Anyone could be the father— Antar, Dao, Nirgal himself, hell John Boone could be, if any sample of his sperm had happened to be still in storage. That would be like Jackie; except she would have told everyone. She shifted the infant’s head toward her.

“Do you really think it’s all right to raise a fatherless child?”

“That’s how you were raised, right? And I had no mother. We were all one-parent children.”

“But was that good?”

“Who knows?”

There was a look on Jackie’s face that Nirgal could not read, her mouth just slightly tight with resentment, defiance . . . impossible to say. She knew who both her parents were, but only one had stuck around, and Kasei had not been much around at that. And killed in Sheffield, in part because of the brutal response to the Red assault that Jackie herself had advocated.

She said, “You didn’t know about Coyote until you were six or seven, isn’t that right?”

“True, but not right.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t right.” And he looked her in the eye.

But she looked away, down at the baby. “Better than having your parents tearing each other up in front of you.”

“Is that what you would do with the father?”

“Who knows?”

“So it’s safer this way.”

“Maybe it is. Certainly there’s a lot of women doing it this way.”

“In Dorsa Brevia.”

“Everywhere. The biological family isn’t really a Martian institution, is it.”

“I don’t know.” Nirgal considered it. “Actually, I saw a lot of families in the canyons. We come from an unusual group in that respect.”

“In many respects.”

Her child pulled away, and Jackie tucked her breast in her bra and let down her shirt. “Marie?” she called, and her assistant entered. “I think her diaper needs changing.” And she handed the infant up to the woman, who left without a word.

“Servants now?” Nirgal said.

Jackie’s mouth went tight again, and she stood, calling “Mem?”

Another woman came in, and Jackie said, “Mem, we’re going to have to meet with those environmental court people about this Chinese request. It could be that we can use it as leverage to get the Cairo water allotment reconsidered.”

Mem nodded and left the room.

“You just make the decisions?” Nirgal said.

Jackie dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Nice to have you back, Nirgal, but try to catch up, all right?”

• • •