Nadia blew out her breath in disgust. “Work. We won’t work anything out. Work isn’t the word for it. We will bicker and dicker and argue and natter.” She sighed a big sigh. “It will go on and on. I thought Nirgal being back would help, but it won’t if he doesn’t join in.”

“He doesn’t have a position,” Art said.

“He could if he wanted one, though.”

“True.”

Nadia thought about it, her mind wandering as her spirits dropped. “You know I’ve only gotten through ten months of my term. There’s over two and a half m-years to go.”

“I know.”

“M-years are so damned long.”

“Yes. But the months are short.”

She made a noise at him. Stared out the window of her apartment, down into Pavonis caldera. “The trouble is that work isn’t work anymore. You know, we go out there and join these projects, and the work on them still isn’t work. I mean I never get to go out and do things. I remember when I was young, in Siberia, work was really work.”

“You might be romanticizing that a bit.”

“Yeah, sure, but even on Mars. I remember putting together Underhill. That was really fun. And one day on our trip to the north pole, installing a permafrost gallery. . . .” She sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for work like that again.”

“There’s still a lot of construction going on,” Art pointed out.

“By robots.”

“Maybe you could go back to something more human. Build something yourself. A house in the country, or a development. Or one of the new harbor towns, hand-built to try out different things, designs, methods, whatever. It would slow the construction process down, the GEC would go for that.”

“Maybe. After my term is over, you mean.”

“Or even before. On breaks, like these other trips. They’ve all been analogs to construction, they haven’t been construction itself. Building actual things. You have to try that, then go back and forth between the two.”

“Conflict of interest.”

“Not if it was a public-works project. What about that proposal to build a global capital down at sea level?”

“Hmm,” Nadia said. She got out a map, and they pored over it. At the zero-longitude line, the south shore of the northern sea bent out in a little round peninsula, with a crater bay at its center. It was about halfway between Tharsis and Elysium. “We’ll have to go take a look.”

“Yes. Here, come to bed. We’ll talk about it more later. Right now I have another idea.”

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