“Yes.” Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran “fractured societies” that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, Armenia . . . as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit; these had been bloody, bloody lands.

“It seems like political structures can only do so much,” he said.

“True,” Nadia said, “but we don’t have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been marginalized by the terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull even them into the process.”

Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

“You’re happy,” Art said.

She didn’t hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the travelers, she said to Sax, “It was so nice to find that political science had abstracted something useful in all these years.”

Eight minutes later his reply came in. “I never understood why they call it that.”

Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia Cherneshevsky, laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going to pull it off.

5

So he went back to the big table, ready to tackle the next-worst problem. That brought him back to earth again. There were a hundred next-worst problems, all small until you actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In all the squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some areas, in fact, it seemed to be getting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa Brevia document were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and Marina’s eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not something that should be codified in the constitution. Some complained because it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, and people listened. “This new economy that’s being proposed,” he declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, “is a radical and unprecedented intrusion of government into business.”

Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over.