Catch up. Free Mars was now a political party, the biggest on Mars. It had not always been that way; it had begun as something more like a network of friends, or the part of the underground that lived in the demimonde. Mostly ex-students of the university in Sabishii, or, later, the members of a very loose association of communities in the tented canyons, and in clandestine clubs in the cities, and so forth. A kind of vague umbrella term for those sympathetic to the underground, but not followers of any more specific political movement or philosophy. Just something they said, in fact—”free Mars.”

In many ways it had been Nirgal’s creation. So many of the natives had been interested in autonomy, and the various issei parties, based on the thoughts of one early settler or another, did not appeal to them; they had wanted something new. And so Nirgal had traveled around the planet, and stayed with people who organized meetings or discussions, and this had gone on for so long that eventually people wanted a name. People wanted names for things.

And so, Free Mars. And in the revolution it had become a rallying point for the natives, rising up out of society as a kind of emergent phenomenon, with many more people declaring themselves members than one would have guessed possible. Millions. The native majority. The very definition of the revolution, in fact; the main reason for its success. Free Mars as a sentence, an imperative; and they had done it.