’m so respectable. I’ve even been working on the Mariner Constitutional Committee. Are we really Statists? Is it possible?”

“We’ll use some other name, okay?”

“And I’m married. More than lawbonded… it’s really more. I’ve gone over to Steinburg-Leschke. I’ve converted to New Reform Judaism. You’ll meet Joseph. He’s very special.”

“You’ll love Ilya, too. Things have changed, Diane.”

We completed arrangements and signed off. I sat in the room’s lone chair, packed bags at my feet, and considered the nature of time. I was not very old, just fifteen, but measuring time as a string of memorable events, I seemed positively ancient.

My head filled with time as reflection of motion, arbiter of change, conveyer and dissipater of information; time is what’s left when nothing happens, time is the distance between then and now; time marked in a haze of multi-colored equations, malleable, nonexistent for massless particles, for them an eternal now and the universe as flat and direct as a sheet of paper.

I recognized the signs then: the enhancement was integrating and informing, organizing areas of shared information and ability within my brain. The process was safe — billions on Earth and a few hundred thousand on Mars had gone through it, some, like Orianna, dozens of times. But for me it was unfamiliar and at once unsettling and hypnotic.

I lost an hour in that chair, in that bleak little Shinktown room, simply pondering motion, and gravitation, and how pressing on a wall meant the wall pressed back with equal force. I puzzled through angular momentum and torque as analogs of straightforward linear momentum and force, and thought of how a wheel, subjected to a force perpendicular to its axis, behaves when not spinning, and when spinning. I broke physical systems down into parts, and ran those parts through their paces while tracking the changes in their simplest characteristics, and how the changes affected the larger system.

Staring at the metabolic carpet, I traced in my imagination the path of a photon passing through a translucent fiber, slowing and echoing. I saw all the possible paths of the photon converge on the eventual real path, sum over histories, and the photon emerging on the other side of the fiber with supreme economy of energy and motion, minimum action, shortest time.

The entire room, spare and dreary, became a fog of forces as fascinating as a party filled with talking people. Behind the facade of electromagnetic interactions — all I would ever touch, see, smell, or be sensually connected with — lay a plenipotential void far richer and stranger than matter and energy, the ground on which my being was so lightly painted as to be negligible… and yet I saw, and seeing, I gave the ensemble shape and meaning.

I struggled out of reverie, stood, grabbed my case, and ordered the door to open. As I marched down the corridor, I tried to dam the flood of insight.

Did Charles think and see this way all the time?

The Republic Information Office had scheduled three interviews for me in a six-hour period, beginning fifteen minutes after my arrival in Mispec Moor. Ilya gave me a quick squeeze as we walked onto the shuttle platform, into a blast of warm moist air from the protein farms. Mispec Moor was strictly hardscrabble protein production and carbonifer mining. “You’re on your own,” he whispered in my ear. “I hate the limelight.”

“Thanks,” I said ruefully. “Enjoy the view.” He would be given a tour of Mispec Moor’s rather common fossil formations while I met the reporters. His attendance was as ceremonial and political as mine, but we still pretended Ilya was above the fray.

The info officer accompanying me introduced two reporters from Mars and Triple Squinfo, a moderate but influential LitVid firm that kept a heavy emphasis on substance and revelation. I had only interviewed with reporters from MTS once before. It had been a tough go.

The officer, a pleasant young man connected by marriage to Klein BM, escorted the reporters and me into a threadbare lounge.

The reporters had come in from North Noachis on a mid-speed train, a journey of eight hours through cratered flatness. They did not seem in a good mood.

We sat on the worn couches and the older of the two reporters placed his slate on the table between us, voice and vid active. The younger, a nervous woman with thick black hair, began the questioning.

“Your interim government has two more months to bring Cailetet and the other dissident BMs into the fold,” she said. “There’s been talk by some members of the transition team that Cailetet simply needs to be given incentive, and that you have a personal grudge against Achmed Crown Niger .”

I raised my eyebrows and smiled, then quickly decided to preempt what the young woman must have thought was a terrific bit of research. “Mr. Crown Niger once represented Freechild Dauble, and presided over the incarceration of a group of students at University of Mars Sinai. I suppose that’s what you’re referring to?”

The reporter nodded, eyes intent on the prey.

“That was a long time ago. Mars has changed, I’ve changed — ”

“But do you believe Crown Niger has changed?” the second reporter chimed in. He leaned forward. I felt like a mouse circled by hawks.

“He’s certainly moved up in the world,” I said. “Advancement changes people.”

“And you think your government can work with him, bring him into the fold before the elections?” the first reporter asked. The third seemed content to listen and bide his time.

“We aim for complete participation. We’d hate to have Mars divided any longer than necessary.”

“But Cailetet says that the interim government supports projects that may endanger stability in the Triple,” said the second reporter.

“I haven’t heard that.”

“It’s a general release to the LitVids, dated for spread on the ex net and broadband Squinfo at twenty-two Triple Standard.” He gave me a second slate with the message. I read it quickly.

“Have you made contact with the Olympians?” the first reporter asked.

“That’s not for me to say one way or another.”

“How could they endanger the Triple?”

I laughed. “I don’t know.”

“We’ve actually dug into this a bit,” the first reporter continued, “and we’ve discovered that Cailetet funded these scientists for a while before cutting. The scientists went elsewhere — supposedly to UMS. They’ve actually come to you now, haven’t they?”

“Cailetet seems to know more about this than I do,” I said. “Have you spoken with Crown Niger ?”

“We have,” the third reporter said. “Off the record. He believes the interim government is behaving very foolishly and inviting a lot of pressure from Earth. He sounds frightened.”

“If Mr. Crown Niger wishes to express his views seriously, on whatever matter real or imagined, he should talk to us directly, not through the ex net.”

The first reporter blinked and nodded. “Crown Niger isn’t stupid. What is he trying to do?”

“I can’t begin to guess,” I said. I glanced at the info officer and he efficiently ended the meeting.

There were no special perks in small stations like Mispec Moor. In a rickety cab traveling through the ancient tunnels, air thick everywhere with the yeasty smell of active nano, the info officer glanced at me cautiously and said, “What can we expect?”

I shook my head grimly. “Crown Niger is trying to sink the elections.”

“Is there anything more the RIO should know?” he asked.

“Not for the moment,” I said. I leaned back in the stiff seat and felt the enhancement’s tickle. Memories of the briefings from the Olympians mixed with my new sophistication. New questions tangled in my head. I visualized certain equations in the papers Charles had transferred to my slate. The symbols flared out in red, green, and purple, sorting themselves in the enhancement and being presented to conscious awareness. I did not savor the feeling yet — it was unsettling, having this powerful expert attached directly to both conscious and subconscious thinking.

The equations — which I still only vaguely understood, the enhancement’s assets not yet having penetrated deeply — kept pointing to vague discrepancies. I shut my eyes, trying to clear these distractions and think about Crown Niger . But the equations would not clear.

There is more.

I shook my head and swore under my breath.

“Are you all right?” the officer asked.

“I’m thinking,” I said, the best answer I could give at the moment.

Diane Johara had gained a couple of kilos in the years since I had seen her last, and her face had taken on a gentler, more knowing expression, but she was still Diane, and we hugged each other as if we were students and roommates again. Joseph and Ilya stood awkwardly beside each other, shaking hands, fresh male acquaintances sizing each other up. The apartment had three rooms and a sanitation alcove, spare even by Mispec Moor standards, but it was neat and comfortable and immaculately decorated with quilts from Diane’s family and colorful, fanciful paintings from Joseph’s.

Diane wore a long black velvet dress and a tiny yarmulke on the crown of her head. In New Reform Judaism, men and women equally had to hide their heads from God’s gaze. Her hair had been coiled into a dove-shaped bun on one side, and I found the style at once very dignified and very attractive. She had found her true beauty.

I was so happy seeing her and being distracted from my almost painful welter of thoughts that I felt like crying with relief. I did cry a little, the allowed tears of renewed friendship. Joseph led us into the middle room, a circular dig about seven meters wide with banded red and black rock walls over insulation. Ilya recognized the mineral immediately and he and Joseph had something to talk about — deposition of oxidized iron during Mars’s early history, the fluctuation of oxygen-producing organisms in the ancient Glass Sea and the chemical binding of their wastes.

I was glad that Ilya and Joseph had found topics of interest to keep them occupied. Diane and I had a lot of catching up to do. The evening progressed pleasantly into dinner, and this was the surprise — after a day of yeasty smells and reduced expectations, the food Diane and Joseph prepared and served was wonderful. Fresh vegetables, the finest salad I had tasted in months, premium protein cakes wonderfully spiced with curry and laced with fresh chutneys. We ate until we could hold no more, reconsidered, and tamped the excess down with a few more bites.

“We keep our own farm vats here,” Joseph explained. Whenever he looked at Diane, Joseph’s face beamed rapture. I don’t think I had ever seen a couple so much in love.

“Joseph’s family has had theirs for thirty years now,” Diane said, smiling at her husband.

Watching them and listening, I felt an odd pang. My feelings for Ilya were strong, and we were comfortable together. Of necessity, we had found ways to be apart without being devastated. I doubted that Diane and Joseph had been apart for more than a few hours in all the years of their marriage.

They were beautiful.

After dinner, Joseph and I cleared dishes while Ilya and Diane talked. Simplicity and self-reliance kept servant arbeiters out of their apartment. Joseph asked a few polite questions about the new government — questions I had long since grown used to, and answered easily. Then he frowned, put down the last plate, and turned to face me. “I’d like to mention something. Diane didn’t think it worth bothering with, but I have different instincts,” he said.

“Oh?”

“There have been requests from several sources to use Steinburg-Leschke territories for mineral exploration, to set up remote analyzers.”

“Is that unusual?” I asked.

“No… But the requests don’t make sense.”

“How?”

“All the requests are for land mapped in the General Resource Survey twenty years ago. New surveys don’t seem necessary.”

All of Mars was ready to find burglars under the bed. The President’s office received more than a hundred warnings a week. If a little worry about the Republic was Joseph’s worst flaw, I could accept that. I politely encouraged him. “And?”

“I’ve traced the requests. They all come from former extensions of Cailetet, and contractors beholden to Cailetet.”

“Former BMs?”

“All signatory to the Republic. None from Cailetet directly… but… all, indirectly.”

“That’s interesting,” I said, though it seemed normal enough. Cailetet might not wish to draw attention from a government it did not support — and it might not wish to be denied permissions by testy district governors.

“I’ve asked around,” Joseph said, sealing the kitchen washer and starting a cycle. “Nine out of ten of the districts Steinburg-Leschke deals with have gotten requests. That would cover half of Mars. Thousands of sites.”

My attention sharpened. “Why so many?”

“I presume they wish to discover resources and stake shared claims before the election. They’re afraid the rules will change after. But I’m puzzled — they couldn’t possibly exploit so many sites.”

“Shotgun spread?” I asked, alluding to the old technique of filing many claims in the hopes of getting one or two that were productive. Erzul itself had not been innocent of such tactics. Hardscrabble mining was a tough enterprise.

“Why in so many empty or depleted areas? Do they know something about areology the government should know? Or maybe my family?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll look into it.”

“I apologize for talking business,” Joseph said, “but I’ve always listened to my instincts.”

“Have they ever been wrong?”

“Oh, frequently.” He laughed. “I listen to them. I don’t always act on them.”

We joined Ilya and Diane in the small living room. The talk wandered from business to politics — nothing impolite or too probing, for which I was grateful. Truly I was getting sick of this public self, longing for some relief. Ilya saw this and quickly moved the discussion over to food and farming. Diane watched me as Joseph took the bait and described Mispec Moor’s plans for expansion.

I took a toilet break as an excuse to be alone for a while and think. There would come a time, I realized, when I would hate even more this role of public person, whose ear was always being whispered in, whose life was the subject of LitVid stare-ups, who could not spend enough time with her husband to fill out half a marriage.

By unspoken agreement, Ilya and I had postponed planning for children, and I realized children and a continuation of real life might not be possible for years if I joined Ti Sandra on a ticket, and we won…

I thought of Joseph, polite and smooth-faced and sincere, and his worries about potholes all over Mars — and of the thousands of warnings either dire or silly, the endless responsibilities focused impossibly on people who must delegate, and in delegating choose wisely and when some of those choices fail — as they will — trim mercilessly for a higher good, a good not always definable, certainly never agreed to by all the governed. I thought of the great grinding of the political wheels and felt very sorry for myself.

It passed. I returned to the living room after washing my face. Ilya, too aware of my hidden emotions, patted the cushions of the couch beside him and hugged me as I sat.

“We have good men, don’t we?” Diane asked.

I put my arm around Ilya and smiled, and Joseph blushed.

I called a conference with the Olympians at Many Hills, two weeks after receiving my enhancement, and revealed my suspicions that not all had been told.

I had not seen Ilya in a week. Criss-crossing Mars, campaigning with and without Ti Sandra, shaking hands and listening earnestly to a thousand well-wishers, ignoring those who simply turned their eyes away and did not offer their hands, I wondered if real life would ever return again, and whether I would recognize it.

We met in the Vice President’s office, just completed — large but not richly furnished, befitting our style.

More than a little dazed, I stared at the full gathering of nine Olympians across a table laden with fresh fruit and grain breakfast goodies. For the first time I met Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta, blocky and balding, dressed in black, who came from a small Martian BM in Hellas; Yueh Liu, tall and athletic, a mild transform, originally from Earth, who had joined the Olympians two years ago; Amy Vico-Persoff from Persoff BM in Amazonis, a solid-looking young woman with determined features and a quiet, steady voice; and Danny Pincher, a bland-faced man of middle years who seemed unconcerned about grooming or clothes. Charles sat at the opposite end, his expression calm and alert as I told them of reading the presentation papers over again.

“There’s something missing, and it’s important,” I concluded. “You haven’t dropped the other boot.”

Charles looked at me with the glimmer of a smile. “What boot?”

I struggled to find words for what my enhancement had encouraged me to think. “Seven league boots,” I said.

The room fell quiet. Nobody ventured to speak. I marched two stiff fingers across the desk in front of me. “Your equations imply a lot more. That much I’ve been able to puzzle through with the help of an enhancement. And if these things bother me, they surely must bother people on Earth.”

“Nobody on Earth has access to our data,” Charles said.

“How long can a discovery this important be kept secret?” I asked. “Weeks, months? Surely someone on Earth will understand — there are millions of people much brighter than I am — ”

“Maybe in a few years someone will stumble on what we’ve learned,” Leander said, clearly uncomfortable. “A lot of what we’re studying is speculative — ”

“I don’t agree,” said Yueh Liu, stretching his tight-muscled arms over his head. “The implications are clear, as Vice President Majumdar says. We should not be too cautious. I know a lot of our colleagues on Earth, and the whole picture is going to be clear to them sooner than we’d like.”

“The destiny tweak,” I said.

Charles shook his head forcefully. “Forget about that. If means nothing.”

“We should reveal all to everybody and put them on equal ground, Earth and Mars and the Belts,” said Chinjia Park Amoy. “I would feel so much better if we could do that.”

“We’ve already decided on secrecy,” Leander said with a worried frown. He sensed the, group’s cohesion loosening. They all looked uneasy, even frightened. I felt as if I had stuck my hand into a nest of sleeping hornets, waking them all.

“Seven league boots,” Maspero-Gambacorta said. “All the dreams.”

“Enough,” Charles said quietly but firmly, his calm regained, at least on the surface. “What do you think we have left unsaid, Casseia?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and stared at me as if I were all that mattered on this world. “You have your enhancement now. Tell us. What do you think?”

“I don’t profess to genius, or to understand it all yet…”

“All the better,” Charles said. “You give us some idea what others will think when they hear about the newest developments. And they will. In time. Tell us.”

I resented Charles’s turnabout questioning. I felt as if I were a student up for an exam. “If you have access to the Bell Continuum — to everything that determines the nature of reality — ”

“All the hidden variables, nothing but,” Nehemiah Royce said. Charles lifted his hand: no interruptions.

“What else can you alter?” I asked. “Descriptors for momentum, angular momentum, spin, charge…” I waved my hand. “All of it. What else can you change or control?”

“Not all descriptors are amenable to tweaking,” Charles said.

“Yet,” Nehemiah Royce said.

Charles barely tilted his head in acknowledgment. “But you’re correct, and it’s interesting you mention seven league boots.”

The hollow in my stomach expanded.

“Your enhancement tells you more than you can consciously express, I suspect,” Charles said. “Others with enhancements have the same problem. It’s a design flaw, I think. Maybe they’ll get better at it soon.”

“Please,” I said.

“We can reach into a particle and tweak the descriptor for its position in space-time. We can change the descriptor and move the particle.”

“Move it where?” I asked.

“Anywhere we want. There’s a problem, however. We haven’t actually moved anything. The fact is…” He looked down at the table. “We can’t move anything small. We don’t understand why, but the Bell Continuum ties a lot of position descriptors together. It has to do with scaling, with the rules that result in conservation of energy. We can’t separate them out, so we can’t access descriptors individually — or in smaller groups — for insignificant objects.” Charles licked his lips and stared at me directly. “But we know how to tweak large numbers of descriptors simultaneously. Right now, we can’t use our theory to move this bowl of rice,” he said, shifting the bowl before him a few centimeters with his fingertip, “but most of us here think we can move a large object, if we’re so inclined.”

“How large?” I asked.

“The parameters are determined by size and density. The minimum we might move is an object of unit density, twenty kilometers in average diameter.”

“We’re ready to try an experiment,” Leander said. The room’s atmosphere had become charged with a wicked kind of excitement. “Phobos is about the smallest local object we can move. Its major axis is twenty-eight kilometers, and its density is two grams per cubic centimeter. We suggest taking a trip on Phobos.”

I stared blankly. Charles leaned his head to one side and lifted an eyebrow, as if to prompt me. “Where?” I asked.

“To Triton, actually,” Charles said. “Around Neptune . Nobody claims Triton. It’s sufficient in size…”

“Why Triton?”

Charles pointed upward. “Volatiles. We could move it and mine it. It could supply Mars for millions of years.”

“We could put it in orbit,” Maspero-Gambacorta said, “and shave ice from it — let the flakes drift into Mars’s atmosphere. In time, the atmosphere would thicken — ”

Leander broke in. “Or we could use it as a vehicle and explore.”

“Why not both?” Royce said, looking at his colleagues with an expression of boyish speculation.

“You’ve all been thinking about this a lot,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

Royce spoke first. “We haven’t actually done an experiment, of course,” he said. “Until we know for sure — moving something — it’s hard to accept. You understand that.”

I nodded slowly, more dazed than ever. “Then there really is no such thing as distance. Space and time.”

Danny Pincher laughed abruptly. “I’ve been working on the time tweak,” he said. “In theory, of course. The descriptors are tightly bound, co-respondent, as we say. They keep a shell of causality in place. The whole system of descriptor logic is surprisingly classical. But the total bookkeeping leads to enormous complications if you only observe macroscopic nature. Only in the descriptor realm does the whole become simpler.”

“Ultimately,” Charles said, “we may be able to reduce our knowledge of the universe to one brief equation.”

“Completing physics,” Leander said, nodding as if this were already certain.

“But moving a moon… Where does the energy come from?” I asked. Even with my enhancement, I could not draw a clear answer from the equations in their papers.

“Energy and vector descriptors governing conservation are linked across greater and greater scales,” Charles said. “If we transfer a large object, we draw from an even larger system. If we move Phobos, for example, automatic bookkeeping in the Bell Continuum would adjust descriptors for all particles moving within the galaxy, deducting a tiny amount of their total momentum, angular momentum, and kinetic energy. The net result would be a reduction in the corresponding quantities for the entire galaxy. Nobody would notice.“

“Not for millions of years, anyway,” Royce said. “We’d have to ship thousands of stars back and forth all over the place to make any big difference.”

“It sounds so smooth,” I said. “Could we actually move stars?”

“No,” Leander said. “We think there’s an upper limit.”

“The upper limit seems to be two-thirds of an Earth mass, of any density,” Royce said. “That may not be more than a temporary problem.”

“Some of us think it’s a true limit,” Chinjia Park Amoy said. Danny Pincher and Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta raised their hands in agreement.

“You could do this with the equipment you have now?” I asked.

The Olympians looked to Charles to give a final answer.

“We’d need to expand the thinker capacity,” Charles said. “We’ve been working on that already. We’ll have new thinkers grown and ready at Tharsis in a few weeks. We could do it in a few weeks or months. If we can do it at all.”

“Can you?‘ I persisted.

‘Theoretically, it’s no more difficult than converting matter to mirror matter,“ Charles said. ”But we can’t do it remotely. We have to be sitting on the object to be moved.“

“Can you do it?”

“Yes,” he answered, his tone sharp in response to my own.

“You could move Phobos.”

“We could move Mars, if you tell us to,” Charles said, and his look was a challenge.

What the Olympians had told me filtered down to my mental basement slowly during the next week, fed along the way by a constant stream of facts and interpretations provided by or encouraged by the enhancement. I began to understand — while distracted by official duties — all that the group’s discoveries implied, the certainties, the probabilities, the possibilities… the improbabilities.

Nothing seemed impossible.

At night, lying alone or on one occasion that week, lying beside Ilya after making love, I thought of a thousand things I wanted to say to Charles. First came angry statements of betrayal similar to what I had expressed before — Why now, why me? Why all this responsibility?

Then came horrible speculations. How would Earth react if it knew that Mars had advanced so far? Charles, you can drop moons on Earth. We can. Goofy immature unstable Mars. They don’t trust us. If they know — if they learn — they’ll try to stop us. They may not even try to negotiate. They can’t afford to be cautious and await our political maturity.

All of these possibilities had existed before, when only the matter/mirror matter discovery had played into the political equations. But now, the pressure became so much greater. Impossible pressure, impossible forces building to a head.

The plans for the election proceeded. The interim government implemented a black budget — funds to be allocated purely at the discretion of the office of the President, hidden from all but a select committee in the legislature, not yet chosen. This was clearly beyond the bounds of the constitution, except in times of emergency — yet no emergency had been declared. I persuaded Ti Sandra of the necessity. From this budget came money to build a larger laboratory in Melas Dorsa, for research on constructing larger versions of tweaker mirror matter drives. Also, we would finance the conversion of a small, decrepit D-class freight vessel seized by the government for unpaid orbital fees.

The vessel became the pet project of the Olympians. They renamed it Mercury. It relied, after all, on the Bell Continuum — the pathways traveled by the messenger reserved for the gods.

When I met with Ti Sandra, four weeks before the election, and we began our campaign, she asked about the Mercury. We took a campaign shuttle from Syria to Icaria for a Grange campaign rally.

“Your friends have a toy,” she said when we had settled into the seats and accepted cups of tea from the arbeiter.

“They do,” I said. “It’s going on a test run soon.”

“And you understand how the toy works,” she said. She had lost weight in the past month, and her face seemed less jovial. Her eyes rarely met mine as we talked.

“Better than I did before,” I said.

“Are you satisfied with the arrangements?” she asked. “I really haven’t had time to look them over myself… I trust you on that.”

“The arrangements are fine.”

“Security?”

“If I’m any judge, it’s adequate.”

Ti Sandra nodded. “When you sent me the new briefing… I wanted to withdraw from the campaign,” she said.

“Me, too,” I said. “I mean, that’s how I felt.”

“But you didn’t.”

I shook my head.

“The awful thing is, I don’t believe any of this, not really. Do you?”

I thought for a moment, to answer with complete honesty. “Yes, I do believe it”

“Then you understand what they’re doing.”

“Much of it,” I said.

“I envy you that much. But I’m not going to get an enhancement, unless you want me to… Do you think I should?”

Knowing Ti Sandra, I saw that an enhancement would endlessly irritate her. She operated less on clearly defined thought and more on instinct. “It isn’t necessary,” I said.

“I’ll lean on you,” she warned me. “You’ll be my walking stick — my cudgel and my shield — if there’s trouble.”

“I understand.”

She looked out the window and for the first time that trip, her face relaxed and she let out a deep sigh. “Jesus, Casseia… We could make Mars a paradise. We could do anything we wanted to make life better, not just for Martians. We could all become gods.”

“We’re still children,” I said.

“That is such a cliche!” she said. “We’ll always be children. There must be civilizations out there so much older and more advanced… They know about these things. They could teach us how to use these tools wisely.”

I shook my head dubiously.

“You don’t believe there are greater civilizations?”

“It’s a nice kind of faith,” I said. A few weeks ago, I might have agreed with her.

“Why faith?” Ti Sandra asked.

“I can’t imagine tens of thousands of civilizations knowing what we know,” I said. “The galaxy would look like a busy highway. In a hundred years, what will we be doing? Moving planets, changing stars?”

Ti Sandra mused for a moment. “So you think we really are alone.”

“It seems likely to me,” I said.

“That’s even more frightening,” she said. “But it means we can’t think of ourselves as children. We’re the best and the brightest.”

“The only,” I added.

She smiled and shook her head. “My dear running mate, you need to cheer me up, not walk over my future grave. What can we talk about that’s cheerful?”

I was about to describe the gardens being installed at Many Hills when she lifted a finger and pulled her slate from her pocket. “First, I wanted to give you some answers about Cailetet. You passed on the news of their claims requests.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve advised that every district deny them. No reason not to make Crown Niger squirm and worry he’s going to be left out.”

“Would we actually isolate them from resources?” I asked.

“You want policy decisions and we’re not even elected?”

“You’ve given it some thought, obviously.”

“Well, flat to the floor, after the elections, when everything stabilizes — and if we’re elected, of course — we treat the dissident BMs as foreign powers with their own territory. The government processes requests from Cailetet and the others, judges on the merits, and considers proper taxes and fees to levy. But no, we won’t cut them off from anything they need.”

“They don’t seem to need any of the claims they’ve requested,” I said.

Ti Sandra closed her eyes again and smiled grimly. ‘The governors don’t need our encouragement to be suspicious.“

“Maybe they’re testing our relations with the governors,” I suggested.

“Crown Niger has better ways of doing that.”

“So we don’t know what he’s really up to,” I said.

“I certainly don’t,” she said.

From my brother I had heard not a whisper for six weeks. To a Martian, raised in the peculiar etiquette of close-knit families and transfers to other BMs, to the mix of family loyalty and business secrets, this was nothing alarming: Cailetet was in dispute with a new and greater kind of family, the government. I didn’t expect Stan to give me substantial help, and the best way to avoid an appearance of impropriety for Stan was silence.

But Stan had not spoken with Father, either. Stan was a very dutiful son, and got along better with Father than I. I knew Stan was healthy, and that no calamity had befallen either him or Jane, but that was all I knew.

The campaign consumed all of my attention now. I lived on the shuttle, or in hastily prepared inns or dorms, surrounded by Point One security and the wits and wizards of Martian politics, our advisors, who were catching on fast.

The head of my personal security detachment was an imposing man named Dandy Breaker. His name suited his physique. Bull shoulders, big thick-fingered hands, close-cut white-blond hair, Dandy seemed out of place in the company of governors and Republic officials. He was nearly always by my side. Fortunately, he and Ilya got along well. Dandy was always ready to ask some question about areology, and Ilya was always ready to answer.

Leander could not grow thinkers fast enough to provide the Republic with replacements for all of our Terrie-grown thinkers. We took the minimal risk, but kept all news of the tweaker projects away from the thinkers.

One of the thinkers — Alice Two, loaned from Majumdar — became our campaign coordinator. Working with Alice again was a pleasure. Ti Sandra and I spent hours talking with her on the endless flights from station to station.

Alice chose our scheduled appearances based on demographics and spot polls. We would drop into a little station at the extreme north, meet with sixty or seventy hard-bitten, dubious, and rather ingrown water harvesters, Ti Sandra would exert her tough yet motherly appeal, and we’d be off in a few hours to skip through half a dozen prosperous lanthanide mines in Amazonis and Arcadia . The toughest sells of the late campaign were the small allied BMs in Terra Sirenum, firmly in the grasp of our chief opponents.

Our opponents ran vigorous and even acerbic campaigns, but Martians were still too polite to be vicious in politics. Still, everyone was reading about the twentieth-century presidential campaigns in the United States of America , before plebiscite voting, and some of our opponents took their lead from masters such as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Personally, I found both Nixon and Johnson tragically revolting, preferring the style of the rough-and-ready candidates of the Economic Union of the Baltics in twenty-one.

The dustbaths of infant Martian politics actually worked in our favor. Opponents tended to eat each other, barely chewing on us because of Ti Sandra’s status as Mother of the Republic; and we emerged from debates and other encounters ranking higher and higher in the spot polls.

The constant travel wore on us. Ti Sandra expressed a wish in private that Charles and his people could reduce the size of objects they could move instantaneously. “I’m large,” she said, “but not that large. And we do need a break…”

The break did not come.

In my few minutes each day of spare time, I found myself working through math texts and vids available through the ex net, and downloading subscription supplements. Alice put together a curriculum to speed up my “absorption” of the enhancement functions, which was moving along quickly enough anyway. What had once seemed tedious and arbitrary to me became a fascinating game, far neater and more challenging than politics. I worked deeper into accepted dataflow theory, the interaction of neural elements, transvection of information to knowledge, and made the crossovers to what Charles and the Olympians had done with physics… in those spare minutes, lapsing into reverie beside Ti Sandra as she slept, watching dark Mars drift below us like some deep blanket beneath the diamond-rich sky. The steady pumping thrum of the shuttle lifters lulled me into a state where I became the numbers and the graphic depictions.

Yet the one thing I could not do was understand in a linear fashion the leap that Charles had made, from dataflow theory to the nature of the Bell Continuum. The more I understood, the more I marveled at what Charles had done. It seemed supernatural.

Given that leap, it became less and less astonishing that we could move worlds and communicate instantly, that a paradigm would die and a new one be born. Descriptor theory blossomed inside me and sent roots into all the imponderables of physics, eliminating the contradictions and infinities of quantum mechanics.

When there was any free time, I visited Ilya. The Cyane Sulci team had finished a larger test dome for the first big experiment with the intact mother cysts. Ilya gave Ti Sandra and me a tour — as he had four other pairs of presidential candidates earlier. “I certainly need to hedge my bets,” he said with a squint in my direction. “Politics is so uncertain.”

Under the five-hectare dome, we watched gray ice dust seep slowly across the landscape, forming powdery puddles around the exposed cysts. Thus far, nothing had been produced but slime and a few embedded silicate shapes like spicules in sponges. But Ilya’s research team was optimistic. From the control room, we watched the team vary the conditions under the dome by degrees and percentages — turning gray ice dust to muddy rain, then to snow, and changing the concentrations of minerals and atmospheric gases.

“We’re aiming for an election day triumph,” Ilya explained to Ti Sandra. “Just to bump your victory off the LitVid banners…”

Ti Sandra nodded with utmost seriousness. “I’d rather be here,” she said.

“Please,” I said to my husband. “No jokes about growing Martian voters.”

“I wasn’t even suggesting…” Ilya said.

Ti Sandra fixed him with wide eyes and prim lips. “Don’t listen to her. Every little bit helps.”

The cysts lay like great rough black eggs in the red sand, linear invaginations banding their dark surfaces, capped by flakes of snow. Shadows from the dome struts waffled the landscape. From all around came the thin, ghostly sounds of the experimental incubation machinery. Old Mars hatching all over, I thought as we prepared to leave. If we get the right combination.

I hugged and kissed Ilya and followed Ti Sandra. Security guards and two armored arbeiters surrounded us in the tunnel to the shuttle terminal.

We weren’t planning to meet again until the eve of the election. I last saw Ilya on the parapet overlooking the terminal, surrounded by our rear contingent of security. He was waving in our general direction and appeared distracted. I felt a burst of warmth for his patience, for his beauty. I remember that we lingered on that kiss, knowing it might be weeks.

My husband of just two years.

My husband.