She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate her, as it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no idea. She only knew she had gotten his attention at last.

This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation. Despite the great flood, Earth’s nations and metanationals were still incredibly powerful, and in some ways the crisis of the flood had drawn them together, making them even more powerful. So Nadia spoke of the need to compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply contradictory, Ann thought; because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they could not afford to offend, and therefore they must change all Terran social reality.

“But how!” Ann cried. “When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a world! No fulcrum, no lever, no force—”

“It isn’t just Earth,” Nadia replied. “There are going to be other settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the asteroids. We’ve got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re the natural leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all that— a reduction in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.”

“Getting in the way of progress,” Ann said bitterly. “Think what Arkady would have said to that. No, look. We had a chance here to make something different. That was the whole point. We still have that chance. Everything that increases the space within which we can create a new society is a good thing. Everything that reduces our space is a bad thing. Think about it!”

Perhaps they did. But it made no difference. Any number of elements on Earth were sending up their arguments for the cable— arguments, threats, entreaties. They needed help down there. Any help. Art Randolph continued energetically lobbying for the cable on behalf of Praxis, which was looking to Ann like it would become the next transitional authority, metanationalism in its latest manifestation or disguise.

But the natives were being slowly won over by them, intrigued by the possibility of “conquering Earth,” unaware of how impossible this was, incapable of imagining Earth’s vastness and immobility. One could tell them and tell them, but they would never be able to imagine it.

Finally it came time for an informal vote. It was representative voting, they had decided, one vote for each of the signatory groups to the Dorsa Brevia document, one vote also to all the interested parties that had arisen since then— new settlements in the outback, new political parties, associations, labs, companies, guerrilla bands, the several red splinter groups. Before they started some generous naive soul even offered the First Hundred a vote, and everyone there laughed at the idea that the First Hundred might be able to vote the same way on anything. The generous soul, a young woman from Dorsa Brevia, then proposed that each of the First Hundred be given an individual vote, but this was turned down as endangering the tenuous grasp they had on representative governance. It would have made no difference anyway.