There were many different kinds of disagreements among the groups there, she told them, but some were basic. There were those for and against terraforming. There were those for and against revolutionary violence. There were those who had gone underground to hold on to cultures under assault, and those who had disappeared in order to create radical new social orders. And it seemed more and more evident to Nadia that there were also significant differences between those who had immigrated from Earth, and those who had been born on Mars.

There were all kinds of disagreements, then, and no obvious alignments to be found among them. One night Michel Duval joined the three of them for a drink, and as Nadia described to him the problem he got out his AI, and began to make diagrams based on what he called the “semantic rectangle.” Using this schema they made a hundred different sketches of the various dichotomies, trying to find a mapping that would help them to understand what alignments and oppositions might exist among them. They made some interesting patterns, but it could not be said that any blinding insights jumped off the screen at them— although one particularly messy semantic rectangle seemed suggestive, at least to Michel: violence and nonviolence, terraforming and antiterraforming formed the initial four corners, and in the secondary combination around this first rectangle he had located Bogdanovists, Reds, Hiroko’s areophany, and the Muslims and other cultural conservatives. But what this combinatoire indicated in terms of action was not clear.

• • •

Nadia began to attend the daily meetings devoted to general questions concerning a possible Martian government. These were just as disorganized as the discussions of revolutionary methods, but less emotional, and often more substantive. They took place every day in a small amphitheater which the Minoans had cut into the side of the tunnel in Malia. From this rising arc of benches the participants looked out over bamboo and pine trees and terra-cotta rooftops all the way up and down the tunnel, from Zakros to Falasarna.

The talks were attended by a somewhat different crowd than the revolutionary debates. A report would come in from the smaller workshops for discussion, and then most of the people who had attended that workshop would join the larger meeting, to see what comments were made on the report. The Swiss had set up workshops for all aspects of politics, economics, and culture generally, and so the general discussions were very wide-ranging indeed.