Independence

The chapter title is a word that belonged to the old century.

The species used *independence* throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries to describe the moment a colony separated itself from its imperial parent and constituted itself as a sovereign nation. The word carried, in those usages, the assumption that the colony and the parent were both nation-states in the inherited Westphalian sense, that the separation was geographic and political, and that the resulting separate entity would take its place in an international system organized around such entities.

The Mars colony's separation from Earth, which the histories now mark by Sable Reyes's speech of October 14, 2066, was not exactly that.