It was hard, Nadia thought one night as she shut down her screen, to be faced with all the competing effects of their actions. The environmental issues were so tightly intertwined that it was hard to tease them out and decide what to do. And it was also hard to stay constrained by their own rules; individual organizations could no longer act unilaterally, because so many of their actions had global ramifications. Thus the necessity for environmental regulation, and for the global environmental court, already faced with a caseload running out of control. Eventually it would have to rule on any plans coming out of this conference as well. The days of unconstrained terraforming were gone.

And as a member of the executive council, Nadia was restricted to saying that she thought increased greenhouse gases were a good idea. Other than that she had to stay out, or appear to be impinging on the environmental court’s territory; which Irishka was defending very vigorously. So Nadia spent time visiting on-screen with a group designing new robot miners that would minimally disrupt the surface, or talking to a group working on dust fixatives that might be sprayed or grown over the surface, “thin fast pavements” as they called them; but they were proving to be a knotty problem.

• • •

And that was the extent of Nadia’s participation in the Sabishii conference that she herself had initiated. And since all its technical problems were enmeshed in political considerations anyway, it might have been said that she hadn’t missed it at all. Not a bit of real work had been done there, by her or anyone else. Meanwhile, back in Sheffield, the council was facing any number of problems of its own: unforeseen difficulties in instituting the eco-economy; complaints that the GEC was overstepping its authority; complaints about the new police, and the criminal justice system; unruly and stupid behavior in both houses of the legislature; Red and other types of resistance in the outback; and so on. The issues were endless, and spanned the gamut from the profoundly important to the incredibly petty, until Nadia began to lose all sense of where on that continuum any individual problem lay.