All of these possibilities had existed before, when only the matter/mirror matter discovery had played into the political equations. But now, the pressure became so much greater. Impossible pressure, impossible forces building to a head.
The plans for the election proceeded. The interim government implemented a black budget — funds to be allocated purely at the discretion of the office of the President, hidden from all but a select committee in the legislature, not yet chosen. This was clearly beyond the bounds of the constitution, except in times of emergency — yet no emergency had been declared. I persuaded Ti Sandra of the necessity. From this budget came money to build a larger laboratory in Melas Dorsa, for research on constructing larger versions of tweaker mirror matter drives. Also, we would finance the conversion of a small, decrepit D-class freight vessel seized by the government for unpaid orbital fees.
The vessel became the pet project of the Olympians. They renamed it Mercury. It relied, after all, on the Bell Continuum — the pathways traveled by the messenger reserved for the gods.
When I met with Ti Sandra, four weeks before the election, and we began our campaign, she asked about the Mercury. We took a campaign shuttle from Syria to Icaria for a Grange campaign rally.
“Your friends have a toy,” she said when we had settled into the seats and accepted cups of tea from the arbeiter.
“They do,” I said. “It’s going on a test run soon.”
“And you understand how the toy works,” she said. She had lost weight in the past month, and her face seemed less jovial. Her eyes rarely met mine as we talked.
“Better than I did before,” I said.
“Are you satisfied with the arrangements?” she asked. “I really haven’t had time to look them over myself… I trust you on that.”
“The arrangements are fine.”
“Security?”
“If I’m any judge, it’s adequate.”
Ti Sandra nodded. “When you sent me the new briefing… I wanted to withdraw from the campaign,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said. “I mean, that’s how I felt.”
“But you didn’t.”
I shook my head.
“The awful thing is, I don’t believe any of this, not really. Do you?”
I thought for a moment, to answer with complete honesty. “Yes, I do believe it”
“Then you understand what they’re doing.”
“Much of it,” I said.
“I envy you that much. But I’m not going to get an enhancement, unless you want me to… Do you think I should?”
Knowing Ti Sandra, I saw that an enhancement would endlessly irritate her. She operated less on clearly defined thought and more on instinct. “It isn’t necessary,” I said.
“I’ll lean on you,” she warned me. “You’ll be my walking stick — my cudgel and my shield — if there’s trouble.”
“I understand.”
She looked out the window and for the first time that trip, her face relaxed and she let out a deep sigh. “Jesus, Casseia… We could make Mars a paradise. We could do anything we wanted to make life better, not just for Martians. We could all become gods.”
“We’re still children,” I said.
“That is such a cliche!” she said. “We’ll always be children. There must be civilizations out there so much older and more advanced… They know about these things. They could teach us how to use these tools wisely.”
I shook my head dubiously.
“You don’t believe there are greater civilizations?”
“It’s a nice kind of faith,” I said. A few weeks ago, I might have agreed with her.
“Why faith?” Ti Sandra asked.
“I can’t imagine tens of thousands of civilizations knowing what we know,” I said. “The galaxy would look like a busy highway. In a hundred years, what will we be doing? Moving planets, changing stars?”
Ti Sandra mused for a moment. “So you think we really are alone.”
“It seems likely to me,” I said.
“That’s even more frightening,” she said. “But it means we can’t think of ourselves as children. We’re the best and the brightest.”
“The only,” I added.
She smiled and shook her head. “My dear running mate, you need to cheer me up, not walk over my future grave. What can we talk about that’s cheerful?”
I was about to describe the gardens being installed at Many Hills when she lifted a finger and pulled her slate from her pocket. “First, I wanted to give you some answers about Cailetet. You passed on the news of their claims requests.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve advised that every district deny them. No reason not to make Crown Niger squirm and worry he’s going to be left out.”
“Would we actually isolate them from resources?” I asked.
“You want policy decisions and we’re not even elected?”
“You’ve given it some thought, obviously.”
“Well, flat to the floor, after the elections, when everything stabilizes — and if we’re elected, of course — we treat the dissident BMs as foreign powers with their own territory. The government processes requests from Cailetet and the others, judges on the merits, and considers proper taxes and fees to levy. But no, we won’t cut them off from anything they need.”
“They don’t seem to need any of the claims they’ve requested,” I said.
Ti Sandra closed her eyes again and smiled grimly. ‘The governors don’t need our encouragement to be suspicious.“
“Maybe they’re testing our relations with the governors,” I suggested.
“Crown Niger has better ways of doing that.”
“So we don’t know what he’s really up to,” I said.
“I certainly don’t,” she said.
From my brother I had heard not a whisper for six weeks. To a Martian, raised in the peculiar etiquette of close-knit families and transfers to other BMs, to the mix of family loyalty and business secrets, this was nothing alarming: Cailetet was in dispute with a new and greater kind of family, the government. I didn’t expect Stan to give me substantial help, and the best way to avoid an appearance of impropriety for Stan was silence.
But Stan had not spoken with Father, either. Stan was a very dutiful son, and got along better with Father than I. I knew Stan was healthy, and that no calamity had befallen either him or Jane, but that was all I knew.
The campaign consumed all of my attention now. I lived on the shuttle, or in hastily prepared inns or dorms, surrounded by Point One security and the wits and wizards of Martian politics, our advisors, who were catching on fast.
The head of my personal security detachment was an imposing man named Dandy Breaker. His name suited his physique. Bull shoulders, big thick-fingered hands, close-cut white-blond hair, Dandy seemed out of place in the company of governors and Republic officials. He was nearly always by my side. Fortunately, he and Ilya got along well. Dandy was always ready to ask some question about areology, and Ilya was always ready to answer.
Leander could not grow thinkers fast enough to provide the Republic with replacements for all of our Terrie-grown thinkers. We took the minimal risk, but kept all news of the tweaker projects away from the thinkers.
One of the thinkers — Alice Two, loaned from Majumdar — became our campaign coordinator. Working with Alice again was a pleasure. Ti Sandra and I spent hours talking with her on the endless flights from station to station.
Alice chose our scheduled appearances based on demographics and spot polls. We would drop into a little station at the extreme north, meet with sixty or seventy hard-bitten, dubious, and rather ingrown water harvesters, Ti Sandra would exert her tough yet motherly appeal, and we’d be off in a few hours to skip through half a dozen prosperous lanthanide mines in Amazonis and Arcadia . The toughest sells of the late campaign were the small allied BMs in Terra Sirenum, firmly in the grasp of our chief opponents.