“I think we should make new plans,” he said. “I think we should be making them now. Everything should be redesigned from the beginning, with our own thinking expressed. It should extend everywhere, even to the first shelters we build.”

“Why bother?” Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstanding. “They’re good designs.” It really was irritating; Arkady often took center stage, and people always looked at her as if she were somehow responsible for him, as if it were her job to keep him from pestering them.

“Buildings are the template of a society,” Arkady said.

“They’re rooms,” Sax Russell pointed out.

“But rooms imply the social organization inside them.” Arkady looked around, pulling people into the discussion with his gaze. “The arrangement of a building shows what the designer thinks should go on inside. We saw that at the beginning of the voyage, when Russians and Americans were segregated into Torus D and B. We were supposed to remain two entities, you see. It will be the same on Mars. Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences. I don’t want people in Washington or Moscow saying how I should live my life, I’ve had enough of that.”

“What don’t you like about the design of the first shelters?” John asked, looking interested.

“They are rectangular,” Arkady said. This got a laugh, but he persevered: “Rectangular, the conventional shape! With work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not part of life. And the living quarters are taken up mostly by private rooms, with hierarchies expressed, in that leaders are assigned larger spaces.”

“Isn’t that just to facilitate their work?” Sax said.

“No. It isn’t really necessary. It’s a matter of prestige. A very conventional example of American business thinking, if I may say so.”