His face took on the puzzled expression it wore when he was thinking hard. It was considerably longer than the transmission delay before he replied: “Many things. It’s a complicated word. But— I mean— I want to maintain the primal landscape, as much as possible.”

Nadia could censor out her laughter at this; but still Sax said, “What do you find amusing?”

“Oh nothing. It’s just you sound like, I don’t know, like some of the Reds. Or the people in Christianopolis, they’re not Reds, but they said almost the same thing to me, last week. They want to keep the primal landscape of the far south preserved. I’ve helped them to set up a conference to talk about southern watersheds.”

“I thought you were working on greenhouse gases?”

“They won’t let me work, I have to be president. But I am going to go to this conference.”

“Good idea.”

• • •

The Japanese settlers in Messhi Hoko (which meant “self-sacrifice for the sake of the group”) came to the council to demand that more land and water be dedicated to their tent high on south Tharsis. Nadia walked out on them, and flew with Art down to Christianopolis, in the far south.

The little town (and it seemed very little after Sheffield and Cairo) was set in Phillips Rim Crater Four, at latitude sixty-seven degrees south. During the Year Without Summer the far south had experienced many severe storms, dropping about four meters of new snow, an unprecedented amount; the previous record for a year had been less than one. Now it was Ls 281, just after perihelion, and high summer in the south. And the various abatement strategies for avoiding an ice age seemed to be working well; most of the new snow had melted in a hot spring, and now there were round lakes on every crater floor. The pond in the center of Christianopolis was about three meters deep, and three hundred meters across; this was fine with the Christians, as it gave them a nice park pond. But if the same thing happened every winter— and the meteorologists believed that the coming winters would drop even more snow, and the coming summers get ever warmer— then their town would quickly be inundated by snowmelt, and Phillips Rim Crater Four become a lake full to the brim. And this was true for craters all over Mars.

The conference in Christianopolis had been convened to discuss strategies to deal with this situation. Nadia had done what she could to get influential people down to it, including meteorologists, hydrologists, and engineers, and the possibility of Sax, whose return was imminent. The problem of crater flooding was to be only the initial point of discussion for the whole question of watersheds, and the planetary hydrological cycle itself.