Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and she shook her head so violently that her cropped gray locks flew out like a clown’s ruff. She was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good reason at all, and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said curtly, “We need the elevator. It’s our conduit to Terra just as much as it’s their conduit to Mars.”

“But we don’t need a conduit to Terra,” Ann said. “It’s not a physical relationship for us, don’t you see? I’m not saying we don’t need to have an influence on Terra, I’m not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we need to try to work on them. But it’s not a physical thing, don’t you see? It’s a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It’s an information exchange. At least it is when it’s going right. It’s when it gets into a physical thing— a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police control— that’s when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took it down we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not yours.”

It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn’t imagine.

Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic-table style said, “If we can bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down,” blinking and everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again— Saxifrage Russell his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words’ inadequacy right in her mouth.

Still she tried. “People act on what’s there, Sax. The metanat directors and the UN and the governments will look up and see what’s there, and act accordingly. If the cable’s gone they just don’t have the resources or the time to mess with us right now. If the cable’s here, then they’ll want us. They’ll think, well, we could do it. And there’ll be people screaming to try.”

“They can always come. The cable is only a fuel saver.”

“A fuel saver which makes mass transfers possible.”

But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about control of orbit and safe-conduct passes and the like.

The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said, “We’ve promised to . . . help them out.”

“By sending them more metals?” Ann said. “Do they really need those?”

“We could . . . take people. It might help.”

Ann shook her head. “We could never take enough.”

He frowned. Nadia saw they weren’t listening to her, returned to the table. Sax and Ann fell into silence.

Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. But that had been so long ago she couldn’t even remember when exactly it was. In Antarctica? Somewhere. But not on Mars.