The global government as they had designed it was to be a confederation, led by an executive council of seven members, elected by a two-housed legislature. One legislative branch, the duma, was composed of a large group of representatives drafted from the populace; the other, the senate, a smaller group elected one from each town or village group larger than five hundred people. The legislature was all in all fairly weak; it elected the executive council and helped select justices of the courts, and left to the towns most legislative duties. The judicial branch was more powerful; it included not only criminal courts, but also a kind of double supreme court, one half a constitutional court, and the other half an environmental court, with members to both appointed, elected, and drawn by lottery. The environmental court would rule on disputes concerning terraforming and other environmental changes, while the constitutional court would rule on the constitutionality of all other issues, including challenged town laws. One arm of the environmental court would be a land commission, charged with overseeing the stewardship of the land, which was to belong to all Martians together, in keeping with point three of the Dorsa Brevia agreement; there would not be private property as such, but there would be various tenure rights established in leasing contracts, and the land commission was to work these matters out. A corresponding economic commission would function under the constitutional court, and would be partly composed of representatives from guild cooperatives which would be established for the various professions and industries. This commission was to oversee the establishment of a version of the underground’s eco-economics, including both not-for-profit enterprises concentrating on the public sphere, and taxed for-profit enterprises which had legal size limits, and were by law employee-owned.

This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for a strong global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was also a response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the previous century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or otherwise collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held firm, issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the land, in a mostly ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the metanats’ depredations; a moral force, which if it had had more teeth, might have done more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle fought, and now they remembered.