A test; exactly the kind of thing for which Nadia had lost all patience. So she crossed the city in a foul mood. No doubt it did not help that the awful days of ‘61 were called back so vividly to mind by the plaza, the boulevards, the city wall at the canyon rim, all just as they had been back then. They said one’s memory was weakest from one’s middle years, but she would have lost those memories happily if she could have; fear and rage, however, seemed to function as some kind of nightmare fixative. For it was all still there— Frank tapping madly away at his monitors, Sasha eating pizza, Maya shouting angrily at something or other, the fraught hours of waiting to see if they would be passed over by the falling pieces of Phobos. Seeing Sasha’s body, bloody at the ears. Clicking over the transmitter that had brought Phobos down.

• • •

Thus it was very hard to keep her irritation in check as she went into the first meeting with the Cairenes, and found Jackie there among them, supporting their position. Jackie was pregnant now as well, and had been for some time; she was flushed, glossy, beautiful. No one knew who the father was, it was something she was doing on her own. A Dorsa Brevia tradition, by way of Hiroko— and just one more irritant to Nadia.

The meeting took place in a building next to the city wall, overlooking the U-shaped canyon below, called Nilus Noctis. The water in dispute was actually visible downcanyon, a broad ice-sheeted reservoir stopped by a dam not visible from up here, stopped just before the Illyrian Gate and the new chaos of the Compton Break.

Charlotte stood with her back to the window, asking the Cairene officials just the questions Nadia would have asked, but without the slightest trace of Nadia’s annoyance. “You will always be in a tent. Opportunities for growth will be limited. Why flood Marineris when you won’t benefit from it?”

No one seemed to care to answer this. Finally Jackie said, “The people living down there will benefit, and they’re part of greater Cairo. Water in any form is a resource at these altitudes.”

“Water running freely down Marineris is no resource at all,” Charlotte said.

The Cairenes argued for the utility of water in Marineris. There were also representatives of the downstream settlers, many of them Egyptians, claiming that they had been in Marineris for generations, that it was their right to live there, that it was the best farming land on Mars, that they would fight before they would leave, and so on. Sometimes the Cairenes and Jackie seemed to be defending these neighbors, at other times their own right to use Marineris as a reservoir. Mostly they seemed to be defending their right to do whatever they wanted. Slowly Nadia got angrier and angrier.