“Yes,” Tariki said, “but wilderness too is a garden now. A kind of garden. That’s what it means to be what we are.” He shrugged, his forehead wrinkled; he believed the idea was true, but did not seem to like it. “Anyway, ecopoesis is closer to your vision of wilderness than industrial terraforming ever was.”

“Maybe,” Sax said. “Maybe they’re just two stages of a process. Both necessary.”

Tariki nodded, willing to consider it. “And now?”

“It depends on how we want to deal with the possibility of an ice age,” Sax said. “If it’s bad enough, kills off enough plants, then ecopoesis won’t have a chance. The atmosphere could freeze back onto the surface, the whole process crash. Without the mirrors, I’m not confident that the biosphere is robust enough to continue growing. That’s why I want to see those soil labs you have. It may be that industrial work on the atmosphere remains to be done. We’ll have to try some modeling and see.”

Tariki nodded, and Nanao too. Their ecologies were being snowed under, right before their eyes; flakes drifted down through the transient bronze sunlight at this very moment, tumbling in the wind. They were open to suggestion.

Meanwhile, as throughout these drives, their young associates from Da Vinci and Sabishii were running over the massif together, and returning to Sabishii’s mound maze babbling through the night about geomancy and areomancy, ecopoetics, heat exchange, the five elements, greenhouse gases, and so on. A creative ferment that looked to Sax very promising. “Michel should be here,” he said to Nanao. “John should be here. How he would love a group like this.”

And then it occurred to him: “Ann should be here.”

4

So he went back to Pavonis, leaving the group in Sabishii talking things over.

Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people, spurred on by Art Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional congress. Write an at least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then establish the government described.

“Good idea,” Sax said. “Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.”

Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout, others wouldn’t.

He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis— gone, people said, to a Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went there but Reds, they said.

After some thought Sax asked for Steve’s help, and looked up the outpost’s location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and flew north, past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past his old headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.