"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 invagina-tions 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.
Part Five
2184. M.Y. 60
In the darkened debating chamber, Ti Sandra and her closest opponent, Rafe Olson of Copernicus, stood behind podiums, bathed in golden spots. Ti Sandra looked over the audience warmly, smiling and nodding. The debates were all being held at UMS and broadcast live around Mars. Three million adult Martians watched loyally, an audience one-tenth of one percent that of the most popular freeband LitVid on Earth.
The affairs of Mars were trivial in numbers, yet significant in emotional impact. LitVid signals were already spreading over the ex net, with attached text commentary from across the Triple. The Martian election campaign was big news everywhere, the first test of a world-nation, all else being birth and rehearsal.
I had suffered through debates with my opponents, and done well enough, but Ti Sandra had no equal on Mars. She had grown into her role with such style and grace that I wondered how anyone could replace her. She accepted the pressures flexibly, and blew them away to become even stronger.
Olson was smooth and efficient and knew his stuff; I've often thought he would have made a good President. He might have been smarter than Ti
Sandra. But leadership has never been carried out by brains alone. Olson had at least three enhancements that we knew of, two social and one technical, yet still couldn't match her for instinct and style.
I sat in the front row, Dandy Breaker on my left, the Chancellor of UMS and his wife to my right, one thousand students in ranked tiers behind us. The scene might have been centuries old; very democratic, very human, a contest between the best Mars could offer.
The chancellor, Helmut Frankel, patted my hand and whispered in my ear, "Makes a red rabbit very proud, doesn't it?"
I agreed with a smile. I knew Ilya was watching; I felt that communality and closeness with him. I knew Charles would be watching. Let the games begin.
The UMS thinker, Marshall, installed two years before, projected an image of a proper Martian university professor, male, melanic, perhaps twenty-five years old, distinguished by peppery spots in his hair. The image bowed to the audience, which applauded politely, then to the stage. "President Erzul, Candidate Olson," the thinker began, "I have taken questions posed by citizens of our young Republic, humans and thinkers, and analyzed them carefully to extract those issues which seem of mo
st concern. First, I would like to ask Candidate Olson, how would you shape the policy of the Republic with regard to imports of high application goods such as nano designs?"
Olson did not appear to pause to think. "The Triple must treat Mars as an economic full partner, with no restrictions on any high app goods. While our economic leverage with regard to the major exporter of nano designs, Earth, is not particularly strong, I believe we have moral leverage, as child to the parent world. Why would Earth not treat us as a full partner, with the aim of eventually uniting all the Solar System under a common alliance, sovereign states and worlds recognizing a common goal?"
"Would that common goal be the so-called Push, the move to expand to the stars?"
"In the long run, certainly; I do share with the governments of Earth the belief that frontiers are necessary for growth. But other goals are much more immediate, among them open gateways for all scientific and technological discoveries, to remove the friction of uneven technological advancement."
Olson did not know much if anything about the Olympians, and was almost certainly referring to Mars's complaints against limited access to Earth technology, but for me, the statement carried extra weight.
"President Erzul, your comment on Candidate Olson's answer?"
Ti Sandra placed her hands on the podium, pausing. The silence of several seconds was significant. Politics is showmanship; Ti Sandra would not appear to give predigested answers, or take the question and response quickly and lightly.
"No nation or political body operates out of altruism in the long run, and there is no reason to expect Earth to behave as mother to child. We have our own planetary pride, our own qualities, our own goods and inventions to offer, and these will in time be very significant. We must grow as friendly competitors, and we must earn our place in the Triple, without gifts, without favors. Others may need new frontiers, but Mars is still a frontier in itself. Mars is young but strong. We can grow, and will grow, to our own maturity in our own time."
"But should not the Triple treat us as an equal partner, for the sake of historical ties?" Marshall asked.