“Something like that.”

“What makes you think she would go?”

“She might not. But she might. Michel says she’s trying some new things. And I think Miranda would be interesting to her. A moon knocked apart in an impact, and then reassembled, moon and impactor together. It’s an image I’d . . . like her to see. All that rock, you know. She’s fond of rock.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Russell and Clayborne, the green and the Red, two of the most famous antagonists in all the melodramatic saga of the first years of settlement. Those first years: a situation so claustrophobic Zo shuddered to think of it. Clearly the experience had brecciated the minds of all those who had suffered through it. And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage inflicted later on, as she recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s stories tended to blur together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony, Maya’s betrayals— all the arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so on— such sordid stuff, with scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far as she could tell. As if the old ones had been anaerobic bacteria, living in poison, slowly excreting the necessary conditions for the emergence of a fully oxygenated life.

Except perhaps for Ann Clayborne, who seemed, from the stories, to have understood that to feel joy in a rock world, you had to love rock. Zo liked that attitude, and so she said, “Sure, I’ll ask her. Or you should, shouldn’t you? You ask, and tell her I’m agreeable. We can make room in the diplomatic group.”

“It’s a Free Mars group?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

He asked her questions about Jackie’s political ambitions, and she answered when she could, looking down her body and its curves, the hard muscles smoothed by the fat under the skin— hipbones flanking the belly, navel, wiry black pubic hair (she brushed bread crumbs out of it), long powerful thighs. Women’s bodies were much more handsomely proportioned than men’s, Michelangelo had been wrong about that, although his David made a best case for his argument, a flier’s body if ever there was one.

“I wish we could fly back up to the rim,” she said.

“I don’t know how to fly the birdsuits.”

“I could have carried you on my back.”

“Really?”

She glanced at him. Another thirty or thirty-five kilos. . . . “Sure. It would depend on the suit.”

“It’s amazing what those suits can do.”

“It’s not just the suits.”

“No. But we weren’t meant to fly. Heavy bones and all. You know.”

“I do. Certainly the suits are necessary. Just not sufficient.”

“Yes.” He was looking at her body. “It’s interesting how big people are getting.”

“Especially genitals.”

“Do you think so?”

She laughed. “Just teasing.”

“Ah.”

“Although you would think the parts would grow that had increased use, eh?”