And she was so insistent about this, not scolding like Maya would have but simply adamant, that they had to agree: everything was at least on the table for discussion. Therefore the various blank constitutions made sense, as starting points; and therefore they should get on with it. A vote on it was taken, and the majority agreed to give it a try.

And so there they were, the first hurdle jumped. Everyone had agreed to work according to the same plan. It was amazing, Art thought, zooming from meeting to meeting, filled with admiration for Nadia. She was not your ordinary diplomat, she by no means followed the empty vessel model that Art aspired to; but things got done nevertheless. She had the charisma of the sensible. He hugged her every time he passed her, he kissed the top of her head; he loved her. He ran around with that wealth of good feeling, and dropped in on all the sessions he could, watching to see how he could help keep things going. Often it was just a matter of supplying people with food and drink, so that they could continue through the day without getting irritable.

At all hours the table of tables was crowded; fresh-faced young Valkyries towering over sunbaked old vets; all races, all types; this was Mars, m-year 52, a kind of de facto united nations all on its own. With all the potential fractiousness of that notoriously fractious body; so that sometimes, looking at all their disparate faces and listening to the melange of languages, English augmented by Babel, Art was nearly overwhelmed by their variety. “Ka, Nadia,” he said as they sat eating sandwiches and going over their notes for the day, “we’re trying to write a constitution that every Terran culture could agree to!”

She waved the problem away, swallowed. “About time,” she said.

• • •

Charlotte suggested that the Dorsa Brevia declaration made a logical starting point for discussing the content that would fill the constitutional forms. This suggestion caused more trouble than even the blanks had, for the Reds and several other delegations disliked various points of the old declaration, and they argued that using it was a way of pisting the congress from the start.

“So what?” Nadia said. “We can change every word of it if we want, but we have to start with something.”

This view was popular among most of the old underground groups, many of whom had been at Dorsa Brevia in m-39. The declaration that had resulted remained the underground’s best effort to write down what they had agreed on back when they were out of power, so it made sense to start with it; it gave them some precedent, some historical continuity.