“Could be,” Sax said. “But as a starting point.”

“All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,” Jackie said.

It was strange how certain elements of the greens were as obsessed by total independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, “In physics I often bracket the problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they don’t get solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that kind of problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.”

But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about the cable, what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds who had apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring all his suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for General Sax in the postrevolutionary world.

• • •

Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want to go into the town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of Spencer’s from Dawes’s Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built just before the revolt, in anticipation of the freedom from the need for stealth. As the AI pilot floated the big silver-winged craft over the great maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom of the fuselage which had a large clear floor, so that they could look over the arms of their chairs at the view below; in this case, the immense linked network of troughs which was the Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth plateaus that stood between the canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice places to live, somewhat like Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a model town in a glass bottle.

The plane’s crew started talking about Séparation de l’Atmosphère, and Sax listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the revolution’s armaments and with basic materials research, while “Sep” as they called it had dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they still had a healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them functioning was a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of them said. Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.