After that, casual conversations with various authorities from the ice Galileans: in cocktail parties after workshops, in bars after the parties, walking in groups along Lake Geneva’s signature lakefront promenade, under the sonolu-minescent streetlights suspended from the tent framework. The delegates from Io, she told these people, are looking into cutting a separate deal on their own. They had the situation with the most potential, when all was said and done; hard ground to stand on, heat, heavy metals; great tourist potential. Zo ventured that they seemed to be willing to use these advantages to strike out on their own, and fractionate the Jovian League.

Ann followed Zo and the others on some of these walks, and Zo let her listen in on a couple of the conversations, curious to see what she would make of them. She followed them down the waterfront promenade, which was set on the low meteor crater rim they had used to contain the lake. The slosh craters here beat any slosh crater on Mars by a long shot; the icy rim of this one was only a few meters higher than the general surface of the moon, forming a round levee from which one could look over the water of the lake, or back onto the grassy streets of the town, or beyond the streets to the rubbly ice plain outside the tent, visibly curving to the nearby horizon. The extreme flatness of the landscape outside the tent gave an indication of its nature— a glacier covering a whole world, ice a thousand kilometers deep, ice which ate every meteor impact and tidal cracking, and quickly flowed back to flatness again.

On the surface of the lake small black waves formed interference patterns on the flat sheet of water, which was white like the lake’s ice bottom, tinted yellow by the great ball of Jupiter looming gibbous overhead, all its bands of creamy yellow and orange visibly swirled at their edges and around the pinprick lanterns.

They passed a line of wooden buildings; the wood came from forested islands, floating around like rafts on the far side of the lake. Streetgrass gleamed greenly, and gardens grew in oversized planter boxes behind the buildings, under long bright lamps. Zo showed a bit of the stick to their companions on the walk, confused functionaries from Ganymede; she reminded them of Mars’s military might, mentioned again that Io was considering defection from their league.

The Ganymedans went off to get dinner, looking dismayed. “So subtle,” Ann remarked when they were out of earshot.

“Now we’re being sarcastic,” Zo said.

“You’re a thug. Put it that way.”

“I will have to enroll in the Red school of diplomatic subtlety. Perhaps arrange for assistants to come along with me and blow up some of their property.”

Ann made a noise between her teeth. She continued down the promenade, and Zo kept up with her.