She laughed, but her eyes kept their calculating look. She took him by the arm, led him back to her entourage like a blind man. Though he knew several of them she made introductions anyway, just to emphasize how much the inner circle of the party had changed since he had left. But of course he could not notice that, and so he was busy being cheerful when the proceedings were interrupted by a great wail. There was a baby among them.

“Ah,” Jackie said, checking her wrist. “She’s hungry. Come meet my daughter.” She walked over to a woman holding a swaddled babe. The girl was a few months old, fat-jowled, darker-skinned than Jackie, her whole face bright with squalling. Jackie took her from the woman and carried her off into an adjacent room.

Nirgal, left standing there, saw Tiu and Rachel and Frantz next to the window. He went over to them, glanced in Jackie’s direction; they rolled their eyes, shrugged. Jackie wasn’t saying who the father was, Rachel said in a quick undertone. It was not unique behavior; many women from Dorsa Brevia had done the same.

The woman who had been holding the girl came out and told Nirgal that Jackie would like to speak with him. He followed the woman into the next room.

The room had a picture window overlooking Nilus Noctis. Jackie was seated in a window seat, nursing the child and looking at the view. The child was hungry; eyes closed, latched on, sucking hard, squeaking. Tiny fists clenched in some kind of arboreal remnant behavior, clutching to branch or fur. That was all culture, right there in that clutch.

Jackie was issuing instructions, to aides both in the room and on her wrist. “No matter what they say in Bern, we need to have the flexibility to dampen the quotas if we need to. The Indians and Chinese will just have to get used to it.”

Some things began to clarify for Nirgal. Jackie was on the executive council, but the council was not particularly powerful. She was also still one of the leaders of the Free Mars party; and although Free Mars might have less influence on the planet, as power shifted out into the tents, in Earth— Mars relations it had the potential to become a determining body. Even if it only coordinated policy, it would gain all the power that a coordinator could command, which was considerable— it was all the power Nirgal had ever had, after all. In many situations such coordination could be the equivalent of making Mars’s Terran policy, as all the local governments attended to their local concerns, and the global legislature was more and more dominated by a Free Mars— led supermajority. And of course there was a sense in which the Earth— Mars relationship had the potential to dwarf everything else. So that Jackie might be on the way to becoming an interplanetary power. . . .