They talked about the natives then, easily and without hidden tension. About Zo; about the ferals and their strange hunter-gatherer city-shopper lifestyle; about the ag nomads, moving from crop to crop like migrant laborers who owned the farms; about the cross-fertilization of all these styles; about the new Terran settlements elbowing into the landscape; about the increasing number of harbor towns. Off in the middle of the bay, they spotted one of the new big townships, a floating island of a seacraft, with a population in the thousands; it was too big to enter the Oxia archipelago, and looked to be headed across the gulf to Nilokeras, or down to the southern fjords. As the land all over Mars was becoming more crowded, and the possibility of settling on it more and more restricted by the courts, more and more people were moving onto the North Sea, making townships like these their permanent home.

“Let’s go visit it,” Ann said. “Can we?”

“I don’t see why not,” Sax said, surprised at the request. “We can certainly catch it.”

He brought the catamaran about and tacked south and west toward the township, pushing the cat as much as he could, to impress the seafarers. In less than an hour they had reached its broad side, a rounded scarp about two kilometers long and fifty meters tall. A dock just above the waterline had a section against the township that would rise, as an open elevator, and when they had stepped across from the cat to the dock and tied their boat on, they got into this railed-off section and were lifted up to the deck of the township.

The deck was almost as broad as it was long, its central area a farm with many small trees scattered on it, so it was hard to see the other side. But it was clear from what they could see that the circumference of the deck was a kind of rectangular street or arcade, with buildings on both sides that were two to four stories high, the outer buildings topped by masts and windmills, the inner ones opening into broad breaks where parks and plazas led inward to the crops and groves of the farm, and a big freshwater pond. A floating town, somewhat like a walled city in Renaissance Tuscany in appearance, except that everything was extraordinarily neat and orderly, shipshape as one might say. A small group of the ship’s citizens greeted them on the plaza overlooking the dock, and when they found out who their visitors were they were thrilled— they insisted the travelers stay for a meal, and a few of them guided them on a walk around the perimeter of the ship, “or for as far as you care to go, it’s a good fair walk.”