"Why bother?" Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstanding. "They're good designs." It really was irritating; Arkady often took center stage, and people always looked at her as if she were somehow responsible for him, as if it were her job to keep him from pestering them.

"Buildings are the template of a society," Arkady said.

"They're rooms," Sax Russell pointed out.

"But rooms imply the social organization inside them." Arkady looked around, pulling people into the discussion with his gaze. "The arrangement of a building shows what the designer thinks should go on inside. We saw that at the beginning of the voyage, when Russians and Americans were segregated into Torus D and B. We were supposed to remain two entities, you see. It will be same on Mars. Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences. I don't want people in Washington or Moscow saying how I should live my life, I've had enough of that."

"What don't you like about the design of the first shelters?" John asked, looking interested.

"They are rectangular," Arkady said. This got a laugh, but he perservered: "Rectangular, the conventional shape! With work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not part of life. And the living quarters are taken up mostly by private rooms, with hierarchies expressed, in that leaders are assigned larger spaces."

"Isn't that just to facilitate their work?" Sax said.

"No. It isn't really necessary. It's a matter of prestige. A very conventional example of American business thinking, if I may say so."

There was a groan, and Phyllis said, "Do we have to get political, Arkady?"

At the very mention of the word, the cloud of listeners ruptured; Mary Dunkel and a couple of others pushed out and headed for the other end of the room.

"Everything is political," Arkady said at their backs. "Nothing more so than this voyage of ours. We are beginning a new society, how could it help but be political?"

"We're a scientific station," Sax said. "It doesn't necessarily have much politics to it."

"It certainly didn't last time I was there," John said, looking thoughtfully at Arkady.

"It did," Arkady said, "but it was simpler. You were an all-American crew, there on a temporary mission, doing what your superiors told you to do. But now we are an international crew, establishing a permanent colony. It's completely different."

Slowly people were drifting through the air toward the conversation, to hear better what was being said. Rya Jiminez said, "I'm not interested in politics," and Mary Dunkel agreed from the other end of the room: "That's one of the things I'm here to get away from!"

Several Russians replied at once. "That itself is a political position!" and the like. Alex exclaimed, "You Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!"

A couple of Americans tried to protest, but Alex overrode them: "It's true! The whole world has changed in last thirty years, every country looking at its function, making enormous changes to solve problems-all but United States. You have become the most reactionary country in the world."