“Speaking of global versus local,” Irishka said, “what about the land outside the tents and covered canyons?” She was emerging as the leading Red remaining on Pavonis, a moderate who could speak for almost all wings of the Red movement, therefore becoming quite a power as the weeks passed. “That’s most of the land on Mars, and all we said at Dorsa Brevia is that no individual can own it, that we are all stewards of it together. That’s good as far as it goes, but as the population rises and new towns are built, it’s going to be more and more of a problem figuring out who controls it.”

Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome. Recently he had made a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to attacking what he and Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they were facing, and so in theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes they were just too hard.

As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the global-local problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent. Still, as it was probably the worst outstanding problem. . . .

4

Art went to the Reds. The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, one of Nirgal and Jackie’s crèche mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their rover camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he was now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big empty vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.

The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the caldera. They sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments, in the glare of a late-afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant silhouetted country of the caldera.

“So what would you like to see in this constitution?” Art said.

He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each other, somewhat taken aback. “Ideally,” Marion said after a while, “we’d like to be living on the primal planet, in caves and cliff dwellings, or excavated crater rings. No big cities, no terraforming.”

“You’d have to stay suited all the time.”

“That’s right. We don’t mind that.”

“Well.” Art thought it over. “Okay, but let’s start from now. Given the situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?”

“No further terraforming.”

“The cable gone, and no more immigration.”

“In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.”

They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his consternation show.

He said, “Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this point?”