June 30, 2131

Eden, Mars

Laura Whiting was a politician and she was doing what politicians were expected to do at times such as these. She was "touring" the area of devastation. Whenever something was devastated — be it by war, by industrial accident, or by acts of divinity — an elected official was expected to tour it, to see the damage firsthand. As to why they needed to perform this tour, as to what possible good was being accomplished with their presence, the answer to that depended upon whom you talked to. Most politicians would answer that they needed an "eyes-on" assessment of the damage in order to help calculate the cost of replacing it. That sounded good on the surface, the sort of thing that played good on Internet, but of course it was not really the reason. There were engineers and insurance claims settlement specialists and hundreds of other people who were much more qualified than a politician to assess damage and calculate cost. Laura — who had the unusual political trait of brutal self-honesty — knew that the real reason was so the politician in question could give the impression that he or she cared about their constituents and their neighborhoods. Such affairs were always rife with Internet cameras. The politician was expected to look properly solemn while viewing the destruction and then give an appropriately moving speech promising aid or an end to the cause or some other such thing.

Laura, though she was only a city council member, was expert in the art and science of politics. She should be. Her father, now retired and living the life of luxury on Earth, had had a long and distinguished elected career that had climaxed with two terms as the Governor of Mars. She had begun to learn politics about the time she had begun to learn to walk. Conventional wisdom among the Martian movers and shakers was that Laura herself would follow in his footsteps by the time she was fifty. Laura was a little more optimistic than that. She hoped to take the oath of high Martian office in ten years; by the time she was forty. But she did not wish this for exactly the same reason everyone thought.