Our opponents ran vigorous and even acerbic campaigns, but Martians were still too polite to be vicious in politics. Still, everyone was reading about the twentieth-century presidential campaigns in the United States of America , before plebiscite voting, and some of our opponents took their lead from masters such as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Personally, I found both Nixon and Johnson tragically revolting, preferring the style of the rough-and-ready candidates of the Economic Union of the Baltics in twenty-one.
The dustbaths of infant Martian politics actually worked in our favor. Opponents tended to eat each other, barely chewing on us because of Ti Sandra’s status as Mother of the Republic; and we emerged from debates and other encounters ranking higher and higher in the spot polls.
The constant travel wore on us. Ti Sandra expressed a wish in private that Charles and his people could reduce the size of objects they could move instantaneously. “I’m large,” she said, “but not that large. And we do need a break…”
The break did not come.
In my few minutes each day of spare time, I found myself working through math texts and vids available through the ex net, and downloading subscription supplements. Alice put together a curriculum to speed up my “absorption” of the enhancement functions, which was moving along quickly enough anyway. What had once seemed tedious and arbitrary to me became a fascinating game, far neater and more challenging than politics. I worked deeper into accepted dataflow theory, the interaction of neural elements, transvection of information to knowledge, and made the crossovers to what Charles and the Olympians had done with physics… in those spare minutes, lapsing into reverie beside Ti Sandra as she slept, watching dark Mars drift below us like some deep blanket beneath the diamond-rich sky. The steady pumping thrum of the shuttle lifters lulled me into a state where I became the numbers and the graphic depictions.
Yet the one thing I could not do was understand in a linear fashion the leap that Charles had made, from dataflow theory to the nature of the Bell Continuum. The more I understood, the more I marveled at what Charles had done. It seemed supernatural.
Given that leap, it became less and less astonishing that we could move worlds and communicate instantly, that a paradigm would die and a new one be born. Descriptor theory blossomed inside me and sent roots into all the imponderables of physics, eliminating the contradictions and infinities of quantum mechanics.
When there was any free time, I visited Ilya. The Cyane Sulci team had finished a larger test dome for the first big experiment with the intact mother cysts. Ilya gave Ti Sandra and me a tour — as he had four other pairs of presidential candidates earlier. “I certainly need to hedge my bets,” he said with a squint in my direction. “Politics is so uncertain.”
Under the five-hectare dome, we watched gray ice dust seep slowly across the landscape, forming powdery puddles around the exposed cysts. Thus far, nothing had been produced but slime and a few embedded silicate shapes like spicules in sponges. But Ilya’s research team was optimistic. From the control room, we watched the team vary the conditions under the dome by degrees and percentages — turning gray ice dust to muddy rain, then to snow, and changing the concentrations of minerals and atmospheric gases.
“We’re aiming for an election day triumph,” Ilya explained to Ti Sandra. “Just to bump your victory off the LitVid banners…”
Ti Sandra nodded with utmost seriousness. “I’d rather be here,” she said.
“Please,” I said to my husband. “No jokes about growing Martian voters.”
“I wasn’t even suggesting…” Ilya said.
Ti Sandra fixed him with wide eyes and prim lips. “Don’t listen to her. Every little bit helps.”
The cysts lay like great rough black eggs in the red sand, linear invaginations banding their dark surfaces, capped by flakes of snow. Shadows from the dome struts waffled the landscape. From all around came the thin, ghostly sounds of the experimental incubation machinery. Old Mars hatching all over, I thought as we prepared to leave. If we get the right combination.
I hugged and kissed Ilya and followed Ti Sandra. Security guards and two armored arbeiters surrounded us in the tunnel to the shuttle terminal.
We weren’t planning to meet again until the eve of the election. I last saw Ilya on the parapet overlooking the terminal, surrounded by our rear contingent of security. He was waving in our general direction and appeared distracted. I felt a burst of warmth for his patience, for his beauty. I remember that we lingered on that kiss, knowing it might be weeks.
My husband of just two years.
My husband.
Part Five
In the darkened debating chamber, Ti Sandra and her closest opponent, Rafe Olson of Copernicus, stood behind podi-ums, bathed in golden spots. Ti Sandra looked over the audience warmly, smiling and nodding. The debates were all being held at UMS and broadcast live around Mars. Three million adult Martians watched loyally, an audience one-tenth of one percent that of the most popular freeband LitVid on Earth.
The affairs of Mars were trivial in numbers, yet significant in emotional impact. LitVid signals were already spreading over the ex net, with attached text commentary from across the Triple. The Martian election campaign was big news everywhere, the first test of a world-nation, all else being birth and rehearsal.
I had suffered through debates with my opponents, and done well enough, but Ti Sandra had no equal on Mars. She had grown into her role with such style and grace that I wondered how anyone could replace her. She accepted the pressures flexibly, and blew them away to become even stronger.
Olson was smooth and efficient and knew his stuff; I’ve often thought he would have made a good President. He might have been smarter than Ti Sandra. But leadership has never been carried out by brains alone. Olson had at least three enhancements that we knew of, two social and one technical, yet still couldn’t match her for instinct and style.
I sat in the front row, Dandy Breaker on my left, the Chancellor of UMS and his wife to my right, one thousand students in ranked tiers behind us. The scene might have been centuries old; very democratic, very human, a contest between the best Mars could offer.
The chancellor, Helmut Frankel, patted my hand and whispered in my ear, “Makes a red rabbit very proud, doesn’t it?”
I agreed with a smile. I knew Ilya was watching; I felt that communality and closeness with him. I knew Charles would be watching. Let the games begin.
The UMS thinker, Marshall, installed two years before, projected an image of a proper Martian university professor, male, melanic, perhaps twenty-five years old, distinguished by peppery spots in his hair. The image bowed to the audience, which applauded politely, then to the stage. “President Erzul, Candidate Olson,” the thinker began, “I have taken questions posed by citizens of our young Republic, humans and thinkers, and analyzed them carefully to extract those issues which seem of most concern. First, I would like to ask Candidate Olson, how would you shape the policy of the Republic with regard to imports of high application goods such as nano designs?”
Olson did not appear to pause to think. ‘The Triple must treat Mars as an economic full partner, with no restrictions on any high app goods. While our economic leverage with regard to the major exporter of nano designs, Earth, is not particularly strong, I believe we have moral leverage, as child to the parent world. Why would Earth not treat us as a full partner, with the aim of eventually uniting all the Solar System under a common alliance, sovereign states and worlds recognizing a common goal?“
“Would that common goal be the so-called Push, the move to expand to the stars?”