Nirgal’s attention returned to the baby at her breast. The princess of Mars. “Have a seat,” Jackie said, indicating the bench beside her with her head. “You look tired.”

“I’m fine,” Nirgal said, but sat. Jackie looked up at one of the aides and jerked her head to the side, and very soon they were alone in the room with the infant.

“The Chinese and Indians are thinking of this as empty new land,” Jackie said. “You can see it in everything they say. They’re too damned friendly.”

“Maybe they like us,” Nirgal said. Jackie smiled, but he went on: “We helped them get the metanats off their backs. And they can’t be thinking of moving their excess population here. There’s just too many of them for emigration to make any difference.”

“Maybe so, but they can dream. And with space elevators they can send a steady stream. It adds up quicker than you would think.”

Nirgal shook his head. “It’ll never be enough.”

“How do you know? You didn’t go to either place.”

“A billion is a big number, Jackie. Too big a number for us to properly imagine. And Earth has got seventeen billion. They can’t send a significant fraction of that number here, there aren’t the shuttles to do it.”

“They might try anyway. The Chinese flooded Tibet with Han Chinese, and it didn’t do a thing to relieve their population problems, but they kept doing it anyway.”

Nirgal shrugged. “Tibet is right there. We’ll keep our distance.”

“Yes,” Jackie said impatiently, “but that’s not going to be easy when there is no we. If they go out to Margaritifer, and cut a deal with the Arab caravans out there, who’s going to stop it from happening?”

“The environmental courts?”

Jackie blew air between her lips, and the baby pulled off and whimpered. Jackie shifted the infant to the other breast. Blue-veined olive curve. “Antar doesn’t think the environmental courts will be able to function for long. We had a fight with them while you were gone, and we only went along with them to give the process a chance, but they made no sense and they had no teeth. And everything everyone does has an environmental impact, so supposedly they should be judging everything. But tents are coming down in the lower elevations and not one in a hundred is going to the courts to ask permission for what they do once their town is part of the outside. Why should they? Everyone is an ecopoet now. No. The court system isn’t going to work.”

“You can’t be sure,” Nirgal said. “So is Antar the father, then?”

Jackie shrugged.