“Is that an official Praxis position?”
“Why yes, I’m sure it could be. Praxis adviser to the Martian president? You bet.”
So possibly she could make him do it.
She heaved a big sigh. Tried to feel less tight in her stomach. She could take the job, and then turn most of the work over to Art, and to whatever staff they gave her. She wouldn’t be the first president to do that, nor the last.
“Praxis adviser to the Martian president,” Art was announcing, looking pleased.
“Oh shut up!” she said.
“Of course.”
He left her alone to get used to it, came back with a steaming pot of kava and two little cups. He poured; she took one from him, and sipped the bitter fluid.
He said, “Anyway I’m yours, Nadia. You know that.”
“Mm-hmm.”
She regarded him as he slurped his kava. He meant it more than politically, she knew. He was fond of her. All that time working together, living together, traveling together; sharing space. And she liked him. A bear of a man, graceful on his feet, full of high spirits. Fond of kava, as was obvious in his slurping, in his squinched face. He had carried the whole congress, she felt, on the strength of those high spirits, spreading like an epidemic — the feeling that there was nothing so fun as writing a constitution — absurd! But it had worked. And during the congress they had become a kind of couple. Yes, she had to admit it.
But she was now 159 years old. Another absurdity, but it was true. And Art was, she wasn’t sure, somewhere in his seventies or eighties, although he looked fifty, as they often did when they got the treatment early. “I’m old enough to be your great-grandmother,” she said.
Art shrugged, embarrassed. He knew what she was talking about. “I’m old enough to be that woman’s great-grandfather,” he said, pointing at a tall native girl passing by their office door. “And she’s old enough to have kids. So, you know. At some point it just doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe not to you.”
“Well, yeah. But that’s half of the opinions that count.”
Nadia said nothing.
“Look,” Art said, “we’re going to live a long time. At some point the numbers have to stop mattering. I mean, I wasn’t with you in the first years, but we’ve been together a long time now, and gone through a lot.”
“I know.” Nadia looked down at the table, remembering some of those times. There was the stump of her long-lost finger. All that life was gone. Now she was president of Mars. “Shit.”
Art slurped his kava, watched her sympathetically. He liked her, she liked him. They were already a kind of couple. “You help me with this damned council stuff!” she said, feeling bleak as all her technofantasies slipped away.
“Oh I will.”
“And then, well. We’ll see.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and smiled.
So there she was, stuck on Pavonis Mons. The new government was assembling up there, moving from the warehouses into Sheffield proper, occupying the blocky polished stone-faced buildings abandoned by the metanats; there was an argument of course over whether they were going to be compensated for these buildings and the rest of their infrastructure, or whether it had all been “globalized” or “co-opted” by independence and the new order. “Compensate them,” Nadia growled at Charlotte, glowering. But it did not appear that the presidency of Mars was the kind of presidency that caused people to jump at her word.
In any case the government was moving in, Sheffield becoming, if not the capital, then at least the temporary seat of the global government. With Burroughs drowned and Sabishii burned, there was no other obvious place to put it, and in truth it didn’t look to Nadia like any of the other tent towns wanted to have it. People spoke of building a new capital city, but that would take time, and meanwhile they had to meet somewhere. So around the piste to Sheffield they retired, inside its tent, under its dark sky. In the shadow of the elevator cable, rising from its eastern neighborhood straight and black, like a flaw in reality.
Nadia found an apartment in the westernmost tent, behind the rim park, up on the fourth floor where she had a fine view down into Pavonis’s awesome caldera. Art took an apartment in the ground floor of the same building, at the back; apparently the caldera gave him vertigo. But there he was, and the Praxis office was in a nearby office building, a cube of polished jasper as big as a city block, lined with chrome blue windows.
Fine. She was there. Time to take a deep breath and do the work asked of her. It was like a bad dream in which the constitutional congress had suddenly been extended for three years, three m-years.
She began with the intention of getting off the mountain occasionally and joining some construction project or other. Of course she would perform her duties on the council, but working on an increase in greenhouse gas output, for instance, looked good, combining as it did technical problems and the politics of conforming to the new environmental regulatory regime. It would get her out into the back country, where a lot of the feedstocks for the greenhouse gases were located. From there she could do her council business over the wrist.
But events conspired to keep her in Sheffield. It was one thing after another — nothing particularly important or interesting, compared to the congress itself, but the details necessary to get things rolling. It was somewhat as Charlotte had said; after the design phase, the endless minutiae of construction. Detail after detail.
She had to expect this, she had to be patient. She would work through the first rush and then get away. In the meantime, along with the start-up process, the media wanted her, the new UN Martian Office wanted her, very interested in the new immigration policies and procedures; the other council members wanted her. Where would the council meet? How often? What were its rules of operation? Nadia convinced the other six councillors to hire Charlotte to be council secretary and protocol chief, and after that Charlotte hired a big crew of assistants from Dorsa Brevia. So they had the start of a staff. And Mikhail also had a great fund of practical experience in government from Bogdanov Vishniac. So there were people better suited than Nadia to do this work; but still she was called in a million times a day to confer, discuss, decide, appoint, adjudicate, arbitrate, administrate. It was endless.
And then when Nadia did clear time for herself, forcibly, it turned out that being president made it very difficult to join any particular project. Everything going on was now part of a tent or a co-op; very often they were commercial enterprises, involved in transactions that were part nonprofit public works, part competitive market. So to have the president of Mars join any given co-op would be a sign of official patronage, and couldn’t be allowed if one wanted to be fair. It was a conflict of interest.
“Shit!” she said to Art, accusingly.
He shrugged, tried to pretend he hadn’t known.
But there was no way out. She was a prisoner of power. She had to study the situation as if it were an engineering problem, like trying to exert force in some difficult medium. Say she wanted to build greenhouse-gas factories. She was constrained from joining any factory co-op in particular. Therefore she had to do it some other way. Emergence at a higher leveclass="underline" she could perhaps coordinate co-ops.
There seemed to her good reasons to promote the building of greenhouse-gas factories. The Year Without Summer had extended to include a series of violent storms that had dropped off the Great Escarpment into the north, and most meteorologists agreed these “Hadley cross-equatorial storms” had been caused by the orbital mirrors’ removal, and the resulting sudden drop in insolation. A full ice age was deemed a distinct possibility; and pumping up greenhouse gases seemed to be one of the best ways to counter it. So Nadia asked Charlotte to initiate a conference to come back with recommendations for forestalling an ice age. Charlotte contacted people in Da Vinci and Sabishii and elsewhere, and soon she had a conference scheduled to take place in Sabishii, named, by some Da Vinci saxaclone no doubt, the “Insolation Loss Effects Abatement Meeting M-53.”