“She reminds me of Phyllis,” Nadia said. The First Hundred again. . . . “Maybe not. Anyway, isn’t there some sort of penalty we can invoke against frivolous suits and challenges?”

“Court costs, in some cases.”

“See if you can lay that on her then.”

“First let’s see if we can win.”

The meetings went on for another week. Nadia left the talking to Charlotte and Art. She spent the meetings looking out the windows at the canyon below, and in rubbing the stump of her finger, which now had a noticeable new bump on it. So strange; despite paying close attention, she could not recall when the bump had first appeared. It was warm and pink, a delicate pink, like a child’s lips. There seemed to be a bone in the middle of it; she was afraid to squeeze it very hard. Surely lobsters didn’t pinch their returning limbs. All that cell proliferation was disturbing— like a cancer, only controlled, directed— the miracle of DNA’s instructional abilities made manifest. Life itself, flourishing in all its emergent complexity. And a little finger was nothing compared to an eye, or an embryo. It was a strange business.

With that going on, the political meetings looked really dreadful. Nadia walked out of one having heard almost none of it, though she was sure nothing significant had happened, and she went for a long walk, out to an overlook bulging out of the western end of the tent wall. She called Sax. The four travelers were getting closer to Mars; transmission delays were down to a few minutes. Nirgal appeared to be healthy again. He was in good spirits. Michel actually looked more drained than Nirgal; it seemed that the visit to Earth had been hard on him. Nadia held up her finger to the screen to cheer him up, and it worked.

“A pinky, don’t they call it that?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t seem to believe it’s going to work.”

“No. I guess I don’t.”

“We’re in a transitional period, I think,” Michel said. “At our age we can’t really believe that we’re still alive, so we act as if it will end at any minute.”

“Which it could.” Thinking of Simon. Or Tatiana Durova. Or Arkady.

“Of course. But then again it might go on for decades more, or even centuries. After a while we’ll have to start believing in it.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. “You’ll look at your whole hand and then you’ll believe it. And that will be very interesting.”

Nadia wiggled the pink nub at the end of her hand. No fingerprint yet in the fresh translucent skin. No doubt when it came it would be the same fingerprint as the one on the other little finger. Very strange.