Art came in beaming with the news. “We can begin plumbing,” he said.
• • •
But of course Nadia couldn’t. There were meetings in Sheffield to go back to, decisions to be made, people to be convinced or coerced. Doggedly she did that work, stubbornly doing her duty whether she liked it or not, and as time passed she got better and better at it. She saw how she could subtly pressure other people to get her way; saw how people would do her bidding if she asked or suggested in certain ways. The constant stream of decisions honed some of her views; she found that it helped to have at least some consciously held political principles, rather than judging each case by instinct. It also helped to have reliable allies, on the council and elsewhere, rather than being a supposedly neutral and independent person. And so by degrees she found herself joining the Bogdanovists, who, to her surprise, conformed more closely to her political philosophy than anything else on Mars. Of course her reading of Bogdanovism was relatively simple: things should be just, Arkady had insisted, and everyone free and equal; the past didn’t matter; they needed to invent new forms whenever the old ones looked unfair or impractical, which was often; Mars was the only reality that counted, at least to them. Using these as her guiding principles, she found it easier to make up her mind about things, to see a course and cut for it directly.
Also she became more and more ruthless. From time to time she felt freshly how power could corrupt, felt it as a slight nausea within her. But she was getting habituated. She clashed often with Ariadne, and when she recalled the remorse she had felt after her first wrangle with the young Minoan, it seemed to her ridiculously overfastidious; she was far tougher than that every day now on people who crossed her, she showed the knives in meeting after meeting, in calculated microbursts of brutality that put people in line very effectively indeed. In fact the more she allowed herself to release little outbursts of fury and scorn, the more certainly she could control them and put them to some use. She was a power; and people knew it; and power was corrosive. Power was powerful, in more ways than one. And now Nadia felt very little remorse about that; they deserved a pop on the nose, generally; they had thought they were going to get a harmless old babushka to sit in the big chair while they worked their games on each other, but the big chair was the power seat, and she was damned if she was going to go through all this shit and not use some of that power to try to get what she wanted.
And so less and less often did she feel how ugly it was. Once when she did, after a particularly hard-nosed day, she thumped down in a chair and almost cried, sick with disgust. Only seven months of her three m-years had passed. What would she become by the time her stint was done? Already she was used to power; by then she might even like it.
Art, worried by all this, squinted at her over their breakfast table. “Well,” he said once, after she explained what was bothering her, “power is power.” He was thinking hard. “You’re the first president of Mars. So in a way you define the office. Maybe you should declare you’re only going to work the one month and not the two months, and delegate the two months to your staff. Something like that.”
She stared at him, mouth full of toast.
Later that week she abandoned Sheffield and went south again, joining a caravan of people working their way from crater to crater, installing drainage systems. Every crater had variations, but essentially it was a matter of picking the right angle to emerge from the crater apron, and then setting the robots to work. Von Karman, Du Toit, Schmidt, Agassiz, Heaviside, Bianchini, Lau, Chamberlin, Stoney, Dokuchaev, Trumpler, Keeler, Charlier, Suess . . . they plumbed all of those craters, and many more unnamed ones, although the craters were taking on names even faster than they drilled them: 85 South, Too Dark, Fool’s Hope, Shanghai, Hiroko Slept Here, Fourier, Cole, Proudhon, Bellamy, Hudson, Kaif, 47 Ronin, Makoto, Kino Doku, Ka Ko, Mondragon. The migration from one crater to the next reminded Nadia of her trips around the south polar cap during the underground years; except now everything was out in the open, and through the nearly nightless midsummer days the team luxuriated in the sun, in the glary light off the crater lakes. They traveled across rough frozen bogs brilliant with sunny meltwater and meadow grass, and always of course they crossed the rust-and-black rockscape breaking out into the light, ring after ring, ridge after ridge. They plumbed craters and laid watershed pipes, and attached greenhouse-gas factories to the excavators whenever the rock had any gas feedstocks in it.
But hardly any of that turned out to be work in the sense Nadia meant. She missed the old days. Of course operating a bulldozer had not been hand labor, but one’s touch with the blade had been a very physical skill, and the repeated gearshifts physically taxing; and it was all around a higher level of engagement than this “work,” which consisted of talking to AIs and then walking around and watching humming and buzzing teams of waist-high robot diggers, city-block-sized mobile factory units, tunnel moles with diamond teeth that grew back like sharks’ teeth— everything made of bioceramic/metallic alloys stronger than the elevator cable, all of it out there doing it all by itself. It just wasn’t what she had in mind.