And he had dodged it. Not by much, but he had dodged it. He was alive, he was home! These faces in the train, what did they know? They thought he had been defeated by Earth; but they also thought he was Nirgal the Hero, who had never been defeated before— they thought he was a story, an idea only. They didn’t know about Simon or Jackie or Dao, or Hiroko. They didn’t know anything about him. He was twenty-six m-years old now, a middle-aged man who had suffered all that any middle-aged man might suffer— death of parents, death of love, betrayal of friends, betrayal by friends. These things happen to everyone. But that wasn’t the Nirgal that people wanted.
The train skirted the first curved head walls of the Labyrinth of Night’s sapped canyons, and soon it floated into Cairo’s old station. Nirgal walked out into the tented town, looking around curiously. It had been a metanat stronghold, and he had never been in it before; interesting to see the little old buildings. The physical plant had been damaged by the Red Army in the revolution, and was still marked by broken black walls. People waved at him as he walked down the broad central boulevard to the city offices.
And there she was, in the concourse of the town hall, by the window walls overlooking the U of Nilus Noctis. Nirgal stopped, breath short. She had not yet seen him. Her face was rounder but otherwise she was as tall and sleek as ever, dressed in a green silk blouse and a darker green skirt of some coarser material, her black hair a shiny mane spilling down her back. He could not stop looking at her.
Then she saw him, and flinched ever so slightly. Perhaps the wrist images had not been enough to tell her how much the Terran illness had hurt him. Her hands extended on their own recognizance, and then she followed them, hands still out even while her eyes were calculating, her grimace at his appearance carefully rearranged for the cameras that were always around her. But he loved her for those hands. He could feel the warmth of his face, blushing as they kissed, cheek to cheek like friendly diplomats. Up close she still looked fifteen m-years old, just past the unblemished bloom of youth— at that point that is even more beautiful than youth. People said she had taken the treatment from the age of ten.
“It’s true then,” she said, “Earth almost killed you.”
“A virus, actually.”
She laughed, but her eyes kept their calculating look. She took him by the arm, led him back to her entourage like a blind man. Though he knew several of them she made introductions anyway, just to emphasize how much the inner circle of the party had changed since he had left. But of course he could not notice that, and so he was busy being cheerful when the proceedings were interrupted by a great wail. There was a baby among them.
“Ah,” Jackie said, checking her wrist. “She’s hungry. Come meet my daughter.” She walked over to a woman holding a swaddled babe. The girl was a few months old, fat-jowled, darker-skinned than Jackie, her whole face bright with squalling. Jackie took her from the woman and carried her off into an adjacent room.
Nirgal, left standing there, saw Tiu and Rachel and Frantz next to the window. He went over to them, glanced in Jackie’s direction; they rolled their eyes, shrugged. Jackie wasn’t saying who the father was, Rachel said in a quick undertone. It was not unique behavior; many women from Dorsa Brevia had done the same.
The woman who had been holding the girl came out and told Nirgal that Jackie would like to speak with him. He followed the woman into the next room.
The room had a picture window overlooking Nilus Noctis. Jackie was seated in a window seat, nursing the child and looking at the view. The child was hungry; eyes closed, latched on, sucking hard, squeaking. Tiny fists clenched in some kind of arboreal remnant behavior, clutching to branch or fur. That was all culture, right there in that clutch.
Jackie was issuing instructions, to aides both in the room and on her wrist. “No matter what they say in Bern, we need to have the flexibility to dampen the quotas if we need to. The Indians and Chinese will just have to get used to it.”
Some things began to clarify for Nirgal. Jackie was on the executive council, but the council was not particularly powerful. She was also still one of the leaders of the Free Mars party; and although Free Mars might have less influence on the planet, as power shifted out into the tents, in Earth— Mars relations it had the potential to become a determining body. Even if it only coordinated policy, it would gain all the power that a coordinator could command, which was considerable— it was all the power Nirgal had ever had, after all. In many situations such coordination could be the equivalent of making Mars’s Terran policy, as all the local governments attended to their local concerns, and the global legislature was more and more dominated by a Free Mars— led supermajority. And of course there was a sense in which the Earth— Mars relationship had the potential to dwarf everything else. So that Jackie might be on the way to becoming an interplanetary power. . . .