Red Mars – Mars 1
Kim Stanley Robinson
1992
Part One
Festival Night
Mars was empty before we camThe.at's not to say that nothing had ever happeTnhede. planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological fecartautreers,
canyons, volcanoes.But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobseTrvheedre.
were
no witnesses-except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.
Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed dirIet cstieoenm. ed to be
saying something with all thaSto.
perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a
peculiar weight on the tongue-NirgaMl,angala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis- they sound as if they were even
older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before. Yes, for thou sands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a
dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.
Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons paNssoedi.mprovement in the
technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave

Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold othffe final deadly encroachment of the desert.
It was a great storByu. t then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything chaOnguerd. knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had beforeA. nd there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.
It seemed, however, to be a world withoutPeliofep.le searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien viAsitsoryso. u know, no evidence
for any of these has ever been fouAnndd.
so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in
Lowell's time, or in Homer's, or in the caves or on the savannah-stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of tAhendeyael.l of these tales are told in
an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it tBoecliafeu.se we are still those animals who survived the Ice
Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told AstonrdieMs. ars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning-a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.
And so we came heIrte.had been a power; now it became a place.
-+=*=+-
". . . And so we came hBeuret . what they didn't realize was that by the time we got to Mars, we would be so changed by the voyage out that nothing we had been told to do mattered Iatnwymasonr'et . like submarining or settling the Wild West-it was an entirely new experience, and as the flight of the Ares went on, the Earth finally became so distant that it was nothing but a blue star among all the others, its voices so delayed that they seemed to come from a previous ceWnteuryw.ere on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings."
All lies, Frank Chalmers thought irritabHlye.
was sitting in a row of dignitaries, watching his old friend
John Boone give the usual Boone Inspirational AddrIetssm. ade Chalmers wearyT.he truth was, the trip to Mars had been the functional equivalent of a long trainNoritdeo.nly had they not become fundamentally different beings, they had actually become more like themselves than ever, stripped of habits until they were left with nothing but the naked raw material of theirBsuetlvJeosh. n stood up there waving a forefinger at the crowd, say"inWge came here to make something new, and when we arrived our earthly differences fell away, irrelevant in this new woYrlde!s", he meant it all literalHlyi.s vision of
Mars was a lens that distorted everything he saw, a kind of religion.
Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the newThecyityw. ere going to call it Nicosia.
It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis LabyrinthTuhs.is location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant
western horizon punctuated by the broad peak of Pavonis MFors.the Mars veterans in the crowd it was giddy stufft:hey were on the surface, they were out of the trenches and mesas and craters, they could see forever!Hurrah!
A laugh from the audience drew Frank's attention back to his oldJofhrinenBd.oone had a slightly
hoarse voice, and a friendly Midwestern accent, and he was by turns (and somehow even all at once)

relaxed, intense, sincere, self-mocking, modest, confident, serious, and fuInnnys.hort, the perfect public speaker. And the audience was rapt; this was the First Man On Mars speaking to them, and judging by the looks on their faces they might as well have been watching Jesus produce their evening meal out of the loaves and fishesA. nd in fact John almost deserved their adoration, for performing a similar miracle
on another plane, transforming their tin can existence into an astounding spiritual v"oOynagMe. ars we will come to care for each other more than ever before," Johwn hsiacihd,really meant, Chalmers
thought, an alarming incidence of the kind of behavior seen in rat overpopulation experiments; "Mars is a sublime, exotic and dangerous place," said John-meaning a frozen ball of oxidized rock on which they were exposed to about fifteen rem a y"eAarn;d with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a
new social order and the next step in the human story"-i.e. the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.
John finished with this flourish, and there was, of course, a huge roar of aMppalyaauseT.oitovna then went to the podium to introduce ChalmeFrrsa.nk gave her a private look which meant he was in no
mood for any of her jokes; she saw it and said, "Our next speaker has been the fuel in our little rocket ship," which somehow got a laug"hH.is vision and energy are what got us to Mars in the first place, so
save any complaints you may have for our next speaker, my old friend Frank Chalmers."
At the podium he found himself surprised by how big the town apIpt ecaorevde.red a long triangle, and they were gathered at its highest point, a park occupying the westernSeavpeenx.paths rayed down through the park to become wide, tree-lined, grassy boulevaBredtsw. een the boulevards stood low trapezoidal buildings, each faced with polished stone of a different Tcohleors.ize and architecture of the
buildings gave things a faintly Parisian look, Paris as seen by a drunk Fauvist in spring, sidewalk cafés and all. Four or five kilometers downslope the end of the city was marked by three slender skyscrapers, beyond which lay the low greenery of the fTarhme. skyscrapers were part of the tent framework, which
overhead was an arched network of sky-colored linTehse.
tent fabric itself was invisible, and so taken all
in all, it appeared that they stood in the opeTnhatr.was goldN.
icosia was going to be a popular city.
Chalmers said as much to the audience, and enthusiastically they aAgrpepeadr.ently he had the crowd, fickle souls that they were, about as securely as JCohhanl.mers was bulky and dark, and he knew he presented quite a contrast to John's blond good looks; but he knew as well that he had his own rough charisma, and as he warmed up he drew on it, falling into a selection of his own stock phrases.
Then a shaft of sunlight lanced down between the clouds, striking the upturned faces of the crowd, and he felt an odd tightening in his stomaScoh.many people there, so many strangePrse!ople in the mass
were a frightening thing-all those wet ceramic eyes encased in pink blobs, looking at him. . . it was nearly too much.Five thousand people in a single Martian towAnft.er all the years in Underhill it was hard to
grasp.
Foolishly he tried to tell the audience something of"Ltohoisk. ing," he said". Looking around... the strangeness of our presence here is...... accentuated."
He was losing the crowHdo. w to say itH? ow to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alive,
their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the liHghotw?
to say that even if living creatures were no more
than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still, somehow, better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?
Of course he could never sayNoitt. at any time, perhaps, and certainly not in a spSeoeche.
collected
himself. "In the martian desolation," he said, "the human presence is, well, a remarkable thing" (they would care for each other more than ever before, a voice in his mind repeated sardo"Tnihceallpyl)a.net,
taken in itself, is a dead frozen nightmare" (therefore exotic and sublime), "and so thrown on our own, we

of necessity are in the process of... reorganizing a bit" (or forming a new social order)-so that yes, yes, yes, he found himself proclaiminegxactly the same lies they had just heard from John!
Thus at the end of his speech he too got a big roar of aIrprpitlaatuesde,. he announced it was time to eat, depriving Maya of her chance for a final remAaltrhko. ugh probably she had known he would do that and so hadn't bothered to think of Farnayn.k Chalmers liked to have the last word.
# # #
People crowded onto the temporary platform to mingle with the celebItritwieass.
rare to get this many
of the first hundred in one spot anymore, and people crowded around John and Maya, Samantha Hoyle, Sax Russell and Chalmers.
Frank looked over the crowd at John and MHaeyad.idn't recognize the group of Terrans surrounding them, which made him curiouHs.e made his way across the platform, and as he approached he saw Maya and John give each other a lo"oTkh.ere's no reason this place shouldn't function under normal law," one of the Terrans was saying.
Maya said to him, "Did Olympus Mons really remind you of Mauna Loa?" "Sure," the man sai"dS. hield volcanoes all look alike."
Frank stared over this idiot's head at MSahyea. didn't acknowledge the looJko. hn was pretending not
to have noticed Frank's arrivaSl.amantha Hoyle was speaking to another man in an undertone, explaining something; he nodded, then glanced involuntarily at FraSnakm. antha kept her back turnetod him.But it
was John who mattered, John and MaAyan.d both were pretending that nothing was out of the ordinary;
but the topic of conversation, whatever it had been, had gone away.
# # #
Chalmers left the platformPeople were still trooping down through the park, toward tables that had
been set in the upper ends of the seven boulevCarhdaslm.
ers followed them, walking under young
transplanted sycamores; their khaki leaves colored the afternoon light, making the park look like the bottom of an aquarium.
At the banquet tables construction workers were knocking back vodka, getting rowdy, obscurely aware
that with the construction finished, the heroic age of Nicosia was
Mars.
Penedrheadp. s that was true for all of
The air filled with overlapping conversatioFnrsa.nk sank beneath the turbulence, wandered out to the northern perimeter.He stopped at a waist-high concrete copitnhge: city wallO. ut of the metal stripping on its top rose four layers of clear plaAsticS.wiss man was explaining things to a group of visitors, pointing happily.
"An outer membrane of piezoelectric plastic generates electricity from wThinedn.
two sheets hold a
layer of airgel insulationT.hen the inner layer is a radiation-capturing membrane, which turns purple and
must be replacedM.
ore clear than a window, isn't it?"
The visitors agreedF.rank reached out and pushed at the inner membrIatnset.retched until his fingers were buried to the knuckleSsl.ightly cool.There was faint white lettering printed on the plaIsiidci:s
Planitia Polymers. Through the sycamores over his shoulder he could still see the platform at the apex.

John and Maya and their cluster of terran admirers were still there, talking animCaotnedulyc.ting the business of the planeDt. eciding the fate of Mars.
He stopped breathingH. e felt the pressure of his molars squeezing togeHtheer.poked the tent wall so
hard that he pushed out the outermost membrane, which meant that some of his anger would be captured and stored as electricity in the town's gIrtidw. as a special polymer in that respect; carbon atoms were
linked to hydrogen and fluorine atoms in such a way that the resulting substance was even more piezoelectric than quartzC. hange one element of the three, however, and everything shifted; substitute chlorine for fluorine, for instance, and you had saran wrap.
Frank stared at his wrapped hand, then up again at the other two elements, still bonded to each other. But without him they were nothing!
Angrily he walked into the narrow streets of the city.
# # #
Clustered in a plaza like mussels on a rock were a group of Arabs, drinkinAgracbosffehea.d arrived on Mars only ten years before, but already they were a force to be reckonTehdeywihtha.d a lot of money, and they had teamed up with the Swiss to build a number of towns, includingAtnhdis thoenye.
liked it on Mars".It's like a cold day in the Empty Quarter," as the SaudiTshseaisdim.
ilarity was such
that Arabic words were slipping quickly into English, because Arabic had a larger vocabulary for this landscape: akaba for thesteep final slopes around volcanoes, badia for the great world dunes, nefuds for deep sand, seyl for the billion year-old dry river beds. . . people were saying they might as well switch over to Arabic and have done with it.
Frank had spent a fair bit of time with Arabs, and the men in the plaza were pleased"Stoalasaeme him. aleyk!" they said to him, and he replied, "MarhabWbah!"ite teeth flashed under black moustacheOsn. ly
men present, as usualS. ome youths led him to a central table where the older men sat, including his
friend Zeyk. Zeyk said, "We are going to call this square Hajr el-kra Meshab, 'the red granite open place in town.' "He gestured at the rust-colored flagstoneFsr.ank nodded and asked what kind of stone it
was. He spoke Arabic for as long as he could, pushing the edges of his ability and getting some good laughs in responseT. hen he sat at the central table and relaxed, feeling like he could have been on a street in Damascus or Cairo, comfortable in the wash of Arabic and expensive cologne.
He studied the men's faces as they talAkend.alien culture, no doubt aboutTiht.ey weren't going to change just because they were on Mars, they put the lie to John'sTvhiesiironth. inking clashed radically with Western thoughtf;or instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of goverAnmndentth. ey were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate-illiterates, onTMhaatrsw! as a signA. nd
indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing
sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatreSd.o that in that sense they were all madmen.
Which was one reason Frank liked theAmn.d certainly they would come in useful to him, acting as a
new locus of powerD.
efend a weak new neighbor to weaken the old powerful ones, as Machiavelli had
said. So he drank coffee, and gradually, politely, they shifted to English.
"How did you like the speeches?" he asked, looking into the black mud at the bottom of his demitasse.

"John Boone is the same as ever," old Zeyk repTlhieed.others laughed angrily". When he says we will
make an indigenous Martian culture, he only means some of the Terran cultures here will be promoted, and others attackedT. hose perceived as regressive will be singled out for destrucItioisn. a form of Ataturkism."
"He thinks everyone on Mars should become American," said a man named Nejm. "Why not?" Zeyk said, smilin"gIt.'s already happened on Earth."
"No," Frank said".You shouldn't misunderstand BooneP. eople say he's self-absorbed, but-"
"He is self-absorbed!" Nejm crie"dH.e lives in a hall of mirroHrse! thinks that we have come to Mars
to establish a good old American superculture, and that everyone will agree to it because it is the John
Boone plan."
Zeyk said, "He doesn't understand that other people have other opinions."
"It's not that," Frank sa"idIt.'s just that he knows they don't make as much sense as his."
They laughed at that, but the younger men's hoots had a bitteTrheygea.ll believed that before their arrival Boone had argued in secret against UN approval for Arab setleFmreanks. encouraged this
belief, which was almost true-John disliked any ideology that might get in hHise wwaayn. ted the slate as blank as possible in everybody who came up.
The Arabs, however, believed that John disliked them in partiYcuoluanr.g Selim el-Hayil opened his mouth to speak, and Frank gave him a swift warning gSlaenlicme. froze, then pursed his mouth angrily. Frank said, "Well, he's not as bad as all Athltahto. ugh to tell the truth I've heard him say it would have been better if the Americans and Russians had been able to claim the planet when they arrived, like explorers in the old days."
Their laughter was brief and grSimel.im's shoulders hunched as if strucFkr.ank shrugged and smiled, spread his hands wide".But it's pointless!I mean, what can he do?"
Old Zeyk lifted his eyebrow"Os.pinions vary."
# # #
Chalmers got up to move on, meeting for one instant Selim's insistenTthegnazeh.e strode down a side street, one of the narrow lanes that connected the city's seven main boulMevoasrdt sw. ere paved with cobblestones or streetgrass, but this one was rough blond concrete. He slowed by a recessed doorway, looked in the window of a closed boot manufacHtuirsy.faint reflection appeared in a pair of bulky
walker boots.
Opinions varyY. es, a lot of people had underestimated John Boone-Chalmers had done it himself many times. An image came to him of John in the White House, pink with conviction, his disobedient blond hair flying wildly, the sun streaming in the Oval Office windows and illuminating him as he waved his hands and paced the room, talking away while the President nodded and his aides watched, pondering how best to co-opt that electrifying charismOah., they had been hot in those days, Chalmers and Boone; Frank with the ideas and John the front man, with a momentum that was practically unsIttopwpoabuld.
be more a matter of derailment, really.

Selim el-Hayil's reflection appeared among the boots. "Is it true?" he demanded.
"Is what true?" said Frank crossly. "Is Boone anti-Arab?"
"What do you think?"
"Was he the one who blocked permission to build the mosque on Phobos?" "He's a powerful man."
The young Saudi's face twiste"dT.he most powerful man on Mars, and he only wants
Hmeorew!ants
to be king!"Selim made a fist and struck his other hHaned.was slimmer than the other Arabs, weak-chinned, his moustache covering a small mouth.
"The treaty comes up for renewal soon," Frank "sAaindd.
Boone's coalition is bypassing meH."e
ground his teeth."I don't know what their plans are, but I'm going to find out Ytoonuighcat.n imagine
what they'll be, anywayW. estern biases, certainlyH.
e may withhold his approval of a new treaty unless it
contains guarantees that all settlements will be made only by the original treaty signaSteolrimies."
shivered, and Frank pressed";It's what he wants, and it's very possible he could get it, because his new coalition makes him more powerful than evIter.could mean an end to settlement by non-signatories.
You'll become guest scientistsO. r get sent back."
In the window the reflection of Selim's face appeared a kminadsk,ofsignifying rage". Battal, battal," he
was muttering.Very bad, very badH. is hands twisted as if out of his control, and he muttered about the
Koran or Camus, Persepolis or the Peacock Throne, references scattered nervously among non-sequiturs. Babbling.
"Talk means nothing," Chalmers said harsh"lWy.hen it comes down to it, nothing matters but action." That gave the young Arab paus"eI. can't be sure," he said at last.
Frank poked him in the arm, watched a shock run through th"eIt'smayno.ur people we're talking about. It's this planet we're talking about."
Selim's mouth disappeared under his moustachAef.ter a time he said, "It's true." Frank said nothingT.hey looked in the window together, as if judging boots.
Finally Frank raised a han"dI'.ll talk to Boone again," he said quie"tTlyo.night. He leaves tomorrowI.'ll
try to talk to him, to reason with Ihidmo.ubt it will matteIrt. never has beforeB. ut I'll tryA. we should meet."
"Yes."
"In the park, then, the southernmost pAatrho.und eleven." Selim nodded.
fterwards...

Chalmers transfixed him with a sta"rTea. lk means nothing," he said brusquely, and walked away.
# # #
The next boulevard Chalmers came to was crowded with people clumped outside open-froonrt bars, kiosks selling cous-cous and bratwursAt.rab and SwissI.t seemed an odd combination, but they
meshed well.
Tonight some of the Swiss were distributing face masks from the door of an apAaprtpmareenntt.ly they
were celebrating this stadtfest as a kind of Mardi Gras, Fassnacht as they called it, with masks and music and every manner of social inversion, just as it was back home on those wild February nights in Basel
and Zürich and Luzern. . O. n. an impulse Frank joined the li"nAe.round every profound spirit a mask is always growing," he said to two young women in front oTf hheiym.nodded politely and then resumed conversation in guttural Schwyzerdüütsch, a dialect never written down, a private code, incomprehensible even to GermansI.t was another impenetrable culture, the Swiss, in some ways even more so than the Arabs. That was it, Frank thought; they worked well together because they were both so insular that they never made any real contacHt.e laughed out loud as he took a mask, a black face with studded with red paste gems.He put it on.
A line of masked celebrants snaked down the boulevard, drunk, loose, at the edge ofActoanntrol. intersection the boulevard opened up into a small plaza, where a fountain shot sun-colored water into the
air. Around the fountain a steel drum band hammered out a calypsoPetuonpele.
gathered around,
dancing or hopping in time to the low bong of the bass Adruhmun. dred meters overhead a vent in the
tent frame poured frigid air down onto the plaza, air so cold that little flakes of snow floated in it, glinting in the light like chips of micTah.en fireworks banged just under the tenting, and colored sparks fell down through the snowflakes.
# # #
Sunset, more than any other time of day, made it clear that they stood on an alien planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was fundamentally wrong, upsetting expectations wired into the
savannah brain over millions of yeaTrsh.is evening was providing a particularly garish and unsettling example of the phenomenonF.rank wandered in its light, making his way back to the cityThwe aplll.ain south of the city was littered with rocks, each one dogged by a long black Usnhdaderowth. e concrete
arch of the city's south gate he stoppNeod. one thereT. he gates were locked during festivals like these,
to keep drunks from going out and getting
Bhuurtt. Frank had gotten the day's emergency code out of
the fire department AI that morning, and when he was sure no one was watching he tapped out the code and hurried into the locHk.e put on a walker, boots, and helmet, and went through the middle and outer doors.
Outside it was intensely cold as always, and the diamond pattern of the walker's heating element burned through his clothes.He crunched over concrete and then duricruLsot.ose sand flowed east, pushed by
the wind.
Grimly he looked arounRd.ocks everywhere.A planet sledgehammered billions of timAesn. d meteors still falling.Someday one of the towns would take aHheit.turned and looked bacIkt. looked like an aquarium glowing in the dusTk.here would be no warning, but everything would suddenly fly apart, walls, vehicles, trees, bodies. The Aztecs had believed the world would end in one of four ways:
earthquake, fire, flood, or jaguars falling from the Hskeyre. flood, now that he thought ofLieta. ving only the jaguars.
there would be no fiNreo. r earthquake nor

The twilight sky was a dark pink over Pavonis MToontsh.e east stretched Nicosia's farm, a long low greenhouse running downslope from the ciFtyr.om this angle one could see that the farm was larger than the town proper, and jammed with green croFpras.nk clumped to one of its outer locks, and entered.
Inside the farm it was hot, a full sixty degrees warmer than outside, and fifteen degrees warmer than in
the city.He had to keep his helmet on, as the farm air was tailored to the plants, heavy on CO2 and short on oxygen. He stopped at a work station and fingered through drawers of small tools and pesticide
patches, gloves and bagsH. e selected three tiny patches and put them in a plastic bag, then slipped the bag gently into the walker's pockTeth.e patches were clever pesticides, biosaboteurs designed to
provide plants with systemic defenses; he had been reading about them, and knew of a combination that in animals would be deadly to the organism. . . .
He put a pair of shears in the walker's other poNcakrerot.w gravel paths led him up between long beds of barley and wheat, back toward the city proHpe r.went in the lock leading into town, unclipped his helmet, stripped off the walker and boots, transferred the contents of the walker pockets to his coat. Then he went back into the lower end of town.
Here the Arabs had built a medina, insisting that such a neighbworahsoocdrucial to a city's health; the boulevards narrowed, and between them lay warrens of twisted alleyways taken from the maps of Tunis or Algiers, or generated randomlNy.owhere could you see from one boulevard to the next, and the sky overhead was visible only in plum strips, between buildings that leaned together.
Most of the alleys were empty now, as the party was uAptopwanir. of cats skulked between buildings, investigating their new homeF.rank took the shears from his pocket and scratched into a few plastic
windows, in Arabic lettering, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew,
HJeew.walked on, whistling through his teeth.
Corner cafés were little caves of ligBhot.ttles clinked like prospectors' hammerAs.n Arab sat on a squat black speaker, playing an electric guitar.
He found the central boulevard, walked upBoity.s in the branches of the lindens and sycamores shouted songs to each other in SchwyzerdüütsOchn.e ditty was in English: "John Boone, Went to the moon, No fast cars, He went to MaSrsm!"all disorganized music bands barged through the thickening crowd. Some moustached men dressed as American cheerleaders flounced expertly through a
complicated can-can routineK.
ids banged little plastic drumIst. was loud; the tenting absorbed sound,
so there weren't the echoes one heard under crater domes, but it was loud nevertheless.
Up there, where the boulevard opened into the sycamore park-that was John himself, surrounded by a
small crowd.He saw Chalmers approaching and waved, recognizing him despite the how the first hundred knew each other...
"Hey, Frank," he sai"dY. ou look like you're having a good time."
Tmhaastk.was
"I am," Frank said through his m"aIskl.ove cities like this, don't yoAu?mixed-species flockI.t shows you what a diverse collection of cultures Mars is."
John's smile was easHy.is eyes shifted as he surveyed the boulevard below. Sharply Frank said, "A place like this is a crimp in your plan, isn't it?"
Boone's gaze returned to hiTmh.e surrounding crowd slipped away, sensing the agonistic nature of the exchange. Boone said to Frank, "I don't have a plan."

"Oh come onW! hat about your speech?"
Boone shrugged". Maya wrote it."
A double lieth: at Maya wrote it, that John didn't believEevietn.
after all these years it was almost like
talking to a strangerT.o a politician at wor"kC. ome on, John," Frank snappe"dY. ou believe all that and you know itB. ut what are you going to do with all these different nationaAliltlietsh?e ethnic hatreds, the religious manias?Your coalition can't possibly keep a thumb on allYthoius. can't keep Mars for
yourselves, John, it's not a scientific station anymore, and you're not going to get a treaty that makes it one."
"We're not trying to."
"Then why are you trying to cut me out of the talks!"
"I'm not!"John looked injured."Relax, Frank. We'll hammer it out together just like we always have. Relax."
Frank stared at his old friend, nonplusWsedh.at to believe?He had never known how to think of John-the way he had used Frank as a springboard, the way he was so friehnadny't. t.he. y begun as allies, as friends?
It occurred to him that John was looking for M"Saoyaw. here is she?" "Around somewhere," Boone said shortly.
It had been years since they had been able to talk aboutNMowayaB.oone gave him a sharp look, as if to say it was none of his businAesss.if everything of importance to Boone had become, over the years, none of Frank's business.
Frank left him without a word.
# # #
The sky was now a deep violet, streaked by yellow cirrus
Fclroaundks.passed two figures wearing
white ceramic dominoes, the old Comedy and Tragedy personas, handcuffed togTethheerc. ity's streets had gone dark and windows blazed, silhouettes partying in tBheigm.eyes darted in every blurry mask, looking to find the source of the tension in theUnadire.r the tidal sloshing of the crowd there was a low tearing sound.
He shouldn't have been surprised, he shouldHne't. knew John as well as one could know another person; but it had never been any of his businInetsos. the trees of the park, under the hand-sized leaves
of the sycamoresW.
hen had it been any differenAt!ll that time together, those years of friendship; and
none of it had mattereDd.iplomacy by other means.
# # #
He looked at his watcNhe. arly eleven.He had an appointment with SeliAmn. other appointment.A
lifetime of days divided into quarter hours had made him used to running from one appointment to the next, changing masks, dealing with crisis after crisis, managing, manipulating, doing business in a hectic

rush that never ended; and here it was a celebration, Mardi Gras, Fassnacht! and he was stilHl edoing it. couldn't remember any other way.
He came on a construction site, skeletal magnesium framing surrounded by
bpriliecsksofand sand and
paving stones.Careless of them to leave such things arouHned.stuffed his coat pockets with fragments
of brick just big enough to hoSltdr.aightening up, he noticed someone watching him from the other side
of the site-a little man with a thin face under spiky black dreadlocks, watching him intently. Something in the look was disconcerting, it was as if the stranger saw through all his masks and was observing him so closely because he was aware of his thoughts, his plans.
Spooked, Chalmers beat a quick retreat into the bottom fringe of thWe hpeanrk.he was sure he had
lost the man, and that no one else was watching, he began throwing stones and bricks down into the lower town, hurling them as hard as he coAunldd. one for that stranger too, right in the fOacvee!rhead
the tent framework was visible only as a faint pattern of occluded stars; it seemed they stood free, in a
chill night windA. ir circulation was high tonight, of courBsero. ken glass, shoutsA.
scream.It really was
loud, people were going crazOy.ne last paving stone, heaved at a big lit picture window across the grass. It missed.He slipped further into the trees.
Near the southern wall he saw someone under a sycamore-Selim, circling nerv"oSueslilmy.," Frank
called quietly, sweatingH. e reached into his jumper pocket, carefully felt in the bag and palmed the trio of stem patchesS. ynergy could be so powerful, for good or ill. He walked forward and roughly embraced the young ArabT.he patches hit and penetrated Selim's light cotton sFhriarnt.k pulled back.
Now Selim had about six hou"rDs.id you speak with Boone?" he asked.
"I tried," Chalmers said".He didn't listenH. e lied to me.I"t was so easy to feign distre"sTsw: enty-five
years of friendship, and he lied to mHee!"struck a tree trunk with his palm, and the patches flew away in the dark.He controlled himself". His coalition is going to recommend that all Martian settlements originate
in the countries that signed the first treatIyt ."was possible; and it was certainly plausible.
"He hates us!" Selim cried.
"He hates everything that gets in his wAanyd. he can see that Islam is still a real force in peopleI'st shapes the way people think, and he can't stand that."
Selim shudderedI.n the gloom the whites of his eyes were b"riHghet.has to be stopped." Frank turned aside, leaned against a t"rIe.e... don't know."
"You said it yourselTf.alk means nothing."
lives.
Frank circled the tree, feeling dizYzyo.u fool, he thought, talk means everythiWnge. information exchange, talk is all we have!
He came on Selim again and said, "How?" "The planetI.t is our way."
"The city gates are locked tonight."
That stopped himH. is hands started to twist.
are nothing but

Frank said, "But the gate to the farm is still open." "But the farm's outer gates will be locked."
Frank shrugged, let him figure it out.
And quickly enough Selim blinked, and said "AThh.e"n he was gone.
# # #
Frank sat between trees, on the grouIntd.was a sandy damp brown dirt, product of a great deal of engineering. Nothing in the city was natural, nothing.
After a time he got to his Hfeeet.walked through the park, looking at peoIpfleI. find one good city I
will spare the manB. ut in an open area masked figures darted together to grapple and fight, surrounded by watchers who smelled blooFd.rank went back to the construction site to get more bricks. He threw them and some people saw him, and he had toInrtuon.the trees again, into the little tented wilderness, escaping predators while high on adrenalin, the greatest drug oHfeala.ughed wildly.
Suddenly he caught sight of Maya, standing alone by the temporary platform up at tShheeapweoxr.e a white domino, but it was certainly thheer: proportions of the figure, the hair, the stance itself, all unmistakably Maya Toitovna.The first hundred, the little band; they were the only ones truly alive to him any more, the rest were ghosFtsr.ank hurried toward her, tripping over uneven grouHned. squeezed a
rock buried deep in one coat pocket, thinking Come on, you Sbaiytchso. mething to save himS.ay something that will make me run the length of the city to save him!
She heard his approach and turnSehde. sequins. It was hard to see her eyes.
wore a phosphorescent white domino, with metallic blue
"Hello, Frank," she said, as if he wore no enough to do it . . . .
Hmeaskal.most turned and raMn. ere recognition was almost
But he stayedH.
e said, "Hello, MayaN. ice sunset, wasn't it?"
"Spectacular.Nature has no tasteI.t's just a city inauguration, but it looked like Judgement Day." They were under a streetlight, standing on their shadoSwhes. said, "Have you enjoyed yourself?" "Very muchA. nd you?"
"It's getting a little wild."
"It's understandable, don't you thinWk?e're out of our holes, Maya, we're on the surface aAt nladst!
what a surface!You only get these kind of long views on Tharsis."
"It's a good location," she agreed.
"It will be a great city," Frank predic"tBeudt.
where do you live these days, Maya?"
"In Underhill, Frank, just as alwaYyso.u know that."

"But you're never there, are yoIuh?aven't seen you in a year or more." "Has it been that lonWg?ell, I've been in HellaSsu. rely you heard?"
"Who would tell me?"
She shook her head and blue sequins glitte"rFerda.nk." She turned aside, as if to walk away from the question's implications.
Angrily Frank circled her, stood in her p"Tatha. t time on the Ares," he saHidi.s voice was tight, and
he twisted his neck to loosen his throat, to make speech "eWasiheart. happened?"
happened, Maya?What
She shrugged and did not meet his gFaozre.a long time she did not speTahke.n she looked at him. "The spur of the moment," she said.
# # #
And then it was ringing midnight, and they were in the martian time slip, the thirty-nine and a half minute gap between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, when all the clocks went blank or stopped mThoivsinwg.as how
the first hundred had decided to reconcile Mars's slightly longer day with the twenty-four hour clock, and the solution had proved oddly satisfactorEy.very nightto step for a while outthoef flickingnumbers, out
of the remorseless sweep of the second hand...
And tonight as the bells rang midnight, the whole city wenFtomrtyadm.
inutes outside of time; it was
bound to be the peak of the celebration, everyone knew that instincFtiivrewlyo. rks were going off, people were cheering; sirens tore through the sound, and the cheering redoFurbalnekd. and Maya watched the fireworks, listened to the noise.
Then there was a noise that was somehow diffedreesnpt:erate cries, serious screams".What's that?" Maya said.
"A fight," Frank replied, cocking an "eSaor.mething done on the spur of the moment, perhaSphse." stared at him, and quickly he add"eMd,aybe we should go have a look."
The cries intensifiedT.rouble somewhere.They started down through the park, their steps getting longer, until they were in the martian loTphe.e park seemed bigger to Frank, and for a moment he was scared.
The central boulevard was covered with trPaseho.ple darted through the dark in predatory schooAls. nerve-grating siren went off, the alarm that signaled a break in thWe tienndto.ws were shattering up and
down the boulevardT. here on the streetgrass was a man flat on his back, the surrounding grass smeared with black streaksC. halmers seized the arm of a woman crouched over "hWimha. t happened?" he
shouted.
She was weeping".They fought!They are fighting!" "Who?Swiss, Arab?"
"Strangers," she said".Ausländer." She looked blindly at Fran"kG. et help!"

Frank rejoined Maya, who was talking to a group next to another fallen"Wfihgautret.he hell's going on?" he said to her as they took off toward the city's hospital.
"It's a riot," she sa"idI. don't know why.H" er mouth was a straight slash, in skin as white as the domino still covering her eyes.
Frank pulled off his mask and threw it aTwhaeyr.e was broken glass all over the strAeetm. an rushed at them."Frank! Maya!"
It was Sax Russell; Frank had never seen the little man so a"gItit'sateJdo.hn-he's been attacked!" "What?" they exclaimed together.
"He tried to stop a fight, and three or four men jumpeTdhehyimk.nocked him down and dragged him away!"
"You didn't stop them?" Maya cried.
"We tried-a whole bunch of us chased thBeumt .they lost us in the medina." Maya looked at Frank.
"What's going on!" he crie"dW. here would anyone take him?" "The gates," she said.
"But they're locked tonight, aren't they?" "Maybe not to everyone."
They followed her to the mediSntar.eetlights were broken, there was glass underfoToht.ey found a fire marshall and went to the Turkish Gate; he unlocked it and several of them hurried through, throwing on walkers at emergency speedT.hen out into the night to look around, illuminated by the bathysphere glow of the city.Frank's ankles hurt with the night cold, and he could feel the precise configuration of his lungs, as if two globes of ice had been inserted in his chest, to cool the rapid beat of his heart.
Nothing out thereB. ack inside.Over to the northern wall and the Syrian Gate, and out again under the stars. Nothing.
It took them a long time to think of theBfyarmth.en there were about thirty of them in walkers, and
they ran down and through the lock and flooded down the farm's aisles, spreading out, running between crops.
They found him among the radishHesis.
jacket was pulled over his face, in the standard emergency air
pocket; he must have done it unconsciously, because when they rolled him carefully onto one side, they saw a lump behind one ear.
"Get him inside," Maya said, her voice a bitter croak- "Hurry, get him inside."
Four of them lifted hiCmh. almers cradled John's head, and his fingers were intertwined with Maya's. They trotted back up the shallow steTphs.rough the farm gate they stumbled, back into the heat of the

city. One of the Swiss led them to the nearest medical center, already crowded with desperate people.
They got John onto an empty benHchis.
unconscious expression was pinched, determineFdr.ank tore
off his helmet and went to work pulling rank, bulling into the emergency rooms and shouting at the doctors and nursesT. hey ignored him until one doctor said, "ShutI'mup.coming."She went into the
hallway and with a nurse's help clipped John into a monitor, then checked him out with the abstracted, absent look doctors have while workinhga:nds at neck and face and head and chest, stethoscope. . . .
Maya explained what they kneTwh.e doctor took down an oxygen unit from the wall, looking at the monitor. Her mouth was bunched into a displeased little kMnoat.ya sat at the end of the bench, face suddenly distraught.Her domino had long since disappeared.
Frank crouched beside her.
"We can keep working on him," the doctor said, "but I'm afraid heT'soogolnoen.g without oxygen, you know."
"Keep working on him," Maya said.
They did, of coursEe.ventually other medical people arrived, and they carted him off to an emergency
room. Frank, Maya, Sax, Samantha, and a number of locals sat outside in tDheochtaolrls.
came and
went; their faces had the blank look they took on in the presence oPfrodteeactthiv. e masks.One came out and shook his hea"dH. e's dead.Too long out there."
Frank leaned his head back against the wall.
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said "Where are all my friends?"
It was quieNt. o sound but the low hum and whoosh that one never escaped on Mars.
Maya put a hand on Frank's shoulder, and he almost flinched; his throat clamped down to nothing, it really hurt."I'm sorry," he managed to say.
She shrugged the remark aside, frownSehde. said, "you never liked him much anyway."
had somewhat the air of the medical peo"Wplee.ll," she
"True," he said, thinking it would be politic to seem honest with her at thatBmutomtheennt. he shuddered and said bitterly, "What do you know about what I like or don't like."
He shrugged her hand aside, struggled to his Sfheeet.didn't know; none of them kneHwe. started to go into the emergency room, changed his miTndim. e enough for that at the funeHrael. felt hollow; and suddenly it seemed to him that everything good had gone away.
He left the medical centIemr.possible not to feel sentimental at such momeHntes.walked through the strangely hushed darkness of the city, into the land of TNheods.treets glinted as if stars had fallen to the pavement. People stood in clumps, silent, stunned by the nFewrasn.k Chalmers made his way through them, feeling their stares, moving without thought toward the platform at the top of town; and as he walked he said to himself, Now we'll see what I can do with this planet.

Part Two
The Voyage Out
-+=*=+-
"Since they're going to go crazy anyway, why not just send insane people in the first place, and save them the trouble?" said Michel Duval.
He was only half joking; his position throughout had been that the criteria for selection constituted a mind-boggling collection of double binds.
His fellow psychologists stared at h"imCa. n you suggest any specific changes?" asked the chairman, Charles York.
"Perhaps we should all go to Antarctica with them, and observe them in this first period of time together. It would teach us a lot."
"But our presence would be inhibitoIryth. ink just one of us will be enough."
So they sent Michel DuvHale.
joined a hundred and fifty-odd finalists at McMurdo Station. The initial
meeting resembled any other international scientific conference, familiar to them all from their various disciplines. But there was a differencteh:is was the continuation of a selection process that had lasted for years, and would last another. And those selected would go to Mars.
So they lived in Antarctica for over a year together, familiarizing themselves with the shelters and equipment that were already landing on Mars in robot vehicles; familiarizing themselves with a landscape that was almost as cold and harsh as Mars iftasmelifl;iarizing themselves with each otheTr.hey lived in a
cluster of habitats located in Wright Valley, the largest of Antarctica's Dry VTahlleeyysr.an a biosphere farm, and then they settled into the habitats through a dark austral winter, and studied secondary or tertiary professions, or ran through simulations of the various tasks they would be performing on the
spaceship Ares, or later on the red planet itself; and always, always aware that they were being watched, evaluated, judged.
They were by no means all astronauts or cosmonauts, although there were a dozen or so of each, with many more up north clamoring to be includBeudt. the majority of the colonists would have to have their expertise in areas that would come into play after lanmdfeadlli:cal skills, computer skills, robotics,
systems design, architecture, geology, biosphere design, genetic engineering, biology; also every sort of engineering, and construction expertise of several kinTdhs.ose who had made it to Antarctica were an impressive group of experts in the relevant sciences and professions, and they spent a good bit of their time cross-training to become impressive in secondary and tertiary fields as well.

And all their activity took place under the constant pressure of observation, evaluation, judIgt ement. was necessarily a stressful procedure; that was part of theMtiecshte. l Duval felt that this was a mistake,
as it tended to ingrain reticence and distrust in the colonists, preventing the very compatability that the
selection committee was supposedly seekinOg.ne of the many double binds, in fTahcte.
candidates
themselves were quiet about that aspect of things, and he didn't blame them; there wasn't any better strategy to take, that was a double bind for ityoinus:ured silenceT. hey could not afford to offend
anyone, or complain too much; they could not risk withdrawing too far; they could not make enemies.
So they went on being brilliant and accomplished enough to stand out, but normal enough to get along. They were old enough to have learned a great deal, but young enough to endure the physical rigors of the work. They were driven enough to excell, but relaxed enough to socAianlidze.they were crazy enough
to want to leave Earth forever, but sane enough to disguise this fundamental madness, in fact defend it as pure rationality, scientific curiosity or something of the sort-that seemed to be the only acceptable reason for wanting to go, and so naturally they claimed to be the most scientifically curious people in history!
But of course there had to be more to it thanThtehyat.had to be alienated somehow, alienated and
solitary enough to not care about leaving everyone they had known behind forever-and yet still connected and social enough to get along with all their new acquaintances in Wright Valley, with every member of the tiny village that the colony would becoOmhe,. the double binds were endlesTsh!ey were to be both extraordinary and extra ordinary, at one and the same Atimn ei.mpossible task, and yet a task that was
an obstacle to their heart's greatest desire; making it the very stuff of anxiety, fear, resentment, rage. Conquering all those stresses. . . .
But that too was part of the Mteisct.hel could not help but observe with great inteSreosmt.e failed,
cracked in one way or anothAern.
American thermal engineer became increasingly withdrawn, then
destroyed several of their rovers and had to be forcibly restrained and remAovReuds.sian pair became
lovers, and then had a falling out so violent that they couldn't stand the sight of each other, and both had to be droppedT. his melodrama illustrated the dangers of romance going awry, and made the rest of them very cautious in this regarRd.elationships still developed, and by the time they left Antarctica they had
had three marriages, and these lucky six could consider themselves in some sense "safe"; but most of them were so focused on getting to Mars that they put these parts of their lives on hold, and if anything conducted discreet friendships, in some cases hidden from almost everyone, in other cases merely kept
out of the view of the selection committees.
And Michel knew he was seeing only the tip of the iHceebekrnge. w that critical things were happening
in Antarctica, out of his sigRhte.lationships were having their beginnings; and sometimes the beginning of a relationship determines how the rest of it wilIlngtoh.e brief hours of daylight, one of them might leave
the camp and hike out to Lookout Point; and another follow; and what happened out there might leave its mark forever.But Michel would never know.
And then they left Antarctica, and the team was chTosheenre.
were fifty men and fifty women:
thirty-five Americans, thirty-five Russians, and thirty miscellaneous international affliates, fifteen invited by each of the two big partneKrse. eping such perfect symmetries had been difficult, but the selection committee had persevered.
The lucky ones flew to Cape Canaveral or Baikonur, to ascend tAo totrhbiist. point they both knew each other very well and did not know each other Taht eayll.were a team, Michel thought, with established friendships, and a number of group ceremonies, rituals, habits, adn tendencies; and among those tendencies was an instinct to hide, to play a role and disguise their reaPlershealvpess.this was
simply the definition of village life, of socialBliufte.it seemed to Michtehlat it was worse than that; no
one had ever before had to compete so strenuously to join a village; and the resulting radical division

between public life and private life was new, and strEanngger.ained in them now was a certain
competitive undercurrent, a constant subtle feeling that they were each alone, and that in case of trouble they were liable to be abandoned by the rest, and yanked out of the group.
The selection committee had thus created some the very problems it had hoped toSpormeveenotf.
them were aware of this; and naturally they took care to include among the colonists the most qualified psychiatrist they could think of.
So they sent Michel Duval.
-+=*=+-
At first it felt like a shove in the cThheesnt.
they were pushed back in their chairs, and for a second
the pressure was deeply familiaorn: e gee, the gravity they would never live in aTghaien.Ares had been
orbiting Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hoFuorr.
several minutes they accelerated, the rockets' push so
powerful that their vision blurred as corneas flattened, and it took an effort toAtinh4a0l,e0.00
kilometers per hour the burn endeTdh.ey were free of the Earth's pull, in orbit to nothing but the sun.
The colonists sat in the delta V chairs blinking, their skin flushed, their hearts pMouanydainKg.atarina Toitovna, the official leader of the Russian contingent, glanced aroPuenodp.le appeared stunned.When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do theyItfewela?s hard to say, realIlyn. a sense their lives were ending; and yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally beFgiullne.d. w. it.h so
many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforcedU. nbuckling from her chair Maya felt a grin contorting her face, and
she saw on the faces around her the same helpless grin; all but Sax Russell, who was as impassive as an owl, blinking as he looked over the readouts on the room's computer screens.
They floated weightlessly around the rooJmu.ly 20th, 2026:they were moving faster than anyone in
history. They were on their waIyt. was the beginning of a nine-month voyage-or of a voyage that would last the rest of their livTesh.ey were on their own.
# # #
Those responsible for piloting the Ares pulled themselves to the control consoles, and gave the orders to
fire lateral control rocketsT. he Ares began to spin, stabilizing at four
Trphme. colonists sank to the
floors, and stood in a pseudogravity of .38 gee, very close to what they would feel MoannyMars.
man-years of tests had indicated that it would be a fairly healthy gee to live in, and so much healthier than weightlessness that rotating the ship had been deemed worth the troAubnlde,. Maya thought, it felt great.
There was enough pull to make balance relatively easy, but hardly any feeling of pressure,Itof drag.
was the perfect equivalent of their mood; they staggered down the halls to the big dining hall in Torus D, giddy and exhilarated, walking on air.
In Torus D's dining hall they mingled in a kind of cocktail party, celebrating the
Mdeapyaarture.
wandered about, sipping freely from a mug of champagne, feeling slightly unreal and extremely happy, a mix that reminded her of her wedding reception many years beHf opee.fully this marriage would go
better than that one had, she thought, because this one was going to last
Tfohreevhear.ll was loud with
talk. "It's a symmetry not so much sociological as mathemAatick.ind of aesthetic balance.""We're

hoping to get it into the parts per billion range, but it's not going to Mbeayeaastyu."rned down an offered refill, feeling giddy enougBh.esides, this was workS.he was co-mayor of this village, so to speak, responsible for group dynamics, which were bound to get comApnletaxr.ctic habits kicked in even at this moment of triumph, and she listened and watched like an anthropologist, or a spy.
"The shrinks have their reasonWs. e'll end up fifty happy couples." "And they already know the match-ups."
She watched them laugSh.mart, healthy, supremely well-educated; was this the rational society at last, the scientifically-designed community that had been the dream of the EnlightenmBeuntt?there was
Arkady, Nadia, Vlad, IvanaS.he knew the Russian contingent too well to have many illusions on that score. They were just as likely to end up resembling an undergraduate dorm at a technical university, occupied by bizarre pranks and lurid affaEirxs.cept they looked a bit old for that kind of thing; several men were balding, and many of both sexes showed touches of gray in thIetirhahdairb.een a long haul;
their average age was forty-six, with extremes ranging from thirty-three (Hiroko Ai, the Japanese prodigy of biosphere design) to fifty-eight (Vlad Taneev, winner of a Nobel Prize in medicine).
Now, however, the flush of youth was on all their Afarkcaeds.y Bogdanov was a portrait in rheadi:r, beard, skin.In all that red his eyes were a wild electric blue, bugging out happily as he e"xFcrleaeimed, at last!Free at last!All our children are free at lasTt!h"e video cameras had been turned off, after Janet Blyleven had recorded a series of interviews for the TV stations back thheoymew;ere out of contact
with Earth, in the dining hall anyway, and Arkady was singing, and the group around him toasted the song. Maya stopped to join this grouFpr.ee at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their
way to Mars!Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had won part of a
Nobel prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical biologists in thSeaxwowrlads, in
the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory, Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life support systems design, and so on all around; a brilliant crowd!
And she was one of their leadIetrsw. as a bit dauntinHg.er engineering and cosmonautic skills were
modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her aboard, presuCmhaobsleyn.
to head the
disparate, fractious Russian team, with the several commonwealth members-well, that wasItokwaays. interesting work, and she was used toAint.d her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones aboard.They had to get along, after Aalnl.d that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and will.
Willing other people to do your biddiSngh!e looked at the crowd of glowing faces, and laughed.
Everyone aboard was good at their work, but some were gifted far beyonSdhethhaatd.
to identify
those people, to seek them out, to cultivate thHeemr . ability to function as leader depended on it; for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a kind of loose scientific meriAtoncdraciyn. a such a society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powWehres.n push came to shove, they would be the colony's true leaders-they, or those who influenced them.
She looked around, located her opposite number, Frank ChalmInerAs.ntarctica she had not gotten to
know him very welAl.
tall, big, swarthy maHn.e was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic; but hard
to read.She found him attractiveD. id he see things as she dSidh?e had never been able to tHelel. was
talking to a group across the length of the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to pounce with a witty remSharek.was going to have to find out more about him.
More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.
She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barelyLteoauncehdedh.er
head in toward hisA.
brief gesture at their comrade"Ts:his is going to be fun, don't you think?"

Chalmers glanced at he"rI.f it goes well," he said.
# # #
After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through thAe llAorefs.them had
spent time in space before, but never in anything like the Ares, which was enTohrmeroeusw. as a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steSaodlya.r watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment which worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the
crew with a weightless, non-rotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.
Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back at the ship
Icturhioaduslbye. en
constructed using space shuttle external fuel tanks; around the turn of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had begun attaching small booster rockets to the tanks and pushing them all the way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this way, then tugged to work sites and put to use-with them they had builtwo big space stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle, and scores of unmanned freighters sent to MSaors.by the time the two agencies agreed to build the
Ares, the use of the tanks had become routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors, propulsion systems and so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two years.
It looked like something made from a children's toy set, in which cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes-in this case, eight hexagons of connected cylinders, which they called
toruses, lined up and speared down the middle by a central hub shaft, made of a cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were connected to the hub shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat like a piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a mobile sprinkler unit.Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought, toothpicked to a stick. Just the sort of
thing a child would appreciate.
Theeight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five bundled lengths of the central shaft were Russian.Both were about fifty meters long and ten meters in diamMeatyera. floated aimlessly
down the tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time, but she was inShneo dhruorpryp.ed down into
Torus G.There were rooms of all shapes and sizes, right up to the largest, which occupied entire tanks. The floor in one of these she passed through was set just below the halfway mark, so its interior resembled a long Quonset huBt. ut the majority of the tanks had been divided up into smaller rooms.
She had heard there were over five hundred of them in all, making for a total interior space roughly the equivalent of a large city hotel.
But would it be enough?
# # #
Perhaps it wouldA.
fter the Antarctic, life on the Ares seemed an expansive, labyrinthine, airy
experience. Around six every morning the darkness in the residential toruses would lighten slowly to a gray dawn, and around six-thirty a sudden brightening marked "sunMrisaey."a woke to it as she had all
her life.After visiting the lavatory she would make her way to torus D's kitchen, heat a meal, and take it into the big dining haTll.here she sat at a table flanked by potted lime Htruemesm. ingbirds, finches,
tanagers, sparrows and lories pecked underfoot and darted overhead, dodging the creeping vines that hung from the hall's long barrel ceiling, which was painted a gray-blue that reminded her of St. Petersburg's winter skyS. he would eat slowly, watch the birds, relax in her chair, listen to the talk around her. A leisurely breakfast! After a lifetime of grinding work it felt rather uncomfortable at first, even

alarming, like a stolen luxurAy.s if it were Sunday morning every day, as Nadia
BsauidtM. aya's
Sunday mornings had never been particularly relaxIend.her childhood that had been the time for cleaning the one-room apartment she had shared with her moHtheerr. mother had been a doctor and
like most women of her generation had had to work ferociously to get by, obtaining food, bringing up a child, keeping an apartment, running a career; it had been too much for one person, and she had joined the many women angrily demanding a better deal than they had gotten in the Soviet years, which had given them half the money jobs while leaving them all the work atNohomo.re waiting, no more mute endurance; they had to take advantage while the instability la"sEtevde.rything is on the tableM!"aya's
mother would exclaim while cooking their meager dinners; "everything but food!"
And perhaps they had taken advantaIgne.the Soviet era women had learned to help each other, a nearly self-containedworld had come into being, of mothers, sisters, daughters, babushkas, women friends, colleagues, even strangersI.n the commonwealth this world had consolidated their gains and thrust even further into the power structure, into the tight male oligarchies of Russian government.
One of the fields most affected had been the space proMgraayma'.s mother, slightly involved in space medical research, always swore that cosmonautics would need an influx of women, if only to provide female data for the medical experimentatio"nT.hey can't hold Valentina Tereshkova against us forever!" her mother would cryA. nd apparently she had been right, because after studying aeronautic engineering
at Moscow University, Maya had been accepted in a program at Baikonur, and had done well, and had gotten an assignment on Novy MiWr. hile up there she had redesigned the interiors for improved
ergonomic efficiency, and later spent a year in command of the station, during which a couple of emergency repairs had bolstered her reputatioAnd. ministrative assignments in Baikonur and Moscow
had followed, and over time she had managed to penetrate Glavkosmos's little politburo, playing the men against each other in the subtlest of ways, marrying one of them, divorcing him, rising afterwards in Glavkosmos a free agent, becoming one of the utmost inner circle, the double triumvurate.
And so here she was, having a leisurely break"fSaost.civilized," Nadia would scoffeSd.he was Maya's best friend on the Ares, a short woman round as a stone, with a square face framed by cropped
salt-and-pepper hair.Plain as could beM. aya, who knew she was good-looking, and knew that this had helped her many timeslo, ved Nadia's plainness, which somehow underlined her competenNcaed. ia was
an engineer and very practical, an expert in cold-climate construcTthioeny. had met in Baikonur twenty
years before, and once lived together on Novy Mir for several months; over the years they had become like sisters, in that they were not much alike, and did not often get along, and yet were intimate.
Now Nadia looked around and said, "Putting the Russian and American living quarters in different toruses was a horrible ideWa. e work with them during the day, but we spend most of our time here with the same old facesI.t only reinforces the other divisions between us."
"Maybe we should offer to exchange half the rooms."
Arkady, wolfing down coffee rolls, leaned over from the next"Itta'sblen.ot enough," he said, as if he had been part of their conversation all aloHnigs. red beard, growing wilder every day, was dusted with crumbs. "We should declare every other Sunday to be moving day, and have everyone shift quarters on a random basis.People would get to know more of the others, and there would be fewer Acnlidqutehse.
notion of ownership of the rooms would be reduced." "But I like owning a room," Nadia said.
Arkady downed another roll, grinned at her as he chIetwweda.s a miracle he had passed the selection committee.

But Maya brought up the subject with the Americans, and though no one liked Arkady's plan, a single exchange of half the apartments struck them as a goodAifdter. some consulting and discussion, the
move was arranged.They did it on a Sunday morning; and after that, breakfast was a little more cosmopolitan. Mornings in the D dining hall now included Frank Chalmers and John Boone, and also Sax Russell, Mary Dunkel, Janet Byleven, Rya Jimenez, Michel Duval, and Ursula Kohl.
John Boone turned out to be an early riser, geting to the dining hall even befo"TrehiMs
aroyoam.
is so
spacious and airy, it really has an outdoor feel to it," he said from his table one dawn when Maya came in. "A lot better than B's hall."
"The trick is to remove all chrome and white plastic," Maya rHeperlieEdn. glish was fairly good, and getting better fast". And then paint the ceiling like real sky."
"Not just straight blue, you mean?" "Yes."
He was, she thought, a typical Americsiamn:ple, open, straightforward, relaxedA. nd yet this particular specimen was one of the most famous people in hisIt rwya. s an unavoidable, heavy fact; but Boone
seemed to slip out from under it, to leave it around his feet on tIhnetenfltooorn.
the taste of a roll, or
some news on the table screen, he never referred to his previous expedition, and if someone brought the subject up he spoke as if it were no different from any of the flights the rest of themBuhtadit taken.
wasn't so, and only his ease made it seem thatawt athye:
same table each morning, laughing at Nadia's
lame engineering jokes, making his portion of the Atafltke.r a while it took an effort to see the aura around him.
Frank Chalmers was more interestinHge.
always came in late, and sat by himself, paying attention only
to his coffee and the table screAenft.er a couple of cups he would talk to people nearby, in ugly but functional Russian.Most of the breakfast conversations in D hall had now shifted to English, to accomodate the Americans.The linguistic situation was a set of egg dEonllgsl:ish held all hundred of
them, inside that was Russian, and inside that, the languages of the commonwealth, and then the internationals. Eight people aboard were idiolinguists, a sad kind of orphaning in Maya's opinion, and it seemed to her they were more Earth-oriented than the rest, and in frequent communication with people back home.It was a little strange to have their psychiatrist in that category.
Anyway English was the ship's lingua franca, and at first Maya had thought that this gave the Americans an advantage.But then she noticed that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while
the rest of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted.
Frank Chalmers was the exception to all that, howHeveers.poke five languages, more than anyone else aboard. And he did not fear to use his Russian, even though it was very bad; he just hacked out questions and then listened to the answers, with a really piercing intensity, and a quick startliHnge laugh. was an unusual American in many ways, Maya thouAght t.first he seemed to have all the characteristics,
he was big, loud, maniacally energetic, confident, restless; talkative enough, after that first coffee; friendly enough. It took a while to notice how he turned the friendliness on and off, and to notice how little his talk revealed. Maya never learned a thing about his past, for instance, despite deliberate efforts to chat him
up. It made her curiousH. e had black hair, a swarthy face, light hazel eyes-handsome in a tough-guy way-his smile brief, his laugh sharp, like Maya's mothHeirs's.gaze too was sharp, especially when looking at Maya; a matter of evaluating the other leader, she assHume eadc.ted toward her as if they
had an understanding built on long acquaintance, a presumption which made her uneasy given how little

they had spoken together in AntarcticSah.e was used to thinking of women as her allies, and of men as attractive but dangerous problemsS.o a man who presumed to be her ally was only the more problematic. And dangerous.And... something else.
She recalled only one moment when she had seen further into him than the skin, and that had been back in Antarctica. After the thermal engineer had cracked and been sent north, news of his replacement had come down, and when it was announced everyone was quite surprised and excited to hear that it was going to be John Boone himself, even though he had certainly received more than the maximum radiation dosage on his previous expeditioWn. hile the evening room was still buzzing with the news Maya had
seen Chalmers come in and be told of it, and he had jerked his head around to stare at his informant; and then for a fraction of a second she had seen a flash of fury, a flash so fast it was almost a subliminal even
But it had made her attentive to Ahinmd. certainly he and John Boone had an odd relationIsthiwpa. s
difficult for Chalmers, of course; he was the Americans' official leader, and even had the title Captain; but Boone, with his blond good looks and the strange presence of his accomplishment, certainly had more natural authority-he seemed the real American leader, and Frank Chalmers something like an overactive executive officer, doing Boone's unspoken biddinTgh.at could not be comfortable.
They were old friendMs, aya had been told when she askeBd.ut she saw few signs of it herself, even watching closely.They seldom talked to each other in public, and did not seem to visit inThpurisvate.
when they were together she watched them more closely than ever, without ever consciously considering why; the natural logic of the situation just seemed to demaInfdthite.y had been back at Glavkosmos, it
would have made strategic sense to drive a wedge between them; but she didn't think of it that way here. There was a lot that Maya didn't think about consciously.
She watched, thoughA. nd one morning Janet Blyleven wore her video glasses into D hall for breakfast. She was a principal reporter for American television, and often she wove her way through the ship wearing her vidglasses, looking around and talking the commentary, collecting stories and transmitting
them back home where they would be, as Arkady put it, "predigested and vomited back into that baby bird consensus."
It was nothing new, of courMsee.dia attention was a familiar part of every astronaut's life, and during the selection process they had been more scrutinized than eNvoewr. , however, they were the raw material for programs magnitudes more popular than any space program had been Mbeiflloioren.s
watched them as the ultimate soap opera, and this bothered some ofSothewmh.en Janet settled at the
end of the table wearing those stylish spectacles with the optical fibers in the frame, there were a few groans. And at the other end of the table Ann Clayborne and Sax Rwuesreselalrguing, oblivious to any
of them.
"It'll take years to find out what we have thereD, eScaaxd.es. There's as much land on Mars as on Earth, with a unique geology and chemisTtryh.e land has to be thoroughly studied before we can start changing it."
"We'll change it just by landinRgu."ssell brushed aside Ann's objections as if they were spiderwebs on
his face. "Deciding to go to Mars is like the first phrase of a sentence, and the whole sentence says-" "Veni, vedi, veci."
Russell shrugged". If you want to put it that way."

"You're the weenie, Sax," Ann said, lip curled with irritSahtieonw. as a broad-shouldered woman with wild brown hair, a geologist with strong views, difficult in argu"mLeonotk. , Mars is its own placYeo. u
can play your climate-shifting games back on Earth if you want, they need tOher
But you can't just wipe out a three billion year-old planetary surface."
htreylpi.t on Venus.
Russell rubbed away more spider we"bIst'.s dead," he said simpl"yB. esides, it's not really our decision. It'll be taken out of our hands."
"None of these decisions will be taken out of our hands," Arkady put in sharply.
Janet looked from speaker to speaker, taking it aAllnnin.was getting agitated, raising her voiMcea.ya glanced around, and saw that Frank didn't like the situaBtiuotn.if he interrupted it he would give away to the millions the fact that he didn't want the colonists arguing in fthroenmt. oInf stead he looked across the
table and caught Boone's gazTe.here was an exchange of expressions between the two so quick it made
Maya blink.
Boone said", When I was there before, I got the impression it was already Earthlike." "Except two hundred degrees Kelvin," Russell said.
"Sure, but it looked like the Mojave, or the Dry VTalhle sfi.rst time I looked around on Mars I found myself keeping an eye out for one of those mummified seals we saw in the Dry Valleys."
And so onJ.anet turned to him; and Ann, looking disgusted, picked up her coffee and left. Afterward Maya concentrated, trying to recall the looks Boone and Chalmers had excThahnegyedh.ad
been like something from a code, or the private languages invented by identical twins.
# # #
The weeks passed, and the days each began with a leisurely breMakifda-smt. ornings were far busier. Everyone had a schedule, although some were fuller than others. Frank's was packed, which was the way he liked it, a maniacal blur of actiBviutyt .the necessary work was not really all that gtrheeayt: had
to keep themselves alive and in shape, and keep the ship running, and keep preparing
SfohripMars.
maintenance ranged from the intricacy of programming or repairs to the simplicity of moving supplies out
of storage, or taking trash to the recyclTehrse.
biosphere team spent the bulk of its time on the farm,
which occupied large parts of Toruses C, E, and F; and everyone aboard had farmMcohsot res. enjoyed this work, and some even returned in their free hEovuerrsy.one was on doctors' orders to spend three hours a day on treadmills, escalators, running wheels, or using weight maTchheisneesh. ours were enjoyed or endured or despised, depending on temperament; but even those who claimed to despise them finished their exercises in noticably (even measurably) better m"oBoedtsa. endorphins are
the best drug," Michel Duval would say.
"Which is lucky, since we don't have any others," Arkady would reply. "Oh, there's caffeine..."
"Puts me to sleep."
"Alcohol. . ."

"Gives me a headache." "Procaine, darvon, morphine-" "Morphine?"
"In the medical supplieNs.ot for general use."
Arkady smiled". Maybe I'd better get sick."
The engineers, including Maya, spent many mornings in training simulaTtihoensse.
took place on the
back-up bridge in Torus B, which had the latest in image synthesizers; the simulations were so sophisticated that there was little visible difference between them and the actThitisseldf.id not
necessarily make them interestingth: e standard orbital insertion approach, simulated weekly, was dubbed
"The Mantra Run," and became quite a bore to every conceivable flight crew.
But sometimes even boredom was preferable to the alternatives; Arkady was their training specialist, and he had a perverse talent for designing problem runs so hard that they often "killed" everybody. These runs were strangely unpleasant experiences, and did not make Arkady popular among his victims. He mixed problem runs with Mantra Runs randomly, but more and more often they were problem runs; they would "approach Mars" and red lights would flash, sometimes with sirens, and they were in trouble again. Once they struck a planetessimal weighing approximately fifteen grams, leaving a large flaw in the
heat shield.Sax Russell had calculated that their chances of hitting anything larger than a gram were about one in every seven thousand years of travel, but nevertheless there they were, emergency!, adrenalin pouring through them even as they poo-pooed the very idea of it, rushing up to the hub and into EVA suits, going out to fill the pothole before they hit the martian atmosphere and burned to a crisp; and halfway there, Arkady's voice came over their interco"mNso:t fast enough!All of us are dead."
But that was a simple onOet.hers.... The ship, for instance, was guided by a fly-by-wire system, meaning that the pilots fed instructions to flight computers which translated them into the actual thrusts needed to achieve the desired resuTlth.is was how it had to be, because when approaching a
gravitational mass like Mars at their speed, one simply could not feel or intuit what burns would achieve the desired effectsS. o none of them were flyers in the sense of an pilot flying Na epvlearnthe.eless,
Arkady frequently blew the entire massively redundant system just as they were reaching a critical
moment (which failure, Russell said, had about a one in ten billion chance of happening) and they had to take over and command all the rockets mechanically, watching the monitors and an orange-on-black
visual image of Mars bearing down on them, and they could either go long and skip off into deep space and die a lingering death, or go short and crash into the planet and die instantly; and if the latter, they got to watch it right down to the simulated hundred and twenty klicks per second final smash.
Or it might be a mechanical failmuraei:n rockets, stabilizing rockets, computer hardware or software, heat shield deployment; all of them had to work perfectly during the appArnodachfa.ilures of these
systems were the most likely of all-in the range, Sax said (though others contested his risk assessment methods), of one in every ten thousand approacSheos.they would do it again and red lights would flash, and they would groan, and beg for a Mantra Run even as they partly welcomed the new Wchhaellnenge.
they managed to survive a mechanical failure, they were tremendously pleased; it could be the high point
of a weekO.
nce John Boone successfully aerobraked by hand, with a single main rocket functioning,
hitting the safe millisecond of arc at the only possible sNpoeedo.ne could believe said, grinning widely as the deed was talked about at dinner.
"itB. lind luck," Boone
Most of Arkady's problem runs ended in failure, however, meaning death Sfiomr ualallt.ed or not, it was

hard not to be sobered by these experiences, and after that, irritated with Arkady for inventiOngnethem. time they repaired every monitor in the bridge just in time to see the screens register a hit by a small asteroid, which sheared through the hub and killed themAnaollt.her time Arkady, as part of the
navigation team, made an "error" and instructed the computers to increase the ship's spin rather than decrease it. "Pinned to the floor by six gs!" he cried in mock horror, and they had to crawl on the floor for half an hour, pretending to rectify the error while weighing half a toWnhencht.hey succeeded,
Arkady leaped off the floor and began pushing them away from the control m"Wonhitaotr.the hell are you doing?" Maya yelled.
"He's gone crazy," Janet said.
"He's simulated going crazy," Nadia corrected "hWer.e have to figure out-" doing an end run around
Arkady "-how to deal with someone on the bridge going insane!"
Which no doubt was truBeu. t they could see the whites of Arkady's eyes all the way around, and there wasn't a trace of recognition in him as he silently assaulted them; it took all five of them to restrain him, and Janet and Phyllis Boyle were hurt by his sharp elbows.
"Well?" he said at dinner afterward, grinning lopsidedly, as he was growing
"aWfahtatlipif. it happens?
We're under pressure up here, and the approach will be worst Wofhaatll.if someone cracks?H" e turned to Russell and the grin grew wi"dWer.hat are the chances of that, ehA?n"d he began to sing a Jamaican song, in a Slavic Carribean acce"n'Pt:ressure drop, oh pressure drop, oh-o, pressure going to drop on you-oo-oo!'"
So they kept trying, handling the problem runs as seriously as they could, even the attack by Martian natives or the decoupling of Torus H caused by "explosive bolts installed by mistake when the ship was
built," or the last minute veering of Phobos out of its
Dorebailti.ng with the more implausible scenarios
sometimes took on a kind of surreal black humor, and Arkady replayed some of his videotapes as after-dinner entertainment, which sometimes got people launched into the air with laughter.
But the plausible problem runs. T. h.ey.
kept on coming, morning after morniAngn.d despite the
solutions, despite the protocols for finding solutions, there was that sight, time aftethr etimreed: planet
rushing at them at an unimaginable forty thousand kilometers an hour, until it filled the screen and the screen went white, and small black letters appeared oCnolilti:sion.
# # #
They were traveling to Mars in a Type II Hohmann Ellipse, a slow but efficient course, chosen from among other alternatives mainly because the two planets were in the correct position for it when the ship was finally ready, with Mars about forty-five degrees ahead of Earth in the plane of theDuercinligptic.
the voyage they would travel just over halfway around the Sun, making their rendezvous with Mars some three hundred days laterT.heir womb time, as Hiroko called it.
The psychologists back home had judged it worthwhile to alter things from time to time, to suggest the passing of the seasons on the ArLeesn. gth of days and nights, weather, and ambient colors were shifted
to accomplish thisS. ome had maintained their landfall should be a harvest, others that it should be a new spring; after a short debate it had been decided by vote of the voyagers themselves to begin with spring, so that they would travel through a summer rather than a winter; and as they approached their goal, the ship's colors would turn to the autumn tones of Mars itself, rather than to the light greens and blossom pastels they had left so far behind.

So in those first months, as they finished their morning's business, leaving the farm or the bridge, or staggering out of Arkady's merrily sadistic simulations, they walked into springWtimalles. were hung with
pale green panelso, r mural-sized photos of azaleas, and jacarandas, and ornamental cheTrrhie .barley
and mustard in the big farm rooms glowed vivid yellow with new blooms, and the forest biome and the ship's seven park rooms had been stocked with trees and shrubs in the spring of theiMr acyacles.
loved these colorful spring blossoms, and after her mornings' work she fulfilled part of her exercise regimen by taking a walk in the forest biome, which had a hilly floor, and was so thick with trees one could not see from one end of the chamber to the Hoethreer.she often met Frank Chalmers, of all
people, taking one of his short breaHkse. said he liked the spring foliage, though he never seemed to
look at itT. hey walked together, and talked or not as the case migIhft thbey.
did talk, it was never
about anything important; Frank didn't care to discuss their work as leaders of the expMedayitaion. found this peculiar, though she didn't sayBsuot. they did not have exactly the same jobs, which might account for his reluctanceM. aya's position was fairly informal and non-hierarchical; cosmonauts among themselves had always been relatively egalitarian, this had been the tradition since the days of Korolyov. The American program had a more military tradition, indicated even inwthitillees:Maya was merely
Russian Contingent Co-ordinator, Frank was Captain Chalmers, and supposedly in the strong sense of the old sailing navies.
Whether this authority made it more or less difficult for him, he didSno'mt esatiym. es he discussed the
biome, or small technical problems, or news from home; more often he just seemed to want to walk with her. So-silent walks, up and down on narrow trails, through dense thickets of painsepeanndand birch.
And always that presumption of closeness, as if they were old friends, or as if he were, very shyly (or subtly), courting her.
Thinking about that one day, it occurred to Maya that starting the Ares in springtime might have created a problem.Here they were in their mesocosm, sailing through spring, and everything was fertile and blooming, profligate and green, the air perfumed with flowers and windy, the days getting longer and warmer, and everyone in shirts and shorts, a hundred healthy animals, in close quarters, eating,
exercising, showering, sleepingO.
f course there had to be sex.
Well, it was nothing neMw.aya herself had had some fantastic sex in space, most significantly during her second stint on Novy Mir, when she and Georgi and Yeli and Irina had tried every weightless variant imaginable, which was a great many indeeBdu. t now it was differenTt.hey were older, they were stuck
with each other for goo"dE: verything is different in a closed system," as Hiroko often said in other contexts. The idea that they should stay on a fraternal basis was big at NouAtSoAf: the 1,348 pages of the tome NASA had compiled called Human Relations In Transit To Mars, only a single page was devoted to the subject of sex; and that page advised agaiTnhsteyit.were, the tome suggested,
something like a tribe, with a sensible taboo against intertribal maTthineg.Russians laughed hilariously at this. Americans were such prudes, really".We are not a tribe," Arkady sa"idW. e are the world."
And it was sprinAg.nd there were the married couples aboard, some of whom were pretty demonstrative; and there was the swimming pool in Torus E, and the sauna and whirlpoBoalthbiantgh.
suits were used in mixed company, this because of the Americans again, but bathing suits were nothing. Naturally it began to happeSn.he heard from Nadia and Ivana that the bubble dome was being used for assignations, in the quiet hours of the night; manthyeocfosmonauts and astronauts turned out to be fond
of weightlessness. And the many nooks in the parks and the forest biome were serving as hideaways for those with less weightless experience; the parks had been designed to give people the sense that they could get away.And every person had a private soundproofed room of their Wowithn.all that, if a
couple wanted to begin a relationship without becoming an item in the gossip mill, it was possible to be very discreet.Maya was sure there was more going on than any one person could know.

But she could feel Nito.
doubt others did as weQllu. iet conversations between couples; changes in
dining room partners; quick glances, small smiles; hands touching shoulders or elbows in passing; oh yes, things were happeningI.t made for a kind of tension in the air, a tension that was only partly pleasant. Antarctic fears came back into play; and besides, there was only a small number of potential partners, which tended to give things a musical chairs kind of feeling.
And for Maya there were additional probleSmhse. was even more wary than usual of Russian men,
because in this case it would mean sleeping with the boss; she was suspicious of that, knowing how it had felt when she had done it hersBelef.sides, none of them... well, she was attracted to Arkady, but she did
not like him; and he seemed uninteresteYde. li she knew from before, he was just a friend; Dmitri she
didn't care for; Vlad was older, Yuri not her type, Alex a follower of Arkady's. . . on and on like that.
And as for the Americans, or the internationals; well, that was a different kind of Cprobslsem.
cultures, who knew?So. . .she kept to herselfB. ut she thought about
Ait.nd occasionally, while waking
up in the morning, or finishing a workout, she floated on a wave of desire that left her washed up on the shore of bed or shower, feeling alone.
# # #
Thus late one morning, after a particularly harrowing problem run, which they had almost solved and then failed to solve, she ran into Frank Chalmers in the forest biome and returned his hello, and they walked for about ten meters into the woods, and stopSpheed.was in shorts and tank-top, barefoot,
sweaty and flushed from the crazed simulatioHne.
was in shorts and aT-shirt, barefoot, sweaty and
dusty from the farmS.uddenly he laughed his sharp laugh, and reached out to touch her upper arm with two fingertips. "You're looking happy todayW."ith that darting smile.
The leaders of the two halves of the expedEitiqouna.ls. She lifted her hand to touch his, and that was all it took.
They left the trail and ducked into a tight thicket oTf hpeiynes.topped to kiss, and it had been long enough since the last time that it felt strange toTrhipepr.ing over a root Frank laughed under his breath, that quick secretive laugh which gave Maya a shiver, almost oTf hfeyar.sat on pine needles, rolled
together like students necking in the wooSdhse.
laughed; she had always liked the quick approach, the
way she could just knock a man down when she wanted to.
And so they made lovFe.or a time passion took her awAayft.erwards she relaxed, enjoying the wash
of afterglow.But then it got a bit awkward, somehow; she didn't know what
Ttohesraey.was
something hidden still about him, as if he were hiding even when makinAgndloveev.en worse, what she
could sense behind his reserve was some kind of triumph, as if he had won something and she had lost. That Puritan streak in Americans, that sense that sex was wrong and something that men had to trick
women into.She had closed up a little herself, annoyed at that hidden smirk on hWisinfaacned. what children.
And yet they were co-mayors, so to spSeoaki.f it was put on a zero sum basis. . . .
lose,
Well, they talked for a while in a jovial enough way, and even made love again beforBe uttheity left. wasn't quite the same as the first time, she found herself distrSaoctemdu. ch in sex was beyond rational analysis. Maya always felt things about her partners that she could not analyze or even express; but she always either liked what she felt or didn't, there was no doubt abouAtntdhalto. oking at Frank
Chalmer's face after the first time, she had been sure that something wasnI't
rmigahdte.
her uneasy.

But she was amiable, affectionate; it would not do to be put off at such a moment, no one would forgive that. They got up and dressed and went back into Torus D, and ate dinner at the same table with some
others, and that was when it made perfect sense to become more
Bdiustantht.en in the days after their
encounter, she was surprised and displeased to find herself putting him off a little bit, making excuses to avoid being alone with himIt. was awkward, not what she had wanted at Sahlel. would have preferred
not to feel the way she did, and once or twice after that they went off alone again, and when he started things she made love with him again, wanting it to work, feeling that she must have made a mistake or been in a bad mood somehoBwu. t it was always the same, there was always that little smirk of triumph,
that I-got-you that she disliked so much, that moralistic Puritan double-standard dirtiness.
And so she avoided him even more, to keep from getting into the start situation; and quickly enough he caught the driftO. ne afternoon he asked to go for a walk in the biome, and she declined, claiming fatigue; and a staccato look of surprise passed over his face, and then it had closed up likSehea fmelat sk.
badly, because she couldn't even explain it to herself.
To try to make up for such an unreasonable withdrawal, she was friendly and forthright with him after that, as long as it was a safe situaAtionnd. once or twice she suggested, indirectly, that for her their enounters had been only a matter of sealing a friendship, something she had done with otherAs llas well.
this had to be conveyed between words, however, and it was possible he misunderstood; it was hard to say. After that first jolt of comprehension, he only seemed puzOzlnecde., when she left a group just
before it broke up, she had seen him give her a sharp glance; after that, only distance anBdutrehseerve. had never been really upset, and he never pressed the issue, or came to her to talkBuatbothuatt iwt. as
part of the problem, wasn't Hit?e didn't seem to want to talk to her about that kind of thing.
Well, perhaps he had affairs going with other women, with some of the Americans, it was hard to say. He really did keep to himseBlfu. t it was... awkward.
Maya resolved to abolish the knockover seduction, no matter the thrill she gotHfirroomko itw. as right;
everything was different in a closed systeImt
.was too bad for Frank (if he did care), because he had
served as her education in this regaIrnd.the end she resolved to make it up to him, by being a good friend. She worked so hard at doing this that once, almost a month later, she miscalculated and went a little too far, to the point where he thought she was seducing himThaegyainh.ad been part of a group,
up late talking, and she had sat next to him, and afterwards he had clearly gotten the wrong impression, and walked with her around Torus D to the bathrooms, talking in the charming and affable way he had at this stage of thingsM. aya was vexed with herself; she didn't want to seem completely fickle, although at
this point either way she went it would probably look thatSowasyh.e went along with him, just because it was easier, and because there was a part of her that wanted to maAknedlosvoe.she did, upset with herself and resolved that this should be the last time, a sort of final gift that would hopefully make the
whole incident a good memory for hSimhe.
found herself becoming more passionate than ever before,
she really wanted to please himA.nd then, just before orgasm, she looked up at his face, and it was like looking in the windows of an empty house.
That was the last time.
ÆV. V for velocity, delta for changIne. space, this is the measure of the change in velocity required to get from one place to another-thus, a measure of the energy required to do it.
Everything is moving alreadBy.ut to get something from the (moving) surface of the Earth into orbit around it, requires a minimum Æv of ten kilometers per second; to leave Earth's orbit and fly to Mars

requires a minimum Æv of 3.6 kilometers per second; and to orbit Mars and land on it requires a Æv of about one kilometer per seconTd.he hardest part is leaving Earth behind, for that is by far the deepest gravity well involvedC. limbing up that steep curve of spacetime takes tremendous force, shifting the
direction of an enormous inertia.
History too has an inertIina. the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality;
mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call "world lines" on Ignrahpuhms.an affairs,
individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curvedThcaotucrsaeb.le of tangled
world lines is historyS.eeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going-it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Æv would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course?
The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.
The form of the Ares gave a structure to reality; the vacuum between Earth and Mars began to seem to
Maya like a long series of cylinders, bent up at their joints at forty-five degreTe haenrgelews.as a
runner's course, a kind of steeplechase, around Torus C, and at each joint she slowed down in her run and tensed her legs for the the increased pressure of the two 22.5 degree bends, and suddenly she could see up the length of the next cylinIdterw. as beginning to seem a rather narrow world.
Perhaps in compensation, the people inside began to get somehow Tlahregepr.rocess of shedding their Antarctic masks continued, and every time someone displayed some new and hitherto unknown characteristic, it made all who noticed it feel that much freer; and this feeling caused more hidden traits to be revealed.One Sunday morning the Christians aboard, numbering a dozen or so, celebrated Easter in
the bubble domeI.t was April back home, though the Ares' season was midsumAmfter. their service
they came down to the D dining hall for bruMncahy.a, Frank, John, Arkady, and Sax were at a table, drinking cups of coffee and teTah.e conversations among them and with other tables were densely interwoven, and at first only Maya and Frank heard what John was saying to Phyllis Boyle, the geologist who had conducted the Easter service.
"I understand the idea of the universe as a superbeing, and all its energy being the thoughts of this being. It's a nice concepBt. ut the Christ story...J"ohn shook his head.
"Do you really know the story?" Phyllis asked.
"I was brought up Lutheran in Minnesota," John replied sh"oIrtwlye.nt to confirmation class, had the whole thing drilled into me."
Which, Maya thought, was probably why he bothered to get into discussions lHikee hthaids. a displeased expression that Maya had never seen before, and she leaned forward a bit, suddenly concentrating. She glanced at Frank; he was gazing into his coffee cup as if in a reverie, but she was sure he was listening.

John said, "You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ.And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third ceSnoturhye. 's a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don't know anything about the man himself."
Phyllis shook her hea"dT. hat's not true."
"But it is," John objecteTdh.is caused Sax and Arkady looked up from the next "tLaboloek. , there's a history to all this stuffM. onotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shephIet'rsd agnod.
exact correlation, you can chart it and Asened.
the god is always male, because those societies were
patriarchal. There's a kind of archeology, an anthropology-a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear-how it came about, what needs it fulfilled."
Phyllis regarded him with a small sm"Iiled. on't know what to say to that, JIoth'sn.not a matter of history, after allI.t's a matter of faith."
"Do you believe in Christ's miracles?"
"The miracles aren't what mattIetr's. matters."
not the church or its dogma that matItte'srsJ. esus himself that
"But he's just a literary construct," John repeated dogg"eSdolym. ething like Sherlock Holmes, or the
Lone Ranger.And you didn't answer my question about the miracles."
Phyllis shrugged". I consider the presence of the universe to be a miTrahceleu. niverse and everything in it. Can you deny it?"
"Sure," John said".The universe just isI. define a miracle as an action that clearly breaks known physical law."
"Like traveling to other planets?" "No.Like raising the dead." "Doctors do that every day." "Doctors have never done that."
Phyllis loked non-plussed".I don't know what to say to you, JIo'mhn.kind of surprisedW. e don't
know everything, to pretend we do is arroganTchee.
creation is mysteriousT.o give something a name
like 'the big bang,' and then think you have an explanation-it's bad logic, bad tOhiuntksidneg. your
rational scientific thought is an enormous area of consciousness, an area more important than science. Faith in God is part of thAant.d I suppose you either have it or you dSonh'et."stood."I hope it comes
to you." She left the room.
After asilence, John sighed". Sorry, folks.Sometimes it still gets to me."
"Whenever scientists say they're Christian," Sax said, "I take it to be an aesthetic statement."

"The church of the wouldn't-it-be-pretty-to-think-so," Frank said, still looking into his cup.
Sax said, "They feel we're missing a spiritual dimension of life that earlier generations had, and they attempt to regain it using the same meaHnse."blinked in his owlish way, as if the problem were disposed of by being defined.
"But that brings in so many absurdities!" John exclaimed. "You just don't have faith," Frank said, egging him on.
John ignored him".People who in the lab are as hard-headed as can be-you should see Phyllis grilling the conclusions her colleagues draw from their daAtan!d then suddenly they start using all kinds of debater's tricks, evasions, qualificationsf,uzzy thinking of every kinAd.s if they were an entirely different person."
"You just don't have faith!" Frank repeated.
"Well I hope I never getIt'ist!like being hit by a hammer in the head!"
John stood and took his tray to the kitcThheen.rest looked at each other in silenItcem. ust have been, Maya thought, a really bad confirmation claCssl.early none of the others had known any more than her about this side of their easy-going heWroh. o knew what they would learn next, about him or any of them?
News of the argument between John and Phyllis spread through theMcaryeaw.wasn't sure who was
telling the storyn; either John nor Phyllis seemed inclined to speak
Tofheint.
she saw Frank with Hiroko,
laughing as he told her somethinWg.alking by them she heard Hiroko say, "You've got to admit Phyllis is right about that part-we don't understand the why of things at all."
Frank, then.Sowing discord between Phyllis and JohAnn. d (not a trivial point) Christianity was still a major force in America, and elsewheIrfe. word got around back home that John Boone was
anti-Christian, it could give him problemAs.nd that wouldn't be such a bad thing for FrManaky.a understood that; what she didn't understand, at first, was why Frank ththoautghatnyone's opinion back
home mattered to them anymorIet. was only after long reflection that she came to see that he was right. They were all getting media play on Earth, but if you watched some of the news and features, it became clear that some were getting more than others, and this made them seem more powerful, and so they became more powerful in fact, by associatiAonm. ong this group were Vlad and Ursula (whom she
suspected were more than friends, now), Frank, Sax-all people who had been well known before their
selection-and none so much as JohSno.
that any diminution in Earth's regard for one of them, might have
a kind of corresponding effect on their status within the TAhriess.at any rate seemed to be Frank's operating principle.
# # #
It felt as if they were confined to the interior of a hotel with no exits, without even anTyhbealconies. oppression of hotel life was growing; they had been inside now for four long months, but it was still less than half their tripA. nd none of their carefully designed physical surroundings or daily routines could
hasten its end.
Then one morning the second flight team was dealing with another of Arkady's problem runs, when all at once red lights burned on several screens.

"A solar flare has been been detected by the solar monitoring equipment," Rya said.
Arkady stood quickly".That's not me!" he exclaimed, and leaned over to read the screen nearest him. He looked up, met his colleagues' skeptical stares, grin"nSeodr.ry, friends.This is the real wolf."
An emergency message from Houston confirmed hHime . could have faked those as well, but he was headed for the nearest spoke, and there was nothing they could do; fake or not, they had to follow.
In fact, a big solar flare was an event they had simulated many timeEs vbeerfyoornee.
had tasks to
perform, quite a few of them in a very short time, so they ran around the toruses, cursing their luck and trying not to get in each other's wTahye.re was a lot to do, as battening down was complicated, and not
very automated.In the midst of dragging plant trays into the plant shelter Janet "yIselltehdis, Arkady's tests?"
"He says not!" "Shit."
one of
They had left Earth during the low point in the eleven-year sunspot cycle, specifically to reduce the chance of a flare like this occurriAngn.d here it was anywaTy.hey had about half an hour before the first radiation arrived, and no more than an hour after that the really hard stuff would follow.
Emergencies in space can be as obvious as an explosion or as intangible as an equation, but their obviousness has nothing to do with how dangerous theyTharee.crew's senses would never perceive the subatomic wind approaching them, and yet it was one of the worst things that could have hAanpdpened. everyone knew itT. hey ran through the toruses to get their bit of battening done-plants had to be
covered or moved to protected areas, the chickens and pigs and pygmy cows and the rest of the animals and birds had to be herded into their own little shelters, seeds and frozen embryos had to be collected and carried along, sensitive electrical components had to be boxed or likewise carriedWahloengt.hey
were done with these high-speed tasks they yanked themselves up the spokes to the central shaft as fast as they could, and then flew down the central shaft tube to the storm shelter, which was directly behind the tube's aft end.
Hiroko and her biosphere team were the last ones in, banging through the hatch a full twenty-seven minutes after the initial alarmT.hey hurtled into the weightless space flushed and out of b"rWeahtha.t's
the reading?Has it started yet?" "Not yet."
The rest of the crew already floated in the semi-cylindrical chamber, breathing hard, nursing bruises and
a few sprainsM. without gaps.
aya ordered them to count off, and was relieved to hear the whole hundred run through
The room seemed very crowdeTdh.ey hadn't gathered the whole hundred in one spot for many weeks, and even a max room didn't seem large enoTughhis. one occupied a tank in the middle strand of the hub shaft. The four tanks surrounding theirs were filled with water, and their tank was divided lengthwise between their room and another semi-cylinder that had been filled with heavy Tmheitsalse. mi-cylinder's
flat side was their "floor," and it was fitted inside the tank on circular tracks, and rotated to counteract the spin of the ship, keeping the tub between the crew and the sun.

So they floated in a non-rotating space, while the curved roof of the tank rotated over them at its usual four rpm.It was a peculiar sight, which along with the weightlessness made some people begin to look thoughtful in a pre-seasick kind of waTyh.ese unfortunates congregated down at the end of the shelter
where the lavatories were located, and to help them out visually, everyone else oriented themselves to the floor. The radiation was therefore coming up through their Mfeaeyt.a felt an impulse to keep her knees together. People floated in place, or put on velcro slippers to walk over thTe hfelyootra.lked in low
voices, instinctively finding their next-door neighbors, their working partners, their frCieonndvs.ersations were subdued, as if a cocktail party had been told that the hors d'oevres had been tainted.
John Boone rip-ripped his way to the computer terminals at the fore end of the room, where Arkady
and Alex were monitoring the shHipe.
punched in a command, and the radiation data were suddenly
displayed on the room's biggest scree"nL.et's see how much we're getting cooked," he said brightly. Groans."Must we?"exclaimed Ursula.
"We might as well know," John s"aAidn.d I want to see how well this shelter wTohrkes.one on the
Rust Eagle was about as strong as the bib you wear at the dentist's."
Maya smiledI.t was a reminder, rare from John, that he had been exposed to much more radiation than any of the rest of them-about a hundred and sixty rem, as he explained now in response to someone's question. On Earth one caught a fifth of a roentgen equivalent man per year; orbiting Earth, still inside the protection of the Earth's magnetosphere, one took around thirty-five perSyoeaJro. hn had taken a lot of
heat. And somehow that gave him the right, now, to screen the data if he wanted to.
Those who were interested-about sixty people-clumped behind him to watch the screen. The rest relocated at the far end of the tank with the people worrying about motion sickness, a group that definitely didn't want to know how much radiation they were taJuksint gt.he thought was enough to send some of them into the heads.
Then the full force of the flare strTuhcek. radiation count shifted to well above the solar wind's usual level, and then soared in a sudden ruAshn. indrawn hiss came from several observers at once, and there were some shocked exclamations.
"But look how much the shelter is stopping," John said.
He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per houSr.everal lifetimes of dentists' X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off Slitgilhl,tlyth.e amount flying through the
rest of the shipB! illions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal they were huddled behind; hundreds of millions were flying between these atoms and then through the atoms of their bodies, touching nothing, as if they were no more thanStgilhl,ostthso. usands were
striking atoms of flesh and bonMe.ost of those collisions were harmless; but in all those thousands, there
were in all probability one or two (or three?) in which a chromosome strand was taking a hit, and kinking in the wrong waya:nd there it wasT.umor initiation, begun with just that typo in the book of thAendself.
years later, unless the victim's DNA luckily repaired itheelf,tumor promotion that was a more or less unavoidable part of living would have its effect, and there would appear a bloom of Something Else inside: cancer. Leukemia, most likely; and, most likely, death.
So it was hard not to regard the figures unhapTphileyr.e were peaks in the readout, four per rotation, indicating the gaps between the four tanks surrounding them; the peaks spiked every few seconds,
making a series of neat U's on the graph pTapoetarl.
shelter radiation appeared on another screen:

24.658 rems, 27.861, 29.004".Like an odometer," Boone said calmHlye.
was gripping a rail with both
hands and pulling himself back and forth, as if doing isometric exeFrcraisneks. saw it and said, "John, what the hell are you doing?"
"Dodging," John saidH. e smiled at Frank's frow"nY. ou know-moving target!"
People laughed at himW. ith the extent of the danger precisely charted on screens and graphs, they were beginning to feel less helpleTssh.is was illogical, buntaming was the power that made every human
a scientist of sortsA. nd these were scientists by profession, with many astronauts among them as well, trained to accept the possibility of such a stoArlml .those mental habits began channeling their thoughts,
and the shock of the event receded aTbhiety.
were coming to terms with it.
Arkady went to a terminal and called up Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, picking it up in the third movement, when the village dance is disrupted by stHorem.turned up the volumaen, d they floated
together in the long half-cylinder, listening to the intensity of Beethoven's fierce tempest, which suddenly seemed to enunciate perfectly the lashings of the silent wind pouring throughIt thweomu.ld sound just
like that!Strings and woodwinds shrieking in wild gusts, out of control and yet beautifully melodic at the
same time-a shiver ran down Maya's spiSnhee.
had never listened to the old warhorse this closely
before, and she looked with admiration (and a bit of fear) at Arkady, who was beaming ecstatically at the effects of his inspired disk jockeying, and dancing like some red knot of fluff in Wthehewninthde.
symphony's storm peaked, it was difficult to believe that the radiation count wasn't rising; and when the musical storm abated, it seemed like theirs should be oveTr htuonod. er muttered, the last gusts whistled through. The French horn sang its serene all-clear.
People began to talk about other things, discussing the various business of the day that had been so rudely interrupted, or taking the opportunity to talk about other thAifntgesr. a half hour or more, one of those conversations got louder; Maya didn't hear how it began, but suddenly Arkady said, very loudly and in English, "I don't think we should pay any attention to plans made for us back on Earth!"
Other conversations went silent, and people turned to look atHheimh.ad popped up and was floating
under the rotating roof of the chamber, where he could survey them all and speak like some mad flying spirit.
"I think we should make new plans," he "sIaitdh.ink we should be making them nEovwe.rything should be redesigned from beginning, with our own thinking expresIst esdh. ould extend everywhere, even to first shelters we build."
"Why bother?" Maya asked, annoyed at his grandstand"iTnhge. y'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 thAemrk."ady 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 BW. e were supposed to remain two entities, you Ist ewe.ill be same on MaBrsu.ildings
express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the senItednocens'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 saTidh.is got a laugh, but he perserver"eRd:ectangular, the conventional shape! With work space separated from living quarters, as if work were not partAonfd ltihfee. 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 necessaryI.t's a matter of prestigeA. business thinking, if I may say so."
very conventional example of American
There was a groan, and Phyllis said, "Do we have to get political, Arkady?"
At the very mention of the word, the cloud of listeners ruptured; Mary Dunkel and a couple of others pushed out and headed for the other end of the room.
"Everything is political," Arkady said at their ba"cNkos.thing more so than this voyage of oWurse. are beginning a new society, how could it help but be political?"
"We're a scientific station," Sax sa"iIdt . doesn't necessarily have much politics to it."
"It certainly didn't last time I was there," John said, looking thoughtfully at Arkady.
"It did," Arkady said, "but it was simYploeur. were an all-American crew, there on a temporary mission, doing what your superiors told you toBduot .now we are an international crew, establishing a permanent colony.It's completely different."
Slowly people were drifting through the air toward the conversation, to hear better what was being said. Rya Jiminez said, "I'm not interested in politics," and Mary Dunkel agreed from the other end of the room: "That's one of the things I'm here to get away from!"
Several Russians replied at onc"eT.hat itself is a political position!" and the like. Alex exclaimed, "You
Americans would like to end politics and history, so you can stay in a world you dominate!"
A couple of Americans tried to protest, but Alex overrode "tIht'esmtr:ue!The whole world has
changed in last thirty years, every country looking at its function, making enormous changes to solve problems-all but United StatesY. ou have become the most reactionary country in the world."
Sax said, "The countries that changed had to because they were rigid before, and almoTsht ebroke. United States already had flex in its system, and so it didn't have to change as dIrasatiycatlhlye. American way is superior because it's smoothIet'sr. better engineering."
This analogy gave Alex pause, and while he was thinking about it John Boone, who had been watching
Arkady with great interest, sai"dG, etting back to the shelterHs.ow would you make them different?"
Arkady said, "I'm not quite sure-we need to see the sites we build on, walk around in them, talk it over. It's a process I advocate, you sBeeu.t in general I think work space and living space should be mixed as much as is practicaOl. ur work will be more than making wages-it will be our art, our whWole wlifiell.
give it to each other, we will not buAylsiot. there should be no signs of hierarcIhdyo. n't even believe in

the leader system we have nowH."e nodded politely at May"aW.
e are all equally responsible now, and
our buildings should show Ait. circle is best-difficult in construction terms, but it makes sense for heat conservation. A geodesic dome would be a good compromise-easy to construct, and indicating our equality. As for insides, perhaps mostly opeEnv.eryone should have their room, sure, but these should be small.Set in the rim, perhaps, and facing larger communal spaHcees-p" icked up a mouse at one terminal, began to sketch on the scre"eTnh. ere. This is architectural grammar that would say 'All equal.' Yes?"
"There's lots of prefab units already there," John "sIa'mid.not sure they could be adapted." "They could if we wanted to do it."
"But is it really necessarIy?mean, it's clear we're already a team of equals."
"Is it clear?" Arkady said sharply, looking aro"uInfdF. rank and Maya tell us to do something, are we free to ignore themI?f Houston or Baikonur tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them?"
"I think so," John replied mildly.
This statement got him a sharp look from FTrahnek.conversation was breaking up into several arguments, as a lot of people had things to say, but Arkady cut through them all again:
"We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them
disastrously. It's why history is such a bloody mNesosw.
we are on our own, and I for one have no
intention of repeating all of Earth's mistakes just because of conventional thiWnkeingar.e the first
Martian colonists! We are scientists!It is our job to think things new, to make them new!"
The arguments broke out again, louder than eMveary.a turned away and cursed Arkady under her breath, dismayed at how angry people were gettSinhge. saw that John Boone was grinniHnge. pushed
off the floor toward Arkady, came to a stop by piling into him, and then shook Arkady's hand, which action swung them both around in the air, in an awkward kind of Tdhainsceg.esture of support
immediately set people to thinking again, Maya could see it on their surprised faces; along with John's fame he had a reputation for being moderate and low-keyed, and if he approved of Arkady's ideas, then it was a different matter.
"Goddammit, Ark," John sai"dF. irst those crazy problem runs, and now this-you're a wild man, you really are!How in the hell did you get them to let you on board this ship, anyway?"
Exactly my question, thought Maya. "I lied," Arkady said.
Everyone laughedE. ven Frank, looking surprised".But of course I lied!" Arkady shouted, a big
upside-down grin splitting his red bea"rdH.ow else could I get herIe?want to go to Mars to do what I
want, and selection committee wanted people to go and do what they weYreoutolkdn.ow that!"He pointed down at them, shoute"dY: ou all lied, you know you did!"
Frank was laughing harder than evSearx.
wore his usual Buster Keaton, but he raised a finger and said,
"The Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory," and a great jeer went up from tThehmey all.
had all been required to take this exam, it was the world's most widely used psychological test, and well regarded by expertsR. espondents agreed or disagreed to five hundred and fifty-six statements, and a

profile was formed from the replies; but the judgements concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s.Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply engrained in the test; or at least some of them tho"uMgihntnesoso. ta!" Arkady
shouted, rolling his eyes".Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota!I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question!I answered exactly opposite to what I really felt, and this iasllwowhaetd me to score as normal!"
Wild cheers greeted this announcemen"tH. ell," John said, "I'm from Minnesota and I had to lie."
More cheersF. rank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his
stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himsSelhfe.
had never seen him laugh like that.
Sax said, "The test made you lie."
"What, not you?" Arkady demande"dD.idn't you lie too?"
"Well, no," Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him"I bteoflodret.he truth to every question."
They laughed harder than evSera.x looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.
Someone shouted, "What do you say, MichHeol?w do you account for yourself?"
Michel Duval spread his hands. "You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RTMheMrePI. are questions which test how honest you are being."
This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inqWuihsiattiown.ere his controls? How did the testers make their theories falsifiabHleo?w did they repeat themH?ow did they eliminate alternative explanations of the datHa?ow could they claim to be scientific in any sense of the word whatsoever? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to getTahbeoayreda.rs of competition had taken their toAll.nd the discovery of this shared feeling sparked a score of voluble conversations. The tension raised by Arkady's political talk disappeared.
Perhaps, Maya thought, Arkady had defused the one with the Ifothsoer.it had been cleverly done, but Arkady was a clever maSn.he thought back.Actually it had been John Boone who had changed the subject. He had in effect flown to the ceiling and come to Arkady's rescue, and Arkady had seized the chance. They were both clever meAn.nd it seemed possible they were in some sort of collusion.
Forming a kind of alternative leadership, perhaps, one American, one RuSsosimane.thing would have to be done about that.
She said to Michel, "Do you think it's a bad sign we all consider ourselves such liars?"
Michel shrugged". It's been healthy to talk aboutNiot.w we realize we're more alike than we thought. No one has to feel they were unusually dishonest to get aboard."
"And you?" Arkady aske"dD. id you present yourself as most rational and balanced psychologist, hiding the strange mind we have come to know and love?"

A small smile from Mich"eYl.ou're the expert in strange minds, Arkady."
Then the few still watching the screens calledThoeut.radiation count had started to fAalflt.er a while it slipped back to just a little above normal.
Someone returned the Pastoral to the moment of the hornThceallla.st movement of the symphony, "Glad and Grateful Feelings After the Storm," poured over the speaker system, and as they left the shelter and fanned out through the ship like dandelion seeds on a breeze, the beautiful old folk melody was broadcast thoughout the Ares, elaborating itself in all its Brucknerian ricWhnheisles. it played, they
found that the ship's hardened systems had survived inTtahcet. thicker walls of the farm and the forest
biome had afforded the plants some protection, and although there would be some die-offs, and an entire crop they could not eat, the seed stocks were not haTrmheda. nimals could not be eaten either, but
presumably would give birth to a healthy next generatTiohne.
only casualties were some uncaptured
songbirds from D's dining hall; they found a scattering of them dead on the floor.
As for the crewth,e shelter's protection had shielded them from all but sixty-oddTrheamt .was the
equivalent of two years of normal work in space, bad for a mere three hours; but it could have been worse. Outside the shelter it would have a lethal dose.
# # #
Six months inside a hotel, with never a walk ouItsnisdied.e it was late summer, and the days were long. Green dominated the walls and ceilings, and people went bareQfouoiet.t conversations were nearly
inaudible in the hum of machinery, the whoosh of ventilTathoers.ship seemed empty somehow, whole sections of it abandoned as the crew settled down to Swmaailtl. knots of people sat in the halls in Toruses B and D, talkinSg.ome stopped their conversations when Maya wandered by, which she naturally found disturbingS. he was having trouble falling asleep, trouble wakingWuopr.k made her
restless; all the engineers were only waiting, after all, and the simulations had gotten nearly intolerable.
She had trouble gauging the passage of tiSmhee. stumbled more than she used Sthoe. Vlad, and he had recommended over-hydration, more running, more swimming.
had gone to see
Hiroko told her to spend more time on the Sfharemg. ave it a try, spending hours weeding, harvesting, trimming, fertilizing, watering, talking, sitting on a bench, looking at leaves; spacinTgheoufta. rm rooms were max chambers, their barrel roofs lined with bright sunsTtrhipes.multi-leveled floors were crowded with crops, many new since the storTmh.ere was not enough space to feed the crew entirely on farm
food, but Hiroko disliked that fact and struggled against it, converting storage rooms as they emptied out. Dwarf strains of wheat, rice, soy, and barley grew in stacked trays; above the trays were hanging rows
of hydroponic vegetables, and enormous clear jars of green and yellow algae, used to help regulate the gas exchange.
Some days Maya did nothing but watch the farm team Hwiroorko.
and her assistant Iwao were
always tinkering at the endless project of maximizing the closure of their biological life support system, and they had a crew of other regulars working Ronauilt,: Rya, Gene, Evgenia, Andrea, Roger, Ellen,
Bob, and TashaS. uccess in the closure attempt was measured in K values, K representing closure itself. Thus for every substance they recycled,
K = I - e/E

where E was the rate of consumption in the system, e the rate of (incomplete) closure, and I a constant for which Hiroko, earlier in her career, had established a corrected Tvhaelueg.oal, K=I-1, was
unreachable, but asymptotically approaching it was the farm biologists' favorite game, and more than that, critical to their eventual existence on MaSros. conversations about it could extend over days, spiraling
off into complexities that no one really understoInode. ssence the farm team was already at their real work, which Maya envied; she was so sick of simulations!
Hiroko was an enigma to MaAyalo. of and serious, she always seemed absorbed in her work, and her
team tended always to be around her, as if she was the queen of a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the shipM. aya didn't like that, but there was nothing she could do abAonudt isto. mething in
Hiroko's attitude made it not so threatening; it was just a fact, the farm was a separate place, its crew a separate society.And it was possible that Maya could use them to counterbalance the influence of
Arkady and John, somehow; so she did not worry about their separate Inreaflamct. she joined them
more than ever beforeS.ometimes she went with them up to the hub at the end of a work session, to play a game they had invented called tunneljumTph.ere was a jump tube down the central shaft; all the joints between cylinders had been expanded to the same width as the cylinders themselves, making a single smooth tube.There were rails to facilitate quick movement back and forth along this tube, but in their
game, jumpers stood on the storm shelter hatch, and tried to leap up the tube to the bubble dome hatch, a full five hundred meters away, without bumping into the walls or raCiloinrigosl.is forces made this
effectively impossible, and flying even halfway would usually win a Bgaumt eo.ne day Hiroko came by
on her way to check an experimental crop in the bubble dome, and after greeting them she crouched on the shelter hatch and jumped, and slowly floated the full length of the tunnel, rotating as she flew, and stopping herself at the bubble dome hatch with a single outstretched hand.
The players stared up the tunnel in stunned silence. "Hey!" Rya called to Hirok"oH.ow did you do that?" "Do what?"
They explained the game to hSehre.
smiled, and Maya was suddenly certain she had already known the
rules. "So how did you do it?" Rya repeated.
"You jump straight!" Hiroko explained, and disappeared into the bubble dome.
That night at dinner the story got aroFurnadn.k said to Hiroko, "Maybe you just got lucky." Hiroko smiled". Maybe you and I should total twenty jumps and see who wins."
"Sounds good to me." "What'll we bet?" "Money, of course."
Hiroko shook her hea"dD. o you really think money matters anymore?"
# # #
A few days later Maya floated under the curve of the bubble dome with Frank and John, looking ahead

at Mars, which was now a gibbous orb the size of a dime.
"A lot of arguments these days," John remarked casu"Iallhye.ar Alex and Mary got into an actual fight. Michel says it's to be expected, but still..."
"Maybe we brought too many leaders," Maya said.
"Maybe you should have been the only one," Frank jibed. "Too many chiefs?" said John.
Frank shook his hea"dT. hat's not it." "No?There are a lot of stars on board."
"The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren't theSosammeeti.mes I think they may be opposites."
"I leave the judgement to you, CaptaJionh."n grinned at Frank's scowHl. e was, Maya thought, the only relaxed person left among them.
"The shrinks saw the problem," Frank went on, "it was obvious enough even fTohr etyheumse. d the
Harvard solution."
"The Harvard solution," John repeated, savoring the phrase.
"Long ago Harvard's administrators noticed that if they accepted only straight A high school students, and then gave out the whole range of grades to freshmen, a distressing number of them were getting unhappy at their Ds and Fs and messing up the Yard by blowing their brains out on it."
"Couldn't have that," John said.
Maya rolled her eye"sY. ou two must have gone to trade schools, eh?"
"The trick to avoiding this unpleasantness, they found, was to accept a certain percentage of students who were used to getting mediocre grades, but had distinguished themselves in some other way-"
"Like having the nerve to apply to Harvard with mediocre grades?"
"-used to the bottom of the grade curve, and happy just to be at Harvard at all." "How did you hear of this?" Maya asked.
Frank smiled". I was one of them."
"We don't have any mediocrities on this ship," John said.
Frank looked dubious".We do have a lot of smart scientists with no interest in runningMthainnygso. f them consider it boringA. dministration, you knowT. hey're glad to hand it over to people like us."
"Beta males," John said, mocking Frank and his interest in sociobi"oBlorigllyia. nt sheep."The way they mocked each other...

"You're wrong," Maya said to Frank.
"Maybe soA.
nyway, they're the body politiTc.hey have at least the power to folloHwe."said this as if
the idea depressed him.
John, due for a shift on the bridge, said good-bye and left.
Frank floated over to Maya's side, and she shifted nervoTuhsely. had never discussed their brief affair, and it hadn't come up, even indirectly, in quite a wShheileh. ad thought about what to say, if it ever did; she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men sheTlhikaet di.t had been something done on the spur of the moment.
But he only pointed to the red dot in th"eI swkyo.nder why we're going."
Maya shruggedP. robably he meant not we, but"EIv. eryone has their reasons," she said. He glanced at he"rT. hat's so true."
She ignored his tone of voi"cMe.aybe it's our genes," she sa"idM. aybe they felt things going wrong on
Earth. Felt an increased speed of mutation, or something like that." "So they struck out for a clean start."
"Yes."
"The selfish gene theorIyn.telligence only a tool to aid successful reproduction." "I suppose."
"But this trip endangers successful reproduction," Frank
"sIatidi.sn't safe out here."
"But it isn't safe on Earth eitWhear.ste, radiation, other people...."
Frank shook his hea"dN. o. I don't think the selfishness is in the geInethsi.nk it's somewhere elseH."e
reached out with a forefinger, and tapped her between the breasts-a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floSotra.ring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same"Gploaocde.
night, Maya."
# # #
A week or two later Maya was in the farm harvesting cabbages, walking down an aisle between long stacked trays of themS.he had the room to herseTlfh.e cabbages looked like rows of brains, pulsing
with thought in the bright afternoon light.
Then she saw a movement and looked to the Asicdreo.ss the room, through an algae bottle, she saw a face. The glass of the bottle warpedaitm: an's face, brown-skinnedT.he man was looking to the side
and didn't see herI.t appeared he was talking to someone she couldn'tHseees.hifted, and the image of his face came clear, magnified in the middle of the bSohtetleu. nderstood why she was watching so closely, why her stomach was clenchesdh:e had never seen him before.

He turned and looked her wTayh.rough two curves of glass their eyes mHete. thin-faced and big-eyed.
was a stranger,
He disappeared in a brown blFuorr.
a second Maya hesitated, scared to pursue him; then she forced
herself to run the length of the room and up the two bends of the joint, into the neIxtt wcyalsinder. empty. She ran through three more cylinders before stoppTinhge.n she stood there, looking at tomato vines, her breath rasping hard in her thrSohaet. was sweating yet felt chilleAd. stranger.It was impossible. But she had seen himS!he concentrated on the memory, tried to see the face aPgearihna.ps
it had been. .bu. t no.It had been none of the hundred, she knew Ftahcaita.l recognition was one of the mind's strongest abilities, it was amazingly accuraAten.d he had run away at the sight of her.
A stowawayB. ut that too was impossiblWe! here would he hide, how would he liWveh?at would he have done in the radiation storm?
Had she begun to hallucinate, theHna?d it come to that?
She walked back to her room, sick to her stomThaechh. allways of torus D were somehow dark
despite their bright illumination, and the back of her neck craWwlheedn.
the door appeared she dove
into the refuge of her rooBmu. t her room was just a bed and a side table, a chair and a closet, some shelves of stuffS. he sat there for an hour, then twBou.t there was nothing there for her to do, no
answers, no distractionsN.
o escape.
Maya found herself unable to mention her sighting to anyone, and in a way this was more frightening than the incident itself, as it emphasized to her its impossibPieliotyp.le would think she had gone maWd.hat
other conclusion was thereH? ow would he eat, where would he hiNdeo?. Too many people would have to know, it really wasn't possibBleu. t that face!
One night she saw it again in a dream, and woke up in Haalslwuceianta. tion was one of the symptoms
of space breakdown, as she well kneItwh. appened fairly frequently during long stays in Earth orbit, a couple dozen incidences had been recordeUds.ually people started by hearing voices in the ever-present background noise of ventilation and machinery, but a fairly common alternative was the sighting of a workmate who wasn't there, or worse yet of a doppelgänger, as if empty space had begun to fill with mirrors. Shortage of sensory stimuli was believed to cause the phenomena, and the Ares, with its long voyage, and no Earth to look at, and a brilliant (and some might say driven) crew, had been judged a potential hazard. This was one of the main reasons the ship's rooms had been given so much variety of color and texture, along with changing daily and seasonal weaAthnedr. still she had seen something that couldn't be there.
And now when she walked through the ship, it seemed to htheer tchreawt
was breaking up into small
and private groups, groups which rarely interactTedh.e farm team spent almost all its time in the farms, even eating meals there on the floors, and sleeping (together, rumor had it) among the rows Tohfe plants. medical team had its own suite of rooms and offices and labs in Torus B, and they spent their time in there, absorbed with experiments and observations and consultations with ETahreth.flight team was
preparing for MOI, running several simulations a dAanyd.
the rest were. . . scatterHeda.rd to findA. s
she walked around the toruses the rooms seemed emptier than ever before. The D dining hall was never

full anymore.And then again in the separated clumps of diners that were there, she noticed arguments broke out fairly frequently, and were hushed with peculiar sPperievda.te spats, but about what?
Maya herself said less at table, and listened mYoorue. could tell a lot about a society by what topics of
conversation came upI.n this crowd, the talk was almost always scieSnhcoep. geology, medicine, whateverY. ou could chat forever about that stuff.
talk:biology, engineering,
But when the number of people in a conversation fell below four, she noticed, the topics of conversation tended to changeS. hop talk was augmented (or replaced entirely) by gossip; and the gossip was always
about those two great forms of the social dynamic, sex and pVoloitiicess.
lowered, heads leaned in;
and word got aroundR. umors about sexual relations were becoming more common and more quiet,
more caustic and more compleIxn.
a few cases, as in the unfortunate triangle of Janet Blyleven, Mary
Dunkel and Alex Zhalin, it went very public and became the talk of the ship; in others it stayed so hidden that the talk was in whispers, accompanied pointed, inquisitive glaJnacneest. Blyleven would walk into
the dining hall with Roger Calkins, and Frank would remark to John, in an undertone meant to reach
Maya's ears, "Janet thinks we're a panmixiMa.a"ya would ignore him, as she always did when he spoke
in that sneery tone of voice; but later she looked up the word in a sociobiology lexicon, and found that a panmixia was a group where every male mated with every female.
The next day she looked at Janet curiously; she had had nJoaniedteaw.as friendly, she leaned in at you as you talked, and really paid attentiAonn.d she had a quick smiBleu. t... Well, the ship had been built to insure a lot of privacNy.o doubt there was more happening than anyone could know.
And among these secret lives, might there not be another secret life, led in solitude, or in teamwork with some few among them, some small clique or cabal?
"Have you noticed anything funny lately?" she asked Nadia one day, at the end of their regular breakfast chat.
Nadia shrugged". People are boredI.t's about time to get there, I think." Maybe that was all it was.
Nadia said, "Did you hear about Hiroko and Arkady?"
Rumors were constantly swirling about HiroMkoa.ya found it distasteful, disturbinTg.hat the lone Asian woman among them should be the focus of that kind of thing... dragon lady, mysterious orient. . . . Underneath the scientific rational surfaces of their minds, there were so many deep and powerful superstitions. Anything might happen, anything was possible.
Like a face seen through a glass.
And so she listened with a tight feeling in her stomach, as Sasha Yefremov leaned over from the next table and responded to Nadia's question by wondering if Hiroko were developing a maleThatrem.
was nonsense; although an alliance of some sort between Hiroko and Arkady had an unsettling sort of logic to Maya, she was not sure wAhryk.ady was very open in advocating independence from mission
control, Hiroko never talked about it at all; but in her actions hadn't she already led the whole farm team away, into a mental torus the others could never enter?
But then when Sasha claimed in a low voice that Hiroko had plans to fertilize several of her own ova with sperm from all the men on the Ares, and store them cryonically for later growth on Mars, Maya

could only sweep up her tray and head for the dishwashers, feeling something likeTvheerytigwo.ere becoming strange.
# # #
The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static eleAcstriicfittyh.e
god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting forThtheemgr.een wall panels inside the
Ares were now flecked with yellow and brown, and the afternoon light was thick with sodium vapor's pale bronze.
People spent hours in the bubble dome, watching what none among them but John had seTenhebefore. exercise machines were in constant use, the simulations performed with renewed enthuJsaiansemt .took
a swing through the toruses, sending back video images of all the changes in their little world; then she threw her glasses on a table, and resigned her post as rep"Lorotoekr., I'm tired of being an outsider,"
she said."Every time I walk into a room everyone shuts up, or starts preparing their offiIcti'sal lilkinee.I
was a spy for an enemy!"
"You were," Arkady said, and gave her a big hug.
At first no one volunteered to take over heHr ojoubst.on sent messages of concern, then reprimands,
then veiled threatsN.
ow that they were about to reach Mars, the expedition was getting a lot more TV
time, and the situation was about to "go nova," as mission controlThpeuyt irte. minded the colonists that
this burst of publicity would eventually reap the space program all kinds of benefits; the colonists had to film and broadcast what they were doing, to stimulate public support for the later Mars missions on which they were going to depenIdt. was their duty to transmit their stories!
Frank got on the screen and suggested that mission control could concoct their video reports out of
footage from robot camerasH.
astings, head of Mission Control in Houston, was visibly infuriated by this
response. But as Arkady said, with a grin that extended the realm of the question to everything: "What can they do?"
Maya shook her heaTd.hey was sending a bad signal, she knew; and revealing what the video reports
had so far hidden, that the group was splintering into rival cWliqhuiecsh.
indicated Maya's own lack of
control over the Russian half of the expeditSiohne.
was about to ask Nadia to take over the reporting
job as a favor to her, when Phyllis and some of her friends in B torus volunteered foMr atyhae, job. laughing at the expression on Arkady's face, gave it to Athrekmad. y pretended not to carIer.ritated, Maya said in Russian, "You know you've missed a chaAncceh!ance to shape our reality, in effect!"
"Not our reality, MayTa.heir reality.And I don't care what they think."
# # #
Maya and Frank began conferring about landfall assignmTenots.a certain extent these were
predetermined by the crew members' areas of expertise, but because of all the skill redundancies, there were still some choices to be maAden.d Arkady's provocations had had this effect at lmeaiss:ion
control's preflight plans were now generally regarded as provisional atInbefsatc. t no one seemed all that inclined to acknowledge Maya or Frank's authority either, which made things tense when it became known what they were working on.
Mission control's preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir

Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles MarineArisll.
the farm team was assigned to the base,
and a majority of the engineers and medical people-altogether, around sixty of the huTnhdererde.st would be scattered on subsidiary missions, returning to the base camp from time Ttohetimlareg. est
subsidiary mission was to dock a part of the disassembled Ares on Phobos, and begin transforming that moon into a space statioAn.nother smaller mission would leave the base camp and travel north to the
polar cap, to build a mining system which would transport blocks of ice back to Athethibradsem. ission was to make a seriegseological surveys, traveling all over the planet; a glamor assignment forAlslure.
the smaller groups would become semi-autonomous for periods of up to a year, so selecting them was no trivial matter; they knew well, now, how long a year could be.
Arkady and a group of his friends-Alex, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Tatiana, Elena-requested all the jobs on Phobos. When Phyllis and Mary heard about it, they came to Maya and Frank to protest. "They're obviously trying to take over Phobos, and who knows what they'll do with it?"
Maya nodded, and she could see Frank didn't like it Teihtheerp.roblem was, no one else wanted to
stay on Phobos; even Phyllis and Mary weren't clamoring to replace Arkady's crew, so it wasn't clear how to oppose him.
Louder arguments broke out when Ann Clayborne passed around her crew list for the geological survey. A lot of people wanted to join that one, and several of those left off her list said they were going on surveys whether Ann wanted them or not.
Arguments became frequent, and vehemenAt.lmost everyone aboard declared themselves for one mission or another, positioning themselves for the final decisioMnasy. a felt that she was losing all control of the Russian contingent; she was gettfiunrgious at ArkadyI.n a general meeting she suggested sarcastically that they let the computer make the assignmTenhtes. idea was rejected with no regard for her authority.She threw up her hand"sT. hen what do we do?"
No one knew.
She and Frank conferred in priva"tLee. t's try giving them the illusion of making the decision," he said to
her with a brief smile; she realized that he was not displeased to have seen her fail in the general meeting. Their encounter was coming back to haunt her, and she cursed herself forLiattlfeooplo. litburos were
dangerous. . . .
Frank polled everyone concerning their wishes, and then displayed the results on the bridge, listing everyone's first, second and third choiceTsh.e geological surveys were popular, while staying on Phobos was not.Everyone already knew this, and the posted lists proved that there were fewer conflicts than it had seemed."There are complaints about Arkady taking over Phobos," Frank said at the next public meeting. "But no one but him and his friends want thaEt vjeorby.one else wants to get down to the
surface."
Arkady said, "In fact we should get hardship compensation."
"It's not like you to talk about compensation, Arkady," Frank said smoothly. Arkady grinned and sat back down.
Phyllis wasn't amused. "Phobos will be a link between Earth and Mars, like the space stations in Earth orbit. You can't get from one planet to the other without them, they're what naval strategists call choke points."

"I promise to keep my hands off your neck," Arkady said to her.
Frank snapped, "We're all going to be part of the same vAilnlaygthei!ng we do affects all of Ausn!d
judging by the way you're acting, dividing up from time to time will be gooIdfoforr ounse. mind having Arkady out of my sight for a few months."
Arkady bowed". Phobos here we come!"
wouldn't
But Phyllis and Mary and their crowd still were not hTahpepyy.spent a lot of time conferring with Houston, and whenever Maya went into B torus, conversations seemed to cease, eyes followed her suspiciously-as if being Russian would automatically put her in Arkady's cSahmepd! amned them for
fools, and damned Arkady even moHree.
had started all this.
But in the end it was hard to tell what was going on, with a hundred people scattered in what suddenly felt like such a large shIinpt.erest groups, micropolitics; they really were fragmentiOngn.e hundred
people only, and yet they were too large a community to cAohnedret!here was nothing she or Frank could do about it.
# # #
One night she dreamed again of the face in theSfhaermw. oke shaken, and was unable to fall back asleep; and suddenly everything seemed out of contTrohle.y flew through the vacuum of space inside a small knot of linked cans, and she was supposed to be in charge of this madIt awrgaossya!bsurd!
She left her room, climbed D's spoke tunnel to the centralShsehapftu. lled herself to the bubble dome, forgetting the tunneljump game.
It was four AMT.he inside of the bubble dome was like a planetarium after the audience has gone: silent, empty, with thousands of stars packed into the black hemisphere of theMdaorsmeh.ung directly overhead, gibbous and quite distinctly spherical, as if a stone orange had been tossed among the stars. The four great volcanoes were visible pockmarks, and it was possible to make out the long rifts of Marineris. She floated under it, spreadeagled and spinning very slightly, trying to comprehend it, trying to
feel something specific in the dense interference pattern of her emoWtiohnesn. teardrops floated out and away among the stars.
she blinked, little spherical
The lock door openeJdo. hn Boone floated in, saw her, grabbtheed door handle to stop himse"lOf.h, sorry. Mind if I join you?"
"No."Maya sniffed and rubbed her eye"Ws. hat gets you up at this hour?" "I'm often up earlAy.nd you?"
"Bad dreams." "Of what?"
"I can't remember," she said, seeing the face in her mind.
He pushed off, floated past her to the d"oImcea.n never remember my dreams."

"Never?"
"Well, rarelyI.f something wakes me up in the middle of one, and I have time to think about it, then I
might remember it, for a little while anyway."
"That's normalB. ut it's a bad sign if you never remember your dreams at all." "Really?What's it a symptom of?"
"Of extreme repression, I seem to recaSlhl.e" had drifted to the side of the dome; she pushed off through the air, stopped herself against the dome next to"Bhuimt .that may be Freudianism."
"In other words something like the theory of phlogiston." She laughed". Exactly."
They looked out at Mars, pointed out features to each Toatlhkeerd. . Maya glanced at him as he spoke. Such bland, happy good looks; he really was not her Intypfaec. t she had taken his cheeriness for a kind of stupidity, back at the beginninBgu. t over the course of the voyage she had seen that he was not stupid.
"What do you think of all the arguments about what we should do up there?" she asked, gesturing at the red stone ahead of them.
"I don't know."
"I think Phyllis makes a lot of good points." He shrugged". I don't think that matters." "What do you mean?"
"The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the peoplXe acrlgauiminsg.a, Y claims b.They make arguments to support their claims, with any number of pBouinttsw. hen their listeners remember the discussion, what matters is simply that X believes a and Y bePlieeovpelse bt.hen form their judgement on what they think of X and Y."
"But we're scientistsW! e're trained to weigh the evidence."
John nodded". True. In fact, since I like you, I concede the point."
She laughed and pushed him, and they tumbled down the sides of the dome away from each other. Maya, surprised at herself, arrested her motion against the Sflhoeort.urned and saw John coming to a
halt across the dome, landing against the flHooer.looked at her with a smile, caught a rail and launched himself into the air, across the domed space on a course aimed at her.
Instantly Maya understood, and forgetting completely her resolution to avoid this kind of thing, she pushed off to intercept himT.hey flew directly at each other, and to avoid a painful collision had to catch and twist in mid-air, as if danciTngh.ey spun, hands clasped, spiraling up slowly toward the doItme.
was a dance, with a clear and obvious end to it, there to reach whenever thweyhewlik!eMd:aya's pulse

raced, and her breath was ragged in her thrAoast.they spun they tensed their biceps and pulled together, as slowly as docking spacecraft, and kissed.
With a smile John pushed down from her, sending her flying to the dome, and him to the floor, where he caught and crawled to the chamber's hatHche. locked it.
Maya let her hair loose asnhdook it out so it floated around her head, across herShfaeces.hook it
wildly and laughedI.t was not as though she felt on the verge of any great or overmastering love; it was simply going to be fun; and that feeling of simplicity waSsh.e. f.el.t a wild surge of lust, and pushed off
the dome toward JohnS.he tucked into a slow somersault, unzipping her jumper as she spun, her heart pounding like tympanisa, ll her blood rushing to her skin, which tingled as if thawing as she undressed, banged into John, flew away from him after an overhasty tug at a sleeve; they bounced around the chamber as they got their clothes off, miscalulating angles and momentums until with a gentle thrust of the big toes they flew into each other and met in a spinning embrace, and floated kissing among their floating clothes.
# # #
In the days that followed they met agTahiney.
made no attempt to keep the relationship a secret; so
very quickly they were a known item, a public coMupalne.y aboard seemed taken aback by the development; and one morning walking into the dining hall, Maya caught a swift glance from Frank,
seated at a corner table, that chilled her; it reminded her of some other time, some incident, some look on his face that she couldn't quite call to mind.
But most of those aboard seemed pleaseAdf.ter all it was a kind of royal match, an alliance of the two powers behind the colony, signifying harmonInyd. eed the union seemed to catalyze a number of others, which either came out of the closet or, in the newly supersaturated medium, sprang intVo labdeinagn.d
Ursula, Dmitri and Elena, Raul and Marina; newly evident couples were everywhere, to the point where
the singletons among them began to make nervous jokes aboBuutt itM. tension in voices, fewer arguments, more laughter.
aya thought she noticed less
One night, lying in bed thinking about it (thinking of wandering over to John's room) she wondered if that was why they had gotten togethnero:t from love, she still did not love him, she felt no more than
friendship for him, charged by lust that was strong but impersonal-but because it was, in fact, a very useful match.Useful to her-but she swerved from that thought, concentrated on the match's usefulness to the expedition as a wholYe.es, it was politicL.ike feudal politics, or the ancient comedies of spring and regeneration. And it felt that way, she had to admit; as if she were acting in response to imperatives stronger than her own desires, acting out the desires of some largerOffo, rcpee.rhaps, Mars itselfI.t
was not an unpleasant feeling.
As for the idea that she might have gained leverage over Arkady; or Frank; or HWireollk,os..h..e successfully avoided thinking about thaIt was one of Maya's talents.
# # #
Blooms of yellow and red and orange spread across the
Mwaalrls. was now the size of the moon in
Earth's sky. It was time to harvest all their effort; only a week more, and they would be there.
There was still tension over the unsolved problems of landfall assignmAenndts.now Maya found it less
easy than ever to work with Frank; it was nothing obvious, but it occurred to her that he did not dislike their inability to control the situation, because the disruptions were being caused more by Arkady than

anyone else, and so it looked like it was more her fault tMhaot rehisth. an once she left a meeting with
Frank and went to John, hoping to get some kind ofBuhtelpJo. hn stayed out of the debates, and threw
his support behind everything that Frank proposHedis.
advice to Maya in private was fairly acute, but
the trouble was he liked Arkady, and disliked Phyllis; so often he recommended to her that she support Arkady, apparently unaware of the way this tended to undercut her authority among the other Russians. She never pointed this out to him, howeLveorv.ers or not, there were still areas she didn't wish to
discuss with him, or with anyone else.
But one night in his room her nerves were jangling, and lying there, unable to sleep, worrying about first this and then that, she said, "Do you think it would be possible to hide a stowaway on the ship?"
"Well, I don't know," he said, surpri"seWd.hy do you ask?"
Swallowing hard, she told him about the face through the algae bottle. He sat up in bed, staring at "hYeor.u're sure it wasn't. . . ."
"It wasn't any of us."
He rubbed his jaw"W.
ell... I suppose if he were getting help from someone in the crew. . . ."
"Hiroko," Maya suggested".I mean, not just because she's Hiroko, but because of the farm and all that. It would solve his food problem, and there's a lot of places to hidAentdhehre. could have taken
shelter with the animals during the radiation storm." "They got a lot of rems!"
"But he could have gotten behind their water supAplyli.ttle one-man shelter wouldn't be to hard to set up."
John still hadn't gotten over the idea
"oAf iwt. hole year in hiding!"
"It's a big shiIpt. could be done, right?"
"Well, I suppose soY. eah, it could, I guesBs.ut why?"
Maya shrugged". I have no ideaS.omeone who wanted on, who didn't make the selecStiomn.eone who had a friend, or friends..."
"Still!I mean, a lot of us had friends who wanted to Tchoamt ed. oesn't mean that. . . ." "I know, I know."
They talked about it for most of an hour, discussing the possible reasons, the methods that could have been used to slip a passenger on board, to hide him, andAsnod otnh.en Maya suddenly noticed that
she felt much better; that she was, in fact, in a wonderful Jmohonodb.elieved her!He didn't think she had gone crazy!She felt a wash of relief and happiness, and threw her arms aroun"dIt'shismo. good to be able to talk to you about this!"
He smiled". We're friends, MayaY.
ou should have brought it up before."

"Yes."
# # #
The bubble dome would have been a wonderful place to view their final approach to Mars, but they were going to be aerobraking to reduce speed, and the dome would be behind the heat shield that they now deployed.There would be no view.
Aerobraking saved them from the necessity of carrying the enormous amount of fuel it would have taken to slow down, but it was an extremely precise operation, and therefore dangTehroeuys.had a leeway of
less than a millisecond of arc, and so several days before MOI the navigation team began to tweak their course with small burns on an almost hourly basis, fine tuning the appTrhoeancha.s they got closer they
stopped the ship's rotationT. he return to weightlessness, even in the toruses, was a shock; suddenly it came home to Maya that it wasn't just another simulaSthioen.lofted through the windy airthoef
hallways, seeing everything from a strange new high perspective; and all of a sudden it felt real.
She slept in snatches, an hour here, three hours Ethveerrey.
time she stirred, floating in her sleeping bag,
she had a moment of disorientation, thinking she was in Novy MirTahgeanins.he would remember, and adrenalin would knock her awakael:most there.She would pull through the halls of the torus, pushing off the wall panels of brown and gold and broOnzne.the bridge she would check with Mary or Raul or
Marina, or someone else in navigation; everything still on coTuhrseey. quickly it seemed they could see it expanding on the screens.
were approaching Mars so
They had to miss the planet by thirty kilometers, or about one ten-millionth of the distance they had traveled. No problem, Mary said, with a quick glance at ArkSaodyf.ar they were on the Mantra Path,
and hopefully none of his mad problems would crop up.
The crew members not involved with navigation worked to batten down, changing the layout of the farm especially, preparing everything for the torque and bumps that two and half gee were sure to bring.
Some of them got to go out on EVAs, to deploy subsidiary heat shields andTthheerelikwea. s a lot to do; and yet the days seemed long anyway.
# # #
It was going to happen in the middle of the night, and so that evening all the lights stayed on, and no on went to bedE. veryone had a station-some on duty, most of them only waiting Mitayoaut.sat in her
chair on the bridge, watching the screens and the monitors, thinking that they looked just like they would if it were all a simulation in BaikoCnuoru.ld they really be going into orbit around Mars?
They could.The Ares hit Mars's thin high atmosphere at forty thousand kilometers per hour, and
instantly the ship was vibrating heavily, Maya's chair shaking her fast and hard, and there was a faint low roar, as if they flew through a blast furnace-and it looked like that too, because the screens were bursting with an intense pink-orange glowC.ompressed air was bouncing off the heat shields and blazing past all
the exterior cameras, so that the whole bridge was tinged the color ofTMheanrsg. ravity returned with a veangance; Maya's ribs were squeezed so hard that she had trouble breathing, and her vision was blurred. It hurt!
They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow.
Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving

too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a waveTahcetiobne.st they could do was to take
the higest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpyAnriddet.here lay the
danger. If they were to hit a high pressure cell in the martian atmosphere, where heat or vibration or gee forces caused some senstive mechanism to break, then they could be cast into one of Arkady's
nightmares at the very time they were crushed in their chairs, "weighing" four hundred pounds apiece, which was something Arkady had never been able to simulate veryInwtehlel. real world, Maya thought grimly, at the moment when they were most vulnerable to danger, they were also most helpless to deal with it.
But as fate would have it, Martian stratospheric weather was stable, and they remained on the Mantra
Path. Which in actuality turned out to be a roaring, shuddering, breath-robbing eight mNinoutheos.ur Maya could remember had lasted as loSnegn. sors showed that the main heat shield had risen to six hundred degrees Kelvin-
And then the vibration stoppeTdh.e roar endedT. hey had skipped out of the atmosphere, after skidding around a quarter of the planTeth.ey had decelerated by some twenty thousand kilometers an hour, and
the heat shield's temperature had risen to seven hundred and ten degrees Kelvin, very nearBiutst
limit.
the method had workedA. ll was stillT. hey floated, weightless again, held down by their chair stIrtaps. felt as if they had stopped moving entirely, as if they were floating in pure silence.
Unsteadily they unstrapped themselves, floated like ghosts around the cool air of the rooms, an airy faint roaring sounding in their ears, emphasizing the sileTnchee.y weretalking too loudly, shaking each others'
hands. Maya felt dazed, and she couldn't understand what people were saying to her; not because she couldn't hear them, but because she wasn't paying attention.
# # #
Twelve weightless hours later their new course led them to a periapsis thirty-five thousand kilometers from Mars.There they fired the main rockets for a brief thrust, increasing their speed by about a hundred kilometers an hour; after that they were pulled toward Mars again, carving an ellipse that would bring them back to within five hundred kilometers of the surTfahceey. were in martian orbit.
Each elliptical orbit of the planet took around aOdvaeyr . the next two months, the computers would
control burns that would gradually circularize their course just inside the orbit of
BPhuot btohse. landing
parties were going to descend to the surface well before that, while apogee was so close.
They moved the heat shields back to their storage positions, and went inside the bubble dome to have a look.
During apogee Mars filled most of the sky, as if they flew over it in aThheighdepjetth.
of Valles
Marineris was perceptible, the height of the four big volcanoes obvthioeuirs:broad peaks appeared over the horizon well before the surrounding countryside came into vTiheewr.e were craters everywhere on
the surface:their round interiors were a vivid sandy orange, a slightly lighter color than the surrounding countryside. Dust, presumably.The short rugged curved mountain ranges were darker than the surrounding countryside, a rust color broken by black shadoBwuts. both the light and dark colors were
just a shade away from the omnipresent rusty-orangish-red, which was the color of every peak, crater, canyon, dune, and even the curved slice of the dust-filled atmosphere, visible high above the bright curve of the planetR. ed Mars!It was transfixing, mesmerizingE.veryone felt it.

# # #
They spent long hours working, and at last it was realTwheorskh.ip had to be partially disassembled. The main body would be eventually parked in orbit near Phobos, and used as an emergency return vehicle. But twelve tanks from the outer lengths of the hub shaft had only to be disconnected from the Ares and prepped to become planetary landing vehicles, which would take the colonists down in groups of ten.The first lander was scheduled to descend as soon as it was decoupled and prepped; so they
worked in round-the-clock shifts, spending a lot of time in
TEhVeAy . pulled in to the dining halls tired
and ravenous, and conversations were loud; the ennui of the voyage seemed forOgonteteni.ght Maya floated in the bathroom getting ready for bed, feeling stiffened muscles that she hadn't heard from in months. Around her Nadia and Sasha and Yeli Zudov were chattering away, and in the warm wash of voluble Russian it suddenly occurred to her that everyone was happy-they were in the last moment of
their anticipation, an anticipation that had lain in their hearts for half a lifetime, or ever since childhood-and now suddenly it had bloomed below them like a child's crayon drawing of Mars, growing huge then
small, huge then small, and as it yo-yoed back and forth it loomed before them in all its immense
potential: tabula rasa, blank slateA.
blank red slateA. nything was possible, anything could happen-in
that sense they were, in just these last few days, perfectlyFrfereeeo. f the past, free of the future,
weightless in their own warm air, floating like spirits about to invest a material woInrldt.he.
m. .irror
Maya caught sight of the toothbrush-distorted grin on her face, and grabbed a railing to hold her position.
It occurred to her that they might never be so happy Baegauinty.
was the promise of happiness, not
happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anythinBgutretahli.s time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last.
She released the railing and spit toothpaste into a wastewater bag, then floated backwards into the hallway. Come what may, they had reached their gTohale.y had earned at least the chance to try.
# # #
Disassembling the Ares made a lot of them feelItowdda.s, as John remarked, like dismantling a town and flinging the houses in different directioAnsn.d this was the only town they hUadn.der the giant eye
of Mars, all their disagreements became taut; clearly it was critical now, there was little Ptiemoepleleft. argued, in the open or under the surfSacoe.many little groups now, keeping their own council... What had happened to that brief moment of happineMssa?ya blamed it mostly on ArkadHy.e had opened
Pandora's box; if not for him and his talk, would the farm group have drawn so close around Hiroko? Would the medical team have kept such close counSchiel? didn't think so.
She and Frank worked hard to reconcile differences and forge a consensus, to give them the feeling they were still a single teamIt. involved long conferences with Phyllis and Arkady, Ann and Sax, Houston and Baikonur. In the process a relationship developed between the two leaders that was even more complex than their early encounters in the park; though that was part of it; Maya saw now, in Frank's occasional flashes of sarcasm, of resentment, that he had been bothered by the incident more than she had thought at the time. But there was nothing to be done about it now.
In the end the Phobos mission was indeed given to Arkady and his friends, mainly because no one else wanted it. Everyone was promised a spot on a geological survey if they wanted one; and Phyllis and
Mary and the rest of the "Houston crowd" were given assurances that the construction of base camp
would go according to the plans made in HousTtohney.
intended to work at the base to see that it
happened that way."Fine, fine,"Frank snarled at the end of one of these meet"iWnges'.re all going to be on Mars, do we really have to fight like this over what we're going to do there?"
"That's life," Arkady said cheerful"lyO.n Mars or not, life goes on."

Frank's jaw was clenche"dI. came here to get away from this kind of thing!"
Arkady shook his hea"dY. ou certainly did notT!his is your life, FranWk. hat would you do without it?"
# # #
One night shortly before the descent, they gathered and had a formal dinner for the entireMhousnt dred. of the food was farm-growpna: sta, salad, and bread, with red wine from storage, saved for a special occasion.
Over a dessert of strawberries, Arkady floated up to propose a"Tto stht.e new world we now create!"
A chorus of groans and cheers; by now they all knew what hePhmyellaisnt.threw down a strawberry
and said, "Look, Arkady, this settlement is a scientific staYtioounr.
ideas are irrelevant to Mit.aybe in
fifty or a hundred yearBs.ut for now, it's going to be like the stations in Antarctica."
"That's true," Arkady said. "But in fact Antarctic stations are very poMliotisctalo. f them were built so
that countries that built them would have a say in the revision of the AntarctAicndtrenatoyw.
the
stations are governed by laws set by that treaty, which was made by a very political Sporoycoeuss!
see, you cannot just stick your head in sand crying 'I am a scientist, I am a sHcieenptiustt!'a "hand to
his forehead, in the universal mocking gesture of the prima d"oNnon.a.When you say that, you are only saying, 'I do not wish to think about complex systWemhsi!c'h is not really worthy of true scientists, is it?"
"The Antarctic is governed by a treaty because no one lives there except in scientific stations," Maya said irritably. To have their final dinner, their last moment of freedom, disrupted like this!
"True," Arkady said".But think of the resuIltn.
Antarctica, no one can own laNndo.
one country or
organization can exploit the continent's natural resources, without the consent of every other cNoountry.
one can claim to own those resources, or take them and sell them to other people, so that some profit
from them while others pay for their
Dusoen. 't you see how radically different that is from the way the
rest of the world is ruAn?nd this is the last area on Earth to be organized, to be given a seItt of laws. represents what all governments working together feel instinctively is fair, revealed on land free from claims of sovereignty, or really from any history aItt ailsl,. to say it plainly, Earth's best attempt to create
just property laws!Do you see? This is the way entire world should be run, if only we could free it from the straitjacket of history!"
Sax Russell, blinking mildly, said, "But Arkady, since Mars is going to be ruled by a treaty based on the
old Antarctic one, what are you objecting Tthoe?
Outer Space Treaty states that no country can claim
land on Mars, no military activities are allowed, and all bases are open to inspection by anyAlcsountry. no martian resources can become the property of a single nation-the UN is supposed to establish an international regime to govern any mining or other exploitaItfioann. ything is ever done along that line,
which I doubt will happen, then it is to be shared among all the nations of thHee wtuornlde.d" upward. "Isn't that what you're agitating for, already achieved?"
a palm
"It's a start," Arkady sa"idB.ut there are aspects of that treaty you haven't mentioBnaesde.s built on
Mars will belong to the countries that build them, for insWtanecew. ill be building American and Russian
bases, according to this provision of the lAawnd.
that puts us right back into the nightmare of Terran law
and Terran historyA. merican and Russian businesses will have the right to exploit Mars, as long as the profits are somehow shared by all the nations signing the tTrehaisty.may only involve some sort of

percentage paid to UN, in effect no more than bIridboen. 't believe we should acknowledge these provisions for even a moment!"
Silence followed this remark.
Ann Clayborne said, "This treaty also says we have to take measures to prevent the disruption of planetary environments, I think is how they puIt'sit.in Article SevenT.hat seems to me to expressly forbid the terraforming that so many of you are talking about."
"I would say that we should ignore that provision as well," Arkady said "qOuuicrkolyw. n well-being depends on ignoring it."
This view was more popular than his others, and several people said so.
"But if you're willing to disregard one article," Arkady pointed out, "you should be willing to disregard the rest.Right?"
There was an uncomfortable pause.
"All these changes will happen inevitably," Sax Russell said with a"Bsheriung on Mars will change us in an evolutionary way."
Arkady shook his head vehemently, causing him to spin a little in the air over"tNhoe, tanbol,e.no, no! History is not evolutionI!t is a false analogyE!volution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of yearsB. ut history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or dayHsi!story is Lamarckian!So that if we choose to establish certain
institutions on Mars, there they will bAen! d if we choose others, there they will Abe!w" ave of his hand encompassed them all, the people seated at the tables, the people floating among th"eI vsianyesw: e
should make those choices ourselves, rather than having them made for us by people back Bony people long dead, really."
Phyllis said sharply",You want some kind of communal utopia, and it's not posIsisbhloe.uld think
Russian history would have taught you something about that."
"It has," Arkady sai"dN. ow I put to use what it has taught me."
Earth.
"Advocating an ill-defined revolutionF?ormenting a crisis situationG? etting everyone upset and at odds with each other?"
A lot of people nodded at this, but Arkady waved them"Iawdaeycl.ine to accept blame for everyone's problems at this point in the tIriph.ave only said what I think, which is my IfrigIhtm. ake some of you uncomfortable, that is your problemIt. is because you don't like the implications of what I say, but can't find grounds to deny them."
"Some of us can't understand what you say," Mary exclaimed.
"I say only this!" Arkady said, staring at her bug-"eWyeed:have come to Mars for goWode.
are going
to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe-all on a planet that has none of these thingWs.e can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right
down to the molecular leveTl.his is an extraordinary ability, think ofAnitd!
yet some of us here can
accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change our

selves, or the way we livTeo.
be twenty-first century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time
living within nineteenth century social systems, based on seventeenth century ideolIotg'sieasb. surd, it's crazy, it's-it's-" he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared "It's unsAcinedntisfoic!I say
that among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them. We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves."
# # #
No one ventured a rebuttal to that; Arkady at full throttle was pretty much unopposable, and a lot of them were geniunely provoked by what he had said, and needed time toOtthheinrsk.were simply
disgruntled, but unwilling to cause to much of a fuss at this particular dinner, which was supposed to be a celebration. It was easier to roll one's eyes, and drink to the"TtooasMt. ars!To Mars!"But as they
floated around after finishing dessert, Phyllis was disdain"fFuilr.st we have to survive," she sa"iWd.ith dissension like this, how good will our chances be?"
Michel Duval tried to reassure h"eAr. lot of these disagreements are symptoms of the fOlignhcte. on
Mars, we'll pull togetherA. nd we have more than just what we brought on the Ares to help us-we'll have what the unmanned landers have brought already, shipments of equipment and food all over the surface
and the moonsA.
ll that's there for uTs.he only limit will be our own stamAinnad.
this voyage is part of
that-it's a kind of preparation, a teIfst.we fail this part, we won't even get to try on Mars." "Exactly my point!" Phyllis sa"idW. e are failing in this."
Sax stood, looking bored, and pushed off toward the kitTchenh. all was filled with the seashell roar of many small discussions, some of them acrimonious in tAonelo. t of people were angry at Arkady,
clearly; and others were angry at them for getting upset.
Maya followed Sax into the kitchAens. he cleaned his tray he sigh"ePde.ople are so emotional. Sometimes it seems like I'm stuck in an endless performance of the play No Exit."
"That's the one where they can't get out of a little room?"
He nodded". Where hell is other peoplIe.hope we don't prove the hypothesis."
# # #
A few days later the landers were reTadhyey.
would descend over a period of five doanylsy; the
Phobos team would stay in what was left of the Ares, guiding it to its near-docking with the little moon. Arkady, Alex, Dmitri, Roger, Samantha, Edvard, Janet, Raul, Marina, Tatiana, and Elena said their farewells, absorbed already in the task at hand, promising to descend as soon as the Phobos station was built.
The night before the descent Maya couldn't slEeveepn. tually she gave up trying, and pulled herself
through the rooms and corridors, up to the hub. Every object was sharp-edged with sleeplessness and adrenalin, and every familiarity of the ship was countered or overwhelmed by some alteration, a
lashed-down stack of boxes or a dead-end in a Ittubwea. s as if they had already left the AShre .
looked around at it one last time, drained of emoTtihoenn. she pulled herself through the tight locks, into the landing vehicle she had been assignedMtoig.ht as well wait there. She climbed into her spacesuit, feeling, as she so often did when the real moment came, that she was only going through another
simulation. She wondered if she would ever escape that feeling, if being on Mars would be enough to end
it. It would be worth it just for tthoatm:
ake her feel real for onSceh!e settled into her chair.

A few sleepless hours later she was joined by Sax, Vlad, Nadia, anHderAncno.mpanions belted in, and they ran through the check-out togethTeor.ggles were flipped, there was a countdown; and their rockets fired. The lander drifted away from the AreItss. rockets fired againT.hey fell toward the
planet. They hit the top of the atmosphere, and their single trapezoidal window became a blaze of
Mars-colored air.Maya, vibrating with the craft, stared up aStheit. felt tense and unhappy, focused
backward rather than forward, thinking of everyone still on the Ares; and it seemed to her that they had failed, that the five of them in the lander were leaving behind a group in Tdhiseairrabye.st chance for
creating some kind of concord had passed, and they had not succeeded; the momentary flash of
happiness she had felt while brushing her teeth had been just that, Sahfelahsha
failed, thenT.hey were
going their separate ways, splintered by their beliefs, and even after two separate years of enforced togetherness they were, like any other human group, no more than a collection of sTtrahnegedrise. was cast.
Part Three
The Crucible
-+=*=+-
It formed with the rest of the solar system, around five billion yeTarhsat'asgofi.fteen million human
generations. Rocks banging together in space, and then coming back and holding together, all because of the mysterious force we call graviTtyh.at same mysterious warp in the weft of things caused the pile of rocks, when it was big enough, to crush in on its center, until the heat of the pressure melted the rock. Mars is small but heavy, with a nickel-iron cItories. small enough that the interior has cooled faster than Earth's; the core no longer spins inside the crust at a different speed, and so Mars has practically no magnetic field.No dynamo leftB. ut the one of the last internal flows of the molten core and mantle was in
the form of a huge anomalous lumping outward on one side, a shove against the crust wall that formed a continent-sized bulge, a bulge eleven kilometers high, three times as high as the Tibetan plateau is above
its surroundings.This bulge caused many other features to appaeasry: stem of radial fractures covering
an entire hemisphere, including the largest cracks of all, the Valles Marineris, a lace of canyons that
would cover the United States coast to coTahste.
bulge also caused a number of volcanoes, including
three straddling its spine, Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons; and off on its northwest edge, Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, three times the height of Everest, one hundred times the mass of Mauna Loa, the Earth's largest volcano.
So the Tharsis Bulge was the most important factor in shaping the surface TofheMoatrhse.r major
factor was meteor falIl.n the Noachian Age, three to four billion years ago, meteors were falling on Mars at a tremendous rate, millions of them, and thousands of them planetesimals, rocks as big as Vega or Phobos. One of the impacts left behind Hellas Basin, 1600 kilometers in diameter, the largest obvious crater in the solar systems; although Daedalia Planum appears to be the remains of an impact basin 4500 kilometers across.Those are big; but then there are areologists who believe that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is an ancient impact basin.

These big impacts created explosions so cataclysmic that it is hard to imagine them; ejecta from them ended up on the Earth and the Moon, aasnadsteroids in Trojan orbits; some areologists think that the Tharsis bulge started because of the Hellas impact; others believe that Phobos and Deimos are ejecta. And these were only the largest impacStms.aller stones fell every day, so that oldest surfaces on Mars
are saturated with cratering, the landscape a palimpsest of newer rings obscuring older ones, with no patch of land untouchedA. nd each of these impacts released explosions of heat that melted rock;
elements were broken out of their matrix and fired away in the form of hot gases, liquids, new minerals. This and the outgassing from the core produced an atmosphere, and lots of water; there were clouds, storms, rain and snow, glaciers, streams, rivers, lakes, all scouring the land, all leaving unmistakable
marks of their passage-flood channels, stream beds, shorelines, every kind of hydrologic hieroglyphic.
But all that went awaTyh.e planet was too small, too far from theTshuen.atmosphere froze and fell to
the ground. Carbon dioxide sublimed to form a thin new atmosphere, while oxygen bonded to rock, and turned it redT. he water froze, and over the ages seeped down through the kilometers of meteor-broken rock. Eventually this layer of regolith became permeated with ice, and the deepest parts were hot enough to melt the ice; so there were underground seas on MAanrds. water always flows downhill; so these
aquifers migrated down, slowly seeping, until they pooled behind some stoppage or another, a rib of high bedrock or a frozen soil barriSero.metimes intense artesian pressures built against these dams; and
sometimes a meteor would hit, or a volcano appear, and the dam would burst apart and a whole underground sea would spew over the landscape, in enormous floods, ftleonodthsousand times the flow
of the MississippiE. ventually, however, the water on the surface would freeze, and sublime away in the ceaseless dry winds, and fall on the poles in every winter's fogTheoopdo. lar caps therefore thickened,
and their weight drove the ice underground, until the visible ice was only the tip of two world-topping lenses of underground permafrost, lenses ten and then a hundred times the visible caps' Wvohliuleme.
back down toward the equator, new aquifers were being filled from below, by outgassing from the core;
and some of the old aquifers were refilling.
And so this slowest of cycles approached its second rBout da.s the planet was cooling, all of it happened more and more slowly, in a long ritard like a clock windingThdeowpnla.net settled into the
shape we seeB. ut change never stops; the ceaseless winds carved the land, with dust that grew finer and finer; and the eccentricities of Mars's orbit meant that the southern and northern hemispheres traded the cold and warm winters in a 51,000 years cycle, so that the dry ice cap and the water ice cap reversed poles. Each swing of this pendulum laid down a new stratum of sand, and the troughs of new dunes cut through older layers at an angle, until the sand around the poles lay in a stippled cross-hatching, in geometrical patterns like Navajo sand paintings, banding the whole top of the world.
The colored sands in their patterns, the fluted and scalloped canyon walls, the volcanoes rising right through the sky, the rubbled rock of the chaotic terrain, the infinity of craters, ringed emblems of the planet's beginning. . .B.eautiful, or harsher than thastp: are, austere, stripped down, silent, stoic, rocky, changeless. Sublime. The visible language of nature's mineral existence.
Mineral; not animal, nor vegetable, nor vIitralc.ould have happened but it didn't. There was never any spontaneous generation out of the clays or the sulphuric hot springs; no spore falling out of space, no
touch of a god; whatever starts life (for we do not know), it did not happen MonarMs of the othernessof the world, of its stony vitality.
And then, one day. . . .
arorsll.ed, proof

-+=*=+-
She hit the ground with both feet solid, nothing tricky about it, the gee familiar from nine months in the Ares; and with the suit's weight, not that much different from walking on Earth, as far as she could remember. The sky was a pink shaded with sandy tans, a color richer and more subtle than any in the photos. "Look at the sky," Ann was saying, "look at the Mskayy.a" was chattering away, Sax and Vlad
spun like rotating statuesN.
adezhda Francine Cherneshevsky took a few more steps, felt her boots
crunch the surfaceI.t was salt-hardened sand a couple of centimeters thick, which cracked when you walked on it; the geologists called it duricrust or calHicehre.boot tracks were surrounded by small systems of radial fractures.
She was out away from the landTerh.e ground was a dark rusty orange, covered with an even litter of rocks the same color, although some of the rocks showed tints of red or black oTr oyethlleowe.ast
stood a number of rocket landing vehicles, each one a different shape and size, with the tops of more sticking over the eastern horizoAn.ll of them were crusted the same red-orange as the griotuwnda:s an
odd, thrilling sight, as if they had stumbled upon a long-abandoned alien spaPcaerptos rto.f Baikonur would look like this, in a million years.
She walked to one of the nearest landing vehicles, a freight container the size of a small house, set on a skeletal four-legged rocket assemblyI.t looked like it had been there for decaTdhees. sun was
overhead, too bright to look at even through her faceplate; it was hard to judge through the polarization and other filters, but it seemed to her that the daylight was much like that on Earth, as far as she could remember. A bright winter's day.
She looked around again, trying to take Titheiny. stood on a gently bumpy plain, covered with small sharp-edged rocks, all half-buried in duBsta.ck to the west the horizon was marked by a small
flat-topped hill.It might be a crater rim, it was hard toAnsany.was already halfway there, still quite a
large figure; the horizon was closer than seemed right, and Nadia paused to take note of that, suspecting that she would soon become accustomed to it, and never nBoutitcei.t was not Earthlike, that strangely
close horizon, she saw that clearly noTwh.ey stood on a smaller planet.
She made a concerted effort to recall Earth's gravity, wondering that it should beWsoalkhinagrd.in the woods, over tundra, on the river ice in winter. . . andstenpo,ws:tep.The ground was flat, but one had
to thread a course between the ubiquitous rocks; there was no place on Earth that she knew of where they were distributed so copiously and evenTlyak. e a jump!She did, and laughed; even with her suit on
she could tell she was lightSerh.e was just as strong as ever, but weighed only thirty Aknildost!he forty
kilos of the suit. . . well, it threw her off balance, that wItasmtarude her feel that she had gone hollow.
That was ith: er center of gravity was gone, her weight had been shifted out to her skin, to the outside of her muscles rather than the insidTeh.at was the effect of the suit, of couInrsid. e the habitats it would
be as it had been in the ABreust. out here in a suit, she was the hollow woWmiathn. the aid of that
image she could suddenly move more easily, hop over a boulder, come down and take a turn, dance! Simply pop in the air, dance, land on top of a flat rock-watch out-
She tumbled, landed on a knee and both hHanedrs.gloves broke through the duricruIstt.felt like a
layer of caked sand at the beach, only harder and more
Lbriiktetleh. ardened mudA.
nd cold! Their
gloves weren't heated the way their boot soles were, and there wasn't enough insulation when actually touching the groundI.t was like touching ice with the bare fingers, wAorwo!und 215° Kelvin, she
recalled, or -90° Centrigrade; colder than Antarctica, colder than Siberia at itsHweorfsitn. gertips were
numb. They would need better gloves to be able to work, gloves fitted with heating elements, like their

boot soles.That would make the gloves thicker and less flexSibhlee'.d have to get her finger muscles back into shape.
She had been laughinSgh. e stood and walked to another freight drop, humm"Rinogyal Garden Blues."
She climbed the leg of the next drop and rubbed the crust of red dirt off an engraved manifest on the side of the big metal cratOe.ne John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer, hydrazine-powered, thermally
protected, semi-autonomous, fully programmableP.rostheses and spare parts included.
She felt her face stretched in a big Bgaricnk.hoes, front loaders, bulldozers, tractors, graders, dump
trucks; construction supplies and materials of every kind; air miners to filter and collect chemicals from the atmosphere; little factories to render these chemicals into other chemicals; other factories to combine those chemicals; a whole commissary, everything they were going to need, all at hand in scores of crates scattered over the plainS.he began to hop from one lander to the next, taking Ssotomcek. of them had
obviously hit hard, some had their spider legs collapsed, others their bodies cracked, one was even flattened into a pile of smashed boxes, half-buried in dust; but these were just another kind of opportunity, the salvage and repair game, one of her favoSrihtees!laughed aloud, she was a bit giddy,
she noticed the comm light on her wrist console blinking; she switched to the common band and was startled by Maya and Vlad and Sax all talking at once, "Where's Ann, you women get back here, hey Nadia, come help us get this damned habitat online, we can't even get the door open!"
She laughed.
# # #
The habitats were scattered like everything else, but they had landed near one that they knew was functional; it had been turned on from orbit some days before, and run through a complete check. Unfortunately the outer lock door could not be included in the check, and it wNasadsitaucwk.ent to
work on it, grinning; it was odd to see what looked like a derelict trailer home sporting a space station lock door.It only took a minute for her to get it open, by tapping out the emergency open code while pulling out on the dooSrt.uck with cold, differential shrinking perhapTsh.ey were going to have a lot of
little problems like that.
Then she and Vlad were into the lock, and then inside the Iht asbtilal t.looked like a trailer home, but with the latest in kitchen fixturAesl.l the lights were oTn.he air was warm, and circulating wTelhle.
control panel looked like a nuclear power plant's.
While the others came inside, Nadia walked down a row of small rooms, through door after door, and the oddest feeling suddenly came over htherin: gs seemed out of placTe.he lights were on, some of them blinking; and down at the far end of the hall, a door was swinging slightly back and forth on its hinges.
Obviously the ventilationA. nd the shock of the landing probably had disarranged things sliSghetly. shook off the feeling, and went back to greet the others.
# # #
By the time everyone had landed and walked across the stony plain (stopping, stumbling, running, staring off at the horizon, spinning slowly, walking again), and had entered into the three functioning habitats, and gotten out of their EVA suits, and put them away, and checked out the habitats, and eaten a bit, talking it all over the whole while, night had falTlehne.y continued working on the habitats and talking through
most of that night, too excited to fall asleep; then most of them slept in snatches until dawn, when they woke and suited up and went out again, looking around and checking manifests and running machines

through checks.Eventually they noticed they were famished, and went back in to jam down a quick meal; and then it was night again!
And that was what it was like, for several days; a wild swirl of timeNapdaisasinwgo. uld wake to the bip of her wrist console, and eat a quick breakfast looking out the habitat's little eastdwawinndow:
stained the sky rich berry colors for a few minutes, before shifting rapidly through a series of rosy tones to the thick pink-orange of daytimAel.l over the floor of the habitat her companions slept, on mattresses
that would fold up against the wall during the day. The walls were beige, tinted orange by Tthhee dawn. kitchen and living room were tiny, the four toilet rooms no more than Aclnonsewts.ould stir as the room
lightened, and go to one of the four toiJloehtsn.
was already in the kitchen, moving around quietly.
Conditions were so much more crowded and public than they had been on the Ares that some of them were having trouble adjusting; every night Maya complained she couldn't sleep in such a crowd, but there she was, mouth open girlishlSyh. e would be the last to rise, snoozing through the noise and bustle of the others' morning routines.
Then the sun would crack the horizon, and Nadia would be done with her cereal and milk, the milk made of powder mixed with water mined from the atmosphere (it tasted just the same); and it was time to get into her walker, and out to work.
The walkers were designed for the martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the terran atmosphere would haveT. his prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars's minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would haveW. alkers also had the very significant advantage of being
fail-operational; only the hard helmet was airtight, so if you ripped a hole at knee or elbow you would have a badly bruised and frozen patch of skin, but would not suffocate and die within minutes.
Getting into a walker, however, was a workout in Nitsaedlifa.
wriggled the pants over her long
underwear, then the jacket, and zipped the two sections of the suit toAgefttehrert.hat she jammed into
big thermal boots, and locked their toprings to the suit's ankle rings; pulled on gloves, and locked the wristrings; put on a fairly standard hard helmet, and locked it to the suit's neck ring; then shouldered into an airtank backpack, and linked its air tubes to her heSlhmeetb. reathed hard a few times, tasting the
cool oxygen-nitrogen in her face. The walker's wristpad indicated that all the seals were good; and she followed John and Samantha into the loTckh.ey closed the inner door; the air was sucked back into containers; John unlocked the outer dooTrh.e three of them stepped outside.
It was a thrill every morning to step out onto that rocky plain, with the early morning sun casting long black shadows to the wesatn, d the various small knolls and hollows revealed cleTarhleyr.e was usually
a wind from the south, and loose fines moved in a sinuous flow over the ground, so that the rocks sometimes seemed to creepE. ven the strongest of these winds could scarcely be felt against an
outstretched hand,but they hadn't yet experienced one of the storm winds; at five hundred kilometers per hour they were pretty sure to feel somethAintg.twenty, nearly nothing.
Nadia and Samantha walked over to one of the little rovers they had uncrated, and clNimadbiead in.
drove the rover across the plain to a tractor they had found the day before, about a kilometer to the west. The morning cold cut through her walker in a diamond pattern, as the result of the X weave of the heating filaments in the suit materiAal. strange sensation, but she had been colder in Siberia many a time,
and she had no complaints.
They came to the big lander and got Noaudt.ia picked up a drill with a Phillips screwdriver bit, and started dismantling the crate on top of the vehTichle. tractor inside the lander's crate was a

Mercedes-Benz. She poked the drill into the head of a screw, pulled the trigger and watched the screw spin out.She moved to the next, grinninIngn. umerable times in her youth she had gone out in cold like
this, with numb white chopped-up hands, and fought titanic battles to unscrew frozen or stripped screws.
. . . but here it was Ziiip, another oneAonudt. really with the walker it was warmer than it had been in Siberia, and freer than in space, the walker no more restrictive than a thin stiffRwedetsruoict.ks were scattered all around in their uncanny regularity; voices chattered on the common"Hbeayn,d:I found
those solar panels!""You think that's something, I just found the goddamn nuclear reacYtoers.," it was a great morning on Mars.
The stacked crate walls made a ramp to drive the tractor off the lander; they didn't look strong enough, but that was the gravity agaNina. dia had turned on the tractor's heating system as soon as she could
reach it, and now she climbed into the cab and tapped a command into its autopilot, feeling that it would be best to let the thing descend the ramp on its own, with her and Samantha watching from the side, just in case the ramp was more brittle in the cold than expected, or otherwise unSrheleiasbtliell. found it
almost impossible to think in terms of martian gee, to trust the designs that took it intoThaeccroaumnpt. just looked too flimsy!
But the tractor rolled down without incident, and stopped on the gerioguhnt dm: eters long, royal blue, with wire mesh wheels taller than they wTerhee.y had to climb a short ladder into theTchaeb.crane
prosthesis was already attached to the mount on the front end, and that made it easy to load the tractor with the winch, the sandbagger, the boxes of spare parts, and finally the crateWwhaelnls.they were
done, the tractor looked as overloaded and topheavy as a steam calliope; but the gee made it only a matter of balanceT. he tractor itself was a real pig, with four thousand horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as trackTs.he hydrazine motor had pick-up even worse than diesel, but it was like the ultimate first gear, completely inexorablTe.hey took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park-and
there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across MShaers!followed
Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.
And that was the morninBga.ck into the habitat, helmet and tank off, a quick bite in walker and boots. With all that running around they were famished.
After lunch they went back out in the Mercedes-Benz, and used it to haul a Boeing air miner to an area east of the habitats, where they were going to gather all the faTcthoerieasi.r miners were big metal
cylinders, somewhat resembling 737 fuselages except that they had eight massive sets of landing gear, and rocket enginesattached vertically to their sides, and two jet engines mounted above the fuselage fore and aft. Five of these miners had been dropped in the area some two years Inbetfhoere.time since,
their jet engines had been sucking in the thin air and ramming it through a sequence of separating
mechanisms, to divide it into its component gaTsehse.
gases had been compressed and stored in big
tanks, and were now available for use. So the Boeings each now held 5,000 liters of water ice, 3,000 liters of liquid oxygen, 3,000 liters of liquid nitrogen, 500 liters of argon, and 400 liters of carbon dioxide.
It was no easy task hauling these giants across the rubble to the big holding tanks near their habitats, but they needed to do it, because after they were drained into the holding tanks they could be turned on
again. Just that afternoon another group had gotten one emptied out and turned back on, and the low hum of its jets could be heard everywhere, in a helmet or a habitat.
Nadia and Samantha's miner was more stubborn; in the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachtmo esnctrape a rough road for it all the way.
Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatique. They stripped down to their dust-caked underwear and went straight to the kitchen, ravenous once

more; Vlad estimated they were each burning about six thousand calories Tahedyayc. ooked and gulped down rehydrated pasta, nearly scalding their partially-thawed fingers on theirOtnralys.when
they had finished eating did they go to the women's changing room and start trying to clean themselves up, sponging down with hot water, changing into clean jum"pIte'srs.going to be hard to keep our clothes clean, that dust even gets through the wristlocks, and the waist zippers are like open"Wheolllesy.e"ah,
those fines are micron-sizedW! e're going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that. It's going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains. . . ."
"That's life on MarsT."his was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.
On some days after dinner there were a couple hours of sunlight left, and Nadia, restless, would sometimes go back outsideO. ften she spent the time wandering around the crates that had been hauled
to base that day, and over time she assembled a personal tool kit, feeling like a kid in a candy store. Years in the Siberian power industry had given her a reverence for good tools, she had suffered brutally from the lack of themE.verything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched-some of it even built in inches-so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells
out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day's work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.
Now she could wander in the dim ruby light of sunset, her old jazz collection piped from the habitat stereo into her helmet headphones, as she rooted in supply boxes and picked out any tool she wanted. She would carry them back to a small room she had commandeered in one of the storage warehouses, whistling along with King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, adding to a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers,
drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wirestripper, X-acto knives,
a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber's bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long nosed pliers, vise grip pliers, a tap and die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding and cutting set, a wheelbarrow-
and so onA. nd this was just the mechanical equipment, her carpenter's tIonolost.her parts of the warehouse they were stockpiling research and lab equipment, geological tools, and any number of computers and radios and telescopes and videocameras; and the biosphere teamwahreahdouses of
equipment to set up the farm, the waste recyclers, the gas exchange mechanism, in essence their whole infrastructure; and the medical team had more warehouses of supplies for the clinic, and their research labs, and the genetic engineering facili"tyY.ou know what this is," Nadia said to Sax Russell one evening looking around her warehouse, "It is an entire town, disassembled and lying in pieces."
"And a very prosperous town at that."
"Yes, a university townW. ith first-rate departments in several sciences." "But still in pieces."

"Yes.But I kind of like it that way."
Sunset was mandatory return-to-habitat time, and in the dusk she would stumble into the lock and inside, and eat another small cold meal sitting on her bed, listening to the talk around her which mostly concerned the day's work, and the arrangement of the tasks for the next mForranniknga. nd Maya were
supposed to be doing this, but in fact it was happening spontaneously, in a kind of ad hoc barter system. Hiroko was particularly good at it, which was a surprise given how withdrawn she had been on the
voyage out; but now that she needed help from outside her team, she spent most of every evening moving from person to person, so single-minded and persuasive that she usually had a sizeable crew working on the farm every morningN. adia couldn't really see this; they had five years of dehydrated and canned food
on hand, fare that suited Nadia fine, she had eaten worse for most of her life and she paid little attention to food anymore, she might as well have been eating hay, or refueling like one of thBe uttratchteoyrs.
did need the farm for growing bamboo, which Nadia planned to use as a construction material in the permanent habitat that she hoped to start building sIotoanl.l interlocked; all their tasks linked together, were necessary to each otheSr.o when Hiroko plopped down beside her, she said, "Yeah, yeah, be there at eight. But you can't build the permanent farm until the base habitat itselSf oisrebaulillyt. you
ought to be helping me tomorrow, right?"
"No, no," Hiroko said, laughin"gD.ay after, okay?"
Hiroko's main competition for labor came from Sax Russell and his crowd, who were working to start all the factoriesV. lad and Ursula and the biomed group were also hungry to get all their labs set up and running. These three teams seemed willing to live in the trailer park indefinitely, as long as their own projects were progressing; but luckily there were a lot of people who were not so obsessed by their work, people like Maya and John and the rest of the cosmonauts, who were interested in moving into larger and better-protected quarters as soon as possibSloe. Nadia's project would get help from them.
When she was done eating, Nadia took her tray into the kitchen and cleaned it with a little swab, then went over to sit by Ann Clayborne and Simon Frazier and the rest of the geAonlongilsotos.ked nearly
asleep; she was spending her mornings taking long rover trips and hikes, and then working hard on the
base all afternoon, trying to make up for her trips
TawoaNy.adia she seemed strangely tense, less
happy about being on Mars than one would have thoSuhgeht.appeared unwilling to work on the
factories, or for Hiroko; indeed she usually came to work for Nadia, who, since she was only trying to build housing, could be said to be impacting the planet less than the more ambitiouMs atyeabme st.hat
was it, maybe not; Ann wasn't sayiSnhge.
was hard to know, moody-not in Maya's extravagant Russian
manner, but more subtly, and, Nadia thought, in a darker regInistBere.ssie Smith land.
All around them people cleaned up after dinner and talked, and looked over manifests and talked, and bunched around computer terminals and talked, and washed clothes and talked; until most were
stretched out on their beds, talking in lower voices, until they passe"dIt'soulitk. e the first second of the universe," Sax Russell observed, rubbing his face wea"riAlyl.l crammed together and no differentiation. Just a bunch of hot particles rushing about."
-+=*=+-
And that was just one day; and that was what it was like every day, for day after daNyoafter day.

change in the weather to speak of, except occasionally a wisp of cloud, or an extra-windy aInfternoon. the main, the days rolled by one like the Enveexrty. thing took longer than plannedJ.ust getting into the
walkers and out of the habitats was a chore, and then all the equipment had to be warmed; and even though it had been built to a uniform set of standards, the international nature of the equipment meant that there were inevitable mismatches of size and function; and the dust ("Don't call it dust!" Ann would complain. "That's like calling dust graveCl!all it fines, they're fines!") the dust got into everything; and all
the physical work in the penetrating cold was exhausting, so that they went slower than they thought they would, and began to collect a number of minor injuArnieds,. finally, there was just an amazing number of
things to do, some of which had never even occurred to Itthteomok.
them about a month, for instance
(they had budgeted ten days) just to open all the freight loads, check their contents, and move them into the appropriate stockpiles-to get to the point where they could really begin to work.
After that, they could begin to build in earAnnesdt. here Nadia came into her owShne.
had had nothing
to do on the Ares, it had been a kind of hibernation fBourt hbeuri.lding things was her great talent, the
nature of her genius, trained in the bitter school of Siberia; and very quickly she became the colony's chief troubleshooter, the universal solvent as John called Ahelmr. ost every job they had benefitted from her
help, and as she ran around every day answering questions and giving advice, she blossomed into a kind of timeless work heavenS.o much to doS!o much to doE!very night in the planning sessions Hiroko
worked her wiles, and the farm went up: three parallel rows of greenhouses, looking like commercial greenhouses back on Earth except smaller and very thick-walled, to keep them from exploding like party balloons. Even with interior pressures of only three hundred millibars, which was barely farmable, the dfiferential with the outside was drastic; a bad seal or a weak spot, and they wouldBguot Nbaandgia.
was good at cold weather seals, and so Hiroko was calling her in a panic every other day.
Then the materials scientists needed help getting their factories operational, and the crew assembling the nuclear reactor wanted her supervision for every breath that they took, they were petrified with fright that they would do something wrong, and were not reassured by Arkady sending radio messages down from Phobos insisting they did not need such a dangerous technology, that they could get all the power they
needed from wind generation; he and Phyllis had bitter arguments abouItt twhiass.
Hiroko who cut
Arkady off, with what she said was a Japanese commonp"lSahceik:ata ga nai," meaning there is no other choice. Windmills might have generated enough power, as Arkady contended, but they didn't have windmills, while they had been supplied with a Rickover nuclear reactor, built by the US Navy and a beautiful piece of work; and no one wanted to try bootstrapping themselves into a wind-powered system, they were in too much of a huSrhriyk.ata ga naiT. his too became one of their oft-repeated
phrases.
And so every morning the construction crew for Chernobyl (Arkady's name, of course) begged Nadia to come out with them and superviTshe.ey had been exiled far to the east of the settlement, so that it made sense to go out for a full day with Bthuetmt.hen the medical team wanted her help building a clinic and some labs inside, from some discarded freight crates that they were converting into Sshoelters.
instead of staying out at Chernobyl she would go back midday to eat, and then help the night she passed out exhausted.
Emveedryteam.
Some evenings before she did, she had long talks with Arkady, up on Phobos; the Phobos crew was having trouble with the moon's microgravity, and he wanted her advice a"sIfwoenlll.y we could get into
some gee just to live, to sleep!" Arkady said.
"Build train tracks in a ring around the surface," Nadia suggested out of"Ma adkoezeo.ne of the tanks from the Ares into a train, and run it around theGtreatcko.n board and run the train around fast enough to give you some gee against the ceiling of the train."

Static, then Arkady's wild cack"leN.adezhda Francine, I love you, I love you!" "You love gravity."
With all this advisory work, the construction of their permanent habitat went slowlyItinwdaesedo. nly
once a week or so that Nadia could climb into the open cab of a Mercedes and rumble over the torn ground to the end of the trench she had staArttedth. is point it was ten meters wide, fifty long, and two deep, which was as deep as she wanted toThgeo.bottom of the trench was the same as the surface:
clay, fines, rocks of all sizRee.golith. While she worked with the bulldozer the geologists hopped in and
out of the hole, taking samples and looking around, even Ann who did not like the way they were ripping up the area; but no geologist ever born could keep away from a lNanaddiaculti.stened to their
conversation band as she workeTd.hey figured the regolith was probably much the same all the way down to bedrock, which was too bad; regolith was not Nadia's idea of good Agtroluenasdt. its water
content was low, less than a tenth of a percent, which meant they wouldn't get much slumping under a foundation, one of the constant nightmares of Siberian construction.
When she got the regolith cut right, she was going to lay a foundation of Portland cement, the best concrete they could make with the materials at haItndw. ould crack unless they poured it two meters thick, but shikata ga nai; and the thickness would provide some insuBlautitonsh. e would have to box the mud and heat it to get it to cure; it wouldn't below 13 degrees Centigrade, so that meant heating
elements. . .
S. low, slow, everything was slow.
She drove the dozer forward to lengthen the trench, and it bit the ground andThbeunckthede. weight
of the thing told, and the scoop cut through the regolith and plowed f"oWrwhaartd.a pig," Nadia said to the vehicle fondly.
"Nadia's in love with a bulldozer," Maya said over their band.
At least I know who I'm in love with, Nadia moSuhtheedh.ad spent too many of the evenings of the last week out in the tool shed with Maya, listening to her rattle away about her problems with John, about how she really got along in most ways better with Frank, about how she couldn't decide what she felt, and was sure Frank hated her now, etc. etc. Celteca.ning tools Nadia had said Da, da, da, trying to
hide her lack of interesTt.he truth was she was tired of Maya's problems, and would rather have discussed building materials, or almost anything else.
A call from the Chernobyl crew interrupted her bulldozing. "Nadia, how can we get cement this thick to set in the cold?"
"Heat it." "We are!"
"Heat it more."
"Oh!"They were almost done out there, Nadia judged; the Rickover had been mostly preassembled, it
was a matter of putting the forms together, fitting in the steel containment tank, filling the pipes with water
(which dropped their supply to nearly nothing), wiring it all up, piling sandbags around it all, and pulling
the control rodsA.
fter that they would have three hundred kilowatts on hand, which would put an end to
the nightly argument over who got the lion's share of generator power the next day.
There was a call from Sax; one of the Sabatier processors had clogged, and they couldn't get the

housing off itS. o Nadia left the bulldozing to John and Maya, and took a rover to the factory complex to have a look". I'm off to see the alchemists," she said.
"Have you ever noticed how much the machinery here reflects the character of the industry that built it?" Sax remarked to Nadia as she arrived and went to work on the S"aIbf aittiewr.as built by car
companies, it's low-powered but reliablIef. it was built by the aerospace industry, it's outrageously high-powered but breaks down twice a day."
"And partnership products are horribly designed," Nadia said. "Right."
"And chemical equipment is finicky," Spencer Jackson added. "I'll sayE. specially in this dust."
The Boeing air miners had been only the start of the factory complex; their gases were fed into big boxy trailers to be compressed and expanded and rendered and recombined, using chemical engineering
operations such as dehumidification, liquefaction, fractional distillation, electrolysis, electrosynthesis, the Sabatier process, the Raschig process, the Oswald process.Sl.ow. l.y they worked up more and more complex chemicals, which flowed from one factory to the next, through a warren of structures that looked like mobile homes caught in a web of color-coded tanks and pipes and tubes and cables.
Spencer's current favorite product was magnesium, which was plentiful; they were getting twenty-five
kilos of it from every cubic meter of regolith, he said, and it was so light in Martian gee that a big bar of felt like a piece of plasti"cI.t's too brittle when pure," Spencer said, "but if we alloy it just a bit we'll have
an extremely light and strong metal." "Martian steel," Nadia said.
"Better than that."
So, alchemy; but with finicky machinNesa.dia found the Sabatier's problem, and went to work fixing a broken vacuum pumpI.t was amazing how much of the factory complex came down to pumps,
sometimes it seemed nothing but a mad assemblage of them; and by their nature they kept clogging with fines and breaking down.
Two hours later the Sabatier was fixOend. the way back to the trailer park, Nadia glanced into the first greenhouse. Plants were already blooming, the new crops breaking out of their beds of new black soil. Green glowed intensely in the reds of this world, it was a pleasure tToheseebaimt.boo was growing
several centimeters a day, she had been told, and the crop was already nearly five mIettewrsastalela. sy
to see they were going to need more Bsoaiclk.
at the alchemists' they were using nitrogen from the
Boeings to synthesize ammonia fertilizers; Hiroko craved these because the regolith was an agricultural nightmare, intensely salty, explosive with peroxides, extremely arid, and completely without biomass. They were going to have to construct soil just like they had the magnesium bars.
Nadia went into her habitat in the trailer park for a standingThluen hs.he was out again, to the site of the permanent habitatT. he floor of the trench had been almost leveled in her abSsheneces.tood on the edge of the hole, looking down inTiht.ey were going to build to a design that she liked tremendously, one she had worked on herself in Antarctica and on the aAsreims:ple line of barrel-vaulted chambers,
sharing adjacent wallsB. y setting them in the trench the chambers would be half-buried to begin with;

then when completed they would be covered by ten meters of sandbagged regolith, to stop radiation and also, because they planned to pressurize to 450 millibars, to keep the buildings from exploding. Local materials were all they needed for the exteriors of these buildPionrgtlsa:nd cement andbricks were it,
basically, with plastic liner in some places to insure the seal.
Unfortunately the brickmakers were having some trouble, and they gave Nadia
Na acdailal.'s patience
was running short, and she groane"dW. e travel all the way to Mars and you can't make bricks?"
"It's not that we can't make bricks," said G"Ietn'se.just that I don't like themTh."e brickmaking factory
mixed clays and sulphur extracted from the regolith, and this preparation was poured into brick molds, and baked until the sulphur began to polymerize, and then as the bricks cooled they were compressed a bit in another part of the machiTnhe.e resulting blackish-red bricks had a tensile strength that was
technically adequate for use in the barrel vaults, but Gene wasn't h"Wapepyd. on't want to be at
minimum values for heavy roofs over our heads," he "sWaihda. t if we pile one too many sandbag on top of it, or if we get a little marsquIakdeo?n't like it."
After some thought Nadia said, "Add nylon." "What?"
"Go out and find the parachutes from the freight drops, and shred them real fine, and add them to the clay. That'll help their tensile strength."
"Very true," Gene said, after a pa"uGseo.od idea!Think we can find the parachutes?" "They must be east of here somewhere."
So they had finally found a job for the geologistasctuhaltly helped the construction efforAt.nn and
Simon and Phyllis and Sasha and Igor drove long-distance rovers over the horizon to east of the base, searching and surveying far past Chernobyl; and in the next week they found almost forty parachutes, each one representing a few hundred kilos of useful nylon.
One day they came back excited, having reached Ganges Catena, a series of sinkholes in the plain a hundred kilometers to the southeas"tI.t was strange," Igor said, "because you can't see them until the last minute, and then they're like huge funnels, about ten kilometers across and a couple deep, eight or nine in a row, each smaller and shallowFera.ntastic. They're probably thermokarsts, but they're so big it's hard
to believe it."
Sasha said, "It's nice to see such a distance, after all this near horizon stuff."
"They're thermokarsts," Ann saiBd.ut they had drilled and found no waTtehri.s was a getting to be a
concern; they hadn't found any water to speak of in the ground, no matter how far down they drilled; it forced them to rely on the supplies from the air miners.
Nadia shruggedT. he air miners were pretty tougShh.e wanted to think about her vauTlths.e new improved bricks were appearing, and she had started the robots building the walls anTdheroobfrsic. k
factory filled little robot cars, which rolled like toy rovers across the plain to cranes at the site; the cranes pulled out bricks one by one, and placed them on cold mortar spread by another set oTfherobots.
system worked so well that soon the bottleneck became brick production Nitsaedlifa.
would have been
pleased, if she had had more faith in the robots; these seemed okay, but her experiences with robots in the years on Novy Mhirad made her waryT. hey were great if everything went perfectly, nbouthting

ever went perfectly, and it was hard to program them with decision algorithms that didn't either make them so cautious that they froze every minute, or so uncontrolled that they could commit unbelievable
acts of stupidity, repeating an error a thousand times and magnifying a small glitch into a giant blunder, as in Maya's emotional lifeY. ou got what you put into robots; but even the best were mindless idiots.
# # #
One evening Maya snagged her out in her tool room and asked her to switch to a pr"iMvaitcehebland. is useless," she complained".I'm really having a hard time, and he won't even talk Ytooum're the only one I trust, NadiaY. esterday I told Frank that I thought John was trying to undercut his authority in
Houston, but that he shouldn't tell anyone I thought so, and the very next day John was asking me why I
thought he was bothering FranTk.here's no one who will just listen and stay quiet!"
Nadia nodded, rolling her eyeFsi.nally she said "Sorry, Maya, I have to go talk to Hiroko about a leak they can't find."She banged her faceplate lightly against Maya's-symbol for a kiss on the cheek-and switched to the common band and took Eonffo.ugh was enough.It was infinitely more interesting to talk
to Hiroko; real conversations, about real problems in the real wHoirrlodk. o was asking Nadia for help almost every day, and Nadia liked that, because Hiroko was brilliant, and since landfall had obviously
raised her estimate of Nadia's abilitieMs.utual professional respect, a great maker of friendshAipnsd. so nice to talk nothing but busineHsse. rmetic seals, lock mechanisms, thermal engineering, glass
polarization, farm/human interfaces (Hiroko's talk was always a few steps ahead of the game); these topics were a great relief after all the emotional whispered conferences with Maya, seensdsiloenss
about who liked Maya and who didn't like Maya, about how Maya felt about this and that, and who had hurt her feelings that day. . . bHaihro. ko was never strange, except when she would say something
Nadia didn't know how to deal with, like "Mars will tell us what it wants and then we'll have to do it." What could you say to something like thBaut?t Hiroko would just smile her big smile, and laugh at
Nadia's shrug.
At night the talk still went everywhere, vehement, absorbed, unselfconsDcimouistr.i and Samantha were
sure that they could soon introduce GEMs into the regolith that would survive, but they would have to get permission first from the UNN.adia herself found the idea alarming; it made the chemical engineering in
the factories look relatively straightforward, more like brickmaking than the dangerous acts of creation
Samantha was proposing...A.
lthough the alchemists were performing some pretty creative things
themselves. Almost every day they came back to the trailer park with samples of new msautleprhiualrsic:
acid, sorel cements for the vault mortar, ammonium nitrate explosives, a calcium cyanamide rover fuel, polysulfide rubber, silicon-based hyperacids, emulsifying agents, a selection of test tubes holding trace elements extracted from the salts; and, most recently, clear gTlhasiss. last was a coup, as earlier attempts
at glassmaking had produced only black glaBsus.t stripping silicate feedstocks of their iron content had
done the trick; and so one night they sat in the trailer passing around small wavy sheets of glass, the glass itself filled with bubbles and irregularities, like something out of the seventeenth century.
# # #
When they got the first chamber buried and pressurized, Nadia walked around inside it with her helmet off, sniffing the aiIr.t was pressurized to 450 millibars, same as the helmets and the trailer park, with an oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix, and warmed to about fifteen degrees CentigraItdef.elt great.
The chamber had been divided into two stories by a floor of bamboo trunks, set in a slot in the brick wall two and a half meters overheTadh.e segmented cylinders made a sweet green ceiling, lit by neon
tubes hung under themA. gainst one wall was a magnesium and bamboo staircase, leading through a hole to the upper storyS.he climbed up to have a loSopkl.it bamboo over the trunks made a fairly flat green

floor. The ceiling was brick, rounded and loUwp. there they would locate the bedrooms and bathroom; the lower floor would be living room and kitchMenay. a and Simon had already put up wall hangings, made of nylon from the salvaged parachuTtehs.ere were no windows; lighting came from only from the
neon bulbs. Nadia disliked this fact, and in the larger habitat she was already planning, there would be windows in almost every roomB.ut first things firsFt.or the time being these windowless chambers were
the best they could dAo.nd a big improvement over the trailer park, after all.
As she went back down the stairs she ran her fingers over the bricks anTdhmeyorwtaer.re rough, but
warm to the touch, heated by elements placed behind tThhemere.
were heating elements under the floor
as well.She took off her shoes and socks, luxuriating in the feel of the warm rough bricks uItnderfoot. was a wonderful room; and nice, too, to think that they had gone all the way to Mars, and there built homes out of brick and bamboo. She recalled vaulted ruins she had seen years ago on Crete, at a site called Aptera; underground Roman cisterns, barrel-vaulted and made of brick, buried in a Thihlelsyide.
had been almost the same size as these chambTehresi.r exact purpose was unknown; storage for olive oil, some said, though it would have been an awful lot Tohfosoeil.vaults were intact two thousand years
after their construction, and in earthquake countrAys.
Nadia put her boots back on she grinned to think
of it. Two thousand years from now, their descendants might walk into this chamber, no doubt a museum by then, if it still existed-the first human dwelling built on AMnadrss!he had done iSt.uddenly
she felt the eyes of that future on her, and shivTehreyd. were like Cro-Magnons in a cave, living a life
that was certain to be pored over by the archeologists of subsequent generations; people like her who would wonder, and wonder, and never quite understand.
# # #
More time passed, more work got doItneb.lurred for Nadia, she was always buTshye. interior construction of the vaulted chambers was complicated, and the robots couldn't help pmlumucbhi:ng,
heating, gas exchange, locks, kitchens; they had all the fixtures and tools, and could work in pants and
sweatshirts, but still, it took an amazing amount of Wtimoerk.
work work, day after day!
One evening, just before sunset, Nadia trudged across torn-up dirt to the trailer park, feeling hungry and beat and extremely relaxed, totally at ease, not that you didn't have to be careful at the end of a day, she had torn a centimeter hole in the back of a glove the other evening being careless, and the cold hadn't been so bad, about -50° Centigrade, nothing compared to some Siberian winter days-but the low air pressure had sucked out a blood bruise instantly, and then that had started to freeze up, which made the bruise smaller no doubt, but slower to heal as Awneyllw. ay, you had to be careful, but there was
something so fluid about tired muscles at the end of a day's construction work, the low rust sunlight slanting across the rocky plain, and all of a sudden she could feel that she waAsrkhaadpypyc.alled in
from Phobos at just that moment, and she greeted him cheerily; "I feel just like a Louis Armstrong solo from 1947."
"Why 1947?" he asked.
"Well, that was thyeear he sounded the most happMy.ost of his life his tone has a sharp edge to it,
really beautiful, but in 1947 it was even more beautiful because it has this relaxed fluid joy, you never hear it in him before or after."
"A good year for him, I take it?"
"Oh yes!An amazing year!After twenty years of horrible big bands, you see, he got back to a little group like the Hot Five, that was the group he headed when he was young, and there it was, the old songs, even some of the old faces-and all of it better than the first time, you know, the recording

technology, the money, the audiences, the band, his own poweIrt. m. u. s.t have felt like the fountain of youth, I tell you."
"You'll have to send up some recordings," Arkady Hsaeidt.ried to sing":I can't give you any thing but love, baby!"Phobos was about over the horizon, he had just been calling to "sSaoy thi.s is your
1947," he said before he went.
Nadia put her tools away, singing the song correcAtlnyd.
she understood that what Arkady had said
was true; something had happened to her similar to what had happened to Armstrong in 1947-because despite the miserable conditions, her youthful years in Siberia had been the happiest of her life, they really had. And then she had endured twenty years of big band cosmonautics, bureaucracy, simulations, an
indoor life-all to get herAe.nd now suddenly she was out in the open again, building things with her
hands, operating heavy machinery, solving problems a hundred times a day, just like Siberia only better. It was just like Satchmo's return!
Thus when Hiroko came up and said "Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position," Nadia sang to her, "That's the only thingthIi'nmking of-baby!" and took the crescent wrench and
slammed it against taable like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression".The engineer's solution," she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn't hammer a nail straight.
And that night she talked over the day's work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of "Ain't Misbehaving" chasing her off to sleep.
###
But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even ha"pDpoineysosu. ell ess one seventy already?" Phyllis said one ni"gDhti.dn't we land at ell ess seven?"
realize it's
So they had been on Mars for half a martianPhyyelalirs.
was using the calenddarevised by planetary
scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the terran sMysatresm's. year was
668.6 local days long, and to tell where they were in this long year it took the LTs hciaslesnydstaerm.
declared the line between the sun and Mars at its northern spring equinox to be O°, and then the year was divided into 360 degrees, so that Ls = 0°-90° was the northern spring, 90-180° the northern summer, 180-270° the fall, and 270-360° (or 0° again) the winter.
This simple situation was complicated by the eccentricity of the martian orbit, which is extreme by terran standards, for at perhelion Mars is abfoourtty-three million kilometers closer to the sun than it is at
aphelion, and thus receiving about 45% more sunliTghi.s fluctuation makes the southern and northern seasons quite unequalP. erihelion arrives every year at Ls = 250°, late in the southern spring; so southern springs and summers are much hotter than northern springs and summers, with peak temperatures as much as thirty degrees higheSr.outhern autumns and winters are colder, however, occurring as they do
near aphelion; so much colder that the southern polar cap is mostly carbon dioxide, while the northern one is mostly water ice.
So the south was the hemisphere of extremes, the north that of modeArantdionth.e orbital eccentricity
caused one other feature of note; planets move faster the closer they are to the sun, so the seasons near perihelion are shorter than those near aphelion; the northern autumn is 143 days long, for instance, while northern spring is 194S.pring fifty-one days longer than autumSno!me claimed this alone made it worth

settling in the north.
# # #
In any case, in the north they were; and spring had aTrrhiveedd.ays got longer by a little bit every day, and the work went oTn.he area around the base got more cluttered, more criss-crossed with tracks;
they had laid a cement road to Chernobyl, and the base itself was now so big that from the trailer park it extended over the horizon in all directiotnhse: alchemists' quarter and the Chernobyl road to the east, the permanent habitat to the north, the storage area and the farm to the west, and the bio-med center to the south.
Eventually everyone moved into the finished chambers of the permanent hTahbeitant.ightly conferences
there were shorter and more routinized than they had been in the trailer park, and days went by when Nadia got no calls for heTlph.ere were some people she saw only once in a while; the biomed crew in its labs, Phyllis's prospecting unit, even AnOnn. e night Ann flopped on her bed next to Nadia's, and invited
her to go along on an exploration to Hebes Chasma, some 130 kilometers to the soOubthvwioeusstl.y Ann wanted to show her something outside the base area; but Nadia de"cIl'vineedg.ot too much work to do, you know.A" nd seeing Ann's disappointmen"t:Maybe next trip."
And then it was back to work on the interiors of the chambers, and the exteriors of aAnrkewadywing.
had suggested making the line of chambers the first of four, arranged in a square, and Nadia was going to do it; as Arkady pointed out, it would then be possible to roof the area enclosed by t"hTehastq'suare.
where those magnesium beams will come in handy," Nadia "sIafido.nly we could make stronger glass panes. . . ."
They had finished two sides of the square, twelve chambers entirely done, when Ann and her team returned from HebesE. veryone spent that evening looking at their videotaTpehse.se showed the
expedition's rovers rolling over rocky plains; then ahead there appeared a break extending all the way
across the screen, as if they were approaching the edge of the
Swtorarnldg.e little meter-high cliffs
finally stopped the rovers, and the pictures bounced as one explorer got out and walked with helmet camera turned on.
Then abruptly the shot was from the rim, a one-eighty pan shot of a canyon that was so much bigger than the sinkholes of Ganges Catena that it was hard to Tghraespw. alls of the far side of the chasm
were just visible on the distant horizIonn.fact they could see walls all the way around, for Hebes was an almost-enclosed chasm, an sunken ellipse about two hundred kilometers long and a hundred across. Ann's party had come to the north rim in late afternoon, and the eastern curve of the wall was clearly
visible, flooded by sunset light; out to the west the wall was just a low daTrhke mflaorokr.
of the chasm
was generally flat, with a central d"iIpf. you could float a dome over the chasma," Ann said, "you'd have a nice big enclosure."
"You're talking miracle domes, Ann," Sax s"aTidh.at's about ten thousand square kilometers."
"Well, it would make a good big enclosAunred. then you could leave the rest of the planet alone." "The weight of a dome would collapse the canyon walls."
"That's why I said you'd have to float it." Sax just shook his head.

"It's no more exotic than this space elevator you talk about."
"I want to live in a house located right where you took this video," Nadia in"tWerrhuapttead.view!" "Just wait till you get up on one of the Tharsis volcanoes," Ann said, "Tirrhietanteydo. u'll get a view." There were little spats like that all the timeItnorewm. inded Nadia unplesantly of the last months on the
Ares. Another example:Arkady and his crew sent down videosPhoofbos, with his commentary":The
Stickney impact almost broke this rock in pieces, and it's chondritic, almost twenty percent water, so a lot of the water outgassed on impact and filled the fracture system and froze in a whole system of ice veins." Fascinating stuff, but all it did was cause an argument between Ann and Phyllis, their two top
geologists, as to whether this was the real explanation for thPehyiclleis.
even suggested shipping water
down from Phobos, which was silly, even if their supplies were low and their demand increasing. Chernobyl took a lot of water, and the farmers were ready to start a little swamp in their biosphere; and Nadia wanted to install a swimming complex in one of the vaulted chambers, including a lap pool, three whirlpool baths, and a saunEa.ach night people asked Nadia how it was coming along, because
everyone was sick of washing with sponges and still being dusty, and of never really gettinTghewy arm. wanted a bath; in their old aquatic dolphin brains, down below the cerebrums, down where desires were primal and fierce, they wanted back into water.
So they needed more water, but the seismic scans were finding no evidence of ice aquifers underground,
and Ann thought there weren't any in the regTihoney.
had to continue to rely on the air miners, or scrape
up regolith and load it into the soil-water distilleries. But Nadia didn't like to overwork the distilleries, because they had been manufactured by a French-Hungarian-Chinese consortium, and were sure to wear out if used for bulk work.
But that was life on Mars; it was a dry place. Shikata ga nai.
"There are always choices," Phyllis said to Tthhaist. was why she had suggested filling landing vehicles
with Phobos ice, and bringing it on down; but Ann thought that was a ridiculous waste of energy; and they were off again.
# # #
It was especially irritating to Nadia because she herself was in such a gooSdhemosaowd.
no reason to
quarrel, and it disturbed her that the others didn't feel the Wsahmye.did the dynamics of a group
fluctuate so?Here they were on Mars, where the seasons were twice as long as Earth's, and every day was forty minutes longer; why couldn't people relNaxa?dia had a sense that there was time for things
even though she was always busy, and the extra thirty-nine and half minutes per day was probably the most important component of this feeling; human circadian biorhythms had been set over millions of years of evolution, and now to suddenly haevxetra minutes of day and night, day after day, night after night-no doubt it had effectsN. adia was sure of it, because despite the hectic pace of every day's work, and the way she passed out in sheer exhaustion every night, she always woke Trhesatteds.trange pause on the
digital clocks, when at midnight the figures hit 12:00:00 and suddenly stopped, and the unmarked time passed, passed, passed, sometimes it seemed for a very long time indeed; and then snapped on to
12:00:01, and began its usual inexorable flicker; well, the martian timeslip was something Ospfteecnial. Nadia was asleep through it, as were most of the rest ofBtuhtemH.iroko had a chant that she chanted during it when she was up, and she and the farm team, and many of the rest of them, spent every Saturday night partying and chanting that chant through the timeslip-something in Japanese, Nadia never learned what, though she sometimes hummed along, sitting enjoying the vault and her friends.

But one Saturday night when she sat there, nearly comatose, Maya came over and sat against her shoulder for a talkM. aya with her beautiful face, always well-groomed, always the latest in chicarnost even in their everyday jumpsuits, looking distraug"hNt.adia, you have to do me a favor, please, please."
"What."
"I need you to tell something to Frank for me." "Why don't you do it yourself?"
"I can't have John seeing us tIalkh!ave to get a message to him, and please, Nadezhda Francine, you're my only way."
Nadia made a disgusted noise. "Please."
It was suprising how much Nadia would have rather been talking to Ann, or Samantha, oIrf Arkady. only Arkady would come down from Phobos!
But Maya was her frienAdn. d that desperate look on her face; Nadia couldn't sta"nWd hiat.t message." "Tell him that I'll meet him tonight in the storage area," Maya said imp"eAritoumsliyd.night.To talk." Nadia sighedB. ut later she went to Frank, and gave him the mesHseagne.odded without meeting her
eye, embarrassed, grim, unhappy.
Then a few days later Nadia and Maya were cleaning up the brick floor of the latest chamber to be pressurized, and Nadia's curiosity got the best of her; she broke her customary silence on the topic, and asked Maya what was going o"nW. ell, it's John and Frank," Maya said querulou"sTlyh.ey're very
competitive. They're like brothers, and there's a lot of jealousy tJhoehrne. got to Mars first, and then he got permission to come back again, and Frank doesn't think it waFsrafnakir.did a lot of the work in
Washington to get the colony funded, and he thinks John has always taken advantage of
Ahinsdwork.
now, well.John and I are good together, I like
Ihti'sme. asy with himE.asy, but maybe a little. .I . .
don't know.Not boring.But not excitingH. e likes to walk around, hang out with the farm Hcreew. doesn't like to talk that mucFhr!ank, now, we could talk forevAerr.gue forever, maybe, but at least
we're talking!And you know, we had a very brief affair on the Ares, back at the beginning, and it didn't work out, but he still thinks it could."
Why would he think that? Nadia mouthed.
"So he keeps trying to talk me into leaving John and being with him, and John suspects that's what he's doing, so there's a lot of jealousy between thI'emm.just trying to keep them from each other's throats,
that's all."
Nadia decided to stick to her resolve and not ask about itBuatganino.w she was involved despite herself. Maya kept coming to her to talk, and to ask her to convey messages to Fran"kI'mfornohtera.
go-between!" Nadia kept protesting, but she kept doing it, and once or twice when she did she got into long conversations with Frank, about Maya of course; who she was, what she was like, why she acted the way she did".Look," Nadia said to him, "I can't speak for MI adyoan. 't know why she does what
she does, you have to ask her yoursBeulft. I can tell you, she comes out of the old Moscow Soviet

culture, university and CP for both her mother and her grandmAotnhder.men were the enemies for
Maya's babushka, and for her mother too, it was a matrioMshakyaa.'s mother used to say to her,
'Women are the roots, men are just the leaTvehse.r'e was a whole culture of mistrust, manipulation, fear. That's where Maya comes fromA.nd at the same time we have this tradition of amicochonstvo, a kind
of intense friendship where you learn the very tiniest details of your friend's life, you invade each other's lives in a sense, and of course that's impossible and it has to end, usually badly."
Frank was nodding at this description, recognizing something Ninadiita.
sighed and went o"nT. hese are
the friendships that lead to love, and then love has the same sort of trouble only magnified, especially with all that fear at the bottom of it."
And Frank-tall, dark, and somehow handsome, bulky with power, spinning with his own internal
dynamo, the American politician (or so Nadia thought of
nhoimw), wrapped around the finger of a
neurotic Russian beauty-Frank nodded humbly, and thanked her, looking discouraAgsedw. ell he should.
# # #
Nadia did her best to ignore all Bthuatt.it seemed everything else had turned problematic as wVelalld.
had never approved of how much time they were spending on the surface in the daytime, and now he said, "We ought to stay under the hill most of the time, and bury all the labsOaustdwooerlsl. work
should be restricted to an hour in the early mornings and another in the late afternoons, when the sun is low."
"I'll be damned if I stay indoors all day," Ann said, and many agreed with her. "We've got a lot of work to do," Frank pointed out.
"But most of it could be done by teleoperation," Vlad"Asnadid.it should beW. hat we are doing is the equivalent of standing ten kilometers from an atomic explosion-"
"So?" Ann said".Soldiers did that-"
"-every six months," Vlad finished, and stared at"Wheoru. ld you do that?"
Even Ann looked subdueNd.o ozone layer, no magnetic field to speak of; they were getting fried by radiation almost as badly as if they were in interplanetary space, to the tune of 5 rems per year.
And so Frank and Maya ordered them to ration their time ouTtdhoeorers.was a lot of interior work to
be done under the hill, getting the last row of chambers finished; and it was possible to dig some cellars below the vaults, giving them some more space protected from radiAatniodn.many of the tractors were equipped to be teleoperated from indoor stations, their decision algorithms handling the details while the human operators watched screens belowS.o it could be done; but no one liked the life that resulted.
Even Sax Russell, who was content to work indoors most of the time, looked a bit pIenrptlheexed.
evenings a number of people began to argue for immediate terraforming efforts, adn they made the case with renewed intensity.
"That's not our decision to make," Frank told them sh"aTrphley. UN decides that onBe.esides it's a
long-term solution, on the scale of centuries at
Dbeosnt.'t waste time talking about it!"
Ann said, "That's all true, but I don't want to waste my time down here in these caWvees, sehiothueldr.

live our lives the way we waWnte. 're too old to worry about radiation."
Arguments again, arguments that made Nadia feel as if she had floated off the good solid rock of her planet back into the tense weightless reality of the ACarerps.ing, complaining, arguing; until people got
bored, or tired, and went to sleNepa.dia started leaving the room whenever it began, looking for Hiroko and a chance to discuss something concreBteu.t it was hard to avoid these matters, to stop thinking
about them.
Then one night Maya came to her cryTihneg
r.e was room in the permanent habitat for private talks, and
Nadia went with her down to the northeast corner of the vaults, where they were still working on interiors, and sat by her arm to arm, shivering and listening to her, and occasionally putting an arm over her shoulder and giving her a h"uLgo. ok," Nadia said at one point, "why don't you just deWcihdye?
don't you quit playing one off against the other?"
"But I have decidedIt!'s John I love, it's always been JoBhunt. now he's seen me with Frank and he thinks I've betrayed himI.t's really petty of himT!hey're like brothers, they compete in everything, and this time it's just a mistake!"
Nadia resisted learning the details, she didn't want to hSehare ista. t there listening anyway.
And then John was standing there before thNeamd.ia got up to leave, but he didn't appear to notice: "Look," he said to May"aI.'m sorry, but I can't helpIti'st. over."
"It's not over," Maya said, instantly compo"sIedl.ove you."
John's smile was ruefu"lY. es. And I love youB. ut I want things simple." "It is simple!"
"No it isn'It. mean, you can be in love with more than one person at the samAneytoimnee.can, that's
just the way it iBs.ut you can only be loyal to oAnned. loyal to meI.t's simple, but. . . ."
I want. . . I want to be lTooyals.omeone who is
He shook his head; he couldn't find the phHraesew. alked back into the eastern row of chambers, disappeared through a door.
"Americans," Maya said viciousl"yF. ucking children!"Then she was up through the door after him. But soon she came bacHk.e had retreated to a group in one of the lounges, and wouldn'"tI'mleave.
tired," Nadia tried to say, but Maya wouldn't hear it, she was getting more and moFroer uopvsert. an
hour they discussed it, over and ovEevr.entually Nadia agreed to go to John and ask him to come to Maya and talk it oveNr.adia walked grimly through chambers, oblivious to the brick and the colorful nylon hangings.The go-between that nobody noticeCd.ouldn't they get robots to do thSish?e found
John, who apologized for ignoring her earl"ieIr.was upset, I'm sorrIy.figured you'd hear it all eventually anyway."
Nadia shrugged". No problem.But look, you have to go talk to Thheart.'s the way it is with MaWyae.
talk, talk, talk; if you contract to be in a relationship, you have to talk your way all the way through it, an all the way out of Iift.you don't it will be worse for you in the long run, believe me."
That got to himS.obered, he went off to find hNear.dia went to bed.

# # #
The next day she was out working late on a treIntcwhears.
the third job of the day, and the second had
been trouble;Samantha had tried to carry a load on the earthmover blade while making a turn, and the thing had taken a nosedive and twisted the rods of the blade lifters out of their casings, spilling hydraulic fluid over the ground, where it had frozen before it even flatteneTdheoyuth. ad had to set jacks under
the airborne back end of the tractor, and then decouple the entire blade attachment and lower the vehicle on the jacks, and every step of the operation had been a pain.
Then as soon as that was finished, Nadia had been called over to help with a Sandvik Tubex boring machine, which they were using to drill cased holes through large boulders they ran into while laying a water line from the alchemists' to the permanent habTihtaet. down-the-hole pneumatic hammer had
apparently frozen at full extension, as stuck as an arrow fired most of the way througNhadaiatree. stood looking down at the hammer sh"aDft.o you have any suggestions for freeing the hammer without breaking it?" Spencer asked.
"Break the boulder," Nadia said wearily, and walked over and got in a tractor with a backhoe already attached. She drove it over, and dug down to the top of the boulder, and then got out to attach a little
Allied hydraulic impact hammer to the backhSohee.
had just set it in position on the top of the boulder
when the down-the-hole hammer suddenly jerked it drill back, pulling the boulder with it and catching the outside of her left hand against the underside of the Allied Hy-Ram.
Instinctively she pulled back, and pain lanced up her arm and into heFrirechfeisllte. d that side of her body and her vision went whiTteh.ere were shouts in her ea"rWs: hat's wrong?What happened?"She
must have screamed". Help," she gratedS. he was sitting, her crushed hand still pinned between rock and hammer. She pushed at the front wheel of the tractor with her foot, shoved with all her might and felt the hammer rasp her bones over rocTkh.en she was flopped on her back, the hand Tfhreee.pain was
blinding, she felt sick to her stomach and thought she mightPufasihnitn.g onto her knees with her good hand, she saw that the crushed hand was bleeding heavily, the glove ripped apart, the little finger apparently gone.She groaned and hunched over it, pressed it to her and then jammed it against the ground, ignoring the flash of paEinv.en bleeding as it was, the hand would freeze in. . . how long? "Freeze, damn you, freeze," she crieSdh.e shook tears out of her eyes and forced herself to look at it. Blood all over, steamingS.he pushed the hand into the ground as hard as she couldAsltraenady it hurt
less. Soon it would be numb, she would have to be careful not to freeze the whoFlreightaennde!d, she prepared to pull it back into her lap; then people were there, lifting her, and she fainted.
# # #
After that she was maimeNda. dia Nine Fingers, Arkady called her over the phone. He sent her lines by
Yevtushenko, written to mourn the death of Louis Armstr"oDngo: as you did in the past/And play." "How did you find that?" Nadia asked "hIimc.an't imagine you reading Yevtushenko."
"Of course I read him, it's better than McGonaNgoa,ll!this was in a book on ArmstroIn'vge. taken
your advice and been listening to him while we work, and lately reading some books on him at night."
"I wish you'd come down here," Nadia said.
Vlad had done the surgerHye.
told her it would be all ri"gIht t.caught you cleanT.he ring finger is a bit
impaired, and will act like the little finger used to, probBaubtlyr.ing fingers never do much anywaTy.he

two main fingers will be strong as ever."
Everyone came by to visNite. vertheless she spoke more with Arkady than anyone else, in the hours of the night when she was alone, in the four and a half hours between Phobos's rising in the west and its setting in the easHt. e called in almost every night, at first, and often thereafter.
Pretty soon she was up and around, hand in a cast that was suspiciouslyShsleenwden.t out to troubleshoot or consult, hoping to keep her mind occupMieidch. el Duval never came by at all, which she
thought was strangeW.
asn't this what psychologists were foSrh?e couldn't help feeling depressed; she
needed her hands for her work, she was a hand labTohre .cast got in the way and she cut off the part around the wrist, with shears from her toolBkuitt. she had to keep both hand and cast in a box when outside, and there wasn't much she could Itdor.eally was depressing.
Saturday night arrived, and she sat in the newly filled whirlpool bath, nursing a glass of bad wine and looking around at her companions, splashing and soaking in their bathingShsueitws.asn't the only one to
have been injured, by any means; they were a bit battered now, after so many months of physical work: almost everyone had frostburn marks, patches of black skin that eventually peeled, leaving pink new skin, garish and ugly in the heat of the poAonlsd. several others wore casts, on hands, wrists, arms, even legs;
all for breaks or sprains. Actually they were lucky no one had gotten killed yet.
All these bodies, and none for Thehre.y knew each other like family, she thought; they were each others' physicians, they slept in the same rooms, dressed in the same locks, bathed together; an unremarkable group of human animals, eyecatching in the inert world they occupied, but more comforting than exciting, at least most of the tiMmeid. dle-aged bodies.Nadia herself was as round as a pumpkin, a plump tough muscular short woman, squarish and yet rounAdend single.Her closest friend these days
was only a voice in her ear, a face on the sWcrheen. he came down from Phobos. . . .well, hard to
say. He had had a lot of girlfriends on the Ares, and Janet Blyleven had gone to Phobos to be with him. .
. .
People were arguing again, there in the shallows of the lapAnpno,olt.all and angular, leaning down to snap something at Sax Russell, short and sAosft.usual, he didn't appear to be listenSinhge. would hit
him one day if he didn't watch Iotuwt. as strange how the group was changing again, how the feel of it
was changing.She could never get a fix on it; the real nature of the group was a thing apart, with a life of its own, somehow distinct from the characters of the individuals that constituIttemd uist.t make Michel's
job as their shrink almost impossibNleo. t that one could tell with Michel; he was the quietest and most
unobtrusive psychiatrist she had ever mNeto.
doubt an asset, in this crowd of shrink-atheBisutts.she
still thought it was odd he hadn't come by to see her after the accident.
# # #
One evening she left the dining chambers and walked down to the tunnel they were digging from the vaulted chambers to the farm complex, and there at the tunnel's end were Maya and Frank, arguing in a vicious undertone that carried down the tunnel not their meaning but their feeling; Frank's face was contorted with anger, and Maya as she turned from him was distraught, weeping; she turned back to shout at him "It was never like that," and then ran blindly toward Nadia, her mouth twisted into a snarl, Frank's face a mask of paMin.aya saw Nadia standing there and ran right by her.
Shocked, Nadia turned and walked back to the living chamSbhe sw. ent up magnesium stairs to the living room in chamber two, and turned on the TV to watch a twenty-four hour news program from Earth, something she very rarely dAidf.ter a while she turned down the sound, and looked at the pattern of bricks in the barrel vault overheMada.ya came in and started to explain things tothheerre: was

nothing between her and Frank, it was in Frank's mind only, he just wouldn't give up on it even though it had been nothing to begin with; she wanted only John, and it wasn't her fault that John and Frank were on such bad terms now, it was because of Frank's irrational desire, it wasn't her fault, but she felt so guilty because the two men had once been such close friends, like brothers.
And Nadia listened with a careful show of patience, saying "Da, da," and "I see," and the like, until Maya was lying flat on her back on the floor, crying, and Nadia was sitting on the edge of a chair staring at her,
wondering how much of it was trAuen.d what the argument had really been abAountd.
whether she was
a bad friend to distrust her old companion's story so complBetuetlys.omehow the whole thing felt like
Maya covering her tracks, practicing another manipulatiIotnw.
as just thist:hose two distraught faces she
had seen down the tunnel had been the clearest evidence possible of a fight between iSnotimates.
Maya's explanation was almost certainly a Nliea.dia said something soothing to her and went off to bed, thinking you already have taken too much of my time and energy and concentration with these games, you cost me a finger with them, you bitch!
# # #
It was getting toward the end of the long northern spring, and they still had no good supply of water, so Ann proposed to make an expedition to the cap and set up a robot distillery, along the way establishing a route that rovers could follow on automatic p"ilCoot.me with us," she said to Nad"iYa.ou haven't seen
anything of the planet yet, just the stretch between here and Chernobyl, and that's Ynouhinmgi.ssed Hebes and Ganges, and you're not doing anything new Rheaell.y, Nadia, I can't believe what a grub you've been.I mean why did you come to Mars, after all?"
"Why?"
"Yes, why?I mean there's two kinds of activities here, there's the exploration of Mars and then there's the life support for that exploratioAnn. d here you've been completely immersed in the life support,
without paying the slightest attention to the reason we came in the first place!" "Well, it's what I like to do," Nadia said uneasily.
"Fine, but try to keep some perspective onWhita!t the hell, you could have stayed back on Earth and
been a plumber!You didn't have to come all this way to drive a goddamn bulJlud
sotzehro! w long are
you going to go on grubbing away here, installing toilets, programming tractors?"
"All right, all right," Nadia said, thinking of Maya and all tThheeressqtu. are of vaults was almost finished, anyway."I could use a vacation."
They took off in three big long-range rovNeards:ia and five of the geologists, Ann, Simon Frazier, George Berkovic, Phyllis Boyle, and Edvard PerrGine. orge and Edvard were friends of Phyllis's from their NASA days, and they supported her in advocating "applied geological studies," meaning prospecting for rare metals; Simon on the other hand was a quiet ally of Ann's, committed to pure research and a hands-off attitudeN. adia knew all this even though she had spent very little time alone with any of these people, except for ABnunt. talk was talk; she could have named all the allegiances of everyone at base if she had to.

The expedition rovers were each composed of two four-wheeled modules, coupled by a flexible frame;
they looked a bit like giant anTths.ey had been built by Rolls Royce and a multinational aerospace
consortium, and had a beautiful sea green finTishhe.
forward modules contained the living quarters and
had tinted windows on all four sides; the aft modules contained the fuel tanks, and sported a number of black rotating solar panelsT.he eight wire mesh wheels were 2.5 meters high, and very broad.
As they headed north across Lunae Planum they marked their route with little green transponders, dropping one every few kilometerTs.hey also cleared rocks from their path that might disable a
robot-driven rover, using the snowplow attachmeonrt the little crane at the front end of the first Srover.
in effect they were building a roBadu.t they seldom had to use the rockmoving equipment on Lunae; they drove northeast at nearly their full speed of thirty kilometers an hour, for several daysTshterayigwhte.re
heading northeast, to avoid the canyon systems of Tempe and Mareotis, and this route took them down
Lunae to the long slope of Chryse PlanBitioat.h these regions looked much like the land around their
base camp, bumpy and strewn with small rocks; but because they were heading downhill they often had much longer views than they were usedIttow. as a new pleasure to Nadia, to drive on and on and see new countryside continually pop over the horizhoinll:ocks, dips, enormous isolated boulders, the
occasional low round mesa that was the outside of a crater.
When they had descended to the lowlands of the northern hemisphere, they turned and drove straight north across the immense Acidalia Planitia, and again ran straight for severaTl hdeaiyr sw. heel tracks
stretched behind them like the first cut of a lawnmover through grass, and the transponders gleamed bright and incongruous among the rockPsh.yllis, Edvard and George talked about making a few side
trips, to investigate some indications seen in satellite photos that there were unusual mineral outcroppings near Perepelkin CraterA. nn reminded them irritably of their missiIotn.made Nadia sad to see that Ann
was nearly as distant and tense out here as she was at back wathebnaesve;er the rovers were stopped
she was outside walking around alone, and she was withdrawn when they sat together in Rover One to eat dinner.Occasionally Nadia tried to draw her o"uAt:nn, how did all these rocks get scattered around
like this?" "Meteors."
"But where are the craters?" "Most are in the south."
"But how did the rocks get here, then?"
"They flewT. hat's why they're so smaIllt.'s only smaller rocks could be tossed so far."
"But I thought you told me that these northern plains were relatively new, while the heavy cratering was relatively old."
"That's right.The rocks you see here come from late meteor acTtihoen.total accumulation of loose rock from meteor strikes is much greater than what we canthaste'se, what gardened regolith iAs.nd the regolith is a kilometer deep."
"It's hard to believe," Nadia sa"iId.mean, that's so many meteors."
Ann nodded". It's billions of yearsT.hat's the difference between here and Earth, the age of the land goes from millions of years to billioInt's such a big difference it's hard to imagBiunte.seeing stuff like
this can help."

Midway across Acidalia they began running lionntog, straight, steep-walled, flat-bottomed canyons. They looked, as George noted more than once, like the dry beds of the legendaryThceangaelosl.ogical name for them was fossae, and they came in cluEstveersn. the smallest of these canyons were
impassable to rovers, and when they came on one they had to turn and run along its rim, until its floors rose or its walls drew together, and they could continue north over flat plain again.
The horizon ahead was sometimes twenty kilometers off, sometimes Cthrraeters became rare, and the
ones they passed were surrounded by low mounds that rayed out from the rims: splosh craters, where meteors had landed in permafrost that had turned to hot mud in the Nimadpiaac'st. companions spent a
day wandering eagerly over the splayed hills around one of these craters; the rounded slopes, Phyllis said, indicated ancient water as clearly as the grain in petrified wood indicated the origBinyal thtreee.
way she spoke Nadia understood that this was another of her disagreements with Ann; Phyllis believed in the long wet past model, Ann in the short wetOpraso.mething like thaSt.cience was many things,
Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
Further north, around latitude 54°, they drove into the weird-looking land of thermokarsts, hummocky
terrain spotted by a great number of steep-sided oval pits, called
Talhaeseses. alases were a hundred
times bigger than their terran analogues, most of them two or three kilometers across, and about sixty meters deep.A sure sign of permafrost, the geologists all agreed; seasonal freezing and thawing of the soil caused it to slump in this pattPeritns. this big indicated that water content in the soil must have been high, Phyllis saidU. nless it was yet another manifestation of martian times scales, Ann rSeplilgiehdtl.y icy
soil, slumping every so slightly, for eons.
Irritably Phyllis suggested that they try collecting water from the ground, and irritably AnnTahgeyreed. found a smooth slope between depressions, and stopped to install a permafrost water coNllaedcitaor.
took charge of the operation with a feeling of relief; the trip's lack of work had begun toItgewt atso her. a good day's jobs:he dug a ten-meter long trench with the lead rover's little backhoe; laid the lateral collector gallery, a perforated stainless steel pipe filled with gravel; checked the electric heating elements
running in strips along the pipe and filthresn;
out earlier.
filled in the trench with the clay and rocks they had dug
Over the lower end of the gallery was a sump and pump, and an insulated transport line leading to a small holding tankB. atteries would power the heating elements, and solar panels charge the batteries. When the holding tank was full, if there was enough water to fill it, the pump would shut off and a solenoid valve would open, allowing the water in the transport line to drain back into the gallery, after which the heating elements would shut off as well.
"Almost done," Nadia declared late in the day, as she started to bolt the transport pipe onto the last magnesium post.Her hands were dangerously cold, and her maimed hand throb"Mbeady. be someone
could start dinner," she sai"dI.'m almost done here.T" he transport pipe had to be packed in a thick cylinder of white polyurethane foam, then fitted into a larger protectiveAmpipazei.ng how much insulation complicated a simple piece of plumbing.
Hex nut, washer, cotter pin, a firm tug on the wrench. Nadia walked along the line, checking the coupling bands at the jointEs.verything firm.She lugged her tools over to Rover One, looked back at the result of the day's worak: tank, a short pipe on posts, a box on the ground, a long low mound of disturbed soil running uphill, looking raw but otherwise not unusual in this land o"fWluem'llpsd.rink
some fresh water on our way back," she said.
# # #

They had driven north for over two thousand kilometers, and finally rolled down onto Vastitas Borealis, an ancient cratered lava plain that ringed the northern hemisphere between latitudes 60° aAndnn70°.
and the other geologists spent a couple of hours every morning out on the bare dark rock of this plain, taking samples, after which they would drive north for the rest of the day, discussing what they had
found. Ann seemed more absorbed in the work, happOienre.
evening Simon pointed out that Phobos
was running just over the low hills to the south; the next day's drive would put it under tIhtewhaosrizon.
a remarkable demonstration of just how low the little moon's orbit was; they were only at latitude 69°! But Phobos was only some five thousand kilometers above the planet's eqNuaadtoiar. waved goodbye
to it with a smile; she would still be able to talk to Arkady using the newly arrived areosynchronous radio satellites.
Three days later the bare rock ended, running under waves of blackisIht wsaansd.just like coming on the shore of a seTa.hey had reached the great northern dunes, which wrapped the world in a band between Vastitas and the polar cap; where they were going to cross, the band was about eight hundred
kilometers wide.The sand was a charcoal color, tinged with purple and rose, a rich relief to the eye after all the red rubble of the souTthe dunes trended north and south, in parallel crests that occasionally
broke or mergedD.
riving over them was easy; the sand was hard-packed, and they only had to pick a
big dune and run along its humpbacked western side.
After a few days of this, however, the dunes got bigger, and became what Ann called barchran dunes. These looked like huge frozen waves, with faces a hundred meters tall, and backs a kilometer wide; and the crescent that each wave made was several kilometers Alosngw. ith so many other martian landscape features, they were a hundred times larger than their terran analogs in the Sahara anTdheGobi.
expedition kept a level course over the backs of these great waves by contouring from one wave back to the next, their rovers like tiny boats, paddlewheeling over a sea that had frozen at the height of a titanic storm.
One day on this petrified sea, Rover Two stopApedre. d light on the control panel indicated the
problem was in the flexible frame between the modules; and in fact the rear module was tilted to the left, shoving the left side wheels into the saNnadd. ia got into a suit and went back to have aShloeokto. ok
the dust cover off the joint where the frame connected to the module chassis, and found that the bolts holding them together were all broken.
"This is going to take a while," Nadia "sYaiodu.
guys might as well have another look around."
Soon the suited figures of Phyllis and George emerged, followed by Simon and Ann andPhEyldlivsard.
and George took a transponder from Rover Three and set it out three meters to the right of their "road." Nadia went to work on the broken frame, handling things as little as possible; it was a cold afternoon, perhaps seventy below, and she could feel the diamond chill right down to the bone.
The ends of the bolts wouldn't come out of the side of the module, so she got out a drill and started drilling new holesS. he began to hum "The Sheik of ArabAyn."n and Edvard and Simon were discussing
sand. It was so nice, Nadia thought, to see ground that wasnT'torehde.ar Ann absorbed in her work. To have some work to do herself.
They had almost reached the arctic circle, and it was Ls = 87, with the northern summer solstice only forty days away; so the days were getting lNonagd.ia and George worked through the evening while
Phyllis heated supper, and then after the meal Nadia went back out to finishTthhee sjuonb. was red in a brown haze, small and round even though it was near setting; there wasn't enough atmosphere for oblation to enlarge and flatten Nita. dia finished, put her tools away, and had opened the outer lock door

of Rover One, when Ann's voice spoke in her e"aOr.h Nadia, are you going in already?"
Nadia looked upA. nn was on the ridge of the dune to the west, waving down at her, a black silhouette against a blood-colored sky.
"That was the idea," Nadia said.
"Come on up here just a second. I want you to see this sunset, it's going to be Ca ogmoeodono,neit.'ll only take a minute, you'll be glad you dTidheirt.e are clouds to the west."
Nadia sighed and closed the outer lock door.
The east face of the dune was stNeeapd.ia carefully stepped in the prints Ann had made in her ascent. The sand there was packed and held firm most of theNteimare.the crest it got steeper, and she leaned forward and dug in with her fingeTrhs.en she was clambering onto the broad rounded crest, and could straighten up and have a look around.
Only the crests of the tallest dunes were still in sunlight; the world wasuarfabclea,ckmarred by short scimitar curves of steely graHy.orizon about five kilometers ofAf.nn was crouching, a scoop of sand in her palm.
"What's it made of?" Nadia asked. "Dark solid mineral particles."
Nadia snorted". I could have told you that."
"Not before we got here you couldItn'tm. ight have been fines aggregated with sBalutst. it's bits of rock instead."
"Why so dark?"
"Volcanic.On Earth sand is mostly quartz, you see, because there's a lot of granitBeuthMerea.rs doesn't have much graniteT.hese grains are probably volcanic silicateOsb. sidian, flint, some garnet. Beautiful, isn't it?"
She held out a handful of sand for Nadia's inspePcetirofnec. tly serious of courseN. adia peered through her faceplate at the black gr"iBt.eautiful," she said.
They stood and watched the sun Tshete.ir shadows went right out to the eastern horiTzohne. sky was a dark red, murky and opaque, only slighty lighter in the west over tThheesucnlo.uds Ann had mentioned were bright yellow streaks, very high in the sSkoym. ething in the sand caught at the light, and the dunes were distinctly purplishT. he sun was a little gold button, and above it shone two eveninVg esntuasrs, :
and the Earth.
"They've been getting closer every night lately," Ann said s"oTfhtley.conjunction should be really brilliant."
The sun touched the horizon, and the dune crests faded to shTahdeowlit.tle button sun sank under the black line to the wesNt.ow the sky was a maroon dome, the high clouds the pink of moss campion.
Stars were popping out everywhere, and the maroon sky shifted to a vivid dark violet, an electric color

that was picked up by tdhuene crests, so that it seemed crescents of liquid twilight lay across the black plain. Suddenly Nadia felt a breeze swirl through her nervous system, running up her spine and out into her skin; her cheeks tingled, and she could feel her spinal cord Btherauumty. could make you shiveIrt!
was a shock to feel such a physical response to beauty, a thrill like some kinAdndofthsiesx.beauty
was so strange, so alieNn.adia had never seen it properly before, or never really felt it, she realized that
now; she had been enjoying her life as if it were a Siberia made right, so that really she had been living in
a huge analogy, understanding everything in terms of her
Bpaustt.now she stood under a tall violet sky
on the surface of a petrified black ocean, all new, all strange; it was absolutely impossible to compare it
to anything she had seen before; and all of a sudden the past sheered away in her head and she turned in circles like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy, without a thought in hWereihgehatds. eeped inward
from her skin, and she didn't feel hollow anymore; on the contrary she felt extremely solid, compact, balanced. A little thinking boulder, set spinning like a top.
# # #
They glissaded down the steep face of the dune on their booAt thetheles.bottom Nadia gave Ann an impulsive hug:"Oh Ann, I don't know how to thank you for Ethvaetn." through the tinted faceplates she
could see Ann grinA.
rare sight.
# # #
After that things looked different to NaOdiha. she knew it was in herself, that it was a matter of paying attention in a new way, of lookiBngu.t the landscape conspired in this sensation, feeding her new attentiveness; because the very next day they left the black dunes, and drove on to what her companions called layered or laminate terraiTn.his was the region of flat sand that in winter would lie under the CO2 skirt of the polar caNp.ow in midsummer it lay revealed, a landscape made entirely of curvilinear
patterns. They drove up broad flat washes of yellow sand that were bounded by long sinuous flat-topped plateaus; the sides of the plateaus were stepped and benched, laminated both finely and grossly, looking like wood that had been cut and polished to show a handsomeNgornaein.of them had ever seen any
land remotely like it, and they spent the mornings taking samples and borings, and hiking around in a loping martian ballet, talking a blue streak, Nadia as excited as any oAf nthnemex.plained to her that
each winter's frost caught a lamina on the surfTahcen.
wind erosion had cut arroyos, and stripped away
at their sides, and each strata was stripped back farther than the one below it, so that the arroyo walls consisted of hundreds of narrow terrace"Ist.'s like the land is a contour map of itself," Simon said.
They drove during the days, and went out every evening, in purply dusks that lasted until just before midnight. They drilled borings, and came up with cores that were gritty and icy, laminated for as far down as they could drilOl. ne evening Nadia was climbing with Ann up a series of parallel terraces,
half-listening to her explain about the precession of aphelion and perihelion, when she looked back across the arroyo and saw that it was glowing like lemons and apricots in the evening light, and that above the arroyo were pale green lenticular clouds, mimicking perfectly the terrain's French curves. "Look!" she exclaimed.
Ann looked back and saw it, and was Tshtielyl.
watched the low banded clouds float overhead.
Finally a dinner call from the rovers brought them Abnacdk.walking down over the contoured terraces
of sand, Nadia knew that she had changed-that, or else the planet was getting much more strange and beautiful as they traveled nortOh.r both.
# # #

They rolled over flat terraces of yellow sand, sand so fine and hard and clear of rocks that they could go at full speed, slowing down only to shift up or down from one bench toOacncoatshioern.ally the
rounded slope between terraces gave them some trouble, and once or twice they even had to backtrack to find a wayB. ut usually a route north could be found without difficulty.
On their fourth day in the laminate terrain, the plateau walls flanking their flat wash curved together, and they drove up the cleavage onto a higher plane; and there before them on the new horizon was a white hill, a great rounded thing, like a white Ayer's RAocwk.hite hill-it was icAe! hill of ice, a hundred
meters high anda kilometer wide-and when they drove around it, they saw that it continued over the horizon to the northI.t was the tip of a glacier, perhaps a tongue of the polar capInitsthelef. other cars they were shouting, and in the noise and confusion Nadia could only hear Phyllis, cryingW"Wateart!e"r!
Water indeedT. hough they had known it was going to be there, it was still startling in the extreme to run into a whole great white hill of it, in fact the tallest hill they had seen in the entire five thousand kilometers of their voyageI.t took them all that first day to get usedthteoy its:topped the rovers, pointed,
chattered, got out to have a look, took surface samples and botoriuncghse,d it, climbed up it a ways.
Like the sand around it, the ice hill was horizontally laminated, with lines of dust about a centimeter apart. Between the lines the ice was pocked and granular; in this atmospheric pressure it sublimed at almost all temperatures, leaving pitted, rotten side walls to a depth of a few centimeters; under that it was solid, and hard.
"This is lot of water," they all said at one point or aWnoatere,r.on the surface of Mars. . . .
The next day the glacier fhoilrlmed their right horizon, a wall that ran on beside them for the whole day's drive. Then it really began to seem like a lot of water, especially as over the course of the day the wall got taller, rising to a height of about three hundred mAetekrisn.d of white mountain ridge, in fact, walling
off their flat-bottomed valley on its east sAidned.
then, over the horizon to the northwest, there appeared
another white hill, the top of another ridge poking over the horizon, the base remaining beneath it. Another glacier hill, walling them in to the west, some thirty kilometers away.
So they were in Chasma Borealis, a wind-carved valley that cut north into the ice cap for some five hundred kilometers, more than half the distance to the TPhoele.chasm's floor was flat sand, hard as
concrete, and often crunchy with a layer of CO2
Tfrhoest.chasm's ice walls were tall, but not vertical;
they lay back at an angle less than forty-five degrees, and like the hillsides in the laminate terrain, they were terraced, the terraces ragged with wind erosion and sublimation, the two forces that over tens of thousands of years had cut the whole length of the chasm.
Rather than driving up to the head of the valley, the explorers crossed to the western wall, aiming toward a transponder that had been included in a drop of ice-mining equipTmhenst.and dunes mid-chasm
were low and regular, and the rovers rolled over the corrugated land, up and down, up aTnhdendown.
as they crested a sand wave they spotted the drop, no more than two kilometers from the foot of the northwest ice wallb: ulky lime green containers on skeletal landing modules, a strange sight in this world
of whites and tans and pink"Ws. hat an eyesore!" Ann exclaimed, but Phyllis and George were cheering.
During the long afternoon, the shadowed western iceside took on a variety of pale colors: the purest water ice was clear and bluish, but most of the hillside was a translucent ivory, copiously tinted by pink and yellow dustI.rregular patches of CO2 ice were a bright pure white; the contrast between dry ice and water ice was vivid, and made it impossible to read the actual contours of theAhnidllsfiodree.shortening
made it hard to tell how tall the hill really was; it seemed to go up forever, and was probably somewhere between three and five hundred meters above the floor of Borealis.

"This is a lot of water," Nadia exclaimed.
"And there's more underground," Phyllis sa"iOd.ur borings show that the cap actually extends many degrees of latitude farther south than we see, buried under the layered terrain."
"So we have more water than we'll ever need!" Ann pursed her mouth unhappily.
# # #
The drop of the mining equipment had determined the site of the ice mininthge cwamespt: wall of
Chasma Borealis, at longitude 41°, latitude 83°DNei.mos had just recently followed Phobos under the horizon; they wouldn't see it again until they returned south of 8T2h°e Ns.ummer nights consisted of an
hour's purple twilight; the rest of the time the sun wheeled around, never more than twenty degrees above the horizon.The six of them spent long hours outside, moving the ice tomitnheer wall and then setting it
up. The main component was a robotic tunnel borer, about the size of one of theiTr hreovbeorsre. r cut
into the ice, and passed back cylindrical drums 1.5 meters in diamWehteern.
they turned the borer on it
made a loud, low buzz, which was louder still if they put their helmets to the ice, or even touched it with their hands.After a while white ice drums thumped into a hopper, and then a small robot forklift carried them to a distillery, which would melt the ice and separate out its considerable load of dust, then refreeze the water into one-meter cubes more suitable for packing in the holds of theRorobvoetrsf.reight rovers
would then be perfectly capable of driving to the site, loading up and returning to base on their own; and base would then have a regular water supply, larger than they could evAerounsed. three or four trillion
cubic meters in the visible polar cap, Edvard calculated, though there were a lot of guesses in the calculation.
They spent several days testing the miner, and deploying an array of solar panels toInpotwheerloint.g evenings after dinner Ann would climb the ice wall, ostensibly to take more borings, although Nadia knew she just wanted away from Phyllis and Edvard and GeAonrgde.naturally she wanted to climb all
the way to the top, to get on the polar cap and look around, and take borings of the most recent layers o ice; and so one day when the miner had passed all the test routines, she and Nadia and Simon got up at dawn-just after two AM-and went out into the supercold morning air and climbed, their shadows like big spiders climbing before themT.he slope of the ice was about thirty degrees, steepening and then letting
off time after time as they ascended the rough benches in the hill's layered side.
It was seven AM when the slope laid back and they walked onto the surface of theTpooltahre cap.
north was a plain of ice that extended as far as they could see, to a high horizon some thirty kilometers away. Looking back to the south they could see a great distance over the geometric swirls of the layered terrain; it was the longest view Nadia had ever had on Mars.
The ice of the plateau was layered much like the laminated sand below them, with wide bands of dirty pink contouring across cleaner stuffT.he other wall of Chasma Borealis lay off to theloeoaksitn,g
almost vertical from their point of view, long, tall, mas"sSivoe:much water!" Nadia said agai"nI.t's more than we'll ever need."
"That depends," Ann said absently, screwing the frame of the little borer intoHtehre diacrek. ened faceplate turned up at Nadi"aI:f the terraformers have their way, this will all go like dew on a hot morning. Into the air to make pretty clouds."
"Would that be so badN?"adia asked.

Ann stared at heTr.hrough the tinted faceplate her eyes looked like ballbearings.
That night at dinner she said, "We really ought to make a run up to the pole."
Phyllis shook her hea"dW.
e don't have the food or air."
"Call for a drop."
Edvard shook his hea"dT. he polar cap is cut by valleys almost as deep as Borealis!"
"Not so," Ann sai"dY. ou could drive straight to Tith.e swirl valleys look dramatic from space, but that's because of the difference in albedo between the water and the CThOe2.actual slopes are never more
than six degrees off the horizontIatl's.
just more layered terrain, really."
George said, "But what about getting onto the cap in the first place?"
"We drive around to one of the tongues of ice that drop to tThheeysa'rned.like ramps up to the central massif, and once there, we drive right to the pole!"
"There's no reason to go," Phyllis s"aIitd'l.l just be more of what we see here. Amnedanits more exposure to radiation."
"And," George added, "we could use what food and air we do have to check out some of the sites we passed on the way up here."
So that was their poiAntn. n scowled."I'm the head of the geological survey," she said shaWrphlyic.h
may have been true, but she was a horrible politician, especially compared to Phyllis, who had any number of friends in Houston and Washington.
"But there's no geological reason to go to the pole," Phyllis said now with"Iat'llsmbeilet.he same ice as here. You just want to go."
"Well?" Ann said".Say I do! There are still scientific questions to be answered up Itshetrhee. same composition, how much dust-everywhere we go up here we collect valuable data."
"But we're up here to get waWteer.'re not up here to fool around."
ice the
"It's not fooling around!" Ann snapped. "We obtain water to allow us to explore, we don't explore just to obtain water!You've got it backwardsI! can't believe how many people in this colony do that!"
Nadia said, "Let's see what they say at
Tbahseey. might want us to help with something there, or they
might not be able to send a drop, you never know."
Ann groaned". We'll end up asking permission from the UN, I swear."
She was righFt.rank and Maya didn't like the idea, John was interestendonbcuotmmittal. Arkady
supported it when he heard of it, and declared he would send a supply drop from Phobos if necessary, which given its orbit was impractical at bBeustt. at that point Maya called mission control in Houston and Baikonur, and the argument rippled outwarHda. stings opposed the plan; but Baikonur, and a lot of the scientific community, liked it.

Finally Ann got on the phone, her voice very curt and arrogant, though she looke"dI'mscathreed:
geological head here, and I say it needs to be Tdhoenree.
won't be any better oportunity to get onsite
data on the original condition of the polar Ict'asp.a delicate system, and any change in the atmosphere is going to impact it heavilAy.nd you're got plans to do that, rigShatx?, are you still working on those windmill heaters?"
Sax had not been part of the discussion, and he had to be called to t"hSeurpeh,"onhee.
said when the
question was repeatedH.
e and Hiroko had come up with the idea of manufacturing small windmills, to be
dropped from dirigibles all over the planTeht.e constant westerlies would spin the windmills, and the spin would be converted to heat in coils in the base of the mills, and this heat would simply be released into the atmosphere.Sax had already designed a robotic factory to manufacture the windmills; he hoped to make them by the thousandsV. lad pointed out that that the heat gained would come at the price of
winds slowed down; you couldn't get something for nothSianxg. immediately argued that that would be a
side benefit, given the severity of the global dust storms the wind sometimes "cAaulsiettdle. little wind is a great trade-off."
heat for a
"So, a million windmills," Ann said n"oAwn.d that's just the starYt.ou talked about spreading black dust on the polar caps, didn't you Sax?"
"It would thicken the atmosphere faster than practically any other action we could take."
"So if you get your way," Ann said, "the caps are doTohmeye'dll. evaporate and then we're going to say, 'I wonder what they were like?' And we won't know."
"Do you have enough supplies, enough time?" John asked. "We'll drop you supplies, " Arkady said again.
"There's four more months of summer," Ann said.
"You just want to go to the poFlrea!n"k said, echoing Phyllis.
"So?" Ann replied".You may have come here to play office politics, but I plan to see a bit of this place." Nadia grimaced; that ended that line of conversation, and Frank would beWahnigcrhy.was never a
good idea.Ann, Ann. . . .
The next day the terran offices weighed in with the opinion that the polar cap ought to be sampled in its aboriginal condition.No objections from base; though Frank did not get back on thSeimlionne. and
Nadia cheered:"North to the Pole!"
Phyllis just shook her hea"dI. don't see the poinGt.eorge and Edvard and I will stay down here as a back-up, and make sure the ice miner is working right."
# # #
So Ann and Nadia and Simon took rover Three and drove back down Chasma Borealis and around to
the west, where one of the glaciers curling away from the cap thinned to a perfect rTahmepmwaeysh. of
the rovers' big wheels caught like a snowmobile's driving chain, running well over all the various surfaces of the cap, over patches of exposed granular dust, low hills of hard ice, fields of blinding white CO2

frost, and the usual lace of sublimed waterSihcael.low valleys swirled outward in a clockwise pattern
from the pole; some of these were very brCoarods.sing these they would drive down a bumpy slope that curved away to right and left over both horizons, all of it covered by bright dry ice; this could last for twenty kilometers, until the whole visible world was bright wThhieten. before them a rising slope of the
more familiar dirty red water ice would appear, striated by contourAlsineths.ey crossed the bottom of the trough the world would be divided in two, white behind, dirty pinkDarihveiandg. up the south-facing slopes, they found the water ice more rotten than elsewhere, but as Ann pointed out, every winter a
meter of dry ice sat on the permanent cap to crush the previous summer's rotten filligree, so the potholes were filled on an annual schedule; and the rover's big wheels crunched cleanly along.
Beyond the swirl valleys they found themselves on a smooth white plain, extending to the horizon in every direction.Behind the polarized and tinted glass of the rover's windows the whiteness was unmarred and pure. Once they passed a low ring hill, the mark of some relatively recent meteor impact, filled in by subsequent ice depositionT. hey stopped to take borings, of courNsea.dia had to restrict Ann and
Simon to four borings a day, to save time and keep the rovers' trunks from being ovAernlodadited.
wasn't just borings; often they would pass black isolated rocks, resting on the ice like Magritte sculptures:
meteorites. They collected the smallest of these, and took samples from the larger ones; and once passed one that was as big as the rover. They were nickel-iron for the most part, or stony chondrites. Chipping away at one of these, Ann said to Nadia, "You know they've found meteorites on Earth that came from MarsT. he reverse happens too, although much less ofIttent.akes a really big impact to jack
rocks out of Earth's gravitational field fast enough to get them out here-delta V of fifteen kilometers per second, at least-I've heard it said that about two percent of the material ejected out of Earth's field would end up on MarsB. ut only from the biggest impacts, like the KT boundary imItpawcot.uld be strange to
find a chunk of the Yucatan here, wouldn't it?"
"But that was sixty million years ago," Nadia "sIat idw. ould be buried under the ice."
"True."Later, walking back to the rover, she said, "Well, if they melt these caps then we'll find some. We'll have a whole museum of meteorites, sitting around on the sand."
# # #
They crossed more swirl valleys, falling again into the up-and-down pattern of a boat over waves, this time the largest waves yet, forty kilometers from crest to Tchreyt. used the clocks to keep on a
schedule, and parkedfrom ten PM to five AM on hillocks or buried crater rims, to give themselves a
view during their stops; and they blacked the windows with double polarization to help them to get some sleep at night.
Then one morning as they crunched along, Ann turned on the radio and began to run checks with the areosynchronous satellites."It's not easy to find the pole," she said as she w"oTrkhe .early terran
explorers had a hell of a time in the north, they were always up there in summertime and couldn't see the stars, and they had no satellite checks."
"So how did they do it?" Nadia asked, suddenly curious.
Ann thought about it and smil"eId.don't knowN.
ot very well, I suspecPt.robably dead reckoning."
Nadia became intrigued by the problem, and started working on it on a skGetecohmpaedtr.y had never
been her strong point, but presumably at the north pole on midsummer's day, the sun would inscribe a perfect circle around the horizon, never getting higher or loIfweyro.u were near the Pole, then, and it
was near Midsummer's Day, you might be able to use a sextant to make timed checks on the sun's height

above the horizon. . w. a. s that right? "This is it," Ann said.
"What?"
They stopped the rover, looked arouTndh.e white plain undulated to the nearby horizon, featureless
except for a couple of broad red contour lines; the lines did not form bull's eyes circles around them, and it didn't look like they were at the top of anything.
"Where, exactly?" Nadia asked.
"Well, somewhere just north of herAe.n"n smiled again". Within a kilometer or sMo.aybe that way."
She pointed off to the rig"hWt. e'll have to go over there a ways and check with the satelliteAalgitatilen. bit of triangulation and we should be able to hit it on thPelunsosoer. minus a hundred meters, anyway."
"Of we just took the time, we could make it plus or minus a meter!" Simon said enthu"sLieats'tsically. pin it down!"
So they drove for a minute, consulted the radio, turned to right angles and drove again, made another consulation. Finally Ann declared they were there, or close enoSuigmh.on programmed the computer to
keep working on it, and they suited up and went out and wandered around a bit, to make sure they had stepped on it. Ann and Simon drilled a boriNnga.dia kept walking, in a spiral that expanded away from
the cars.A reddish white plain, the horizon some four kilometers away; too close; it came to her in a rush, as during the black dune sunset, that this was alien-a sharp awareness of the tight horizon, the dreamy gravity, a world just so big and no bigger. . . and now she was standing right on itsIt north pole.
was Ls = 92, about as near midsummer as you could ask; so if she stood facing the sun, and didn't move the sun would stay right in front of her face for all the rest of the day, or the rest of the week for that matter! It was strangeS. he was spinning like a toIpf. she stood still long enough, would she feel it?
Her polarized faceplate reduced the sun's glare on the ice to a arc of crystalline rainboIwt wpaosinn't . very cold.She could just feel a breeze against her upraised pAalmgr.aceful red streak of depositional laminae ran over the horizon like a longitude Slihnee. laughed at the thoughTt.here was a very faint
ice-ring around the sun, big enough that its lower arc just touched the hIcoerizwoans.
subliming off the
polar cap and gleaming in the air above, providing the crystals in thGerinrinnign.g, she stomped her boot prints into the north pole of Mars.
# # #
That evening they aligned the polarizers so that a very dimmed-down image of the white desert stood around them in the module windowNsa. dia sat back with an empty food tray in her lap, sipping a cup of coffee. The digital clock flicked from 11:59:59 to 0:00:00, and stopItpsedst.illness accentuated the
quietness in the carS.imon was asleep; Ann sat in the driver's seat, staring out at the scene, her dinner
half-eaten. No sound but the whoosh of the ventila"tIo'mr. been great."
glad you got us up here," Nadia
"sIati'ds.
"Someone should enjoy it," Ann saWidh. en she was angry or bitter her voice became flat and distant, almost as if she were being matter-of-fa"cItt. won't be here long."
"Are you sure, AnnIt?'s five kilometers deep here, isn't that what you Dsaoid?you really think it will completely disappear just because of black dust on it?"

Ann shrugged". It's a question of how warm we makAe nidt. of how much total water there is on the planet, and how much of the water in the regolith will surface when we heat the atmWoespwheorne'.t
know any of those things until they happBeunt. I suspect that since this cap is the primary exposed body of water, it'll be the most sensitive to chaInt gceo. uld sublime away almost entirely before any significant part of the permafrost has gotten within fifty degrees of melting."
"Entirely?"
"Oh, some will be deposited every winter, sBuuret .there's not that much water, when you put it in the global perspective.This is a dry world, the atmosphere is super-arid, it makes Antarctica look like a jungle, and remember how that place used to suck usSodryif? temperatures go up high enough, the ice will sublime at a really rapid raTthe.is whole cap will shift into the atmosphere and blow south, where it'll frost out at nightsS.o in effect it'll be redistributed more or less evenly over the whole planet, as frost about a centimeter thick.S"he grimaced."Less than that, of course, because most of it will stay in the
air."
"But then if it gets hotter still, the frost will melt, and it
Twhilelnrawine.'ve got rivers and lakes, right?"
"If the atmospheric pressure is high enouLgihq.uid surface water depends on air pressure as well as temperature. If both rise, we could be walking around on sand here in a matter of decades."
"It'd be quite a meteorite collection," Nadia said, trying to lighten Ann's mood.
It didn't workA. nn pursed her lips, stared out the window, shook her Hherdf.ace could be so bleak;
it couldn't be explained entirely by Mars, there had to be something more to it, something that explained that intense internal spin, that angBere.ssie Smith landI.t was hard to watcWh. hen Maya was unhappy
it was like Ella Fitzgerald singing a blues, you knew it was a put on, the exuberance just poured through it. But when Ann was unhappy, it hurt to watch it.
Now she picked up her dish of lasagna, leaned back to stick it in the mBiceroywonadveh. er the white waste gleamed under a black sky, as if the world outside were a photo nTehgeaticvleo.ckface suddenly read 0:00:01.
# # #
Four days later they were off theAicse.they retraced their route back to Phyllis and George and
Edvard, the three travelers rolled over a rise and came to a halt; there was a structure on thOeuthorizon.
on the flat sediment of the chasma floor there stood a classical Greek temple, six Dorian columns of white marble, capped by a round flat roof.
"What the hell?"
When they got closer they saw that the columns were made of ice drums from the miner, stacked on top of each otherT. he disk that served as roof was rough-hewn.
"George's idea," Phyllis said over the radio.
"I noticed the ice cylinders were the same size as the marble drums the Greeks used for their pillars," George said, still pleased with himse"lAf.fter that it was obviouAs.nd the miner is running perfectly, so
we had some time to kill."

"It looks great," Simon saAidn. d it dida: lien monument, dream visitation, it glowed like flesh in the long dusk, as if blood ran under its "iAce.temple to Ares."
"To Neptune," corrected Georg"eW.
e don't want to invoke Ares too often, I don't think."
"Especially given the crowd at base camp," Ann said.
# # #
As they drove south their road of tracks and transponders ran ahead of them, as distinct as any highway of paved concreteI.t did not take Ann to point out how much this changed the feel of their travel; they were no longer exploring untouched land, and the nature of the landscape itself was altelrefdt, asnpdlit
right by the parallel lines of crosshatched wheel tracks, and by the green canisters slightly dimmed by a rime of dust, all marking for them "the wIat yw."asn't wilderness any more; that was the point of
road-building, after allT. hey could leave the driving to Rover One's automatic pilot, and often did.
So they were trundling along at thirty kph, with nothing to do but look at the bisected view, or talk, which they did infrequently, except on the morning they got into a heated discussion about Frank Chalmers-Ann maintaining that he was a complete Machiavellian, Phyllis insisting that he was no worse than anyone else in power, anNdadia, remembering her talks with him about Maya, knowing it was
more complex than either of those viewBus.t it was Ann's lack of discretion that appalled her, and as Phyllis went on about how Frank had held them together in the last months of the voyage out, Nadia glared at Ann, trying to convey to her by looks that she was talking in the wronPghycllrisowwdo.uld
use her indiscretions against her later on, that was obvBiouuts.Ann was bad at seeing looks.
Then suddenly the rover braked and slowed to aNsotopo.ne had been watching, and they all jumped to the front window.
There before them was a flat white sheet, covering their road for nearly a hundre"dWmhaeteirss. it?" George cried.
"Our permafrost pump," Nadia said, pointi"nIgt . must have broken." "Or worked too well!" Simon sa"iTdh. at's water ice!"
They switched the rover to manual, drove neaTrehre.
spill covered the road like a wash of white lava.
They struggled into their walkers and and got out of the module, walked over to the edge of the spill.
"Our own ice rink," Nadia said, and went to the Sphuempu.nhooked the insulation pad had a look inside. "Ah ha-a gap in the insulation-water froze right here, and jammed the stopcock in the open position. A good head of pressure, I'd sRaya.n till it froze thick enough to stoAp itta.p from a hammer might get us our own little geyser."
She went to her tool cabinet in the underside of the module, took ou"tWaatpchicko.ut!"She struck a single blow at the white mass of ice, where the pump joined the tank feedAerthpiicpke.bolt of water squirted a meter into the a"iWr. ow!" It splashed down onto the white sheet of ice, steaming even though it froze within seconds, making a white lobate leaf on top of the ice alread"yLothoekrea.t that!"The
hole too froze over, and the stream of water stopped, and the steam blew away. "Look how fast it froze!"

"Looks just like those splosh craters," Nadia remarked, grinIntinhga.d been a beautiful sight, water spilling out and steaming like mad as it froze.
Nadia chipped away at the ice around the stopvalve; Ann and Phyllis argued about migration of permafrost, quantities of water at this latitude, etc.Oentce. would think they'd get sick ofBuitt. they
really did dislike each other, and so they were helpless toIt swtoopu. ld be the last trip they ever took
together, no doubt about
Nit.adia herself would be disinclined to travel with Phyllis and George and
Edvard anymore, they were too complacent, too much a little in-group of theBirutowAnn.n was
alienated from quite a few other people as well; if she didn't watch out, she'd be without anyone at all to accompany her on tripsF.rank, for instance-that comment to him the other night, and then telling Phyllis
of all people how horrible he was; incredible.
And if she alienated everyone but Simon, she would be hurting for conversation; for Simon Frazier was the quietest man in the whole hundrHede. had hardly said twenty sentences the entire length of the trip, it was uncanny, like traveling with a deaf-muEtxe.cept maybe he talked to Ann when they were alone,
who knew?
Nadia worked the valve into its stop position, then shut the whole pump"Wdeo'wll nh.ave to use
thicker insulation this far north," she said to no one in particular as she took her tools back to the rover. She was tired of all the sniping, anxious to get back to base camp and hSehre wwoarnkt.ed to talk with
Arkady; he would make her laugAhn. d without trying, or even knowing exactly how, she would make him laugh too.
They put a few chunks of the ice spill in among the rest of the samples, and set out four transponders to guide robot pilots around the sp"ilAl.lthough it may sublime away, right?" Nadia said.
Ann, lost in thought, didn't hear the ques"tiTohne. re's a lot of water up here," she muttered to herself, sounding worried.
"You're damned right there is," Phyllis exclaim"Nedo.w why don't we have a look at those deposits we've spotted at the north end of Mareotis?"
# # #
As they got closer to base Ann became more close-mouthed and solitary, her face held tight as a mask. "What's the matter?" Nadia asked one evening, when they were out together near sunset, fixing a
defective transponder.
"I don't want to go back," Ann sSahied. was kneeling by an isolated rock, chipping "aIt dito. n't want
this trip to endI.'d like to keep traveling all the time, down into the canyons, up to the volcano rims, into the chaos and the mountains around HellIasd.on't ever want to stop."
She sighed". But. . . I'm part of the teSamo .I have to climb back into the hovel with everyone else."
"Is it really that bad?" Nadia said, thinking of her beautiful barrel vaults, of the steaming whirlpool bath and a glass of icy vodka.
"You know it iTs!wenty-four and a half hours a day, underground in those little rooms, with Maya and Frank running their political schemes, and Arkady and Phyllis fighting over everything, which I understand now, believe me-and George complaining and John floating in a fog and Hiroko obsessed by her little

empire-Vlad too, Sax too-. . I. m. ean, what a crowd!"
"They're no worse than any othNeor. all by yourself."
worse and no betteYr.ou have to get alonYg.ou couldn't be here
"No.But it feels like I'm not here anyway, when I'm at theMbigahste.as well be back on the ship!"
"No, no," Nadia sai"dY. ou're forgetting."She kicked the rock Ann was working on, and Ann looked up in surprise". You can kick rocks, seeW? e're here, Ann.Here on Mars, standing on Aitn. d every
day you can go out and run arouAnndd.
you'll be taking as many trips as anyone, with your position."
Ann looked away".It just doesn't seem like enough, sometimes."
Nadia stared at he"rW.
ell. Ann. It's radiation keeping us underground more than anythWingh.at you're
saying in effect is that you want the radiation to go Wawhiacyh. means terraforming."
means thickening the atmosphere, which
"I know."Her voice was tight, so tight that suddenly the careful matter-of-fact tone was lost and forgotten: "Don't you think I know?S"he stood and waved the hamm"eBr.ut it isn't rightI! mean I look
at this land and, and I loveI
iwt.ant to be out on it traveling over it always, to study it and live on it and
learn it.But when I do that, I change it-I destroy what it is, what I loTvheis inroaitd.
we made, it hurts
me to see itA! nd base camp is like an open pit mine, in the middle of a desert never touched since time began. So ugly, so. . . . I don't want to do that to all of Mars, NadiaI',d Iradtohne'rt. dieL. et the
planet be, leave it wilderness and let radiation do what iItt'swiolnl.ly a statistical matter anyway, I mean if it raises my chance of cancer to one in ten, then nine times out of ten I'm all right!"
"Fine for you," Nadia sa"idO.r for any individuaBl.ut for the group, for all the living things here-the genetic damage, you knowO. ver time it would cripple uSso., you know, you can't just think of yourself."
"Part of a team," Ann said dully. "Well, you are."
"I know."She sighed."We'll all say thaWt. e'll all go on and make the place
Rsaofea.ds, cities.New
sky, new soilU.
ntil it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll
be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so emWphtyy. when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces."
On the sixty-second day of their expedition they saw plumes of smoke over the southern horizon, strands of brown, gray, white and black rising and mixing, billowing into a flat-topped mushroom cloud that wisped off to the ea"sHt.ome again home again," Phyllis said cheerily.
Their tracks from the trip out, half-filled by dust, led them back toward thethsrmouogkhe:the freight
landing zone, across grouncdrisscrossed with treadmarks, across ground trampled to light red sand, past

ditches and mounds, pits and piles, and finally to the great raw mound of the permanent habitat, a square earthen redoubt now topped by a silvery network of magnesium bTeahmats.sight piqued Nadia's
interest, but as they rolled on in she could not help noticing the litter of frames, crates, tractors, cranes, spare part dumps, garbage dumps, windmills, solar panels, water towers, concrete roads leading east
west and south, air miners, the low buildings of the alchemists' quarter, their smokestacks emitting the plumes they had seen; the stacks of glass, the round cones of gray gravel, the big mounds of raw regolith next to the cement factory, the small mounds of regolith scattered everywhereIt ehlsaed. the
disordered, functional, ugly look of Vanino or Usman or any of the Stalinist heavy industry cities in the
Urals, or the oil camps of YakTuht.ey rolled through a good five kilometers of this devastation; and as
they did Nadia did not dare to look at Ann, who sat silently beside her, emanating disgust and loathing. Nadia too was shocked, and surprised at the change in herself; this had all seemed perfectly normal
before the trip, indeed had pleased her very mNucohw.
she was slightly nauseated, and afraid Ann might
do something violent, especially if Phyllis said anything mBourte.Phyllis kept her mouth shut, and they rolled into the tractor lot outside the northern garage and stoTphpede. xpedition was over.
One by one they plugged the rovers into the wall of the garage and crawled through Ftahme ildiaorors. faces crowded around, Maya and Frank and Michel and Sax and John and Ursula and Spencer and Hiroko and all the rest, like brothers and sisters really, but so many of them that Nadia was overwhelmed, she shrivelled like a touched anenome, and had trouble taSlkhiengw. anted to grasp
something she could feel escaping her, she looked around for Ann and Simon, but they were trapped by another group and seemed stunned, Ann stoical, a mask of herself.
Phyllis told their story for the"mIt. was nice, really spectacular, the sun shone all the time, and the ice is
really there, we've got access to a lot of water, it's like the Arctic when you're up on that polar cap. . . ."
"Did you find any phosporus?" Hiroko askWedo.nderful to see Hiroko's face, worried about the shortage of phosphorus for her plantAs.nn told her that she had found drifts of sulphates in the light material around the craters in Acidalia, so they went off together to look at the Nsaamdipalefso.llowed
the others down the concrete-walled underground passageway to the permanent habitat, thinking about a real shower and fresh vegetables, half-listening to Maya give her the latestShnewws.as home.
# # #
Back to work; and as before, it was unrelenting and many-faceted, an endless list of things to do, and never enough time, because even though some tasks took much less human time than Nadia had
expected, being robot-adequate, everything else took much mAorned.
none of it gave her the same joy
as building the barrel vault chambers had, even if it was interesting in the technical sense.
If they wanted the central square under the dome to be any use, they hfaoduntdoatiloany
that from
bottom to top was composed of gravel, concrete, gravel, fiberglass, regolith, and finally treaTtehde soil.
dome itself would be made of double panes of thick treated glass, to hold the pressure and to cut down on UV rays, and a certain percentage of cosmic radiaWtiohne.n all of it was done, they would have a
central garden atrium of ten thousand square meters, really quite an elegant and satisfying plan; but as Nadia worked on the various aspects of the structure she found her mind wandering, her stomach tense. Maya and Frank were no longer speaking to one another in their official capacities, which indicated that their private relationship was going poorly indeed; and Frank did not seem to want to talk to John either, which was a shameT.he broken affair between Sasha and Yeli had turned into a kind of civil war
between their friends; and Hiroko's band, Iwao and Paul and Ellen and Rya and Gene and Evgenia and the rest, perhaps in reaction to all this, spent every day out in the atrium or in the greenhouses, living together out there, more withdrawn than evVelra. d and Ursula and rest of the medical team were
absorbed in research almost to the exclusion of clinical work with the colonists, which made Frank

furious; and the genetic engineers spent all their time out in the converted trailer park, in the labs.
And yet Michel was behaving as if nothing were abnormal, as if he were not the psychological officer for
the colony; he spent a lot of time watching FrenchWThVen. only looked blankly at her.
Nadia asked him about Frank and John, he
They had been on Mars for 420 days; the first seconds of their universe wTehreypnaost.longer gathered to plot the next days' work, or discuss what they were "dTooiongb. usy," people said to Nadia
when she asked". Well, it's too involved to describe, you know, it'd put you toItsldeoeeps. so on.
me."And
And then at odd moments she would see in her mind's eye the black dunes, the white ice, the silhouetted figures against a sunset skSyh. e would shiver and come to with a sAignhn. had already arranged another
trip and was gone, this time south to the northernmost arms of great Valles Marineris, to see more unimaginable marvels.But Nadia was needed at base camp, whether she wanted to be out with Ann in
the canyons or noMt. aya complained about how much Ann was aw"Iaty's.
clear she and Simon have
started something and are just out there having a honeymoon while we slave away iTnhhaterwe."as
Maya's way of looking at things, that would be what it would take to make Maya as happy as Ann sounded in her callsB. ut Ann was in the canyons, and that was all that was needed to make her sound that way.If she and Simon had started something it would only be a natural extension of that, and Nadia hoped it was true, she knew that Simon loved her, and she had felt the presence of an immense solitude in Ann, something that needed a human contIafcto.nly she could join them again!
But she had to worSko.
she worked, she bossed people around the construction sights, she stalked the
building sites and snapped at her friends' sloppy wHoerkr . injured hand had regained some strength
during the trip, so she was able to drive tractors and bulldozers again; she spent long days doing that, but it just wasn't the same anymore.
# # #
At Ls = 208° Arkady came down to Mars for the firsNt atdimiae.went out to the new spaceport and
stood on the edge of the broad expanse of dusty cement to watch the arrival, hopping from foot to foot. The burnt sienna cement was already marked byyethlleow and black stains of earlier landinAgsrk. ady's
pod appeared in the pink sky, a white dot and then a yellow flame like a an inverted gas burnoff stack. Eventually it resolved into a geodesic hemisphere with rockets and legs below, drifting down on a column of fire, and landing with unearthly delicacy right on the centerpoinAtrkdaodt.y had been working on the
descent program, apparently with good results.
He climbed out of the lander's hatch about twenty minutes later, and stood upright on the top step, looking around.He descended the staircase confidently, and once on the grboouunndced experimentally
on the tips of his toes, took a few steps, then spun around, armNsadwiiadeh.ad a sudden sharp
memory of how it had felt, that hollow sensaTtihoenn.
he fell overS.he hurried over to him, and he saw
her and stood and made straight for her and tripped again across the rough PortlandSche heenltp.ed
pull him back to his feel, and they met in a hug and staggered, him in a big pressurized suit, her in a walker. His hairy face looked shockingly real through their faceplates; the video had made her forget the third dimension and all the rest that made reality so vivid, sHoerebaaln. ged his faceplate lightly against
hers, grinning his wild griSnh. e could feel the stretch of a similar smile on her face.
He pointed at his wrist console and switched to their private band, 4224, and she did the same. "Welcome to Mars."

Alex and Janet and Roger had come down with Arkady, and when they were all out of the lander they climbed into the open carriage of one of the Model Ts, and Nadia drove them back to base, over the wide paved road at first, and then shortcutting through the Alchemists' QSuharetetro. ld them about each
building they passed, aware that they already recognized themSuadldl.enly she was nervous,
remembering what it had looked like to her after the trip to thTehepyoles.topped at the garage lock and she led them insideT.here it was another family reunion.
Later that day Nadia led Arkady around the square of vaulted chambers, through door after door, room after furnished room, all twenty-four of them; and then out into the Tathreiumsk.y was a ruby color
through the glass panels, and the magnesium struts gleamed like tarnished silver. "Well?" Nadia said at last, unable to stop he"rWselhf:at do you think?"
Arkady laughed and gave her a hHueg.was still in his spacesuit, his head looking small in the open neck hole; he felt padded and bulky, and she wanted him out of it.
"Well, some of it is good and some of it iBs ubtawd.hy is it so uglWy?hy is it so sad?" Nadia shrugged, irritated".We've been busy."
"So were we on Phobos, but you should sWeee'ivt!e walled all the galleries in panels of nickel stripped with platinum, and scored the panel surfaces with iterated patterns that the robots run at night, Escher reproductions, mirrors offset for infinite regress, scenes from Earth, you should Yseoeu ict!an put a
candle in some of the chambers and it looks like the stars in the sky, or a rooEmveroyn rfoiorem.
is a
work of artw,
ait till you see it!"
"I look forward to iNt."adia shook her head, smiling at him.
That evening they had a big communal dinner in the four connected chambers that formed the largest room in the complexT.hey ate chicken and soyburgers and large salads, and everyone talked at once, so that it was reminiscent of the best months on Ares, or even of AnAtarkctaidcay. stood to tell them
about the work on Phobo"sI. am glad to be in Underhill at laTsht.e"y were nearly done doming
Stickney, he told them, and under it long galleries had been drilled into the fractured and brecciated rock,
following ice veins right through the moo"nIf.
it weren't for the lack of gravity, it would be a great place,"
Arkady concluded."But that's one we can't solvWe.e spent most of our free time on Nadia's gravity train, but it's cramped, and meanwhile all the work is in Stickney or bSeolo weit.spent too much time weightless or exercising, and even so we lost strength; even martian gee makes me tired now, I'm dizzy right now."
"You're always dizzy!"
"So we must rotate crews there, or run it by Wroeboatr.e thinking of all coming down for gWooed'v. e
done our part up there, a functioning space station is now available for those whoNofowllowwe. our reward down here!H" e raised his glass.
want
Frank and Maya frowneNd.o one would want to go up to Phobos, and yet Houston and Baikonur wanted it manned at all timMes.aya had that look on her face familiar from the Ares, the one that said it was all Arkady's fault; when Arkady saw it he burst out laughing.
The next day Nadia and several others took him on a more detailed tour of Underhill and the

surrounding facilities, and he spent the whole time nodding his head with that pop-eyed look of his that made you want to nod back while he said, "Yes, but, yes, but," and went into one detailed critique after another, until even Nadia began to get annoyed with Ahlitmho. ugh it was hard to deny that the Underhill
area was battered, thrashed to the horizon in every direction, so that it seemed as if it continued outward over the whole planet.
"It's easy to color bricks," Arkady s"aAidd.d manganese oxide from the magnesium smelting and you have pure white bricksA. dd carbon left over from the Bosch process for bYlaocuk. can get any shade of red you want by altering the amount of ferric oxides, including some really stunningSusclpahrluerts.
for yellows.And there must be something for greens and blues, I don't know what but Spencer might, maybe some polymer based on the sulphur, I don't kBnouwt .a bright green would look marvelous in
such a red placeI.t will have a blackish shade to it from the sky, but it will still be green and the eye is pulled to it.
"And then with these colored bricks, you build walls that are all mIto'ssabicesa.utiful to do
Eit.veryone
can have their own wall or building, whatever they wAalnl t.the factories in the Alchemists' Quarter look like outhouses or discarded sardine tinBsr.ick around them would help insulate them, so there is a good scientific reason for it, but truthfully it's just as important that they look good, that it looks like home here. I've already lived too long in a country that thought only of Wutielitmy.ust show that we value more
than that here, yes?"
"No matter what we do to the buildings," Maya pointed out sharply, "the ground around them will still be all ripped up."
"But not necessarilyL!ook, when construction is over, it would be very possible to grade the ground right back to its original configuration, and then cast loose rock over the surface in a way that would imitate the aboriginal plainD. ust storms would deposit the required fines soon enough, and then if people walked on pathways, and vehicles ran on roads or tracks, soon it would have the look of the original ground, occupied here and there by colorful mosaic buildings, and glass domes stuffed with greenery, and yellow brick roads or whatnoOt.f course we must do Iitt!is a matter of spirAit!nd that's not to say it
could have been done earlier, the infrastructure had to be installed, that's always messy, but now we are ready for the art of architecture, the spirit of it."
He waved his hands around, stopped suddenly, popped his eyes at the dubious expressions framed in the faceplates around him".Well, it's an idea, yes?"
Yes, Nadia thought, looking around with interest, trying to visuaPlizeerhaitp. s that kind of process
would bring back her pleasure in the woPrekr?haps it would look different to Ann thSehne?
sure.
wasn't
"More ideas from Arkady," as Maya put it in the pool that night, looki"nJgustsowurh.at we need."
"But they're good ideas," Nadia saSihde.
got out, showered, put on a jumper.
Later that night she met Arkady again, and took him to see the northwest corner chamber of Underhill, which she had left bare-walled so she could show him the structural detail.
"It's very elegant," he said, rubbing a hand over the b"Rriecaklsl.y, Nadia, all of Underhill is magnificent. I can see your hand everywhere on it."
Pleased, she went to a screen and called up the plans she had been working on for a larger habitat.

Three rows of vaulted chambers stacked underground, in one wall of a very deep trench; mirrors on the opposite wall of the trench, to direct sunlight down into the roomAsr.ka.d.y . nodded and grinned and
pointed at the screen, asking questions and making suggesti"oAnns: arcade between the rooms and the
wall of the trench, open space; and each story laid back a bit from the one below it, so each has balcony overlooking the arcade. . . ."
"Yes, that should be possible. .A.n.d" they tapped at the computer screen, altering the architectural sketch as they spoke.
Later they walked in the domed atriTumhe.y stood under tall clusters of black bamboo leaves, the plants still in pots while the ground was prepaItredw.as quiet and dark.
"We could perhaps lower this area one story," Arkady said "sCofuttlyw. indows and doors into your vaults, and lighten them up."
Nadia nodded". We thought of that, and we're going to do it, but it's slow getting so much dirt out through locks."She looked at him".But what about us, ArkadyS?o far you've only talked about the infrastructure. I should have thought that beautifying buildings would be pretty low down on your list of things to do."
Arkady grinned". Well, maybe all the things higher on the list are already done." "What?Did I hear Arkady Nikelyovich say that?"
"Well, you know-I don't complain just to complain, Ms. Nine FiAnngderst.he way things have been going down here, it's very close to what I was calling for during the voyCalgoeseouent.ough that it would be stupid to complain."
"I must admit you surprise me."
"Do I? But think about how you all have been working together here, this last year." "Half a year."
He laughed". Half a yearA. nd for all that time we have had no leaders, rTehaollsye.
nightly meetings
when everyone has their say, and the group decides what needs doing most; that's how it sAhnoduld be. no one is wasting time buying or selling, because there is no mEvaerkryetth. ing here belongs to all
equally. And yet none of us can exploit anything that we own, for there's no one outside us to sell it to. It's been a very communal society, a democratic groAulpl. for one and one for all."
Nadia sighed". Things have changed, ArkadyI.t's not like that anymorAe.nd it's changing more all the time. So it won't last."
"Why do you say that?" he cr"iIetd.will last if we decide that it will." She glanced at him skeptical"lyY.ou know it isn't so simple."
"Well, noN. ot simple.But within our power!"
"Maybe."She sighed, thinking of Maya and Frank, of Phyllis and Sax and"TAhenrne.'s an awful lot of fighting going on."

"That's all right, as long as we agree on certain basic things."
She shook her head, rubbed her scar with the fingers of her otheHrerhaanbds.ent finger was itching,
and suddenly she felt depresseOd.verhead the long bamboo leaves were defined by occluded stars; they looked like sprays of a giant baccilTuhs.ey walked along the path between crop trAayrsk.ady picked
up her maimed hand and peered at the scar, until it made her uncomfortable and she tried to pull it back. He drew it up, gave the newly exposed knuckle at the base of the ring fing"eYr oau'vkeissg.ot strong
hands, Ms. Nine Fingers."
"I did before this," she said, making a fist and holding it up.
"Someday Vlad will grow you a new finger," he said, and took the fist and opened it, then held the hand as they continued to wal"kT. his reminds me of the arboretum in Sebastopol," he said.
"Mmm," Nadia said, not really listening, intent on the warm heft of his hand in hers, in the tight intermingling of their fingersH. e had strong hands toSo.he was fifty-one years old, a round little Russian woman with gray hair, a construction worker with missing finSgoersn.ice to feel the warmth of another body; it had been too long, ahnedr hand soaked up the feeling like a sponge, until the poor thing tingled, full and warmI.t must feel odd to him, she thought, then gave up"Io'mn igt.lad you're here," she said.
# # #
Having Arkady at Underhill made it like the hour before a thundeHrsetormma.de people think about
what they were doing; habits that they had fallen into without thought came under scrutiny, and under this new pressure some became defensive, others aggressivAel.l the standing arguments got a bit more
intense. Naturally this included the terraforming debate.
Now this debate was in no sense a single event but was rather an ongoing process, a topic that kept coming up, a matter of casual exchanges between individuals, out working, eating meals, falling asleep. Any number of things could bring it thuep:sight of the white frost plume over Chernothbeyl;arrival of a
robot-driven rover, laden with water ice from the polar station; clouds in the daSweneinskgy.these or
many other phenomena someone would say "That'll add some BTUs to the system," or "Isn't that a good greenhouse gas," and perhaps a discussion of the technical aspects of the problem would follow. Sometimes the subject would come back up in the evenings back in Underhill, leading from the technical to the philosophical; and sometimes this led to long and heated arguments.
The debate was not, of course, confined to MPoasrist.ion papers were being churned out by policy centers in Houston, Baikonur, Moscow, Washington, and the UN Office for Martian Affairs in New York, as well as in government bureaus, newspaper editorial offices, corporate board rooms, university campuses, and bars and homes all over the wIonrldth. e arguments on Earth, many people began to use
the colonists' opinions as a kind of shorthand for the various positions, so that watching the terran news the colonists themselves would see people saying that they backed the Clayborne position, or were in favor of the Russell programT.his reminder of their enormous fame on Earth, their existence as
characters in an ongoing TV drama, was always peculiar and unsettling; after the flurry of TV specials and interviews following touchdown, they had tended to forget the ongoing video transmissions,
absorbed in the daily reality of their liBveust.the video cameras were still shooting tape to send back home; and there were a lot of people on Earth who were fans of the show.
So nearly everyone had an opiniPoonl.ls showed that most supported the Russell Program, an informal name for Sax's plans to terraform the planet by all means possible, as fast as theByutcothueld.minority

who backed Ann's hands-off attitude tended to be more vehement in their belief, insisting that it had immediate applications to the Antarctic policy, and indeed to all terran environmental Mpoelaicnyw.hile different poll questions made it clear that many people were fascinated by Hiroko and the farming
project, while others called themselves Bogdanovists; Arkady had been sending back lots of video from
Phobos, and Phobos was good video, a real spectacle of architecture and enginNeeerwingt.erran hotels and commercial complexes were already imitating some of its features, there was an architectural movement called Bogdanovism, as well as other movements interested in him that were more concentrated on social and economic reforms in the world order.
But terraforming was near the center of all these debates, and the colonists' disagreements about it were played out on the largest possible public staSgoem. e of them reacted by avoiding the cameras and
requests for interviews"; It's just what I came to get away from," Hiroko's assistant Iwao said, and quite a few agreed with himM. ost of the rest didn't care one way or the other; a few seemed actually to like it. Phyllis's weekly program, for instance, was carried by both Christian cable stations and business analysis programs all over the worldB. ut no matter how they dealt with it, looking at the polls and listening to the talk made it obvious that most people on Earth and on Mars assumed that terraforming would take place. It was not a question of whether but of when, and how Ammucohn.g the colonists themselves this was
nearly the universal viewV. ery few sided with AnSn:imon of course; perhaps Ursula and Sasha;
perhaps Hiroko; in his way John, and now in her way NTahdeirae.
were more of these "reds" back on
Earth, but they necessarily held the position as a theory, an aesthetic judgeTmhenst.trongest point to
their arguments, and thus the one that Ann emphasized most often in her communiques back to Earth,
was the possibility of indigenous li"fIef.
there is Martian life here," Ann would say, "the radical alteration
of the climate might kill it
Woffe.
cannot intrude on the situation while the status of life on Mars is
unknown; it's unscientific, and worse, it's immoral."
Many agreed with that, including a lot of the terran scientific community, which influenced the UNOMA
committee charged with overseeing the colonByu. t every time Sax heard the argument he blinked rapidly. "There's no sign of life on the surface, past or present," he would say"Imf iiltdldyo. es exist it has to be underground, near volcanic vents I suppBosuet. even if there is life down there, we could search
for ten thousand years and never find it, nor eliminate the possibility it isn't down there somewhere else, somewhere we haven't lookedS.o waiting until we know for sure that there is no life-" which was a fairly common position among moderates- "effectively means waiting foreFvoer a remote possibility which terraforming wouldn't immediately endanger anyway."
"Of course it would," Ann would ret"oMrta. ybe not immediately, but eventually the permafrost would
melt, there would be movement through the hydrosphere, and contamination of all of it by warmer water and terran lifeforms, bacteria, viruses, algaIte.might take a while, but it would surely hapApnedn. we
can't risk that."
Sax would shrug".First, it's postulated life, very low probabilSiteyc. ond, it wouldn't be endangered for centuries. We could presumably locate it and protect it in that time."
"But we may no be able to find it."
"So we stop for low-probability life we can never actually find?"
Ann shrugged". We have to, unless you want to argue that it's okay to destroy life on other planets, as long as we can't find Aitn. d don't forget; indigenous life on Mars would be the biggest story of all time, it
would have implications for the galactic frequency of life that are impossible to exaLggoeorkaitneg. life is one of the main reasons we're here!"
for

"Well," Sax would sa"yi,n the meantime, life that we are quite sure exists is being exposed to an extraordinarily high amount of radiatioInf. we don't do something to lessen it, we may not be able to stay here. We need a thicker atmosphere to cut down on radiation."
This was not a reply to Ann's point but the substitution of another one, and it was an argument that was very influential.Millions on Earth wanted to come to Mars, to the "new frontier," where life was an adventure again; waiting lists for emigration both real and fake were massively oversubsBcruitbendo.
one wanted to live in a bath of mutagenic radiation; and the practical desire to make the planet safe for humans was stronger in most people than the desire to preserve the lifeless landscape already there, or to protect a postulated indigenous life that many scientists assured them did not exist.
So it did seem, even among those urging caution, that terraforming was going to Ahappen.
subcommittee of UNOMA had been convened to study the issue, and on Earth it was now in the nature of a given, an unavoidable part of progress, a natural part of the order oAf tmhianngisf.est destiny.
On Mars, however, the issue was both more open and more pressing, not so much a matter of philosophy as of daily life, of frigid poisonous air and the radiation being taken; and among those in favor of terraforming, a significant group was clustering around Sax-a group that not only wanted to do it, but
to do it as fast as possibWleh. at this meant in practice no one was sure; estimates of the time it would take to get to a "human-viable surface" ranged from a century to ten thousand years, with extreme opinions on either end, from thirty years (Phyllis) to a hundred thousand years P(hIwylalios).would say,
"God gave us this planet to make in our image, to create a newSiEmdoenn."would say, "If the permafrost melts we'd be living on a collapsing landscape, and a lot of us would beArkgiullmede.n"ts
wandered over a wide range of issues: salt levels, peroxide levels, radiation levels, the look of the land, possibly lethal mutations of genetically engineered microorganisms, and so on.
"We can try to model it," Sax said, "but the truth is we'll never be able to model itIta'sdetqouoately.
big, and there's too many factors, many of them unknBowutn.what we will learn from it will be useful in
controlling Earth's climate, in avoiding global warming or a future icIet'sagaen.
experiment, a big one,
and it will always be an ongoing experiment, with nothing guaranteed or known fBourt stuhraet.'s what science is."
People would nod at this.
Arkady as always was thinking of the political point of"Wvieewc.an never be self-sufficient unless we
do terraforming," he pointed ou"tW. material basis for independence."
e need to terraform in order to make it ours, so that we will have the
People would roll their eyes at tBhuist. it meant that Sax and Arkady were allies of a sort, and that was a powerful combinationA. nd so the arguments would go around, again and again and again, endlessly.
And now Underhill was nearly complete, a functioning and in most ways a self-sufficienNt ovwillaigte. was possible to act further; now they had to decide what to dAonndexmt.ost of them wanted to
terraform. Any number of projects had been proposed to begin the process, with advocates for each, usually those who would be responsible for doinTghis. was an important part of terraforming's
attraction; every discipline could contribute to the enterprise in one way or another, so it had
broad-based support.The alchemists talked about physical and mechanical means to add heat to the system; the climatologists debated influencing the weather; the biosphere team talked about ecological systems theories to be testeTd.he bioengineers were already working on new microorganisms; they were shifting, clipping and recombining genes from algae, methanogens, cyanobacteria, and lichens, trying to
come up with organisms that would survive on the present martian surface, or uOnndeerdiaty.
they

invited Arkady to take a look at what they were doing, and Nadia went along with him.
They had some of their prototype GEMs in Mars jars, the largest of which was one of the old habitats in the trailer parkT. hey had opened it up, shoveled regolith onto the floor, and sealed iTt haegyain.
worked inside it by teleoperation, and viewed the results from the next trailer over, where instrument gauges took readings, and video screens showed what the various dishes were prodAurckiandgy.
looked at every screen closely, but there wasn't that much ttohesireeo: ld quarters, covered with plastic cubicles filled with red dirt; robot arms extending from their bases against theThweraellsw. ere visible growths on part of the soil, a bluish furze.
"That's our champion so far," Vlad s"aBidu.t still only slightly areophylicT."hey were selecting for a number of extreme characteristics, including resistance to cold and dehydration and UV radiation, tolerance for salts, little need for oxygen, a habitat of rock oNr ososiiln. gle terran organism had all these
traits, and those that had them individually were usually very slow growers; but the engineers had started what Vlad called a mix and match program, and recently they had come up with a variant of the cyanophyte that was sometimes called bluegreen alg"aIet . is not precisely thriving, but it does not die so
fast, let us put it that waTyh."ey had named it cyanophyte primares, its common name becoming
Underhill algae. They wanted to make a field trial with it, and had prepared a proposal to send down to
UNOMA.
Arkady left the trailer park excited by the visit, Nadia could see; and that night he said to the dinner group, "We should make the decision on our own, and if we decide in favor, act."
Maya and Frank were outraged by this, and clearly most of the rest were uncomfortableMays awell. insisted on a change of subject, and awkwardly the dinner conversation sAhinftdedt.he next morning
Maya and Frank came to Nadia, to talk about ArkTahdey.two leaders had already tried to reason with him, late the night befor"eH. e laughs in our face!" Maya exclaim"eIdt'.s useless to try to reason with
him!"
"What he proposes could be very dangerous," Frank "sIafidw. e explicitly disregard a directive from the
UN, they could conceivably come here and round us up and ship us home, and replace us with people who will pay attention to the laIwm. ean, biological contamination of this environment is simply illegal at
this point, and we don't have the right to ignoreIt'tshaitn.ternational treatyI.t's how humanity in general wants to treat this planet at this time."
"Can't you talk to him?" Maya asked.
"I can talk to him," Nadia sa"iBdu. t I can't say that it will do any good." "Please, NadiaJ. ust try.We've got enough problems as it is."
"I'll try, sure."
So that afternoon she talked to ArkaTdhye.y were out on Chernobyl Road, walking back toward
Underhill. She brought it up, and suggested that patience was in before the UN comes around to your view anyway."
"oIrtdewr.ill only be a matter of time
He stopped and lifted her maimed ha"nHd.ow long do you think we have?" he
Hsaeid.pointed at the
setting sun."How long do you suggest we waFiot?r our grandchildren?Our great-grandchildren?Our great-great-grandchildren, blind as cave fish?"

"Come on," Nadia said, pulling her hand "fCreaev. e fish."
Arkady laughed". Still, it's a serious questioWn. e don't have forever, and it would be nice to see things start to change."
"Even so, why not wait a year?" "A terran year or a martian year?"
"A martian yearG. et readings on all the seasons, give the UN time to come around." "We don't need the readings, they've been taken now for years."
"Have you talked to Ann about that?" "No.Well, sort ofB. ut she doesn't agree."
"A lot of people don't agrIeem. ean maybe they will eventually, but you have to convinceYthoeum.
can't just run roughshod over opposing opinions, otherwise you're just as bad as the people back home that you're always criticizing."
Arkady sighed". Yeah yeah." "Well, aren't you?"
"You damned liberals."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means you're too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything."
But they were now within sight of the low mound of Underhill, looking like a fresh squarish crater, its
ejecta scattered around iNt. adia pointed at i"t.I did thatY.
ou damned radicals-"she jabbed him in the
ribs with her elbow, hard- "you hate liberalism because it works." He snorted.
"It does!It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or
people getting hurtW.
ithout your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they Itbroinngly.
works."
"Ah, Nadia."He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again towar"dEabrathse.is a perfectly liberal worldB. ut half of it is starving, and always has been, and always wVeilrlybleib. erally."
# # #
Still, Nadia seemed to have affected him; he quit calling for a unilateral decision to release the new
GEMs onto the surface, and he confined the agitprop to his beautification program, spending much of his
time in the Quarter, trying to make colored bricks and Nglaadsisa.
joined him for a swim before
breakfast on most days, and they along with John and Maya took over a lane in the shallow pool that filled all of one of the vaulted chambers, and swam a brisk workout of one or two thousaJnodhnmeters.
led the sprint sets, Maya led the distance sets, Nadia followed in everything, hampered by her bad hand,

and they churned through the extra-splashy water like a line of dolphins, staring through their goggles
down at the sky-blue concrete of the pool bot"toTmhe.
butterfly was made for this gee," John would
say, grinning at the way they could practically fly out of theBwreaatkerf.asts afterwards were pleasant if brief, and the rest of the days were the usual round of work; Nadia seldom saw Arkady again till evenings at dinner, or afterward.
Then Sax and Spencer and Rya finished setting up the robot factory for making Sax's windmill heaters, and they applied to UNOMA for permission to distribute a thousand of them around the equatorial regions, to test their warming effeActl.l of them together were only expected to add about twice the heat
to the atmosphere that Chernobyl did, and there were even questions as to whether they would be able to distinguish the added heat from background seasonal fluctuations; but as Sax said, they wouldn't know until they triedA. nd there was no doubt that the heaters would add some heat to the surface, detectable or not.
And so the terraforming argument flared agAainnd.
suddenly Ann flew into violent action, taping long
messages that she sent to the members of UNOMA's executive committee, and to the national offices for Martian affairs for all the countries that were currently on the committee; and finally to the UN General Assembly. These appearances were given enormous amounts of attention, from the most serious
policy-making levels all the way down to the tabloid press and TV, media that regarded it as the newest episode of the red soap opeAran. n had taped and sent her messages in private, so the colonists learned
of them by seeing excerpts on terran TV, and watching the reaction to them in the days that followed: debates in government, a rally in Washington that drew twenty thousand; endless amounts of editorial space, and commentary in the scientific nIetts.was a bit shocking to see the strength of these responses, and some of them feAltnn had gone behind their backPsh.yllis for one was outraged.
"Besides, it doesn't make sense," Sax said, blinking rap"iCdhlye.rnobyl is already releasing almost as much heat into the atmosphere as these windmills, and she never complained about that."
"Yes she did," Nadia sa"idS.he just lost the vote."
Hearings were held at UNOMA, and while they were going on a group of the materials scientists
confronted Ann after dinnerA.
lot of the rest of them were there to witness this confrontation; Underhill's
main dining hall filled four chambers, whose dividing walls had been removed and replaced by
load-bearing pillars; it was a big room, filled with chairs and potted plants and the descendants of the Ares' birds, and most recently lit by windows installed high across the northern wall, through which they saw the ground level crops of the atriAumb. ig space; and at least half the colonists were in it eating
when the meeting took place.
"Why didn't you discuss this with us?" Spencer asked her.
Ann's glare forced Spencer to look aw"aWy.hy should I discuss it with you?" she said, turning her gaze on Sax."It's clear what you all think about this, we've gone over it many times before, and nothing I've said makes any difference to yoHu.ere you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as
well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billioAn nydeayros.u're going to wreck it all.And without ever honestly admitting what you're doing, eiBtheecra. use we could live here and
study the planet without changing it-we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you knoTwheriet.'s simply not a high enough level of it
to justify this mass alteration of the environmYenotu.
want to do that because you think youYcoaun.

want to try it out and see-as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to buildAcabsitgles in. Mars jar!You find your justifications where you can, but it's bad faith, and it's not science."
Her face had gone bright red during this tirade; Nadia had never seen her anywhere near as angry as this. The usual matter-of-fact facade that she placed over her bitter anger had shattered, and she was almost speechless with fury, she was shudderiTngh.e whole room had gone deadly qu"ieItt'.s not
science, I say!It's just playing aroundA. nd for that game you're going to wreck the historical record, destroy the polar caps, and the outflow channels, and the canyon bottoms-destroy a beautiful pure landscape, and for nothing at all."
The room was as still as a tableau, they were like stone statues of theTmhseelvveenst.ilators hummed. People began to eye one another warSiliym. on took a step toward Ann, his hand outstretched; she
stopped him dead with a glance, he might as well have stepped outside in his underwear and frozen stiff. His face reddened, and he cracked his posture and sat back down.
Sax Russell rose to his feHeet. looked the same as ever, perhaps a bit more flushed than usual, but mild, small, blinking owlishly, his voice calm and dry, as if lecturing on some textbook point of thermodynamics, or enumerating the periodic table.
"The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed."Without the human presence it is just a concatenation of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the univerIst'es. we who understand it, and we who give it meaAnlilngo.ur
centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through thAell stthaorss.e nights of
watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedoAlclhanges. those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizAatniodnsa.ll the scientists
who studied the data, or got us hTerhea.t's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides."
He paused to look around at themNaaldl.ia gulped; it was strange in the extreme to hear these words come out of the mouth of Sax Russell, in the same dry tone that he would use to analyTzoeoa graph. strange!
"Now that we are here," he went on, "it isn't enough to just hide under ten meters of soil and study the rock. That's science, yes, and needed science tBoou.t science is more than thSatc.ience is part of a
larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to usS.cience is creationT. he lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life evenAnradreyr.et the whole meaning of
the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligenWt elifaer.e the consciousness of
the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywheIrte's we can. too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wAinpded out. so now we're on two, three if you count the mAonodn.we can change this one to make it safer to live
on. Changing it won't destroy
Rit.eading its past might get harder, but the beauty of it won't goIf away.
there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers, how does that diminish Mars's bIeaduotny'?t think it doeIs.think
it only enhances iIt.t adds life, the most beautiful system ofBaultl.nothing life can do will bring Tharsis down, or fill MarinerisM. ars will always remain Mars, different from Earth, colder and wBiludteri.t can
be Mars and ours at the same tiAmned.
it will beT.here is this about the human mind; if it can be done, it
will be doneW.
e can transform Mars and build it like you would build a cathedral, as a monument to
humanity and the universe botWh. e can do it, so we will dSoo-it". he held up a palm, as if satisfied that
the analysis had been supported by the data in the graph-as if he had examined the periodic table, and found that it still held true- "we might as well start."
He looked at Ann, and all eyes followedAhnenr'.s mouth was tight, her shoulders slumpSehde.
knew

she was beaten.
She shrugged, as if she were shrugging a hooded cape back over her head and body, a heavy carapace that weighed her down, and covered her entirely from tIhnemth.e flat dead tone that she usually
employed when she was upset, she said, "I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not lords of the univerWsee. 're one small part of Wit.e may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror imagIte mofeaunss. rather fitting
into it as it is, and worshippinwg itiht
our attention."She met Sax's mild gaze, and one final flare of her
anger jetted out:"You've never even seen Mars." And she left the room.
# # #
Janet had had her camera specs on, and videotaped this exchPahnyglleis.
sent a copy back to EarAth.
week later the UNAMO committee on environmental alterations approved the dissemination of the heater windmills.
# # #
The plan was to drop them from dirigibAlersk.ady immediately claimed the right to pilot one, as a sort of reward for his work on PhobMosa.ya and Frank were not unhappy at the thought of Arkady
disappearing from Underhill for another month or two, so they immediately assigned him one of the craft. He would drift east in the prevailing winds, descending to place windmills in channel beds and on the outer flanks of craters, both places where winds tended to be sNtraodniga. first heard of the expedition
when Arkady skipped through the chambers to her and told her about it. "Sounds nice," she said.
"Want to come along?" he asked.
"Why yes," she saiHd.er ghost finger was tingling.
Their dirigible was the biggest ever made, a planetary model built back in Germany by Friedrichshafen
Nach Einmal, and shipped up in 2029, so that it had just recently Iatrrwivaesd.called the Arrowhead,
and it measured 120 meters across the wings, a hundred meters front to back, and forty mIteters tall.
had an internal ultralite frame, and turboprops at each wingtip and under the gondola; these were driven by small plastic engines whose batteries were powered by solar cells arrayed on the upper surface of the bag. The pencil-shaped gondola extended most of the length of the underside, but it was smaller inside than Nadia had expected, because much of it was temporarily filled with their cargo of windmills; at takeoff their clear space consisted of nothing more than the cockpit, two narrow beds, a tiny kitchen, an even smaller toilet, and the crawlspace necessary to move among Itthewsea.s pretty tight, but happily
both sides of the gondola were walled with windows, and though somewhat blocked by windmills these still gave them a lot of light, and good visibility.

Takeoff was slowA. rkady released the lines extending from the three mooring masts with the flip of a cockpit toggle; the turboprops ran hard, but they were dealing with air that was only twelve millibars thick. The cockpit bounced up and down in slow motion, flexing with the internalanfrdamevee: ry up
bounce was a little higher off the grouFnodr. someone used to rocket launches it was comical.
"Let's take a three-sixty and see Underhill before we go," Arkady said when they were fifty meters high. He banked the ship and they made a slow wide turn, looking out Nadia's wTrinacdkosw, .pits, mounds
of regolith, all dark red against the dusty orange surface of the plain-it looked as if a dragon had reached down with a great taloned claw, and drawn blood time afterUtnimdeer.hill sat at the center of the
wounds, and by itself was a pretty siaghstq, uare dark red setting for a shiny glass-and-silver jewel, with green just visible under the domEex.tending away from it were the roads east to Chernobyl and north to the spacepads.And over there were the long bulbs of the greenhouses, and there wtraisletrhepark-
"The Alchemists' Quarter still looks like something out of the Urals," Arkad"yWseairde.ally have to do something about that."He brought the dirigible out of its turn and headed east, moving with the wind. "Should I run us over Chernobyl and catch the updraft?"
"Why don't we see what this thing can do unassisted," NadiSahesaifde.lt light, as if the hydrogen in the ballonets had filled her as weTllh.e view was stupendous, the hazy horizon perhaps a hundred kilometers away, the contours of the land all clearly visible: the subtle bumps and hollows of Lunae, the more prominent hills and canyons of the channeled terrain to the"Oeahs,t.this is going to be wonderful!"
"Yes."
It was remarkable, in fact, that they had not done anything like thisBbuetfofrley.ing on Mars was no easy thing, because of the thin atmospheTrhe.ey were in the best solutioan:dirigible as big and light as possible, filled with hydrogen, which in martian air was not only not flammable, but also even lighter
relative to its surroundings than it would have been on
HEayrdthro. gen and the latest in superlight
materials gave them the necessary lift to carry a cargo like their windmills, but with such a cargo aboard they were ludicrously sluggish, and everything happened in extreme slow motion.
And so they drifted alonAgl.l that day they crossed the rolling plain of Lunae Planum, pushed southeast by the windF. or an hour or two they could see Juventa Chasm on the southern horizon, a gash of a canyon that looked like a giant pit mFinaert.her east, the land turned yellowish; there was less surface rubble, and the underlying bedrock was more rumpTlehde.re were also many more craters, craters big
and small, crisp-rimmed or nearly burieTdh.is was Xanthe Terra, a high region that was topographically similar to the southern uplands, here sticking into the north between the low plains of Chryse and Isidis. They would be over Xanthe for some days, if the prevailing westerlies held true.
They were progressing at a leisurely ten kilometers per
Mhoousrt. of the time they flew at an altitude of
about a hundred meters, which put the horizons about fifty kilometers
Tawheay. had time to look
closely at anything they wanted to, although Xanthe was proving to be little more than a steady succession of craters.
Late that afternoon Nadia tilted the nose of dirigible down and circled into the wind, dropping until they were within ten meters of the ground and then releasing their aTnhcheosr.hip rose, jerked on its line, and
settled downwind of the anchor, tugging at it like a fatNkaditiea.
and Arkady twisted down the length
of the gondola, to what Arkady called the bombNbaadyi.a lifted a windmill onto the bay's winch hook.
The windmill was a little thing, a magnesium box with four vertical vanes on a rod projecting from its top. It weighed about five kiloTs.hey closed the bay door on it, sucked out the air, and opened the bottom doors. Arkady operated the winch, lookinthgrough a low window to see what he was doing. The

windmill dropped like a plumb, and bumped onto hardened sand, on the southern flank of a small unnamed crater.He released the winch hook and reeled it back into the bay, and closed the bomb doors.
They returned to the cockpit, and looked down again tothseeewiifndmill was workingT.here it stood,
a small box on the outside slope of a crater, somewhat tilted, the four broad vertical blades spinning merrily. It looked like an anemometer from a kid's meteorologyThkeit.heating element , an exposed
metal coil that would radiate like a stovetop, was on one side of thIne abagseo.od wind the element might get up to two hundred degrees centigrade, which wasn't bad, especially in that ambient temperature. Still. . . ".It's going to take a lot of those to make any difference," Nadia remarked.
"Sure, but every little bit helps, and in a way it's freNeotheoant.ly the wind powering the heaters, but the sun powering the factories making the windmIilltsh.ink they're a good idea."
They stopped once more that afternoon to set out another one, then anchored for the night in the lee of a crisp young craterT. hey microwaved a meal in the tiny kitchen, and then retired to their narrowIt bunks.
felt odd to rock on the wind, like a boat at its mooring: tug and float, tugBauntditflwoaats. relaxing when you got used to it, and soon Nadia was asleep.
very
The next morning they woke before dawn, cast off, and motored up into the Fsruonmligaht.hundred
meters heightthey could watch the shadowed landscape below turn to bronze as the terminator rolled by and clear daylight followed, illuminating a fantastic jumble of bright rocks and long shTahdeowmso.rning
wind pushed right to left across their bow, so they were pushed northeast toward Chryse, humming along with the props on full powTerh.en the land fell away below them, and they were over the first of the outflow channels they would pass, a sinuous unnamed valley west of Shalbatana TVhaisllilsi.ttle arroyo's
S shape was unmistakably water-cuLt.ater that day they lofted out over the deeper and much wider canyon of Shalbatana, and the signs were even more obvtieoaur-ss:haped islands, curving channels,
alluvial plains, scablands; there were signs everywhere of a massive flood, a flood that had created a canyon so huge that the Arrowhead suddenly looked like a butterfly.
The outflow canyons and the high land between them reminded Nadia of the landscape of American cowboy movies, with washes and mesas and isolated ship rocks, as in Monument Valley-except here it lasted for four days, as they passed in succession over the unnamed channel, Shalbatana, Simud, Tiu, and then Ares.And all of them had been caused by giant floods, which had burst onto the surface and flowed
for months, at rates ten thousand times that of the MissisNsiapdpiia.
and Arkady talked about that as
they looked down into the canyons under them, but it was very hard to imagine floodsNsoowhtuhgee.
big empty canyons funnelled nothing but wiTndh.ey did that quite well, however, so Arkady and Nadia descended into them a number of times per day, to drop more windmills.
Then east of Ares Vallis they floated back over the densely cratered terrain ofAXgainnthteh.e land
was everywhere marred by craterbsi:g craters, little craters, old craters, new craters, craters with rims
marred by newer craters, craters with floors punctured by three or five smaller craters; craters as fresh as if they had struck yesterday; craters that just barely showed, at dawn and dusk, as buried arcs in the old plateau. They passed over Schiaparelli, a giant old crater a hundred kilometers across; when they floated over its central uplift knob, its crater walls formed their horizon, a perfect ring of hills around the edge of the world.
After that winds blew from the south for several Tdhaeyys. caught a glimpse of Cassini, another great
old crater, and passed over hundreds of smaller oTnheesy.
dropped several windmills per day, but the
flight was giving them a stronger sense of the size of the planet, and the project began to seem like a joke as if they flew over Antarctica and tried to melt the ice by setting down a number of camping stoves.

"You'd have to drop millions to make any difference," Nadia said as they climbed up from another drop.
"True," Arkady said".But Sax would like to drmopillions. He's got an automated assembly line that will just keep churning them out, it's only distribution that is a proAblnedm.besides, it's just one part of the campaign he has in mindH."e gestured back toward the last arc of Cassini, inscribing the whole northwest. "Sax would like to bang out a few more holes like thCatapotnuer.e some icy moonlets from Saturn, or from the asteroid belt if he can find any, and push them back and smash them into Mars. Make hot craters, melt the permafrost-they'd be like oases."
"Dry oases, wouldn't they bYe?ou'd lose most of the ice on entry, and have the rest disappear on contact."
"Sure, but we can use more water vapor in the air."
"But it wouldn't just vaporize, it would break into its constituent atoms." "Some of itB. ut hydrogen and oxygen, we could use more of both."
"So you're bringing hydrogen and oxygen from SatCuronm? e on, there's lots of both here alreaYdoyu!
could just break down some of the ice."
"Well, it's just one of his ideas."
"I can't wait to hear what Ann says to Sthet."sighed, thought about
"itT. he thing to do, I suppose,
would be to graze an ice asteroid through the atmosphere, as if trying to aerobTrhaakte wito.uld burn it up without breaking the molecules apaYrto. u'd get water vapor in the atmosphere, which would help,
but you wouldn't be bombing the surface with explosions as big as a hundred hydrogen bombs going off all at once."
Arkady nodded". Good idea!You should tell Sax." "You tell him."
East of Cassini the terrain grew rougher than eTvheirs. was some of the oldest surface on the planet, cratered to saturation in the earliest years of torrential bombardmAenhte.llish age, the Noachian, you could see that in the landscapAe. No Man's Land from a Titanic trench war, the sight of it induced a kind of numbness after a while, a cosmological shell shock.
They floated on, east, northeast, southeast, south, northeast, west, eastT, heeayst.finally came to the
end of Xanthe, and began to descend the long slope of Syrtis Major PTlhainsitiwa.as a lava plain, much less densely cratered than XanthTe.he land sloped down and down, until finally they drifted over a smooth-floored basin:Isidis Planitia, one of the lowest points on MItarws.as the essence of the northern hemisphere, and after the southern highlands it seemed especially smooth and flat anAdndlowit . too
was a very large regioTn.here really was a lot of land on Mars.
Then one morning when they lofted up to cruising altitude, a trio of peaks rose over the eastern horizon. They had come to Elysium, the only other Tharsislike "bulge continent" that the plaEnelytsihuamd. was a
much smaller bulge than Tharsis, but it was still big, a high continent, one thousand kilometers long and ten kilometers taller than the surrounding terraAins. with Tharsis, it was ringed by patches of fractured
land, crack systems caused by the upliTfth.ey flew over the westermost of these crack systems, Hephaestus Fossae, and found the area an unearthly sfigivhet: long deep parallel canyons, like claw

marks in the bedrockE. lysium loomed beyond, a saddleback in shape, Elysium Mons and Hecates Tholus rearing at each end of a long spine rafinvgee,thousand meters higher than the bulge they punctuated: an awesome sight. Everything about Elysium was so much bigger than anything Nadia and Arkady had seen so far that as the dirigible floated toward the range, the two were speechless for minutes at a timeT.hey sat in their seats, watching it all float slowly towardWthheemn. they did speak, it was just thinking aloud":Looks like the Karakorum," Arkady sa"idD.esert Himalayas.Except these are
so simple.Those volcanoes look like FuMji.aybe people will hike up them someday in pilgrimages."
Nadia said, "These are so big, it's hard to imagine what the Tharsis volcanoes will look like. Aren't the
Tharsis volcanoes twice as big as these?"
"At leastI.t does look like Fuji, don't you think?" "No, it's a lot less steWeph. y, did you ever see Fuji?" "No."
After a while":Well, we'd better try to go around the whole damn thing," Arkad"yI'msaidn.ot sure we have the loft to get over those mountains."
So they turned the props, and pushed south as hard as they could, and the winds naturally cooperated, as they were curving around the continent Stooo.the Arrowhead floated southeast into a rough
mountainous region called Cerberus; and all of the next day they could mark their progress by the sight of
Elysium, passing slowly to their leHfto. urs passed, the massif shifted in their side windows; the slowness of the shift made it plain just how big this worldMwarass.has as much land surface as the
Earth-everyone always said that, but it had been just a phrase. Their creep around Elysium was the proof of the senses.
# # #
The days passed: up in the frigid morning air, over the jumbled red land, down in the sunset, to bounce at an airy anchorageO. ne evening when the supply of windmills had dwindled they rearranged those that remained, and moved their beds together under the starboard windTohwesy. did it without discussion,
as if it had been the obvious thing to do when they had room; as if they had already agreed to do it long before. And as they moved around the cramped gondola rearranging things, they bumped into each
other just as they had all trip long, but now intentionally, and with a sensuous rubbing which accentuated what they had been up to all along, accidents become foreplay; and finally Arkady burst out laughing and caught her up into a wild bear hug, and Nadia shouldered him back onto their new double bed and they kissed like teenagers, and made love through the nAignhdt. after that they slept together, and made love frequently in the ruddy glow of dawn and in the starry black nights, with the ship lightly bobbing at its moorings. And they lay together talking, and the sensation of floating as they embraced was palpable,
more romantic than any train or sh"iWp.e became friends first," Arkady said once, "that's what makes this different, don't you think?H"e prodded her with a fing"eIr. love you."It was as if he were testing the words with his tongueI.t was clear to Nadia that he hadn't said them often; it was clear they meant a lot to him, a kind of commitmenItd. eas meant so much to hi"mA!nd I love you," she said.
And in the mornings Arkady would pad up and down the narrow gondola naked, his red hair bronzed like everything else by the horizontal morning light, and Nadia would watch from their bed feeling so serene and happy that she had to remind herself that the floating sensation was probably just martian gee. But it felt like joy.

# # #
One night as they were falling asleep Nadia said curiously, "Why me?" "Huhn?"He had been almost asleep.
"I said, why meI?mean, Arkady Nikelyovich, you could have loved any of the women here, and they would have loved you bacYk.ou could have had Maya if you wanted."
He snorted". I could have had MayOa!h my!I could have had the joy of Maya KatarJiunsat! like
Frank and John!"He snorted, and they both laughed out lo"uHdo.w could I have passed on such joy! Silly me!"He giggled until she punched him.
"All right, all righOt.ne of the others then, the beautiful ones, Janet or Ursula or Samantha." "Come on," he saiHd.e propped himself up on an elbow to look a"tYhoeur. really don't know what
beauty is, do you?"
"I certainly do," Nadia said mulishly.
Arkady ignored her and sa"idB,eauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function,
intelligence, and reasonabilityA. nd very often," he grinned and pushed at her belly, "expressed in curves." "Curves I've got," Nadia said, pushing his hand away.
He leaned forward and tried to bite her breast, but she dodged him.
"Beauty is what you are, Nadezhda FrancBinye. these criteria you are queen of Mars." "Princess of Mars," she corrected absently, thinking it over.
"Yes that's righNt. adezhda Francine Cherneshevsky, the nine-fingered Princess of Mars." "You're not a conventional man."
"No!"He hooted."I never claimed to bEe!xcept before certain selection committees of courAse. conventional man!Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!-the conventional men get MTahyaat. is their reward.A" nd he laughed like a wild man.
# # #
One morning they crossed the last broken hills of Cerberus, and floated out over the flat dusty plain of Amazonis Planitia.Arkady brought the dirigible down, to set a windmill in a pass between two final hillocks of old CerberusS.omething went wrong with the clasp on the winch hook, however, and it
snapped open when the windmill was only halfway to the grTohuendw. indmill thumped down flat on its
base. From the ship it looked okay, but when Nadia suited up and descended in the sling to check it out, she found that the hot plate had cracked away from the base.
And there, behind the plate, was a mass of sometAhindgu. ll green something with a touch of blue to it, dark inside the boxS.he reached in with a screwdriver and poked at it care"fSuhlliyt,." she said.

"What?" Arkady said above.
She ignored him and scraped some of the substance into a bag she used for screws and nuts. She got into the slin"gP.ull me back up," she ordered.
"What's wrong?" Arkady asked. "Just get me up there."
He closed the bomb bay doors after her, and met her as she was getting out o"fWthheat'sslinugp.?"
She took off her helm"eYt.ou know what's up, you bastardS!h"e took a swing at him and he leaped back, banging into a wall of windmi"lOls.w!" he cried; a vane had caught him in the back. W"Hheayt'!s
the problem!Nadia!"
She took the bag from her walker pocket and waved it befo"rTe hhisimis.
the problemH! ow could you
do it?How could you lie to mYe?ou bastard, do you have any idea what kind of trouble this is going to get us in?They'll come up here and send us all back to Earth!"
Round-eyed, Arkady rubbed his ja"wI. wouldn't lie to you, Nadia," he said earne"sItlyd.on't lie to my friends. Let me see that."
She stared at him and he stared back, his arm stretched out for the bag, the whites of his eyes visible all the way round the iriseHs.e shrugged, and she frowned.
"You really don't know?" she demanded. "Know what?"
She couldn't believe he would fake ignorance; it just wasn't hisWshtiyclhe. suddenly made things very strange. "At least some of our windmills are little algae farms."
"What?"
"The fucking windmills that we've been dropping everywhere," she"Tsahiedy.'re stuffed with Vlad's new
algae or lichen or whatever itLios.ok." She put the little bag on the tiny kitchen table, opened it and used
the screwdriver to spoon out a little bit out of an old pulp novel.
They stared at it.
Lofittilte.
knobby chunks of bluish licheLni.ke Martian life forms
"Well I'll be damned," Arkady saHide. leaned over until his eyes were a centimeter from the stuff on the table.
"You swear you didn't know?" Nadia demanded.
"I swearI.
wouldn't do that to you, NadYiao.u know that."
She heaved a big brea"thW. ell-our friends would do it to us, apparently."

He straightened up and nodde"dT.hat's right."He was distracted, thinking harHd.e went to one of the windmill bases and hefted it away from the oth"Wersh.ere was it?"
"Behind the heating pad."
They went to work on it with Nadia's tools, and got iBt eohpinedn. the plate was another colony of Underhill algae.Nadia poked around at the edges of the plate, and discovered a pair of small hinges where the top of the plate met the insides of the containe"rLwooakll,. it's made to open."
"But who opens it?" Arkady said. "Radio?"
"Well I'll be damnedA."rkady stood, walked up and down the narrow corri"dIomr. ean..."
"How many dirigible trips have been made so farT, wteenn?ty? And all of them dropping these things?" Arkady started to laugHh.e tilted his head back, and his huge crazed grin split his red beard in two, and
he laughed until he held his sid"eAs.h, ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
Nadia, who didn't think it was funny at all, nevertheless felt her face grinning at the sig"Ihtt's onfoht im. funny!" she protested". We're in big trouble!"
"Maybe," he said.
"Definitely!And it's all your faulSt!ome of those fool biologists in the trailer park took your anarchist rant seriously!"
"Well," he said, "that at least is a point in their favor, the bI amstaeradns-." he went back to the kitchen table to stare at the clump of blue stuff- "who exactly do you think we're talking about,Haonwyway? many of our friends are in on tAhins?d why in the world didn't they tell me?"
This really rankled, she could tIenll.fact the more he thought about it, the less amused he was, because the algae meant there was a subculture in their group that was acting outside UNOMA supervision but had not let Arkady in on it, even though he had been the first and most vocal advocate of such subversion. What did that meanW? ere there people who were on his side but didn't trustWheimre?
there dissidents with a competing program?
They had no way of telliEngv.entually they pulled anchor, and sailed on over AmazoTnhiesy.
passed a
medium-sized crater named Pettit, and Arkady remarked that it would make a good site for a windmill, but Nadia only snarledT.hey flew by, talking the situation ovCeer.rtainly several people in the
bioengineering labs had to be in on it; probably most of them; maAybned atlhl.en Sax, the designer of
the windmills, certainly had to be apart oAf nidt. Hiroko had been an advocate of the windmills, but they
had neither been sure why; it was impossible to judge whether she would approve of something like this or not, as she was simply too close with her opinBiuotnsi.t was possible.
As they talked it over, they took the broken windmill completelyThaepahrte. ating plate doubled as a
gate for the compartment containing the algae; when the gate opened, the algae would be released into an area that would be a bit warmer because of the hot plateEaitcshelfw. indmill thus functioned as a
micro-oasis, and if the algae managed to survive with its help, and then grow beyond the small area warmed by the hot plate, then goIofd.not it was not going to do very well on Mars anTyhwe ahyo. t

plate served to give it a good sendoff, nothing mOorres.o its designers must have thoug"hWt.e've been made into Johnny Appleseed," Arkady said.
"Johnny what?"
"American folk tale.H" e told her about it.
"Yeah, rightA. nd now Paul Bunyon is going to come kick our ass." "Ha.Never. Big Man is much bigger than Paul Bunyon, believe me." "Big Man?"
"You know, all those names for landscape featuBriegs.Man's Footprints, Big Man's Bathtub, Big
Man's Golf Course, whatever." "Ah yeah."
"Anyway, I don't see why we should get in troWubeled.idn't know anything about it." "Now who's going to believe that?"
". . . .Good poiTnth.ose bastards, they really got me with this one."
Clearly this was what bothered Arkady mNosott. that they had contaminated Mars with alien biota, but
that he had been kept out of a seMcren.
were such egomaniacs when it came down Atondit. Arkady,
he had his own group of frienpdesr,haps more than thatp:eople who agreed with him, followers of a sort. The whole Phobos crew, a lot of the programmers in UndeArhnidll. if some of his own people
were keeping things from him, that was bad; but if another group had secret plans of its own, that was worse, apparently, because they were at least interference, and perhaps competition.
Or so he seemed to thiHnke. wouldn't say much of this explicitly, but it became obvious in his mutterings, and his sudden sharp curses, which were genuine even though they alternated with bursts of hilarity. He couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he was pleased or angry, and Nadia finally
believed that he was both at once. That was Arkady; he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn't much worried about consistencyB. ut she wasn't too sure she liked his reasons this time, for either his anger or
his amusement, and she told him so with considerable irritation.
"Well, but come on!" he cri"eWd.hy should they keep it a secret from me, when it was my idea to begin with?"
"Because they knew I might come along withIfyotuh.ey told you, you would have had to telAl nmde.if you told me, I would have stopped it!"
Arkady laughed outrageously at th"iSs.o it was pretty considerate of them after all!" "Fuck."
The bioengineers, Sax, the people in the Quarter who had actually constructed theSothmineogns.e in communications, probably... there were quite a few who must have known.

"What about Hiroko?" Arkady asked.
They couldn't decideT.hey didn't know enough of her views to be able to guess what she might think. Nadia was pretty sure she was in on it, but couldn't explain"I wsuhpyp. ose," she said, thinking about it,
"I suppose I feel like there is this group around Hiroko, the whole farm team and a fair number of others, who respect her and... follow hEerv.en Ann, in a waAy.lthough Ann will hate this when she hears about
it! Whew! Anyway, it just seems to me that she would know about anything secret going on. Especially something having to do with ecological systemThs.e bioengineering group works with her most of the
time, after all, and for some of them she's like a guru, they almost worTshhiepy hperro. bably got her advice when they were splicing this algae together!"
"Hmm. . . ."
"So they probably got her agreement for the Midaeyab. e I should even say her permission." Arkady nodded". I see your point."
On and on they talked, hashing over every pointTohfe ilta. nd they passed over, flat and immobile, looked different to Nadia nowIt. was seeded, fertilized; it was going to change, now, inevitTahbelyy.
talked about the other parts of Sax's terraforming plans, giant orbiting mirrors reflecting sunlight onto the dawn and dusk terminators, carbon distributed over the polar caps, areothermal heat, the ice asteroids.
It was all really going to happen, it seemThede. debate had been bypassed; they were going to change the face of Mars.
# # #
The second evening after their momentous discovery, as they were cooking dinner at a crater's lee anchorage, they got a call from Underhill, relayed off one of the comm sa"tHelelyiteys.ou two!" John Boone said by way of greetin"gW. e've got a problem!"
"You've got a problem," Nadia replied. "Why, something wrong out there?"
"No no."
"Well good, because really it's you guys who have the problem, and I wouldn't want you to have more than one!A dust storm has started down in the Claritas Fossae region, and it's growing, and coming
north at a good ratWe. e think it'll reach you in a day or so." "Isn't it early for dust storms?" Arkady asked.
"Well no, we're at Ls =240, which is pretty much the usual seasoSnouftohrerint. spring.Anyway, there it is, and it's coming your way."
He sent a satellite photo of the storm, and they studied their TV screen closely. The region south of
Tharsis was now obscured by an amorphous yellow cloud.
"We'd better take off for home right now," Nadia said after studying the photo. "At night?"

"We can run the props on batteries tonight, and recharge the batteries tomorrow mAoftrenrintgh.at we may not have much sunlight, unless we can get above the dust."
After some discussion with John, and then with Ann, they caTshteowff.ind was pushing them
east-northeast, and on this heading they would pass just to the south of OlympuAs fMterontsh.at their
hope was to get around the north flank of Tharsis, which would protect them from the dust storm for at least a while.
It seemed louder flying at nigThht.e wind's rush over the fabric of the bag was a fluctuating moan, the sound of their engines a pitiful little hTumhe.y sat in the cockpit, lit only by dim green instrument lights, and talked in low voices as they moved over the black land bTehloewy . had about three thousand kilometers to go before reaching Underhill; that was about three hundred hours of flyinIfg thtiemye.went round the clock, it would be twelve days oBr usto.the storm, if it grew in the usual pattern, would reach them long before thenA. fter that... it was hard to tell how it woulWd igthoo.ut sunlight the props would
drain the batteries, and then"..C. an we just float on the wind?" Nadia directional nudges?"
"saUidse.
the props for occasional
"Maybe.But these things are designed with the props as part of the lift, you know."
"Yeah."She made coffee and brought mugs of it up to the coTchkepyit.sat and drank, and looked out at the black landscape, or the green sweep of the little radar "sWcreeenp.robably ought to drop everything we don't needE. specially those damned windmills."
"It's all ballast, save it for when we need the lift."
The hours of the night wore Tohne.y traded shifts at the helm, and Nadia caught an uneasy hour's sleep. When she returned to the cockpit, she saw that the black bulk of Tharsis had rolled over the horizon ahead of them: the two northernmost of the three prince volcanoes, Ascraeus Mons and Pavonis Mons, were visible as humps of occluded stars, out at the edge of theTwo otrhledi.r left Olympus Mons still
bulked well above the horizon, and taken with the other two volcanoes, it looked as if they flew low in some truly gigantic canyonT.he radar screen reproduced the view in miniature, in green lines on the
screen's gridwork.
Then, in the hour before dawn, it seemed as though another massive volcano were rising behind them. The whole southern horizon was lifting, low stars disappearing as they watched, Orion drowned in black. The storm was coming.
It caught them just at daybreak, choking off the red in the eastern sky, rolling over them, returning the world to rusty darknessT. he wind picked up until it swept past the gondola windows in a muted roar,
and then with a loud howling; dust flew by them with terrifying, surrealTshpeenedt.he wind grew even
more violent, and the gondola jerked up and down as the frame of the dirigible was twisted back and forth.
They were lucky north was the direction they wanted Atot goon.e point Arkady said, "The wind should hopefully wrap around the north shoulder of Tharsis."
Nadia nodded silentlyT.hey hadn't gotten the chance to recharge the batteries after the night's flight, and without sunlight the motors wouldn't run too much lon"gHeirr.oko told me sunlight on the ground during a storm is supposed to be about fifteen percent of normal," she"Hsiagihde. r there should be morSe.o
we'll get some recharge, but it'll be slCowou. ld be that over the course of the day we might get enough

use the props a bit tonighSt.h"e flicked on a computer to do the calculatiSoonms.ething in the
expression on Arkady's face-not fear, not even anxiety, but a curious little smile-made her aware of how much danger they were iInf. they couldn't use the props, they wouldn't be able to direct their movement,
and they might not even be able to stay aTlohfety.
could descend, it was true, and try to anchor; but
they had only a few weeks' more food, and storms like these often persisted for two months, sometimes three.
"There's Ascraeus Mons," Arkady said, pointing at the radar sc"Greoeond.
image."He laughed."Best
view of it we're going to get this time around, I'm Taforoaidb.ad, I was really looking forward to seeing them! Remember Elysium?"
"Yeah yeah," Nadia said, busy running simulations of the batteries' efficDieanilcyy.sunlight was near its perihelion peak, which was why the storm had started in the first place; and the instruments said that about twenty percent of full daylight was penetrating to this level (it felt to her eye more like thirty or forty); therefore it might be possible to run the props half the time, which would help tremendously. Without them they were moving at around twelve kilometers per hour, and losing altitude as well, although that might just be the ground rising under tWheimth. the props they might be able to hold a
steady altitude, and influence their course by a degree or two. "How thick is this dust, do you think?"
"How thick?"
"You know, grams per cubic meTterry.
to get Ann or Hiroko on the radio and find out, will you?"
She went back to see what they had on board that could be used to
prowpesr. Hthyedrazine, for the
bomb bay vacuum pumps; the pump motors could be wired to the props, proSbhaeblyw..a.s kicking one of the damned windmills out of the way when she stareTdheat hiot.t plates were heated by an electric charge generated by the spinning of the windmSiollsi.f she could run that charge into the prop
batteries, the windmills could be attached to the outside of the gondola, and this wind would spin them like tops, and the resulting electricity could help power the pArospss.he rooted through the equipment
locker looking for wire and transformers and tools she told Arkady the idea, and he laughed his madman laugh. "Good idea, Nadia!Great idea!"
"If it works.S"he rummaged through the tool kit, sadly smaller than her usual sTuhpeplyli.ght in the gondola was eerie, a dim yellow glfoliwckering with every gusTt.he view out the side windows shifted from pockets of complete clarity, with thick yellow clouds like thunderheads flying past them, to complete obscurity, all the window surfaces streaming with dust that flashed by at well over three hundred kilometers per hourE.ven at twelve millibars the blast of the wind was tossing the dirigible about; up in the cockpit Arkady was cursing the autopilot's insuffic"ieRnecpyr.ogram it," Nadia called
forward, and then remembered him and all his sadistic simulations on the Ares, and laughed out loud: "Problem run! Problem run!"She laughed again at his shouted curses, and went back to Awtolreka.st
the wind would push them along fasAterk. ady yelled back information from Anthne:
dust was
extremely fine, average particle size about 2.5 microtontsa;l column mass about 10^-3 grams per
cm^-2, pretty evenly distributed from top to bottom of the coTluhmatn.wasn't so bad; drop it on the
ground and it would be a really thin layer, which was consistent with what they had seen on the oldest freight drops at Underhill.
When she had rewired a number of the windmills she banged down the passageway to th"eAcn says the winds will be slowest close to the ground," Arkady said.
onckpit.

"Good.We need to land to get those windmills outside."
So that afternoon they descended blind, and let the anchor drag until it hooked
Tanhde
hweilndd.
here
was slower, but even so Nadia's descent in the sling was harrowing; down and down into rushing clouds of yellow dust, swinging back and forth. . . and there it was right under her boots, thSehegrhoiut nadn!d
dragged to a haltO.
nce out of the sling she found herself leaning into the wind; thin as it was it still struck
like blows, and her old feeling of hollowness was extrVemisieb.ility billowed back and forth in waves,
and the dust flew past so fast it was disorienting; on Earth a wind that fast would simply pick you up and throw you, like a broomstraw in a tornado.
But here you could hold your ground, if onlyArjuksatd.y had been slowly winching the dirigible down on its the anchor line, and now it bulked over her like a greIetnwraosofw. eirdly dark underneath it.
She unreeled the wires out to the wingtip turboprops, taped them to the dirigible and crimped them to the contacts inside, working fast to try to reduce their exposure to dust, and to get out from under the Arrowhead; it was bouncing on the wiWndi.th difficulty she drilled holes in the bottom of the gondola
fuselage, and attached ten windmills with screwAs she was taping the wiring from these to the plastic fuselage, the whole dirigible dropped so fast that she had to collapse onto her face, her whole body spreadeagled on the cold ground, the drill a hard lump under her sto"Smhaitc!h". she shouted". What's wrong?" Arkady cried over the interco"mN.othing," she said, jumping up and taping faster than ever. "Fucking thing-it's like working on a trampolinTe-h"en as she was finishing the wind picked up strength yet again, and she had to crawl back down to the bomb bay, her breath rasping in and out of her.
"The damn thing almost crushed me!" she shouted forward to Arkady when she had her helmet off. While he worked to unhook the anchor she staggered around the interior of the gondola, picking up things that they wouldn't need and taking them into the bomba lbaamy:p, one of the mattresses, most of the cooking utensils and dinnerware, some books, all the rock samInplethse. y went, and she jettisoned
them happily.If some traveler ever came upon the resulting pile of stuff, she thought, they would really wonder what the hell had happened.
They had to run both props full out to get the anchor unhooked, and when they succeeded they were off and flying like a leaf in NovembTehr.ey kept the props on full, to gain altitude as fast as possible; there
were some small volcanoes between Olympus and Tharsis, and Arkady wanted to pass several hundred meters over themT. he radar screen showed Ascraeus Mons falling steadily behWinhde.n they were well
north of it they could turn east, and try to chart a course around the northern flank of Tharsis, and then down to Underhill.
But as the long hours passed they found that the wind was rushing down the north slope of Tharsis, across their bow; so that even when running full power toward the southeast, they were still only moving northeast at bestI.n their attempts to fly across the wind the poor Arrowhead was bouncing like a hang glider, yanking them up and down, up and down, up and down, as if the gondola weartetacinhdeeded
to the underside of a trampolinBeu. t despite all that, they still weren't going in the direction they wanted to go.
Darkness fell againT.hey were carried farther northeasOt.n this heading, they were going to miss
Underhill by several hundred kilometerAs.fter that, nothing; no settlements at all, no refTuhgey.
would
be blown over Acidalia, up onto Vastis Borealis, up to the empty petrified sea of blacAk nd ntheesy. did not have enough food and water to circumnavigate the planet again and give it another try.
Feeling dust in her mouth and eyes, Nadia went back to the kitchen and heated theAmlreaadmyeal. she was exhausted, and, she realized as the smell of food filled the air, extremelyThiurnstgyr,y.too; and the water recycler ran on hydrazine.

Thinking about water, an image came to her mind, from the trip to the nothrtaht bporolek:en permafrost gallery, with its white spill of water ice. Now how was that relevant?
She worked her way back up to the cockpit, holding onto a wall with evSehrey astepa.
dusty meal
with Arakdy, trying to figure it oAurtk. ady watched their radar screen, saying nothing; but he was looking concerned.
Ah."Look," she said, "if we could pick up the signals from the transponders on our road to Chasma
Borealis, we could come down and land bTyhietn.
one of the robot rovers could be sent up to get us.
The storm won't matter to the robot rovers, they don't go by sight aWnyewcaoyu. ld leave the
Arrowhead tethered, and drive back home."
Arkady looked at her, finished swallowi"nGg.ood idea," he said.
# # #
But only if they could actuaplilcyk up the road's transponder signaAlsr.kady flicked on the radio and
called Underhill.The connection crackled in a storm of static almost as dense as the dust, but they could still make themselves understoodA. ll through that night they conferred with the crowd back home, discussing frequencies, bandwiths, the power of the dust to mask the transponder's farily weak signals, and so onB. ecause the transponders were designed only to signal rovers that were nearby and on the ground, it was going to be a problem hearing tUhenmde.rhill might be able to pinpoint their location well enough to tell them when to descend, and their own radar map would give them a general fix on the road's location as well; but neither of these methods would be very exact, and it would be almost impossible to find the road in the storm if they didn't land righTt eonn kiitl.ometers either way and it
would be over the horizon, and they would be out ofIt luwcoku. ld be a lot more certain if they could just latch onto one of the transponder signals, and follow it down.
In any case, Underhill dispatched a robot rover on the road Int owrtohu. ld arrive in the area of the road they were expected to cross in about five days; at their current speed, now nearly thirty kilometers per hour, they would cross the road themselves in about four days.
When the arrangements were finished, they traded watches through the rest of thNeandiahst.lept
uneasily on her off watches, and spent much of the time lying on the bed feeling the wind bTohuence her. windows were as dark ascuifrtains had been drawnT. he roar of the wind was like a gas stove, and then occasionally like banshees; once she dreamed they were inside a great furnace full of flame demons, and
woke sweating, and went forward to relieve ArkaTdhye.
whole gondola smelled of sweat and dust, and
burnt hydrazine.Despite all the gaskets' micron seals, there was a visible whitish film on all the surfaces inside the gondolaS. he wiped her fingers across a pale blue plastic bulkhead, and stared at her fingers' mark. Incredible.
They bounded along through the gloom of the days, through the starless black of thTehenigrahdtsa.r
showed what they thought was Fesenkov Crater, running under them; they were being shoved northeast
still, and there was absolutely no chance they would be able to buck the storm and get south to Underhill. The polar road was their only hoNpea.dia occupied her off watches by looking for things to throw
overboard, and cutting away at parts of the gondola frame she judged inessential, until the engineers in Friedrichshafen would have shudderedB. ut Germans always overengineered things, and no one on Earth could ever really believe in martian gee anywSaoy.she sawed and hammered until everything inside the gondola was latticed nearly to nothinEgv.ery use of the bay brought in another small cloud of dust, but
she figured it was worth it; they needed the loft, her windmill arrangement was not getting sufficient power

to the batteries, and she had tossed the rest of them overboard long Ebveefnoreif.
she had had them,
she would not have gone back under the dirigible to install them; the memory of the incident still gave her the shivers.Instead she kept cutting further and further; she would have tossed out pieces of the dirigible frame too, if she could have gotten into the ballonets.
While she did this Arkady padded around the gondola cheering her on, naked and dust-caked, the red man incarnate, singing songs and watching the radar screen, jamming down quick meals, planning their course such as it waIst. was impossible not to catch a bit of his exhilaration, to marvel with him at the strongest buffets of the wind, to feel the dust flying wild in her blood.
And so three long intense days passed, in the wild grip of the dark oranAgnedwoinndt.he fourth day,
a bit after noon, they turned the radio receiver up to full volume, and listened to the crackly roar of static at the transponders' frequencyC. oncentrating on the white noise made Nadia drowsy, for they had had
very little sleep; and she was almost unconscious when Arkady said something, and she jerked up in her seat.
"Hear it?" he asked agaSinh.e listened, and shook her hea"dT.here, it's a kind of ping."
She heard a little b"ipIs.
that it?"
"I think soI.'m going to get us down as fast as I can, I'll have to empty some of the ballonets."
He tapped away at the control keyboard, and the dirigible tilted forward and they began to drop at emergency speed.The altimeter's numbers flickered dowTn.he radar screen showed the ground below
to be basically flaTt.he ping got louder and louder; without a directional receiver, that was going to be their only way to tell if they were still approaching it or movingPinawg.a..y.ping... ping..I.n her
exhaustion it was hard to tell what whether it was getting louder or softer, and it seemed every beep was a different volume, depending on the attention she could bring to bear.
"It's getting softer," Arkady said sudden"lDy.on't you think?" "I can't tell."
"It is."He switched on the props, and with the whir of the motors the signal definitely seemeHd equieter. turned into the wind, and the dirigible bounced wildly; he fought to steady its downward movement, but there was a delay between every shift of the flaps and the dirigible's bucking, and in reality they were in little more than a controlled crasThh.e ping was perhaps getting softer at a slower rate.
When the altimeter indicated they were low enough to drop the anchor they did so, and after an anxious bit of drifting it caught, and heTldh.ey dropped all the anchors they had, and pulled the Arrowhead down
on the lines. Then Nadia suited up and climbed into the sling and winched down, and once on the surface she began walking around in a chocolate dawn, leaning hard into the irregular torrent Sohfewfionudn.d
she was more physically exhausted than she could ever remember being, it was really hard to make headway upwind, she had to tacOkv. er her intercom the transponder signal pinged, and the ground seemed to bounce under her feet; it was hard to keep her bTalhaencpei.ng was quite distinc"t.We
should have been listening on our helmet intercoms all along," she said to A"Yrkoaudyc.an hear better."
A gust knocked her ovSerh.e got up and shuffled slowly along, letting out a nylon line behind her,
adjusting her course as she followed the volume of the
Tpihnegsg. round flowed underfoot, when she
could see it; visibility was actually down to a meter or less, at least in the thickTehsetnguitstws.ould clear a touch and brown jets of dust would flash by, sheet after sheet, moving at an awesoTmhe
speed.

wind buffetted her as hard as anything she had ever felt on Earth, or hwaardserp;aiint ful work to keep her balance, a constant physical effort.
While inside a thick, blinding cloud, she nearly shuffled right into one of the transponders, standing there like a fat fencepos"t.Hey!" she shouted.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing!I scared myself running into the roadmark." "You found it!"
"Yeah."She felt her exhaustion run down into her hands andShfe ts.at on the ground for a minute, then stood again; it was too cold toHseirt. ghost finger hurt.
She took up the nylon line, and returned blindly to the dirigible, feeling she had wandered into the ancient myth, and was following the only thread out of the labyrinth.
# # #
Duringtheir rover trip south, blind in the flying dust, word came crackling over the radio that UNOMA
had just approved and funded the establishment of three follow-up colEonaciehs.would consist of five hundred people, all to be from countries not represented in the first hundred.
And the subcommittee on terraforming had recommended, and the General Assembly approved, a whole package of terraforming efforts, among them was the distribution on the surface of genetically engineered micro-organisms, GEMs constructed from parent stock such as algaes, bacteria, or lichens.
Arkady laughed for a good thirty secon"Tdsh.ose bastards, those lucky bastardTs!hey're going to get away with it. "
Part Four
Homesick
-+=*=+-
One winter morning the sun shines down on Valles Marineris, illuminating the north walls of all the canyons in that great concatenation of canyonAsn. d in that bright light, all day every day, one can see that every ledge and outcropping is black with a warty surface of lichen.

Life adapts, you seIet. has only a few needs, some fuel, some energy; and it is fantastically ingenious at extracting these needs from a wide range of environmSenotms.e organisms live always below the
freezing point of water, others above the boiling point; some live in high radiation zones, others in intensely salty regions, or within solid rock, or in pitch black, or in extreme dehydration, or without oxygen. All kind of environments are accomodated, by adaptive measures so strange and marvelous they are beyond our capacity to imagine; and so from the bedrock to high in the atmosphere, life has permeated the Earth with the full weave of one great biosphere.
All these adaptive abilities are coded and passed along in Igfenthees. genes mutate, the organisms change. If the genes are altered, the organisms chanBgieo.engineers use both these forms of change, not only recombinant gene splicing, but also the much older art of selective brMeeidcirnog-.organisms are
plated, and the fastest growers (or those that exhibit most the trait you want) can be culled and plated again; mutagens can be added to increase the mutation rate; and in the quick succession of microbial generations (say ten per day), you can repeat this process until you get something like what you want. Selective breeding is one of the most powerful bioengineering techniques we have.
But the newer techniques tend to get the attenGtieonne.tically engineered micro-organisms, or GEMs, had been on the scene only about half a century when the first hundred arrived Bount Mhaalrfs.a century in modern science is a long tiPmlaes.mid conjugates had become very sophisticated tools in
those years.The array of restriction enzymes for cutting, and ligase enzymes for pasting, was big and versatile; theability to line out long DNA strings precisely was there; the accumulated knowledge of genomes was immense, and growing exponentially; and used all together, this new biotechnology was allowing all kinds of trait mobilization, promotion, replication, triggered suicide (to stop excess success), and so forthI.t was possible to find the DNA sequences from an organism that carried the desired characteristic, and then synthesize these DNA messages and cut and paste them into plasmiadfterrings;
that cells were washed and suspended in a glycerol with the new plasmids, and the glycerol was suspended between two electrodes and given a short sharp shock of about two thousand volts, and the plasmids in the gycerol shot into the cells, and vTohileár!e, zapped to life like Frankenstein's monster,
was a new organismW. ith new abilities.
And so:fast-growing lichens.Radiation-resistant algae.Extreme-cold fungi.Halophylic bacteria, eating salt and excreting oxygenS.urarctic mosses. An entire taxonomy of new kinds of life, all partially adapted to the surface of Mars, all out there having a trSyomate its.pecies went extinctn:atural selection. Some prospered:survival of the fittesSt.ome prospered wildly, at the expense of other
organisms; and then chemicals in their excretions activated their suicide genes, and they died back until the levels of those chemicals dropped again.
So life adapts to conditionAsn. d at the same time, conditions are changed byTlhiafet. is one of the
definitions of lifeo: rganism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole.
And so:black fuzz on the polar icBel.ack fuzz on the ragged surfaces of bubbled rock. Pale green patches on the groundB. igger grains of frost in the Aainr.imacules shoving through the depths of the regolith, like trillions of tiny moles.
At first it was nearly invisible, and very
Wsloiwth. a cold snap or a solar storm there would be massive
die-offs, whole species extinct in a nigBhut.t the remains of the dead fed other creatures; conditions were thus easier for them, and the process picked up momenBtuamcte. ria reproduce quickly, doubling their
mass many times a day if conditions are right; the mathematical possibilities for the speed of their growth are staggering, and although environmental constraints-especially on Mars-keep all actual growth far from the mathematical limits, still, the new organisms, the areophytes, quickly reproduced, sometimes mutated,

always died, and the new life fed on the compost of their ancestors, and reproduceLdivaegdaiann.d died; and the soil and air left behind were different than they were before these millions of brief generations.
And so one morning the sun rises, shooting long rays through the ragged cloud cover, up the length of Valles Marineris.On the north wall every horizontal face is black and yellow and olive and gray and green, all with the warty surfaces of lichPelant.es of lichen drip down the vertical faces of stone, which
stand as they always have, stony, and cracked, and red; but now mottled, as if with lace.
-+=*=+-
Michel Duval dreamed of homHee.
was swimming in the surf off the point at Villefranche-Sur-Mer, the
warm August water lifting him up and doIwt nw. as windy and near sunset and the water was a sloppy white bronze, the sunlighbtouncing all over iTt.he waves were big for the Mediterranean, swift breakers that rose up all riven with wind chop to crash in quick uneven lines, allowing him to ride them for a
moment. Then it was under in a tumble of bubbles and sand, and back up into a burst of gold light and the taste of salt in everything, his eyes stinging voluptuoBuisgly.black pelicans rode air cushions just over
the swells, soared into steep clumsy turns, staldlerodp, ped into the water around hiTmh.ey half-folded
their wings when they dove, making adjustments with them until the actual moment of the awkward crash into the waterO. ften they came up gulping small fiJsuhs.t meters from him one splashed in, silhouetted
against the sun like a Stuka or a pterodaCctoyol.l and warm, immersed in salt, he bobbed on the swell and blinked, blinded by salt light. A breaking wave looked like diamonds smashed to cream.
His phone rang.
His phone rangI.t was Ursula and Phyllis, on to tell him that Maya was having another fit and was inconsolable. He got up, put on unders and went to the bathrWooamve.s leaped over a line of
backwash. Maya, depressed againL. ast time he had seen her she had been in high spirits, almost euphoric, and that was what, a week aBgou?t that was MayaM. aya was crazyC. razy in a Russian way, however, which meant she was a power to be reckoned Mwoith.er Russia!The church and the
communists both had tried to eradicate the matriarchy that had preceded them; and all they had achieved was a flood of bitter emasculating scorn, a whole nation full of contemptuous russalkas and baba yagas and twenty-hour-a-day superwomen, living in a nearly parthenogenic culture of mothers, daughters, babushkas, granddaughters.Yet still necessarily absorbed in their relationships with men, desperately
trying to find the lost father, the perfect mOartej.ust a man who would pull his share of theFilnodaidn.g that great love, and then more often than not destroyiCngrazity.!
Well, it was dangerous to generaliBzeu.t Maya was a classic casMe.oody, angry, flirtatious, brilliant, charming, manipulative, intense-and now filling his office like a huge slab of dejection, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, her mouth haggarUdr.sula and Phyllis nodded and whispered thanks to
Michel for getting up so early, and Hleeft.went to the venetian blinds and opened them, and the light
from the central dome poured
Hine.
saw again that Maya was a beautiful woman, with wild lustrous hair
and a dark charismatic gaze, immediate and dirIetctw. as dismaying to see her this upset, he never got
used to it, it contrasted too sharply with her usual vivaciousness, the way she would put a finger to your arm as she rattled on in a confiding tone about one fascinating thing or other. . . .
All strangely mimicked by this desperate creature, who leaned forward onto his desk and began to tell

him in a ragged hoarse voice about the latest scene in the unfolding drama of her and John, and then, again, Frank. Apparently she had gotten angry at John for refusing to help her in a plan she had to get some of the Russian-based multinationals to underwrite the development of settlements in Hellas Basin,
which being the deepest point on Mars was going to be first to benefit from the atmospheric changes they were beginning to seeT.he air pressure at Low Point, four kilometers below the datum, was always
going to be ten times thicker than that on top of the great volcanoes, and three times thicker than at the datum; it was going to be the first human-viable place, it was perfect for development.
But apparently John preferred to work through UNOMA and governmAenndts.this was just one of the
many basic political disagreements which were beginning to infect their personal life, to the point that they were fighting pretty frequently about other things, things that didn't matter, things about which they had never fought before.
Watching her Michel almost said, John wants you irritated withHehimw.asn't sure what John would
say to thatM.
aya rubbed her eyes, leaned her forehead on his desk, revealing the back of her neck and
her broad rangy shouldersS.he would never look this distraught in front of most of Underhill; it was an intimacy between them, something she only did with Ihtimw.as as if she had taken off her clothes.
People didn't understand that true intimacy did not consist of sexual intercourse, which could be done with strangers and in a state of total alienation; intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one's lifAe.lthough it was true she would be beautiful naked, she had perfect proportions. He recalled the way she looked swimming in the pool, doing the backstroke in a blue bathing suit cut high over the hipbonAes.Mediterranean imageh: e was floating in the water at
Villefranche, everything flooded with sunset's amber light, and he was looking in at the beach where men and women were walking, naked except for the neon triangles of cache-sexe bathing
suits-brown-skinned bare-breasted women, walking in pairs like dancers in the sunlight-then dolphins
sliced out of the water between him and the beach, their sleek black bodies rounded like the women's-
But now Maya was talking about FraFnrkan. k, who had a sixth sense for trouble between John and
Maya (six would not be necessary), and who came running to Maya every time he felt the signs, to walk with her and talk about his vision of Mars, which was progressive, exciting, ambitious, everything that John's was not". Frank is so much more dynamic than John these days, I don't know why."
"Because he agrees with you," Michel said.
Maya shrugged". Perhaps that's all I meaBn.ut we have a chance to build a whole civilization here, we
do. But John is so. . .Bi.g"
sigh."And yet I love him, I really Bduot.. . . ."
She talked for a while about their past, how their courtship had saved the voyage out from anarchy (or at least ennui), how John's easy-going stability had been so good fHorowhery.ou could count on him.
How impressed she had been by his fame, how she had felt that the liason made her part of world history forever. But now she understood that she herself was going to be part of world history anyway; all of
them in the first hundred weHree. r voice rose, became faster and more vehem"eIntd: on't need John for
that now, I only need him for how I feel about him, but now we don't agree on anything and we're not very much alike, and Frank who has been so careful to hold back no matter what, we agree about almost everything and I've been so enthusiastic about that part that I've given him the wrong signal again, so he
did it again, yesterday in the pool he-he held me, you know, took my arms in his hands-" she crossed her arms and clasped her biceps in her hands- "and asked me to leave John for him, which I would never do, and he was shaking, and I said I couldn't but I was shakinSgo tolaot.e"r she had been on edge, and had
started a fight with John, started it so flagrantly that he had gotten truly angry and had left and taken a rover out to Nadia's arcade, and spent the night there with the construction team; and Frank had come to talk to her again, and when she had (just barely) put him off, Frank had declared he was going to live

with the European settlement on the other side of the planet; he who was the colony's driv"iAngndforce! he'll really do it, he's not one to threaHte's. been learning German the way he does, languages are nothing to Frank."
Michel tried to concentrate on what she was saIytinwga. s difficult, because he knew full well that in a week everything would be different, all the dynamics in that little trio altered beyond recoSgoniittion.
was hard to careW. hat about his troublesT?hey went much, much deeper; but no one ever listened to him. He walked back and forth in front of the window, reassuring her with the usual questions and comments. The greenery in the atrium was refreshing; it could have been a courtyard in Arles or Villefranche; or suddenly it reminded him of Avignon's narrow cypress-arched plaza near the Pope's palace, the plaza and its café tables which in the summer just after sunset had just the color of Mars. Taste of olive and red wine. . . .
"Let's go for a walk," he sSatiadn. dard part of therapy houTr.hey crossed the atrium and went to the kitchens, so Michel could eat a breakfast which he forgot even as he swallowed; we should call eating forgetting, he thought as they walked around the hall to the Tlohcekys.put on suits-Maya entering a
change room to get her unders on-then checked them and went in the lock and depressurized it and then opened the big outer door and stepped outside.
The diamond chilFl.or a while they stayed on the sidewalks circling Underhill, taking a tour of the dump and its great salt pyramid"sD. o you think they'll ever find a use for all this salt?" he said.
"Sax is still working on it."
From time to time Maya went on talking about John and MFricahnekl. asked the questions that a shrink program would have asked, Maya answered in the way a Maya program would have anTshweeirred. voices right in each other's ears, the intimacy of the intercom.
They came to the lichen farm, and Michel stopped to gaze over the trays, to soak in their intense living color. Black snow algae, and then thick mats of otoo lichen, in which the algae symbiote was a
blue-green strain that Vlad had just gotten to grow alone; red lichen, which seemed not to be doing well. Superfluous in any caseY. ellow lichen, olive lichen, a lichen that looked exactly like battleship paint.
Flakey white and lime green lichen-living greIetn!pulsed in the eyae, rich and improbable desert flower. He had heard Hiroko, looking down at such a growth, say "This is viriditas," which was Latin for
"greening power." The word had been coined by a Christian mystic of the middle ages, a woman named Hildegard. Viriditas, now adapting to conditions here, and spreading slowly over the lowlands of the northern hemisphere.In the southern summers it did even better; one day had reached 285 degrees Kelvin, a record high by twelve degreTehs.e world was changing, Maya remarked as they walked by
the flats."Yes," Michel said, and could not help adding, "Only three hundred years before we reach livable temperatures."
Maya laughedS. he was feeling betterS.oon she would be back on level, or at least crossing through that zone on the way to euphorMia.aya was labileS. tability-lability was the most recent characteristic Michel had been studying in the first hundred; Maya represented the labile extreme.
"Let's drive out and see the arcade," she Msaiicdh.el agreed, wondering what might happen if they ran into John.They went to the parking lot and checked orouat darunner. Michel drove the little jeep and listened to Maya talkD. id conversation change when voices were divorced from bodies, planted right in the ears of the listeners by helmet mikItesw? as as if one were always on the phone, even when sitting next to the person you were talkingOtro-.was this better or worse?-as if you were engaged in telepathy.

The cement road was smooth, and he drove at the roadrunner's top speed of sHixetycokuplhd. just feel the rush of thin air against his facepAlaltle.that CO2 that Sax so wanted to scrub from the atmosphere. Sax would need powerful scrubbers, even more powerful than the lichens; he needed forests, enormous multi-layered halophylic rainforests, trapping enormous loads of carbon in wood,
leaves, mulch, peatH.
e needed peat bogs a hundred meters deep, rain forests a hundred meteHres tall.
had said as muchI.t marked Ann's face just to hear the sound of his voice.
Fifteen minutes' drive and they came to Nadia's arTcahdee.site was still under construction and looked raw and messy, like Underhill in the beginning but on a largerAscloanleg.mound of burgundy rubble
had been excavated from the trench, which ran east and west like Big Man's grave.
They stood at one end of the great treTnhcihrt.y meters deep, thirty wide, a kilometer loTnhge.
south
side of the trenchwas now a wall of glass; the north side of the trench was covered with arrays of filtering mirrors, alternating with wall-mesocosms, marsjars or terrariums, all of them together a colorful mix, like
a tapestry of past and futuMre.ost of the terrariums were filled with spruce trees and other flora that made it resemble the great world-wrapping terran forest of the sixtieth laLtiitkuedeN. adia
Cherneshevsky's old home in Siberia, in other woWrdsa.s this perhaps a sign that she had a touch of his disease? And could he prevail on her to build a Mediterranean?
Nadia was up working on a bulldoAzerw. oman with her own kind of viridSitahse.
stopped and came
over to talk briefly with theTmh.e project was coming along, she told them calAmmlya.zing what one could do with the robot vehicles that were still being sent up fromThEearctho.ncourse was done, and
planted with a variety of trees, including a strain of dwarf sequoia already thirty meters tall, nearly as tall as thewhole arcade.The three stacked rows of Underhill-style vaulted chambers behind the concourse
were installed, their insulation in placTeh.e settlement had just the other day been sealed and heated and pressurized, so that it was possible to work inside it withoutTshueitsth. ree floors were stacked on each other in ever smaller arches, reminding Michel of the Pont du Gard; of course all the architecture here was Roman in origin, so that should not be a surTphriesea. rches were wider, however, and slighter.
Airier in the tolerance of the gee.
Nadia went back to worSku.ch a calm personS.tabile, the very opposite of labilLe.ow-keyed,
private, inward.Couldn't be less like her old friend Maya; it was good for Maya to be around her. Opposite end of the scale, keep her from flying aSweat ya. n example for heAr.s in this encounter,
where Maya was matching Nadia's calm toAnen.d when Nadia went back to work, Maya retained some of that serenity".I'll miss Underhill when we move out here," she "sWaiodn. 't you?"
"I don't think so," Michel sa"iTdh. is will be a lot sunnieAr."ll three floors of the new habitat would open
onto the tall concourse, and have terraced broad balconies on the sunny side of the rooms, so that even though the whole structure faced north and was buried deeper than Underhill, the heliotropic filtered mirrors on the other side of the trench would pour light onto them from dawn"It'oll dbueskh.appy to
move. We've needed the space from the beginning."
"But we won't get all this space to ourseTlvher.e'll be new people here." "Yes.But that will give us space of a different kind."
She looked thoughtfu"l.Like John and Frank leaving."
"Yes.But even that isn't necessarily a bad thinIng."a larger society, he told her, the claustrophobic
village atmosphere of Underhill would begin to dissipate; this would give a better perspective on certain aspects of things.Michel hesitated before continuing, unsure how to saSyubitt.lety was dangerous when

you were both using a second language, coming at it from different native tongues; possibilities for misunderstanding were all too rea"lY. ou must accept the idea that you perhaps do not want to choose between John and FrankT.hat in fact you want them boInth.the context of the first hundred that can only be scandalousB. ut in a larger world, over time. . . ."
"Hiroko keeps ten men!" she exclaimed angrily.
"Yes, and so do yoSuo.
do youA.
nd in a larger world, no one will know or care."
He went on reassuring her, telling her that she was powerfu(ul,sitnhgatFrank's terms) she was the alpha female of the troopS.he disagreed and forced more praise from him until finally she was satiated, and he could suggest they return home.
"Don't you think it will be a shock to have new people aDroifufenrde?nt people?"She was driving, and as she turned to ask him this she almost drove off the road.
"I suppose."Parties had already landed in Borealis and Acidalia, and the videotapes of them had been a shock, you could see it in people's faAcess.if aliens had arrived from spaBceu.t so far only Ann and
Simon had met with any of them in person, running into a rover expedition north of Noctis Labyrinthus. "Ann said it felt as if someone had stepped out of the TV."
"My life feels like that all the time," Maya said sadly.
Michel lifted his eyebrowTs.he Maya program would not have said t"hWat.hat do you mean?" "Oh, you knowH. alf the time it seems like one big simulation, don't you think?"
"No."He considered it". I don't."It was all too real, in fact-the cold of it seeping up through the rover seat deep into his flesh-inescapably real, inescapably cPoeldrh. aps as a Russian she didn't appreciate
that. But it was always, alwaycsold. Even at noon on midsummer's day, with the sun overhead like an open furnace door blazing in the sand-colored sky, the temperature would be at best 260° K, meaning
20 degrees below zero Centigradceo, ld enough to push through the mesh of a walker and make each move a little diamond pattern of hAurst. they approached Underhill Michel felt the cold pushing through
the fabric into his skin, and he felt the too-cool oxygenated air expand out of the mouthpiece deep into his lungs, and he glanced up at the sand horizon and the sand sky and said to himself, I am a diamondback snake, slithering through a red desert of cold stone and drSodmuesdt.ay I will shed my
skin like a phoenix in a fire, to become some new creature of the sun, to walk the beach naked and splash in warm salt water. . . .
Back at Underhill he turned on sthhreink program in his head and asked Maya if she were feeling better,
and she touched her faceplate to his, giving him a brief glimpse of a gaze that w"Yasoua knisosw. I
do," her voice said in his eHaer. nodded." I think I'll go for another walk, then," he said, and did not say
But what about meW? hat will make me feel betteHr?e willed the movement of his legs and walked off. The bleak plain surrounding the base was a vision out of some post-holocaust desolation, a nightmare world; nevertheless he didn't want to go back into their little warren of artificial light and heated air and carefully deployed colors, colors that he himself had chosen for the most part, utilizing the very latest in color-mood theory, a theory which he now understood to be based on certain root assumptions that did not in fact apply here; the colors were all wrong, or worse, irreWlevalalnpat.per in hell.
The phrase formed in his mind and pushed at hiWs alilplpsa. per in hellW.
allpaper in hellS. ince they're
going to go crazy anyway. . C. e.rtainly it had been a mistake to have only one psychiatrist Eavloenryg.

therapist on Earth was also in therapy, it was part of the job, it came with theButetrrhitios ryth.erapist
was back in Nice, fifteen timeslipped minutes away at best, and Michel talked to him but he couldn't
help. He didn't understand, not really; he lived where it was warm and blue, he could go outside, he was
(Michel presumed) in reasonably good mental heaWlthh. ile Michel was a doctor in a hospice in a prison in hell; and the doctor was sick.
He hadn't been able to adaPpeto. ple were different in that regard, it was a matter of temperament. Maya, walking toward the lock door, had a temperament quite different from his, which somehow enabled her to be completely at home hTeroe.tell the truth he didn't think she really noticed her surroundings much in any casAe.nd yet in other ways he and she were simItilhara.d to do with the lability-stability index, and its particular emotionality; they were both lAabnilde.yet fundamentally they
were very different characters; the labile-stabile index had to be considered in combination with the very different set of characteristics grouped under the labels extraversion and introveTrshiiosn.had been his
great discovery of the recent year, and now it structured all his thinking about himself and his charges.
Walking toward the Alchemists' Quarter, he fit the morning's events into the gridwork of this new characterlogical system.Extraversion-introversion was one of the best-studied systems of traits in all psychological theory, with great masses of evidence from many different cultures supporting the objective reality of the concepNt. ot as a simple duality of course; one did not label a person plainly thibsuot r that, rather placed them on a scale, rating them for such qualities as sociability, impulsiveness, changeability, talkativeness, outgoingness, activity, liveliness, excitability, optimism, and soThoens.e measurements had
been done so many times that it was statistically certain that the various traits did indeed hang together, to a degree that exceeded chance by a huge amoSuontt.he concept was real, quite reIanl!fact
physiological investigations had revealed theaxt traversion was linked with resting states of low cortical
arousal, introversion with high cortical arousal; this had sounded backwards to Michel at first, but then he remembered that the cortex inhibits the lower centers of the brain, so that low cortical arousal allows the more uninhibited behavior of the extravert, while high cortical arousal is inhibitory and leads to
introversion. This explained why drinking alcohol, a depressant which lowers cortical arousal, could lead to more excited and uninhibited behavior.
So the whole collection of extravert-introvert traits, with all that they said about one's character, could be traced back to a group of cells in the brain stem called the ascending reticular activating system, the area that ultimately determined levels of cortical arouTshalu.s they were driven by biologTyh.ere should
be no such thing as fatRe:alph Waldo Emerson, a year after his six year-old sonBduitedb.iology was fate.
And there was more to Michel's system; fate, after all, was no simple eHitehehr-aodr. recently begun
to consider Wenger's index of autonomic balance, which used seven different variables to determine whether an individual was dominated by the sympathetic or the parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous systemT. he sympathetic branch responds to outside stimuli and alerts the organism to action, so that individuals dominated by this branch were excitable; the parasympathetic branch, on the
other hand, habituates the alerted organism to the stimulus, and restores it to homeostatic balance, so that individuals dominated by this branch were placDidu.ffy had suggested calling these two classes of
individuals labiles and stabiles, and this classification, while not as famous as extraversion and introversion, was just as solidly backed by empirical evidence, and just as useful in understanding varieties of temperament.
Now, neither system of classification told the investigator all that much about the total nature of the personality being studiedT. he terms were so general, they were collections of so many traits, that they said very little in any useful diagnostic sense, especially since both were Gaussian curves in the actual population.

But combine the two systems, and it began to get very interesting indeed.
It was not a simple matter, and Michel had spent a fair amount of time at his computer screen sketching one kind of combinatoire after another, using the two different systems as the x and y axes of several different grids, none of which told him muBcuht. then he began moving the four terms around the initial
points of a Greimas semantic rectangle, a structuralist schema with alchemical ancestry, which proposed that no simple dialectic was enough to indicate the true complexity of any cluster of related concepts, so that it was necessary to acknowledge the real difference between something's opposite and its contrary; the concept "not-X" being not quite the same thing as "anti-X," as one saw immSedoiattheely.first stage
was usually indicated by using the four terms S, -S, S-S, ,ainnd a simple rectangle:
insert Diagram 4a
Thus -S was a simple not-S, Sanwd as the stronger anti-S; while -S was the for Michel skullcracking negation of a negation, either a neutralizing of the initial opposition, or the union of the two negations; in practice this often remained a mystery or koan, but sometimes it came clear, as an idea that completed the conceptual unit quite nicely, as in one of Greimas's example:
insert Diagram 4b
The next step in the complication of the design, the step where new combinations often revealed structural relationships not at all obvious on the face of it, was to build another rectangle that bracketed the first at right angles, like so:
insert Diagram 4c
And Michel had stared at this schema, with extraversion, introversion, lability and stability at the first four corners, and considered their combinations; and then everything had suddenly fallen into focus, as if a kaleidoscope had suddenly clicked by accident into a depiction of aForor siet. made perfect sense:
there were extraverts who were excitable, and extraverts who were on an even keel; there were introverts who were quite emotional, and those who wereHneotc.ould immediately think of examples among the colonists of all four of the types.
When considering names to give these combined categories, he had had toUnlabueglihe.veable! It was
ironic at best to think that he had used the results of a century's psychological thinking, and some of the latest laboratory research in psychophysiology, not to mention a complicated apparatus from structuralist alchemy, all in order to reinvent the ancient system of the humBouutrst.here it was; that was what it
came down toF. or the northern combination, extraverted and stabile, was clearly what Hippocrates,

Galen, Aristotle, Trimestigus, Wundt, and Jung would have called sanguine; the western point,
extraverted and labile, was choleric; in the east, introverted and stabile was phlegmatic; and in the south, introverted and labile was of course the very definition of the melancYheosl,ict!hey all fit perfectly!
Galen's physiological explanation for the four temperaments had been wrong, of course, and bile, choler, blood and phlegm had now been replaced as causative agents by the ascending reticular activating system and the autonomic nervous system; but the truths of human nature had hAeldndftahset! powers
of psychological insight and analytic logic of the first Greek physicians had been as strong, or rather stronger by far, than that of any subsequent generatibolnin'sk, ered by an often-useless accumulation of knowledge; and so the categories had endured and were reaffirmed, in age after age.
insert Diagram 4d
Michel found himself in the Alchemist's QuaHrteer.exerted himself to pay attention toHeitr.e men used
arcane knowledge to make diamonds out of carbon, and they made it so easily and precisely that all their window glass was coated in a molecular layer of diamond to protect it from the corrosive dust; and their great white salt pyramids (one of the great shapes of ancient knowledge, the pyramid) were coated in layers of pure diamondA. nd the one-molecule diamond-coating process was just one of thousands of alchemical operations performed in these squbautildings.
In recent years the buildings had taken on a faintly Moslem look, their white brick walls displaying equation after equation, all rendered in black flowing mosaic calligrapMhyic.hel ran into Sax, who was
standing next to the terminal velocity equation displayed on the wall of the brick factory, and he switched to the common band":Can you turn lead into gold?"
Sax's helmet tilted quizzicall"yM. think about it some."
aybe," he said". A little of it, anywaBy.ut it would be harLd.et me
Saxifrage RussellT. he perfect Phlegmatic.
The really useful part of mapping the four temperaments onto the semantic rectangle was that it immediately suggested a number of basic structural relationships between them, which then helped Michel
to see their attractions and antagonisms in a new Mligahyta.
was labile and extraverted, clearly choleric,
and so was Frank; and both of them were leaders, and both were quite attracted to Bthoethobtheeinr.g choleric, however, there was a volatile and essentially repellent aspect to the relationship as well, as if they recognized in each other exactly what they didn't like in themselves.
And thus Maya's love for John, who was clearly sanguine, with an extraversion similar to Maya's but much more emotionally stabile, even to the point of placSidoityth. at most of the time he gave her great peace, like an anchor to reality-which then occasionally rankAlendd. John's attraction to MayaT?he
attraction of the unpredictable, perhaps; the spice in his hearty bland happSiunrees,s.why not?You can't make love to your famEe.ven though some people try.
Yes, there were a lot of sanguines in the first huPnrdorbeadb. ly the psychological specs for selection to

the colony preferred the typAe.rkady, Ursula, Phyllis, Spencer, YeliY...es. And stability being the most preferred quality for selection, there were naturally a lot of phlegmatics among them Nasadwiae,ll:Sax,
Simon Frazier, perhaps Hiroko-the fact that one could not even be sure about her tended to support the guess-Vlad, George, Alex.
Phlegmatics and melancholics would naturally not get along, both being introverted and quick to withdraw, and the stabile one put off by the unpredictability of the labile; so that they would withdraw from each other, like Sax and ATnnh.ere were not many melancholics among theAmn.n, yes; and
probably by the fate of her brain's structure, although it did not help that she had been molested as a
child. She had fallen in love with Mars for the same reason that Michel
And Ann was in love with death.
bheatceadusiet: it was dead.
A few of the alchemists were melancholics as Awnedll,. unfortunately, Michel himselfP.erhaps five all told. Along both axes they had been selected against, as neither introversion nor lability had been considered desirable by the selection committeOen. ly people quite clever at concealing their real nature from the committee could have slipped through, people with great control over their personas, those larger-than-life masks that conceal all the wild inconsistencies wiPtheirnh.aps only a certain kind of persona had been selected to the colony, with a wide variety of persons beWhiansd thita. t true?The selection committees had made impossible demands, it was important to remembeTr htehyat.had
wanted stabiles and yet they had wanted people who cared about going to Mars so passionately and monomaniacally that they would devote years of their lives to achieving thWe agsoatlh. at consistent?
They wanted extraverts and they wanted brilliant scientists who necessarily had had to dive deep into solitary study for years and yeaWrs.as that consistent?No! Never. It went on like that all down the list.
They had created double bind after double bind, no wonder the first hundred had hidden from them, had hated them!He recalled with a shudder that moment in the great solar storm on the Ares when everyone had realized how much lying and hiding they had had to do, when they had all turned and stared at him with all that pent-up fury, as if it were all his fault, as if he were all psychology, and had concocted the criteria and conducted the tests and made the selections all by hiHmoswelf.he had cringed at that
moment, how alone he had feIltt!had shocked him, frightened him, so much that he had not been able to think fast enough to confess that he too had lied, of course he had, more than any of the rest of them!
But why had he lied, why?
This was what he could not quite reMcaella. ncholia as a failure of memory, an acute sensation of the irreality of the past, its non-existence. H. e. .was a melancholic: withdrawn, out of control of his feelings,
inclined to depressionH.
e shouldn't have been chosen to go; and now he could not remember why he
had fought so passionately to be chosTenh.e memory had gone away, overwhelmed perhaps by the
poignant, aching, fragmented images of the life he had lived in the interstices of his desire to go to Mars. So miniscule and so precious; the evenings in the plazas, the summer days on the beaches, the nights in women's beds.The olive trees of AvignoTn.he green flame cypress.
He found he had left the Alchemist's QuaHrteer.was at the foot of the Great Salt PyraHmeids.tepped slowly up the four hundred stairs, putting his feet carefully on the blue no-slEipacphadsste. p gave him a
wider view of Underhill Plain, but it was still the same sere and barren rockpile, no matter how large it got. From the square white pavilion at the pyramid's summit one could just see Chernobyl, and the spaceport. Other than that, nothingW. hy had he come to this placWe?hy had he worked so hard to get
here, sacrificing so many of the pleasures of life, family, home, leisure, pHlaey. s.ho. o.k his headS.o far as he could recall, it had simply been what he had wanted to do, the definition Aof his life. compulsion, a life with a goal, how could you tell the diffeMrenocoen?lit nights in the fragrant olive
grove, the ground dotted with small black circles and the electric warm brush of the mistral rustling the leaves in quick soft waves, flat on his back, arms spread wide, the leaves flickering silver and grey under

the black bowl of stars; and one of those stars would be steady, faint, red, and he would seek it out and watch it, there among the windswept olive leaves; and he had been eight yeMarys oGldo!d, what were
they? Nothing explained that, nothing explained themAs!
well explain why they had painted in Lascaux,
why they had built stone cathedrals into the Wskhyy.
coral polyps built reefs.
He had had an ordinary youth, moved often, lost what friends he made, went to University of Paris to study psychology, did his degree work on space station depression and went to work for Ariane, and then Glavkosmos.Along the way got married and divorcFedra:nçoise had said he "was not therAe.ll"
those nights with her in Avignon, all those days in Villefranche-sur-mer, living in the most beautiful place on Earth, and he had walked about in a fog of desire forIt Mwaarss!absurd!Worse, it was stupidA.
failure of the imagination, of memory, of, finally, intelligence
hiteselhf:ad not been able to see what he
had had, or to imagine what he would Agnedt. now he was paying for it, trapped on an icefloe in the
Arctic night with ninety-nine foreigners, not one of whom spoke French worth aOdnalymnth.ree who
could even try, and Frank's French was worse than no French at all, like listening to someone attack the language with a hatchet.
The absence of his mind's own tongue had driven him to watching TV from home, which only exacerbated his painS. till he taped video monologues, and sent them to his mother and sister, so that
they would send replies in kind; he watched the replies many times, looking more at the backdrops than at his relativesH. e even had occasional live conversations with journalists, waiting impatiently between exchanges. Those talks made it clear how famous he was in France, a household name, and he was careful to answer everything conventionally, playing the Michel Duval persona, running the Michel
program. Sometimes he cancelled consultations with fellow colonists when he was in the mood to listen to French; let them eat EnglishB!ut these incidents got him a sharp reprimand from Frank, and a
conference with MayaW.
as he overworked?Of course not; only ninety-nine people to keep sane, while
at the same time wandering in a Provence of the mind, on tree-covered steep hillsides with their vineyards and farmhouses and ruined towers and monasteries, in a living landscape, a landscape infinitely more beautiful and humane than the stony waste of this reality-
He was in the TV loungWe.hile lost in thought he had apparently gone back inBsuidte.he could not
remember that; he had thought he was still standing on top of the Great Pyramid; and then he had blinked and was in the TV lounge (all asylums have them), watching a video image of one of the lichen-covered canyon walls of Marineris.
He shiveredI.t had happened again. He had lost touch, gone away and come to later inItthheadday. happened already some dozen times befoAren. d it was not just being lost in thought, but buried in it,
dead to the worldH.
e looked around the room, shivered convulsiveIlyt .was Ls = 5 now, the beginning
of northern spring, and the northern walls of the great canyons were basking in Stihnecesuthne. y're all going to go crazy anyway. . . .
Then it was Ls = 157, and 152 degreespahssaedd in a blur of tele-existencHee.
was basking in the
sun in the courtyard of Françoise's seaside villa in Villefranche-sur-mer, looking down on tile rooftops and terracotta pillars and a small pool, turquoise above the cobalt of the MediterAranceyapnr.ess stood
like a green flame over the pool, swaying in a breeze and casting its perfume overInhitshefadcies.tance the green headland of a peninsula-
Except really he was in Underhill Prime, usually called the trench, or Nadia's arcade, sitting on the upper balcony looking out at a dwarf sequoia, behind it the glass wall and the mirrors with their gradient refractive index that guided the light down into the concourse from its origin on the CTotaetiaDna'Or.
Durova had been killed by a crane tipped by a robot, and Nadia was inconBsuotlagbrliee.f runs off us, Michel thought as he sat with her, like rain off aIndutcimk.e Nadia would be welMl. eanwhile there

was nothing to be donDe.id they think he was a sorcerAer?priest?If that were true he would have healed himself, healed all this world, or better, flown through space Whoomueld. n't that cause a
sensation, to appear on the beach at Antibes and say, "Bonjour, I am Michel, I have come home?"
Then it was Ls = 190, and he was a lizard on the top of the Pont du Gard, on the narrow rectangular
rock plates that covered the actual aqueduct itself, which ran in its straight line high over
Hthies gorge.
diamondback skin had sluffed off around his tail, and the hot sun burned the new skin in crisscross lines. Except he was Underhill, in fact, in the atrium, and Frank had gone off to live with the Japanese that had landed in Argyre, and Maya and John were at loggerheads about their rooms, and where to house the UNOMA local headquarters; and Maya, more beautiful than ever, stalked him through the atrium,
imploring his aidH. e and Marina Tokareva had stopped rooming together nearly a full martian year
before-she had said he was not there-and looking at Maya Michel found himself imagining her as a lover but of course this was crazy, she was a russalka, she had slept with Glavkosmos bosses and cosmonauts to make her way up through the system and it had made her dissociated and bitter and unpredictable, she
used sex to hurt now, sex was just diplomacy by other means to her, it would be insane to have anything to do with her in that mode, to be drawn down into the vortex of her limbs and her limWbihcysystem.
not send crazy people in the first place. . . .
But now it was Ls =2H41e. walked over the honeycombed limestone parapet of Les Baux, looking in
the ruined chambers of the medieval hermitaIgtew.
as near sunset and the light was a curious martian
orange, the limestone glowing, the whole village and hazy plain below stretching out to the whitebronze line of the Mediterranean, looking as implausible as a dr-eEaxmc.ept it was a dream, and he woke up,
and found himself awake and back in UnderPhhilyl.llis and Edvard had just returned from an expedition
and Phyllis was laughing and showing them a buttery lump of rock, "it was scattered all over the canyon," she said laughing, "gold nuggets the size of your fist."
Then he was walking the tunnels out to the gTarhaegec.olony's psychiatrist, experiencing visions, falling
into gaps of consciousness, gaps of memoPrhyy. sician, heal thyself!But he couldn'tH.
e had gone insane
of homesickness.Homesickness, there must be a better term for that, a scientific label that would legitimize it, make it real to others; but he already knew it wHase rmeails.sed Provence so much that at times he felt he could not breatHhee. was like Nadia's hanad, part of it torn away, the ghost nerves still throbbing with pain.
. . . .And save them the trouble?
Time passedT. he Michel program walked around, a hollow persona, empty inside, only some tiny homunculus of the cerebellum left to teleoperate the thing.
The night of the second day of Ls = 266, he wentHtoe wbeads. dog-tired though he had done nothing, totally exhausted and drained, and yet he lay in the dark of his room and could Hnoist mslienedp.spun miserably; he was very aware of how sick he Hweasw. ished he could quit the pretense and admit that
he had lost it, institutionalize himseGlfo.
home.He could remember almost nothing of the previous few
weeks; or maybe it was longer than thHaet? was not sureH. e began to weep.
His door clickedI.t swung open, and a narrow wedge of hall light shone in, unbNloockeodn.e there. "Hello?" he said, working to keep the tears out of his"Wvohicoe.is it?"
The reply was right in his ear, as if from a helmet intercom: "Come with me," a man's voice said. Michel jerked back and bumped into the wHaell.stared up at a black silhouetted figure.

"We need your help," the figure whispeAredh. and gripped his arm as he pressed back into the wall.
"And you need ours.A"
suggestion of a smile in the voice, which Michel did not recognize.
Fear thrust him into a new woSruldd.denly he could see much better, atsheiftouch of his visitor had
sprung his pupils open like camera aperturAes.thin dark-skinned manA.
stranger. Astonishment
launched through his fear, and he got up and moved through the dark light with dreamlike precision, stepping into slippers, and then at the stranger's urging following him out into the hallway, feeling the lightness of martian gee for the first time in yTehaers.hallway seemed bursting with gray light, though he
could tell that only the night strips in the floor weIrte woans.
enough to see well by if you were scared.
His companion had short black dreadlocks, which made his head appear sHpiekewd.as short, thin,
narrow-faced. A stranger, no doubt about Aitn.
intruder from one of the new colonies in the southern
hemsiphere, Michel thoughtB. ut the man was leading him through Underhill with an expert touch, moving in utter silenceI.ndeed the whole of Underhill was soundless, as if it were a silent black-and-white film. He glanced at his wristwatch; it was blaTnhke. timeslip.He wanted to say "Who are you?" but the
silence was so blanketing that he couldn't bring himself to sHpeakm. outhed the words and the man
turned and looked over his shoulder at him, the whites of his eyes visible and luminous all the way around
the irises, the nostrils wide black hol"eIs'm.
the stowaway," he mouthed, and grinnHedis.
eyeteeth were
discolored; they were made of stone, Michel suddenly saw Mthaartt.ian stone teeth in his heaHde.
took
Michel by the armT.hey were heading to the farm lo"cWk.e need helmets out there," Michel whispered, balking.
"Not tonight."The man opened the lock door, and no air rushed into it even though it was open on the other side.They went in and walked between the black rows of packed foliage, and the air was sweet. Hiroko will be angry, Michel thought.
His guide was gonAe.head Michel saw movement, and heard a tinkly little laItugsho.unded like a child. Suddenly it occurred to Michel that the absence of children accounted for the colony's pervasive feeling of sterility, that they could build buildings and grow plants and yet without children this sterile feeling would still permeate every part of their liEvexst.remely frightened, he continued to walk toward the
center of the farmI.t was warm and humid, and the air stank of wet dirt and fertilizer andLifgohltiage. glinted from thousands of leaf surfaces, as if the stars had fallen through the clear roof and clustered around him.Rows of corn rustled, and the air was going to his head like Lbirtatlnedyfe. et were
scurrying behind the narrow rice paddies: even in the darkness the rice was an intense blackish green, and there among the paddies were small faces, grinning knee-high and disappearing when he turned to face them.Hot blood flooded his face and hands, his blood turned to fire and he retreated three steps, then stopped and spunT. wo naked little girls were walking down the lane toward him, black-haired,
dark-skinned, about three years olTd.heir oriental eyes were bright in the gloom, their expressions
solemn. They took him by the hands and turned him around; he allowed them to lead him down the lane, looking down at first one head and then the oStohmere. one had decided to take action against their
sterility. As they walked along other naked toddlers appeared out of the shrubbery and crowded around them, boys and girls both, some a bit darker or lighter than the first two, most the same color, all the same age.Nine or ten of them escorted Michel to the center of the farm, weaving around him in a quick trot; and there at the center of the maze was a small clearing, currently occupied by about a dozen adults, all naked, seated in a rough circTlhe.e children ran to the adults, gave them hugs and sat at their knees. Michel's pupils opened further in the nimbus of starlight and leaf gleam, and he recognized members of
the farm team, Iwao, Raul, Ellen, Rya, Gene, Evgenia, all of the farm team except for Hiroko herself.
After a moment's hesitation Michel stepped out of his slippers and took off his clothes, and put them on top of the slippers and sat down in an empty spot in theHecirdcilde.n't know what he was taking part
in, but it didn't matteSre. veral of the figures nodded at him in welcome, and Ellen and Evgenia, seated on

each side of him, touched him on the aArmlls.of a sudden the children got up and ran together down
one of the aisles, squealing and giggliTngh.ey came back in a tight knot around Hiroko, who walked into
the middle of the circle, her naked form dark in the darTkrnaeislesd.
by the kids she walked slowly
around the circle, pouring from her two outstretched fists a little bit of dirt into each person's offered hands. Michel held up his palms with Ellen and Evgenia as she approached, he stared at her lustrous skin. Once on the night beach at Villefranche he had walked by a gang of African women splashing in the phosphorescent waves, white water on black gleaming skin-
The dirt in his hand was warm and smelled "rTushtiys. is our body," Hiroko said. She walked to the
other side of the circle, gave the children each a fistful of dirt and sent them back to sit among the adults. She sat across from Michel and began to chant in JapaEnvegsen. ia leaned over and whispered a
translation or rather an explanation in his Teahre.y were celebrating the areophany, a ceremony they had created together under Hiroko's guidance and inspiratiIotn.was a kind of landscape religion, a
consciousness of Mars as a physical space suffused with kami, which was the spiritual energy or power that rested in the land itseKlfa. mi was manifested most obviously in certain extraordinary objects in the landscape, stone pillars, isolated ejecta, sheer cliffs, oddly smoothed crater interiors, the broad circular peaks of the great volcanoesT.hese intensified expressions of Mars's kami had a terran analogue within
the colonists themselves, the power that Hiroko called viriditas, that greening fructiparous power within, which knows that the wild world itself is hKoalym. i, viriditas; it was the combination of these sacred powers that would allow humans to exist here in a meaningful way.
When Michel heard Evegnia whisper the word combination, all the terms immediately fell into a semantic rectangle: kami and viriditas, Mars and Earth, hatred and love, absence and yeaAr ndngt.hen the
kaleidoscope clicked home and all the rectangles folded into place in his mind, all antimonies ctoollapsed a single, beautiful rose, the heart of the areophany, kami suffused with viriditas, both fully red and fully
green at one and the same timHeis.
jaw was slack, his skin was burning, he could not explain it and did
not want toH.
is blood was fire in his veins.
Hiroko stopped chanting, brought her hand to her mouth, began to eat the dirt in Ahellr tphaelmot.hers
did the sameM.
ichel lifted his hand to his faacel:ot of dirt to eat, but he stuck his tongue out and llicked
up half of it and felt a brief electric shiver as he rubbed it against the roof of his mouth, sliding the gritty stuff back and forth until it was mItudta. sted salty and rusty, with an unpleasant whiff of rotten eggs and
chemicals. He choked it down, gagging slightHlye.
swallowed the other mouthful in his haTnhde.re was
an irregular hum coming from the circle of celebrants as they ate, vowel sounds shifting from one to the next, aaaay, ooooo, ahhhh, iiiiiii, eeee, uuuuuu, lingering over each vowel for a minute it seemed, the sound spreading into two and sometimes three parts, with head tones creating odd harHmioronkieos.
began to chant over this sonEgv.eryone stood and Michel scrambled up with thTemhe.y all moved into
the center of the circle together, Evgenia and Ellen taking Michel by the arms and pulling hTimhenalong. they were all pressed together around Hiroko, in a mass of close-packed bodies, surrounding Michel so
that warm skin squashed up against every side of Thhimis. is our bodyA.
lot of them were kissing, their
eyes closed.Slowly they moved, twisting to keep maximum contact as they shifted to new kinetic configurations. Wiry pubic hair tickled his bottom, and he felt what had to have been an erect penis
against his hipT. he dirt was heavy in his stomach, and he felt light-headed; his blood was fire, his skin felt like a taut balloon, containing a blaTzhe.e stars were packed overhead in astonishing numbers, and each
one had its own color, green or red or blue or yellow; they looked like sparks.
He was a phoenixH. iroko herself pressed against him, and he rose in the center of the fire, ready for rebirth. She held his new body in a full embrace, squeezed him; she was tall, and seemed aSllhemuscle.
looked him eye-to-eyeH.
e felt her breasts against his ribs, her pubic bone hard on hiSs htehigkhis.sed
him, her tongue touching his teeth; he tasted the dirt, then suddenly felt all of hearllatthoencres;t of his
life the involuntary memory of that feeling would be enough to start the pulse of an erection, but at that

moment he was too overwhelmed, completely aflame.
Hiroko pulled her head back and looked at him aHgiasinb.reath was whooshing in his lungs, in and out.
In English, in a voice formal but kind, she said, "This is your initiation into the areophany, the celebration
of the body of MarWs. elcome to itW.
e worship this worldW.
e intend to make a place for ourselves
here, a place that is beautiful in a new Martian way, a way never seen Wone Ehaarvthe. built a hidden refuge in the south, and now we are leaving for it.
"We know you, we love yWoue.
know we can use your heWlpe.
know you can use our heWlpe.
want to build just what you are yearning for, just what you have been missBinugt haellrei.n new forms.
For we can never go bacWk.e must go forwardW. e must find our own waWy.e start tonightW. you to come with us."
And Michel said, "I'll come."
Part Five
Falling Into History
-+=*=+-
e want
The lab hummed quietlyD. esks and tables and benches were cluttered with things, the white walls crowded with graphs and posters and cut-out cartoons, all vibrating slightly under bright artificial light.
Like any lab anywhere: somewhat clean, somewhat disordeTrlhye.
one window in the corner was black
and reflected the interior; it was night outsTidhee. whole building was nearly empty.
But two men in lab coats stood at one of the benches, leaning forward to look at a computer screen. The shorter of the two tapped at the keyboard below the screen with a forefinger, and the image on the screen changed.Green corkscrews on a black field, squiggling so that they looked sharply three dimensional, as if the screen were a bAonx. image from an electron microscope; the field was only a few microns across.
"You see it's a kind of plasmid repair of the gene sequence," the short scien"Btisrteaskasidi.n the original strands are identifiedR. eplacement sequences are synthesized, and when these replacement
sequences are introduced into the cell, the breaks are seen as attachment sites, and the replacements bind to the originals."
"Do you introduce them by transformatioEnl?ectroporation?"
"Transformation.Treated cells are injected along with a competent, and the repair strands make a conjugal transfer."
"In vivo?" "In vivo."

A low whistle".So you can repair any little thinCg?ell division error?" "That's right."
The two men stared at the corkscrews on the screen, waving about like the new tips of grapevines in a breeze.
"You've got proof?"
"Did Vlad show you those mice in the next room?" "Yeah."
"Those mice are fifteen years old." Another whistle.
They went next door into the mice room, muttering to each other under the hum of mTahcehintaelrly. one stared curiously into a cage, where patches of fur breathed under woodWchheinpst.hey left again
they turned out the lights in both rooTmhse.
flicker of the electron microscope screen illuminated the first
lab, giving it a green caTsth.e scientists went to the window, talking in low voTihcey.
looked outT. he
sky was purple with the coming day; stars were popping out of exiOstuetncoen.
the horizon stood a
black massive bulk, the flat-topped mound of an immense volcOalnyom. pus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system.
The tall scientist shook his he"aTdh. is changes everything, you know." "I know."
-+=*=+-
From the bottom of the shaft, the sky looked like a bright pinTkhecosihna.ft was round, a kilometer in diameter, seven kilometers deepB. ut from the bottom it seemed much thinner and deeper than that. Perspective plays a lot of tricks on the human eye.
Such as that bird, flying down the round pink dot of the sky, lookinEgxscoepbt igit. wasn't a bird. "Hey," John saidT. he shaft director, a round-faced Japanese namEetdsu Okakura, looked at him, and through their two faceplates John could see the man's nervousOgnrein.of his teeth was discolored.
Okakura looked up".Something falling!" he said quickly, and th"eRnu: n!"
They turned and ran over the shaft fQlouoirc.kly John found that although most of the loose rock had been swept off the starred black basalt, no effort had been made to make the shaft bottom perfectly level. Miniature craters and scarps became increasingly difficult as he gained speed; in this moment of primate flight the instincts formed in childhood reasserted themselves, and he kept pushing off too hard
with each step, coming down on uninspected terrain with a jolt and then pushing off wildly again, a crazy

run until finally he caught his toe and lost control and fell crashing across the ragged stone, arms flung out to save his faceplateI.t was small comfort to see that Okakura had fallen asFowrteulln.ately the same
gravity that had caused their tumbles was giving them more time to escape; the falling object had not yet landed. They got up and ran again, and once again OkakuraJofhenll.glanced back and saw a bright
metallic blur hit the rock, and then the sound of the impact was a solid whump, likSeilvaerblboiwts. splashed away, some in their direction; he stopped running, scanned the air for incomingNoejecta. sound at all.
A big hydraulic cylinder flew out of the air and banged end over end to their left, and they both jumped. He hadn't seen it coming.
After that, stillnessT.hey stood nearly a minute, and then Boone stiHrre .was sweating; they were in pressurized suits, but at 49° C. the shaft bottom was the hottest place on Mars, and the suit's insulation was built for coldH. e made a move to help Okakura to his feet, but stopped himself; presumably the
man would rather get up himself than owe giri to Boone for thIef Bheolopn. e understood the concept properly. "Let's have a look," he said instead.
Okakura got up, and they walked back over the dense black
Tbahsealst.haft had long ago bored into
solid bedrock, in fact it was now about twenty percent of the way through the lithosphere. It was stifling at the bottom, as if the suits were entirely uninsulBaoteodn.e's air supply was a welcome coolness in the
face and lungs. Framed by the dark shaft walls, the pink sky above was verySubnrilgighhtt. illuminated
a short conic section of the shaft wInallm.
idsummer the sun might shine all the way-no, they were south
of the Tropic of CapricorInn.
shadow forever, down here.
They approached the wrecIkt. had been a robot dump truck, hauling rock up the road that cut a spiral into the shaft walPl.ieces of the truck were mixed with big rough boulders, some scattered as much as a hundred meters from the point of impaBcet.yond a hundred meters debris was rare; the cylinder that had flown by them must have been fired out under pressure of some kind.
A pile of magnesium, aluminum and steel, all twisted hoTrrhibelym. agnesium and aluminum had partially melted. "Do you think it fell all the way from the top?" Boone asked.
Okakura didn't respondB. oone glanced at him; the man was studiously avoiding his Pgearzhea.ps he
was frightened.Boone said, "There must have been a good thirty seconds between the time I caught sight of it and when it hit."
At roughly three meters per second squared, that had been more than enough time for it to reach terminal velocity.So it had hit at about two hundred kilometers per Nhoturs.o bad, reallyO. n Earth it would have come down in less than half the atinmde,might have caught themH.ell, if he hadn't have looked up when he had, this one might have caught Htheemm.ade a quick calculatioInt. had probably
been about halfway up the shaft when he saBwutit.at that point it could have been falling for quite some time.
Boone slowly walked around into gthaep between the shaft wall and the pile of sTcrhaep.truck had
landed on its right side, and the left side was deformed but recognizable. Okakura climbed several steps up the wreckage, then pointed at a black area behind the left froJnothntirfeo.llowed him up, scraped at
the metal with the claw on his right glove's forefiTnhger.black came away like soAotm. monium nitrate explosion. The body of the truck was bent in there as if hamm"Aeregdo.od-sized charge," John observed.
"Yes," Okakura said, and cleared his thrHoaet. was frightened, that was suWre.ell, the first man on

Mars had almost been killed while in his care; and himself too, of course, but who knew which would scare him more?"Enough to push truck off road."
"Well, like I said, there's been some sabotage reported." Okakura was frowning through his facepla"tBeu. t who?And why?"
"I don't knowA. nyone in your team seem to be having any psychological difficulties?"
"No."Okakura's face was carefully blanEk.very group larger than five had someone experiencing difficulties, and Okakura's little industrial town had a population of five hundred.
"This the sixth case I've seen," John
"sAaidlt.hough none so close upH."e laughed.The image of the
birdlike dot in the pink sky came back to "hItimw. ould have been easy for someone to attach a bomb to a truck before it came dowDne. tonate it with a clock or an altimeter."
"Reds, you mean.O" kakura was looking relieved".We have heard of themB.ut it is. . .H."e shrugged. "Crazy."
"Yes."John climbed gingerly off the wrecTkh.ey walked back across the floor of the shaft to the car they had come down iOn.kakura was on another band, talking to people up top.
John stopped by the central pit to have a final look aTrhoeunsdh.eer size of the shaft was hard to
grasp; the muted light and vertical lines reminded him of a cathedral, but all the cathedrals ever built would have sat like dollhouses at the bottom of this greatTheoles.urreal scale made him blink, and he decided he had tilted his head back too long.
They drove up the road inscribed in the side wall to the first elevator, left the car and gotUipn the cage. they went.Seven times they had to get out and walk across the wall road to the bottom of the next elevator. The ambient light grew to something more like ordinary dayAligchrot.ss the shaft he could see
where the wall was scored by the double spiral of the two trhoraedads:-marks in an enormous screw hole. The shaft's bottom had disappeared into the murk, he couldn't even make out the truck.
In the last two elevators they ascended through regolith; first the megaregolith, which looked like cracked bedrock, and then the regolith proper, its rock and gravel and ice all hidden behind a concrete retainer, a smooth curved wall that looked like a dam, and was angled so far back that the final elevator was actually a cog rail traTinh.ey cranked up the side of this enormous funnel-Big Man's bathtub drain, Okakura had said on the way down-and came finally to the surface, out into the sun.
Boone got out of the cog train and looked back dTohwenr.egolith retainer lookeldike the inner wall of a very smooth crater, with a two-laned road spiraling down it; but the crater had Anomfolohoorl.e.He
could see down the shaft a little way, but the wall was in shadow, and only the road spiraling down picked up any light, so that it appeared to be something like a freestanding staircase, descending through empty space to the planet's core.
Three of the giant dump trucks ground slowly up the last stretch of the road, full of black boulders. These days it took them five hours to make the trip from the bottom of the shaft, OkaVkeurrya said.
little supervision, like most of the project, in both manufacture and opeTrahteionin. habitants of the town only had to see to programming, deployment, maintenance, and troubleshooAtinndg,. now, security.
The town, called Senzeni Na, was scattered over the floor of Thaumasia Fossae's deepest canyon.

Nearest to the hole was the industrial park; here most of the excavation equipment was manufactured, and the rock from the hole processed for its trace amounts of valuable Bmoeotnaels.and Okakura
stepped into the rim station, changed out of their pressure suits into coppery jumpers, and entered one of the clear walktubes that connected all the buildings in the Ittowwna.s cold and sunny in the tubes, and everyone in them wore clothing with an outer layer of copper-colored foil, the latest in Japanese radproofing. Copper creatures, moving in clear tubes; it looked to Boone like a giant aOntvefarhrmea.d
the thermal cloud frosted into existence and shot up like steam from a valve, until it was caught by high winds and blown out in a long flattened contrail.
The town's actual living quarters were built into the southeast wall of the Acanbyiogn.rectangular
section of the cliff had been replaced by glass; behind it was a tall open concourse, backed by five stories of terraced apartments.
They walked through the concourse and Okakura led him up to the town offices, on the Afifth floor. small crowd of concerned-looking people gathered in their wake, chattering to Okakura and among themselves. They all went through the office and out onto its balJcoohnny.watched closely as Okakura
described in Japanese what had happeneAd.
number of his audience looked nervous, and most would
not meet John's eyeH. ad the near accident itself been enough to incur Itgirwi?as important to make sure they didn't feel publicly shown up, or anything likSehaimt. e was strong stuff for the Japanese, and Okakura was beginning to look desperately unhappy, as if he were deciding it had been his fault.
"Look, it could just as easily have been outsiders as someone from here," John saiHdebomldadlye. some suggestions for future securit"yT. he rim is a perfect barrieSr.et up an alarm system, and a few people at the rim station could keep an eye on both the system and the eAlevwataosrtes. of time, but I guess we have to do it."
Diffidently Okakura asked him if he knew anything about who might be responsible for the Hsaebotage. shrugged. "No idea, sorryP. eople opposed to the moholes, I guess."
"But the moholes are dug," one of them said.
"I knowI.
guess it's symbolic.H" e grinned."But if a truck falls on someone, it would be a bad symbol."
They nodded seriouslyH. e wished he had Frank's facility for languages, it would help to be able to communicate better with these peoplTe.hey were hard to read; inscrutable and all that.
They wondered if he wanted to lie down.
"I'm okay," he sai"dI.t missed usW. schedule we had."
e'll have to look into it, but today let's just continue according to the
So Okakura and several men and women led him on a tour of the town, and cheerfully he visited labs and meeting rooms, lounges and dining haHllse. nodded and shook hands and said Hi until he was sure
he had met over fifty percent of Senzeni Na's inhabiMtanotsst.
had not yet heard of the incident in the
hole, and all were pleased to meet him; happy to shake his hand, to speak with him, to show him something, to look at himIt. happened everywhere he went, reminding him unpleasantly of the fishbowl years between his first trip and his second.
But he did his joAbn.
hour's work, then four hours of being The First Man OnthMe aursu: al ratio.
And as afternoon darkened to evening, and the whole town gathered for a banquet in honor of his visit, he settled back and patiently played his pTahrta.t meant shifting into a good mood, no easy task that

night. If fact he took a break and went back to the bathroom in his room, and swallowed a capsule manufactured by Vlad's medical group in Acheron; it was a drug they had named omegendorph, a synthetic mix of all the endorphins and opiates they had found in the brain's natural chemistry, and a better feel-good drug than Boone would have imagined possible.
He returned to the banquet much more relaIxnedfa. ct filled with a little gloHwe. had escaped death, after all, and by running like a wild mSoanm!e more endorphins were not inappropriatHe.e moved
easily from table to table, asking questions as he wThenist. was what pleased people, what gave them the festival feeling that a meeting with John Boone should Jborhinng.liked being able to do that, it was
the part of his job that made celebrity tolerable; because when he asked questions, people leaped to answer like salmon in the streaImt .was peculiar, really, as if people were seeking to right the imbalance they felt in the situation, in which they knew so much about him while he knew so little aSboout them. that with the right encouragment, often a single carefully-judged prompt, they would erupt with the most astonishing spills of personal informatiown:itnessing, testifying, confessing.
So he spent the evening learning about life at Senze(n"iMNeaans, what have we done?Q"uick grin.)
And afterwards he was led to his big guest suite, the rooms thick with live bamboo, the bed seemingly hacked out of a stand ofWith. en he was alone he connected his code box to the phone, and called Sax Russell.
# # #
Russell was at Vlad's new headquarters, a research complex built into a dramatic fin ridge in the
Acheron Fossae north of Olympus MonSsa.x spent all his time there now, studying genetic engineering
like an undergrad; he had become convinced that biotechnology was the key to terraforming, and he was determined to educate himself to the point where he could contribute actively to that part of the
campaign, despite the fact that all his training was in phMysoicdse.rn biology was notoriously gooey, and
a lot of physicists hated it; but the people at Acheron said Sax was a quick learner, and John believed it. Sax himself made little snicking noises at his own progress, but it was clear he wasHedeteaplkeind.
about it all the time, "It's the crux," he would"wseayn, eed the water out of the ground and the carbon
dioxide out of the air, and it's going to take biomass to doAnbdoths.o" the labs.
he slaved at the screens and in
He listened to Boone's report with his usual impassSivuictyh. a parody of the scientist, John thouHghet. even wore a lab coaSt.eeing his characteristic blink madJeohn think of a story he had heard one of
Sax's assistants tell, to a laughing audience at a party: in a secret experiment gone awry, a hundred lab rats that had been injected with an intelligence booster became genTiuhseeys. revolted and escaped
from their cages, and captured their principal investigator, and strapped him down and retro-injected all their minds into his body, using a method they invented on the spot-and that scientist was Saxifrage Russell, white-coated, blinking, twitching, inquisitive, lab-bounHdi.s brain the sum of a hundred hyperintelligent rats, "and named for a flower like lab rats are, it's their little joke, see?"
It explained a loJto.hn smiled as he finished his report, and Sax cocked his head at him cur"iDouosly. you think this truck was meant to kill you?"
"I don't know."
"How do the people there seem?" "Scared."

"Think they're in on it?"
John shrugged". I doubt itT. hey're probably just worried about what happens next."
Sax flicked a hand o"uSt.abotage like that won't make the slightest dent in the project," he said mildly. "I know."
"Who's doing this, John?" "I don't know."
"Could it be Ann, do you thiHnka?s she become another prophet, like Hiroko or Arkady, with followers and a program and the like?"
"You have followers and a program too," John reminded him.
"But I'm not telling my followers to wreck things and try to kill people."
"Some people think you're trying to wreck MAanrsd. people will certainly die as a result of terraforming, in accidents."
"What are you saying?"
"Just reminding youT.rying to get you to see why someone might do this." "So you do think it's Ann."
"Or Arkady, or Hiroko, or someone we've never heard of in one of the new Tchoelroeniaerse.
a lot of
people here nowA.
lot of factions."
"I know."Sax walked over to a countertop, drained his battered old coffeeFimnaulgly.
he said, "I'd like
you to try to find out who iGt ois.where you need to gGoo.
talk to AnnR. eason with her."There was a
plaintive note in his voic"eI: can't even talk to her anymore."
John stared at him, surprised at the display of emSoatixont.ook this silence for reluctance, and went on: "I know it isn't exactly your thing, but everyone will talk tYooyuo'rue. practically the only one left we
can say that abouIt. know you're doing the mohole work, but you can get your team to do your part of
that, and keep visiting the moholes as part of this inTquhierrye.
really isn't anyone else who can do it.
There's no real police to turn Atolt.hough if things keep happening, UNOMA will provide some."
"Or the transnationals.B" oone considered itT. he sight of that truck, falling out of the sky".A.ll. ri.ght. I'll go talk to Ann, anywaAyf.ter that we should get together and talk about security for all the terraforming projects.If we can stop anything more from happening, that will keep UNOMA out."
"Thanks, John."
Boone wandered out onto his suite's balcoTnhye.
concourse was filled with Hokkaido pines, the chilled
air stiff with resinC. opper figures walked below, among the tree trunBkoso. ne considered the new
situation. For ten years now he had worked for Russell on terraforming, managing the moholes and doing
PR and the like, and he enjoyed the work; but he wasn't on the cutting edge of any of the sciences

involved, and so he was out of the decision-making Hloeopk.new that many people thought of him as a figurehead only, a celebrity for consumption back on Earth; a dumb space jock who had gotten lucky once, and was living off that for goTohda.t didn't bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their Tshizaet. was okay, especially since in his case they
were wrong.His power was considerable, although perhaps only he could see the full extent of it, as it consisted of an endless succession of face-to-face meetings, of the influence he had over what people chose to do. Power wasn't a matter of job titles, aftPeor waellr. was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influencTe.he figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.
Still, despite all that, there was something to be said for this neHwe tcaosukl.d feel that alreadIyt. would problematic, difficult, perhaps risky. . . above all, challenAginnge.w challenge; he liked that.
Going back into his suite, getting into bed (John Boone Slept Here!) it occurred to him that now he was going to be not only the first man on Mars, but the first deHteectgivrien.ned at the thought, and the last
action of the omegandorph set his nerves aglow.
# # #
Ann Clayborne was doing a survey in the mountains surrounding the Argyre Basin, which meant he could check out a glider and fly from Senzeni Na tSoohear.rly the next morning he took the elevator balloon up the mooring mast to the stationary dirigible floating over the town, exulting as he rose in the ever-expanding view of the big Thaumasia canyoFnrso.m the dirigible he lowered himself into the
cockpit of one of the gliders hooked to its underAsifdteer. securing himself he unhooked, and the glider dropped like a stone until he ran it into the mohole thermal, which tossed it violentlyHeupfwouargdh.t
for control and banked the big gossamer craft into a steep rising gyre, whooping as he battled the intense buffeting; it was like riding a soap bubble over a bonfire!
At five thousand meters the plume cloud flattened and spread out to tJhoehneasswt.ooped out of his
spiral and headed southeast, playing with the glider as he went to get a feHeel fworouiltd. the winds carefully to make it to Argyre.
have to ride
He aimed into the sun's smeary yelblolawze. Wind keened over the wingTs.he land below him was a dark rough orange, shading to a very light orange at the hoTrhizeonso. uthern highlands were wildly pocked in every direction, with the raw, primordial, lunar look that saturation cratering alwaJoyhs nhad. loved flying over it, and he piloted unconsciously, concentrating on the land Ibt ewloaws. precious to sit back and fly, feeling the wind as if under his elbows, watching the land and not thinkinHge awtahsing.
sixty-four years old in this year 2047 (or "m-year 10" as he usually thought of it), and he had been the most famous man alive for almost thirty of those years; and nowadays he was happiest when he was alone, and flying.
After an hour had passed, he started thinking about his newIt
twasaks. important not to get caught up
in fantasies of magnifying glasses and cigar ash, or gumshoe with handgun; there was work he could do even as he flewH. e called up Sax, and asked if he could connect his AI into the UNOMA emigration and planetary travel records, without alerting UNOMA to the connecAtifotenr. some investigation Sax
got back to him and said that he could manage that, and so John sent a sequence of questions through, and then continued to flAy.n hour and many craters later, Pauline's redlight blinked rapidly, indicating a downloading of raw dataJ.ohn asked the AtIo run the data through various analyses, and when she was done he studied the results on the screPeantt.erns of movement; they were confusing, but he hoped that
when matched with the sabotage incidents, something might turnOfupc.ourse there were people moving around off the record, the hidden colony among them; and who knew what Hiroko and the others thought of the terraforming projectsS?till, it was worth a look.

The Nereidium Montes popped over the horizon ahMeaadr.s had never had much tectonic movement,
and so mountain ranges were rare; those that existed tended to be crater rims writ large, rings of ejecta thrown out by impacts so great that the debris fell in two or three concentric ranges, each many kilometers wide, and extremely ruggeHd.ellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the
biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancientOceanus Borealis.Debate raged over that question, and Ann, John's final authority in such matters, had never expressed an opinion on it.
The Nereidium Montes made up the northern rim around Argyre, but currently Ann and her team were investigating the southern rim, the Charitum MonBteos.one adjusted his course southward, and in the
early afternoon he soared low over the broad flat plain of the ArgyreABftearsinth. e wild cratering of the highlands, the basin floor seemed smooth indeed, a flat yellowish plain bounded by the big curve of rim ridges. From his vantage he could see about ninety degrees of the arc of the rim, enough to give him a sense of the size of the impact that had formed Argyre; it was an amaziFnlgyinsigghot.ver thousands of
Martian craters had given Boone a sense of the sizes they came in, and Argyre was simply off the scale; a quite big crater named Galle was no more than a pockmark in ArgyreA's wrihmo!le world must have
crashed in here!Or, at the very least, a damn big asteroid.
Inside the southeast curve of the rim, on the basin floor against the foothills of the Charitum, he spotted the thin white line of a landing sEtriaps.y to spot human constructs in such desolation, their regularity
stood out like a beacoTn.hermals were rising hard off the sunwarmed hills, and he turned down into one, dropping with a vibratory humm, the craft's wings bouncing visibly as it stoDorpoepdp.ing like a rock,
like that asteroid, John thought with a grin, and he pulled up for the landing with a dramatic last flourish, putting down with as much precision as he could muster, aware of his reputation as a hot flyer, which of course had to be reinforced at every opportunPitayr.t of the job. . . .
But it turned out there were only two people in the trailers by the strip, and neither of them had watched him land.They were inside watching TV news from Earth; they looked up when he came in the inner lock
door, and jumped to their feet to greet
Ahinmn. was up one of the mountain canyons with a team, they
told him, probably no more than two hours' drive aJwohany. ate lunch with them, two Brit women with
North accents, very tough and charming; then he took a rover and followed the tracks up a cleft into the Charitum. An hour's twisting climb up a flat-bottomed arroyo brought him to a mobile trailer, with three rovers parked outside iTt.ogether they gave it the look of a dessicated café in the Mojave.
The trailer was unoccupieFd.ootprints led away from the camp in many directiAofntse.r thinking it over
Boone climbed a knoll west of camp, and sat down on itsHepelaaky.
on the rock and slept until the
cold penetrated his walkerT. hen he sat up and tongued a capsule of omegendorph, and watched the black shadows of the hills creep eaHset. thought about what had happened at Senzeni Na, running
through his memories of the hours before and after the accident, the looks on people's faces, what they had said.The image of the falling truck gave his pulse a little surge.
Copper figures appeared in a cleft between hills to theHwe esto. od and descended the knoll, and met them down at the trailer.
"What are you doing here?" Ann said over the first hundred's band. "I want to talk."
She grunted and switched off.

The trailer would have been a bit crowded even withouTt hheiym.sat in the main room knee-to-knee, while Simon Frazier heated spagetti sauce and boiled water for pasta in the little kitchTenhenook.
trailer's sole window faced east, and as they ate they watched the shadow of the mountains stretch out over the floor of the great basJionh.n had brought along a half-liter bottle of Utopian cognac, and he
broke it out after dinner to moans of approAvsal.the areologists sipped he cleaned the dishes ("I want to") and asked how their investigation was goTinhge.y were looking for evidence of ancient glacial
episodes, which if found would support a model of the planet's early history that included oceans filling the low spots.
But Ann, John thought as he listened to them; would she want to find evidence of an ocIetanic past? was a model that tended to lend moral support to the terraforming project, implying as it did that they were only restoring an earlier state of thinSgos.probably she would not want to find any such evidence. Would that disinclination bias her worWk?ell, sure.If not consciously, then deepeCr.onsciousness was
just a thin lithosphere over a big hot core, afteDr eatlel.ctives had to remember that.
But everyone in the trailer seemed to agree that they weren't finding any evidence for glaciation, and they were all good areologistsT.here were high basins that resembled cirques, and high valleys with the classic
U-shape of glacial valleys, and some dome-and-wall configurations that might have been the result of glacial plucking; all these features had been seen in satellite photos, along with one or two bright flashes that some people had thought might be reflections from glacial pBoulitsho.n the ground none of it was
holding up.They had found no glacial polish, even in the most wind-protected sections of the U-shaped valleys; no moraines, lateral or butt; no signs of plucking, or of transition lines where nanatuks would have stuck out of even the highest levels of ancientNoicteh.ing. It was another case of what they called sky
areology, which had a history going back to the early satellite photos, and even to the teTlhesecopes. canals had been sky areology; and many more bad hypotheses had been formulated in the same way, hypotheses that were only now being tested with the rigor of ground areMoloosgt yc. ollapsed under the weight of surface data, got tossed in the canal as they said.
The glacial theory, however, and the oceanic model of which it was part, had always been more persistent than mostF. irst, because almost every model of the planet's formation indicated that there should have been a lot of water outgassing, and it had to have gone somAenwdhesreec. ond, John
thought, because there were a lot of people who would be comforted if the oceanic model were true;
they would feel less uneasy about the morality of terraformOipnpgo. nents to terraforming, therefore. . . . No, he was not surprised that Ann's team was not finding anyFteheinlign.g the cognac a bit, and irritated
by her unfriendliness, he said from the kitchen, "But if there were glaciers the most recent would have been, what, a billion years agToh?at much time would take care of any of the superficial signs, I should think, glacial polish or moraines or nanatuLkesa. ving nothing but the gross landforms, which is what you have. Right?"
Ann had been silent, but now she
"sTaihde,
landforms aren't unique to glaciatioAnl.l of them are
common in Martian ranges, because they were all formed by rock falling out of Etvheryskkyi.nd of
formation you can think of is out here somewhere, bizarre shapes limited only by the the angle of repose." She had refused any cognac, which surprised John, and now she stared at the floor with a disgusted
look.
"Not U-shaped valleys, surely," John said. "Yes, U-shaped valleys too."
"The problem is that the oceanic model isn't very falsifiable," Simon said "qYuoieutlyc.an keep failing to find good evidence for it, and we are, but that doesn't disprove it."

The kitchen clean, John asked Ann to go out for a sunseSthwe ahlkes. itated, unwilling; but it was one of her rituals and everyone knew it, and with a quick grimace and a hard glance she agreed.
Once outside he led her up to the same peak he had napTpheed sokny.
was a plum colored arch over
the black serrated ridges surrounding them, and stars were popping into existence in a flood, hundreds per eyeblink.He stood by her side; she stared away from Thhime .ragged skyline might have been a
scene from EarthS. he was a bit taller than him, a gaunt, angular silhoJuoehtnte.liked her, but whatever reciprocal liking she may have had for him-and they had had some good talks in years past-had dissipated when he chose to work with SHaex. could have done anything he liked, her hard looks said, and yet he had chosen terraforming.
Well, it was truHe.e put his hand before her, forefinger raiSsehde. punched her wristpad and suddenly her breathing sighed in his e"aWr. hat," she said, without looking his way.
"It's about the sabotage incidents," he said.
"I thought soI. suppose Russell thinks I'm behind them." "It's not so much that-"
"Does he think I'm stupiDd?oes he imagine tIhink a little bit of vandalism will stop you from your boys' games?"
"Well, it's a bit more than little Tbhitesr.e've been six major incidents now, and any of them could have killed people."
"Knocking mirrors out of orbit can kill people?" "If they're doing maintenance on them."
She hmphed". What else has happened."
"A truck was knocked off one of the mohole shaft roads yesterday, and almost landedHeonhemared." her breath catch". That's the third truck to gAon. d that mirror was knocked into a spin with a
maintenance worker on it, and she had to do a free solo to a station, it took her more than an hour to ge there, and she almost didn't make Aitn. d then an explosives dump went off by accident at the Elysian
mohole, a minute after a whole crew leAft nidt. all the lichen at Underhill were killed by a virus that shut down the whole lab."
Ann shrugged". What do you expect from GEMIst?could have been an accident, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often."
"It wasn't an accident."
"It all adds up to peanuDtso.es Russell think I'm stupid?"
"You know he doesnB't.ut it's a matter of tipping the balanAcel.ot of terran money is being invested in the project, but it wouldn't take much bad publicity to get a lot of it to drop out."
"Maybe so," Ann sai"dB. ut you ought to listen to yourself when you say things likYeotuhaat.nd

Arkady are the biggest advocates of some kind of new Martian society, you two plus Hiroko, maybe.
But the way Russell and Frank and Phyllis are bringing up terran capital, the whole thing's going to be out of your handsI.t'll be business as usual, and all your ideas will disappear."
"I tend to think we all want something similar here," Joh"nWseaidw. ant to do good work in a good place. We just emphasize different parts of the process of getting there, thaIft'swaell.only coordinated our efforts, and worked as a team-"
"We don't want the same things!" Ann that."
"sYaido.u want to change Mars, and I doItn's't.as simple as
"Well. . . J.o" hn faltered before her bitternesTs.hey were moving slowly around the hill, in a
complicated dance that imitated the conversation, sometimes face to face, sometimes back to back; and always her voice was right in his ear, and his inHehelrisk.ed that about walker conversations, and used
it, that insidious voice in the ear which could be so persuasive, caressing, hy"Iptn'sotnico.t that simple,
even so.I mean, you ought to be helping those of us who are closest to your beliefs, and opposing those furthest away."
"I do that."
"Which is why I came to ask you what you know about these saIbt omteaukrse.s sense, right?" "I know nothing about theImw. ish them luck."
"In person?" "What?"
"I've traced your movements in the last couple of years, and you've always been near every incident,
within a month or so before it happenYeodu. right?"
were in Senzeni Na a few weeks ago on your way here,
He listened to her breathSeh.e was angry". Using me as cover," she muttered, and something more he didn't catch.
"Who?"
She turned her back on h"imY.ou should ask the coyote about this stuff, John." "The coyote?"
She laughed shortly".Haven't you heard of himH?e wanders around on the surface without a walker, people say.Pops up here and there, sometimes on both sides of the world in a singKlenenwighBt.ig
Man himself, back in the good old dAaynsd.
a big friend of HirokoA'sn. d a big enemy of terraforming."
"Have you met him?" She didn't reply.
"Look," he said after nearly a minute of their shared breathing, "people are going to Ignentokceilnletd. bystanders."

"Innocent bystanders are going to get killed when the permafrost melts and the ground collapses under our feet.I don't have anything to do with that eiIthjeur.st do my worTk.rying to catalog what was here
before we came."
"Yes.But you're the most famous red of all, ATnhnes. e people must have contacted you because of
that, and I wish you'd discourage theImt m.
ight save some lives."
She turned to face hiHme. r helmet's faceplate reflected the western skyline, purple above, black below, the border between the two colors jagged and "rIafwy. ou left the planet alone, it would save lives.
That's what I wanIt.'d kill you if I thought it would help."
# # #
After that there was little to
Osany. the way back down to the trailer, he tried another "tWophiact. do
you think happened to Hiroko and the rest of them?" "They disappeared."
John rolled his eye"sS. he didn't talk to you about it?" "No.Did she talk to you?"
"No.I don't think she talked to anyone but her gDrooupy. ou know where they went?" "No."
"Do you have any idea why they left?"
"They probably wanted to get free ofMuask.e something newW. they really wanted."
hat you and Arkady say you want,
John shook his hea"dI.f they do it, they'll do it for twenty peIopmlee.an to do it for everyone." "Maybe they're more realistic than you."
"Maybe.We'll find outT. here's more than one way to do this, AYnonu. have to learn that." She didn't reply.
The others stared at them as they entered the trailer, and Ann, storming into the kitchen nook, was no help. John sat on the arm of the one couch and asked them more questions about their work, and about groundwater levels in Argyre and the southern hemisphere generTalhley. big basins were low in
elevation, but had been dehydrated in the impacts that formed them; and in general it appeared that the
planet's water had mostly seeped norAthn. other part of the mysternyo:
one had eveerxplained why the
northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology, a solution to which might prove the key to explaining all the other enigmas of the Martian landscape, as tectonic plate theory had once explained so many different problems in geolIongyf.act some people wanted to use the
tectonic explanation again, postulating that an old crust had slid over itself onto the southern half, leaving
the north to form a new skin, then all of it freezing in position when planetary cooling stopped all tectonic movement. Ann thought that was ridiculous; in her opinion the northern hemisphere was simply the

biggest impact basin of all, the ultimate bang of the NoaAchiasinm. ilar-sized strike had knocked the moon out of the Earth, probably around the same Ttihmee.areologists discussed various aspects of the problem for a while, and John listened, asking an occasional neutral question.
They turned on the TV for news from Earth, and watched a short feature on the mining and oil drilling that was starting in Antarctica.
"That's our doing you know," Ann said from the ki"tcThheeny.
kept mining and oil out of Antarctica for
almost a hundred years, ever since the IGY and the first Btruetatyw.hen terraforming began here it all collapsed. They're running out of oil down there, and the Southern Club is poor, and there's a whole continent of oil and gas and minerals right next to them, being treated like a national park by the rich northern countries.And then the south saw these same rich northern countries start to take Mars completely apart, and they said What the hell, you can tear a whole planet apart and we're supposed to protect this iceberg we've got right next door with all these resources we desperatelFyorngeeetd?it!So
they broke the Antarctic Treaty, and there they are drilling and no one's done a thing aAbnodutniot.w the last clean place on Earth is gone too."
She walked over and sat before the screen, stuck her face in a mug of steaming hot"Tchhoecreo'lsate. more if you want," she said to John rudSeimlyon gave him a sympathetic glance, and the others stared round-eyed at the both of them, looking appalled to see a fight between two of the firstwhatndared:
joke that was!It almost made John laugh; and when he got up to pour a mug for himself, he leaned over
impulsively and kissed Ann on the top of the
Shehaed.stiffened and he went on to the kitc"hWene. all
want different things from Mars," he said, forgetting he had just said the otoppAosninte out on the hill. "But here we are, and there aren't that many of us, and it's ouWr eplamcaek. e what we want of it, like Arkady says.Now you don't like what Sax or Phyllis want, and they don't like what you want, and Frank doesn't like what anyone wants, and more people are coming every year supporting one position
or another, even if they don't knowSoit.it could get uglIyn.
fact it's started to get ugly already, with
these attacks on equipmenCt. an you imagine that happening at Underhill?"
"Hiroko's group was ripping off Underhill the whole time they were there," A"nTnhesyaidh.ad to've been, to take off like that."
"Yeah, maybeB. ut they weren't endangering people's liveTs.h"e image of the truck falling down the shaft came to him again, quick and viHvied. drank hot cocoa and scalded his mo"uDtha.mn! Anyway, whenever I get discouraged about all this I try to remember that it's Int'astuirnaelv. itable that people are going to fight, but now we're fighting about Martian thIinmgse.an people aren't fighting over whether they're American or Japanese or Russian or Arab, or some religion or race or sex orTwhehya'trneot. fighting because they want one Martian reality or oTthheart.'s all that matters nowS.o we're already halfway there."He frowned at Ann, who stared at the fl"oDoor. you see what I mean?"
She glanced at him"I.t's the second half that matters."
"All right, maybe sYo.ou take too much for granted, but that's the way peoplBeuat rye.ou have to realize that you're having your effect on us, AYnonu.'ve changed the way everyone thinks about what
we're doing hereH.
ell, Sax and a lot of others used to talk about doing anything possible to terraform as
quick as possible-driving a bunch of asteroids directly into the planet, using hydrogen bombs to try and start volcanoes-whatever it tookN! ow all those plans have been scrapped because of you and your supporters. The whole vision of how to terraform and how far to go with it has AchnadngIedth. ink we
can eventually reach a compromise value, where we get some protection from radiation, and a biosphere and maybe air we can breathe, or at least not die in immediately-and still leave it pretty much like it was before we came."Ann rolled her eyes at this, but he forged"Noon:one's talking about pumping it up

into a jungle planet you know, even if they cIotu'llda!lways be cold, and the Tharsis bulge will always stick right out into space, in effect, so there'll be a huge part of the planet that's neveAr ntdoutchhaet'dll.
be partly because of you."
"But who's to say that with that first step done, you won't want more?"
"Maybe some wilBl. ut I for one will try to stop thIewmi.ll!I may not be on your side, but I see your
point. And when you fly over the highlands like I did today, you can't help buPteolopvle
imt.ay try to
change the planet, but all the while the planet will be changing theAmsetonos.e of place, an esthetics of landscape, all those things change with timYeo.u know the people who first saw the Grand Canyon
thought it was ugly as hell because it wasn't like theItAtloposk.
them a long time to see its beauty."
"They drowned most of it anyway," Ann said blackly.
"Yeah yeahB. ut who knows what our kids will think is beauItti'fsul?sure to be based on what they know, and this place will be the only place they kSnooww.e terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us."
"Areoforming," Ann said, and a rare little smile flashed over her face; seeing it John felt his face flush; he hadn't seen her smile like that in years, and he loved Ann, he loved to see her smile.
"I like that word," she said nSohwe. pointed a finger at hi"mB:ut I'll hold you to it, John BooI'nlle!
remember what you've said tonight!" "Me too," he said.
# # #
The rest of the evening was more relaAxendd. the next day Simon saw him down to the airstrip, to the
rover he was going to drive northward, and Simon, who usually would have seen him off with a smile and a handshake, at most a "nice to see you," suddenly said to him, "I really appreciate what you said last night. I think it really cheered her Eupsp. ecially what you said about kidSsh.e's pregnant, you see."
"What?"John shook his head".She didn't tell meA. re you the, the father? " "Yeah."Simon grinned.
"How old is she now, sixty?"
"Yeah.It's stretching things a bit, so to speak, but it's been done Tbehfeoyret.ook an egg frozen about
fifteen years ago, fertilized it and planted it inWhee'rll.
see how it goeTs.hey say Hiroko stays pregnant
all the time these days, just keeps popping them like an incubator, same C section over and over." "They say a lot of things about Hiroko, but it's all just stories."
"Well, but we heard this from someone who supposedly knows." "The coyote?" John said sharply.
Simon raised his eyebrow"sI.'m surprised she told you about him."

John grunted, obscurely annoyeNd.o doubt his fame meant he missed out on a lot of "gIot's igpo. od
that she didW.
ell, anyway-"He extended his right hand and they shook, hooking their fingers in the stiff
clasp that had developed in the old space d"aCyosn. gratulations. Take care of her." Simon shrugged". You know AnnS. he does what she wants."
So Boone drove north from Argyre for three days, enjoying the countryside and the solitude, and spending a few hours each afternoon ransacking the planetary records to track people's movement, looking for correlations with the sabotage incidents. Early on the fourth morning he reached the Marineris canyons, which were some 1500 kilometers north of ArgHyere.ran into a north-south transponder
road, and followed it up a short rise to the southern rim of Melas Chasma, and got out of the rover to have a proper look.
He had never been to this part of the great canyon system; before the completion of the Marineris
Transverse Highway it had been extremely hard to geIt wtoa. s dramatic, no doubt aboutthiet; Melas
cliff dropped a full three thousand meters from rim to canyon floor, so that the rim had a kind of glider's view north.The other wall of the canyon was just visible out there, its rim peeking over the horizon; and between the two cliffs lay the spacious expanse of Melas Chasma, the heart of the whole Marineris complex. He could just make out the gaps in distant cliffs that marked the entrances to other canyons:
Ius Chasma to the west, Candor to the north, Coprates to the east.
John walked the broken rim for more than an hour, pulling his helmet's binocular lenses down over his faceplate for long periods of time, taking in as much as he could of the greatest canyon on Mars, feeling the euphoria of red lanHd.e threw rocks over the side and watched them disappear, he talked to himself
and sang, he hopped on his toes in a clumsy dTanhceen.
he got back in his rover, refreshed, and drove
a short distance along the rim, to the start of the cliff road.
Here the Transverse Highway became a single concrete lane, and switchbacked down the spine of an enormous rock ramp that extended down from the south rim to the canyoTn hfilsooord. d feature, called
the Geneva Spur, pointed north almost perpendicularly from the cliff, straight toward Candor Chasma; it was so perfectly placed for their purposes that with the roaditolnooikt,ed like a ramp that the
road-builders had constructed.
It was a steep spur, however, and the road had been forced to switchback all the way down, to keep the grade within reasonI.t was all visible from above; a thousand switchbacks snaking down the spine, looking like yellow thread stitched down a bump in a stained orange carpet.
Boone drove down this marvel carefully, turning the rover's steering wheel left then right then left then
right, time after time until he actually had to stop to rest his arms, and give himself a chance to look back and up at the southern wall behind him; it was steep indeed, fluted by a fractal pattern of deeply eroded ravines. Then it was off again for another half hour's drive, hairpins left and right, again and again, until finally the road extended straight down the top of the flattening spur, which eventually sparnedad out
merged into the canyon flooAr.nd down there was a little cluster of vehicles.
It turned out to be the Swiss team that had just finished building the road, and he ended up spending the

night with themT. hey were a group of about eighmtyo:stly young, mostly married, speaking German and Italian and French and, for his benefit, English in several different acTcheenyts.had kids with them, and cats, and a portable greenhouse thick with herbs and garden vegetSaboloens. they would be off like
gypsies, in a caravan made up mostly of their earthmoving vehicles, traveling up to the west end of the canyon, to thread a road through Noctis Labyrinthus and onto the east flank of ATfhtearsitsh.at there
would be other roads; perhaps one over the Tharsis Bulge between Arsia Mons and Pavonis Mons, perhaps one north to Echus OverlooTkh.ey weren't sure yet, and Boone got the impression they didn't
really care; they planned to spend the rest of their lives traveling around building roads, so it didn't much matter to them where they went neRxot.ad gypsies forever.
They made sure all their kids shook John's hand, and after dinner he gave a short talk, rambling in his usual way about their new life on M"aWrs.hen I see you people out here it makes me really happy
because it's part of a new pattern to life, we've got the chance to create a new society out here, everything's changing on the technical level and the social level might as wellI'fmollonwot. exactly sure
what the new society should be or should look like, that's the hard part after all, but I know that it should be done, and I think you and all the other small groups out on the surface are figuring it out on an empirical basis.And seeing you helps me to think aboutWith."ich it did, though he was never much at
doing it on his feet; so he just slithered along a bit more in his free associational way, plucking whatever
stuck out of the bag of his thougAhtnsd.
their eyes shone in the lamplight as they listened to him.
Later he sat with a few of them in a circle around a single lit lamp, and they stayed up through the night talking. The young Swiss asked him questions about his first trip, and about the first years in Underhill,
both of which obviously had mythic dimensions for them, and he told them the real story, sort of, and made them laugh a lot; and asked them questions about Switzerland, how it worked, what they thought
of it, why they were here rather than thAereb.lond woman laughed when he asked t"hDato.
you know
about the Böögen?" she said, and he shook his h"Heaed's.
part of our ChristmaSs.ami Claus comes to
all the houses one by one, you see, and he has an assistant, the Böögen, who wears a cloak and a hood and carries a big baSg.ami Claus asks the parents how the children have been that year, and the parents
show him the ledger, the record you knAownd.
if the children have been good, Sami Claus gives them
presents. But if the parents say the children have been bad, the Böögen sweeps them up in his bag and carries them away, and they're never seen again."
"What!" John cried.
"That is what they tell yTouh.at is SwitzerlandA. nd that is why I am here on Mars." "The Böögen carried you here?"
They laughed, the woman to"oY.es. I was always bad.S"he grew more serious".But we will have no
Böögen here."
They asked him what he thought of the debate between the reds and the greens, and he shrugged and summarized what he could of Ann and Sax's positions.
"I don't think they are either right," one of themHissainda. me was Jürgen and he was one of their leaders, an engineer who seemed some kind of cross between a burgermeister and a gypsy king, dark-haired and sharp-faced and seriou"sB. oth sides say they are in favor of nature, of coOunrese.has
to say this. The reds say that the Mars that is already here is Bnaut rite.is not nature, because it is
dead. It is only rockT.he greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only cuAlturgea.rden, you knowA. n artwork. So neither way gets
nature. There isn't such a thing as nature possible on Mars."

"Interesting!" John said".I'll have to tell Ann that, and see what sheBsuaty.s.. . .H" e thought about it. "Then what do you call thiWs?hat do you call what you're doing?"
Jürgen shrugged, grinned".We don't call it anythinIgt. is just Mars."
Perhaps that was being Swiss, John thouHghet.had been meeting them more and more in his travels,
and they all seemed like thDato.
things, and don't worry too much about theWorhya.tever seemed right.
Later still, after they had drunk another few bottles of wine, he asked them if they had ever heard of the coyote. They laughed; one said, "He's the one who came here before you, Trihgehyt?"laughed again at
his expression."A story only," one explaine"dL. ike the canals, or Big MaOnr.
Sami Claus."
Driving north the next day across Melas Chasma, John wished (as he had before) that everyone on the
planet was Swiss, or at least like the SwOirssm.
ore like the Swiss in certain ways, anywThaeyi.r love
of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind
roaftiolinfea:l, just, prosperous, scientific.
They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch of land they owned Tohne ESawrtihss.
roadbuilding crew back there was Martian already, having brought the life and left the baggage behind.
He sighed, and ate lunch as his rover rolled past transpondersItnowraths. not that simple, of course.
The roadbuilding crew were traveling Swiss, gypsies of a sort, the kind of Swiss who spent most of their life out of SwitzerlandT.here were a lot of those, but they were selected out by that choice, they were different. The Swiss who stayed at home were pretty intense about Swissness; still armed to the teeth,
still willing to be the bagman for whoever brought them cash; still not a member oAf ltthheouUghN.that
fact, given the power UNOMA currently had over the local situation, made them even more interesting to John, as a modeTl.hat ability to be part of the world but to stand away from it at the same time; to use it, but hold it off; to be small but in control, to be armed to the teeth but never go to war; wasn't that one way of defining what he wanted for MIatrss?eemed to him there were some lessons there, for any
hypothetical Martian state.
He spent a fair amount of his time alone thinking about that hypothetical state; it was a kind of obsession with him, and he found it very frustrating that he could not seem to come up with anything more than vague desires. And so now he thought hard about Switzerland and what it might tell him, he tried to be organized about it": Pauline, please call up an encyclopedia article on the Swiss government."
The rover passed transponder after transponder as he read the article that came up on thHe escreen.
was disappointed to find that there was nothing obviously unique about the Swiss system of government. Executive authority was given to a council of seven, elected by the assNemo bclyh.arismatic president,
which some part of Boone did not like very mTuhceh.assembly, aside from selecting the federal council, appeared to do little; it was caught between the power of the executive council and the power of the people, as exercised in direct iniatives and referendums, an idea they had gotten in the nineteenth century from California of all placeAs.nd then there was the federal system; the cantons in all their diversity were supposed to have a great deal of independence, which also weakened the assBemutblcya.ntonal power
had been eroding for generations, the federal government wresting away more andWmhoarte.did it add
up to?"Pauline, please call up my constitution fiHle.e" added a few notes to the file he had just recently begun: Federal council, direct initiatives, weak assembly, local independence, particularly in cultural matters. Something to think over, anywaMy.ore data to add to the stew of his iIdteahse.lped somehow
to write it down.

He drove on, remembering the roadbuilders' calmness, their strange mixture of engineering and mysticism. The warmth of their welcome, which wasn't something Boone took for granted; it didn't always happen.In the Arab and Israeli settlements, for instance, he was received very stiffly, perhaps
because he was seen as being anti-religion, perhaps because Frank had been spreading tales against him; he had been amazed to discover an Arabic caravan whose members believed he had forbidden the building of a mosque on Phobos; and they had only stared at him when he denied even hearing about such a plan.He was pretty sure that was Frank's doing, word got back to him through Janet and others that Frank was prone to undercutting him in that Swoayy.es, there were definitely groups that greeted
him coolly:the Arabs, the Israelis, the nuclear reactor teams, some of the transnational executives. . . groups with their own intense and parochial programs, people who objected to his larger perspective. Unfortunately there were a lot of them.
He came out of his reverie and looked around, and was surprised to discover that out in the middle of
Melas it looked exactly as if he were out on the northern plains somTewhehegrere. at canyon was two hundred kilometers wide at this point, and the curvature of the planet was so sharp that the north and south canyon walls, all three vertical kilometers of them, were completely under the hNoroiztounnst.il
the following morning did the northern horizon double, and then separate out into the canyon floor and the great northern wall, which was cut in two by the agasphoorft north-south canyon connecting Melas
and Candor.It was only when he drove into that wide slot that he had the kind of view people thought of when they imagined being down in Marineris: truly giant walls flanked him on both sides, dark brown
slabs riven by a fractal infinity of gullies and riAdgtetsh. e foot of the walls lay the huge spills of ancient rockfall, or the broken terracing of fossil beaches.
In this gap the Swiss road was a line of green transponders, snaking past mesas and arroyos, so that it looked as if Monument Valley had been relocated at the bottom of a canyon twice as deep and five times as wide as the Grand CanyoTnh.e sight was too astonishing for John to be able to concentrate on
anything else, and for the first time in his journey he drove all day with Pauline off.
North of the transverse gap, he drove into the huge sink of Candor Chasma, anwdasnoaws ifit he
were in a gigantic replica of the Painted Desert, with great deposition layers everywhere, bands of purple and yellow sediment, orange dunes, red erratics, pink sands, indigo gullies; truly a fantastic, extravagant landscape, disorienting to the eye because all the wild colors made it hard to figure out what was what, and how big it was, and how far awGaiya.nt plateaus that seemed about to block his way would turn
out to be curving strata on a distant cliff; small boulders next to the transponders would turn out to be enormous mesas half a day's drive awAayn.d in the sunset light all the colors blazed, the whole martian spectrum revealed and blazing as if color was bursting out of the rock, everything from pale yellow to dark bruised purpleC. andor Chasma!He was going to have to come back some time and explore it.
The day after that, he drove up the steady slope of the north Ophir road, which the Swiss crew had completed the previous yearU. p and up and up; and then, without ever seeing a distinct rim he was out of the canyons, rolling past the domed holes of Ganges Catena, and then over the old familiar plain,
following a wide road, over the tight horizon past Chernobyl and Underhill; then on for another day west to Echus Overlook, Sax's new terraforming headquarteHrsi.s journey had taken a week, and crossed
2500 kilometers.
# # #
Sax Russell was back from Acheron, in his own
Hpleacew.as a power now and no doubt about it,
having been named by UNOMA a decade before as scientific head of the terraforminAg nedffoorft.
course that decade of power had had its effect onHheimh.ad solicited UN and transnational aid to build
a whole town to serve as headquarters for the terraforming effort, and he had placed this town about five

hundred kilometers due west of Underhill, on the edge of the cliff that formed the eastern wall of Echus Chasma. Echus was one of the narrowest and deepest canyons on the planet, and its eastern wall was even taller than south Melas; the section they had chosen to build the town into was a vertical basalt cliff four thousand meters high.
At the top of the cliff there was very little sign of the new town; the land behind the rim was almost unmarked, only a concrete pillbox here and there, and to the north the plume of a BRuictkwovheern.
John climbed out of his rover into one of the rim pillboxes, and got in one of the big elevators inside it, th extent of the town began to come clear; the elevators went down fifty Aflnodorws.hen he descended
fifty stories, he got out and found other elevators that would take him even lower, a whole series of them, descending right down to the floor of Echus ChaSsmaya. a story was ten meters; that meant there was
room in the cliff for four hundred storAiesc.tually not that much of the room had been used yet, and most of the rooms built so far were clustered up in the highest twentySafxlo'sorosf.fices, for instance, were very near the top.
His meeting room was a big open chamber, with a continuous floor-to-ceiling window as its western wall. When John walked into the room looking for Sax, it was still mid-morning, and the window was almost clear; far, far below lay the chasm floor, still half in shadow, and there out in the sunlight stood the much lower western wall of Echus, and beyond that the great slope of the Tharsis bulge, rising higher and higher to the southO. ut in the middle distance was the low bump of Tharsis Tholus, and to the left of it,
just poking over the horizon, lay the purple cone of Ascraeus Mons, the northernmost of the great prince volcanoes, a full 1200 kilometers away.
But Sax was not in the meeting room, and he never looked out this window as far as JohnHecould tell. was next door in a lab, more lab rat than ever, hunch-shouldered and twitch-whiskered, gazing around at the floor, speaking in a voice that sounded like aHn eAlIe.d John through a whole sequence of labs,
leaning forward to peer into screens or at inching graph paper, talking to John over a shoulder, in a state of distraction.The rooms they passed through were jammed with computers, printers, screens, books,
rolls and stacks of paper, disks, GC-mass specs, incubators, fume hoods, long apparatus-filled lab tables, whole libraries; and placed on every precarious surface were potted plants, most of them unrecognizable bulges, armored succulents and the like, so that at a glance it looked like a virulent mold had sprung up and covered everythin"gY.our labs are getting kind of messy," John said.
"The planet is the lab," Sax replied.
John laughed, moved a bright yellow surarctic cactus from a countertop and saItt dwoawsn.said Sax never left these rooms anymore".What are you simming today?"
"Atmospheres."
Of courseI.t was a problem that gave Sax a serious case of the Abllintkhse.
heat they were releasing
or applying to the planet was thickening the atmosphere, but all their CO2-fixing strategies were thinning it; and as the chemical composition of the air slowly shifted to something less poisonous it became less greenhouse-gassed as well, so that things cooled back down and the process sNloewgaetdi.ve feedback countering positive feedback, all over the plaJcueg.gling all these factors into any meaningful
extrapolative program was more than anyone had yet accomplished to Sax's satisfaction, so he had resorted to his usual solution; he was trying to do it himself.
He paced the narrow aisles left between equipment, moving chairs out of h"iTshewraey's. just too much carbon dioxide.In the old days the modelers swept that under theI rtuhgin. k I'm going to have to have robots feed the southern polar cap into Sabatier factoWriehsa.t we can process won't sublime, and we

can release the oxygen and make bricks of the carbon, I Wguee'lsls.have more carbon blocks than we'll know what to do witBh.lack pyramids to go along with the white."
"Pretty."
"Uhn."The Crays and the two new Schillers hummed away behind him, providing his monotonal recitative with a ground basTs.hese computers spent all their time running through one set of conditions after another, Sax said; but the results, while never the same, were seldom encouTrhaeginagir. was
going to be cold and poisonous for a good while yet.
Sax wandered down the hall, and John followed him into what looked like another lab, although there was a bed and a refrigerator in one corVnieorl.ently disarranged bookscapes were overgrown with
potted plants, bizarre Pleistocene growths that looked as deadly as the air oJuothsnides.at in the lone
empty chair.Sax stood and looked down at a seashell shrub as John described his meeting with Ann. "Do you think she's involved?" Sax said.
"I think she may know whoShise. mentioned someone called the coyote."
"Ah yes."Sax glanced briefly at John-at his feet, to be pre"cSihse's siccing us onto a legendary character. He's supposed to have been on the Ares with us, you Hknidodwe.n by Hiroko."
John was so surprised that Sax had heard of the coyote that it took him a while to figure out what else was disturbing about what he had saBidu.t then it came to hiOmn. e night Maya had told him that she
had seen a face, the face of a stranTgheer. voyage out had been hard on Maya, and he had discounted the tale.But now. . . .
Sax was wandering around turning on lights, peering at screens, muttering about security mHeeasures. opened the refrigerator door briefly and John caught a glimpse of more spiky growths; either he kept experiments in there, or else his snack food had suffered a truly virulent eruption Joofhnmosladid. , "You
can see why most of the attacks have been on the moThhoeleys'r.e the easiest project to attack." Sax tilted his head to the s"iAder.e they?"
"Think about iYt. our little windmills are everywhere, there's nothing to be done about them." "People are disabling themW. e've had reports."
"What, a dozenA? nd how many are out there, a hundred thousaTnhde?y're junk, SaxL. itter. Your
worst idea."And nearly fatal to his project, in fact, because of the algae dishes Sax had hidden in some
of them.All of that algae had died, apparently; but if it hadn't, and if anyone had been able to prove Sax had been responsible for its dissemination, he could have lost hisIt jwoba.s yet another indication that
Sax's logical manner was a front.
Now his nose was wrinkle"dT.hey add up to a terawatt a year."
"And knocking a few apart won't do anything toAtshafto.r the other physical operations, the black snow algae is on the northern polar cap, and can't be remTohveedd.awn and dusk mirrors are in orbit, and it's not so easy to knock them out."
"Someone did it to Pythagoras."

"True, but we know who it was, and there's a security team following her."
"She may never lead them to anyone Telhsey. wouldn't be surprised."
may be able to afford to expend a person per act, I
"Yeah, but some simple changes in screening personnel would make it impossible for anyone to smuggle any tools aboard."
"They could use what's out therSea."x shook his head".The mirrors are vulnerable." "Okay.More than some projects, anyway."
"Those mirrors adding thirty calories per square centimeter per sol," Sa"xAsnadidm. ore all the time." Almost all the freighters from Earth were sunsailers now, and when they arrived in the martian system they were linked to large collections of earlier arrivals parked in areosynchronous orbit, and programmed to swivel so that they reflected their light onto the terminators, adding a little bit of energy to each day's dawn and duskT. he whole arrangement had been coordinated by Sax's office, and he was proud of it.
"We'll increase security for all the maintenance crews," John said. "So.Increased security on the mirrors and at the moholes." "Yes.But that's not all."
Sax sniffed". What do you mean?"
"Well, the problem is that it isn't just the terraforming projects per se that are potentiIalmteaargne, ts.
the nuclear reactors are part of the project too in their way; they provide a lot of your power, and they're pumping out heat like the furnaces they Iafreo.ne of them were to go, it would cause all kinds of fallout,
more political even than phyical."
The vertical lines between Sax's eyes reached up nearly to his hJaoihrlnineh.eld out his palm"sN. ot my fault. That's just the way it is."
Sax said", A.l., take a noteL. ook into reactor security."
"Note taken," one of the Schillers said, sounding just like Sax.
"And that's not the worst," John sSaaidx. twitched, glared furiously at the flo"oTrh. e bioengineering labs."
Sax's mouth became a tight line.
"New organisms are being cooked up daily," John went on, "and it might be possible to create something that would kill everything else on the planet."
Sax blinked". Let's hope none of these people think like you." "I'm just trying to think like them."

"A. I., take a noBtei.olab security."
"Of course Vlad and Ursula and their group have stuck suicide genes into everything they've made," John said."But those are meant to stop oversuccess, or mutational accidIefnstso.meone were to
deliberately circumvent them, and concoct something that fed on oversuccess, we could be in trouble." "I see that."
"So.The labs, the reactors, the moholes, the mirrIotrsc.ould be worse."
Sax rolled his eye"sI.'m glad you think sIo'l.l talk to Helmut about Ii'ltl. be seeing him soon anywaIty. looks like they're going to approve Phyllis's elevator at the next UNOMA sTehssaitonw. ill cut the costs of terraforming tremendously."
"Eventually it will, but the initial investment must be huge."
Sax shrugged". Push an Amor asteroid into orbit, set up a robot factory, let it go Itto's wnotk.as expensive as you might think."
John rolled his eye"sS. ax, who's paying for all this?" Sax tilted his head, blinke"dT.he sun."
John stood, suddenly hungr"yT. hen the sun calls the shoRtse.member that."
-+=*=+-
Mangalavid broadcast six hours of local amateur video every evening, a weird grab bag of stuff that John watched every chance he goSt.o after building a big green salad in the kitchen he went to the window
room on the dorm floor, and watched while eating, glancing from time to time at the florid sunset over Ascraeus. The first ten minutes of that evening's broadcast had been shot by a sanitary engineer working on a waste processing plant in Chasma Borealis; her voiceover was enthusiastic but boring, "What's nice is we can pollute all we want with certain materials, oxygen, ozone, nitrogen, argon, steam, some
biota-which gives us leeway we didn't have back home, we just keep grinding what they give us till we can let it loose.B" ack home, John said to himseAlf. newcomer.After her there was an attempt at a
karate bout, both hilarious and beautiful at the same time; and then twenty minutes of some Russians staging Hamlet in pressure suits at the bottom of the Tyrrhena Patera mohole, a production that struck
John as crazy until Hamlet caught sight of Claudius kneeling to pray, and the camera tilted up to show the mohole as cathedral walls, rising above Claudius to an infinitely distant shaft of sunlight, like the
forgiveness he would never receive.
John shut off the TV and took the elevator down to theHedogrmot. into bed and relaxeKd.arate as
ballet. The newcomers were all still engineers, construction workers, scientists of all kinds; but they didn't seem as single-minded as the first hundred, and that was probably Tghoeoyd.still had a scientific
mindset and worldview, they were practical, empirical, rational; one could hope that the selection process on Earth was still working against fanaticism, sending up people with a kind of traveling-Swiss sensibility, practical but open to new possibilities, able to form new loyalties and Oberliesfos. he hopedH. e knew

by now it was a bit naïYveo.u only had to look at the first hundred to realize scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so; educations too narrowly focused, peHrhiraopkso. 's team disappearing. . . . Out there in the wild rock somewhere, lucky bastarHdes. f.ell. .asleep.
He worked at Echus Overlook a few days more, then got a call from Helmut Bronski in Burroughs, who
wanted to confer with him about the new arrivals from and see Helmut in person.
JEoahrtnh.decided to take the train to Burroughs
The night before his departure, he went to see Sax in his labs; when he walked in Sax said in his monotone, "We've found an Amor asteroid that's ninety percent ice, in an orbit that will bring it near Mars in three yearsJ.ust what I've been looking for, in faHcti.s" plan was to place a robot-controlled
mass driver on an ice asteroid and push it into an aerobraking orbit around Mars, thus burning it up in the atmosphere. This would satisfy UNOMA protocols forbidding the kind of mass destruction that a direct impact would cause, but it would still add massive quantities of water and separated hydrogen and
oxygen to the atmosphere, thickening it with precisely the gases they needed"Itmcoostu.ld raise the atmospheric pressure by as much as fifty millibars."
"You're kidding!"The pre-arrival average at the datum had been between seven and ten millibars
(Earth's sea level averaged 1013), and all their efforts so far had only raised the average to around fifty. "One iceball will double the atmospheric pressure?"
"That's what the simulations indicaOtef. as it sounds."
course with the initial level so low, doubling is not as impressive
"Still, that's great, SaAx.nd it'll be hard to sabotage."
But Sax didn't want to be reminded of Htheatf.rowned slightly, and slipped away.
John laughed at his skittishness, and went to the Tdhoeonr. he stopped to think, and looked up and
down the hallE. mpty. And no video monitors in Sax's officHese.
went back in, grinning at his own
furtive tiptoes, and glanced around at the paper chaos on Sax'sWdheeskre.
to start?Presumably his AI
would be the repository of anything interesting, but probably it would only respond to Sax's voice, and would surely keep a record of any other inquiQriuesie. tly he opened a desk drawEerm. pty. All the
drawers in the desk were empty; he almost laughed out loud, stiTflheedreit.was a stack of correspondence on a lab bench; he picked througMh oits.tly notes from the biologists at AcheroAnt.
the bottom of the stack was a single sheet of unsigned mail, with no return address or origin code; Sax's printer had spit it out without any identification that John couldThseeem. essage was brief:
"1).We use suicide genes to curb proliferatio2n).. There are so many heat sources now on the surface
that we don't think anyone can tell our exhaust from the rest3)o.fWite.
simply agreed we wanted to
get off and work on our own, without interfereIn'mce.sure you understand now."
After a minute of staring at this John whipped his head up and lookedStailrlouanlodn.e.He glanced at
the note again, put it back where he had found it and walked quietly out of Sax's offices, back to the guest quarters."Sax," he said admiringly, "you tricky congress of rats!"
# # #
The train to Burroughs carried mostly freight, thirty narrow cars of it, with two passengers cars up front, running over a superconducting magnetic piste so quickly and smoothly that it was hard to believe the view; after John's endless plods cross-country in rovers, it was almost frightTehneingo.nly thing to do

was flood the pleasure centers in the old brain with omegandorph and sit back and enjoy it, looking out at what appeared to be some kind of terrain-following supersonic flight.
The piste had been routed roughly parallel to the 10° N latitude; eventually the plan was to ring the planet, but so far only the hemisphere between Echus and Burroughs had been fBinuisrrhoeudg. hs had
become the biggest town in the far hemisphere; the original settlement had been built by an
American-based consortium, using a French-led EEC design; it was located at the upper end of Isidis Planitia, which was in effect a huge trough where the northern plains made a deep indentation into the southern highlands.The sides and head of the trough counteracted the planet's curvature in such a way that the landscape around the town had something like terran horizons, and as the train flew down the great trough Boone could see across mesa-dotted dark plains to horizons some sixty kilometers away.
Burroughs's buildings were almost all cliff-dwellings, cut into the sides of five low mesas that were grouped together on a rise in the bend of an ancient curving cBhaignnseel.ctions of the mesas' vertical
sides had been filled by rectangles of mirrored glass, as if postmodern skyscrapers had been turned on their sides and shoved into the hiAlls.startling sight, in fact, and far more impressive than Underhill, or even Echus Overlook, which had a great view but could not beNsoe,enth. e glass-sided mesas of
Burroughs, on their rise over a channel that seemed to be begging for water, with a view out to distant hills; these features combined to give the new town a quickly growing reputation as the most beautiful city on Mars.
Its western train station was inside one of the excavated mesas, a glass-walled room sixty meters high. John stepped out into this grand space and made his way through the crowds of people, head craned back like a hick in ManhattaTn.rain crews were dressed in blue jumpers, prospecting teams in walker green, UNOMA bureaucrats in suits, construction workers in work jumpers, colored like rainbows to suggest sportswear.UNOMA headquarters had been located in Burroughs three years before, and that
had caused a real building boom; it was a close thing whether there were more UNOMA bureaucrats or construction workers in the station.
At the far end of the great room John found a subway entrance, and took a little subway car to the
UNOMA headquarters.In the car he shook hands with a few people who recognized and approached
him, feeling the old weirdness of the fishbowl reHtuern.was back among strangerIsn.
a city.
That night he had dinner with Helmut BroTnshkeiy.
had met many times before, and John was
impressed by the man, a German millionaire who had gotten into potaliltli,csb:eefy, blond and
red-faced, impeccably groomed, dressed in an expensive gray Hsueit.had been the EEC's minister of finance when he took the UNOMA poNsot.w he told John the latest news, in a very urbane British English, eating roast beef and potatoes rapidly between bursts of sentences, holding his silverware in the workmanlike German fashion."We are going to award a prospecting contract in Elysium to the transnational consortium ArmscorT. hey will be shipping up their own equipment."
"But Helmut,"John said,"won't that violate the Mars treaty?"
Helmut made a wide gesture with the hand holding the fork; they were men of the world, his look said, they understood these kinds of thing"sT. he treaty is superannuated, this is obvious to everyone dealing
with the situationB. ut its scheduled revision is ten years awInayt.he meantime, we have to try to anticipate certain aspects of the revisioTnh.at's why we give some concessions noTwh.ere is no rational reason to delay, and if we tried there would be trouble in the general assembly."
"But the general assembly can't be happy that you've given the first concession to an old South African weapons manufacturer!"

Helmut shrugged". Armscor has very little relation to its origIitnsi.s just a namWe. hen South Africa became Azania, the company moved its home offices to Australia, and then to SinAganpdorneo.w of course it has become very much more than an aerospaceItfirims .a true transnational, one of the new tigers, with banks of its own, and controlling interest in about fifty of the old Fortune 500."
"Fifty of them?" John said.
"Yes.And Armscor is one of the smallest of the transnationals, that is why we pBicukteidt iist. still has a bigger economy than any but the largest twenty countArisest.he old multinationals coalesce into transnationals, you see, they really gather quite a bit of power, and they have influence in the general assembly. When we give one a concession, some twenty or thirty countries profit by it, and get their
opening on MarsA. reduced."
nd for the rest of the countries, that serves as a precAednednts.o pressure on us is
"Uh huh."John thought it over".Tell me, who negotiated this agreement?" "Well, it was a number of us, you know."
Helmut ate on, serenely ignoring John's steady gaze.
John pursed his lips, looked awHaye. understood suddenly that he was talking with a man who, though a functionary, yet considered himself to be vastly more important on the planet thanGBenoioanl,e.
smooth-faced (and who cut his hair?), Bronski leaned back and ordered them after-dinnerHdirsinks. assistant, their waitress for the evening, scurried off to oblige.
"I don't believe I've been waited on before on Mars," John observed.
Helmut met his gaze calmly, but his beefy color had heighJtoehnneda. lmost smiledT. he UNOMA
factor wanted to seem menacing, the representative of powers so sophisticated that John's little weather station mentality couldn't even comprehend theBmu. t John had found in the past that few minutes of his
First Man On Mars routine was usually enough to crush that kind attitude; and so he laughed, and drank, and told tales, and alluded to secrets only the first hundred were privy to, and made it clear to the assistant-waitress that he was the one in command at the table, and so on-behaving in general in an unconcerned, knowing, arrogant manner-and by the time they were finished with their sherbet and brandy Bronski was loud and blustery himself, clearly nervous and on the defensive.
Functionaries.John had to laugh.
But he was curious concerning the ultimate point of their conference, which still wasn't clear to him. Perhaps Bronski had wanted to see in person how news of the new concession would affect one of the first hundred-perhaps to gauge the reaction of the rTehsat?t would be silly, for to get a good gauge on
the first hundred you would need to poll eighty of them at least; but that didn't mean it
Jwoahsnn't true.
was used to being taken for a representative of things, for a sTymhebofilg. urehead againI.t could definitely be a waste of time.
He wondered if he could salvage something of his own from the evening, and as they were walking back to his guest suite, he said, "Have you ever heard of the coyote?"
"An animal?"

He grinned, left it at thInat.his room he lay on his bed, Mangalavid on the TV, thinking things over. Brushing his teeth before going to sleep, he looked his mirror image in the eye andHsecowalevde.d
his toothbrush in the expansive gestu"reV:ell," he said in a horrible parody of Helmut's accent, "Ziss is business, you know!Business as usual!"
# # #
The next morning he had a few hours before his first meeting, and so he spent the time with Pauline, going over what he could find out about Helmut Bronski's doings in the last sixthCmouolndthPsa. uline
get into the UNOMA diplomatic poucHh?ad Helmutever been to Senzeni Na, or any of the other sabotage sites?While Pauline ran through her search algorithms John swallowed an omegendorph to kill
his hangover, and thought about what lay behind this inspiration to search Helmut's
UreNcoOrdMs.A
constituted the ultimate authority on Mars these days, at least according to the letter ofInthe law. practice, as last night had made clear, it had the UN's usual toothlessness before national armies and transnational money; unless it did their bidding it was helpless, it could not succeed against their desires and probably would never even try, as it was their Stoowl. hat did they want, the national governments
and the transnational boards of directorIsf? enough sabotages occurredw, ould that constitute a reason to bring in more of their own securWityo?uld it tend to increase their control?
He made a disgusted noisAep. parently the only result of his investigation so far was that the list of suspects had tripledP. auline said, "Excuse me, Johna,"nd the information came up on her screTehne.
diplomatic pouch, she had found, was coded in one of the new unbreakable encryptions; you'd have to get the decryptions to enter Hite. lmut's movements, on the other hand, were easily traceaHbele.had
been to Pythagoras, the mirror station that had been spun out of orbit, ten weAeknsd atgoo.Senzeni
Na two weeks before John's visAitn. d yet no one at Senzeni Na had mentioned his appearance.
Most recently, he had just returned from the mining complex being set up at a place called Bradbury
Point. Two days later John left to visit it.
# # #
Bradbury Point was located some eight hundred kilometers north of Burroughs, at the easternmost extension of the Nilosyrtis MensaTe.he mensae were a series of long mesas, like islands of the southern highlands standing out in the shallows of the northern pTlahines.island mesas of Nilosyrtis had recently
been found to be a rich metallogenic province, with deposits of copper, silver, zinc, gold, platinum and other metals.Concentrations of ore like this had been discovered in several locations on the so-called Great Escarpment, where the southern highlands dropped to the northern lowlands; some areologists were going so far as the label the entire escarpment region a metallogenic province, banding the planet like the stitching on a basebaIltl.was another odd fact to add to the great north-south mystery, and a fact that was, of course, getting more than its share of atteEnxtcioanv.ations accompanied by intensive areological studies were being conductebdy scientists working for UNOMA and, John discovered as he checked new arrivals' employment records, the transnationals; all trying to find clues that would enable them to locate more depositBs.ut even on Earth the geology of mineral formation was not well
understood, which was why prospecting still had large elements of chance in it; and on Mars, it was more mysterious yet.The recent finds on the Great Escarpment had been mostly an accident, and only now
was the region becoming the main focus for prospecting.
The discovery of the Bradbury Point complex had accelerated this hunt, as it was turning out to be as big as the largest terran complexes, perhaps the equal of the Bushveldt Complex of SAoz;anaiag. old rush
in Nilosyrtis.And Helmut Bronski had visited the scene.

Which turned out to be small and utilitarian, a mere beginning; a Rickover and some refineries, next to a mesa hollowed out and filled by a habiTtaht.e mines were scattered in the lowlands between mesas.
Boone drove up to the habitat, coupled to the garage, then ducked through thIensliodceksa. welcoming committee greeted him, and took him up to a window-walled conference room to talk.
There were, they said, about three hundred people in Bradbury, all employees of UNOMA, and trained by the transnational ShellalcoW. hen they took John on a brief tour, he found they were a mix of
ex-South Africans, Australians and Americans, all happy to shake his hand; about three-quarters men,
pale and clean, looking more like lab techs than the blackened trolls John envisioned when he heard the word miner.Most of them were working on two-year contracts, they told him, and keeping track of the time they had left, by the week or even by thTe hdeayy.ran the mines mostblyy teleoperation, and
looked shocked when Boone asked to go down into a mine for a look "aItr'soujnuds.t a hole," one said. Boone stared at them innocently; and after another moment's hesitation, they scrambled to gather an escort team to take him out.
It took them two hours to get into walkers and out Taheloyckd.rove to the rim of a mine, and then down a ramp road into a terraced oval pit some two kilometersThleorneg.they got out, and followed
John as he walked around. Surrounded by big robotic dozers and dumptrucks and earth movers, his four escorts' faceplates were all eyes; on the alert for a behemoth on the loose, John Hgeuestsaerde.d at
them, amazed at their timidity; it made him realize, all of a sudden, that Mars could be just another version of the hardship assignment, a hellish combination of Siberia, the interior of Saudi Arabia, the South Pole in winter, and Novy Mir.
Or else they just thought he was a dangerous man to be aWrohuinchd. gave him a starEt.veryone had no doubt heard of the falling dump truck; maybe it was juBstuthcaot.uld it be something moreM?ight these people be aware of something that he waRsne'ft?lecting on this for a while, John found his own eyes beginning to press glass; he had been thinking of the falling truck as an accident, or at least
something that could only happen oncBeu. t his movements were easy to trace, everyone knew where he was. And every time you went outdoors you were only a walker away, as thAeyndsaiind.a pit mine
there were a lot of behemoths about. . . .
But they got back in without incidAenntd.
that night they had the usual dinner and party in his honor, a
hard-drinking party, with a lot of omegendorph consumption and loud raucouas tbaulkn:ch of young tough engineers, pleased to find that John Boone was actually a fun guy to paArtyfawiriltyh.common reaction among newcomers, especially younger meJno.hn chatted them up, and had a good time, and
slipped his inquiries into the flow pretty unnoticably, he thoTuhgehyt.
had not heard of the coyote, which
was interesting, as they did know about Big Man, and the hidden cAoplopnayre.ntly the coyote was not in that category of tale; he was some kind of insider thing, known, so farcoausldJotehlnl, only to some of the first hundred.
The miners had had a recent unusual visit, however; an Arab caravan had come by, traveling the edge of Vastitas Borealis.And, they said, the Arabs had claimed to have been visited by some of "the lost colonists," as they called them.
"Interesting," John saidI.t seemed unlikely to him that Hiroko or any of her crew would reveal themselves, but who could teHll.e might as well go check it out; after all, there was only so much he could do at Bradbury PoinVt.ery little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred. So he spent a couple more days observing the mibnuint gt,hat told him little; it only reinforced his shock at the scale of the operation, at how much robotic earthmovers could tear away.
"What are you going to do with all the metal?" he asked, after taking a look down into another great open pit mine, located twenty-five kilometers to the west of the ha"Gbietattti.ng it to Earth will cost more than

it's worth, won't it?"
The chief of operations, a black-haired man with a hatchet face, g"rWinnee'ldl .hold onto it until it's worth more.Or until they build that space elevator."
"You believe in that?"
"Oh yeah, the materials are theGrer!aphite whisker reinforced with diamond spirals, why you could almost build one on Earth with thHaet.re, it would be a snap."
John shook his heaTd.hat afternoon they drove for an hour back to the habitat, past raw pits and slag heaps, toward the distant plume of the refineries on the other sides of the habitHate mweassa. used to
seeing the land torn up for building purposes, but thitis.w.as. amazing what a few hundred people
could do.Of course it was the same technology that was allowing Sax to build a vertical town the whole height of the Echus Overlook, the same technology that allowed all the new towns to be built so quickly; but still, wreaking such havoc just to strip away metals, destined for Earth's insatiable demand. . . .
The next day he gave the operations chief a fiendishly tight security regimen, to be followed for two months; and then drove out into the wind-eroded tracks of the Arab caravan, and followed them north and east.
-+=*=+-
It turned out that Frank Chalmers was traveling with this Arab cBaruatvahne.
had not seen or heard of
any visitation by Hiroko's people, and none of the Arabs would admit to being the one who had told the
story at Bradbury PoinAt.
false lead, thenO. r else one that Frank was helping the Arabs to eliminate;
and if so, how would John find that Tohuot?ugh the Arabs had only recently arrived on Mars, they were already Frank's allies, no doubt about it; he lived with them, he spoke their language, and now, naturally, he was the constant mediator between them and JNohont . a chance of an independent investigation,
except what Pauline could do in the records, which she could do as well away from the caravan as in it.
Nevertheless, John traveled with them for a while as they roamed the great dune sea, doing areology and a bit of prospectingF.rank was only there briefly himself, to talk to an Egyptian friend; he was too busy
to stay anywhere for lonHg.is job as US Secretary made him as much of a globe-trotter as John, and they crossed paths pretty frequentlFy.rank had managed to keep his position as the American
department head now through three administrations, even though it was a cabinet post; a remarkable feat, even without considering his distance from WashingtAonn.d so he was now overseeing the introduction
of investment by the American-based transnationals, a responsibility that made him manic with overwork and puffed up with power, what John thought of as the business version of Sax, always moving, always gesturing with his hands as if conducting the music of his speech, which had shifted over the years to full-tilt Chamber of Commerce overdriv"eG, ot to stake a claim on the Escarpment before the transnats
and the Germans snap everything up, lotta work to be done!" which was his constant refrain, often said while pointing for illustration at the little globe he carried with him in his lectern"Lpooockkeat.t your
moholes, I just entered them last week, one near the north pole, three in the sixties north and south, four along the equator, one near the south pole, all of them nicely placed west of volcanic rises to catch their updrafts, it's beautiful."He spun the globe and the blue dots marking the moholes blurred for a moment
into blue lines". It's good to see you finally doing something useful."

"Finally."
"Look, here's the new habitat factory in HeTllhaesy. 're manufacturing starter units at a rate that'll enable
them to handle some three thousand emigrants per Ls ninety, and given the new fleet of roundtrip shuttles, that's just barely enough.H" e saw John's expression and said quickly, "All heat in the end, John, so it
helps the terraforming with more than just money and labor, I mean think about it." "But do you ever wonder what's going to come of Jitohanll?a"sked.
"What do you mean?"
"You know, this deluge of people and equipment, while things are falling apart on Earth." "Things are always going to be falling apart on Earth, you might as well get used to it." "Yeah, but who's going to own what up hWerheo?'s going to call the shots?"
Frank just made a face at John's naïveté, at the very nature of the Oquneestilook.
at his grimace and
John could read it all, the whole complex of disgust and impatience and amuAsempeanrtt. of John was
pleased at this instant recognition; he knew his old friend better than he had ever known any of his family, so that the swarthy pale-eyed face glowering at him was like that of a brother, a twin that he couldn't ever
remember not knowingO.
n the other hand, he was annoyed with Frank for his condesce"nPseiopl.e
are wondering about it, FranIkt.'s not just me, and it's not just ArkYadoyu. can't just shrug it off and act like it's a stupid question, like there's nothing to be decided."
"The UN decides," Frank said brusque"lTyh. ere's ten billion of them, and ten thousand oTf huast'.s a million to oneI.f you want to influence those kind of odds you ought to have become the UNOMA factor like I told you to when they set up the poBsiutitony.ou didn't listen to mYeo. u just shrugged it
off. You could have really done something, but now what areSyaoxu's? assistant in charge of publicity." "And development, and security, and Terran affairs, and the moholes."
"Ostrich!" Frank pounced".Head in a holeC! ome on, let's go eat."
John agreed and they went off to a dinner in the Arabs' biggest rover, a meal of basted lamb and dill-flavored yogurt, delicious and exotiBc.ut John found himself still irritated at Frank's scorn, which
never let upT. he old rivalry, sharp as ever; and no First Man routine would ever make a dent in Frank's sneery arrogance.
Thus when Maya Toitovna showed up unexpectedly the next day, traveling west on her way to Acheron, John gave her a longer hug than he might have otherwise; and by the time that night's dinner was over, he had made certain that she would spend the night in his rover-a matter of a particular attentiveness, a certain laugh, a certain look, the nearly-accidental brushing of arms together as they
stood trying sherbets, talking to the happy men of the caravan, who clearly found her fascinating. . . all their old code of conciliation and seduction, established through the Ayenadrs.Frank could only watch,
deapan, talking in Arabic to his Egyptian friends.
And that night, as John and Maya made love in John's rover bed, John pulled up from her briefly and looked down at her white body, and thought So much for political power FrankTbhuatdddye!adpan
look had told it all, the fierce desire for Maya still there, still bFurrannikn,g.like most of the men in the

caravanserai that night, would have loved to have been in John's place at that moment; once or twice in the past he no doubt had been; but not when John was aNr o, ntdo.night Frank would be reminded
what real power was made of.
Distracted by such nastiness, it took John a while to pay any real attention to MayIta hhaedrseblef.en
almost five years since he and she had slept together, and in the intervening time he had had several other partners, and knew she had lived for a time with an engineer inItHwelalass.strange to begin again, as
they knew each other intimately and yet and diHdner't.turning face flickering under him in the dim light, sister then stranger, sister then stranger. S. o.m.ething happened, then, something turned in him; all that
exterior business fell away, all those gamSeosm.
ething in her face, in the way she was all there, the way
she would give her whole self to him when they madeHleovdei.dn't know anyone else who was quite like that.
And thus the old flame sparked again, uncertainly at first, as it had not there been at all in their first lovemaking. But then, after an hour's quiet talk, they had started kissing and rolled together and suddenly it was ablaze and they were insideLiitt. up by Maya as usual, he had to admShite itm. ade him pay
attention. Sex for her was not (as it tended to be for John) some kind of extension of sport; it was a grand passion to her, a transcendent state of being, and she was so tigerish when she got going that she always surprised him, woke him up, brought him up to her level, reminded him what sex Acnoduldit be.
was wonderful to be reminded again, to learn that again; really wonOdemrfeugl.andorph was nothing to
it, how could he have forgotten, why did he keep wandering away from her as if she weren't, somehow, irreplaceable? He crushed her with a hug and they twisted together, bit at each other, panted and
moaned; came together as they had so often before, Maya pulling him over the edge Twhiethir her. ritual.
And even afterwards, just talking, he somehow felt very much more fondHoef hhaedr. started things
just to irk Frank, it was true; he had been completely careless of her; but now, lying beside her, he could feel how much he had missed her presence in the previous five years, how bland life haHd osweemed.
much he had missed heNr!ew feelings-they always surprised him, he kept assuming he was too old for them, that he had more or less stopped changAinngd. then something would happeAn.nd so often that something (thinking back over the years) was a meeting with Maya. . . .
She was still the same Maya Toitovna, howemverc: urial, full of her own thoughts and plans, full of herself; she had no idea what John was doing out there on the dunweosu, ladndnever think to asAk.nd
she would slash him to ribbons if he accidentally crossed her mood, he could tell that just in the sultry set of her shoulders, just in the way she padded off to the Btouitleth.e knew all that already, it was old
news, something from the first years at Underhill, so long ago; and the sheer familiarity of it was pleasing-even her irritability was pleasingL!ike Frank and his scorWn. ell, he was getting old, and they were family.He almost laughed, he almost said something to set her off, then thought betJteurst of it. knowing was enough, no need for another demonstration, LAortdt!hat thought he did laugh, and she smiled to hear it, and came back to bed and shoved him in th"eLacuhgehsitn. g at me again I see! Because of my fat bottom is it?"
"You know your bottom is perfecSth."e shoved him again, insulted at what she considered a gross lie, and their wrestling drew them back into the reality of skin and salt, into the worAldt osfomse .point in
the long lazy session he found himself thinking I love you, wild Maya, I rIetalwlyasdoa. disconcerting thought, a dangerous thoughNt. ot something he would risk sayinBgu. t it felt true.
So a couple of days later, when she left to visit the Acheron group, and asked him to join her there, he was pleased."Maybe in a couple of months."

"No, no."Her face was serious".Come sooner, I want you there with me sooner."
And when he agreed, on a whim, she grinned like a girl with "aYoseucrweto. n't be sorry.W" ith a kiss she was off, driving south to Burroughs to catch the train west.
After that, there was less chance than ever of learning anything from theHeArhaabds. offended Frank, and the Arabs closed ranks behind their friend, as was only Hriigdhdte.n colony? they saidW. hat was that?
He sighed and gave up on it, and decided to Sletoacvkei.ng his rover the night before his departure (the
Arabs were punctilious about filling his hold with supplies), he pondered what he had accomplished so far
in his investigation of the sabotagSeso.
far Sherlock Holmes was in no danger, that wasWsuorres.e
than that, there was now a whole society on Mars that was basically impenetrableMtoslheimms., what were they exactly?He read Pauline that evening after he was done stocking, and then he rejoined his hosts and watched them as closely as he was able, asking questions all that night long. . . . He knew asking questions was the key to people's souls, infinitely more useful than wit; but in this case it didn't seem to make any differencCe.oyote? Some kind of wild dog was it?
Baffled, he left the caravan the next morning and drove west, on the southern border of theIt dune sea. would be a long journey to Acheron to join Mfiavyea,thousand kilometers of dune after dune; but he preferred driving to going down to Burroughs and taking the train. He needed time Atondthrineakl.ly it
was a kind of habit now, driving cross-country, or flying gliders-getting away, traveling slowly across the land. He had been on the rofaodr years now, criss-crossing the northern hemisphere and making long excursions into the south, inspecting moholes or doing favors for Sax or Helmut or Frank, or looking into things for Arkady, or cutting ribbons at the opening of one thing or another-a town, a well, a weather station, a mine, a mohole-and always talking, talking in public speeches or private conversations, talking
to strangers, old friends, new acquaintances, talking almost as fast as Frank did, and all in an attempt to inspire the people on the planet to figure out a way to forget history, to build a functioninTgo society.
create a scientific system designed for Mars, designed to their specifications, fair and just and rational and all those good thingsT. o point the way to a new Mars!
And yet after every year that passed, it seemed less likely to happen the way he had enAvisioned it. place like Bradbury Point showed how rapidly things were changing, and people like the Arabs confirmed the impression; events were out of his control, and more than that, out of anyone's control. There was no planH. e rolled west on autopilot, up and down over dune after dune, not seeing a thing, sunk deep in an attempt to understand what exactly history was, and how it Awnodrkeitd.seemed to
him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effecItts.was what happened when you weren't looking-an unknowable
infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everytAhifntegr.
all, he had been here from
the very beginning!He had been the beginning, the first person to step on this world, and then he had returned against all the odds, and helped to build it from scArantdchy! et now, despite all that, it was spinning away from himC. ontemplating that fact made him tense with disbelief, and sometimes with a
sudden furious frustration; to think that the whole thing was accelerating not only beyond his control, but even beyond his ability to comprehend-it wasn't right, he had to fight it!
And yet howS?ocial planning of some sort. c.le.arly they had to have Tith.is flailing about without a
plan, in violation of even the flimsy plan people had made back at the beginning with the Mars treaty. . . well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoideNdo. . They needed a plan. They had a chance at a new start
here, they needed a visioHn.elmut the oily functionary, Frank with his cynical acceptance of the status
quo, his acceptance of the breakdown of the treaty, as if they were in a kind of gold rush; Frank was

wrong. Wrong as usual!
But his owrnushing about was probably wrong toHoe.
had been operating on the unarticulated theory
that if he only saw more of the planet, visited one more settlteamlkedt,to one more person, that he would somehow (without really thinking too hard) get it-and that his holistic understanding would then flow back from him to everybody else, spreading out through all the new settlers and changing things.
Now he was pretty sure that this feeling had been naïve; there were so many people on the planet these days, he could never hope to connect with them, to become the articulator of all their hopes and desires. And not only that, bfuetw of the newcomers seemed much like the first hundred in regard to their
reasons for comingW.
ell, that wasn't entirely true; there were still scientists coming up, and people like
the Swiss roadbuilding gypsiesB. ut he didn't know them like he did the first hundred, and he never would. That little band had formed him, really, they had shaped his opinions and idteaausg, hht ahdim;
they were his family, he trusted theAmn. d he wanted their help, he needed it now more than ever. Perhaps it was that which explained the sudden new intensity of his feeling foAr nMdapyea.rhaps it was this that made him so angry with Hiroko-he wanted to talk to her, he needed ahnedr hshelep!had abandoned them.
-+=*=+-
Vlad and Ursula had relocated their biotech complex to a finlike ridge in the AcheroTn hFeorsisdagee. a narrow prominence which looked like the conning tower of a vast submerged subTmhaeryineh.ad honeycombed the upper part of it with excavations that extended from cliff to cliff; some of the rooms were a kilometer wide, and glass-walled on both sTidhees. windows on the south side had a view of Olympus Mons, some six hundred kilometers away; north-facing windows looked down onto the pale tan sands of Arcadia Planitia.
John drove up a wide ledge to the bottom of the fin, and plugged into the garage lock door, noticing as he did that the ground in the narrow canyon south of the settlement was lumpy with heaps of what appeared to be melted brown sugar.
"It's a new kind of cryptogamic crust," Vlad said when John asked him "aAbosuytmitb.iosis of cyanobacteria and Florida platform bacteriTa.he platform bacteria goes very deep, and converts sulfates
in the rock to sulfides, which then feed a variant of MicrocTohle
sto. p layers of that grow in filaments,
which bind to sand and clay in big dendritic formations, so it's like little forest sylvanols with really long bacterial root systemsI.t looks like these root systems will keep on going right down through the regolith to bedrock, melting the permafrost as they go."
"And you've released this stuff?" John said.
"Sure.We need something to bust up the permafrost, right?" "Is there anything to stop it from growing planetwide?"
"Well, it has the usual array of suicide genes in case it begins to overwhelm the rest of the biomass, but i it keeps to its niche. . . ."
"Wow."

"It's not too unlike the first life forms that covered the terran continents, wWee'tvheinkju. st enhanced
its speed of growth, and its root systeTmhse.
funny thing is that I think at first it's going to cool the
atmosphere, even though it's warming things undergrouBnde.cause it'll really increase chemical
weathering of the rock, and all those reactions absorb CO2 from the air, so the air pressure is going to drop."
Maya had come up and joined them with a big hug for John, and now she said, "But won't the reactions release oxygen as fast as they absorb CO2, and keep air pressure up?"
Vlad shrugged". Maybe. We'll see."
John laughed". Sax is a long term thinkHere. 'll probably be pleased."
"Oh yesH.
e authorized the releaseA. nd he's coming to study here again when spring comes."
They had dinner
ain hall located high on the fin, just under the Sckreyslitg. hts opened above to the
greenhouse on the crest itself, and windows ran the length of the north and south walls; stands of bamboo filled the walls to east and weAsltl. the residents of Acheron were there for dinner, holding to an
Underhill custom as they did in many other wTahyes. discussion at John and Maya's table ranged
widely, but kept returning to the current work, which involved trying to solve problems caused by the need to implant safeguards in all the GEMs they were releDasoinugb.le suicide genes in every GEM was
a practice the Acheron group had initiated on its own, and it was now going to be codified as UN law. "That's all well and good for legal GEMs," Vlad "sBauidt. if some fools try something on their own and
blow it, we could be in big trouble anyway."
After dinner, Ursula said to John and Maya, "Since you're here you ought to get your Ipt'shybsieceanls. a while for both of you."
John, who hated physicals and indeed all medical attention of any kind, deBmuutrrUedr.sula hounded him, and eventually he gave in, and visited her clinic a couple dayTshelareterh. e was put through a
battery of diagnostic tests that seemed even more intensive than usual, most of them run by imaging machines and computers with too-relaxing voices, telling him to move this way and then that, while John in complete ignorance did what he was tMoldo.dern medicine.But after all that, he was poked and
prodded and tapped in time-honored fashion by Ursula herAsenldf. when it was over he was lying on his
back with a white sheet over him, while she stood at his side, looking at read-outs and humming absently.
"You're looking good," she told him after several minutes of"Sthoamt.e of the usual gravity-related problems, but nothing we can't deal with."
"Great," John said, feeling relieveTdh.at was the thing about physicals; any news was bad news, one wanted an absence of newGs.etting that was somehow a victory, and more so every time; but still, a negative accomplishment.Nothing had happened to him, great!
"So do you want the treatmenUt?r"sula asked, her back to him, her voice casual. "The treatment?"
" It's a kind of geronotological theraApny. experimental procedureS. omewhat like an inoculation, but with a DNA strengthenerR. epairs broken strands, and restores cell division accuracy to a significant degree."

John sighed". And what does that mean?"
"Well, you knowO. rdinary aging is mostly caused by cell division eArrfotre.r a number of generations, ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands depending which kind of cells you're talking about, errors in
reproduction start to increase, and everything gets weaTkehre.
immune system is one of the first to
weaken, and then other tissues, and then finally something goes wrong, or the immune system gets overwhelmed by a disease, and that's it."
"And you're saying you can stop these errors?"
"Slow them down, anyway, and fix the ones that are already bAromkeinx., reallyT. he division errors
are caused by breaks in DNA strands, so we wanted to strengthen DNA
Tstoranddos.it we would
read your genome, and then build an auto repair genomic library of small segments that will replaced the broken strands-"
"Auto repair?"
She sighed". All Americans think that is funnAyn. yhow we push this auto repair library into the cells, where they bind to the original DNA and help keep them from breSakhiengb."egan to draw double and quadruple helixes as she talked, shifting inexorably into biotech jargon, until John could only catch the general drift of the argument, which apparently had its origins in the genome project and the field of genetic abnormality correction, with application methods taken from cancer therapy and GEM technique. Aspects of these and many other different technologies had been combined by the Acheron group, Ursula explained.And the result seemed to be that they could give him an infection of bits of his own
genome, an infection which would invade every cell in his body except for parts of his teeth and skin and bones and hair; and afterwards he would have nearly flawless DNA strands, repaired and reinforced
strands that would make subsequent cell division more accurate. "How accurate?" he asked, trying to grasp what it all meant. "Well, about like if you were ten years old."
"You're kidding."
"No, noW. working."
e've all done it to ourselves, back around Ls ten of this year, and so far as we can tell, it's
"Does it last forever?" "Nothing lasts forever, John." "How long then?"
"We don't knowW. e ourselves are the experiment, we figure we'll find out as we goIt asloenemg.s
possible we might be able to do the therapy again when the rate of division error begins to increase again. If that is successful, it could mean you would last for quite a while."
"Like how long?" he insisted.
"Well, we don't know, do wLoe.nger than we live now, that's pretty sPuores.sibly a lot longer."

John stared at herS.he smiled at the expression on his face, and he could feel that his jaw was slack with amazement; no doubt he looked less than brilliant, but what did she Ietxpweacst?. . . . it was. . . .
He was following his thoughts with difficulty as they skittered a"rWouhnod. have you told about this?" he asked.
"Well, we have asked everyone in the first hundred, when they get a check-upAwndithevuesr.yone
here at Acheron has tried Aitn. d the thing is, we've only combined methods that everyone has, so it won't be long before others try putting it all togetheSr otowo.e're writing it up for publication, but we're
going to send the articles first to be reviewed by the World Health OrganPizoalittiiocnal. know."
fallout, you
"Um," John said, considering Nite. ws of a longevity drug loose on Mars, back among the teeming billions. . . . my Lord, he thoug"hIst. it expensive?"
"Not extremelyR. eading your genome is the most expensive part, and it takesBtuimt iet.'s just a procedure, you know, it's just computer timIt'es. very possible you could inoculate everyone on Earth.
But the population problem down there is already critical asThiteyis'd.
have to institute some pretty
intense population control, or else they'd go Malthusian reallyWfaest.thought we'd better leave the decisions to the authorities down there."
"But word is sure to get out."
"Is that trueT?hey might try to put a clamp oMn aity.be even a comprehensive clamp, I don't know." "Wow.But you folks. . . . you just went ahead and did it?"
"We did."She shrugged."So what do you sayW? ant to do it?" "Let me think about it."
# # #
He went for a walk on the crest of the fin, up and down the long greenhouse stuffed with bamboo and food crops.Walking west he had to shield his eyes from the glare of the afternoon sun, even through the filtered glass; walking back east, he could look out at the broken slopes of lava stretching up to Olympus Mons. It was hard to thinHk.e was sixty-five years old; born in 1989, and what was it back on Earth
now, 2048?M-11, eleven long hi-rad martian yeaArsn. d he had spent thirty-five months in space, including three trips between Earth and Mars, which was still the rHeceorhda.d taken on 195 rems in
those trips alone, and he had low blood presssure and a bad HDL to LDL ratio, and his shoulders ached when he swam and he felt tired aHleot.was getting oldH. e didn't have all that many years left, weird
though it was to think of it; and he had a lot of faith in the Acheron group, who, now that he thought of were wandering around their aerie working and eating and playing soccer and swimming and so on with little smiles of absorbed concentration, with a kind of hummNiontg.like ten year-olds, certainly not; but
with an aura of suffused, absorbed happineOssf. health, and more than healHthe.
laughed out loud, and
went back down into Acheron looking for UrsWulah.en she saw him she laughed t"oIot'.s not really that hard a choice, is it."

"No."He laughed with her":I mean, what have I got to lose?"
# # #
So he agreed to Tith.ey had his genome in their records, but it would take a few days to synthesize the collection of repair strands and clip them onto plasmids, and clone millionsUmrsourlae. told him to come
back in three days.
When he got back to the guest rooms Maya was already there, looking as shocked as he felt, wandering nervously from dresser to sink to window, touching things and looking around as if she had never seen
such a room beforeV. lad had told her about it after her physical, just as Ursula had with John. "Immortality plague!" she exclaimed, and laughed strange"lCya. n you believe it?"
"Longevity plague," he corrected h"eAr.nd no, I can'Nt. ot really."He felt a little dizzy, and he could see she hadn't heard himH. er agitation made him nervouTs.hey heated soup, ate in a daVzea.ld had told
Maya to come to Acheron, and intimated what it was all about; that was why she had insisted that John accompany her to AcheronW. hen she told him that, he felt a shiver of fondness fSotranhdeirn. g next to
her washing the dishes, observing her hands shake as she spoke, he felt exceptionally close to her; it was as if they knew each other's thoughts, as if, after all the years, in the face of this bizarre development, there were no need for words, only for each other's presTehnacte.night in the warm dark of their bed
she whispered hoarsely, "We'd better do it twice tonWighhti.le it's still us."
# # #
Three days later they both got the treatmJoenhtn.
lay back on a medical couch in a small room, and
stared at an intravenous plug in the back of his AhanndIV.
feed shot, just like all those he'd had before.
Except this time he could feel a strange heat rising up his arm, flushing his chest, pouring down his legs. Was it real?Was he imagining itF?or a second he felt extremely odd all over, as if his ghost had walked through him.Then he was just very h"oSt.hould I be this hot?" he asked Ursula anxiously.
"It's like a fever at first," she
"sTaihde. n we put a small shock through you to push the plasmids into your
cells. After that it's more chills than fever, as the new strands bond to Ptheeopoleldo. ften feel quite cold, actually."
An hour later a big IV bag had drained intoHehimwa. s still hot, and his bladder was Tfuhelly.
let him
get up and go to the bathroom, then when he returned he was strapped into what looked like a cross between a couch and an electric chTaihr.at didn't bother him; astronaut training had inured him to all devices. The shock when it came lasted about ten seconds, and felt like a disagreeable tickling everywhere in himU. rsula and the others detached him from the apparatus; Ursula, her eyes twinkling, gave him a kiss full on the moSuhthe. warned him again that in a while he would start to feel chilled, and that it would last for a couple of dIat yws.as okay to sit in the saunas or whirlpool baths; in fact they recommended it.
# # #
So he and Maya sat in the corner of a sauna together, huddled in the penetrating warmth, watching the bodies of the other visitors, who came in white and went ouItt psienekm. ed to John an image of what
was happening to the two of them; come in sixty-five, go oHute treena.lly couldn't believe
Iit was still
very hard for him to think, he found his thoughts simply blanked, his mind Isftubnrnaeind. cells were reinforced too, had his clogged unexpectedlHy?e had always been a ragged slow thinIknerf.act this
was probably no more than his usual obtuseness, brought to his attention because he was trying so hard

to come to grips with the thing, to think what it mCeoaunltd.
it really be trueC?ould they really be
sidestepping death for some years, perhaps somed. e.ca.des. . . .
They left the sauna to eat, and after their meals they took short walks in the crest greenhouse, looking out at the dunes to the north, the chaotic lava to theTshoeutvhi.ew north reminded Maya of early
Underhill, with the random litter of stones on Lunae replaced by Arcadia's windswept quilt pattern of dunes; as if her memory had cleaned up her recollections of that time, making them more patterned, tinting their faded ochres and reds to rich lemon yelPloawtisn.ation of the pasHt. e stared at her
curiously. It had been m-eleven years since those first days in the trailer park, and in most of the years since, the two of them had been lovers, with a number of (blessed) interruptions and separations, of course, caused by circumstances or, more usually, their inability to get Baluotngth.ey had always started
again when the opportunities came, and the upshot was that now they knew each other just about as well as any old married couple with a less interrupted history; perhaps even better, because any completely constant couple was likely to have stopped paying attention to each other at some point, while the two of them, with all their separations and reunions, fights and rapprochements, had had to relearn each other countless times.John said some of this to her, and they talked about it; it was a pleasure to talk about it; "We have had to keep paying attention," Maya said intently, nodding with a look of solemn satisfaction, sure that this was mostly her doiYnge.s, they had paid attention, they had never fallen into the mindless
rut of habit.Surely, they both agreed as they sat in the baths, or walked the crest, this compensated for the time they had spent apart, more than compensated fYoers;it.no doubt they knew each other even
better than any old married couple.
And so they talked, trying to stitch their pasts to this strange new future, in the anxious hope that it would not prove to be an unbridgeable ruptuAren.d late the following evening, two days after the inoculation,
sitting alone naked in the sauna, their flesh still cold, their skin all rosy with sweat, John looked at Maya's body sitting there beside him, as real as a rock, and he felt a glow like the IV injection running all through him. He had not eaten much since the treatment, and the beige and yellow tiles they sat on had started to throb, as if lit from within; light gleamed on every water droplet covering the tiles, like tiny chips of
lightning scattered everywhere, and Maya's body sprawled over these sparkling tiles pulsing before him like a pink candleT.he intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in
here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every momTenhta.t's why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is thNiso?w, remembering Sax's odd word and his odd religion, John finally
understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this mTohmeentitl.es and the thick hot air were pulsing
around him as if he were dying and being reborn, and sure, that was really the case if what Ursula and Vlad said were trueA. nd there beside him in the process of being reborn was the pink body of Maya Toitovna, Maya's body which he knew better than his Aowndn.not only in this moment, but through
time; he could recall vividly his first sight of her naked, floating toward him in the bubble chamber on the
Ares, surrounded by a nimbus of stars and the black velvet ofAsnpdacevery change in her since then was perfectly visible to him, the shift from the image in his memory to the body beside him was a hallucinatory time-dissolve, her flesh and skin shifting, dropping, lining-agTinhge.y were both older, creakier, heavier.That was the way it weBntu. t really the amazing thing was how much had remained,
how much they were still themselvLesi.nes from a poem came to him, the epitaph of the Scott expedition near Ross Station in Antarctica, they had all climbed the hill to see the big wooden cross together, and carved on it had been linemsu: ch has gone yet much remains. . . something likeHtehacto. uldn't
remember-much had gone; it had been a long time ago, afteBruat llt.hey had worked hard, aenadten
well, and perhaps Mars's gravity had been kinder than Earth's would have been; because the obvious glowing truth was that Maya Toitovna was still a very beautiful woman, strong and muscly, her imperial face and gray wet hair still commanding his gaze, her breasts still magnets to his eye, completely different
in appearance if she so much as shifted an elbow, and yet in every position completely familiar to him. . .

his breasts, his arms, ribs, flankSsh.e was, for better and worse, the person he was closest to, a beautiful pink animal and also an avatar for him, of sex, of life itself on this bare rocIkfythwisorwlda.s what they
were at sixty-five, and if the treatment did no more than hold them at this point, for even a few added years, or (the shock of it still) for decaFdoesr?decades? Well, it was astonishinAgb. solutely too much
to grasp, he had to stop trying or he would strip all the gears of
Bhiust mcoinudld.
it beC? ould it really
be? The aching desire of all true lovers through all the ages, to have a bit more time together, to be able to stretch out and live the love fully. . . Similar feeling seemed to be stirrinSgheMwaaysa. in a great
mood, she watched him from hooded eyes, with that come-hither half-smile he knew so well, one knee
up and tucked in her armpit, not flaunting her sex at him but just comfortable, relaxing as she would if she were alone. . . yes, there was nothing like Maya in a goodnomonde, could infect other people with it
so much and so surelHy.e felt a rush of affection for that aspect of her character, an IV of sentiment, and he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, eros just a spice in a feast of agape, and suddenly as usual the words just burst out of him, he said things to her that he had never said before, "Let's get married!" he said, and when she laughed he did too, and said "No, no, I mean it, let's getGmetarmrieadrr."ied and
grow really, really old together, seize whatever gift years came and make them a shared adventure, have kids, watch the kids have kids, watch the grandkids have kids, watch the great-grandkids have kids, my Lord who knew how long it might lTashte?y might watch a whole nation of descendants flourish,
become patriarch and matriarch, a kind of mini Martian Adam andAEnvde!Maya laughed at each declaration, her eyes vivacious and sparkling with affection, windows to a soul in a very, very good mood, watching him and soaking him up, he could feel the blotter tug of her gaze watching him and laughing delightedly at each new absurd hilarious phrase that burst out of him, and saying to him "Something like that, yes, something like that," and then hugging him"OhhardJ.ohn," she said".You
know how to make me happYyo. u are the best man I ever haSdh.e" kissed him and he found that
despite the sauna's heat it was going to be easy to shift the empahsis from agape to eros; but now the two were one, indistinguishable, a great mingled flood of l"oSvoe.you'll marry me and all?" he said as he
locked teh sauna door and they began to fall in"tSoomit.ething like that," she said, eyes flashing, face ablaze with an absolutely ravishing smile.
When you expect to live another two hundred years, you behave differently than when you expect to live only twenty.
This they proved almost immediateJlyo.hn spent the winter there at Acheron, on the edge of the CO2
fog cap that still descended over the north pole every winter, studying areobotany with Marina Tokareva and her lab groupH. e did this on Sax's instruction, and because he felt in no hurry tSoaxleasveee.med
to have forgotten about the search to find out who the saboteurs were, which made John a little suspicious; in his spare time he still made efforts through Pauline, concentrating on the areas he had been working on before Acheron; travel records mostly, and then employment records of all the people that had traveled to the areas where the sabotages had taken pPlraecseu.mably there were a lot of people
involved, so individual travel records might not tell him mBuucth.everyone on Mars had been sent there
by an organization, and by checking which organizations had sent people to the relevant places, he hoped to get some indicationsI.t was a messy business, and he had to rely on Pauline not only for statistics but advice, which was worrying.
The rest of the time he studied a branch of areobotany in which all the payoffs were at least decades away. Why not?He had the time, and might very well see the fruits of theSowhoerk.watched Marina's

group design a new tree, studying with them and doing their lab work, washing glassware and the like.
The tree was designed to serve as the canopy of a multi-layered forest which they hoped to grow on the dunes of Vastitas BorealisI.t was based on a sequoia genome, but they wanted trees even bigger than sequoias, perhaps two hundred meters tall, with a trunk fifty in diameter at thTehebiarseb.ark would
stay frozen most of the time, and their broad leaves, which would probably look as if they had tobacco leaf disease, were going to be able to absorb the baseline dose of UV radiation without damage to their purplish undersides.At first John thought the trees' size was excessive, but Marina pointed out that they would be capable of taking in great quantities of carbon dioxide, fixing the carbon and transpiring the oxygen back into the aiAr.nd they were going to be quite a sight, or so they supposed; the actual shoots of the competing test prototypes were only ten meters tall, and it would be twenty years before the
winners of the competition reached their mature heigAhtnsd.
right now all the prototypes still died in
Mars jars; atmospheric conditions would have to change considerably before they would survive outdoors. Marina's lab was getting ahead of the game.
But so was everyone elsTeh.is seemed to be a result of the treatment, it made sense on the face of it. Longer experiments.Longer (John groaned) investigationsL.onger thoughts.
In many respects, however, nothing changJeodh.n felt about the same as before, except it didn't take omegendorph to get an occasional buzz humming through him, as if he had recently finished swimming a couple of kilometers, or cross-country skiied for an afternoon, ort,akyens, a dose of omegendorph.
Which now would have been carrying coals to NewcaBstelcea. use things glowed.When he took the crest walk, the whole visible world glowsetdil:led bulldozers, a crane like a gallows, he could watch
anything for minutes on enMd.aya left for Hellas, and it didn't matter; their relations were back on the old rollercoaster ride, a lot of bickering and fits of temper on her part, but all that seemed unimportant, floating inside the glow, changing nothing in the way he felt toward her, or in the way she had, from time to time, turned on him that look of hHeers.would see her in a few months, and talk to her on screen; meanwhile this was a separation he was not entirely unhappy to see.
It was a good wintHere.
learned a lot about areobotany and bioengineering, and in many of the
evenings, after dinner, he would ask the Acheron people both individually and severally what they thought the eventual Martian society should be like, and how it should bAet rAunch. eron this usually lead
directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics; these to them were much more critical than politics, or the what Marina called "the supposed decision-making appaMraatruisn.a"
and Vlad were particularly interesting on this topic, as they had worked out a system of equations for what they called "eco-economics," which always sounded to John like "echo economHiecsl.i"ked
listening to them explain the equations, and he asked them a lot of questions, learning about concepts like carrying capacity, coexistence, counteradaptation, legitimacy mechanisms, ecologic efficien"Tcyh.at's the
only real measure of our contribution to the system," Vlad woul"dIfsayyo.u burn our bodies in a
microbomb calorimeter you'll find we contain about six or seven kilocalories per gram of weight, and of course we take in a lot of calories to sustain that through ouOr ulrivoesu.tput is harder to measure,
because it's not a matter of predators feeding on us, as in the classic efficiency equations-it's more a matter of how many calories we create by our efforts, or send on to future generations, something like that. And most of that is very indirect, naturally, and it involves a lot of speculation and subjective judgement. If you don't go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all."
"Sounds about right to me," John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him.
"Anyway that's a large part of what economics is-people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical thingAs.nd then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers

up, which they haveE.conomics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful."
"Better just to concentrate on what we're doing here," Marina "pTuht einb.asic equation is simple,
efficiency merely equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in, times one hundred to put it in the form of a percentIangeth. e classic sense of passing along calories to one's predator, ten percent was average, and twenty percent doing really wMeolls.t predators at the tops of food chains did more like five percent."
"This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers," Vla"dRosbabide.r barons are not really very efficient."
"So tigers don't have predators not because they're so tough, but because it's not worth the effort," John said.
"Exactly!"
"The problem is in calculating the values," Marina "sWaied. have had to simply assign certain calorie-equivalent numerical values to all kinds of activities, and then go on from there."
"But we were talking about economics?" John said.
"But this is economics, don't you see, this is our eco-econoEmveicrys!one should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human eEcvoelorygoyn. e can increase
their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use-this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial natTiohnesr.e was a real ecologic
basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South."
"They were predators on the South," John said.
"Yes, and they will become predators on us too, if we leAt nthdemlik.e all predators their efficiency is
low. But here, you see-in this theoretical state of independence that you speak of-" she grinned at John's look of consternation- "you do, you have to admit that that is ultimately what you talk about all the time, John-well, there it should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the system."
Dmitri, coming in the lab, said, "From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs!" "No, that's not the same," Vlad s"aWid.hat it means is, You get what you pay for!"
"But that's already true," John sa"iHd.ow is this different from the economics that already exists?"
They all scoffed at once, Marina most persiste"ntl.y:. . there's all kinds of phantom wUonrrke!al values assigned to most of the jobs on EaTrhthe! entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accountingA. dvertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only
from the manipulation of money-that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulationS."he waved a hand in disgust.
"Well," Vlad said, "we can say that their efficiency is very low, and that they predate on the system

without having any predators, so that they are either the top of the chain or parasitical, depending on how you define itA. dvertising, money brokering, some types of manipulation of the law, some politics. . . ."
"But all of these are subjective judgements!" John exclai"mHeodw. values to such a variety of activities?"
have you actually assigned caloric
"Well, we have done our best to calculate what they contribute back to the system in terms of well-being measured as a physical thinWg. hat does the activity equal in terms of food, or water, or shelter, or
clothing, or medical aid, or education, or free tiWme've talked it over, and usually everyone at
Acheron has offered a number, and we have taken the mHeraen,. let me show you. . . ."
And they would talk through the evening about it before the computer screen, and John would ask questions, and plug Pauline in to record the screens and tape the discussions, and they would go through the equations and jab their fingers at the flow charts, and then stop for coffee and perhaps take it up to the crest, to pace the length of the greenhouse arguing vehemently about the human value in kilocalories
of plumbing, opera, simulation programming and the lTikhee.y were up on the crest, in fact, one
afternoon near sunset, when John looked up from the equation on his wristpad, and stared up the long slope toward Olympus Mons.
The sky had darkeneIdt. occurred to him that it might be just another double ePclhiposbeo:s was so
close overhead that it blocked a third of the sun when it crossed in front of it, and Deimos about a ninth, and a couple times a month they crossed at the same time, causing a shadow to be cast across the land, as if a film had got in your eye, or you had had a bad thought.
But this wasn't an eclipse; Olympus Mons was hidden from view, and the high southern horizon was a fuzzy bronze bar."Look at that," he said to the others, and poi"nAtedd.ust storm."They hadn't had a
global dust storm in over ten yeaJrosh.n called up the weather satellite photos on his wrisTtphaed.origin
of the storm had been near the Thaumasia mohole, SenzenHi eNcaa. lled up Sax and found him blinking philosophically, stating his surprise in mild tones.
"Winds at the edge of the storm were up to six hundred and sixty kilometers an hour,"ASanxewsaid. planetary record.It looks like this is going to be a bigI othnoeu. ghtthe cryptogamic soils in the storm start-up zones would have dampened them, or even stopped tOhebmvi.ously that model had something wrong with it."
"Okay, Sax, too bad about that, but it'll be okay, I gotta go now because it's rolling right down on us now and I want to watch."
"Have fun," Sax said deadpan before John clicked himVlaodff.and Ursula were scoffing at Sax's
model; temperature gradients between biotically-defrosted soil and the remaining frosted areas would be greater than ever, and the winds between the two regions correspondingly fiercer; so that when they finally hit loose fines, off they wouldTgoota. lly obvious.
"Now that it's happened," John saHide. laughed and moved down the greenhouse to watch the storm's approach by himselfS. cientists could be so catty.
The wall of dust rolled down the long lava slopes of Olympus Mons's northernItauhraedolea.lready halved the land visible since John first saw it, and now it approached like a giant breakaingbilwloawvye, chocolate milk wave ten thousand meters high, with a bronze filigree foaming up and off it, leaving great curved streamers in the pink sky abo"vWe.ow!" John cried."Here it comes!Here it comes!"Suddenly
the crest of the Acheron fin seemed located a great distance above the long narrow canyons of the fossae

below them, and lower fin ridges reared like dragon backs out of the crackaedwlialdva:place from
which to face the onrush of such a storm, too high, too exposed; John laughed again, and presssed himself against the southern windows of the greenhouse, looking down, out, around, shouting, "Wow! Wow! Look at it goW! ow!"
And then suddenly they were overwhelmed, dust flying over them, darkness, a high whooshing shriek. The first impact against Acheron ridge caused a wild flurry of turbulence, quick cyclonic twisters that appeared and disappeared, horizontal, vertical, at angles up the few steep gullies in the ridge; and the general shriek was punctuated by booms as these disturbances hit the ridge and coTllhaepnsedw.ith
dreamlike rapidity the wind settled into a smooth standing wave, and the dust rushed up past John's face;
the pit of his stomach lifted, as if the greenhouse were suddenly dropping with violenCterstpaieneldy.
that's what it looked like; the ridge had caused a ferocious uSpdterpapfti.ng back, however, he saw the dust streaming overhead and then off to the nOornth.thatside of the greenhouse he could see for a few kilometers, before the wind smashed into the ground again and cut off the view in continual explosions of dust. "Wow!"
His eyes were dry, and his mouth felt a bit
Lcaoktsedo. f the fines were less than a micron across; was
that a faint sheen of them, there already across the bamboo leNaov.es?Only the weird light of the storm. But there would be dust on everything, eventuaNlloy. seal system could keep it out.
Vlad and Ursula were not completely confident of the greenhouse's ability to withstand the wind, and they encouraged everyone up there to go downstaOirns. the way down John re-established contact with Sax. Sax's mouth was bunched into a tighter knot than uTshueayl. would lose a lot of insolation with this storm, he said evenlyE.quatorial surface temperatures had been averaging eighteen degrheigesher than
the baseline figures, but temperatures near Thaumasia were already down six degrees, and they would continue to plummet for the duration of the stAornmd., he added with what seemed to John an almost masochistic completeness,the mohole thermals would loft the dust higher than ever before, so that it was all too possible that the storm might last for a long time.
"Buck up, Sax," John advise"dI. think it'll be shorter than ever befDoroen. 't be so pessimistic."
Later on, when the storm was going into its second m-year, Sax would remind John of this prediction with a little laugh.
# # #
Traveling during the storm was officially restricted to the trains and to certain heavily used
double-transponder roads, but when it became obvious that it wasn't going to die back down that summer, John ignored the restrictions and resumed his wanderiHnges.made sure that his rover was
well-stocked, he had a backup rover follow him, and he had an extra-powerful radio trasmitter installed. That and Pauline in the driver's seat would be enough to get him around most of the northern hemisphere, he figured; rover breakdowns were rare, because of the really comprehensive internal monitoring systems hooked into their control computers; two rover breakdowns at once was unheard of, there had been only
a single recorded fatality as a result of that happenSiongh. e said good-bye to the Acheron group, and took off again.
Driving in the storm was like driving at night, except more inteTrehsetindgu. st rocketed by in gusts,
leaving little pockets of visibility that give him quick dim sepia snatches of a view, the landscape rolling, everything seeming to be moving souTthh.en blank rushing tempests of dust would return again, flush
against the windowsT. he rover rocked hard on its shock absorbers during the worst gusts, and the dust did indeed get into everything.

On the fourth day of his drive he turned straight south, and began to drive up the northwest slope of the
Tharsis bulge. This was the great escarpment again, but here it was not a cliff, only a slope imperceptible
in the storm's dark, lasting for more than a day, until he was high on the side kilometers higher than he had been in Acheron.
foifveTvheartsiicsa,l
He stopped at another mine, located near crate(cralPlet d Pete), located in the upper end of the Tantalus Fossae.Apparently the Tharsis bulge had initiated the great lava flood covering Alba Patera, and later bulging had then cracked the lava shield; these were the Tantalus cSanoymoenso. f them had
cracked over a platinoid-rich mafic igneous intrusion that the miners had named the Merensky Reeflets. The miners were real Azanians this time, but Azanians who called themselves Afrikaaners, and spoke Afrikaaner among themselves; white men who welcomed John with a heavy doses of God, volk, and
trek. They had named the canyons they worked in Neuw Orange Free State and Neuw
APrnedtoria.
they, like the miners at Bradbury Point, worked for Arm"sYcoers.," the operations head said happily,
with an accent like a New ZealandeHr'se. had a heavily-jowled face, a ski-jump nose and a big crooked smile, and a very intense manner. "We've found iron, copper, silver, manganese, aluminum, gold, platinum, titanium, chromium, you name Siut.lfides, oxides, silicates, native metals, you nameThiet.
Great Escarpment has them allT."he mine had been running for about an m-year; it consisted of strip mines on the canyon floors, with a habitat half buried in the mesa between two of the largest canyons, looking like a clear eggshell, packed with a meat of green trees and orange tile roofs.
John spent several days with them, being sociable and asking quesMtioonres. than once, thinking of the Acheron group's eco-economics, he asked them how they were going to get their valuable but heavy product back to EarthW. ould the energy cost of the transfer overwhelm the potential profit?
"Of course," they said, just like the men at Bradbury "PItoiwnti.ll take the space elevator to make it worthwhile."
Their chief said, "With the space elevator we are in the terran Wmaitrhkoeut.t it we will never get off
Mars."
"That's not necessarily a bad thing," John
Bsauidt .they didn't understand him, and when he tried to
explain it they only went blank and nodded politely, anxious to avoid thinking about Wpohliictihcsw. as something Afrikaaners were good aWt. hen John realized what was going on, he found he could bring up the topic of politics to get some time to himself; it was, he said to Maya one night on the wrist, like tossing a tear gas canister in the roIotme.ven enabled him to wander into the mining operations center
alone for most of an afternoon, linking Pauline to the records and recording everything that she could lift. Pauline noticed no unusual patterns in the operatBiount. she did flag an exchange of communications with
the Armscor home office; the local group wanted a security unit of a hundred persons, and Singapore had agreed to it.
John whistled". What about UNOMA?"Security was supposed to be entirely their purview, and they gave out approval for private security pretty routinely; but a hundred pJeoohpnle?instructed Pauline to look into the UNOMA dispatches on the subject, and left for dinner with the Afrikaaners.
Again the space elevator was declared a neces"sTithye. y'll just pass us by if we don't have it, go straight out to the asteroids and not have any gravity well to worry about, eh?"
Despite the five hundred micrograms of omegandorph in his system, John was not in a happy mood. "Tell me," he said at one point, "do any women work here?"

They stared at him like fiTshey were even worse than Moslems, really.
He left the next day and drove up to Pavonis, intent on looking into the space elevator notion.
# # #
Up the long slope of TharHsise. never saw the steep, blood-colored cone of Ascraeus Mons; it was lost in the dust along with everything eTlsrea.vel now consisted of life in a set of small rooms that
bumped around a loHt. e worked his way around Ascraeus on its west flank, and then motored up onto the crest of Tharsis, between Ascraeus and Pavonis; here the double-transponder road became an acutal concrete ribbon under the wheels-concrete under a rush of dust, concrete that finally tilted up sharply, and led him straight up the northern slope of Pavonis MIt ownse.nt on for so long that it began to feel
like a slow blind takeoff into space.
The crater of Pavonis, as the Afrikaaners had reminded him, was amazingly equatorial; the round O of its caldera sat like a ball placed right on the equatoTr hliisnea.pparently made the south rim of Pavonis
the perfect tethering point for a space elevator, as it was both directly on the equator, and twenty-seven kilometers above the datumP.hyllis had already arranged for the construction of a preliminary habitat on
the south rim; she had thrown herself into work on the elevator, and was one of its chief organizers.
Her habitatwas dug into the rim wall of the caldera, in Echus Overlook style, so that windows in several
stories of rooms looked out over the caldera, or would, when the dust
Pclheoatroesd.blown up and
stuck on the walls showed that the caldera itself would eventually be revealed as a simple circular depression, with walls five thousand meters deep, slightly terraced near the bottom; the caldera had
slumped often in earlier days, but always in nearly the same Itplawcaes.
the only one of the great
volcanoes to have been so regular; the other three had calderas that were like sets of overlapping circles, with each circle set at a different depth.
The new habitat, nameless at this point, had been built by UNOMA, but the equpiment and personnel had been provided by the transnational Praxis, one of the biggest of thCemurreanllt.ly the rooms that
were finished were crowded with Praxis executives, or executives of some of the other transnationals who had subcontracts on the elevator project; among them were representatives of Amex, Oroco, Subarashii, and MitsubishiA. nd all their efforts were being coordinated by Phyllis, who was now apparently Helmut Bronski's assistant in charge of the operation.
Helmut too was there, and after John had greeted him and Phyllis, and been introduced to some of the visiting consultants, he was led into in a big high room with a windoOwutwsiadlel. the window swirled
clouds of dark orange dust dropping down into the caldera, so that it seemed that he room ascended, uncertainly, in a dim fluctuating light.
The room's only furnishing was a globe of Mars one meter in diameter, resting waist-high on a blue plastic stand.Extending from the globe, specifically from the little bump that represented Pavonis Mons, was a silver wire about five meters loAntg.the end of the thread was a small blackTdhoet.globe was
rotating on the stand at about one RPM, and the silver wire and its terminating black dot rotated with it, always remaining above Pavonis.
A group of about eight people ringed this dis"pElavye.rything is to scale," Phyllis sa"idT.he
areosynchronous satellite distance is 20,435 kilometers from the center of mass, and the equatorial radius is 3,386 kilometers, so the distance from the surface to the areosynchronous point is 17, 049 kilometers; double that and add the radius, and you have 37,484 kilomWete'lsl. have a ballast rock at the far end,
so the actual cable won't have to be quite as Tlhoengd. iameter of the cable will be about ten meters,

and will weight about six billion toTnhse.
material for it will have been mined from its terminal ballast
point, which will be an asteroid that starts at around thirteen and a half billion tons, and ends up when the cable is finished at the proper ballast weight of around seven and a half billTiohnat'tsonnso. t a very big
asteroid, about two kilometers in radius to begin with; there are six Amor asteroids crossing Mars's orbit that have been identified as candidates for the Tjoheb. cable will be manufactured by robots mining and processing the carbon in the asteroid's chondritTehs.en, in the last stages of construction, the cable will maneuvered to its tethering point, hereS.h"e pointed at the floor of the room in dramatic fas"hAitonth. at
point, the cable will be in areosynchronous orbit itself, barely touching down here, its weight suspended between the pull of the planet's gravity and the centrifugal force of the upper half of the cable, and the terminal ballast rock."
"What about Phobos?" John asked.
"Phobos is way down there, of couTrshee.
cable will be vibrating to avoid it, in what the designers call a
Clarke oscillation.It won't be a problemD.eimos will also have to be avoided by oscillation, but because its orbit is more inclined this won't be such a frequent problem."
"And when it's in position?" Helmut asked, his face bright with pleasure.
"A few hundred elevators at least will be attached to the cable, and loads will be lifted into orbit using a counterweight system.There will be lots of material to load down from Earth as usual, so energy requirements for lifts will be minimizeItd.will also be possible to use the cable's rotation as a slingshot;
objects released from the ballast asteroid toward Earth will be using the power of Mars's rotation as their push, and will have an energy-free high-speed take-Iot'fsf.a clean, efficient, extraordinarly cheap
method, both for lifting bulk into space and for accelerating it towardAEnadrthg.iven the recent
discoveries of strategic metals, which are becoming ever more scarce on Earth, a cheap lift and push like this is literally invaluableI.t creates the possibility of an exchange that wasn't economically viable before;
it will be a critical component of the Martian economy, the keystone of its iAnndudstirty.won't be that
expensive to buildO.
nce a carbonaceous asteroid is pushed into the proper orbit, and a
nuclear-powered robotic cable plant put to work on it, the plant will extrude cable like a spider spinning its thread. There will be very little to do but wThaiet. cable plant as designed will be able to produce
over three thousand kilometers of cable a year-this means we need to start as soon as possible, but after production begins, it will only take ten or eleven yAenards.the wait will be well worth it."
John stared at Phyllis, impressed as always by her fSerhveorw. as like a convert giving witness, a
preacher in a pulpit, quietly and confidently triumphTanhte.
miracle of the skyhooJka.ck and the
Beanstalk, the Ascension to Heaven; it definitely had an air of the miraculo"uRs etaollyit,. we don't have much choice," Phyllis was sayin"gT. his gets us out of our gravity well, eliminating it as a physical and economic problem.That's crucial; without that we'll be bypassed, we'll be like Australia in the nineteenth century, too far away to be a significant part of the world ecoPneoomplye. will pass us by and mine the asteroids directly, because the asteroids have mineral wealth without gravitational constrWaiinthtso.ut the elevator we could become a backwater."
Shikata ga nai, John thought sardonicaPllhyy. llis glanced very briefly at John, as if he had spoken aloud. "We won't let that happen," she sa"iAd.nd best of all, our elevator will serve as an experimental
prototype for a terran onTe.he transnationals who gain expertise in building this elevator will be in a commanding position when it comes to bidding the contracts for the much larger terran project that is sure to follow."
On and on she went, outlining every aspect of the plan, and then answering questions from the executives with her usual polished brilliancSeh.e got a lot of laughs; she was flushed, bright-eyed, John

could almost see the tongues of fire flickering from her mass of auburn hair, which in the storm light looked like a cap of jeweTlsh.e executives and project scientists glowed under her look; they were onto something big, and they knew Eita.rth was seriously depleted in many of the metals they were finding on
Mars. There were fortunes to be made, enormous fortuAnensd.
someone who owned a piece of the
bridge over which every ounce of metal had to pass would make an enormous fortune as well, probably the greatest fortune of aNll.o wonder Phyllis and the rest of them looked like they were in church.
Before dinner that evening John stood in his bathroom, and without looking at himself in the mirror took out two tabs of omegandorph and swallowed thHeme .was sick of PhylliBs.ut the drug made him feel a
better; she was just another part of the game, after all; and when he sat down to dinner he was in an expansive mood.Okay, he thought, they have their gold mine of a beanBstuatlki.t wasn't clear that they
would be able to keep it to themselves; highly unlikely inSofatchta. t their fat-cat complacency was a bit silly, as well as grating, and he laughed in the middle of one of their enthusiastic exchanges and said, "Don't you think it unlikely that an elevator like this will stay private property?"
"We don't intend for it to be private property," Phyllis said with her brilliant smile.
"But you expect to be paid for its construcAtinodn. then you expect concessions to be granYteodu. expect to make a profit from the venture, isn't that what venture capitalism is all about?"
"Well, of course," Phyllis said, looking offended that he had spoken of such things so explicitly. "Everyone on Mars will profit from it, that's its nature."
"And you'll skim a percentage of every percentaPgree.d"ators at the top of the chaOinr. else parasites,
up and down the length of it. . . . "How rich did the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge get, do you thin
Were there great transnational dynasties formed from the profits of the Golden Gate
NBroid. gIte?was
a public project, wasn't
Tit.he builders were public employees, making a standard wage for their work.
What do you want to bet that the Mars treaty doesn't stipulate a similar arrangement for infrastructural construction here?I'm pretty sure it does."
"But the treaty is up for revision in nine years," Phyllis pointed out, her eyes glittering.
John laughed". So it is!But you wouldn't believe the support I see around this planet for a revised treaty that sets even tighter limits on terran investment and pYroofuit. just haven't been paying attentioTnh.e
thing you have to remember is that this is an economic system being built from scratch, on principles that make sense in scientific termTs.here's only a limited carrying capacity here, and to create a sustainable
society we've got to pay attention to tYhaotu.
can't just lift raw materials from here to Earth-the colonial
era is over, you have to remember thHate."laughed again at the glinty stares being leveled on him; it was like gunsights had been implanted in their corneas.
And it only occurred to him later, back in his room and remembering those looks, that it probably had not been a very good idea to stick their noses in the situation sTohehaArdm. ex man had even lifted his
wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant toTbheis sJeoehnn:
Boone was
bad news! he had whispered, eyes on John all the while; he had wanted John toWselel, hainmo.ther suspect then.But it took John a while to get to sleep that night.
# # #
He left Pavonis the next day, and headed east down Tharsis, intending to drive a full seven thousand kilometers to Hellas, to visit MayTa.he journey was made strangely solitary by the great stHoerm.
glimpsed the southern highlands in murky snatches only, through billowing sheets of sand, with the

ever-shifting whistle of the wind as accompanimeMnt.aya was pleased he was coming to visit; he had never been to Hellas before, and a lot of people there were looking forward to meeTtihnegy hhimad. discovered a sizeable aquifer to the north of Low Point, so their plan was to pump water from that
aquifer to the surface, and create a lake in the low point, a lake with a frozen surface which would be continuously subliming into the atmosphere, but which they would keep supplied from bSeulsotwain. ed
in that way it would both enrich the atmosphere, and serve as a reservoir and heat sink for cultivation, in a ring of domed farms built around the lake shMoraey.a was very excited at the plans.
John's long journey toward her passed in a mesmerized state, as he watched crater after crater loom out of the clouds of dusOt. ne evening he stopped at a Chinese settlement where they knew hardly a word
of English, and lived in boxes like the trailer park; he and the settlers had to make use of an AI translation program which kept them both laughing for most of the eveTnwinog.days later, he stopped for a day at
a huge Japanese air mining facility in a high pass between cHraetreers.everyone spoke excellent English, but they were frustrated because the air miners had been brought to a standstill by the storm; the technicians smiled painfully, and escorted him through a nightmare complex of filtering systems that they had set up to try to keep the pumps working; and all for naught.
East three days from the Japanese, he ran across a Sufi caravanserai, located on top of a circular steep-walled mesa.This particular mesa had once been a crater floor, but it had been so hardened by impact metamorphosis that it had resisted the erosion that had cut away the surrounding soft land in the eons that followed, and now it stood above the plain like a thick round pedestal, its furrowed sides a kilometer high.John drove up a switchbacking ramp road to the caravanserai on top.
Up there he found that the mesa was situated in a permanent standing wave in the dust storm, so that there was more sunlight leaking through the dark clouds here than anywhere else he had been, even on the rim of PavonisV. isibility was almost as truncated as everywhere else, but everything was more
brightly colored, the dawns purple and chocolate, the days a vivid cloudy rush of umbers and yellow, orange and rust, pierced by the occasional bronzed sunbeam.
It was a great spot, and the Sufis proved to be more hospitable than any of the Arab groups he had met so far.They had come up in one of the latest Arab groups, they told him, as a concession to religious factions in the Arab world back home; and as Sufis were numerous among Islamic scientists, there had
been very few objections to sending them as a coherent group of theOirnoewonf. them, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, said to h"imIt',s wonderful in this time of the seventy thousand veils that you, the great talib, has followed his tariqat here to visit us."
"Talib?" John said".Tariqat?"
"A talib is a seekerA. nd the seeker's tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality."
"I see!" John said, still surprised at the friendliness of their greeting.
Dhu led him from the garage to a low black building which stood in the center of a ring of rovers, lookin dense with concentrated energy; a squat round thing like a model of the mesa itself, its windows rough
clear crystals.Dhu identified the black rock of the building as stishovite, a high-density silicate created by the meteor's impact, when pressures of over a million kilograms per square centimeter had momentarily existed. The windows were made of lechatelierite, a kind of compressed glass also created by the
impact.
Inside the building, a party of about twenty people greeted him, both men and womTehne awliokme.en

were bare-headed and behaved just like the men, which again surprised John, and alerted him to the fact that things among the Sufis were different than they were among Arabs genHeeralslayt. down and drank
coffee with them, and started asking questions agTaihne.y were Qadarite Sufis, they told him, pantheists influenced by early Greek philosophy and modern existentialism, trying by modern science and the ru' yat al-qalb, the vision of the heart, to become one with that ultimate reality which w"TasheGreoda.re four
mystical journeys," Dhu said to hi"mT.he first begins with gnosis and ends with fana, or passing away from all phenomenal thingsT.he second begins when fana is succeeded by baqa, or abAidtintgh.is point you journey in the real, by the real, to the real, and you yourself are a realitAy,nda ahfatqerq.that you
move on to the center of the spirit universe, and become one with all others who have done likewise." "I guess I haven't begun the first journey yet," John"I sdaiodn.'t know anything."
They were pleased by this response, he couldYsoeue. can start, they told him, and poured him more coffee. You can always starTt.hey were so encouraging and friendly compared to any of the Arabs John
had met before that he opened up to them, and told them about his trip to Pavonis, and the plans for the great elevator cable". No fancy in the world is all untrue," Dhu Asanidd.when John mentioned his last
meeting with Arabs, on Vastitas Borealis, and how Frank had been accompanying them, Dhu said cryptically, "It's the love of right lures men to wrong."
One of the women laughed and said, "Chalmers is your nafs." "What's that?" John asked.
They were all laughinDg.hu, shaking his head, said "He is not your Onnafes's. which some used to believe lived in one's chest."
"Like an organ or something?"
nafs is one's evil self,
"Like an actual creaturMe.ohammed ibn 'Ulyan for instance reported that something like a young fox leaped out of his throat, and when he kicked it it only got Tbhiagtgewr.as his nafs."
"It is another name for your Shadow," the woman who had brought it up explained.
"Well," John said".Maybe he is, thenO. r maybe it's just that Frank's nafs gets kicked aAlnodt."they laughed with him at the thought.
Later that afternoon sunlight pierced the dust more strongly than usual, lighting the streaming clouds so that the caravanserai seemed to rest in the ventricle of a giant heart, with the gusts of the wind saying beat, beat, beat, beatT. he Sufis called out to each other when they looked through the lechatelierite windows, and quickly they suited up to go out into this crimson world, into the wind, calling to Boone to accompany them.He grinned and suited up, surreptitiously swallowing a tab of omeg as he did so.
Once outside they walked the circumference of the ragged edge of the mesa, oluotokinintog the clouds
and down onto the shadowed plain below, pointing out to John whatever features happened to be visible. After that they gathered near the caravanserai, and John listened to their voices as they chanted, various voices providing English translations for the Arabic and F"aProsis.sess nothing and be possessed by
nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in youHrerheeaart.world and there a world, we are seated on the threshold. "
Another voice": Love thrilled the chord in my soul's lute, and changed me to love from head to foot."

And they began to dancWe.atching John suddenly got it, that they were whirling dervitshheeys: leaped
into the air to the beat of drums pattering lightly over the common band, they leaped and whirled in slow unearthly spins, arms outstretched; and when they touched down they pushed off and did it again, for turn after turn after turnW. hirling dervishes in the great storm, on a high round mesa that had been a crater
floor in the NoachianI.t looked so marvelous in the bloody pulsing glow of light that John stood up and started to spin with themH.e wrecked their symmetries, he sometimes actually collided with other
dancers; but no one seemed to miHnde. found that it helped to jump slightly into the wind, to keep from
being blown off balanceA.
hard gust would knock you fHlaet. laughed.Some of the dancers were
chanting over the common band, the usual quarter-tone ululatipounnsc, tuated by shouts and harsh
rhythmic breathing, and the phrase "Ana el-Haqq, ana el-Haqq"-I am God, one translated, I aAm God. Sufi heresy.The dancing was meant to hypnotize you-there were other Moslem cults that did it with self-flagellation, John knew.Spinning was better; he danced, he joined the chant on the common band
by punctuating it with his own rapid breath, and with grunts and babble; then without thinking about it he began to add to the flow of sound the names for Mars, muttering them in the rhythm of the chant as he understood it."Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, BahramH. armakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, KaseMi. a'adim,
Maja, Mamers, MangalaN.
irgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and TiuH."e had memorized the list years ago, as a
kind of party trick; now he was quite surprised to find what an excellent chant it made, how it spilled out
of his mouth and helped stabilize his spinnTinhge.
other dancers were laughing at him, but in a good way,
they sounded pleasedH.
e felt drunk, his whole body was hummHineg.repeated the litany many times,
then shifted to repeating the Arabic name, over and "oAvel-rQ: ahira, Al-Qahira, Al-Qahira."And then, remembering what one of the translating voices had told him, "Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-AQnaahira.
el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira."I am God, I am Mars, I am God. . . . The others quickly joined him in this
chant, lifted it into a wild song, and in the flash of rotating faceplates he caught sight of their grinning faces. They were really good spinners; as they whirled their outstretched fingers cut the rush of red dust into arabesques, and now as they spun they tapped him with their fingertips, guiding him or even actively
pushing his clumsy turns into the weave of their paHtteerns.houted the planet's names and they repeated them after him, in call and response style; they chanted the names, Arabic, Sanskrit, Inca, all the names for Mars, mixed together in a soup of syllables, creating a polyphonic music that was beautiful and shivery-strange, for the names for Mars came from times when words sounded odd, and names had power: he could hear that when he sang them.
When he finally stopped dancing and sat to watch, he began to feTehlesiwcko.rld swamh, is middle
ear thingie was no doubt still spinning like a rouletteThbealls.cene pulsed before him; it was impossible
to say whether this was the swirling dust or something internal, but either way he goggled at what he saw: whirling dervishes, on MarsW? ell, in the Moslem world they were deviants of a kind, and with an ecumenical bent rare in IslamA.nd scientists tooS. o they were hiws ay into Islam, perhaps, his tariqat;
and their dervish ceremonies could perhaps be shifted into the areophany, as during hiHs echsatonto.d,
reeling; all of a sudden he understood that one didn't have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came"Lboevfoereth. rilled the chord
of love in my lute. .H.e"was too dizzyT.he others were laughing at him, supporting hHime . talked to
them in his usual way, hoping they would underst"aIndfe. el sickI.
think I'm going to throw Bupu.t you
must tell me why we can't leave all the sad terran baggage bWehyndw. e can't invent together a new religion. The worship of Al-Qahira, Mangala, Kasei!"
They laughed, and carried him on their shoulders back toward the shelter. "I'm serious," he said as the world spun."I want you people to do it, I want your dancing to be in it, it's obvious you should be the ones to design this religion, you're doing it alreaBduyt."vomiting in a helmet was dangerous, and they
only laughed at him and hustled him into the crushed-stone habitat as quickly as theTyhecroeulads. he
threw up a woman held his head, saying in musical subcontinental English, "The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he wTahseyhappy. consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message 'This Too Will Pass.' "

"Straight into the recyclers," Boone saHide. lay back spinningI.t was kind of an awful feeling, when you were trying to lie sti"llB. ut what do you want herWe?hy are you on MarsY?ou have to tell me what you want here."They took him to the common room and set out cups, and a pot of aromHaeticstiltleaf.elt
like he was spinning, and the dust rushing by the crystalline windows didn't help.
One of the old women around him picked up thaendpoptoured John's cup fuSll.he put down the pot, gestured: "Now you fill mine.J"ohn did so, unsteadily, and then the pot went around the Eroacohm. pourer filled someone else's cup.
"We start every meal this way," the old woman"Istaiids. a little sign of how we are togeWtheer.have studied the old cultures, before your global market netted everything, and in those ages there existed many different forms of exchangSeo. me of them were based on the giving of Egaifcths. of us has a gift,
you see, given us freely by the univeArsned.
each of us with every breath gives something back."
"Like the equation for ecologic efficiency," John said.
"Maybe soI.n any case, whole cultures were built around the idea of the gift, in Malaysia, in the
American northwest, in many primitive culturIens. Arabia we gave water, or coffFeoeod and shelter.
And whatever you were given, you did not expect to keep, but gave it back again in your turn, hopefully with interest.You worked to be able to give more than you receNivoewd. we think that this can be the
basis for a reverent economics."
"It's just what Vlad and Ursula said!" "Maybe so."
The tea helpedA. fter a while his equilibrium returneTdh.ey talked about other things, the great storm, the great hard plinth they lived Lonat.e that night he asked if they had heard of the coyote, but they hadn't. They did know stories about a creature they called the "hidden one," the last survivor of an ancient race of Martians, a wizened thing who wandered the planet helping endangered wanderers, rovers, settlements.It had been spotted at the water station in Chasma Borealis last year, during an ice fall and subsequent power outage.
"It's not Big Man?" John asked.
"No, noB. ig Man is bigT.he hidden one is like uItss. people were Big Man's subjects." "I see."
But he didn't, not reallIyf. Big Man stood for Mars itself, then maybe the story of the hidden one had
been inspired by HirokoI.mpossible to sayH.
e needed a folklorist, or a scholar of myths, someone who
could tell him how stories were born; but he had only these Sufis, grinning and weird, story creatures themselves. His fellow citizens in this new lanHde .had to laughT.hey laughed with him and took him off
to bed."We say a bedtime prayer from the Persian poet Rumi Jalaluddin," the old woman told him, and recited it:
" 'I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal.

I died as animal and I was human.
Why should I fearW? hen was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die human,
To soar with angels blessed above. And when I sacrifice my angel soul
I shall become what no mind ever conceived.'
"Sleep well," she said into his drowsing m"iTnhdi.s is all our path."
The next morning he climbed stiffly in his rover, wincing with soreness and determined to eat some omeg
as soon as he got on his wTahye. against hers affectionately.
same woman was there to see him off, and he bumped his faceplate
"Whether it be of this world or of that," she said, "your love will lead you yonder in the end."
-+=*=+-
The transponder road led him through the brown wind-torn days, crossing the broken land south of Margaritifer Sinus.John would have to drive it again some other time to see any of it, for in the storm it was nothing but flying chocolate, pierced by momentary golden shafts ofNleigarht.Bakhuysen Crater he
stopped at a new settlement called Turner Wells; here they had tapped into an aquifer that was under such hydrostatic pressure at its lower end that they were going to generate power by running the artesian flow through a series of turbinTesh.e water released would be poured into molds, frozen, and then
hauled by robot to dry settlements all over the southern hemispMhaerye. Dunkel was working there, and she showed John around the wells, the power plant, and the ice res"eTrvhoeiresx. ploratory drilling
was actually scary as helWl. hen the drill hit the liquid part of the aquifer it was blasted back out of the well, and it was touch and go whether we were going to be able to control the gusher or not."
"What would have happened if you hadn't?"
"Well, I don't knowT.here's a lot of water down theIrfe.it broke the rock around the well, it might have gone like the big outflow channels in Chryse."
"That big?"
"Who knows?It's possible." "Wow."
"That's what I saidN!ow Ann has started an investigation into methods for determining aquifer pressures by the echoes they give back in the seismic Bteusts.there are people who would like to release an
aquifer or two, seeT? hey leave messages on the bulletin boards in theI nweot.uldn't be surprised if Sax

is among themB. ig floods of water and ice, lots of sublimation into the air, why shouldn't he cheer?" "But floods like those old ones would be as destructive to the landscape as dropping asteroids on it."
"Oh, more destructive!Those channels downslope from the chaoses were incredible outbreTahkes. best terran analogy is the scablands in eastern Washington, have you heard ofAtbhoeumt ?eighteen thousand years ago there was a lake covering most of Montana, Lake Missoula thecyomcapllosiet,d of Ice Age meltwater and held in place by an ice Adtamso.me point this ice dam broke and the lake
emptied catastrophically, about two trillion cubic meters of water, draining down the Columbia plateau and out to the Pacific in a matter of days."
"Wow."
"While it lasted it ran about a hundred times the discharge of the Amazon, and carved channels in the basalt bedrock that are as much as two hundred meters deep."
"Two hundred meters!"
"Right.And this was nothing compared to the ones that cut theChryse chaTnhneelsa!nastomosing up there covers areas-"
"Two hundred meters of bedrock?"
"Yeah, well, it isn't just normal erosiIonn.floods that big the pressures fluctuate so much that you get exsolution of dissolved gases, you know, and when those bubbles collapse they produce incredible pressures. Hammering like that can break anything."
"So it would be worse than an asteroid strike."
"Sure. Unless you dropped a really big asteroBidu.t there are people who think we should be doing that too, right?"
"Are there?"
"You know there arBe.ut the floods are better yet, if you want to do that kind oIf ythoiungc. ould
direct one of them into Hellas, for instance, you'd have Aa nsdeay.ou might be able to refill it faster than the surface ice sublimed."
"Direct a flood like that?" John exclaimed.
"Well, yeah, that would be impossibBleu.t if you found one in the right spot, you wouldn't have to direct it. You should check where Sax has sent the dowsing team lately, see what it looks like to you."
"But it would be forbidden by UNOMA for sure." "Since when has that mattered to Sax?"
John laughed. "Oh, it matters nowT.hey've given him too much for him to ignore tThheemy.'ve tied him down with money and power."
"Maybe."

# # #
That night at 3:30 AM there was a small explosion in one of the well haelardms,
baenldls ripped them
from sleep and sent them stumbling through the tunnels half-naked, to be faced with a gusher that was shooting up into the night's flying dust, in a column of white water torn to shreds in the unsteady glare of hastily directed spotlightsT. he water was falling out of the dust clouds as chunks of ice, hail the size of bowling balls; wells downwind were being pummelled by these missiles, and the ice balls were already knee deep.
Given the discussion of the previous night John found himself quite alarmed by the sight, and he ran around until he found MarTy.hrough the noise of the eruption and the ever-present storm, Mary shouted in John's ear": Clear the area, I'm going to set off a charge beside the well and try toSshneufrfanit!o"ff
in her white nightshirt, and John rounded up the spectators and got them back down the tunnels to the station habitat.Mary joined them in the lock, huffing and puffing, and fiddled with her wristpad, and there was a low boom in the direction of the "wCeolml. e on let's go see," she said, and theygot through the
lock and ran back down the tunnels toward the window overlooking thTe hwereell.in a tumble of white ice balls lay the wreckage of the drill, on its side, an"dYesatihll!. Capped!" Mary cried.
They cheered weaklyS.ome of them went down to the well area, to see if there was anything they could do to secure the situatio"nG. ood work!" John said to Mary.
"I've read a lot about well capping since that first incident," Mary said, still short "oAf nbdrewateh.had
it all set up to gBou. t we never actually had the chanTcoe. try itO.
f course.So you never know."
John said, "Do your locks have recorders?" "They do."
"Great."
John went to check theHme.
plugged Pauline into the station system, and asked questions, and scanned
the answers as they appeared on his pNaod. one had used the locks after the time-slip that Hnieght.
called the weather satellite overhead, and clicked into the radar and IR systems that Sax had given him the codes for, and scanned the area around BakhuyNseon.sign of any machines nearby, except some of
the old windmill heatersA. nd the transponders showed that no one had been on the roads in the area since his arrival the previous day.
John sat heavily before Pauline, feeling sluggish and slow-wHitteedc.ouldn't think of any other checks
to make; and it seemed from those he had, that no one had been out that night to do tThhee damage. explosion could have been arranged days before, perhaps; although it would be hard to hide the device,
the wells being worked on daiHlye.
got up slowly and went to find Mary, and with her help talked to the
people who had last worked on that well, the day bNefooresi.gn of tampering then, all the way until
eight PM.And after that everyone in the station had been at the John Boone party, the locksSounused. there really had been no chance.
He went back to his bed and thought abo"uOthi,t.by the way, Pauline; please check Sax's records, and give me a list of all the dowsing expeditions in the last year."
# # #

Continuing on his blind road to Hellas he ran into Nadia, who was overseeing the construction of a new kind of dome over Rabe CratIetr.was the largest dome yet built, taking advantage of the thickening of
the atmosphere and the lightening of construction materials, which created a situation where gravity could be balanced with pressure, making the pressurized dome effectively weighTtlheses.frame was to be
made of reinforced areogel beams, the latest from the alchemists; areogel was so light and strong that
Nadia went into little raptures as she described the potential usesCfroarteirt. domes themselves were a
thing of the past, in her opinion; it would be just as easy to erect areogel pillars around the circumference of a town, bypassing the rock enclosures and putting the whole population inside what would be in effect
a big clear tent.
She told John all about it as they walked around Rabe's interior, now nothing but a big construction site. The whole crater rim was going to be honeycombed with skylighted rooms, and the domed interior
would hold a farm that would feed thirty thousEaanrdth. moving robots the size of buildings hummed out
of the murk of the dust, invisible even fifty meters Tawheasye.
behemoths were working on their own, or
by teleoperation, and the teleoperators probably had too little view of their surroundings to make nearby foot traffic entirely safeJ.ohn followed Nadia nervously as she strolled about, remembering how skittish
the miners at Bradbury Point had been-and there they had been able to see what was haHpepehnaindg! to laugh at Nadia's obliviousnesWs. hen the ground trembled underfoot, they just stopped and looked around, ready to leap away from any oncoming building-sized vehIitclewsa. s quite a touNr.adia railed against the dust, which was wrecking a lot of machiTnherey.great storm was now four months old, the longest in years; and it still showed no sign of enTdeinmgp. eratures had plummeted, people were eating canned and dried food, and an occasional salad or vegetable grown under artificiaAlnldighdtu.st was in
everything. Even as they discussed it John could feel it caking his mouth, and his eyes were dry in their sockets. Headaches had become extremely common, as well as sinus trouble, sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, lung distress generallyP.lus frequent cases of frostniAp.nd computers were becoming
dangerously unreliable, a lot of hardware breakdown, a lot of AI neurosis or retarMdaitdidoany. s inside
Rabe were like living inside a brick, Nadia said, and sunsets looked like coal mSinhee fhiraetse.d it.
John changed the subjec"tW.
hat do you think of this space elevator?"
"Big."
"But the effect, NadiTa.he effect."
"Who knows?You can never tell with a thing like that, can you."
"It'll make a strategic bottleneck, like the one Phyllis used to talk about when we were discussing who would build Phobos stationS.he'll have made her own bottlenecTkh.at's a lot of power."
"That's what Arkady says, but I don't see why it can't be treated as a common resource, like a natural feature."
"You're an optimist."
"That's what Arkady saysS."he shrugged."I'm just trying to be sensible." "Me too."
"I knowS. ometimes I think we're the only two." "And Arkady?"

She laughed.
"But you two are a couple!" "Yes, yesL. ike you and Maya." "Touché."
Nadia smiled briefly".I try to make Arkady think about thinTghsa.t's the best I can dWo.e're meeting at Acheron in a month, to take the treatmMenaty.a tells me it's a good thing to do together."
"I recommend it," John said with a grin. "And the treatment?"
"Beats the alternative, right?"
She chuckledT. hen the ground growled through their boots, and they stiffened and jerked their heads around, looking for shadows in the muArk.black bulk like a moving hill appeared to their Trhigehyt. ran
to the side, stumbling and hopping over cobbles and debris, John wondering if this were another attack, Nadia rapping out commands over the common band, cursing the teleoperators for not keeping track of them on the IR".Watch your screens, you lazy bastards!"
The ground stopped tremblinTg.he black leviathan no longer moveTdh.ey approached it warilyA. Brobdignagian dump truck, on trackBs.uilt locally, by Utopia Planitia Machines; a robot built by robots, and big as an office block.
John stared up at it, feeling the sweat drip down his foTrehheeyadw. ere safeH.
is pulse slowed.
"Monsters like this are all over the planet," he said to Nadia wonde"rCinugttliyn.g, scraping, digging,
filling, building.Pretty soon some of them will attach themselves to one of those two-kilometer asteroids,
and build a power plant that will use the asteroid itself as fuel to drive it into Martian orbit, at which point other machines will land on it, and begin to transform the rock into a cable about thirty-seven thousand kilometers long!The size of it, NadiTa!he size!"
"It's big all right."
"It's unimaginable, reallyS.omething completely beyond human abilities as we were brought up to understand them.Teleoperation on a massive scalAe. kind of spiritual waldAo.nything that can be
imagined can be executed!" Slowly they walked around the giant black object before them: no more than
a kind of dump truck, nothing compared to what the space elevator would be; and yet even this truck, he
thought, was an amazing thin"gM.
uscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that
is so large and powerful that it's difficult to conceptualizMeayitb. e impossible.That's probably part of your talent, and Sax's too- to flex the muscles that no one else realizes we Ihamveanyeht.oles drilled
right through the lithosphere, the terminator lit with mirrored sunlight, all these cities filling mesas and stuck in the sides of cliffs-and now a cable strung out way past Phobos and Deimos, so long that it's both in orbit and touching down at the same tiImt'se!impossible to imagine it!"
"Not impossible," Nadia noted.
"No.And now of course we see the evidence of our power all around us, we almost get run down by it

as it goes about its worAkn! d seeing is believingE.ven without an imagination you can see what kind of
power we haveM.
aybe that's why things are getting so strange these days, everyone talking about
ownership or sovereignity, fighting, making claimPse.ople squabbling like those old gods on Olympus, because nowadays we're just as powerful as they were."
"Or more," Nadia said.
# # #
He drove on into the Hellespontus Montes, the curved mountain range surrounding Hellas Basin. Somehow, one night when he was sleeping, his rover got off the transpondeHrerowado.ke up, and in
breaks in the dust saw that he was in a narrow valley, walled with small cliffs that were cut by the typical fluting of ravinesI.t seemed likely that by staying on the valley floor he would cross the road again, so he headed on cross countryT. hen the valley floor was disrupted by shallow transverse grabens like empty
canals, and Pauline kept having to stop and turn and try another branch in her route-finding algorithm, defeated by one gulch after another as they appeared out of theWmhuernk.John got impatient and tried
to take over, it only got worIsne.the land of the blind, the autopilot is king.
But slowly he closed on the valley mouth, where the map showed the transponder road descending to a wider valley belowS. o that night he stopped, unworried, and sat in front of the TV and ate a meal. Mangalavid was showing the premiere performance of an aeolia built by a group in Noctis Labyrinthus. The aeolia turned out to be a small building, cut with apertures which whistled or hooted or squeaked, depending on the angle and strength of the wind hitting Fthoermt.he premiere the daily downslope wind
in Noctis was augmented by some fierce katabatic gusts from the storm, and the music fluctuated like a composition, mournful, angry, dissonant or in sudden snatches harmoitnisce:emed the work of a mind,
an alien mind perhaps, but certainly something more than random chTahnecea. lmost aleatory aeolia, as a commentator said.
After that came news from EarTthe existence of the gerontological treatments had been leaked by a
official in Geneva, and had flashed around the world in a day; and now there was a violent debate going on in the general assembly concerning the maMttearny delegates were demanding that the treatments be
made a basic human right, guaranteed by the UN for all, with funding from the developed nations placed immediately in a pool to make sure that financing for the treatments would be equally available to all.
Meanwhile other reports were coming
sino:me religious leaders were coming out against the treatments,
including the Popet;here were widespread riots, and some damage at certain medical centers. Governments were in a turmoiAl. ll the faces on the TV were tense or angry, demanding change; and all the inequality, hatred and misery that the faces revealed made John flinch, he couldn'Ht ewafetcllh.
asleep, and then slept poorly.
He was dreaming of Frank when a sound wokeAhikmn.ock on his windshielIdt. was the middle of the night. Groggily he hit the lock lock; sitting up he wondered that he had such a reflex actioWnheinn him. had he learned that oneH?e rubbed his jaw, turned on the common b"aHnedl.lo? Anyone out there?"
"The Martians."
It was a man's voicHei.s English was accented, but John couldn't identify how. "We want to talk," the voice said.
John stood and looked out the windshiAeltd.night, in the storm, there was precious little toBusteeh.e thought he could pick out shapes in the blackness, there below him.

"We just want to talk," the voice said.
If they had wanted to kill him they could have blown open the rover whileBehseidselse,pth.e still couldn't quite believe that anyone wished him haTrmhe.re was no reason for it!
So he let them in.
There were five of them, all mTehne.ir walkers were frayed, dirty, patched with material that had not been made for walkersT.heir helmets were without identification, stripped of all pAaisnt.they took off
the helmets he saw that one of the men was Asian, and young; he looked about Tehigehyteoeunt.h went
forward and sat in the driver's seat, leaned over the steering wheel to look closer at the instrument array. Another got off his helmet; a short brown-skinned man, with a thin face and long drHeaedlosactkso. n
the padded bench across from John's bed, and waited for the other three men to get their helmets off too. When they did they crouched on their haunches, watching John attentHiveelyh.ad never seen any of
them before.
The thin-faced man said, "We want you to slow the rate of immigHraetiowna."s the one who had
spoken outside; now his accent sounded CaribbeHane. spoke in a low voice, almost in a whisper, and
John found it very difficult not to emulate him.
"Or stop it," the young man in the driver's seat said.
"Shut up, Kasei.T"he thin-faced man never took his gaze from John's "fTachere are too many people coming up.You know thatT. hey're not Martian, and they don't care what happens Thhereey.'re going
to overwhelm us, they're going to overwhelm yYoouu.
know thatY.
ou're trying to turn them into
Martians, we know, but they're coming in a lot faster than you canThweoorkn.ly thing that will work is slowing down the influx."
"Or stopping it."
The man rolled his eyes, appealed with a grimace for John's understaTnhdeinygo. uth was young, his look said.
"I don't have any say-" John began, but the man cut him off:
"You can advocate
Yit.ou're a power, and you're on our side."
"Are you from Hiroko?"
The youth snicked his tongue against the roof of his mThoeuthth. in-faced man said nothinFg.our faces stared at John; the other looked resolutely out the window.
John said, "Have you been sabotaging the moholes?" "We want you to stop the immigration."
"I want you to stop the sabotaItg'se.just bringing more people hePreo.lice."
The man eyed him"W.
hat makes you think we can contact the saboteurs?"

"Find themB. reak in on them at night."
The man smiled".Out of sight, out of mind." "Not necessarily."
They had to be with HiroOkoc.cam's razor.There couldn't be more than one hidden groOurp.maybe there could.John felt light-headed, and wondered if they were doctoring thReealeira.sing aerosol drugs.
He definitely felt strange, it was all surreal, dreamy; the wind buffetted the rover, sent a sudden burst of aeolian music coursing by, a weird drawn-out hHooist. thoughts were slow and ponderous, and he felt
the edge of a yawTn.hat's it, he thoughIt.'m still trying to wake from a dream.
"Why do you hide?" he heard himself say.
"We're building MarsJ.ust like youW.
e're on your side."
"You ought to help, thenH."e tried to think".What about the space elevator?"
"We don't care about iTt.h"e kid snicked". That isn't what mattersI.t's people that matter." "The elevator will bring a lot more people."
The man considered tha"tS. low the immigration, and it can't even be built."
Another long silence, punctuated by the wind's eerie commenCtany't. people would build itO? r maybe they meant the money.
even be builtD? id they think
"I'll look into it," John saTidh.e kid turned and stared at him, and John raised a hand to forestall him. "I'll do what I canH."is hand stood before him, a huge pink th"iTnhga. t's all I can saIyf. I promised
results, it would be lyinIg.know what you meaIn'l.l do what I canH."e thought about it more, with difficulty. "You ought to be out in the open, helpinWg eus.need more help."
"Each in his way," the man said qui"eWtlye.'ll be going nowW. e'll keep track to see what you do." "Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her."
The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.
The thin-faced man smiled brief"lyIf.
I see her I will."
One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue amn aasesr:ogel sponge, barely visible under the
night-running lights.The hand holding it made a fYiset.s, a drugH.
e lunged out and caught the young one
unawares, clawed the youth's bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.
When he came to they were goHnee. had a headacheH. e fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the v"isYitoauti'oren. a
fool," Frank said". You don't understand."
When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the wiTnhdeshiwelidn.ds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to Sbheapsuerse.in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory deprivation hallucinItatiroenalsl.y was

sensory deprivation, this storm; and getting very claustrophobic indHee .ate some omeg and suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeareAd. difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?
But if they had been tracking him. . . .
Back inside he called up the satelliRteasd.ar and IR got nothing but his roEvevre.n walkers would have shown on the IR; so presumably they had a refuge neEaarsbyy.to hide in mountains like theHse called up his Hiroko map, and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging it north and south in the
mountains. He had several circles on the Hiroko map by now, but none of them had been searched by ground crews with any thoroughness, and probably they never would be, as most of them were in chaotic terrain, ravaged land the size of Wyoming or Te"xIta's. a big world," he muttered.
He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at theThfleonorh. e remembered the last thing he had done.He looked under his fingernails; a little skin matter was stuck therHe,e ygeos.t a sample dish from the little autoclave, and carefully scraped what was there onto thGe edniosmh.e identification was
far beyond the rover's capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on recordI.f not, that too would be useful informatiAonn.d maybe, John wasn't sure, Ursula and
Vlad could identify him by parentage.
# # #
He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeairtedwatshatturning into
a conference on agriculture under artificial lightiTngh.e next morning John took him out for a walk in the cleartunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the eas"t.I think I met the coyote," John said.
"Did you!Did he tell you where Hiroko is?" "No."
Sax shruggedI.t appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evSeoninJgo.hn decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station ocScauxpaanstssu.red the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a
significant fraction of their theoretical maximums-about two percent, to be precise-and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few Adepcpaldaeuss.e at
this announcement was non-existant, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax's. Surface insolation was still twenty-five percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of endTinegm. peratures had dropped, and tempers were risinAgl.l the
new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.
Sax dismissed all that with a mild sh"rIut'gs. the last global storm," he sa"iIdt . will go down in history as some kind of heroic agEe.njoy it while it lasts."
This was poorly receiveSd.ax, however, did not notice.
A few days later, Ann and Simon drove into the settlement with their boy Peter, who was Hneow three.

had been, so far as they could tell, the thirty-third child born on Mars; the colonies established after the first hundred had been fairly prolifJioc.hn played with the boy on the floor as he and Ann and Simon
caught up on news, and exchanged some of the thousand and one tales of the GreIatt sSeteomrmed. to
John that Ann ought to be enjoying the storm and the horrendous knock it had put on the terraforming process, like some kind of planetary allergic response, the temperatures plummeting below the baseline, the reckless experimenters struggling with their puny clogged machines. . . . But she was not amused.
Irritated as usual, in fac"tA.
dowsing team drilled into a volcanic vent in Daedalia and came up with a
sample containing unicellular microorganisms significantly different from the cyanobacteria you released in the north.And the vent was pretty nearly encased in bedrock, and very far from any biotic release sites. They sent samples of the stuff up to Acheron for analysis, and Vlad studied it and declared that it looked like a mutant strain of one of their releases, perhaps injected into the sample rock by contaminated drilling equipment." Ann poked John in the che"s'tP:robably terran,' Vlad saidP.robably terran!"
"Probabry tewwan!" her little boy said, catching Ann's intonation perfectly. "Well, it probably is," John said.
"But we'll never knowT!hey'll end up debating it for centuries to come, there'll be a journal devoted to that issue alone, but we'll never really know."
"If it's too close to tell, it's probably terran," John said, grinning at "tAhenybthoiyn.g that evolved separately from terran life would give itself away in an instant."
"Probably," Ann said(."Probabry.") "Except what if there's a common source, the space spores theory, for instance, or ejecta blasted from one planet to another with microorganisms buried in its rock?"
"That's not too likely, is it?"
"We don't knowW. e'll never know, now."
John had a hard time sharing her conc"eTrhne.y might have come from the Viking landers for all we
know," he said". There's never been a very effective effort to sterilize our explorations here, that's just the
way it isM.
eanwhile we've got more pressing problemSs.u"ch as a global dust storm longer than the
longest one ever recordedo,r an influx of immigrants whose commitment to Mars was as minimal as their housing, or an upcoming treaty revision that no one could agree on, or a terraforming effort that a lot of people hated.Or a home planegtoing critical.Or an attempt (or two) to do one John Boone some harm.
"Yeah yeah," Ann sai"dI. know.But all that's politics, we'll never get away fromTthiast. was science, a question I wanted answereAd.nd now I can'Nt. obody can."
John shrugged". We'll never answer that one, AnNno.
matter whatT. hat was one of those questions
that was fated always to remain unanswerDedid. n't you know that?" "Probabwy tewwan."
# # #
A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of
Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they wIanlvkeesdti.gative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related inciTdehnetrse. were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young wMoomstenh.ad been

assigned from the American FBTI.heir leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone; John agreed politely.
When they met after breakfast the next morning-six of the agents there, including both women-he meekly answered every question without hesitation, though instinctively he told them only what he thought they knew already, plus a bit more to seem honest and helpful. They were polite and deferential; thorough in their questioning, extremely reticent if he asked them anything in rTethueryn. seemed unaware of much of
the detail of the situation on Mars, and asked him about things that had happened in the first years at
Underhill, or during the time of Hiroko's disappearanTchee.y obviously knew the events of that time, and
the basic facts of the various relationships among the first hundred's media stars; they asked him a lot of questions about Maya, Phyllis, Arkady, Nadia, the Acheron grSoauxp., . . all of whom were
well-known to these young Terrans, permanent fixtures on theirBTuVt .it seemed they knew little
beyond what had been taped and sent back to EJaorthhn., his mind wandering, wondered if that would be true of all TerranAs.fter all what other sources of information did they have?
At the end of the interview, one of them named Chang asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. John, who had ommitted an account of his midnight visit from the coyote, among many other things,
said "I can't think of anything!"
Chang nodded, and then Sam Houston s"aWid,e'd appreciate it if you'd give us access to your AI on these matters," he said.
"I'm sorry," John said, looking apologe"tiIc.don't give access to my AI." "You have a destruct lock on it?" Houston said, looking surprised. "No.I just don't do iTt.hose are my private records."
John stared the man in the eye, watched him squirm under the gaze of his associates. "We, um, we can get a warrant from UNOMA, if you like."
"I doubt you can, actualAlyn. d even if you do I won't let you in."
John smiled at him, almost laughAedn.other moment where being the First Man On Mars was useful.
There was nothing they could do to him without causing far more trouble than it wHase wstoorothd.
up,
surveyed the little gang with as much easy arrogance as he could muster, which was q"uLiteet amelot. know if there's anything else I can do for you."
He left the room"P. auline, click into the building comm center and copy anything you can that they send out." He called Helmut, remembering that his own calls would be opened as well; he kept his questions
brief, as if just checking credentiaYlse. s, a team had been sent out by UNOMThAey. task force, assembled in the last six months to deal with problems.
were part of a
Police on Mars, then, as well as a detecWtiveell., it was to be expecteBdu. t it was a nuisance
nevertheless. He couldn't do much with them hanging around watching him, suspicious because he hadn't
given them access to PaulinAe.nd really there wasn't that much to do in Hellas anyTwhearye.
had been
no incidents of sabotage there, and it seemed unlikely that any would occuMr
anyoaw.was
unsympathetic, she didn't want to be bothered with his problems, she had enough problems of her own, with the technical aspects of the aquifer proj"eYcto.u're probably their chief suspect," she said irritably.
"These things keep happening to you, a truck in Thaumasia, a well at Bakhuysen, and now you won't let

them into your recordsW. hy don't you just do it?"
"Because I don't like them," John said, glaring aItt hwera.s back to normal with MaWyae.ll, not really;
they went through their routines in a kind of high spirits, as if playing a good role in the theater, knowing they had time for everything, knowing now what was real, what lay at the base of the reSlaotioinship.
that sense it was much betteOr.n the surface, however, it was the same old melodrMamayaa.
refused
to understand, and in the end John gaveAuftpe.r that he spent a couple of days thinking it Hoevewr.ent
down to the station's labs, and had the sample of skin taken from under his fingernails cultured, cloned, and read.No one with that genome was in the planetary records, so he sent the information to Acheron requesting an analysis and any information they could gUivrseu. la sent their results back coded, with a
single word added at the enCdo. ngratulations.
He read the message again, swore out lHoued.went out for a walk, alternately laughing and swearing. "Damn you, Hiroko!Damn you to hellG! et out of your hole and help Auhs,! ha ha haY! ou bitch!I'm
sick of this Persephone shit!"
Even the walktubes were oppresive at that moment, and he went to the garage and suited up, and went out the lock for a walk outside, the first in manyHdeayws.as out at the end of the northern arm of the
town, on a smooth desert flooHre.
wandered around, staying within the fluctuating column of dust-free
air that every city created, thinking the situation over as he surveyed tHheellcaisty.was going to be
much less impressive than Burroughs, or Acheron, or Echus, or even Senzeni Na; located at the low point of the basin, it had no heights to build on, no prAosltpheocut.gh the whipping dust made it a poor
time to judge thaTt.he town had been built in a crescent which would eventually become the shoreline of the new lake; that might look nice when it happened-a waterfront-but meanwhile it was as featureless as Underhill, with all the latest in power plant and service apparatus, intake vents, cables, tunnels like giant sloughed snakeskins . .th.e old scientific station look, no esthetics involvWede.ll, that was fineT.hey
couldn't put every town on a mountaintop.
Two people passed him, their faceplates polarizOeddd. , he thought, it being so gloomy in the storm.
Then they leaped on him, knocked him down. He shoved off the sand with a wild John Carter leap and threw his fists around him, but to his surprise they were running off into the clouds of dust whipping by.
He staggered, stared after themT.hey disappeared behind the veils of duHsits.
blood jolted through him;
then he felt his shoulders buHrne.
reached up and back; they had cut his walker Hopeenp.ressed his
hand over the rip and began to run hHaerd.couldn't feel his shoulders at all any more. It was awkward
to run with his arm up and behind his
Hneicsk.air supply appeared to be all right-no-a tear in the tube,
at the neckH.
e took his hand from his shoulder long enough to dial maximum flow on his Twhreistpad.
cold flowed down his back like ghost ice wAatehr.undred below zero CentigradHe.e was holding his breath and could feel dust on his lips, caking his mImouptohs. sible to tell how much CO2 was getting into his oxygen supply, but it didn't take much to kill you.
The garage appeared out of the murk; he had run right to it, and was feeling mighty pleased with himself until he came to the lock door and pushed the open button and nothing haIpt pwenaesd.easy to lock a
lock's outer door, just leave the inner one oHpeisn.lungs burned, he needed a breaHthe. ran around the garage to the walktube that connected it to habitat proper, reached it, stared in through the layers of plastic. No one in sighHt. e took his hand away from the rip on his shoulder and as quickly as he could
opened the box on his left forearm and took out the little drill, turned it on and plunged it into the plastic, which gave without breaking and gathered up around the spinning bit, until the drill almost broke his
elbow; he poked wildly with it and finally got the plastic to tear, then ripped downward, widening the hole until he could dive through it helmet Wfirhste.n he was inside to the waist he held still, using his body
as a rough plug for the hoHle unclipped his helmet and ripped it off his head and gasped for breath as if
coming up from a long dive, out in out in oGuett inth. at CO2 out of the bloHodis.
shoulders and neck

were numb.Down at the garage an alarm bell was ringing.
After a twenty second compressed burst of thought, he yanked his legs through the hole and ran down the quickly depressurizing tube toward the habitat, away from the gaHrapgpe.ily the door there opened
on command.Once inside he jumped in an elevator and dropped to the third floor below the ground, where he was staying in one of the guest sHuietesl.et the elevator door open and looked Noout.one in
sight. He hustled down to his rooImn.side he stripped off the walker and stashed it and the helmet in his closet. In the bathroom he winced at the sight of his whitened shoulders and upper back; a really horrible
case of frostnipH.
e took some oral painkiller and a triple dose of omegandorph, put on a shirt with a
collar, pants, shoesH.
e combed his hair, composed himseTlfh.e face in the mirror looked glassy-eyed
and distracted, almost stunned; he threw his face through the most violent contortions, slapped it, resettled his expression, started breathing in a deep patTtehrne. drugs began to kick in, and his reflection looked a little better.
He went out into the hall and walked to the big trench wall concourse, which extended downward three more stories.He walked along the railing looking at the people below, feeling a curious mixture of elation and rage.Then Sam Houston and one of his women colleagues approached him.
"Excuse me, Mr. Boone, but will you please come with us?" "What's up?" he said.
"There's been another incidenSt.omeone cut open one of the walkway tubes."
"Cut open a walktubeY?ou call that an incidenWt? e have mirror satellites flying out of orbit, and trucks falling into moholes, and you're calling a prank like that an incident?"
Houston glared at him, and Boone almost laughed at the "mHaonw. asked.
do you think I can help?" he
"We know you've been working on this for Dr. RuWsseellt.hought you might like to be informed." "Oh, I seeW. ell, let's go have a look then."
And then it was a matter of going through the paces, for nearly two hours, his shoulders burning like fire the whole timeH. ouston and Chang and the other investigators spoke to him as if in confidence, and
anxious for his input; but their gazes were coolly evaluJaotihvne. returned them with a little smile. "Why now, I wonder?" Houston said at one point.
"Maybe someone doesn't like you being here," John said.
Only when the whole charade was finished did he have time to think about why he wanted to keep them
from finding out about the attacNko.
doubt it would have drawn more investigators up, and that was
bad; and certainly it would have become the top news story all over Mars and Earth, tossing him back into maximum fishbowl.And he was sick of the fishbowl.
But there was something more than that, that he couldn't quiTtehepisnu.bconscious detectiveH. e
snorted with disgustT. o distract himself from the pain he stalked around from dining hall to dining hall, hoping to catch some expression of poorly-concealed surprise when he walked into eachBarockom.
from the dead!Which one of you murdered mAen! d once or twice he saw someone flinch from his

roving gaze.But the fact was, he thought dourly, many people flinched when he looked
Aats thifem.
avoiding the gaze of a freak, or a condemned Hmeanh.ad never felt his fame in quite that way before, and it made him angry.
The painkillers were wearing off, and he returned early to his Hroiosmdso.or was openW. hen he rushed in he found two of the UNOMA investigators in"sWidhea. t are you doing!" he cried angrily.
"Just looking out for you," one of them said smoTohthely. glanced at each othe"rW. someone to try something."
ouldn't want
"Like breaking and entering?" Boone said, standing in the doorway and leaning against it. "Part of the job, sSiro.rry we've upset you.T"hey shuffled nervously, trapped in his room. "Just who gave you authorization for this?" Boone said, folding his arms over his chest. "Well."They looked at each other aga"inM. r. Houston is our superior officer-"
"Call him and get him here."
One of them whispered into his wristpInada.
suspiciously short time Sam Houston appeared down the
hallway, and as he hurried up glowering John laug"hWedh.at were you doing, hiding around the corner?"
Houston walked right up to him and stuck his face forward, and said in a low voice, "Look, Mr. Boone, we're in the midst of a very important investigation here, and you are obstruDcteisnpgiteit.what you
seem to believe you are not above the law-"
Boone jerked forward so that Houston had to flinch to avoid their bumping"Ynoouseasr.en't the law,"
he said.He unfolded his arms and poked Houston in the chest, driving him back further down the hall. Now Houston was losing his temper, and Boone laughed at"Whimha.t are you going to do to me,
officer? Arrest me?Threaten me?Give me something good to include in my next report on Eurovid? Would you like thatW? ould you like me to show the world how John Boone was harrassed by some tin-god tin-badge functionary, who came to Mars thinking he was a sherriff in the wilHd ewest?" remembered his opinion that anyone who spoke of themselves in the third person was a self-declared idiot, and laughed and sa"idJohn Boone doesn't like that kind of thNinog! he doesn't!"
The other two had taken the opportunity to slip out of his room, and were now watching closely. Houston's face was the color of Ascraeus Mons, and his teeth were re"vNeaoledone's above the law,"
he grated."There are criminal acts occurring here, very dangerous ones, and quite a few of them happen when you're around."
"Like breaking and entering."
"If we determine that we need to check your quarters, or your records, to pursue our investigation, than we're going to do thaWt. e have that authority."
"I say you don't," John said arrogantly, and snapped his fingers in the man's face.
"We are going to search your rooms," Houston said, articulating each word very carefully. "Get away," Boone said contemptuously, and jerked at the other two and waved themHeback.

laughed, lip curled with scor"nT: hat's right, go!Get out of here, you incompetents-go back and read the regs on search and seizure!"
He went in his room and closed the door behind him.
He pausedI.t sounded like they were leaving, but either way he had to act like he diHdne't care. laughed, and went to the bathroom and took some more painkillers.
They hadn't yet gotten to the closet, which was lucky; it would have been hard to explain the torn walker without telling the truth, and that would have been mCesusryio. us how tangled things got when you
concealed the fact that someone had tried to kill Tyhoaut. made him pauseT.he attempt had been pretty
clumsy, after allT. here must have been a hundred more effective ways to kill someone out in a walker on Mars. So if they were just trying to scare him, or were perhaps hoping that he would try to conceal the attack, so that they could find him lying, and then have somethinhgimo.n. . .
He shook his head, confuseOdc. cam's razor, Occam's razorT. he detective's pimary tooIl.f someone attacks you they mean you harm, that was the basic, the fundamentaItl wfaacst. important to find out
who the attackers wereA. nd so onT. he painkillers were strong, and the omegandorph was wearing off.
It was getting hard to thinIkt .was going to be a problem disposing of the walker; the helmet in particular was a big bulky thinBg.ut now he was into it, and there was no graceful waHye oluaut.ghed; he knew
he would think of something eventually.
He wanted to talk to ArkadAy. call determined that Arkady had finished the gerontological treatment in
Acheron with Nadia, however, and had gone up to PhoJobhons. had still never visited the fast little moon. "Why don't you come on up and see it?" Arkady said over the"Bpheottneer . to talk in person, yes?"
"Okay."
He hadn't been in space since the landing from the Ares twenty-three years before, and the familiar sensations of acceleration and weightlessness brought on an unexpected bout of nHauesetao.ld Arkady
about it as they docked with Phobos, and Arkady said, "It always used to happen to me, until I started drinking vodka right before takeoffH."e had a long phsyiological explanation for this, but the details
began to pull John back over the edge and he cut hiAmrkoadffy.
laughed; the gerontological treatment
had given him its usual post-operative lift, and he had been a happy man to begin with; he didn't look like he would be sick again for a thousand years.
Stickney turned out to be a bustling little town, the crater's concrete dome lined with the latest
heavy-duty radiation proofing, and the floor of the crater terraced in concentric rings down to a bottom plaza. The rings alternated between parks and two-storied buildings with gardens on theirThroeorefs.
were nets in the air for people who lost control of their leaps across the city, or took off by accident; escape velocity was only fifty kilometers per hour, so it was almost possible to run right off the moon. Just under the dome foundation John spotted a small version of the exterior circumnavigating train, running horizontally compared to the buildings of the town, and moving at a speed that returned its
passengers to a sensation of Martian gravIit
.stopped four times a day to take people on, but if John

took refuge in it that would only delay his acclimatization, so he went to the guest room assigned to him, and miserably waited out the nauseIta.seemed he was a planet dweller now, a Martian for good, so that leaving it was painR. idiculous but true.
The next day he felt better, and Arkady took him on a tour ofTPhheoibnotesr.iorwas honeycombed
with tunnels, galleries, drifts, and several enormous open chambers, many of them still being enlarged, mined for water and fueMl.ost of the interior tunnels inside the moon were smooth functional tubes, but the interior rooms and some of the big galleries had been built according to Arkady's socio-architectural theories, and he showed John around some of thceirsceu: lar hallways, mixed work and recreation areas, terracing, etched metallic walls, all features that had become standard during Mars's crater-oriented
phase of construction, but of which Arkady was still proud.
Three of the little surface craters on the side opposite to Stickney had been domed with glass and filled with villages which had a view of the planet rushing beneath them-views never available from Stickney, as Phobos's long axis was permanently aligned toward Mars, with the big crater always pointed away.
Arkady and John stood in Semenov, looking up through the doMmaersa, t which filled half the sky and
was shrouded by its dust clouds, all its features obscu"rTehde. be going mad."
"No," John said".A thing of the moment, he saAys.glitch."
Great Storm," Arkady sai"dS. ax must
Arkady hootedA.
lready the two of them had fallen back into their old easy camaraderie, the feeling that
they were equals, brothers from way baAckrk. ady was the same as ever, laughing, joking, a great
kidder, ideas and opinions flooding out of him, confident in a way that John enjoyed immensely, even now, when he was sure many of Arkady's ideas were wrong, and even dangerous.
"Sax is probably right, in fact," Arkady s"aIifd.those aging treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revoluSthioonrt.ness of life was a primary force in
the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to sBayut iti.t is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work-no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generLateiot ntsh.em deal with it,
you know.And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again.But look, if you learn it, and then stare at it for fifty more years, you will eventually be saying, Why not make this more rationaWl? hy not make it closer to our heart's desWireh?at's stopping us?"
"Maybe that's why things are getting so strange down there," Joh"nBusatids.omehow I don't think
these people are taking the long viewH.e" gave Arkady a quick account of the sabotage situation, and ending it by saying boldl"yD: o you know who's doing it, ArkadAyr?e you involved?"
"What, me?No, John, you know me better than tThhate.se destructions are stupidT. he work of reds, from the look of it, and I am noI rdeodn. 't know exactly who is doingPriot.bably Ann does, have you asked her?"
"She says she doesn't know."
Arkady cackled". Still my same John BoonIe!love itL. ook here, my friend, I will tell you why these things are happening, and then you can work at it systematically, and perhaps seAe hm, ohreer.e's the
subway to Stickney-come on, I want to show you the infinity vault, it's really a nice pieceHoef work."
led John to the little subway car, and they floated down a tunnel to near the center of Phobos, where the car stopped and they got oTuth.ey pushed across the narrow room, and pulled themselves down a hall;

John noted that his body had adjusted to the weightlessness, that he could float and keep his trim again. Arkady led him into an expansive open gallery, which on first glance appeared to be too large to be contained inside of Phobosf:loor, wall and ceiling were paneled in faceted mirrors, and each round slab
of polished magnesium had been angled so that anyone in its microgravity space was reflected in thousands of infinite regresses.
They touched down on the floor and hooked their toes through rings, floating like sea bottom plants in a shifting crowd of Arkadys and John"sY. ou see, John, the economic basis of life on Mars is now
changing," Arkady said."No, don't you dare scofSf!o far we have not been living in a money economy,
that's the way scientific stations aIrte's.
like winning a prize that frees you from the economic
Wwheeel.
won that prize, and so did a lot of others, and we've all been here for years now, livinBgut antowway.
more people are flooding onto Mars, thousands of thAemnd!
many of them plan to work here, make
some money, and return to EarTthh.ey work for the transnationals that have gotten UNOMA
concessions. The letter of the Mars treaty is being kept because supposedly UNOMA is in charge of it all, but the spirit of the treaty is being broken left and right, by the UN itself."
John was nodding".Yes, I've seen thaHt. elmut told me about it righ to my face."
"Helmut is a snaBil.ut listen, when the treaty renewal comes up, they will change the letter of the law to match the new spiriOt. r even give themselves license to do mIotr'se.the discovery of strategic metals,
and all the open spacTe.hese represent salvation to a lot of countries down there, and new territory for the transnationals."
"And you think they'll have enough support to change the treaty?"
Millions of Arkadys stared bug-eyed at millions of
"JoDhonn.'t be so naïveO! f course they have enough
support! Look, the Mars treaty is based on the old Outer Space Ttrheatyw. as the first mistake,
because the Outer Space treaty was in fact a very fragile arrangement, and so the Mars treaty is too. According to the treaty's own provisions, countries can become voting members of the treaty council by establishing an interest here, which is why we're seeing all the new national scientific stations, the Arab League, Nigeria, Indonesia, Azania, Brazil, India and China and all thAe nrdestq. uite a few of these new countries are becoming treaty members specifically with the intent to break the treaty at renewal time. They want to open up Mars to individual governments, outside UN cAonntdrolt.he transnationals are
using flag of convenience countries like Singapore and the Seychelles and Moldavia to try to open Mars to private settlement, ruled by corporations."
"The renewal is still a few years off," John said.
A million Arkadys rolled their ey"eIst'.s happening nowN. ot just in talk, but in what's happening
day-to-day down thereW.
hen we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica
but even purerW.
e were outside the world, we didn't even own things-some clothes, a lectern, and that
was it!Now you know what I think, JoThnh.is arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three millions of years praIcnticing it. essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of tShoat alsifea.
result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance tIot alilvloewist.
you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one's curiosity, or pTlahya.t is utopia, John, especially for primitives and
scientists, which is to say everybodSyo.
a scientific research station is actually a little model of
prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well."

"You'd think everyone would join," John said.
"Yes, and they might, but it isn't being offered toAthnedmt.hat means it wasn't a true utoWpiae. clever primate scientists were willing to carve out islands for ourselves, rather than work to create such
conditions for everyoneA.
nd so in reality, the islands are part of the transnational Tohredyer.are paid
for, they are never truly free, there is never a case of truly pure rBeseecaarucshe.
the people who pay
for the scientist islands will eventually want a return on their invesAtmnedntn.ow we are entering that
time. A return is being demanded for our islaWnde. were not doing pure research, you see, but applied research. And with the discovery of strategic metals the application has becomeAcnledars.o it all
comes back, and we have a return of ownership, and prices, and Twhaegews.hole profit systemT.he
little scientific station is being turned into a mine, with the usual mining attitude toward the land over the treasure. And the scientists are being asked, what you do, how much is it Twheoyrtha?re being asked
to do their work for pay, and the profit of their work is to be given over to the owners of the businesses they are suddenly working for."
"I don't work for anyone," John said.
"Well, but you work on the terraforming project, and who pays for that?" John tried out Sax's answ"eTr:he sun."
Arkady hooted". Wrong! It's not just the sun and some robots, it's human time, a lAotndofthito.se humans have to eat and so Aonn.d so someone is providing for them, for us, because we have not bothered to set up a life where we provide for ourselves."
John frowned". Well, in the beginning we had to have the Thhealpt. was billions of dollars of equipment flown up hereL. ots of work time, like you say."
"Yes, it's trueB. ut once we arrived we could have focused all our efforts on making ourselves self-sufficient and independent, and then paid them back and been done withBtuhtemw.e didn't, and
now the loan sharks are heLreo.ok, back in the beginning, if someone were to ask us who made more money, you or me, it would have been impossible to say, right?"
"Right."
"A meaningless questionB. ut now you ask, and we have to conDfoer.you consult for anybody?" "Nobody."
"Me neitherB. ut Phyllis consults for Amex, and Praxis, and ArmsAcnodr. Frank consults for Honeywell-Messerschmidt, and GE, and Boeing, and SubarasAhini.d so onT. hey are richer than us. And in this system, richer is more powerful."
We'll just see about that, John thouBghutt. he didn't want to make Arkady laugh again, so he didn't say it.
"And it is happening everywhere on Mars," Arkady Asaroidu.nd them clouds of Arkadys waved their arms, looking like a Tibetan mandala of red-haired dem"oAnns.d naturally there are people who notice what's going onO. r I tell themA. nd this is what you must understand, John; there are people who will fight to keep things the way they wTerhee.re are people who loved the feel of life as a scientist primitive, so much that they will refuse to give it up without a fight."

"So the sabotages. . . ."
"Yes!Perhaps some of them are done by these peoItplies. counterproductive, I think, but they don't
agree. Mostly the sabotage is done by people who want to keep Mars the way it was before we arrived. I am not one of thosBeu. t I am one of those who will fight to keep Mars from becoming a free zone for transnational mining.To keep us all from becoming happy slaves for some executive class, walled in its fortress mansion."He faced John, and out of the corner of his eye John saw around them an infinity of confrontations. "Don't you feel the same?"
"I do, actually.H" e grinned."I do!I think if we disagree, it's mostly on the matter of methods." "What methods do you propose to use?"
"Well- basically, I want to get the treaty renewed as it stands, and then adIhfetrheadt thoa. ppens then we'll have what we want, or we'll have the basis for getting to full independence, at least."
"The treaty will not be renewed," Arkady said f"lIattlyw.ill take something much more radical to stop
these people, JohnD.
irect action-yes, don't you look so unbelievinSge!izure of some property, or of the
communication system-the institution of our own set of laws, backed by everyone here, out in the streets-yes, John, yes!It will come to that, because there are guns under the Mtaabsles. demonstration and insurrection is the only thing that will beat them, history shows this."
A million Arkadys clustered around John, looking graver than any Arkady he could ever remember seeing-so grave that the blossoming rows of John's own face exhibited a regressive expression of slack-jawed concern.He pulled his mouth shu"tI.'d like to try my way first," he said.
Which made all the Arkadys laugJho.hn gave him a playful shove on the arm and Arkady went to the floor, then pushed off and tackled himT.hey wrestled while they could keep contact and then flew away to opposite sides of the chamber; in the mirrors, millions of them flew away into infinity.
After that they went back to the subway, and to dinner in SeAmsenthoevy.
ate they looked up at the
surface of Mars, swirled like a gas giSaundt.denly it looked to John like a great orange cell, or embryo, or egg.Chromosomes whipping about under a mottled orange shAelln. ew creature waiting to be born, genetically engineered for sure; and they were the engineers, still working on what kind of creature it would be.They were all trying to clip the genes they wanted (their own) onto plasmids and insert them into the planet's DNA spirals, to get the expressions they wanted from the new chimericYalesb.east.
And John liked much of what Arkady wanted to put iBntuot iht.e had his own ideas as wTehlel.y would see who managed to create more of the genome in the end.
He glanced at Arkady, who was also looking up at the sky-filling planet, with the same grave expression that had been on his face in the hall of mIirtrowrsa.s a look that had been impressed on John very
accurately and powerfully, he found, but in a weird multiple fly's-vision format.
# # #
John descended back into the murk of the Great Storm, and down in the dim blustery sandswept days he saw things he hadn't seen befoTrhe.at was the value of talking with ArkaHdey. paid attention to
things in a new way; he travelled south from Burroughs, for instance, to Sabishii ("Lonely") Mohole, and visited the Japanese who lived therTe.hey were old-timers, the Japanese equivalent of the first hundred,
on Mars only seven years after the first hundred had arrived; and unlike the first hundred they had

become a very tight unit, and had "gone native" in a biSgabwisahyi.i had remained small, even after the mohole was dug thereI.t was out in a region of rough boulders near Jarry-Desloges Crater, and as he drove down the last part of the transponder trail to the settlement, John caught brief glimpses of boulders carved into oversized faces or figures, or covered with elaborate pictographs, or hollowed out into little Shinto or Zen shrinesH. e stared in the dustclouds after these visions, but they were always gone like hallucinations, half-seen and then disappeareAd.s he passed into the tattered zone of clear air directly downwind from the mohole, he noticed that the Sabishiians were taking the rock hauled out of the great shaft to this area and arranging it into curving mounds-a pattern-from space it would look like, what, a dragon? And then he arrived at the garage and was greeted by a group of them, barefoot and
long-haired, in frayed tan jumpers or sumo-wrestler jock straps: wizened old Japanese Martian sages, who talked about the kami centers in the regainodn, how their deepest sense of on had long ago shifted from the emperor to the planTeth.ey showed him their labs, where they were working on areobotany and radiation-proofed clothing materialsT.hey had also done extensive work on aquifer location, and climatology in the equatorial beLlt.istening to them it seemed to John that they just had to be in touch with Hiroko, it didn't make sense that they werBenu'tt. they shrugged when he asked about hJeorh.n
went to work drawing them out, establishing the atmosphere of trust that he was so often able to generate
in old-timers, the sense that they went back a long way together, into their own NAoacohuiapnle. of
days of asking questions, of learning the town, of showing that he was "a man who knew giri", and slowly they began to open up, telling him in a quiet but blunt way that they did not like the sudden growth of Burroughs, nor the mohole next to them, nor the population increase in general, nor the new pressures
put on them by the Japanese government, to survey the Great Escarpment and "fin"dWgeolrde."fuse,"
said Nanao Nakayama, a wrinkled old man with scraggly white whiskers and turquoise earrings, and long white hair in a pony t"aTilh. ey cannot make us."
"And if they try?" John asked.
"They will fail.A" nd his easy assurance caught John's attention; and he remembered the conversation with Arkady among the mirrors.
So some of the things he now saw were the result of paying attention in a new way, of asking new questions. But others were the result of Arkady sending word down through his network of friends and acquaintances, to identify themselves to John and show him aroTuhnuds. when John stopped in
settlements on the way from Sabishii to Senzeni Na, he was often approached by small groups of two, or three, or five, who introduced themselves and said, Arkady thought you might be interested to see this. . .
. And they would lead him to see an underground farm with an independent power plant, or a cache of tools and equipment, or a hidden garage full of rovers, or complete little mesa habitats, empty but ready for occupation.John would follow them bug-eyed and slack-jawed, asking questions and shaking his
head in amazementY. es, Arkady was showing him things; there was a whole movement down here, a little group in every town!
Eventually he came to Senzeni NHae. was returning because Pauline had identified two workers there as absent without explanation from their jobs, on the day the truck had fallen Tohneyhimda.y after he arrived he interviewed them, but they proved to have plausible explanations for their absence from the
net; they had been out climbinBg.ut after he had apologized for taking their time, and started back to his room, three other mohole technicians introduced themselves as friends of ArkJaodhyn's.greeted them enthusiastically, glad that something would come of the trip; and in the end a egirgohutptooofk him in a
rover to a canyon paralleling the mohole's canyTohne.y drove down through the obscuring dust to a habitat dug into an overhanging canyon wall; it was invisible to satellites, its heat was released from a number of dispersed small vents which from space would look like Sax's old windmill"Wheeatefrigs.ure
that's how Hiroko's group has done it," one of his guides told him. Her name was Marian, and she had a long beak of a nose and eyes that were set too close together, so that her gaze was very intent.

"Do you know where Hiroko is?" John asked. "No, but we think they're in the chaos."
The universal responseH. e asked them about the cliff dwelliIntgh. ad been built, Marian told him, with equipment from Senzeni NaI.t was currently uninhabited, but ready if needed.
"Needed for what?" John said as he walked around the little dark rooms of the place. Marian stared at him"F. or the revolution, of course."
"The revolution!"
John had very little to say on the drive Mbaacrkia.n and her companions sensed his shock, and it made
them uneasy too; perhaps they were concluding that Arkady had made a mistake in asking them to show
John their habitat. "There are a lot of these being prepared," Marian said defensHivierolyk.o had given them the idea, and Arkady thought they might come in haSnhdey.and her companions began ticking
them off on their fingers: a whole stockpile of air and ice mining equipment, buried in a dry ice tunnel at one of the south polar cap processing stations; a wellhole tapping the big aquifer under Kasei Vallis; scattered greenhouse labs around Acheron, growing pharmacologically useful plants; a communications
center in the basement of Nadia's concourse at Under"hAilln.d that's just what we know aboTuht.ere
are one-read samizdatappearing in the net that we had nothing to do with, and Arkady's certain that there are other groups out there, doing the same thing wBeecaareu.se when push comes to shove, we're all going to need places to hide and fight from."
"Oh come on," John sai"dY. ou all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state-it's all just a false analogy!"
"Why do you say that?" Marian demand"Wed.hat's different?"
"Wellfor one thing, we're not living on land that can sustaAinndusf.or another, we don't have the means to revolt successfully!"
"I disagree with both those poinYtso.u should talk to Arkady more about that."
"I'll tryA. nyway I think there's a better way of doing it than all this sneaking around stealing equipment,
something more directW.
e simply tell UNOMA what the new Mars treaty is going to say."
His companions shook their heads scornfully.
"We can talk all we want," Marian
"sbaiudt, that's not going to change what they do."
"Why not?Do you think they can just ignore the people who are livingThheeyre?may have continuous shuttles now, but we're still eighty million kilometers away from them, and we're here and thIety're not.
may not be North America in the 1760s, but we do have some of the same advantages; we're at a great distance, and we're in possessioTn.he important thing is not to fall into their way of thinking, into all the
same old violent mistakes!"

And so he argued against revolution, nationalism, religion, economics-against every mode of Terran thought that he could think of, all mashed together in his usua"lRsetyvloel.ution never even worked on Earth, not reallyA. nd here it's all outmodeWd. e should be inventing a new program, just like Arkady
says, including the ways to take control of ourWfaith. you all living a fantasy of the past you're leading
us right into the repression you're complaining aboWute!
philosophy, economics, religion!"
need a new Martian way, a new Martian
They asked him just what these new Martian modes of thought might be, and he raised "hHisowhands. can I say?When they've never existed it's hard to talk about thhaermd , to imagine them, because we
don't have the imagesT.hat's always the problem when you try to make something new, and believe me I know, because I've been tryinBg.ut I think I can tell you it will feel like; it will feel like the first years here, when we were a group and we all worked togeWthheer.n there was no purpose in life except to settle
and discover this place, and we all decided together what we shouTlhdatd'so.how it should feel."
"But those days are gone," Marian said, and the others no"Tddheadt's.
just your own fantasy of the
past. Nothing but wordsI.t's like you're holding a philosophy class in a giant gold mine, with armies bearing down on both sides."
"No no," John sai"dI.'m talking about methods for resistance, methods appropriate to our real situation, and not some revolutionary fantasy out of the history books!"
And around they went, again and again, until they were back at Senzeni Na, and had retired to the workers' rooms on the lowest residential floTohr.ere they argued passionately, through the time-slip and
long into the night; and as they argued a certain elation filled John, because he could see them beginning
to think about it-it was clear that they were listening to him, and that what he said, and what he thought of them, mattered to themT.his was the best return yet on the old First Man fishbowl; combined with
Arkady's stamp of approval, it gave him an influence over them that was palpable, he could shake their confidence, he could make them think, he could force them to re-evaluate, he could change their minds!
And so in the murky purple Great Storm dawn they wandered down the halls to the kitchen and talked on, looking out the windows and bolting down coffee, glowing with a kind of inspiration, with the age-old excitement of honest debateA. nd when they finally quit to go catch a little sleep before the day got going, even Marian was clearly shaken, and all of them were deep in thought, half-convinced that John was
right.
John walked back to his guest suite feeling tired but hWaphpeyth.er Arkady had intended to or not, he
had made John one of the leaders of his movemPeernhta. ps he would come to regret it, but there was no
going back nowA.
nd John was sure it was for the bHeest.could be a sort of bridge between this
underground and the rest of the people on Mars-operating in both worlds, reconciling the two, forging them into a single force that would be more effective than eitherAalfoonrec.e with the mainstream's resources and the underground's enthusiasm, perhapAs.rkady considered that an impossible synthesis;
but John had powers that Arkady didnS'to. simply change them all.
that he could, well, not usurp Arkady's leadership, but
The door to his room in the guest quarters wasHoepernu.shed in, alarmed, anthdere in the room's two chairs sat Sam Houston and Michael Cha"nSgo. ," Houston said". Where have you been?"
# # #
"Oh come on," John saHidi.s temper flared, his good mood burnt off in a "fDlaisdh.I pick the wrong door by mistake?"He leaned back out to loo"kN. o, I didn'tT. hese are my rooms.H" e lifted his arms

and clicked on his wristpad's record"eWr. hat are you doing in here?"
"We want to know where you've been," Houston said ev"Wenely'v.e got the authority to enter all the rooms here, and to get all our questions answeSroedy. ou might as well start."
"Come on," John scoffe"dD. on't you ever get tired of playing the bad Dcon?'t you guys ever trade off?"
"We just want answers to our questions," Chang said gently.
"Oh please, mister good cop," John s"aWid.e all want answers to our questions, don't we."
Houston stood up; already he was on the edge of losing his temper, and John walked right over to him
and stopped with their chests about ten centimeters a"pGarett.
out of my rooms," he sa"iGd.et out now,
or I'll throw you out, and then we'll figure out who had the right to be in here."
Houston merely stared at him, and without warning John shoved him hard in the chest; Houston ran into his chair and sat down involuntarily, bounced up going for John, but Chang jumped between them, saying "Wait a second, Sam, wait a second," while John shouted "Get out of my rooms!" over and over at the top of his lungs, bumping against Chang's back and glaring over his shoulder into Houston's red face.
John nearly burst into laughter at the sight; his high spirits had returned with the success of the shove, and he stalked to the door bellowing "Get oGuett! out! Get out!" so that Houston would not see the grin on
his face. Chang pulled his angry colleague out into the hall and John foTllhoewethdr.ee of them stood
there, Chang carefully placing himself between his partner and and now he faced John with a worried, irritated look.
"Now what did you want?" John said innocently.
HJoehnw. as bigger than either of them,
"We want to know where you've been," Chang said dogg"Wedley.have reason to suspect that your so-called investigation of the sabotage incidents has been a very convenient cover for you."
"I suspect the same of you," John said.
Chang ignored him".Things keep happening right after your visits, you see-" "They happen right during your visits."
"-hoppers of dust were dropped in every mohole you visited during the GreatCoSmtoprmut.er viruses
attacked the software in Sax Russell's office at Echus Overlook, right after your consultation with him in
2047. Biological viruses attacked the fast lichens at Acheron right after yoAu nldefts.o on." John shrugged". So? You've been here two months, and that's the best you can do?" "If we're right, it's good enouWghh. ere were you last night?"
"Sorry," John said".I don't answer questions from people who break into my rooms." "You have to," Chang sa"idIt.'s the law."
"What law?What are you going to do to mHe?e" turned toward the open door of the room, and Chang moved to block him; he lost his temper again and jerked toward Chang, who flinched but remained in the

doorway, immovable.John turned and walked away, back down to the commons.
# # #
He left Senzeni Na that afternoon in a rover, and took the transponder road north along the eastern flank of Tharsis.It was a good road and three days later he was 1300 kilometers to the north, just northwest
of Noctis Labyrinthus, and when he came to a big transponder intersection, with a new fuel station, he hung a right and took the road east to UndeErhacilhl. day as the rover rolled along blindly through the
dust, he worked with Paulin"eP. auline, would you please look up all planetary records for theft of dental equipment?" She was as slow as a human in processing an incongruous request, but eventually the data were there.Then he had her go over the movement records of every suspect he could Wthihnekn ohfe.
was sure where everyone had been, he gave Helmut Bronski a call to protest the actions of Houston and Chang. "They say they're working with your authorization, Helmut, so I thought you should know what they're doing."
"They are trying their best," Helmut s"aIidw. ish you would stop harrassing them and cooperate, JItohn. could be helpful.I know you have nothing to hide, so why not be more helpful?"
"Come on, Helmut, they don't ask for hIte'slpr.ank intimidationT. ell them to stop it."
"They are only trying to do their job," Helmut said bl"aIndhlayv.e not heard of anything illegitimate." John broke the connectioLn.ater on he called Frank, who was in Burrou"gWhsh.at's with Helmut?
Why is he turning the planet over to these policemen?"
"You idiot," Frank saiHd.e was typing madly at a computer screen as he talked, so that he seemed to be only barely conscious of what he was say"iAngre.n't you paying any attention at all to what's going on here?"
"I thought I was," John said.
"We're knee deep in gasolinAe!nd these god-damned aging treatments are the matBchu.t you never understood why we were sent here in the first place, so why should you understand anythinHge now?" typed on, staring hard into his screen.
John studied the little image of Frank on his Fwinriasltl.y he said, "Why were we sent here in the first place, Frank?"
"Because Russia and our United States of America were desperate, that'Ds ewcrheyp.it outmoded
industrial dinosaurs, that's what we were, about to get eaten up by Japan and Europe and all the little tigers popping up in AsiAa.nd we had all this space experience going to waste, and a couple of huge and unnecessary aerospace industries, and so we pooled them and came here on the chance that we'd find something worthwhile, and it paid oWff!e struck gold, so to speaWk.hich is only more gasoline poured
onto things, because gold rushes show who's powerful and who'sAnndot.now even though we got a
head start up here, there are a lot of new tigers down there who are better at things than we are, and the all want a piece of the actiTonh.ere's a lot of countries down there with no room and no resources, ten
billion people standing in their own shit."
"I thought you told me Earth would always be falling apart."
"This isn't falling aparTt.hink about it-if this damned treatment only goes to the rich, then the poor will

revolt and it'll all explode-but if the treatment goes to everyone, then populations will soar and it'll all explode. Either way it's goneI!t's going now!And naturally the transnats don't like that, it's horrible for
business when the world blows uSpo.
they're scared, and they're deciding to try to hold things together
by main forceH. elmut and those policemen are only the smallest tip of the iceberg-a lot of policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so is our only chance of getting to some kind of population stabilization without a catastrophCe.ontrol from above, the stupid bastards."
Frank shook his head disgustedly, then leaned toward his screen and became absorbed in its contents. John said, "Did you get the treatment, Frank?"
"Of course I diLd.eave me alone, John, I've got work to do."
# # #
The southern summer was warmer than the previous one that had been shrouded in the Great Storm, but still colder than any recordeTd.he storm was now almost two m-years long, over three terran years, but
Sax was philosophical about
Jito.hn called him at Echus Overlook, and when John mentioned the cold
nights he was experiencing Sax only said, "We'll very likely have low temperatures for the greater part of
the terraforming period.But warmer per se isn't what we're tryingVfeonr.us is warmW. survivable. If we can breath the air, I don't care if it's cold."
hat we want is
Meanwhile it was cold, cold everywhere, the nights down to a hundred below every night, even on the equator. When John reached Underhill, a week after leaving Senzeni Na, he found there was a kind of pink ice covering the sidewalks; it was nearly invisible in the storm's dim light, and walking around was a treacherous business.The people at Underhill spent most of their time indJooohrns. occupied a few
weeks by helping the local bioengineering team field test a new fast snowUnadlgearhe.ill was crowded
with strangers.Most of them were young Japanese or Europeans, who fortunately still used English to communicate with each otherJ.ohn roomed in one of the old barrel vaults, near the northeast corner of the quadrant.The old quadrant was less popular than Nadia's concourse, smaller and dimmemr,anaynd
of its vaults were now were used for storIatgwe.as strange to walk the square of hallways, remembering the pool, Maya's room, the dining hall-now all dark, and stacked with Tbhooxsees.years when the first hundred had been the only hundreIdt .was getting hard to remember what that had been like.
He kept track through Pauline of the movements of quite a few people, the UNOMA investigating force among them.It was a not-very-rigorous surveillance, as it was not always easy to track the investigators, especially Houston and Chang and their crew, whom he suspected were going off-net deliberately. Meanwhile the spaceports' arrival records gave more evidence every month that Frank had been right
about them being only the tip of the iceberg; a lot of people coming down at Burroughs in particular were working for UNOMA without job specifications, and then spreading out to the mines and moholes and
other settlements, and going to work for the local security hAenads.their Terran employment records were very interesting indeed.
Often at the end of a session with Pauline John would leave the quadrant, and go for a walk outside, feeling disturbed and thinking hardT.here was a lot more visibility than there had been; things were
clearing up a bit out on the surface, though the pink ice still make walkinIgt streiecmkye.d the Great
Storm was lesseningW.
ind speeds on the surface were only two or three times the pre-storm average of
thirty kilometers per hour, and the dust in the air was sometimes little more than a kind of thick haze, turning the sunsets into blazing pastel swirls of pink, yellow, orange, red, and purple, with random streaks of green or turquoise appearing and disappearing, along with icebows, and sundogs, and occasional
brilliant shafts of pure yellow lignhat:ture at her most tasteless, transient and spectacuAlanrd.
watching

all that hazy color and movement John would be distracted from his thoughts, and climb the great white pyramid to have a look around, and then go back inside ready to start the fight again.
One evening after one of these sunset extravaganzas he climbed down the peak of the great pyramid, and walked slowly back toward Underhill-and then he spotted two figures climonbe oouft the garage
side doors, and down a clear crawltube into a rTovhere.
was something quick and furtive in their
motion, and he stopped to look closthere:y did not have their helmets on, and he recognized Houston and Chang by the backs of their heads and the size of their Tbhoedyiems. oved with scurrying terran inefficiency into the rover, and drove toward hJiomh.n polarized his faceplate and started walking again,
head down, trying to look like someone coming in from work, veering to the side a bit to increase the distance between him and themT.he rover dove intao thick dust cloud and disappeared abruptly.
By the time he got to the lock doors he was deep in thought, and almost fHrieghstetonoed.
motionlessly at the door, thinking it over, and when he moved it was not to the door, but to the intercom console in the wall next to the dToohre.re were several different kinds of jacks under the speakers, and carefully he unplugged the stopper in one and cleared away the fines crusting the edge-these jacks were never used anymore-and plugged in his wristpHade. tapped in the code for Pauline, and waited for
encryption and decryption to work throug"hY.es, John?" said Pauline's voice from his helmet intercom speaker.
"Turn on your camera please, Pauline, and pan my room."
Pauline was sitting on the side table by his bed, plugged into tHheerwcaalml. era was a little fiber thing,
rarely used, and the image on his wristpad was small, and the room was dim with only a nightlight on; and his faceplate's curve was yet another barrier, so that even with the wristpad right against it, he couldn't
quite make out the images; gray shapes, shiftTinhge.re was the bed, there was something on it, then the wall. "Back ten degrees," John said, and squinted trying to comprehend the two centimeter square image. His bed.There was a man lying on his bWeda.sn't that what it wasT?he bottom of a shoe, torso, hair. It was hard to teIllt. didn't move". Pauline, do you hear anything in the room?"
"The vents, the electricity."
"Transmit to me what you're picking up on your mike, at full vHoleumleea."ned his head to the left against his helmet, cramming his ear against the helmet speAakehri.ss, a whoosh, statiTc.here was too much transmission error in a process like this, especially using these corroded oldBujtacckesr.tainly he
heard no breathing". Pauline, can you enter the Underhill monitoring system, and locate our vault's door camera, and transmit its image to my wrist, please?"
He had directed the installation of Underhill's security system, just a few years before; Pauline still had all the plans and codes, and it didn't take long for her to replace the image on his wrist with that of the suite outside his room, seen from abovTeh.e suite's lights were on, and in the camera's sweeps he could see
that his door was shut; that was all.
He let his wrist fall to his side and thought iFt ivoevemr. inutes passed before he raised it again and began giving instructions through Pauline to the Underhill security syPstoesmse. ssion of the codes
allowed him to instruct the entire camera system to erase its surveillance tapes, and then to run them in an hour loop rather than the usual eight-hour oTnhee.n he instructed two of the cleaning robots to come to
his room, and open its dooWr.hile they did that he stood shivering, waiting for them to make their slow roll through the vaultsW. hen they opened his door, he saw them through Pauline's little eye; light poured into the room and momentarily blazed, then adjusted, and he had a much cleareYresv,ieiwt .was a man
on his bedJ. ohn's breath went shallowH. e teleoperated the robots, using the minute button toggles on his

wristpad. It was a jerky procedure, but if lifting the man woke him up, so much the better.
It didn'tT. he man lolled down on both sides of the robot's cradling arms, which lifted him with their algorithmic delicacy.A body hanging downT.he man was dead.
John deliberately took a deep breath, then held it and continued the teleoperation, directing the first robot to deposit the body in the second robot's big trash hSoepnpdeirn. g the robots back down the hall
to their storage vault was easSye.veral people walked by them as they rolled along, but there was nothing he could do about thTath.e body was not visible except from above, and hopefully no one was paying enough attention to remember the robots later.
When he got them in their storage room, he hesiStahtoeudl.d he take the body to the incinerators in the alchemist's quarter?But no-now that it was out of his room, he didn't need to get rid of Itnhefabcot dy.
he would need it lateFr.or the first time he wondered who it
Hweas.directed the first robot to put its
extensor eye against the body's right wrist, and read with its magnetic iImt atogoerk.
a long time for the
eye to hit the right spot on the wTrhisetn.
it held fasTt.he minute tag that everyone had implanted on a
wristbone held information in the standard dot language, and it only took a minute for Pauline to get an
ID. Yashika Mui, UNOMA auditor, based at Underhill, arrived 2A05n0.actual personA. might have lived a thousand years.
man who
John began to shiveHr.e leaned against the glazed blue brick wall of UndeIrthwillo. uld be an hour before he could go inside, or a little Ilmesps.atiently he pushed off and walked around the quadIrtant.
took about fifteen minutes to walk around it usually, but now he found he was doingAfiterinthte . second turn he walked over to the trailer park.
Only two of the old trailers were still there, and they were apparently abandoned or used only for storage. Figures loomed out of the night dust between them, and for a second he was afraid, but they
passed on byH.
e returned to the quadrant and circled it again, then walked out the path to the
alchemist's quarter.He stood looking at the antiquated complex of tubes and piping and squat white buildings, all covered with their black calligraphic equatioHnes.thought of their first yeaArsn. d now it
had come to this, in what seemed the blink of aInn etyhee. gloom of the Great StorCmiv.ilization,
corruption, crisis.Murder on MarsH.
e gritted his teeth.
An hour had passed, it was nine HPMe .went back to the lock and went inside, took off his helmet and walker and boots in the changing room and stripped, went into the showers and showered, dried off and put on a jumper, combed his hHaier. took a deep breath and walked around the south side of the
quadrant and up through the vaults to the one with his Arosomhe. was opening his door he was not surprised to see four of the UNOMA investigators appear, but he tried to act surprised when they ordered him to stop":What's this?" he said.
It wasn't Houston or Chang, but rather three men, with one of the women from that first group at Low
Point. The men clustered at his sides without really responding to him, and pulled his door completely
open and two of them went inside; John controlled the urge to punch them, or shout at them, or laugh at the expressions that came over their faces when they saw that his room was empty; he merely stared curiously at them, and tried to limit himself to the irritation he would have shown had he been ignorant of what was going onT.his irritation would have been considerable of course, and once he opened that
door inside himself it was hard indeed to keep all his fury from banging through, hard to keep it to an innocent's level; they had to be snapped at as if they were overzealous policemen, rather than assaulted as murderous functionaries; and that was extremely hard to hold to.
In their confusion at the unexpected situation he managed to drive them off with a few biting sentences,

and when he had closed the door on them he stood in the middle of h"Pisaurloinoem, .transmit what's
happening on the security system to yourself, please, and reScohrodw. them."
me whatever cameras have
So Pauline tracked themIt. only took a couple of minutes for them to go to the security control room, where they were joined by Chang and othTehrse.y went after the camera packJos.hn sat at Pauline's
screen and watched right along with them as they ran the loops back and found that they were only an hour long, and that the events of the afternoon had been eTrhasaet dw. ould give them something to think about. He smiled grimly and told Pauline to get off the system.
A wave of exhaustion swept through hIitmw. as only eleven, but all adrenalin and the morning's dose of omegendorph had drained out of him, and he was Htireeds.at on his bed, but then remembered what
had last been there, and got
Iunp.the end he slept on the floor.
He was awakened in the timeslip by Spencer Jackson, with news of a body discovered in a robot hopper. He went and stood wearily beside Spencer in the clinic, staring at the body of Yashika Mui while several of the investigators eyes him warTilyh.e diagnostic machinery was as good at autopsy as anything
else, maybe better; tests of minute samples were indicating a blood coagSuolmanbte. rly John ordered a
full criminal autopsy; Mui's body and clothes had to be scanned, and all microscopic particles read again his genome, and all foreign particles read against the list of people who were currently in UJonhdnerhill.
stared at the UNOMA investigators as he made this instruction, but they didn'Pt robblianbkl.y they had
been wearing gloves and walkers, or teleoperated the whole thing as hHeehhadad. hide his disgust; he couldn't let on that he knew!
to turn away to his
But then of course they knew that they had put the body there; and so they must suspect that he was the one who had removed it, and erased the camera tSapoesth. ey already knew that he knew, or suspected
he did.But they couldn't be sure; and there was no reason to give anything away.
An hour later he went back to his room, and lay on the flooArlthaoguaignh.
he was still exhausted, he
could no longer sleepH. e stared at the ceiling, thinking it oTvehri.nking over everything that he had learned.
# # #
Near dawn he felt he had things sortedHoeutg.ave up on sleep, and got up to go out for another walk; he needed to be outside, away from the human world and all its sickening corruption, out into the great rush of the wind, made so dramatically visible by the storm's flying dust.
But when he got out of the lock door, there were stars ovTehrheeacdo.mplete net of them-all the
thousands burning as of old, without the slightest twinkle or flicker, the faint ones so dense that the black sky itself appeared slightly whitish, as if the whole sky were the Milky Way.
When he had recovered from his astonishment, and the almost-forgotten wonder of the stars, he got on his intercom and called in the news.
It caused pandemonium; people heard and woke their friends, and rushed down to the changing rooms to grab a walker before the supply was exhausAtendd. the lock doors started opening and spewing out crowds.
The sky to the east turned a blackish red, and then lightened qTuhieckwlyh. ole sky shifted to a dark rose shade, and then began to gloTwh.e stars disappeared by the hundreds, until only Venus and the

Earth hung in the east, over a growing intensity ofTlhigehts.ky in the east grew brighter, and brighter again, until it seemed brighter than day could ever get; even behind faceplates their eyes watered, and
some cried out over the common band at the sTighherte.
were figures scampering around, the intercom
babbling, the sky growing impossibly brighter, and brighter, and brighter yet, until it seemed it would burst, it pulsated with glowing pink light, the dots that were Venus and Earth overwhelmAedndby it.
then the sun cracked the horizon and fountained across the plain like a thermonuclear bomb, and the people roared and jumped up and down and ran among the long black shadows of the rocks and the buildings. All east-facing walls were great blocks of Fauvist color, their glaze mosaics stunning, hard to look at directly.The air was clear as glass and indeed seemed a solid substance, imbuing the things stuck in it with razor-edged clarity.
John walked out away from the crowds, east toward ChernHoebytlu.rned his intercom ofTf.he sky was a darker pink than he remembered, with a touch of purple at theEvzeernyiothn.e in Underhill was
going crazy; many of the people there had never seen the sun shine on Mars, and no doubt it felt like they had lived their whole lives in the Great StAornmd. now it was over, and they were wandering out in the sunshine drunk with it, slipping on pink ice left and right, getting in yellow snowball fights, climbing the
frosted pyramids.When John saw that he turned, and went up the steps of the last pyramid himself, to
have a look at the tors and hollows around UndeTrhelyl.
were somewhat frosted and silted over, but
otherwise just the sameH. e turned on the common band, but turned it back off; people still inside were howling for walkers, and no one outside was paying any attention toItthheamd . been an hour since
sunrise, one cried, though John found that hard to beliHevee.shook his head; the raucous voices, and the memory of the body on his bed, made it hard to feel much joy in the end of the storm.
Eventually he went back inside, and gave his walker over to awpoamirenofhis size who were
squabbling over who got to use it next, and he went down to the comm center and called Sax in Echus
Overlook. When he got him he congratulated him on the end of the storm.
Sax waved this away brusquely, as if it had happened years "bTehfoerye'v. e boarded Amor 2051B," he said. This was the ice asteroid they had found for insertion into MartianThoerybitw. ere in the process
of installing rockets on it, which would knock it onto a course that would bring it in on a trajectory similar to the the Ares'; without a heat shield the aerobraking would burnAlilt luopo.ked well for a MOI ETA
about six months awayT.hat was the big news, Sax implied in his blinking, calmThweayG. reat Storm was history.
John had to laugBh.ut then he thought of Yashika Mui, and he told Sax about it because he wanted someone else's celebration to be ruined as wSealxl. only blinked". "They're getting serious," he finally
said. Disgusted, John said good-bye and got off.
He wandered back out through the vaults, disturbed by a fiercely clashing mix of good and bad emotions. He returned to his room and took an omegandorph and one of the new pandorphs Spencer had given him, and then he went out into the quadrant's central atrium, and wandered among the plants, all skinny storm spawn, troping toward the light bulbs running overThheeads.ky was still a clear dark
pink, still very brighAt.
lot of the people who had gone out first were now back and in the atrium
between the rows of crops, partyinHge.
ran into a few friends, some acquaintances, mostly strangers.
He went back into the vaults, through rooms full of strangers who sometimes cheered when he walked in. If they yelled "Speech!" long enough he would stand on a chair and rattle something off, feeling the endorphins, which today were rendered unpredictable in their effect by the thought of the murdered man. Sometimes he was pretty vehement, and he never knew what he was going to say until it came out of him. We saw John Boone drunk on his ass, they would say, the day the Great StorFmine, dheed.
thought, let them say what they wantIetd.never mattered what he did anymore anyway, as far as the legend was concerned.

One room contained a crowd of Egyptians, not like his Sufis but orthodox Moslems, talking like the wind and drinkingcups of coffee, high on caffeine and sunlight, flashing white smiles under their moustaches, extremely cordial for once, in fact pleased to see himHtheerwea. rmed to that, and flying
on the momentum of the day he said, "Look, we're part of a newIfwyoorlud.don't base your actions
on martian reality then you become a kind of schizophrenic, with your body on one planet and your spirit on another.No society split like that can function for long."
"Well, well," one of them said with a s"mYioleu.
must understand we have traveled befoWree.
are a
traveling people.But wherever we are, Mecca is our spirit's hoWmee.could fly to the other side of the universe and that would still be true."
Nothing to say to that; and in fact such direct honesty was so much cleaner than what he had been dealing with through the night that he nodded, and said, "II usnedee. rstand." Compare that after all to
the hypocrisy of the West, where people talked of profit at prayer breakfasts, people who couldn't articulate a single belief they had; people who thought their values were physical constants, who would say "That's just the way things are," like Frank so often did.
So John stayed and talked with the Egyptians for a while, and when he left them he was feeling better. He wandered back to his vault, listening to the rowdy voices pouring into the hallway from every room; shouts, shrieks, happy scientist talk, "these things are such halophytes that they don't like brine because there's too much water in it," peals of laughter.
He had an ideSa.pencer Jackson lived in the vault next door to John's, and was passing through when
John hurried in, so John told him the i"dWeae.
ought to gather everyone we can for a big celebration of
the storm's endA.
ll the sort-of Mars-centered groups, you know, or really everyone who can possibly
make it.Anyone who wants to be there." "Where?"
"Up on Olympus Mons," he said without considerin"gWiet. could probably get Sax to time the arrival of his ice asteroid so that we could watch it from there."
"Good idea!" Spencer said.
Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, and therefore a cone that is not steep in most places, its great height resulting from its even greater breadth; it is twenty-five kilometers higher than the surrounding plain, but
eight hundred kilometers across, so its slope averages about six deBgruetesa.round the circumference
of its great bulk there is a circular escarpment some seven kilometers high, and this spectacular cliff, twice as tall as that at Echus Overlook, is in most places close to vSecttiicoanl.s of it had already lured the
few climbers on the planet, but no one had yet succeeded in climbing it, and for most of the inhabitants of the planet it remained merely a spectacular impediment on the way to the summit Tcraalvdeelrear.s on
the ground made it up the escarpment by way of a wide ramp on the north side, where one of the last lava flows had overrun the cliff-areologists told tales of what it must have been like, of a river of molten rock a hundred kilometers wide, too bright to look at, falling seven thousand meters onto the black

lava-crusted plain, piling higher and higher and higThheris.
spill of lava had left a rampway with nothing
more than a slight jog in it where the escarpment had been overrun; it was an easy ascent, and after it, an uphill drive of some two hundred kilometers took one to the rim of the caldera.
The summit rim of Olympus Mons is so broad and flat that while it has an excellent view down into the many-ringed caldera, the rest of the planet cannot be seen from it; looking outward one sees only the
outer edge of the rim, and then the Bskuyt .on the south side of the rim there is a small meteor crater,
with no name but its map designation, THA-TZhpe.
interior of this little crater is somewhat sheltered
from the thin jet stream rushing over Olympus Mons, and standing on the southern arc of its fresh spiky rim, an observer finally has a view down the slope of the volcano, and then over the vast rising plain of west Tharsis; it is like looking down at the planet from a platform in low space.
# # #
It took almost nine months before the asteroid was brought to a rendezvous with Mars, and word of
John's celebration had had time to get arouSnod.they came in scattered rover caravans, in twos and fives and tens, up the north ramp and around to the southern outer slope of Zp; and they erected a number of big crescent-shaped clear-walled tents, with rigid clear floors that stood two meters off the ground, resting on clear entry stalkTsh.ey were the very latest thing in temporary shelter, in fact, and all
set with their inner arcs facing uphill, so that when they were done they had a row of crescents stacked like stairs, like greenhouse gardens on a terraced hillside, overlooking the immense sweep of a bronze world. Every day for a week the caravans arrived, and dirigibles labored up the long slope, and were tethered inside Zp, filling it so that the interior of the little crater looked like a bowl of birthday balloons.
The size of the crowd surprised John, as he had expected only a few friends to travel to such a remote site. It was yet another proof of his inability to comprehend the planet's current population; there were nearly a thousand people gathered there together, it was amaAzilnthgo. ugh many were faces he had seen
before, and quite a few he knew by naSmo ei.t was a collection of friends, in a Iwt awya. s as if a home town that he hadn't known existed had suddenly sprung up aroundAnhdims.ince so many of the first
hundred had come, forty of them in all, including Maya and Sax, Ann and Simon and Nadia and Arkady, Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the Acheron group, Spencer, Rya, Alex and Raul and Janet and Mary and Dmitri and Elena and the rest of the Phobos group, and Arnie and Sasha and Yeli and several more, some of whom he hadn't seen in twenty years-everyone he was close to, in fact, except for Frank, who had said he was too busy, and Phyllis, who hadn't replied to the invitation at all.
And it wasn't just the first hundred; many of the others were old friends as well, or friendsa of friends: lot of Swiss, including the roadbuilding gypsies; Japanese from all over; most of the Russians on the planet; his Sufi friends; and all of them scattered up and down the terraced crescent tents, in collections of caravan groups and dirigible teams, rushing from time to time to the locks to greet the latest arrivals.
During the days many of them wandered around outside the tents, collecting loose rock from the great curved slope.The Zp meteor's impact had scattered chunks of brecciated lava everywhere, including shishtovite shattercones like pottery shards, some dead black, others a bright blood red, or flecked with impact diamonds.An areological team from Greece started laying these in a pattern on the ground under
the raised floor of their tent, and they had brought a little kiln with them, so they could glaze some shards yellow or green or blue, to accent their desiTghniss. idea caught on as soon as others saw it, and within
two days each clear tent floor stood over a flagged parquet with a mosaic cdirecsuigitnry:
maps,
pictures of birds and fish, fractal abstracts, Escher drawings, theTibetan calligraphy spelling Om Mani
Padme Hum, maps of the planet and of smaller regions, equations, people's faces, landscapes, and so on.

John spent his time wandering from tent to tent, talking with people and enjoying the carnival atmosphere-an atmosphere which did not preclude arguments, there were a lot of those-but most people spent the time partying, talking, drinking, going out on excursions on the wavy surface of the old lava flows, making mosaic floors, dancing to music made by various amateur Tbahnedsb.est of these was a magnesium drum band, the instruments local, the players from Trinidad Tobago, a notorious transnational flag of convenience with a vigorous local resistance movement, of which the band were representatives. There was also a country western group with a good slide guitar player, and an Irish band with
home-made instruments and a large shifting membership, which allowed it to play more or less non-stop. These three bands were all surrounded by crowds of dancers, and indeed the tents they occupied had all of their movementransformed into a kind of pulsing dance, as just getting from here to there was
suddenly stuffed with the grace and exuberance of the music, the gravity, the view.
So it was a great festival, and John was pleased, partying hard in every wakingHmeodmiden't.
need
any omegendorph or pandorph; once when Marian and the Senzeni Na crowd hustled him in a corner and started passing tabs around, he could only la"uIghd;on't think so right now," he said to the young hotheads, waving a hand weakly. "It'd be carrying coals to Newcastle at this point, really it would."
"Carrying coals to Newcastle?"
"He means it'd be like taking permafrost to Borealis." "Or pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere." "Bringing lava to Olympus."
"Putting more salt in the goddamn soil."
"Putting any more ferric oxide anywhere on the whole damn planet!" "Exactly," John said, laughin"gI.'m already full red."
"Not as red as these folks," one of them said, pointing down to tAhe swtriensgt. of three sand-colored dirigibles floated up the slope of the volcaTnhoe.y were small and antiquated, and did not answer radio inquiries. By the time they had scraped over Zp's rim and anchored among the larger and more colorful dirigibles in the crater, everyone was waiting to hear from the observers at the lock who they might be. When their gondolas popped open, and twenty or so figures in walkers stepped out, a sil"eTnhceat'sfell.
Hiroko," Nadia said suddenly over the common baTnhde.
first hundred made their way quickly to the
upper tent, looking up at the walktube that ran over thAe nrdimt.hen the new visitors were walking
down the tube to the tent lock, and were through and inside, and yes, it was Hiroko-Hiroko, Michel, Evgenia, Iwao, Gene, Ellen, Rya, Raul, and a whole crowd of youngsters.
Shrieks and shouts pierced the air, people were embracing, a few crying, and there were a good number of angry accusations; John himself couldn't help it when he got a chance to hug Hiroko, all those hours in his rover worrying about things, wishing he could have talked to her; now he took her shoulders in his hands and almost shook her, ready for hot words to pour from his throat; but her grinning face was so much like his memory of her and yet not-her face thinner and more lined, not her and yet clearly her-that her face blurred and flowed in his vision, from what he expected to see to whaHt ehewsaaswc.onfused
enough by this hallucinatory smear (in his feelings too) that he only said, "Oh, I've wanted to talk to you so!"
"And me to you," she said, although it was hard to hear her in the din; Nadia was intervening between

Maya and Michel, for Maya was shouting "Why didn't you tell me?" again and again, before bursting into tears. John was distracted by this, and then he saw Arkady's face over Hiroko's shoulder, bunched in an expression that said there's going to be questions answered later, and he lost his train ofThtheoreught.
were going to be some hard things said-but still, here they were! Here theDyownerei.n the tents the noise level had jumped twenty decibePlse.ople were cheering their reunion.
# # #
Late in the afternoon John convened the first hundred, now numbering almost sixty. They gathered in the highest tent by themselves, and looked out over those below, and the land beyond.
It was all so much huger than Underhill and the tight rocky plain aErovuenrydthiitn. g had changed, it seemed; the world and its civilization all grown vastly larger and more compAlicnadtedy.et there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human fatcimese age:
texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyTehs.ey were in their seventies now, most of thAenmd. the world
was indeed larger-in many different wayasft:er all it was now quite possible that they were destined to watch each other age a lot more, if they were lucky. It was a strange sensation.
So they milled about, looking at the people in the tents below, and beyond them to the variegated orange carpet of the planet; and the conversations rushed this way and that in quick chaotic waves, creating inteference patterns, so that sometimes they all went still at once and stood there together, stunned or
bemused or grinning like dolphinIsn.
the tents below, people occasionally looked up through the plastic
arcs at them, curious to catch a glimpse of such a historic meeting.
Finally they sat in a scattering of chairs, passing around cheese and crackers and bottles of red wine. John leaned back in his chair and looked aroAunrkda. dy had one arm over Maya's shoulders, the other over Nadia's, and the three of them were laughing at something Maya had said; Sax was blinking his owlish pleasure, and Hiroko was beaminJgo.hn had never seen that look on her face in the earlyItyears.
was a shame to disturb such a mood, but there would never be a good time; and the mood would return. So in a quiet moment he said to Sax in clear loud tones, "I can tell you who's behind the sabotages."
Sax blinked". You can?"
"Yes."He looked Hiroko in the ey"eIt.'s your people, Hiroko."
That sobered her, though she still smibleudt: it was the contained, private smile of "oNldo. no," she said mildly, and shook her hea"dY. ou know I wouldn't do that."
"I figured noBt. ut your people are doing it without your knowleYdgoeu.r children, in facWt. orking with the coyote."
Her eyes narrowed, and she threw a quick glance down at the tents below.
When she looked at John again he wen"tYoonu. grew them in vitro?"
After a pause she nodded.
grew them, rightF?ertilized a bunch of your eggs, and
"Hiroko!"Ann said."You don't have any idea how well that ectogene process works!"

"We tested it," Hiroko sa"idT.he kids have turned out all right."
Now the whole group was silent, and watching Hiroko andHJeohsna.id, "Maybe so, but some of them
don't share your ideasT.hey're doing things on their own, like kids Twhilely. stone, isn't that right?"
have eyeteeth made of
Hiroko wrinkled her nos"eT. hey're crowns.A composite rather than true stonAe. silly fashion."
"And a kind of badgAen. d there are people out on the surface who have picked it up, people in contact with your kids, helping them with the sabotaIgeasl.most got killed by some of them in SenzenMi yNa.
guide there had a stone eyetooth, although it took me a long time remember where it was I Ihad seen it. assume it was an accident that we was down there at the time the trIuchkadfne'tll.given them any
warning I was going to visit, so I assume the whole thing was planned before I got there, and they didn't know to stop iOt. kakura probably went down the hole thinking he was going to get squished like a bug
for the cause."
After another pause Hiroko said, "Are you sure?"
"I'm pretty sureI.t was confusing for a long time, because it's not just them-there's more than one thing going on.But when I remembered where I had seen that first stone tooth I looked into it, and I found out that a whole shipment of dental equipment from Earth arrived empty, back inA 2w04ho4l.e freighter
ripped off.It made me think I was onto somethAinngd.
then, the sabotages kept happening in places and
at times when no one who was in the net could possibly have Ldioknee thita.t time I visited Marythaet Margaritifer aquifer, and the well housing was blownItuwp.as clear it hadn't been done by anyone stationed there, it just wasn't possibBleu. t that's a really isolated station, and there was no one else anywhere nearby at the timSe.o it had to be someone outside the Annedt. so I thought of you."
He shrugged apologetically".When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn't have been done by anyone in the Annedt. in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was ususally spotted in the areaI.t's becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but Istiflilg.ured it was you,
and I had my A.I. do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three thousand kilometer circle with the chaotic
terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center Tpohiant'ts.
a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but
even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteuArsndto wheid'vee. all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill."
Hiroko's face revealed nothingF. inally she said, "I will look into this." "Good."
Sax said, "John, you said there was more than one thing going on?"
John nodded". It hasn't just been sabotage, you sSeoem.
eone's been trying to kill me."
Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shoc"Aketd.first I thought it was the saboteurs," John said, "trying to stop my investigatioInt. made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confuseBd.ut now I'm pretty sure that that time was a miTsthaekes. aboteurs aren't
interested in killing me-they could have done it and they dOindne't.night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the Ares-"

This caused an uproar; it looked like a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and
Maya was on her feet pointing a dramatic finger at Hiroko, cryinJoghnoust.houted them all down,
forged on: "Their visit-their visit!-that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I
managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with
some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had beSeno tthheorsee.
were
the saboteurs, but they weren't trying to kill me, obvioBuuslty.one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open."
He nodded at his friends' exclamatio"nTsh. at was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing the elevator and so on."
Arkady was laughing at him, but John ignored him and forg"eAdftoenr . that, I was harrassed several
times by UNOMA investigators that Helmut allowed to come up, and he did that under pressure from
those same transnationalsA.
nd in fact I found out that most of those investigators had worked for
Armscor or Praxis on Earth, rather than for the FBI like they toTlhdosmee.are the transnationals most involved with the elevator project and the mining on the Great Escarpment, and now they've got their own security people established everywhere, and this roving team of so-called investigAantodrst.hen,
just before the big storm ended, some of those investigators tried to get me accused of that murder that
happened at UnderhillY.
es they did!It didn't work, and I can't absolutely prove it was them, but I saw
two of them working on the set-Aupn.d I think they killed that mtaono,, just to get me in troubTloe. get me out of their way."
"You should tell Helmut," Nadia sa"iIdf. we present a united front and insist that these people be sent back to Earth, I don't think he could deny us."
"I don't know how much real power Helmut has anymore," Joh"nBusatidit.
would be worth a
Itry.
want these people kicked off the planAent.d those two in particular I've got recorded by the Senzeni Na security system, both going into the med clinic and messing with the cleaning robots befoSroe tIhedid. circumstantial evidence against them is about as strong as it could be."
The others didn't know quite what to make of this, but it tursneevderaolutof them had also been harrassed by other UNOMA teams-Arkady, Alex, Spencer, Vlad and Ursula, even Sax-and they quickly agreed that an attempt to get the investigators deported was a goo"dThiodseea. two in particular ought to be deported at best," Maya said hotly.
Sax simply tapped at his wristpad, and called Helmut up on the phone right then and there; he laid the situation out to Helmut, and the angry group pitched in from time t"oWteim'lle.take this to the Terran
press if you don't act on it," Vlad declared.
Helmut frowned, and after a pause he said, "I'll look Tinhtoseit.agents that you complain about in particular will be rotated back home, for sure."
"Check their DNA again before you let them go," John"Tshaeidm. among them, I'm sure of it."
"We will check," Helmut said heavily.
urderer of that man in Underhill is
Sax cut the connection, and John looked around at his friends"Oagkaaiyn,." he said". But it'll take more
than a call to Helmut to make all the changes we Tnheedt.ime has come to act together again, across a whole range of issues, if we want the treaty to suTrvhiavte.as a minimum, you knoAw. start on the rest

of it.We need to form a coherent political unit no matter what kind of disagreements we might have."
"It won't matter what we do," Sax said mildly, but he was jumped on immediately, in an incomprehensible babble of competing protests.
"It does matter!" John crie"dW. e've got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here."
Sax shook his head, but the others were listening to John, and most seemed to agree Awrkitahdyh,im: Ann, Maya, Vlad, each from their different perspective. I.t .co. uld be done, John could see it in their
faces. Only Hiroko he could not read; her face was a blank, closed in a way that brought back a sharp pang of recollectionS. he had always been that way to John, and suddenly it made him ache with frustration and remembered pain, and he got annoyed.
He stood, and waved a hand outward; it was nearing sunset, and the enormous curved plate of the planet was dappled with an infinite texture of shad"oHwisr.oko, can I have a word with you in private? Just for a secondW. e can go down into the tent below hIejrues. t have a couple questions, and then we can come right back up."
The others stared at them curiousUlyn.der that gaze Hiroko finally bowed, and walked ahead of John to the tube down to the next tent.
# # #
They stood at one tip of that tent's crescent, under the gazes of their friends above, and the occasional observer below.The tent was mostly empty; people were respecting the first hundred's privacy by
leaving a gap.
"You have suggestions for how I can identify the saboteurs?" Hiroko said.
"You might start with the boy named Kasei," John"Tsahied.one that is a mix of you and me." She would not meet his eye.
John leaned toward her, getting ang"rIy.presume there's kids from every man in the first hundred?"
Hiroko tilted her head at him, and shrugged very sli"gWhtely.took from the samples everyone gave. The mothers are all the women in the group, the fathers all the men."
"What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?" Joh"nToasmkeadk.e our children without asking us-to run away and hide in the first placeW-whhyy??"
Hiroko returned his gaze calm"lyW. e have a vision of what life on Mars caWn ebec.ould see it wasn't going to go that waWy. e have been proved right by what has happened sSinocew. e thought we would establish our own life-"
"But don't you see how selfish thaWt ies?all had a vision, we all wanted it to be different, and we've been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you've been gone, off creating a little pocket world for your little groupI !mean we could have used your hIelpw!anted to talk to you so ofHteenr!e
we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven't talked to me in twenty years!"

"We didn't mean to be selfish," Hiroko said slo"wWley. wanted to try it, to show by experiment how
we can live hereS.omeone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life."
"But if you do it in secret then no one can see it!"
"We never planned to stay secret foreTvehre.
situation has gotten bad, and so we've stayed aBwuaty.
here we are now, after aAlln. d when we are needed, when we can help, we will appear again."
"You're needed every day!" John said fla"tTlyh.at's how social life workYs.ou've made a mistake,
Hiroko. Because while you've been hiding, the chances for Mars remaining its own place have gone way down, and a lot of people have been working to speed that disappearance, including some of the first hundred. And what have you done to stop them?"
Hiroko said nothingJ.ohn went on: "I suppose you've been been helping Sax a little inI sseacwret.one
of your notes to himB.ut that's another thing I object to-helping out some of us and yet not others." "We all do that," Hiroko said, but she looked uncomfortable.
"Have you had the gerontological treatments in your colony?" "Yes."
"And you got the process from Sax?" "Yes."
"Do these kids of yours know their parentage?" "Yes."
John shook his head, exasperated and m"oIrej.ust can't believe you would do these things!" "We do not ask for your belief."
"Obviously notB. ut aren't you the least bit concerned about stealing our genes and making kids by us without our knowledge or consenAt?bout bringing them up without giving us any part in their upbringing, any part in their childhood?"
She shrugged". You can have your own kids if you wAasnt.for these, welWl. ere any of you interested in having children twenty years agNo?o. The subject never came up."
"We were too old!"
"We were not too oWld.e chose not to think ofMito. st ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to peYopolue. did not want children, and so you did not know about late birtBh.ut we did, and so we learned the techniqAunesd. when you meet the results, I think you will see it was a good Iidtehain. k you will thank uWs.hat have you lost, after aTllh?ese
children are oursB. ut they have a genetic link to you, and from now on they will exist for you, as an unexpected gift, sayA. s a quite extraordinary giftH."er Mona Lisa smile appeared and disappeared.

The concept of the gift, agaJionh.n paused to think about "iWt. ell," he finally said".We'll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect."
Twilight had turned the atmosphere below them into a dark purple band, running like a velvet border
around the black star-studded bowl which had appeared over their hIneadthse.
tents below they were
singing, led by the Sufi"sH: armakhis, Mangala, Nirgala, Aquakuh; Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgala,
Aquakuh," and around again, time after time, adding grace notes that were other names for Mars, and encouraging the bands already there to add instrumental accompaniments of all kinds, until every tent was filled with this song, all of them singing togeTthheer. Sufis then began their whirling, and little knots of
dancers swirled all through the crowds.
"Will you at least stay in contact with me now?" John said intently to"WHiilrlokyou give me that?" "Yes."
# # #
They returned to the upper tent, and the group went down together into the general party, and joined the celebration. John made his way slowly to the Sufis, and tried the spins he had learned from them on their mesa, and people cheered and caught him when he spun out of control into the spAefctteartoorns.e fall
he was helped to his feet by the thin-faced man with dreadlocks who had led the midnight visit to his rover. "Coyote!" John cried.
"It's me," the man said, and his voice caused a ripple of electricity down Joh"nB'sutspninoe.reason for alarm."
He offered John a flask; after a moment's hesitation John took it andFodrtruanek. favors the bold, he thought. Tequila, apparently."You're Coyote!" he shouted over the music of the magnesium drum band.
The man grinned widely and nodded once, took the flask back and drank. "Is Kasei with you?"
"No.He doesn't like this meteorA."nd then with a friendly slap to the arm the man moved off into the swirling crowd.He looked over his shoulder and shouted, "Have fun!"
John watched him disappear among the faces in the crowd, feeling the tequila burn in hisThsteomach. Sufis, Hiroko, now Coyote; the gathering was blesHseed. saw Maya and hurried over to her and threw an arm over her shoulder, and they walked through the tents and the connecting tunnels, and people toasted them as they passeTd.he rigid tent floors were gently bouncing up and down.
The countdown reached two minutes, and many people ascended to the upper tents, and then pressed
against the clear walls of the south-facing aTrchse.
ice asteroid would probably burn up in a single orbit,
its injection trajectory was so steep; an object half the size of Phobos burned to steam and then, as it got hotter, to oxygen and hydrogen molecules; and all in a matter of mNinoutoens.e could be sure what it
would look like.
So they stood there, some of them still singing the chords of the namAenrdoutnhedn.
a final countdown
was picked up by more and more of them, until they were all into the last ten, shouting out the reversed sequence of numbers at the top of their lungs, in the astronaut's primal Tschreeyamro. ared out "zero!",
and for three breathless heartbeats nothing happened; then a white ball trailing a blazing fan of white fire

came shooting up over the southwestern horizon, as big as the comet in the Bayreuth Tapetry, and brighter than all the moons and mirrors and stars combBinuerdn.ing ice, bleeding across the sky, white
on black, hurtling fast and low, so low that it was not much higher than they were on Olympus, so low that they could see white chunks bursting back through the tail and falling away like gianTthesnparks.
about halfway across the sky it broke into fragments, and the whole collection of incandescent blazes tumbled east, scattering like buckshoAt. ll the stars suddenly shuddered; it was the first sonic boom, striking the tents and shaking theAm. second boom followed, and the phosphor chunks bounced wildly for a moment as they tumbled down the sky and disappeared over the southeast Thhoeriizrofni.redrake
tails followed them into Mars, and disappeared, and it was suddenly dark again, the ordinary night sky standing overhead as if nothing had happenEedx.cept the stars were twinkling.
# # #
After all that anticipation, the passage had taken no more than three or four Tmhienucteelse.brants had
mostly gone silent at the sight, but many had cried out involuntarily at the sight of the breakup, as during a fireworks show; and again at the impact of the two sonic bNoow,s.in the old dark, the silence was
complete, and people stood in their tracWksh. at could you do after something like that?
But there was Hiroko, making her way down through the tents to the one where John and Maya and
Nadia and Arkady were standing togetheAr.s she walked she chanted, in a tone that was quiet but carried throughout each tent she crosse"dA:l-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei.Ma'adim, Maja, Mamers, MangalaM. awrth, Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud, Tiu.S"he
walked through the crowd right to John, and facing him she plucked up his right hand and pulled it aloft, and suddenly shouted, "John BoonJeo!hn Boone!"
And then everyone was cheering and yelling "BoBonoeo!ne! Boone! Boone!" and others were shouting
"Mars! Mars! Mars!"
John's face blazed like the meteor had, and he felt stunned, as if a piece of it had pinged him on the hea His old friends were laughing at him, and Arkady yelled "Speech!" in what he imagined was an American accent: "Speech! Speech! Speeeeeeeeeech!"
Others picked this up, and after a time the noise died down, and they watched him expectantly, laughter rippling through them at the sight of his slack-faced astonishmHeirnotk. o released his hand, and he raised
the other one helplessly, holding both overhead with hands outstretched.
"What can I say, friends?" he cr"iTedh.is is the thing itself, there are no words forThthisis.is what words ask for."
But his blood ran high with adrenalin, with tequila and omegendorph and happiness, and without willing it the words spilled out of him as they so often had before. "Look," he said, "here we are on Mars!" (Laughter) "That's our gift and a great gift it is, the reason we have to keep giving all our lives to keep the cycle going, it's like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that antri-entropic surge which characterizes all creative
life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a hNoomwe. we all know that different people have
different reasons for being here and just as important the people who sent us up had different reasons for sending us, and now we're beginning to see the conflicts caused by those differences, there are storms brewing on the horizon, meteors of trouble flying in and some of them are going to strike dead on rather than skip overhead like that blaze of white ice just (Cdihde!"ers). "It may get ugly at times it almost
certainly will get ugly, so we have to remember that just as these meteor strikes enrich the atmosphere,

thicken it and add the elixir oxygen to the poison soup outside these tents, the human conflicts coming down may do the same, melting the permafrost at our social base, melting all those frozen institutions away and leaving us with the necessity of creation, the imperative to invent a new social order that is purely Martian, as Martian as Hiroko Ai, our own Persephone now come back up out of the regolith to announce the start of this new sprin(gC!"heers) "Now I know I used to say that we had to invent it all
from scratch but in these last few years traveling around and meeting you all I've seen that I was wrong to say that, it's not like we have nothing and are being forced to conjure forms godlike out of the
vacuum-we have the genes you might say, the memes as Vlad says moeuarnicnugltural genes, so that it's
in the nature of an act of genetic engineering what we do here, we have the DNA pieces of culture all made and broken and mixed by history, and we can choose and cut and clip together from what's best in that gene pool, knit it all together the way the Swiss did their constitution, or the Sufis their worship, or
the way the Acheron group made their latest fast lichen, a bit from here and there, whatever's appropriate, keeping in mind the seven generation rule, thinking seven generations back and seven generations forward, and seven times seven if you ask me because now it's our lives we're talking about extending way off into the years, we don't know how that will affect us yet, but it's certainly true that altruism and self-interest have collapsed together more tightly than ever bBefuotrea.lso it's still and
always our children's lives and our children's children and on down forever that we have to think of, we must act in a way that gives them just as many chances as we have been given and hopefully more, channeling the sun's energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flowA. nd I know that's an awfully general way of putting it when this treaty that orders
our lives here is coming up for renewal so soon, but we have to keep that level in mind because what's coming is not just a treaty but more a kind of constitutional congress, because we're dealing with the genome of our social organization here, you can do this, you can't do that, you have to do this, to eat or to give.And we've been living by a set of rules established for empty land, the Antarctic treaty so fragile and idealistic which has held that cold continent free of intrusion for so long, up until the last decade in
fact when it's been chipped away at, and that's a sign of what's beginning to happenThhe e too. encroachment on that set of rules has begun everywhere, like a parasite feeding on the edges of its host organism, because that's what the replacement set of rules is, the old parasitic greed of the kings and their henchmen, this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic, it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of
human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in pl(aCceh!e"ers)
"So it's democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there's empty land here, there's scarce and non-renewable resources here, and we're going to get swept
up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human woTrlhda.t being the case, we had better band together
for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it's going to be hard it's going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I'm so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I'm so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel drum band is ready to play aren't you" (shouts of assent) "so why don't you folks start and we'll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere."
Mad cheers.The magnesium drum band picked them up into its stacatto flurry of plinks and plonks, and the crowd heaved into motion again.

They partied all night lonJgo.hn spent the time wandering from tent to tent, shaking hands and hugging people, "Thanks, thanks, thanksI. don't know, I don't remember what I sBauidt .this is what I meant all along, this right here."His old friends laughed at hiSma.x, drinking coffee and looking supremely
relaxed, said to him, "Syncretism is Vit?ery interesting, very well put"-with the tiniest of smMileasy.a
kissed him, Vlad and Ursula and Nadia kissed him; Arkady lifted him up and with a great roar swirled him around in the air, giving him a hairy kiss on each cheek and shouting, "Hey, John, could you repeat that please?" hooting at the very thoug"hYt.ou amaze me, John, you always amaze mAe!n"d Hiroko
with her private smile, with Michel and Iwao flanking her, grinning at him. . . .
Michel said, "I think this is what Maslow meant by the term peak experience," and Iwao groaned and elbowed him, while Hiroko reached out and touched John on the arm with her forefinger, as if to pass along a certain animating touch, a power, a gift.
# # #
They next day they sorted and bagged the party wreckage and took down the tents, leaving the flagstone terraces behind, like strands of cloisonné necklace draped down the side of the old black volcano. They said good-bye to the dirigible crews, and the dirigibles drifted down the slope like balloons slipped from a child's fist; the sand-colored ones of the hidden colony got hard to see very quickly.
As he got in his rover wMitahya John said good-byes, and as they drove around the rim of Olympus
Mons they caravaned with rovers containing Arkady and Nadia, and Ann and Simon and their son Peter. In conversations that day John sa"idW, e need to talk to Helmut, and get the UN to accept us as
speakers at large for the local populatiAonn.d we need to present the UN with a draft of the revised treaty. Around Ls ninety I'm scheduled to go to a dedication ceremony for a new tent city on east Tharsis. Helmut is supposed to be there, maybe we could meet then?"
Only a few of them could make it, but they were named delegates for the rest, and the plan was agreed on. After that they talked about what the contents of the draft treaty should be, calling around to all the caravans and the dirigiblesT.he next day they came to the ramp down the northern escarpment, and at its foot they took off each in every direct"ioTnh.at was a good party!" John said over the radio to each in
turn. "See you at the next one!"
The Sufis rolled by while they were stopped, and they waved from their windows came on the radio to say good-bye as welJl.ohn recognized the voice of the old woman who had tended him at the toilet after his dance in the storm; as he was waavtintgheir caravan she said over the radio,
"Whether it be of this world or of that, Your love will lead us yonder at the last."
Part Six
Guns Under the Table

The day John Boone was assassinated we were up on east Elysium and it was morning and this meteor shower came raining down on us, there must have been thirty streaks or so and they were all black, I don't know what those meteorites were made of but they burned black instead oLf ikwehistme.oke
from crashing planes except straight and fast as lightnItinwg.as so strange to see that we all were
amazed and we hadn't even yet heard the news, but when we did we figured back, and it happened at exactly the same time.
We were down in Hellas Lakefront and the sky went dark and a sudden wind whipped over the lake and blew every walktube in that town away, and then we heard.
We were in Senzeni Na where he worked a lot, and it was night and lightning started hammering us, giant bolts of lightning were shooting right down into the mohole, no one could believe it, and it was so loud you couldn't hearA. nd there was a picture of him down in the worker's quarters, up on the wall of one suite, and a lightning bolt hit the the concourse window and everyone was blinded for a second, and when our sight returned the frame of that picture was busted and the glass cracked and it was smoking. And then we heard the news.
We were in Carr and we couldn't believAellitt.he first hundred there were crying, he must have been
the only one in that whole gang that everyone liked, if most of them were killed a good half of the rest
would be cheeringA.
rkady was out of his mind, he cried for hours and it was so scary because it was so
unlike him, Nadia kept trying to comfort him and she was saying It's all right, it's all right and Arkady kept saying It's not all right, it's not all right, and roaring and throwing things and then falling into Nadia's arms again, even Nadia was freakeAd.nd that was when he ran off to his room and came back with one of
the ignition transmitter boxes, and when he explained what it was Nadia got really furious at all of us, she said Why would you ever do a thing like Athnadt? Arkady was crying and yelling What do you mean
why? Because of this, because of what just happened to John, they killed him, they kilWledhohim!
knows which of us will be nexTth!ey'll kill all of us if they cAand!
Nadia kept trying to give the
transmitter back and he got so upset, he kept making her hold it saying Please Nadia please, just in case, just in case, please, until finally she had to keep it to get him to calImnedvoewr ns.aw anything like it.
We were in Underhill and the power went off, and when it came back on every plant in the farm had frozen solid.The lights and heat came back on and the plants all began Wtoewsialt around all night
telling stories about himI. remembered what it was like when he first touched down back in the twenties,
a lot of us diId.was just a kid at the time but I remember everyone laughing at his first words, I thought it was funny myself but I remember being very surprised that all the adults were laughing too, everyone was so tickled, I think everyone fell in love with him at that moment, I mean how could you not like someone who was the first person on another planet walking out there and saying Well, hereIt wweasare.
impossible not to like him.
Oh I don't knowI .saw him punch a man once, it was on the Burroughs train and he was in our car obviously high, and there was this woman who had some kind of deformity, a big nose and no chin and when she went down to the toilets some guy said My Lord, that woman has really been beat hard with
the ugly stick, and Boone bam! knocks him into the next seat and says, There is no such thing as an ugly woman.
That's what he thought.
That is what he thought, why he slept with a different woman every night, and he didn't care what they looked like.Or how old they were, he had to talk fast when they found him with that fifteenI year-old.

don't suppose Toitovna ever heard of that one or it would have been his balls, and hundreds of women would have gone wantingH. e used to like to do it in two-person gliders with the woman on top of him while he piloted.
Oh man once I saw him pull a glider out of a downdraft that would have killed anyone else, it was a shear-off and it would have ripped the glider apart if he'd tried to resist it, but he just went with it and the plane dropped like a Rickover a thousand meters in a second, three or four times terminal velocity, and
then when it was about to go smash he just tweaked it to the side and up and pancaked it in about twent meters. Came out with his nose and ears bleedHineg.was the best pilot on Mars, he could fly like an
angel. Hell the whole first hundred would've been dead if he hadn't hand flown them into their orbital insertion, that's what I heard.
There were people who hated hAimn.d with good reason toHo.e stopped the mosque on Phobos from being built.And he could be cruel, I've never met a man more arrogant.
We were on Olympus Mons and the whole sky went black.
Well, back before the beginning, Paul Bunyon came to Mars, and he brought his blue ox Babe with him. He walked around looking for lumber and his every footprint cracked the lava and left a riHft ecanyon.
was so tall that he could reach into the asteroid belt while he walked around, and he chewed those rocks like Bing cherries and spit the pits out and boom there would be another crater.
And then he ran into Big MItanw. as the first time Paul had ever seen anyone bigger than himself, and believe me Big Man was bigger-the usual two magnitudes, and that's ain't just twice as big let me tell you. But Paul Bunyon didn't carWe. hen Big Man said let's see what you can do with that axe of yours Paul
said sure, and with one stroke he hit the planet so hard that all the cracks of Noctis appeared at once. But then Big Man scratched the same spot with his toothpick, and the entire Marineris system yawned open. Let's try bare fists, Paul said, and he landed a right cross on the southern hemisphere and there was Argyre.But Big Man tapped a spot nearby with his pinky and there was THryellsapsi.tting, Big
Man suggested, and Paul spat and Nirgal Vallis ran as long as the MissBisustipBpiig.
Man spat and all
the big outflow channels ran at onTcrey.
shitting!Big Man said, and Paul squatted and pushed out
Ceraunius Tholus-but Big Man threw back his butt and there was the Elysium massif right next to it, steaming hot.Do your worst, Big Man suggesteTda.ke a shot at mAe.nd so Paul Bunyon picked him up
by the toe and swung his whole bulk around and slammed him into the north pole so hard that that whole northern hemisphere is depressed to this dBayu.t without even getting up Big Man grabbed Paul by the
ankle, and caught up his blue ox Babe in that same fist, and swung them into the ground and slammed them right through the planet and almost out the otherAsnid .that's the Tharsis bulge-Paul Bunyon,
almost sticking out-Ascraeus his nose, Pavonis his cock, and Arsia his biAg ntdoeBs.abe is off to one
side, pushing up Olympus MonTs.he blow killed Babe and Paul Bunyon both, and after that Paul had to admit that he was beat.
But his own bacteria ate him, naturally, and they crawled all around down on the bedrock and under the megaregolith, down there going everywhere, sucking up the mantle heat, and eating the sulfides, and
melting down the permafrosAt. nd everywhere they went down there, every one of those little bacteria said I am Paul Bunyon.
-+=*=+-

It's a matter of will, Frank Chalmers said to his face in theThmeirrpohrr.ase was the only residue of the dream he had been having when he awoHkee.shaved with quick decisive strokes, feeling tense, crammed with energy ready to be unleashed, wanting to get to Mwoorrek.residue:Whoever wants it
the most wins!
He showered and dressed, padded down to the diningIthwalal.s just after dawSnu. nlight flooded
Isidis with horizontal beams of redbronze light, and high in the eastern sky cirrus clouds looked like copper shavings.
Rashid Niazi, the Syrian representative to the conference, passed by and gave Chalmers a cool nod. Frank returned it and walked oBn.ecause of Selim el-Hayil, the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood had gotten blamed for Boone's assasination, and Chalmers had always been quick and public in defending them from all such accusationSse.lim had been a lone assassin, he always asserted, a mad murder-suicide. This underlined the Ahads' guilt while at the same time commanding their gratitude. Naturally Niazi, an Ahad leader, was a bit frustrated.
Maya came into the dining room and Frank greeted her cordially, automatically covering the discomfort he always felt in her presence.
"May I join you?" she said, watching him. "Of course."
Maya was perceptive, in her way; Frank concentrated on the moTmheynt.chatted.The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, "How I wish John were heWree ncoowul.d use him.A" nd then: "I miss him."This kind of thing would distract Maya instanSthlye. put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on Dheimsp.ite himself he had to look away.
The TV wall was showing the news package beamed up from Earth, and he tapped on the table console and turned up the sounEd.arth was in bad shapTe.he video was of a massive protest march in
Manhattan, the whole island packed with a crowd the protesters would call ten million and the police five hundred thousand.The helicopter images were quite arresting, but there were a lot of places these days that, although less visual, were much more dangeroInust.he advanced nations people were marching
because of draconian birth population reduction acts, laws that made the Chinese look like anarchists, and the young had erupted in fury and dismay, feeling their lives pulled out of their hands by a great crowd of ancient unnatural undead, by history itself come aTlhivaet. was bad, sureB. ut in the developing countries they were rioting over "inadequate access" to the treatments themselves, and that was far worse. Governments were falling; people were dying by the thousaRnedasl.ly these images of Manhattan
were probably meant to reassure; everything's still ordetrhlyey!
said.People conducting themselves in a
civil manner, even if it be civil disobedieBncuet. Mexico City and Sao Paulo and New Dehli and Manila were in flames.
Maya looked at the screen and read aloud one of the Manhattan b"a'Snennedrs:the Old To Mars.'"
"That's the essence of a bill someone's introduced in ConRgreeascsh. retirement orbitals, the moon, or here."
"Especially here." "Maybe," he said.
a hundred and you're off, to

"I supose that explains their stubborness about emigration quotas."
Frank nodded". We'll never get thoseT. hey're under too much pressure down there, and we're seen as one of the few escape valveDsi.d you see that program aired on Euronews about all the open land on Mars?" Maya shook her head".It was like a real estate Nado.. If the UN delegates gave us any say in emigration, they'd be crucified."
"So what do we do?"
He shrugged". Insist on the old treaty at every poAinctt. like every change is the end of the world." "So that's why you were so crazy about the preface material."
"Sure.That stuff may not be all that important, but we're like the British at WIfatwereloog.ive at any point the whole line collapses."
She laughedS. he was pleased with him, she admired his stratAegnyd. it was a good strategy, although it
was not the one he was pursuiFnogr.
they were not like the British at Waterloo; they were if anything
like the French, making a last-ditch assault which they had to win if they wanted toAnsudrvsioveh. e
had been very busy giving in on many points in the treaty, hoping to thrust forward and hold on to what he really wanted in other areaWs.hich certainly included some remaining role for the American Martian Department, and its Secretary; after all, he needed a base from which to work.
So he shrugged, dismissing her pleasuOren. the TV wall the crowds boiled up and down the great avenues. He clenched his teeth a few tim"eWs.e'd better get to it again."
Upstairs the conferees were milling about in a sequence of long high rooms that were divided by tall partitions. Sunlight streamed into the big central room from the eastern meeting chambers, throwing a ruddy glare over the white pile carpet and the squarish teak chairs and the dark pink stone of the long table top.Knots of people were chatting casually against the wMalalsy.a went off to confer with
Samantha and SpencerT. he three of them were now the leaders of the MarsFirst coalition, and as such had been invited to the conference as non-voting representatives of the Martian poputhlaetiopne:ople's
party, the tribunes, and the only ones there actually elected to their positions, although they were there only at Helmut's sufferanceH. elmut had been as inclusive as anyone could ask; he had allowed Ann to attend as a non-voting member representing the Reds, even though they were part of the coalition; Sax was there observing for the terraforming team; and any number of mining and development executives were observing as welTl.here was a whole crowd of observers, in fact; but the voting members were the only ones to sit at the central table, where Helmut was now ringing a smFaifltly-btherlle.e national
representatives and eighteenUN officials took their seats; another hundred continued to wander in the
eastern rooms, watching the discussion through the open portals or on smalOl uTtsVidse.
the windows,
Burroughs crawled with figures and vehicles, moving around in the clear-walled mesas, and the tents on and between the mesas, and in the network of connecting clear walktubes that lay on the ground or arched through the air, and in the huge valley tent with its wide streetgrass boulevards and iAts canals. little metropolis.
Helmut called the session to ordIenr.the eastern rooms people clustered around the TFVrasn.k
glanced through a portal into the east room nearest him; there would be rooms like that all over Mars and
Earth, thousands of them, with millions of observTewrso.
worlds watching.
The day's topic, as it had been for the past two weeks, was emigrationChqiunoataasn. d India had a

joint proposal to make; the head of the Indian office rose and read it in his musical Bombay English. Stripped of camoflage it came down to a proportional system, of cCohuarslme.ers shook his headI.ndia
and China between them had forty percent of the world's population, but they were only two votes of fifty-three at this conference, and their proposal would never Tphaess.Brit in the European delegation
rose to point out this fact, not in so many words of
Wcoruarnsge.ling began.It would go on all morning.
Mars was a real prize, and the rich and poor nations of Earth were struggling over it as they were over everything else.The rich had the money but the poor had the people, and the weapons were pretty
evenly distributed, especially the new viral vectors that could kill everyone on a coYnteisn,entht.e stakes
were high, and the situation existed in the most fragile of balances, the poor surging up out of the south and pressing the northern barriers of law and money and pure militaryGfuonrcbe.arrels in their faces, in essence. But now there were so many faces; a human wave attack might explode at any instant, it seemed, just from the expansive pressure of sheer numbers-attackers shoved over the barricades by the press of babies in the rear, raging for their chance at immortality.
At the midmorning break, with nothing more accomplished, Frank rose from hHise sheadt. heard little
of the wrangle, but he had been thinking, and his lectern's sketchpad was marked up with a rough schematic. Money, people, land, gunsO. ld equations, old trade-offsB. ut it wasn't originality he was
after; it was something that would work.
Nothing would happen at the long table itself, that was cSeortmaieno. ne had to cutthe knot.He got up and wandered over to the Indian and Chinese delegation, a group of about ten conferring in a
camera-free side roomA.
fter the usual exchange of pleasantries he invited the two leaders, Hanavada
and Sung, to take a walk on the observation brAidfgter.
a glance at each other, and quick
conversations in Chinese and Hindu with their aides, they agreed.
So the three delegates walked out of the rooms and down the corridors to the bridge, a rigid walktube which began at the wall of their mesa and arched out over the valley and into tahne esvideen otafller
mesa to the southT.he bridge's height gave it an airy flying magnificence, and there were quite a few people walking its four kilometers, or just standing midway and taking in the view of Burroughs.
"Look," Chalmers said to his two colleagues, "the expense of emigration is so great that you will never
ease your population problems by moving them hYeroeu.
know thatA.
nd you already have lots more
reclaimable land in your own countriSeso.
what you want from Mars isn't land but resources, or money.
Mars is leverage to get your share of resources back hYoomue'r.e lagging behind the North because of resources that were taken from you without payment during the colonial years, and you should have repayment for that now."
"I am afraid that in a very real sense the colonial period never ended," Hanavada said politely. Chalmers nodded". That's what transnational capitalism means; we're all colonies nAonwd. there's
tremendous pressure on us here, to alter the treaty so that most of the profits from local mining become
the property of the transnationalTs.he developed nations are feeling that very strongly." "This we know," Hanavada said, nodding.
"Okay.And now you've made the pitch for proportional emigration, which is just as logical as alloting profits proportional to investmenBt. ut neither of these proposals is in your best intTerheest.emigration
would be a drop in the bucket to you, but the money woMuledann'tw. hile the developed nations have a new population problem, so a chance at a larger share of emigration would be wAenlcdomthee.y can spare the money, which would mostly go to transnationals anyway and become free-floating capital, outside any national controSl.o why shouldn't the developed nations give you more Iotf wito?uldn't

really be coming out of their pocket anyway."
Sung nodded quickly, looking solemPne.rhaps they had foreseen this response, and had made their proposal to stimulate it, and were waiting for him to play hBisupt atrht.at just made it easi"eDr.o you think your governments will agree to such a trade?" Sung asked.
"Yes," Chalmers said".What is it but governments reassserting their power over the transnationals? Sharing the profits resembles in a way your old nationalization movements, only this time all countries would benefit.Internationalization, if you will."
"It will cut down on investments by the corporations," Hanavaba noted.
"Which will please the Reds," Chalmers s"aPidle.ase most of the MarsFirst group, in fact." "And your government?" Hanavaba asked.
"I can guarantee itA."ctually the administration would be a probleBmu.t Frank would deal with them
when the time came, they were a bunch of Chamber of Commerce kids these days, arrogant but stupid. Tell them it was this or a third world Mars, a Chinese Mars, a Hindu Chinese Mars, with little brown people and cows unmolested in the walktubTehs.ey would come aroundI.n fact they would hide behind
his knees yelling for protection, Grandpa Chalmers please save me from the yellow horde.
He watched the Indian and the Chinese look at each other, in a completely scrutable con"sHueltlla,"tion. he said, "this is what you were hoping for, right?"
"Perhaps we should work on some figures," Hanavaba said.
# # #
It took much of the next month to implement the compromise, as it entailed a whole set of corollary compromises to get the all voting delegations to acceEptveirt.y nation's delegate had to get a cut to
show the folks back homAe.nd there was Washington to be convinced as well; in the end Frank had to
go over the heads of the kids right to the President, who was only a bit older than them, but could see a deal when it was poking him in the sternSuomF. rank was busy, meetings nearly sixteen hours a day in
his old pattern, as familiar as the sunrIinset.he end, mollifying transnat lobbyists like Andy Jahns was the hardest part-essentially impossible, as the deal was being made at their expense and they Tkhneeyw it.
put all the pressure they could on the northern governments and on their flags of convenience, and that was considerable, as evidenced by the President's scared irritability, and the defection of Singapore and Sofia from the deaBl. ut Frank convinced the President, even across all that space, even across the deep psychological barrier of the time laAgn. d he used the same arguments with every other northern government. If you give in to the transnationals, he would say, then they're the real government of the world. This is the chance to assert the interests of you and your population over those freefloating accumulations of capital which are very near to holding the ultimate power onYoeuartnhe!ed to get
them on the leash somehow!
And it was the same at the UN, for every official"Wthheore.do you want to be the real world government? You or them?"
Still, it was a close thiTngh.e pressures the transnats could bring to bear were awesome, it was impressive to watchS. ubarashii and Armscor and Praxis were each bigger than all but the ten largest countries or commonwealths, and they really put out the fMunodns.ey equals power; power makes the

law; and law makes governmenSto.
that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were
like the Lilliputians trying to tie down GulliTvhere.y needed a great network of tiny lines, staked into place along every millimeter of the circumferenAcen.d as the giant heaved to free itself and start
trampling about, they had to rush from side to side, throw new lines over the monster, hammer new little pin stakes into placeR. ush around making quarter-hour pin-stake appointments, for sixteen hours a day.
Mad Dutch boy juggling.
Andy Jahns took him to dinner one nHigeht.was angry with Chalmers, naturally, but tried to hide it, as the evening's business consisted of the offer of a bribe thinly disguised, accompanied by threats thinly
veiled. Business as usual, in other wordHse.
offered Chalmers a position as head of a foundation which
was being set up by the Earth-to-Mars transport consortium-the old aerospace industries, with their old Pentagon stash still sloshing around in their pockTehtsi.s new foundation would assist the consortium to make policy, and advise the UN on Mars-related matTtehres. position was to begin after his tenure as Secretary for Mars was over, to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.
"It sounds marvelous," Chalmers sa"idI'.m very interested indeed.A" nd over the course of the dinner he convinced Jahns he was sincerNe.ot only about taking the position in the foundation, but in working for the consortium immediatelyT. his was work indeed, but he was good at it; he could see the suspicion slowly leak out of Jahns as the evening woreThoen.weakness of businessmenth: e belief that money
was the point of the gam"eI'.ll do what I can," Chalmers promised energetically, and outlined some
strategies he would start to pursue at onTcaelk.
to the Chinese about their need for land, get Congress
back to the idea of a fair return on investmCeenrttsa.inly. Make promises here and some of the pressure would subside; meanwhile the work could go Tohne.re was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.
So he went back to the conference table and carried on as before. The walk on the bridge, as it was now being called (others called it the Chalmers Shift), had broken the imFpeabsrsuea.ry 6th, 2057;
Ls=144, m-16; a red-letter date in the history of diplomNaocwy. it was a matter of giving everyone else a piece, and fixing the actual numbeArs this process ground along Chalmers talked with all the first hundred observers there, reassuring them and checking their opiniSoanxs,. it turned out, was upset with him, because he thought that if the transnats ceased investment his terraforming would have to slow
considerably. He saw all the arriving business as hAeantd.
yet Ann too was upset with him, because a
new treaty based on the shift would allow both emigration and investment, and she and the Reds had been hoping for a treaty that would give Mars a kind of world parkThsattatkuisn. d of disconnection
from reality made him craz"yI.'ve just saved you fifty million Chinese immigrants," he yelled at her, "and you bitch at me because I haven't managed to send everyone back Yhooumeb.itch because I didn't
work a miracle and turn this rock into a holy shrine, right next door to a world that's beginning to look
like Calcutta on a bad daAyn. n, Ann, AnnW.
hat would you have done? What would you have done
except stalk around glaring at every single fucking thing people said, and convincing everyone that you're from Mars?Jesus Christ.Go out and play with your rocks and leave the politics to people who can think."
"Remember what thinking is, Frank," she sSaoidm. ehow he had made her smile for a second there, in the middle of his tiradBe.ut she laid the same old wild glare on him before she left.
But Maya, now; Maya was pleased with
Hhiem.could feel her gaze on hwimhen he talked in the public
meetings. Millions of people watching, and he felt only that Igtazmea. de him angryS.he was full of admiration for the bridge walk, and he told her only what she would be pleased to hear about the backstage compromises he was making in order to get it acceSphteedb.egan joining him every evening during the cocktail hour, approaching him when the first press of critics and supplicants had ebbed,
standing by his side through the second and third waves, watching and easing things along with her laugh,
and extricating him from time to time with reminders that they had to go outThaennd tehaety.
would go

out onto restaurant terraces under the stars, and eat and then sip coffee, looking over the orange tiles and roof gardens under one of the big mesa-topping tents, feeling the evening breeze just as if they were out
in the openT. he MarsFirst crowd had committed themselves to his plan; so he had most of the locals,
and he had the home office, and those were the two most important single parties in the whole process, he judged, aside from the transnational leadership, which he could do littleSaoboitutw. as only a matter
of time before he would work the dAeasl.he would tell her, sometimes, late in the evenings when he had fallen a bit under her speBlle.en calmed by her".Between us we'll get it done," he would say as he
looked up at the vivid stars in the sky, unable to meet her penetrating gaze.
And one night she kept returning to his side during the cocktail gatWheirtihnga.ll the others they
watched the terran news reports of the day's progress, and saw again how oddly distorted and flattened they appeared, like tiny players in an incomprehensible soap oApenrda. then they left together, and ate,
and then went walking down the wide grassy boulevards, eventually coming to his room in the lower town. And she accompanied him insidWe. ithout explanation or comment, in Maya's usual wAasy.if she always did thisI.t just happened, was happeninSgh. e was in his room, and then in his arms, hugging him. They lay on his bed and she kissed Thihme. shock of it was such that Frank felt completely removed from his body, his flesh was like rubTbehri.s was beginning to worry him when the sheer animal presence
of her broke through the shock, body spoke to body and he suddenly he could feel her again; sensation flooded back into him, and he responded to it with animal intIetnshiatyd. been a long time.
Afterward she walked around with a white sheet draped over her like a cape, getting a glas"sI of water. like the way you work those people," she said, her back tSohehimdr.ank from the glass, looked over
her shoulder with her old affectionate grin, with that full and open gaze of hers, a gaze that seemed so insightful, like lazed light shining right through him, that suddenly he felt not only naked, butHeexposed. pulled the remaining sheet up over his hip, then felt that he had given himseSluf raewlyays.he would see,
see the way the air turned to cold water in his lungs, the way his stomach knotted, the way his feet froze. He blinked, returned her smilHe.e knew it was a wan and crooked smile; but feeling his face like a stiff
mask over his real flesh, he took comfNoort. one could accurately read emotions from facial expressions, that was all a lie, a bogus relationship as in palm reading or asStorolhoegyw. as safe.
But after that night she began spending a lot of time with him, both in public aSnhdepjroivinaeted. him
at the receptions given every night by one or another of the national offices; she sat beside him at many of the group dinners; she sailed the hot sea of conversation with him afterward, as they watched the bad
news from Terra, or sat in the close knot of the first huAnnddredsh. e went with him to his room at night, or even more disturbing, took him to hers.
And all without any sign of what she wanted fromHehimco.uld only conclude that she knew she did
not have to speak of Tith.at just being with him was enough, that he would know what she wanted, and
try his best to do it without her ever having to say aThwatorsdh.e would get what she wantFeodr. of
course it was impossible that she was doing it all without Tchauatsew. as the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply aInleovvietarb. ly they all wanted things you could give them-if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powTehrfautl.was prestige that Maya did
not need, but she knew what she wanAtendd.
wasn't he doing it, after aInllf?uriating a large part of his
power base, to forge a treaty that would please no one but a handful oYf elso,caslhse? was getting what she wanted.And all without a word, or without a direct wNoortdh.ing but praise and affection.
So that as he talked in the endless caucus conferences, carefully hammering out the wording of each clause of the new treaty, playing James Madison to this strange simulacrum of a constitutional convention, Spencer and Samantha and Maya would wander around helping him, and Maya would watch him with the most fractional smile, which revealed to him alone her approval, her prideAindhitmhe.n, energized
by the day's work, he would roam the evening reception, and she would laugh at him and stand at his

side and chatter with all the rest, a kind of coHnseollr,t.a consort!And at night shower him with kisses, until it was impossible to imagine that she did not like him.
Which was intolerableT.hat it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best. . . that she should be so stupid. it. w. as shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever bHeofowre.
hidden the true self is, he thought, under the phenomenological
Imnasreka. lity they were all actors all the
time, playing their video partasn, d there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore; over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten losAt.nd now they were all hollow.
Or perhaps it was just hBime.cause she seemed so reaHl!er laughter, her white hair, her passion, my
God: her sweaty skin and the ribs underneath it, ribs that slid back and forth under his fingers like the slats of a fence, ribs that clamped down on the paroxysms of oArgatsrume. self, didn't it have to be so? Didn't it?He could hardly believe otherwisAe. true self.
But sadly deceivedO. ne morning he awoke from a dream of JIothwn.as from their time together on the space station, when they had been youEngx.cept in the dream they had been old, and John had not died and yet he had; he spoke as a ghost, aware that he had died and that Frank had killed him, yet aware also of everything that had happened since, and free of all anger orItblwamase.just something that had happened, like the time John had gotten the first landing assignment, or had taken Maya away on the Ares. A lot of things had happened between them one way and another, but they were still friends, still brothers. They could talk, they understood each othFeere. ling the horror of that Frank had groaned
through the dream, and tried to fold in on himself, and awaIktenweads.
hot, his skin was sweaMtya.ya
was sitting up, her hair wild, her breasts swinging loosely between her"Warhmast'.s wrong!" she was saying. "What's wrong!"
"Nothing!" he cried, and got up and padded to the bathBrouot msh. e came after him, put her hands on him. "Frank, what was it?"
"Nothing," he shouted, involuntarily jerking out of her "gCraipn.'t you leave me alone!"
"Of course," she said, huArt. flush of anger":Of course I can.A" nd she walked out of the bathroom.
"Of course you can!" he shouted after her, suddenly furious at her stupidity, to be so ignorant of him, so
vulnerable to him, when it was all an act any"wNaoyw.
that you've got what you want from me!"
"What does that mean?" she said, reappearing instantly in the bathroom doorway, a sheet around her.
"You know what I mean," he said bitt"eYrlyo.u've got what you wanted from the treaty, haven't you. And you never would have, without me."
She stood there, hands on her hips, watching Thhime .sheet was loose around her hips and she looked like the French figure of Liberty, very beautiful and very dangerous, her mouth a tSighhet lsihnoeo. k her head in disgust and walked awa"yY.ou don't have the faintest idea, do you," she said.
He followed her".What do you mean?"
She threw the sheet away and stepped violently into her underwear, yanked it up over heAr sbottom. she dressed she hurled short sentences at h"iYmo.u don't know anything about what other people think. You don't even know what you thiWnkh. at do you want out of the treYaot?u, Frank Chalmers?You
don't know.It's only what I want, what Sax wants, what Helmut wWahnatst. any of them wanYt.ou

yourself have no opinionW. hatever is easiest to managWe. hatever leaves you in control at the end.
"And as for feelingsS!"he was dressed, standing at the doSohre.
stopped to glare at him, a look like a
lightning strike:he had been standing there too stunned to move and so now he stood there naked before
her, exposed to the full blast of her sc"oYrno.u don't have any feelings, do yIo'vue.
tried, believe me,
but you just-"She shuddered, apparenly unable to think of words vile enough to describHe ohlliomw., he wanted to sayE.mpty. An act.And yet-
She walked out.
# # #
So when they signed the new treaty, Maya was not at his side; not even in BWuhrriocuhgahs.relief in many ways, reallyA. nd yet he could not help but feel empty, and cold in the chest; and certainly the others of the first hundred (at least) knew something had happened between them (again), which was infuriating, or so he told himself.
They signed the thing in the same conference room they had hammered it out in, with Helmut doing the honors with a big smile, and each delegate coming up in turn, in penguin suit or black evening gown, to say a few words for the cameras and then put their hand to "the document," a gesture that only Frank seemed to see as bizarrely archaic, like scratching a petrogRlyipdhic.ulous. When it was his turn he went
up and said something about striking a balance, which was exactly it; he had arranged the competing interests to strike together at angles that matched their momentum exactly, arranging a traffic accident so that all the vehicles would collide into a single solidified Tmhaessr.esult was something not all that
dissimilar to the previous version of the treaty, with both emigration and investment, the two main threats to the status quo (if there was such a thing on Mars), mostly blocked, and (this was the clever part) blocked by each otherI.t was a good piece of work, and he signed with a flourish, "for the United States of America," he announced emphatically, glaring around the world inteTnhtalyt. would play well on vid.
So he strode through the subsequent parade with the cold satsifaction of work wTelhledone.
grass-floored tents and walktubes of the city were crowded with thousands of spectators, and the parade wound through them, wandering down the cbaignalside tent with diversions up into the mesas, coming
back down and crossing every canal bridge to cheers, and proceeding up to Princess Park for a great street party.The weather people had set for cool and crisp, with brisk downslope Kwiitnesdsd. ueled
under the tent roofs like raptors, their colors bright against the dark pink afternoon sky.
Frank found the party in the park unsettling, there were too many people watching him, too many who wanted to approach him and taTlkh.at was famey: ou talked to groupsS.o he turned around and walked
back up the canalside tent.
Two parallel rows of white pillars ran down the sides of the canal; each pillar was a Bareiss column, semicircular at top and bottom but with the hemispheres rotated 180 degrees to eacThhiosthseimr. ple maneuver created pillars that looked completely different depending on where you were when you looked at them, and the two rows of these pillars had a strange tumble-down look, as if they were
already ruins, although the smoothness and whiteness of their diamond-coated salt belied that; they stood off the grass as white as sugar cubes, and gleamed as if wet.
Frank walked between the rows, touching each pillar inAtbuornv.e them on each side the valley slopes rose to the window-walled bluffs of mesMasa.ssed greenery shone behind these cliffs of untinted glass, so that it looked as if the city were rimmed by enormous terraAriurmeasll.y elegant ant farmT.he part of
the valley slope under tenting was dotted with trees and tile roofs, and cut by broad grassy boulevards.

The uncovered part was still a red rocky pAlaing.reat number of buildings were just being finished, or
still under construction; there were cranes everywhere rearing up toward the tent roofs, a kind of odd colorful skeletal statuaryA. lso scores of scaffolded buildings, so that Helmut had said the tented hillsides reminded him of Switzerland, no suprise since most of the construction was being done b"yThSewy iss. scaffold a house to replace a window box."
Sax Russell was standing at the foot of one of these scaffolded buildings, looking up at iFt rcarnitkically. turned and walked up a tube to him, said hello.
"There's twice as much support as they need," Sax"Msaaidy.be more." "The Swiss like that."
Sax noddedT. hey stared at the building. "Well?" Frank said".What do you think?"
"The treaty?It will reduce support for terraforming," Sax s"aPide.ople are more inclined to invest than to give."
Frank scowled". Not all investment is good for terraforming, Sax, you have to remembeAr tlhoat t.of that money is spent on other things entirely."
"But terraforming is a way to reduce overhead, youA sceer.tain percentage of the total investment will
always be devoted to
Sit.o I want the total as high as possible."
"Real benefits can only be calculated using real costs," Frank"Aslalidt.he real costsT.erran economics never bothered to do that, but you're a scientist and you sYhoou dh.ave to judge the environmental
damage from higher population and activity, as well as the benefits to terraforming that go along with it. Better to up the investment devoted to pure terraforming, rather than compromising and taking a percentage of a total that in some ways is working against you."
Sax twitched". It's funny to hear you speak against compromise after the last four months, Frank. Anyway, I say it's better to up both the total and the percTenhteageen.vironmental costs are negligible. Managed right they can mostly be turned to beneAfints.economy can be measured in terawatts or
kilocalories, like John used to saAyn. d that's energyA.
nd we can use energy here in any form, even a lot
of bodies.Bodies are just more work, very versatile, very energetic."
"Real costs, SaxA. ll of of themY. ou're still trying to play at economics, but it isn't like physics, it's like politics. Think what will happen when millions of displaced terran emigrants arrive here, with all their viruses, biological and psychicM. aybe they'll all join Arkady or Ann, ever thought ofEtphiadte?mics,
running through the mob's body and mind-they could crash your whole syLsoteomk,! hasn't the Acheron group been trying to teach you biologYyo?u should pay attentionT!his isn't mechanics, SaxI.t's ecology. And it's a fragile, managed ecology, so it has to be managed."
"Maybe," Sax saidI.t was one of John's mannerisms, that phrFasraen. k missed what Sax was saying for a minute, then his attention was captured again:
". . . . this treaty isn't going to make all that much difference Tahneywtraayn.snationals that want to
invest will find a waTy.hey'll make a new flag of convenience and it'll look like a country staking its claim here, exactly according to the treaty's quotBaus.t behind it will be transnational monTeyh.ere'll be all

kinds of that stuff happening, FranYko. u know how it iPso. litics, right?Economics, right?" "Maybe,"Frank said harshly, upseHt. e walked away.
# # #
Later he found himself in an upper valley district, still beingThbeuisltc.affolding was extreme, as Sax had said, especially for Martian geSeo.me of it looked like it would be hard to bring Hdoewtnu.rned
and looked out over the valleTyh.e city was nicely placed, that was indisputaTbhlee.
two sides of the
valley meant there was going to be a lot visible from anyEvpeoriynwt. here in town would have a view.
Suddenly his wristpad beeped, and he answeIrtedw. as Ann, staring up at h"imW.hat do you want," he snapped. "I suppose you think I sold you out too. Let in the hordes to overrun your playground."
She grimaced". No. You did the best that could be done, given the situTathiaotn's. say." She clicked off and his pad went blank.
what I wanted to
"Great," he said alou"dI.'ve got everyone on two worlds mad at me except Ann ClaybHoernela."ughed bitterly, took off walking.
Back down to the canal and the rows of Bareiss colLuomt'nss.wives.There were knots of celebrants scattered over the canalside sward, and in the late afternoon light their shadows weTrehelosnigh. t
took on a somehow ominous cast, and Frank turned, uncertain where Htoe
gdoid.n't like the aftermath
of things.Everything seemed finished, done, revealed as pointleItss.was always this way.
A group of Terrans were standing under one of the more magnificent new office blocks in the
Niederdorf tent.There was Andy Jahns among them.
If Ann was pleased, Andy would be furiForuasn.k walked up to him, wanting to witness that.
Andy saw him, and his face went still for a mo"Fmreank. here?"
Chalmers," he said".What brings you down
His tone was amiable, but his eyes were unamused, evenYceos,ldh. e was angryF.rank, feeling better every second, said "I'm just walking around, Andy, getting the blood flowingWahgatin.about you?"
After the briefest of hesitations Jahns said, "We're looking at office space."
He watched as Frank digested the implications of the stateHmiesnts.mile took on an edge, became a
genuine smile.He went on": These are friends of mine from Ethiopia, from Addis AWbabe'are.
thinking
of moving our home office there next yAeanrd.
so-" his smile broadened, no doubt in response to the
look on Frank's face, which Frank could feel hardening over the front of his skull- "we have a lot to discuss."
Al-Qahira is the name for Mars in Arabic, and Malaysian, and IndoTnheseialna.tter two langauges got

it from the former; look at a globe, then, and see how far the Arabs' religioTnhesprwehado.le middle of the world, from West Africa to the West PacAifnicd. most of that in a single centYureys., it was an empire in its time; and like all empires, after death it had a long half-life.
The Arabs who live out of Arabia are called Mahjaris, and the Arabs who came to Mars, the Qahiran Mahjaris. When they arrived on Mars a good number of them began to wander Vastitas Borealis ("The Northern Badia") and the Great EscarpmeTnth.ese wanderers were mostly Bedouin Arabs, and they
traveled in caravans, in a deliberate recreation of a life that had disappeared oPneoEpalreth.who had lived incities all their lives went to Mars and moved around in rovers anTdhteenetxs.cuses for their
ceaseless travel included the hunt for metals, areology, and trade; but it seemed clear that the important thing was the travel, the life itself.
# # #
Frank Chalmers joined old Zeyk Tuqan's caravan a month after the treaty was signed, in the northern autumn of m-year 16 (July 2057F)o.r a long time he wandered with this caravan over the broken slopes of the Great EscarpmenHt. e worked on his Arabic, and helped with their mining, and took
meteorological observations.The caravan was composed of actual Bedouins from Awlad 'Ali, the western coast of EgypTt.hey had lived north of the area that the Egyptian government had named the New Valley Project, after a search for oil discovered a water aquifer holding an amount equal to a thousand years of the Nile's floEwv.en before the discovery of the gerontological treatment, the Egyptian population problem had been severe; with 96% of the country desert, and 99% of the population in the Nile Valley, it was inevitable that the hordes relocated in the New Valley Project would overwhelm the Bedouins and their entirely distinct cultuTreh.e Bedouins wouldn't even call themselves Egyptians, and
despised the Nile Egyptians as spineless and immoral; but that did not keep the Egyptians from crowding north from the New Valley Project into Awlad 'BAelid.ouins in the other Arab countries had taken the
side of these overwhelmed outposts of their culture, and when the Arab commonwealth started a Mars program, and bought space on the continuous Earth-to-Mars shuttle fleet, they asked Egypt to give preference to their western BedouinTs.he Egyptian government had been only too happy to oblige, and clear the region of its troublesome minorSitoy. here they were, Bedouins on Mars, wandering the
world-wrapping northern desert.
# # #
The weather observations piqued Frank's interest in climatology like none of the scientists' talk ever had. The weather on the Escarpment was often violent, with katabatic winds rushing downslope and colliding
with the Syrtis trade winds to create tall fast red tornadoes, or onslaughts of grCitutyrrehnatilly.
the
atmosphere was at around 130 millibars in the summer, in a mix about 80% carbon dioxide and 10% oxygen, the remainder mostly argoInt. wasn't clear yet whether they were going to be able to overwhelm the CO2 with oxygen and the other gases, but Sax seemed satisfied with their progresCserstoainflayr.
on a windy day on the escarpment it was clear that the air was thickening; it had some real heft to it, it
threw heavy sand, and darkened the afternoons to the color of aAnsdcabin.
the hardest gales the gusts
could knock you down quite easiFlyr.ank timed one katabatic gust at six hundred kilometers an hour;
luckily it was part of such a hard general blow that everyone was in the rovers when it happened.
# # #
The caravan was a mobile mining operatMione.tals and ore-bearing minerals were being discovered in
all kinds of locations and concentrations on Mars, but one thing the Arab prospectors were discovering was that a lot of sulfides were very lightly scattered on the great escarpment and the flats immediately below it.Most of these deposits were in concentrations and total quantities that would not justify the use

of conventional mining methods, and so the Arabs were engaged in pioneering new extraction and processing procedures; they had built an array of mobile equipment, altering construction vehicles and exploration rovers to suit their purposTeh.e resulting machines were big, segmented, and distinctly insectile, looking like things out of a truck mechanic's nightmTharees.e creatures wandered the Great
Escarpment in loose caravans, seeking the diffuse surface areas of stratiform copper deposits, preferably those with high amounts of tetrahedrite or chalcocite in them, so that they could recover silver as a byproduct of the copperW. hen they located one of these, they would stop for what they called the harvesting.
While they did this, prospector rovers would range ahead along the Escarpment, on expeditions of a week or ten days, following the old flows and Wrifhtes.n Frank had arrived he had been welcomed by Zeyk, who told him to do whatever work he chose; so Frank commandeered one of the prospector rovers, and took it out on solo expeditioHnes. would spend a week out, puttering around on automatic search, reading the seismograph and the samplers and the weather instruments, doing an occasional boring, watching the skies.
# # #
All over both worlds, Bedouin settlements looked drab from the outside; when they abandoned tents, their neighborhoods took on a windowless thick-walled look, as if perpetually hunched over to protect themselves from the desert heaOt.nly when you got inside their homes did one see what was protected, the courtyards, the gardens, the fountains, the birds, the staircases, the mirrors, the arabesques.
The Great Escarpment was strange country, cut by north-south canyon systems, marred by old craters, overrun by lava flows, broken into hummocks and karsts and mesas and ridges; and all of them on a steep slope, so that on top of any rock or prominence one could see far down to Inthehisnodrathy.s of solitary travel, Frank let the prospector program make most of the decisions, and sat watching the land roll by:silent, stark, huge, torn like the dead past itsDealfy. s would pass, and the shadows wheTehl.e
winds swirled upslope in the mornings, and downslope in the late afterCnolounds.s stacked the sky,
from low fog balls bouncing over the rocks to high cirrus shavings, with the occasional thunderhead spanning the whole distance, solid masses of cloud twenty thousand meters high.
Occasionally he woultdurn on the TV and watch the Arabic news chaSnonmele. times in the silence of
the mornings he woultdalk back to the TVT.here was a part of him that was outraged at the stupidity of
the media, and of the events they packagTehde.
stupidity of the human race, playing out its spectacle.
Except that the vast bulk of humanity never appeared on video, never once in their lives, not even in the crowd scenes when a camera swept the mBoabc.k there the Terran past still lived on in enormous
regions, where village life was plodding on as it alwaysMhaaydb.e that was wisdom, held to by old
wives and shamansM.
aybe. But it was hard to believe, because look what happened when they
gathered in citiesI.diots on video, history in the maki"nOg.ne can say that the lengthening of human life must, by definition, be a great booTnh."ese things made him laug"hH. aven't you ever heard of secondary effects, you asshole!"
One night he watched a report on the fertilization of the Antarctic Ocean with iron dust,
twohiaccht was
as a dietary supplement to phytoplankton, a population that was shrinking at an alarming rate for no obvious reason.The iron dust was dumped out of planes, it looked like they were fighting some kind of submarine fire; the project would cost ten billion dollars a year, and would have to be continued in perpetuity, but it had been calculated that a century's worth of fertilization would reduce the global concentration of carbon dioxide by fifteen percent plus or minus ten percent, and given the ongoing warming and subsequent threat to the coastal cities, not to mention the death of most of the world's coral reefs, the project had been judged worth"Aitn.n's going to love this," Frank mutter"eNd.ow they're

terraforming Earth."
Each vocal outburst he maudnetied a knot in his cheHste.
came to realize that no one was watching
him, no one was listeninTg.he tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our
life movies. No friend or enemy would ever know what he did here, he could do whatever he liked and normalcy be damnedA. pparently this was what he had been craving, what he had instinctively sought.
He could go out and kick stones down the side of a karst for a whole afternoon; or cry; or write aphorisms in the sand; or scream abuse at the moons, careening across the southHeren csokuyl.d talk
back to himself over meals, he could talk back to the TV, he could have conversations with his parents or his lost friends, with the President, or John, or MHeaycao. uld dictate long rambling entries into his
lectern: bits of a sociobiological history of the world, a journal, a philosopical treatise, a pornographic
novel (he could masturbate), an analysis of the Arab culture and their hHisetodriyd.
all these things, and
when he and his prospector rolled back to the caravans, he would feelembeptttieerr:, calmer.More truly hollow."Live," as the Japanese said helpfully, "as if you were already dead."
# # #
But the Japanese were alienAsn. d living with the Arabs sharpened his sense of how alien they were too. Oh, they were part of twenty-first century humanity, no doubt about it; they were sophisticated scientists and technicians, cocooned like everyone else in a protective shell of technology at every moment of their lives, and busy making and watching their own life moAvnieds. yet they prayed three to six times a day, bowing toward Earth when it was the morning or eveningAnstdar.the reason their techno-caravans
gave them such great and obvious pleasure was because the caravans were an outward manifestation of this bending of the modern world to their ancient g"oMalasn. 's work is to actualize God's will in history," Zeyk would say". We can change the world in ways that help to actualize the divine Ipt'asttaelrwn.ays
been our way:Islam says the desert does not remain desert, the mountain does not remain moTuhnetain. world must be transformed into a semblance of the divine pattern, and that is what constitutes history in Islam. Al-Qahira gives us the same challenge as the old world, except in a purer form."
He would say these things to Frank as they sat around in his rover, in its tiny Tchoeusretyafarmd.ily
rovers were transformed into private preserves, spaces that Frank was seldom invited into, and then only by Zeyk.Each time he visited he was surprised antehwe : rover was nondescript from the exterior, big,
with darkened windows, one of several parked in a bunch with walktubes betweenButthetmhe.n one ducked through a doorway and inside, and stepped into space filledsunwligthht pouring down through skylights, illuminating couches and elaborate rugs, tiled flogorrese, n-leafed plants, bowls of fruit, a
window with the martian view tinted and framed like a photo, low couches, silver coffee urns, computer consoles of inlaid teak and mahogany, running water in pools and fouAntacinoso.l wet world, green and
white, intimate and smalLl.ooking around Frank had the powerful sensation that rooms like this had
existed for centuries, that the chamber would be instantly recognized for what it was by people living in the Empty Quarter in the tenth century, or across Asia in the twelfth.
Often Zeyk's invitations would come in the afternoon, when a group of men would convene in his rover for coffee and talkF. rank would sit in his spot near Zeyk, and sip his muddy coffee and listen to the Arabic with all the attention he could musIterw. as a beautiful language, musical and intensely
metaphoric, so that all their modern technical terminology resonated with desert imagery because of the
root meanings of all the new words, which like most of their abstract terms had concrete physical origins. Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on, and this showed in many unexpected
cognates with English, and in the organic and compact nature of the vocabulary.
The conversations ran all over, but they were guided by Zeyk and the other elders, who were deferred
to by the younger men in a way Frank found increMdiabnley.
times the conversation became an overt

lesson for Frank on Bedouin ways, which allowed him to nod and ask questions, and occasionally to offer comments or criticism".When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would
say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Columbia that they called La Violencia, for inAstacnicvei.l war that became a
complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control."
"Or like Beirut," said Frank innocently.
"No, no."Zeyk smiled."Beirut was much more complex than thItatw.
as not only civil war, but also a
number of exterior wars impinging onItitw.
as not a matter of social or religious conservatives detaching
from the normal progress of culture, as in Columbia or the Spanish Civil War." "Spoken like a true progressive."
"All Qahiran Mahjaris are progressive by definition, or we would not bBeutheIrsela. m has avoided
civil war by remaining a whole; we have a coherent culture, so that the Arabs here are sTtilhlisdeisvout. understood even by the most conservative elements back hoWmee.will never have civil war, because
we are united by our faith."
Frank let his expression alone speak the fact of the Shiite heresy, among many other Islamic "civil wars." Zeyk understood the expression, but ignored it and forged"Wone: all move together through history,
one loose caravanY.
ou could say that we here on Al-Qahira are like one of our prospectingArnodvers.
you know what a pleasure it is to be in one of those."
"So. . .F"rank thought hard about how to word his question; his inexperience with Arabic would only give him a certain amount of leeway before they got offe"nIds etdh.ere really the idea of social progress
in Islam?"
"Oh, certainly!"Several of them had replied in the affirmative, and were noddinZg esytkill.said, "Don't you think so?"
"Well. . . F."rank let it passT. here still was not a single Arab democraItcyw. as a hierarchical culture
with a premium put on honor and freedom; and for the many who were low down in the hierarchy, honor and freedom were only achievable by deferenWceh. ich reinforced the system and held it staBtiuct. what
could he say?
"The destruction of Beirut was a disaster for progressive Arab culture," another m"aInt wsaaisd. the
city where intellectuals and artists and radicals went when they were attacked by their local governments. The national governments all hated the pan-Arab ideal, but the fact is we speak one language across
these several countries, and language is a powerful unifier of cuAltluorneg.
with Islam it makes us one,
really, despite the political borderBs.eirut was always the place to affirm that position, and when the
Israelis destroyed it, that affirmation became more difficTuhlte. and it didS. o here we begin the work again."
And that was their social progress.
# # #
destruction was calculated to splinter us,
The stratiform copper deposit that they had been raking up ran dry, and it was time for another ráhla, the movement of the hejra to the next sTihtee.y traveled two days, and arrived at another stratiform deposit
that Frank had foundF.rank went out again on another prospecting trip.

For days he sat in the driver's seat, feet on the dash, watching the lanTdheroyllwbeyr.e in a region of thulleya or little ribs, parallel ridges running downsloHpe never turned on the TV anymore; there was a lot to think abou"t.The Arabs don't believe in original sin," he wrote in his l"eTctheeryn. believe that man
is innocent, and death naturaTl.hat we do not need a savioTuhr.ere is no heaven or hell, but only reward and punishment, which take the form of this life itself and how it Iits ilsivaedh. umanist correction of Judaism and Christianity, in that senAsel.though in another sense they have always refused to take responsibility for their destiny; it's always Allah's wI idllo. n't understand that contradictionB. ut now they
are here.And the Mahjaris have always been an intimate part of Arab culture, often its leading edge; Arabic poetry was revived in the twentieth century by poets who actually lived in New York or Latin America. Perhaps it will be the same heItrei.s surprising to find how much their vision of history corresponds to what Boone believed; I don't think either understood thatVaetryallf.ew people ever
bother to find out what other people really thTinhkey. anyone sufficiently distant."
are willing to accept whatever they are told about
He came on a find of porphyry copper, unusually dense, and with high concentrations of silver in it as well. That would be welcomeC. opper and silver were both only somewhat scarce metals on earth, but silver was used in massive quantities in a great number of industries, and they were running low on easy
sources of itA.
nd here was more of it, right on the surface, in good concentrations; not as much as in
Silver Mountain on the Elysium massif, of course, but the Arabs would nHotarcvaerset. it, and then they would get to move again.
He moved on himselDf.ays passed, the shadows wheeleTd.he wind went downslope, upslope, downslope, upslope.Clouds formed and storms broke, and sometimes the sky was spangled with icebows and sundogs and dust devils made of hail, sparkling like mica in the pink Ssoumnleigtihmt.es he
would see one of the aerobraking continuous shuttles, like a blazing meteor running steadily across the
sky. One clear morning he saw Elysium Montes, bulking over the horizon like a black Himalaya; the view was bending a thousand kilometers over the horizon, bent by an inversion layer in the atmHoesphere.
stopped turning on the lectern as he had theNToVth.ing but the world and hiWm.inds caught at the sand, and tossed clouds of it against the roKvheár.la, the empty land.
# # #
But then dreams began to plague him, dreams that were memories, intense and full and accurate, as if he were reliving his past while he sleOpnt.e night he dreamed of the day he had found out for sure that he would lead the American half of the first Martian coHloenyh.ad driven from Washington out to the
Shenandoah Valley, feeling very odHd.e walked for a long time in the great Eastern hardwood forest.
He came on the the limestone caves at Luray, now a tourist attraction, and on a whim he took the tour.
Every stalagtite and stalagmite was lit by lurid colored lSigohmtse.
had had mallets attached to them, and
an organist could play them like the plates of a glockenspiel; the well-tempered Hcaevehrand!
to walk
out into the peripheral blackness and stuff his sleeve in his mouth so the other tourists wouldn't hear him laugh.
Then he parked in a scenic overlook and walkd off into the forest, and sat down between the roots of a big tree.No one around, a warm fall night, the earth dark, and furry witCh ictraedeass. cycling through
their alien hum, crickets creaking their last mournful creaks, sensing the frost that would kHilel tfheeltm.
so odd. . . could he really leave this world beShiitntidn?g there on the earth he had wished he could slide down a crack like a changeling and re-emerge something else, something better, something mighty, noble, long-lived-something like a treeB. ut nothing happened, of course; he lay on the ground, cut off from it already. A Martian already.

And he woke, and was disturbed all the rest of that day.
And then, even worse, he dreamed of JHohen.dreamed of the night he had sat in Washington and watched John on TV, stepping out onto Mars for the first time, closely followed by the otFhrearnkthree. left the official celebration at NASA and walked the streets, a hot D.C. night, summer Itofha2d020.
been part of his plan for John to make the first landing, he had given it to him as one sacrafices a queen i chess, because that first crew would be fried by the voyage's radiation, and according to the regs
grounded for good on their returAnn. d then the field would be cleared for the next trip out, for the colonists who would stay for gooTdh.at was the real game; and that was the one Frank planned to lead.
Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foulHmeowode.nt back to his apartment near Dupont
Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders' heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark roomA.nd as he got drunk and listened to John's inane talk his mood got
worse and worseI.t was hard to focus on his pHlaen. drank hardT. he bar was noisy, the crowd
inattentive; not that the landing hadn't been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par
with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cuttinTghteon.
blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia.
The man next to him swore at the sw"Bitcahs.ketball's gonna be a hell of a game on Mars," Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated.
"Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads." "Sure, but think of the jumTpws.enty foot dunks, easy."
"Yeah even you white boys'll jump high there, or so yoBuutsayyo.u better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here."
Frank laughedB. ut outside it was hot, a muggy DC summer naingdht,he walked home in a plummeting
foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont's beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting "Fuck you!Get a job!"But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and
furious. Beggars slumped in the doorwayTs.here were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation's capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their gre"eWd.e're gonna do it different on MarFsr,a"nk said viciously,
and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning- "Get a fucking job!" he shouted at another homeless mTahne.n on to his apartment building, with its bored
security team behind the foyer desk, people wasting their whole lives sitting there doing Unoptshtainirgs.
his hands shook so hard that he couldn't at first get his door open; and once inside he stood frozen, horrified at the sight of all the bland executive's furniture, all of it a theater set, built to impress infrequent visitors, really just NASA and the FNBoI.ne of it hisN. othing his.Nothing but a plan.
And then he woke up, alone, in a rover on the Great Escarpment.
# # #
Eventually he returned from this horrid expedition of dreBaamcsk.
in the caravan he found it hard to
talk. He was invited to Zeyk's for coffee, and he swallowed a tablet of an opiate complex to relax himself
in the company of meInn.
Zeyk's rover he sat in his spot, and waited for Zeyk to pass around little cups
of clove-dosed coffeeU.
nsi Al-Khal sat on his left, speaking at length about the Islam vision of history,
and how it had begun in the Jahili or pre-Islam peArilo-Kd.hal had never been friendly, and when Frank tried to pass him the cup that came his way in a standard gesture of politeness, Al-Khal curtly insisted

that the honor was Frank's, that Al-Khal would not be prevailed upon to uTsyupripcailt.insult by
over-politeness, the hierarchy againo:ne could not do favors for one higher in the system, favors only
went downward.Alpha males, pecking orders; really they might as well have been back on the savannah
(or in Washington), it was nothing more than primate dominance tactics again.
Frank ground his teeth, and when Al-Khal began pontificating again he said, "What about your women?" They were taken aback, and Al-Khal shrugg"eInd. Islam men and women have different roJluesst. as in
the West.It is biological in origin."
Frank shook his head and felt the sensuous buzz of the tabs, the black weight oTf hteheprpeassstu. re on a permanent aquifer of disgust at the bottom of his thiinnckrienagsed, and something gave, and suddenly he didn't care about anything and was sick of pretending hSeickdido.f all pretense everywhere, the glutinous oil that allowed society to run on in its gnashing horrible way.
"Yes," he said, "but it's slavery, isn't it?"
The men around him stiffened, shocked by the word.
"Isn't it?" he said, helplessly feeling the words bubble up out of hi"sYtohuroratw. ives and daughters are powerless, and that is slaverYy.ou may keep them well, and they may be slaves with peculiar and intimate powers over their masters, but the master-slave relationship twists everythingSotothiat.t all
these relations are twisted, pressured to the bursting point."
Zeyk's nose was wrinkle"dT. his is not the lived experience of it, I can assureYoyuous.hould listen to our poetry."
"But would your women assure me?" "Yes," Zeyk said with perfect confidence.
"Maybe.But look, the most successful women among you are modest and deferent at all times, they are scrupulous in honoring the systemT.hose are the ones that aid their husbands and sons to rise in the
system. So to succeed, they must work to enforce the same system that subjugateTs htihsemis. poisonous in its effectsA. nd the cycle repeats itself, generation after generatSiounp.ported by both masters and slaves."
"The use of the word slaves," Al-Khal said slowly, and p"aIusseodf.fensive, because it presumes judgement. Judgement of a culture you do not really know."
"True.I only tell you what it looks like from the ouTtshiidse.can only be of interest to a progressive
Moslem. Is this the divine pattern you are struggling to actualize in hTishtoeryl?aws are there to read,
and to watch in action, and to me it looks like a form of Aslnadv,eryyo.u know, we fought wars to end slavery. And we excluded South Africa from the community of naftoior nasrranging its laws so that the blacks could never live as well as the whiBteust. this you do this all the timIfe.any men in the world were treated like you treat your women, the UN would ostracize that Bnuat obne.cause it is a matter of women, the men in power look awTayh.ey say it is a cultural matter, a religious matter, not to be
interfered with.Or it is not called slavery because it is only an exaggeration of how women are treated elsewhere."
"Or not even an exaggeration," Zeyk sugges"tAed.variation."

"No, it is an exagerratioWn.estern women choose much of what they do, they have their lives to live. Not so among youB. ut no human submits to being property, they hate it, and subvert it, and have what
revenge they can against sisters, your daughters."
Tit.hat's how humans areA. nd in this case it is your mother, your wife, your
Now the men were glaring at him, still more shocked than offended; but Frank stared at his coffee cup, and went on regardless".You must free your women."
"How do you suggest we do this?" Zeyk said, looking at him curiously.
"Change your lawsE!ducate them in the same schools you educate your Msoankse.
them the equal in
rights to any Moslem of any kind anywhRereem. ember, there is much in your laws that is not in the
Koran, but was added in the time since Mohammed." "Added by holy men," Al-Khal said angrily.
"Certainly.But we choose the ways we enforce our religious beliefs in the behavior of dTahiliys ilsife. true of all culturesA. nd we can choose new wayYso. u must free your women."
"I do not like to be given a sermon by anyone but a mullah," Al-Khal said, mouth tight under his moustache. "Let those who are innocent of crime preach what is right."
Zeyk smiled cheerily. "This is what Selim el-Hayil used to say," he said. And there was a deep, charged silence.
Frank blinkedM.
any of the men were smiling now, looking at Zeyk with apprecAiantidoni.t came to
Frank in a flash that they all knew what had happened in NOicfoscioau. rse!Selim had died that night
just hours after the assassination, poisoned by a strange combination of microbes; but they knew anyway.
And yet they had accepted him, taken him into their homes, into their private enclosures where they lived their private livesT. hey had tried to teach him what they believed.
"Perhaps we should make them as free as Russian woZmeeynk," said with a laugh, extricating Frank from the moment". Crazed by overwork, don't they saTy?old they are equal, but actually not?"
Yussuf Hawi, a high-spirited young man, leered and cac"kBleitdc:hes, I can tell youB!ut no more or less than any other womanI!sn't it true that in the home the power always goes to the sIntromngy? rover I am the slave, I can tell you Ithkaits.s snake's butt daily with my Aziza!"
The men roared with laughter at hZimey.k took their cups, and poured another round of coTfhfeee.
men patched up the conversation as best they could; they covered for Frank's gross assault, either because it was so far beyond the pale that it only indicated ignorance, or because they wanted to acknowledge and support Zeyk's sponsorship of hBimu.t only about half of them looked at Frank anymore.
He withdrew and listened again, profoundly angry at himItsewlfa. s a mistake to speak one's mind at
any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it nevBeresdt idto.
strip all statements
of real content, this was a basic law of diplomOaucty.on the Escarpment he had forgotten that.

Disturbed, he went out in a prospector agTahine. dreams became less frequenWt. hen he came back in,
he did not take any drugHse.
sat silently in the coffee circles, or spoke about minerals and groundwater,
or the comfort of the newly-modified prospecting rovTehrse.
men regarded him cautiously, and only
included him in the conversation again because of Zeyk's friendliness, which never flagged-except for that one moment, when he had most effectively reminded Frank of one of the basic facts of the situation.
One night Zeyk invited him over for a dinner with Zeyk and his wife NaNzaikzikonwlyo. re a long
white dress cut in the traditional Bedouin style, with a blue waist band and bare-headed, her thick black hair drawn back into a flat comb and then left to fall down hFerrabnakckh.ad read enough to know
that this was all wrong; among the Bedouin of the Awlad 'Ali, women wore black dresses and red sashes, to indicate their impurity, sexuality, and moral inferiority; and they kept their heads covered, and used the veil in an elaborate hierarchical code of modAeslltyi.n deference to male power; so that
Nazik's clothes would be deeply shocking to her mother and grandmothers, even if she was, as now, wearing them before an outsider who didn't really maBttuetr.if he knew enough to understand, then it
was a sign.
And then at one point, when they were all laugNhainzigk, and she said to Zeyk with a laugh, "Yes, master."
rose at Zeyk's request to get them dessert,
Zeyk scowled and said "Go, slave," and took a swipe at her, and she snapped her teeTtheyat him. laughed at Frank's fierce blush, and saw that he understthoeoyd:were mocking him, and also breaking the Bedouin taboo against showing marital affection of any kind, to anNyaoznike. came over and put her
fingertip on his shoulder, which shocked him furt"hWer.e are only joking with you, you know," she said. "We women heard about your declaration to the men, and we love yoYu ofuorcoitu. ld have as many wives among us as an Ottoman sultBane.cause there is some truth to what you said, too mSuhceh."
nodded seriously, and pointed a finger at Zeyk, who wiped the grin from his face and nodded as well. Nazik went on": But so much depends on the people within the laws, don't youThfeindm?en in this
caravan are good men, smart meAn.nd the women are even smarter, and we have taken over entirely." Zeyk's eyebrows shot up, and Nazik laugh"eNd.o, really, we have only taken our shSaereri.ously."
"But where are you, then?" Frank s"aIidm. ean where are the caravan's women, during the Wdahya?t do you do?"
"We work," Nazik said simp"lyT.ake a look, you'll see us." "Doing all the kinds of work?"
"Oh yesP. erhaps not where you can see us muTchhe.re are still some-habits, customWs. e are reclusive, separate, we have our own world-it is perhaps not WgoeodB. edu tend to group together,
men and womenW.
e have our traditions, you see, and they endBuurte.there is much that is changing
here, changing fastS. o that this is the next stage of the IslamicWweaya.re. . .S"he searched for the word.
"Utopia," Zeyk suggested".The Moslem utopia."
She waggled a hand doubtful"lyH.istory," she said". The hadj to utopia."
Zeyk laughed with pleasur"eB. ut the hadj is the destination," he s"aTidh.at is what the mullahs always teach us.So we are already there, noA?"nd he and his wife smiled at each other, a private communication with a high density of information exchange, a smile which they shared, for a moment,

with Frank.And their talk veered elsewhere.
# # #
In practical terms Al-Qahira was the pan-Arab dream come alive, as all the Arab nations had contributed money and people to the MahjaTrihs.e mix of Arab nationalities on Mars was complete, but
in the individual caravans it separated out aStbililt,.
they mixed; and whether they came from the oil-rich
nations or the oil-poor ones didn't seem to maHtteerre.
among the foreigners they were all cousins.
Syrians and Iraqis, Egyptians and Saudis, Gulf Staters and Palestinians, Libyans and BeAdolluins. cousins here.
# # #
Frank began to feel bettHere.
slept deeply again, refreshed by the timeslip in every day, a little slack in
the circadian rhythm, the body's own time Ionfdfe. ed all life in the caravan had an altered duration, as if the moment itself had dilated; he felt there was time to spare, that there was never a reason to hurry.
And the seasons rolled bTyh.e sun set in almost the same spot every night, shifting ever so slowly; they lived entirely by the martian calendar now, it was the only new year they noticed or cLelse=b0ra, tethde:
start of northern spring, of the year S1e7a.son after season, each six months long, and each passing in
the absence of the old sharp sense of mortaitlitwy:as like living in the eternal now, in an endless round of works and days, in the continuous cycle of prayer to the oh-so-distant Mecca, in the ceaseless
wandering over the landI.n the always-coldO.
ne morning they woke to find it had snowed in the night,
and the whole landscape was pure whAiten.d mostly water iceT.he whole caravan went crazy for the
day, all of them men and women outside in walkers, giddy at the sight, kicking snow, making snowballs that did not cohere satisfactorily, trying to pile snowmen that likewise did not stick tTohgeethsnero.w
was too cold.
Zeyk laughed hard at these effo"rWts.hat an albedo," he sai"dI.t's astonishing how much of what Sax does rebounds against himF.eedbacks naturally adjust toward homeostasis, don't you thiInkw?onder if Sax shouldn't have first made things so much colder that the whole atmosphere froze out onto the surface. How thick would it be, a centimetTerh?en line up our harvesters pole to pole, and run them
around the world like latitude lines, processing the carbon dioxide into good air and fertilizer. Ha, can't you see it?"
Frank shook his hea"dS. ax probably considered it, and rejected it for some reason we don't see." "No doubt."
# # #
The snow sublimed away, the red land returned, they traveled on theOirccwaasyio.nally they passed nuclear reactors, standing like castles on the top of the Escarpment; not just Rickovers but giant Westinghouse breeders, with frost plumes like thunderheaOdsn. Mangalavid they saw programs about a fusion prototype in Chasma Borealis.
Canyon after canyonT.hey knew the land in a way that even Ann didn't; every part of Mars interested
her equally, so she could not have this focused knowledge of a single region, this way they had of reading it like a story, following its leads through the red rock to a patch of blackish sulfides, or the delicate cinnabar of mercury depositsT.hey were not so much students of the land as lovers of it; they wanted
something from itA. nn, on the other hand, asked for nothing but answTheersre.
were so many different

kinds of desire.
Days passed, and then more seasoWnsh. en they ran into other Arab caravans they celebrated long into the night, with music and dance, coffee and hookahs and talk, in meeting tents covering an octagon of parked rovers.Their music was never recorded, but played with great facility on flutes and electric guitars, and mostly sung, in quarter-tones and wails so strange to Frank's ear that for a long time he couldn't tell if the singers were accomplished or Tnhoet. meals lasted hours, and afterwards they talked
till dawn, and made a point of going out to watch the furnace blast of sunrise.
# # #
When they met with other nationalities, however, they were naturally more reOsenrvced.they passed a
new Amex mining station manned mostly by Americans, perched on one of the rare big veins of mafic rock rich in platinoids, in Tantalus Fossae near Alba PaTtheera.mine itself was down on the long flat
floor of the narrow rift canyon, but it was mostly robotic, and the crew lived up in a plush tent, on the rim overlooking the riftT. he Arabs circled next to this tent, made a brief guarded visit inside, and retreated
into their insectile rovers for the nigIthtw. about them.
ould have been impossible for the Americans to learn a thing
But that evening Frank went back over into the Amex tent by hTihmesefolfl.ks inside were from
Florida, and their voices brought up memories in him like nets filled with coelacanths; Frank ignored all the little mental explosions, and asked question after question, concentrating on the black and Latino and redneck faces that answered himH.e saw that this group was imitating an earlier form of community just like the Arabs did; this was a wildcat oil field crew, enduring harsh conditions and long hours for big paychecks, all saved for the return to civilizatIitonw. as worth it even if Mars sucked, which i"tI did.
mean even on the Ice you can go outside, but here, fuck."
They didn't care who Frank was, and as he sat among them listening they told stories to each other that astonished him even though they were somehow deeply fam"ilTiahre. re was twenty-two of us
prospecting with this little mobile habitat with no rooms to it, and one night we got to partying and took all our clothes off, and all the women got in a circle on the floor with their heads in the middle, and the guys went in a circle around the outside, and there were twelve guys and ten gals so the two guys out kept the rotation going pretty fast, and we actually got all the way around the circle in thWe etimeslip.
tried to all come at once at the end of the timeslip and it worked pretty good, once a few couples got
going it was like a whirlpool and it sucked everyone down Finetlot sito.
good."
And then, after the laughter and the shouts of disb"Welief:was killing and freezing these hogs in
Acidalia, and those humane killers are like shooting a giant arrow into their heads so we figured why not kill and freeze them both at once and see what hapSpoenws.e got them all handicapped, and bet on
which ones would get the furthest, and we open the outer lock door and those pigs all dash out outside and wham, they all keeled over inside of fifty yards of the door, except for one little gal that got almost two hundred yards, and froze standing uprigIhtw. in a thousand dollar on that hog."
Frank grinned at their howHlse.
was back in AmericHa.e asked them what else they had done on
Mars. Some had been building nuclear reactors up on top of Pavonis Mons, where the space elevator
would touch downO.
thers had worked on the water pipe running up eastern Tharsis bulge from Noctis
to Pavonis.The parent transnational for the elevator, Praxis, had a lot of interests at the bottom end, as they called it". I worked on a Westinghouse on top of the Compton aquifer under Noctis, which is
supposed to have as much water in it as the Mediterranean, and this reactor's entire job was going to be to power a bunch of humidifierFsu. cking two hundred megawatts of humidifier, they're the same as the humidifier I had in my bedroom when I was a kid, except they take fifty kilowattsGiagpainetcice!

Rockwell monsters with single molecule vaporizers and jet turbine engines that shoot the mist out of
thousand meter stacks. Fucking unbelievablAe.
million liters a day of H and O added to the air."
Another of them had been building a new tent city in the Echus channel, below Overlook: "They've tapped an aquifer there and there's fountains all over town, statues in the fountains, waterfalls, canals, ponds, swimming pools, you name it, it's a little Venice upGthreearte.thermal retention too."
The conversation removed itself to the gym, which was well-stocked with machines designed to enable their users to stay Earth-read"yH. e's buffed, look at that, must be short timAlem."ost everyone kept to a rigorous workout schedule, three hours a day minim"uImf .you give up you're stuck here, rigAhnt?d then
what good is that savings account?"
"Eventually it'll be legal tender," another one of them"Wsahide.re people go, the American dollar is sure to follow."
"You got it backwards, assbite." "As we are the proof of."
Frank said, "I thought the treaty blocked the use of Terran money here?" "The treaty's a fucking joke," said one doing lat pulls.
"Dead as Bessy the Long Distance Hog."
They stared at Frank, all of them in their twenties and thirties, a generation he had never talked to much;
he didn't know how they had grown up, what had shaped them, what they mightThbelieve.
oh-so-familiar accents and faces might be deceptive, in fact probably were. "You think so?" he asked.
Some of them seemed more aware than the rest that he might be connected to the treaty, along with all his other historical associationsB. ut the man doing lat pulls was oblivio"Wus:e're here on a deal that the
treaty says is illegal, maAn.nd it's happening all oveBr.razil, Georgia, the Gulf States, all the countries
that voted against the treaty are letting the transnatIst'sina.
contest among the flags of convenience as to
how convenient they can bAe!nd UNOMA is flat on its back with its legs spread, saying More, more. Folks are landing by the thousands and most are employed by transnats, they've got their government visas and five year contracts, including rehab time to get you Earth buffed, things like that."
"By the thousands?" Frank said.
"Oh yeah!By the tens of thousands!"
He hadn't looked at TV, he realized, forF. o.r .a. long time.
A man doing military presses spoke between lifts of the whole stack of black "wIt'esigghotns.na blow pretty soon-A lot of people don't like it-Not just oldtimers like you-A whole bunch of newtimers too-They're disappearing in droves-Whole operations-whole towns sometimes-Came on a mine in Syrtis-completely empty-Everything useful gone-Completely stripped-Even stuff like inner lock
doors-Oxygen tanks-Toilets-Stuff that'd take hours-to pull loose." "Why did they do that?"

"Going native!" a bench presser exclaim"eWd.on over by your comrade Arkady Bogdanov!"
From flat on his back this man met Frank's gaze; a tall, broad-shouldered black man with an aquiline nose. He said, "They get up here and the company tries to look good, gyms and good food and rec time and all, but what it comes down to is them telling you everything you can do and can't do, it's all scheduled, when you wake up, when you eat, when you shit, it's like the Navy has taken over Club Med, you know?And then here comes your bro Arkady, saying to us, You're Amurricans, boys, you got to be free, this Mars is the new frontier, and you should know some of us are treating it that way, we ain't no robot software, we're free men, making our own rules on our own Awnodrldth!at's it, man!T"he room
crackled with laughter, everyone had stopped to lis"teTnh:at does the trickF!olks get up here and they
see they're schedule software, they see they can't keep Earth-buffed without they spend their whole time in here sucking the air hose, and even then I spect it's impossible, they lied to Suos It'hlle bpeat.y
means nothing, really, we're all software and maybe stuck here for Sglaovoeds., man!Fucking slaves! And believe you me, that's pissing a lot of folTk hoefyf'.re ready to strike back, I mean to tell Aynodu. that's the folks who are disappearinGgo. nna be a whole lot of them before it's all over."
Frank stared down at the m"aWn.hy haven't you disappeared?" The man laughed shortly and began pumping weights again. "Security," someone else called from the Nautilus machine.
Military Press disagreed. "Security's lame-But you got to have-Somewhere Stooogno.as Arkady shows-Gone!"
"One time," Bench Press said, "I saw a vid of him where he talked about how folk of color are better suited for Mars than white folk, how we do better with the UV."
"Yeah!Yeah!" They were all laughing at that, both skepticalaamnudsed at once.
"It's bullshit, but what the hell," Bench Press "sWaihdy.
not?Why not?Call it our worldC. all it Nova
Africa. Say no boss is gonna take it away from us this Htiemew."as laughing again, as if everything he had said was no more than a funny iOder ae. lse a hilarious truth, a truth so delicious that just saying it made you laugh out loud.
# # #
And so very late that night Frank went back to the Arab rovers, and he continued on with them, but it
wasn't the sameH.
e had been yanked back into time, and now the long days in the prospector only
made him itchH. e watched TV; he made some caHllse. had never resigned as Secretary; the office had
been run in his absence by Assistant Secretary Slusinski, and he had done just enough by phone for them to cover for him, telling Washington that he was working, then that he was doing deep research, then that he was taking a working vacation, and that as one of the first hundred he needed to be out there wandering around.It wouldn't have lasted much longer, but when Frank called Washington directly the President was pleased, and in Burroughs the exhausted-looking Slusinski looked happy iInndefeadc.t
the whole Burroughs office sounded pleased that he planned to come back, which surprised Frank quite a bit.When he had left Burroughs, disgusted at the treaty and depressed about Maya, he had been, he
thought, a bastard of a boBssu. t here they had covered for him for almost two
aynedarss,eemed happy
to hear he was coming bacPke.ople were strangeT. he aura of the first hundred, no doAubst.if that mattered.

# # #
So Frank returned from his final prospecting trip and sat that evening in Zeyk's rover, sipping his coffee, watching them talk, Zeyk and Al-Khan and Yussuf and the rest, and, wandering in and out of the room, Nazik and AzizaP. eople who had accepted him; people who in some sense understoodByhimthe. ir
code he had done the necessary thinHgse. relaxed in the flow of Arabic, still and always awash with ambiguity: lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine, words that might refer to a waldo hand, a pipe, a kind of talus, robot parts; or perhaps just to lily, river, forest, lark, jasAminbeautiful, beautiful languageT.he speech
of the people who had taken him in, and let himBurtesht.e would have to leave.
They had arranged things so that if you spent half the year in Underhill you were assigned a permanent room of your ownT.owns all over the planet were adopting similar systems, because people were
moving around so much that no one felt at home anywhere, and this arrangement seemed to mitigate that. Certainly the first hundred, who were among the most mobile Martians of all, had started spending more time in Underhill than they had in the years before, and this was mostly a pleasure, to moAstt of them.
any given time twenty or thirty would be around, and others came in and stayed for a while between jobs, and in the constant come and go they had a chance to carry on a more-or-less continuous conference on the state of things, with newcomers reporting what they had seen firsthand, and the rest arguing about what it meant.
Frank, however, did not spent the required thirteen months a year in Underhill, and so he did not have a room there.He had moved the department's head offices to Burroughs back in 2050, and before joining
the Arabs in '57 the only room he had kept was there in the offices.
Now it was '59 and he was back, in a room one floor down from hiDs ropdpionnge.his bag on the floor and looking around at the room, he cursed aTlooudh.ave to be in Burroughs in person-as if one's physical presence made any difference these daIyts!was an absurd anachronism, but that's the way people were.Another vestige of the savannaTh.hey lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
Slusinski came inT.hough his accent was pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC se"rWiese.'re like dwarves in a waldo," Frank said to him angrily.
"One of those really big waldo excavatoWrse.'re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we're leaning out of a window and digging with teAasnpdoons. complimenting each other on the way we're taking advantage of the height."
"I see," Jeeves said carefully.
But there was nothing to be done aboHute itw. as back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paperT.hey were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the general assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out "necessary personnel" status to thousands of emigTrahnetys. were
ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirMst.ost of this was done in the name of the elevator itself, which provided an endless string of excuses, thirty-five thousand kilometers of excuses, a hundred

and twenty billion dollars of excusWes.hich was not all that expensive, actually, compared to the military budgets of the past century-less than a year of the global military budget of those days, in fact, and most of the elevator funds had been needed in the first years of finding the asteroid and getting it into proper orbit, and setting up the cable factoAryft.er that the factory ate the asteroid and spit out the cable, and
that was that; they only had to wait for it to grow long enough, and nudge it down inAto position. bargain, a realbargain!
And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. "God damn it," Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week"Wbahcyk.has UNOMA caved like this?"
Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered noHethehoardies. definitely been away too long; they were afraid of himHneowh.ad to answer the question hims"eIltf':s greed I guess, they're all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another."
At dinner that night, in a little café, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and VlAads
Tthaenyeev.
ate they watched the news from Earth on a barReTaVlly.
it had gotten to be almost too much to watch.
Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population growth slowNdo onn. e would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that's what it was in fact, and it
was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over
iafgaoine:
country ignored the UN resolutions,
then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed-another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandanavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland
had all proclaimed immigration illegaWl. hile India was growing by eight percent a yeFaarm. ine would solve that, as it would in a lot of counTtrhie .Four Horsemen were good at population contUronlt.il
then. . . th. e TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. "Eat all you want!"
Janet clicked off the T"VL.et's change the subject."
They sat around their table and stared at their pIltatteusr.ned out Vlad and Ursula had come from
Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Ely"sTiuhme .cordon sanitaire has
fallen apart," Ursula said".Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems."
Earth againI.t was impossible to avoid "iTt.hings are falling apart down there!" Janet said.
"It's been coming for years," Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. "Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in Tthheinkpoor. about that!But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole conceNrno. w every corner shop has a TV and and they can see what's happening-that they've got AIDS while the rich have the treatmIt'esntg.one way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live foSreovewr!hy should they hold bacTkh?ey've got
nothing to lose."
"And everything to gain," Vlad sa"iTdh. ey could live like us."
They huddled over cups of coffTehe.e room was dimT.he pine furniture had a dark patina; stains,
nicks, fines rubbed in by hand.It. c.ould have been one of those nights in that distant time when they were the only ones in the worldfe, wa of them up later than the rest, talkEinxgce. pt Frank blinked and
looked around, and saw in his friends' faces the weariness, the white hair, the turtle faces oTfimthee old.
had passed, they were scattered over the planet, running like he was, or hidden like Hiroko, or dead like
John. John's absence suddenly seemed huge and gaping, a crater on whose rim they huddled glumly,

trying to warm their handFs.rank shuddered.
Later Vlad and Ursula went to bFerdan. k looked at Janet, feeling immobilized as he sometimes did at
the end of a long day, incapable of ever moving
"aWgaihne.re's Maya these days?" he asked, to keep
Janet from retiring tooS.he and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years. "Oh, she's here in Burroughs," Janet s"aDidi.dn't you know?"
"No."
"She's got Samantha's old roomSsh.e may be avoiding you." "What?"
"She's pretty mad at you."
"Mad at me?"
"Sure."She regarded him across the dim, faintly humming ro"oYmou.
must have known that."
While he was still considering how open to be with her, he saWidhy"Nsoh!ould she be?"
"Oh Frank," she saiSd.he leaned forward in her cha"iQr.uit acting like you've got a stick up your ass! We know you, we were there, we saw it all hapApennd!"as he was recoiling she leaned back, and said calmly, "You must know that Maya loves ySohue. always has."
"Me?" he said weakl"yI.t's John she loved."
"Yeah, sureB. ut John was easyH. e loved her back, and it was glamoroItusw. as too easy for Maya. She likes things hardA. nd that's you."
He shook his hea"dI. don't think so."
Janet laughed at him"I. know I'm right, she's told me as mEucvhe!r since the treaty conference she's been angry at you, and she always talks when she's mad."
"But why is she angry?"
"Because you rejected heRr!ejected her, after pursuing her for years and years, and she got used to
that, she loved iIt.t was romantic, the way you persistSehde.
took it for granted, sure, but she loved you
for it.And she liked how powerful you weAren.d now John is dead, and she could finally say yes to you, and you sent her packinSgh.e was furious!And she stays mad a long time."
"This. . . F."rank struggled to collect himsel"fI.t just doesn't match with my understanding of what's happened."
Janet stood up to go, and as she walked by him she patted him on "tMheayhbeeady.ou ought to talk to Maya about it thenS."he left.
For a long time he sat there, feeling stunned, examing the shiny grain of his think. Eventually he stopped trying and went to bed.
Icthawirasarmha.rd to

# # #
He slept poorly, and at the end of a long night he had another dream abTohuetyJowhenr.e in the long
drafty upcurved chambers of the space station, spinning at martian gravity, in their long stay of 2010, six weeks together up there, young and strong, John saying I feel like Superman, this gravity's great, I feel like Superman!Running laps around the big ring of the station hallEwvaeyry. thing's going to change on
Mars, Frank.Everything!
No.Each step was like the last jump of a triple Bjuominpg., boing, boing, boing. Yes!The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.
A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of MadTahgeascsuarn. bronzing the ocean below.
Everything looks so fine from up here.
Get any closer and you begin to see too much, Frank murmured. Or not enough.
It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open.So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice.
They played chess and Frank woJno.hn laughed.How stupid, he said. What do you mean?
Games don't mean anything.
Are you sureS?ometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.
John shook his heaIdn.
games there are rules, but in life the rules keep chaYngoiungc.ould put your
bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a Aronodk.you're fucked.
Frank noddedH.
e had taught these things to John.
A confusion of meals, chess, talk, the view of the rollingItEfaerltth.like the only life they had ever lived. The voices from Houston were like AIs, their concerns abTsuhred.planet itself was so beautiful, so intricately patterned by its land and its clouds.
I never want to go dowI nm. ean this is almost better than Mars'll be, don't you think? No.
Huddled, shivering, listening to John talk of boyhGooirdl.s, sports, dreams of spaceF.rank responded
with tales of Washington, lessons from Machiavelli, until it occurred to him that John was formidable enough as it wasF.riendship was just diplomacy by other means, afterBaultl. later, after a vague blur. . . talking, halting, shivering, talking about his father, coming home drunk from the Jacksonville bars, Priscilla
and her white blond hair, her fashion magazine fHaocew.
it meant nothing to him anymore, a marriage for

the resumé, for looking normal to the shrinks without holding him Adonwd nn.ot his faultA. after all.Betrayed.
That sounds badN. o wonder you think people are so fucked.
bandoned,
Frank waved at their big blue laBmupt. they areW. about what's happened down there.
aving by coincidence at the Horn of AfrTichain. k
That's history, FrankW. e can do better than that. Can we? Can we?
You just wait and see.
# # #
He woke up, his stomach knotted, his skin swHeaetyg. ot up and took a shower; already he could remember no more than a single fragment of the drJeoahmn:, saying "Wait and seeB."ut his stomach was like wood.
After breakfast he clicked his fork on the table, thinAkilnl gt.hat day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the diWffearsen'ct et.his life dreamlike in every significant respect?Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?
That evening he went looking for Maya, feeling helpless, in the grip of a comTphuelsdioenci.sion had
been made the night before, when Janet said "she loves you, you
Aknnodwh."e turned a corner to the
dining commons and there she was, her head thrown back in the middle of her pealing laugh, vividly
Maya, her hair as white as it had once been black, her eyes fixed on her companion; a man, dark-haired, handsome, perhaps in his fifties, smiling at Mhear.ya put a hand to his upper arm, a characteristic
gesture, one of her usual intimacies, it meant nothing and in fact indicated that he was not her lover but rather someone she was in the process of enchanting; they could have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.
She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surpSrihse. looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.
Frank hesitated and almost turned and
Sleiflte.ntly he cursed himself; was he no more than a schoolboy,
then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they rAepllliethdr.ough the dinner she stayed glued to the man's side, not looking his way, not comingThoevemr. an, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleasCedle.arly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night togetherT.hat foreknowledge always made people pleasaSnth.e would use people like that without a qualm, the bitcLho.ve. . . . The more he thought about it the angrier Shhee ghoat.d never
loved anyone but herselfA. nd yet. . . that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn't she been pleased, and then wanted him angry atAhnedr?wasn't that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire for him?
Well, the hell with hHere.
went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train
station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.
# # #

In a few months' time, when the elevator was maneuvered into its remarkable orbit, Pavonis Mons was going to become the hub of Mars, superceding Burroughs as Burroughs had once superceded Underhill. And as the elevator's touchdown was not far off, signs of the area's coming predominance were already everywhere. Paralleling the train piste as it ascended the steep eastern slope of the volcano were two
new roads and four thick pipelines, as well as an array of cables, a line of microwave towers, and a continuous litter of stations, loading tracks, warehouses, and dumApnsd. then, on the last and steepest
upcurve of the volcano's cone, there was a vast congregation of tents and industrial buildings, thicker and thicker until up on the broad rim they were everywhere, and betweenimtmheemnse fields of insolation
capture sheets, and receivers for the energy microwaved down from the orbiting solar Epaacnheltse.nt along the way was a little town, stuffed with little apartment blocks; and each apartment block was stuffed with people, their laundry hanging from every windTohwe. tents nearest the piste had very few
trees in them, and looked like commercial districts; Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open-front gyms, clothing stores, laundromaLtsi.tter piled in the streets.
# # #
Then he was into the train station on the rim, and out of the train and into the spacious tent of the station
The south rim had a tremendous view over the great caldera, an immense, nearly circular hole, flawless except for a single giant scoop bursting out of the rim to the noTrhthiseasc.oop formed a great gap
across the caldera from the station, the mark of a truly huge sideways expBloustiotnh.at was the only
flaw in the design; otherwise the cliff was regular, and the floor of the caldera was almost perfectly round, almost perfectly flatA. nd sixty kilometers across, and a full five thousand meters Ldiekeep.the start of
the mohole to end all moholTesh.e few signs of human presence on the caldera floor were on an ant's scale, almost invisible from the rim.
The equator ran right across the southern rim, and that was where they were going to secure the lower end of the elevatorT.he attachment point was obvious; it was a massive tan and white concrete
blockhouse, located a few kilometers west of the big tent town around the trainRsutnantiionng. west
along the rim beyond the blockhouse was a line of factories and earthmovers and cones of feedstock materials, all gleaming with photographic clarity in the clear dustless thin high air, under a sky that was a kind of plum blackT.here were a number of stars near the zenith that were visible by day.
The day after his arrival, the staff of the local department office took him out to the elevator base;
apparently technicians were going to capture the leader line from the cable that aftTehrnisootnu.rned out
to be unspectacular, but it was a peculiar sight nevertheTlheses.end of the leader line was marked by a small guidance rocket, antdhis rocket's eastern-facing jets flared continuously, while the north and south jets added occasional spurtsT. he rocket thus descended slowly into the grasp of a gantry, looking like
any other landing vehicle, except that there was a silver line extending up from it, a straight fine line that was only visible for a couple thousand meters above the roLcokoekti.ng at it Frank felt as if he were
standing on a sea floor and observing a fishing line, dropped down among them from the plum sea surface-a fishing line tied to a bright colorful lure, in the process of snagging on a bottoHmis wreck. blood burned in his throat, and he had to look down and breathVe edryeepeculiar.
They toured the base compleTxh.e gantry that had captured the leader line was located inside a big hole in the concrete block, a concrete crater with a thick ring ofTaheriwma.lls of this concrete crater were studded by curved silver columns, which held magnetic coils that would fix the cable butt in a
shock-cushioning collar.The cable would float well off the concrete floor of the chamber, suspended
there by the pull of the outer half of the cable; an exquisitely balanced orbit, an object extending from a moonlet down into this room, thirty-seven thousand kilometers inAnadll. only ten meters across.
With the leader line secured, the cable itself could be guided down fairly easily; but not rapidly, as it had

to drift down into its final orbit very gently indeed, in an asymptotic ap"pItr'osacgho.ing to be like Zeno's paradox," Slusinski said.
So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there
Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in thAeirvesrkyy.odd sight
indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to himT. hey were looking up at a fishing line, a black thread hanging down from the plum sea surface.
# # #
Frank spent this time setting up the head Department of Mars offices in the town, which one day was christened Sheffield.The Burroughs staff protested the move, but he ignored tHhe s.pent his time
meetting with American executives and project managers, all at work on various aspects of the elevator or Sheffield, or the outlying Pavonis towAnsm. ericans represented only a fraction of the workforce on
hand, but Chalmers was kept busy nevertheless, because the overall project was soAnhduge.
Americans appeared to be dominating the superconducting, and the software involved with the actual elevator cars, a coup that was worth billions and which many people gave Frank credit for, though it was in fact his AI and Slusinski who were responsible, along with Phyllis.
Many of the Americans lived out in a tent town east of Sheffield called Texas, sharing the space with internationals who liked the idea of Texas, or had just ended up there ranFdraonmklym. et with as many
of them as he could, so that by the time the cable touched down they would be organized and working with a coherent policy-or under his thumb, as some of them Bpuutt hita.ppy to be there, as long as it
gave them any clouTt.hey knew they were less powerful than the East Asian commonwealth, which was building the elevator car shells, and less powerful than the EEC, which had constructed the cable itself. And less power ful than Praxis, and Amex, and Armscor, and Subarashii.
# # #
Eventually the day came when the cable was going to touchAdogwiann.t crowd gathered in Sheffield
to see it; the train station concourse was jammed to well over capacity, as it had a good view along the rim to the base complex, popularly referred to as the Socket.
As the hours passed, the end of the black column drifted downward, moving more and more slowly as it approached its targetT. here it hung, not that much bigger than the leader line guiding it down; smaller in
fact than the business end of an Energia rocItkestt.ood up into the sky perfectly vertically, but it was so thin and the foreshortening was so severe that it looked not much longer than a tall skAysvcrearpyer.
skinny tall skyscraper, walking on aAir. black tree trunk, taller than the s"kWy.e ought to be right under it, down on the floor of the socket," one of his staf"fThsaeirde.'d be headroom when it stops, right?"
"Magnetic field might scramble you a bit," Slusinski replied, never taking his gaze from the sky.
As it got closer they saw that the cable was knobbed with various protrusions, and filigreed with silver lines. The gap under it got smallTerh.en the end of it disappeared into the base complex, and the seashell roar of the crowd in the concourse grew louPdeeorp. le watched the TVs closely; cameras inside the
socket showed the cable come to a slow halt, still ten meters above the concreAteftfelroothr.at came
the tweezerlike movement of gantries, and the clamping of a physical collar around the cable, a few meters up from its enEd.verything happened in dreamlike slow motion, and when it was done it looked like the round socket room had suddenly gained an ill-fitting black roof.

Over the loudspeaker system a woman's voice said, "The elevator is seTcuhreerde."was a brief cheer. People moved away from the TVs and looked out the tent wallsNaogwaint.he object looked much less
strange than it had when hanging out of the sky; now it was nothing more than the reductio ad absurdum
of Martian architecturea,
very slender, very tall black spAire.beanstalk.Peculiar, but not so unsettling.
The crowd burst into a thousand conversations, and scattered.
# # #
And not long after that, the elevators were worDkiunrgin. g the years when the cable was extruding from Clarke, robots had been spidering along it, constructing the power lines, safety cables, generators, superconducting pistes, maintenance stations, defense stations, position adjustment rockets, fuel tanks, and emergency shelters that marked the cable every few kilomTetheirs. work had proceeded at the
same pace as the cable construction itself, so that soon after touchdown the cars were running up and down, up and down, four hundred of them going in each direction, like parasites on a stranAdndof hair.
a few months after that, you could take an elevator into orbit. And you could take another elevator down out of orbit, to the surface.
And down they came, transported from Earth by the fleet of continuous shuttles, those big spaceships that boomed around the Earth-Venus-Mars system, using the three planets and Luna as gravity handles,
fielding madly accelerating ferry packets from Earth and MEaarcsh.
of the thirteen operating ships held a
thousand people, and they were full every trip Sooutt.here was a continuous stream of people docking on Clarke, descending in elevator cars, and debarking in the soAcnkdet.then pouring into Sheffield's concourses, wild and unsteady and bug-eyed with gawking, as they were herded with some difficulty to the train station, and onto trains outbouMndo.st of these trains then emptied their loads into the Pavonis
tent towns; robot crews were building the tents just fast enough to house the influx, and the completion of two new pipelines had secured the water supply on Pavonis, which was being pumped up from the
Compton Aquifer beneath Noctis LabyrinthuSso.
the emigrants settled in.
And back in the socket, on the other side of the cable, upbound elevator cars were being loaded with refined metals, platinum, gold, uranium, silver; and then the cars swung in and locked onto the piste, and up they rose again, accelerating slowly to their full speed of three hundred kilometers Fainvehoduary.s
later they arrived at the top of the cable, and decelerated into locks inside the ballast asteroid Clarke, now a much-tunneled chunk of carbonaceous chondrite, so filigreed with exterior buildings and interior chambers that it seemed more a spaceship or a city than Mars's thirdItmwoaosn.a busy place; there
was a continuous procession of incoming and outgoing ships,craenwds perpetually in transit, as well as a large force of local traffic controllers, using some of the most powerful AIs in exTihsoteungche. most of
the operations involving the cable were computer controlled and robotically accomplished, entire human professions were springing up to direct and oversee all these efforts.
And of course media coverage of all the new imagery was immediate and intense; and all in all, despite the decade of waiting, it seemed that on touchdown the elevator had sprung into being like Athena.
# # #
But there was troublFe.rank found that his staff was spending more and more time dealing with men and women from the tents, who had come in to Sheffield and right into their offices, new arrivals who were sometimes nervous, sometimes loud and angry, rattling on about crowded living conditions or insufficient police or bad foodO. ne bulky red-faced man wearing a baseball cap shook a finger at them and said, "Private security companies come in from tents higher up and offer protection, but they're just gangs, it's just extortion!I can't even give you my name or our security might found out I camI emheearne!I
believe in the black economy as much as the next guy, but this iTs hcisrazisyn!'t what we came here

for."
Frank paced his office, seethinTgh.ese kinds of allegations were clearly true, but difficult to verify without a security team of one's own, a big police force iWn hfeanct.the man left, he grilled his staff, but they could tell him nothing new, which made him even an"gYroieur'.re paid to find these things out for
me, that's your jobs!What are you doing sitting around in here all day watching Terran news!"
He cancelled a day's appointments, thirty-seven meetings in"Laalzl.y incompetent bastards," he said
loudly as he stalked out the doHoer. went to the train station and caught a local downslope to have a look for himself.
The local train now stopped every kilometer of the descent, in small stainless steel locks that served as stations for the tent townHs.e got out in one; signs in the lock identified it as EHl ePawsaol.ked through
the open doors of the passage lock.
At least these tents had a view, there was no denyinDgotwhant.the great eastern slope of the volcano ran the train piste and the pipelines, and on either side of them tent after tent, likeThbelisctleerasr.
fabric of the older ones upslope was already turning a bit pVuernptliela. tors hummed loudly from the
physical plant next to the station, and from somewhere a hydrazine generator was adding its high hum. People were conversing in Spanish and EngliFsrha.nk called his office and got them to ring the apartment
of a man from El Paso who had dropped in to complain; the man answered, and Frank arranged to meet him at a cafe next to the station, then walked over and sat at an ouMteerntaabnled. women sat around
tables eating and talking like anywhere eLlsiet.tle electric cars hummed up and down the narrow streets, most piled high with boxeTs.he buildings near the station were three stories tall and appeared prefab, steel-reinforced concrete painted bright blue and whTithe.ere was a line of young trees in tubs running away from the station down the main thoroughfSamrea. ll groups sat on the astroturf, or walked aimlessly
from shop to shop, or hurried with shoulderbags and daypacks toward the
Astallti of. them looked a
bit disoriented or uncertain, as if they had no habits, or had not yet learned to walk properly.
The man showed up with a whole crowd of his neighbors, all in their twenties, too young to be on Mars or so it used to be said; perhaps the treatment could fix damage from radiation, allow them to reproduce accurately, who could say for sure till they trLieadb?oratory animals, that's what they weWre.hat they
had always been.
It was strange to stand among them like some ancient patriarch, treated with a mixture of awe and condescension, like a grandpaI.rritably he told them to take him on a walk and show him Tahroeuynd. guided him down narrow streets away from the station and the taller buildings, between long rows of what turned out to be Agee huts, which had been designed for temporary shelter in the reosuetlaarncdhs:
outposts, or water stationso,r refugee hutsN.
ow lined up by the scoTreh.e slope of the volcano had
been hastily graded, and a lot of the huts were on a two or three degree slope, so that they had to be careful in the kitchens, they said, and make sure to align their beds properly.
Frank asked them what they dSitde.vedores in Sheffield, most replied; offloading the elevator cars and getting the stuff on trainRs.obots were supposed to do it, but it was surprising how much labor remained in the process for human muscHlee. avy equipment operations, robot programmers, machine repairmen, waldo dwarves, construction workersM. ost of them had rarely gotten out onto the surface; some of
them never hadT. hey had done similar kinds of work back home, or had been unempTlhoiysedw.as
their chance.Most wanted to return to Earth someday, but the gyms were crowded and expensive and time-consuming, and they were all losing their toTnhe.ey had southern accents that Frank hadn't heard since childhood; it was like hearing voices from a previous century, like listening to ElizaDbeidthans.
people still talk that wayT?V never revealed i"t.Y'all been here so long you don't mind being indoors,

but I can't stand itA."h caint stayun det.
Frank glared into a kitche"nW. hat do you eat?" he demanded.
Fish, vegatables, rice, tofIut. all came in bulk packageTsh.ey had no complaints; they thought it was
good. Americans, the most degraded palates in histoSroym.
ebody gimme a cheeseburgerN! o, what
they minded was the confinement, the lack of privacy, the teleoperation, the crowding toAgnedthethr.e resulting problems:"All my stuff got stole the day after I got "hMere."too.""Me too."Theft, assault,
extortion. The criminals all came from other tent towns, they Rsuaisds.ians, they saidW.
hite folks with
strange talk.Some black folks too, but not so many here as at Ahomweo.man had been raped the previous week."You're kidding!" Frank said.
"What do you mean you're kidding," one woman said, disgusted at him.
Eventually they led him back to the staPtiaouns.ing in the door, Frank didn't know what to say to them. Quite a crowd had gathered, people had recognized him or been called or drawn to th"Ie'llgsroeeup.
what I can do," he muttered, and ducked through the passage lock.
Thoughtlessly he stared into tents as he rode a train baTchkeruep.was one fitted with coffin hotels,
Tokyo style.That would be much more crowded than El Paso, but did its occupants care about that? Some people were used to being treated like ball bearAinglso.t of people, in faBctu. t on Mars it was supposed to be different!
Back in Sheffield he stalked the rim concourse, staring out at the thin vertical line of the elevator, ignoring
other people and forcing some of them to jump out of his way as hOe npcaecehde.
stopped and looked
around at the crowd; there were perhaps five hundred people in view at that moment, living their lives. When had it gotten like thiTs?hey had been a scientific outpost, a handful of researchers, scattered over
a world with as much land surface as the Eaarwthh:ole Eurasia, Africa, America, Australia, and
Antarctica, all for themA. ll that land was still out there, but what percentage of it was under tents and habitable? Much less than one percenAt.nd yet what was UNOMA sayinAg? million people here
already, with more on the waAyn. d so police, and crime-or rather, crime without poAlicme.illion
people and no law, no law but corporate Tlahwe. bottom lineM. smoothly on ball bearings.
# # #
inimize expenses, maximize profitsR. un
The next week a set of tents on the south slope went onChsatlrmiker.s heard about it on his way to the office, Slusinski actually breaking in on his walk with Tahcealslt.riking tents were mostly American,
and his staff was in a pan"iTch. ey've closed the stations and aren't allowing anyone off the trains, so they can't be controlled unless their emergency locks are stormed-"
"Shut up."
Frank went down the south piste to the striking tents, ignoring Slusinski's objIenctifoancst. he ordered several of the staff down to join him.
A team from Sheffield security was standing in the station, but he ordered them to get on the train and leave, and after a consulation with the Sheffield administrators, theyAtditdh.e passage lock he identified himself, and asked to come in aloTnhe.ey let him through.
He emerged in the main square of another tent, surrounded by a sea of ang"rKyillfatchees.TVs," he

suggested. "Let's talk in private."
They killed the TVIst. was the same as in El Paso, different accents but the same comHpilsaineatsr.lier visit gave him the ability to anticipate what they were going to say, to say it beforeHethewyatdcihde.d grimly as their faces revealed how impressed they were by this aTbhieliyty.were young.
"Look, it's a bad situation," he said after they had talked for a"nBuhtoiufr.you strike for long, you'll
only make it worseT.hey'll send in security and it won't be like living with gangs and police among you, it'll be like livng in prisoYno. u've made your point already, and now you've got to know when to let off and negotiate.Form a committee to represent you, and make a list of complaints and demands. Document all the incidents of crime, just write them down and get the victims to sign the sIt'laltements. make good use of themIt.'s going to take work at UNOMA and back home, because they're breaking the treaty."
He paused to get control of himself, relax his"Mjaewa.nwhile, get back to workIt!'ll pass the time better than sitting around cooped up in here, and it'll make you points for the negAontdiatifony.ou
don't, they'll maybe just cut off your food and makeByetotuer. like rational negotiators."
to do it of your own free will, and look
So the strike endeTd.hey even gave him a ragged round of applause when he went back out into the station.
He got on the train in a blinding fury, refusing to acknowledge any of his staff's questions or their mute looks of idiot inquiry, and savaging the head of the security team, who was an arrog"Iafntyofuool:
corrupt bastards had any integrity this wouldn't have happeYneodu!'re nothing but a protection racket! Why are people getting assaulted in the tenWts?hy are they paying protection, where are you when all this is happening!"
"It's not our jurisdiction," the man said, white-lipped.
"Oh come on, what is your jurisdictiYono?ur pocket is your only jurisidictionH."e went on until they got up and left the car, as angry at him as he was at them, but too disciplined or scared to talk back.
In the Sheffield offices he strode from room to room, shouting at the staff and makSianxg,
cVallalsd.,
Janet. He told them what was happening, and they all eventually offered the same suggestion, which he had to admit was a good oHnee. would have to go up the elevator, and talk to P"hSyelelisi.f you can
manage the reservations," he said to his staff.
The elevator car was like an old Amersterdam house, narrow and tall, with a light-filled room at the top, in this case a clear-walled and domed chamber that reminded Frank of the bubble dome of Othne Ares.
the second day of the trip he joined the car's other passengers (only twenty on this one, there weren't too many people going this way) and they took the car's own little interior elevator up the thirty stories to this clear penthouse, to see Phobos paTssh.e outer perimeter of the room was set out over the elevator
proper, so there was a view down as well; Frank stared down at the curved line of the planet's horizon, much whiter and thicker than the last time he had sAeetnmoits.phere at one hundred fifty millibars now,

really quite impressive, even if it was composed of poison gas.
While they were waiting for the little moon's appearance Frank stared at the planeTt hbeelgoowss. amer
arrow of the cable pointed straight down at it; it looked like they were rising on a tall slender rocket, a strange attentuated rocket which stretched some kilometers above and below Tthheamt .was all they
would ever see of the cabAlen. d below them the round orange floor of Mars looked just as blank as it had on their first approach so long ago, unchanged despite all their meOddnleingo.nly had to get far
enough away.
Then one of the elevator pilots pointed out Phobos, a dim white object to Itnhetewn emst.inutes it was
upon them, flashing past with astonishing speed, a large gray potato hurtling faster than the head could turn. Zip! Gone. The observers in the penthouse hooted, exclaimed, chatterFerda.nk had caught only
the merest glimpse of the dome on Stickney, winking like a gem in tAhendrocthke.re had been a piste
banding the middle like a wedding ring, and some bright silver lumps; that was all he could recall of the
blurred image. Fifty kilometers away when it passed, the pilot
Asatids.even thousand kilometers an
hour. Not all that fast, actually; there were meteors that hit the planet at fifty thousand kilometers an hour. But fast enough.
Frank went back down to the dining floor, trying to fix the hurtling image in Phhiosbmosi:npd.eople at
the dining table next to him talked of shoving it up into a braided orbit withItDweiams oosu. t of the loop
now, a new Azores, nothing but an inconvenience to the
Acanbdle.Phyllis had argued all along that
Mars itself would have suffered the same fate in the solar system at large, unless the elevator were built to climb its gravity well; they would have been bypassed by miners going to the metal-rich asteroids, which
had no gravity wells to contend wAithn.d then there were the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, the outer planets.
. . .
But there was no danger of that now.
# # #
On the fifth day they approached Clarke, and slowed dItowhand.
been an asteroid about two
kilometers across, a carbonaceous hunk now shaped to a cube, with every centimeter of its Mars-facing surface graded and covered with concrete, steel, or gTlahses. cable plunged right into the center of this assemblage; there were holes on both sides of the joint where cable met moon, just big enough to allow passage to the elevator cars.
They slid up into one of these holes, and came to a smooTt hestionpte.rior space they slid into was
like a vertical subway statioTn.he passengers got out and went their ways into the tunnels of
OClnaerke.
of Phyllis's assistants met him and drove him in a little car through a warren of rock-walleTdhetuynnels. came to Phyllis's offices, which were rooms on the planet side of the moon, walled with mirrors and green bamboo.Though they were in microgravity and pulling themselves around, they stood on a consensus floor as established by the furniture, rip-ripping around in velcro Ashoraetsh. er conservative
practice, but to be expected in such an Earth-regarding pFlaracnek. velcro slippers by the door and followed suit.
exchanged his shoes for some
Phyllis was just finished a talk with a couple of"Nmoetn:only a cheap and clean lift out of the gravity well, but a propulsion system for slinging loads all over the solar sIyt's eamn! extraordinarily elegant
piece of engineering, don't you think?" "Yes!" the men replied replied.

She looked about fifty years oAldft.er fulsome introductions-the men were from Amex-the others left.
When Phyllis and Frank were the only ones left in the room, Frank said to her, "You'd better stop using this extraorinarily elegant piece of engineering to flood Mars with emigrants, or it'll blow up in your face and you'll lose your anchoring point."
"Oh Frank." She laugheSdh. e really had aged wehlla: ir silver, face handsomely lined and taut, figure
trim. Neat as a pin in a rust jumpsuit and lots of gold jewelry, which together with her silver hair gave her an overall metallic sheenS.he even looked at Frank through gold wire-rimmed glasses, an affectation that distanced her from the room, as if she were focusing on flat video images on the insides of her spectacles.
"You can't send down so many so fast," he ins"iTstheedr.e's no infrastructure for them, physically or culturally. What's developing are the worst kind of wildcat settlements, they're like refugee camps or
forced labor camps, and it'll get reported like that back home, you know how they always use analogies
to Terran situationsA.
nd that's bound to hurt you."
She stared at a spot about three feet in front o"fMhoismt .people don't see it that way," she proclaimed, as if the room were full of listen"eTrsh.is is just a step on the path to full human use oIft'sMhaersr.e for
us and we're going to useEiatr.th is desperately crowded, and the mortality rate is still dropSpciinegn.ce and faith will continue to create new opportunities as they alwaysThevse. first pioneers may suffer
some hardships, but those won't last loWnge.
lived worse than they do now, when we first arrived."
Startled at this lie, Frank glared at Bhuetr. she did not back dowSnc.ornfully he said, "You're not paying attention!"But the thought frightened him, and he paused.
He brought himself back under control, stared through the clear floor at theApslatnheety.
were
rotating with it they always looked down on Tharsis, of course, and from this high it looked like one of the old photographs, the orange ball with all the familiar markings of its most famous hemthiesphere:
great volcanoes, Noctis, the canyons, the chaos, all unblemis"hWedh.en was the last time you went down?" he asked her.
"L sixtyI.
go down regularly.S"he smiled.
"Where do you stay when you descend?"
"In UNOMA dorms.W" here she worked busily to break the UN treaty.
But that was her job, that was what UNOMA had assigned heEr lteovadtoor. manager, and also the primary liason with the mining concernWs.hen she quit the UN, she could take all the jobs she could handle from them.Queen of the elevatorW. hich was now the bridge for the greater part of the Martian economy. She'd have at her disposal all the capital of whatever transnationals she chose to associate with.
And all this showed, of course, in the way she rip-ripped around the brilliant glassine room, in the way she smiled at all his withering remarWkse.ll, she always had been a little stupFirda.nk gritted his teeth. Apparently it was time to start using the good old USA like a sledgehammer, see if it had any heft remaining in it.
"Most of the transnationals have giant holdings in the States," h"eIfsathide. American government
decided to freeze their assets, because they were breaking the treaty, it would slow down all of them, and break some."

"You could never do that," Phyllis s"aIitd.would bankrupt the government."
"That's like threatening a dead man with hangAingc.ouple more zeroes on the figure are just one more level of unreality, no one can really imagine it anymThoere.only ones who even think they can are
exactly your transnational executivesT.hey hold the debt, but no one else cares about their mI oney. could convince Washington of this in a minute, and then you just see how it blows up in you face. Whichever way it does, it wrecks your gamHee."waved a hand angril"yA. t which point someone else
will occupy these rooms, and-" a sudden intuition-"you'll be back in Underhill."
That got her attention, no doubt abouHt eirt. easy contempt took on a sudden edge. "No single person can convince Washington of anythinIgt.'s quicksand down thereY. ou'll have your say and I'll have mine, and we'll see who has more influencAe.n"d she rip-rippedacross the room and opened the door, and loudly welcomed a gang of UN officials.
# # #
So.A waste of timeH. e wasn't surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being ratioAnasl.with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same Rsyesatseomn. had nothing to
do with itA. nd while she might still believe in America's power, she certainly didn't believe in Frank's ability to wield iFt.air enough; he would prove her wrong.
On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with
his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new president would give him a meeting asMweealnl.while message after message, back and
forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhaustingT.he case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and
a lot of them were bent.
Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd; it was a physical wave that passed through Thhime .sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through oAnne igmeaeg. e
came to him: running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stinOk.ne gee.Funny how the body remembered it.
Once resettled in Sheffield, he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together
into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different
Aratteos.ne point, late in the northern autumn, he
was engaged in about fifty conferences simultaneously; it was like those people who play chess blind with a room full of opponentTs.hree weeks of this, however, and it began to come around, basically because President Incaviglia himself was extremely interested in getting any leverage he could over Amex and Mitsubishi and Praxis; and so he was more than willing to leak to the media his intent to look into allegations of treaty violations.
He did that, and stocks fell sharply in the relevant quAarntderst.wo days later, the elevator consortium announced that enthusiasm for Martian opportunities had been so great that demand had exceeded
supply for the time beinTg.hey would raise prices, of course, as their creed required; but also they would have to slow down emigration temporarily, until more towns and robotic townbuilders had been constructed.

Frank first heard this on a bar TV news report, one evening in a café over his solitHarey gdrinnedr. wolfishly as he chewed".So we see who's better at wrestling in quicksand, you biHtceh.f"inished eating and went for a walk along the rim concouItrswe.as only one battle, he kneAwn.d it was going to be a bitter long warB. ut still, it was nice.
# # #
Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted, and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in; and the Russians next door did the same.
A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the backgroAupnpda.rently both groups were employed
by the roadbuilding subdivision of Praxis, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric and killed three men in each tent, and knifed a bunch of othersT. he Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii's security force, a small army that was mostlyInKorean.
any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil; they had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside Ttoheleianvhea.bitants
had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through in their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed.The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.
Enraged and disgusted, Frank went down again to deal with it in Hpershoand.
to ignore not only the
standard objections of his staff, but also the new factor's prohibition (Helmut had been called back to Earth); and once at the station he also had to face down the UNOMA police head, no Neeavsyer task. before had he tried to rely so heavily on the charisma of the first hundred, and it made hIinmthfuerious.
end he had to simply walk through the policemen, a crazy old man striding through all civilized restraint. And no one there cared to stop him, not this time.
The crowd inside the tent looked ugly indeed on the monitors, but he banged on their passage lock door
and finally was let in, into a crush of angry young men and
Hweomweanl.ked through the inner lock
door and breathed hot stale aSiro.
many people were shouting he could make nothing out, but the ones
in front recognized him and were clearly surprised to see himAthecroeu.ple of them cheered. "All right!I'm here!" he shoutedT.hen: "Who speaks for you?"
They had no spokesmaHn.e swore viciously. "What kind of fools are yYoouu?'d better learn to operate the system, or you'll be in bags like this one foBraegvser.like this or else bodybags."
Several people shouted things at him, but most wanted to hear what he woAunld stiyll. no sign of a spokeman, so Chalmers shouted, "All right, I'll talk to all oSf iyt oduo!wn so I can see who's speaking!"
They would not sit; but they did stand without moving, in a group around him, there on the tattered astroturf of the tent's main squaCreh. almers balanced himself on an upturned box in the middle of them. It was late afternoon and they cast shadows far down the slope to the east, into the tenHtse below.
asked what had happened, and various voices described the midnight attack, the skirmish in the station.
"You were provoked," he said when they were d"Tonhee.y wanted you to make some fool move and you did, it's one of the oldest tricks in the Tbhoeoyk'.ve gotten you to kill some third parties that had nothing to do with the attack on you, and now you're the murderers the police havYe ocuauwghetr!e

stupid!"
The crowd murmured and swore at him angrily, but some were taken"Tahboacsek. so-called police were in on it too!" one of them said loudly.
"Maybe so," Chalmers said, "But it was corporate troops that attacked you, not some random Japanese
on a rampageY.
ou should have been able to tell the difference, you should have bothered to find out!
As it is you played into their hands, and the UNOMA police were happy to go along, they're on the other side right now, at least some of thBeumt .the national armies are shifting over to your sSiode!
you've got to learn to co-operate with them, you've got to figure out who your allies are, and act accordingly! I don't know why there are so few people on this planet capable of doIitn'sg litkheat.the passage from Earth scrambles the brain or something."
Some laughed a startled laugFhr.ank asked them about conditions in the teTnhtse.y had the same
complaints as the others had, and again he could anticipate, and say it foTrhethnemhe.
described the
result of his trip to Clark"eI . got a moratorium on emigration, and that means more than just time to build more towns.It means the start of a new phase between the US and thTeheUy Nfi.nally figured it out in Washington that the UN is working for the transnationals, and so they need to enforce the treaty themselves. It's in Washington's best interest, and they're the only ones that'llThdeo tirte. aty is part of
the battle now, the battle between people and the transnatioYnoalus'.re in that battle and you've been attacked, and you have to figure out who to attack back, and how to connect up with your allies!"
They were looking grim at this, which showed sense, and Fran"kEvsaeindtu, ally we're going to win, you know.There's more of us than them."
So much for the carrot, such as it Awsasf.or the stick, that was always easy with people as powerless
as these."Look, if the national governments can't calm things down quick, if there's more unrest here and things start coming apart, they'll say the hell with it-let the transnats solve their labor problems themselves, they'll be more efficient at Aitn. d you know what that means for you."
"We're sick of this!" one man shouted.
"Of course you are," he saHide. pointed a finger".So do you have a plan to bring it to an end, or not?" It took a while to rachet them into agreemDeisnatr.m, co-operate, organize, petition the American
government for help, for justicPeu. t themselves in his hands, in effeOcft. course it took a whiAlen. d
along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and Hdied gita.ve them advice in media
relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant!Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.
He left to cheers.
# # #
Maya was out there in the statEioxnh.austed, he could only stare at her in disbeSlhieef. had been watching him over the video, she saFidr.ank shook his head; the fools inside hadn't even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their exisSteoncteh.e world had seen it all.
And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and

sophistry were the highest heroismW. hich to her it no doubt wIans.fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president!So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently.
She asked him to accompany her, and he was too exhausted to run a cost/benefit analysis of the act. With a twist of the mouth he agreItedw. as easier just to tag along.
They took the train down to the next station, made their way through the police aTnhde inRsuidssei.an
tent was packed like a circuit boa"rYd.ou're going to have a harder job of it than I did," Frank said as he looked around.
"Russians are used to it," she sa"iTdh. ese tents aren't that different from Moscow apartments." "Yes, yes."Russia had become a kind of immense Korea, sporting the same brutal streamlined
capitalism, perfectly Taylorized and with a veneer of democracy and consumer goods covering the junta.
"It's amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along." "Frank, please."
"Just remember that and it will go okay."
"Are you going to help or not?" she demanded. "Yes, yes."
# # #
The central square smelt of bean curd and borscht and electrical fires, and the crowd was much more unruly and loud than in the American tent, everyone there a defiant leader, ready to unleash a declamation. A lot more of them were women than in the AmericanThteynt.had unpisted a train and
this had galvanized them, they were anxious for more acMtioayna.
had to use a hand megaphone, and all
the time that she stood on a chair and talked, the crowd swirled around them and participants in several loud arguments ignored her, as if she were a cocktail lounge pianist.
Frank's Russian was rusty, and he couldn't understand most of what the crowd shouted at Maya, but he followed her replies pretty weSllh. e was explaining the emigration moratorium, the bottleneck in town
robot production and in water supplies, the necessity for discipline, the promise of a better life to come if all was enacted in an orderly fashiHone. supposed it was a classic babushka harangue, and it had the
effect of pacifying them somewhat, as there was a strong reactionary streak in many Russians now; they remembered what social unrest really meant, and were justifiably afraidAonfd itt.here was a lot to
promise, it all seemed plausiblbei:g world, few people, lots of material resources, some good robot designs, computer programs, gene templates. . . .
In one really loud moment of the discussion he said to her in English, "Remember the stick." "What?" she snapped.
"The stickT. hreaten them.Carrot and stick."
She noddedI.nto the megaphone againt:he never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact of the poisonous air, the deadly cold.They were alive only because of the tents, and the input of electricity andVuwlnaetrearb. le

in ways they hadn't fully thought out, in ways that didn't exist back home.
She was quick, she always had beBeanc.k to promisesB. ack and forth, stick and carrot, a jerk on the leash, some nibletsE. ventually the Russians too were pacified.
Afterward on the train up to Sheffield Maya gabbled with nervous relief, face flushed, eyes brilliant, hand clutching his arm as she threw her head back abruptly and lauTghhaet dn. ervous intelligence, that
arresting physical presence. .he.
must have been exhausted himself, or more shaken than he had realized
by the the time in the tents, or maybe it was the encounter with Phyllis; because he felt himself warming to her, it was like stepping into a sauna after a freezing day outside, with that same sense of relief from vigilance, of penetrating ease".I don't know what I would have done without you," she was saying
rapidly, "really you are so good in those situations, so clear and firm anTdhsehyarbpe.lieve you because you don't try to flatter them or soften the truth."
"That's what works best," he said, looking out the window at the tents run"nEinspgecbiayl.ly when you're flattering them and lying to them."
"Oh Frank."
"It's trueY.
ou're good at it yourself."
This was an example of the trope under discussion, but Maya didn'Tt hseeree iwt. as a name for that in rhetoric, but he couldn't recall Mit.etonymy? Synechdoche? But she only laughed and squeezed his
shoulder, leaning against himA. s if the fight in Burroughs had never happened, not to mention everything before that.And in Sheffield she ignored her stop, and got off the train with him at his stop, walking at his shoulder through the spaciousnesosf the rim station, and then to his rooms, where she stripped and
showered and put on one of his jumpers, chattering all the while about the day and the situation at large, as if they did this all the tiwmeen:t out to dinner, soup, trout, salad, a bottle of wine, every night sure! Leaning back in their chairs, drinking coffee and braPnodlyit.icians after a day of politiTcsh.e leaders.
She had finally wound down, and was poured into her chair, content just to wAatcnhd hfoimr .a wonder it didn't make him nervous, it was as if some force field protected him fromPerahllapthsat.he look in her eyeS.ometimes it seemed you really could tell if someone liked you.
She spent the nighAt.nd after that she divided her time between her quarters at the MarsFirst office and his rooms, without ever discussing what she was doing, or what it Amnedanwt.hen it was time for bed,
she would take off her clothes and roll in next to him, and then onto him, warm Tahned tcoaulcmh. of a
whole body, all at once. .A.nd.
if he ever started things, she was so quick to respond; he only had to
touch her armL. ike stepping into a saunSa.he was so easy these days, so caLlmik.e a different person, it was amazingN. ot Maya at all; but there she was, whispering Frank, Frank.
But they never talked about any of Itthawt.as always the situation, the day's news; and in truth that gave them a lot to talk aboTuth.e unrest on Pavonis had gone into abeyance temporarily, but the troubles
were planetwide, and getting worssea:botages, strikes, riots, fights, skirmishes, murdAern. d the news from Earth had plummeted through even the blackest of gallows humor, into just plain awMfualrnsess;
was the picture of order in comparison, a litle local eddy spun away from the vortex of a giant maelstrom, which looked to Frank like a death spiral for everything that fell Liinttloe iwt. ars like matchheads were
flaring everywhere.India and Pakistan had used nuclear weapons in KashAmfirri.ca was dying, and the north bickered over who should help first.
One day they got word that the mohole town Hephaestus, west of Elysium, manned by Americans and

Russians, had been entirely deserteRd.adio contact had stopped, and when people went down from
Elysium to look, they had found the town emApltly.Elysium was in an uproar, and Frank and Maya
decided to see if they could do something in peTrshoeny.
took the train down Tharsis together, back
down into the thickening air and across the rocky plains now piebald with snowdrifts that never melted, with snow that was a dirty granular pink, conforming tightly to the north slope of every dune and rock,
like colored shadowsA.
nd then onto the glistening crazed black plains of Isidis, where the permafrost
melted on the warmest summer days, and then refroze in a bright black cracAkletluunrde.ra in the
making, maybe even a marsFh.lying by the train windows were tufts of black grass, perhaps even arctic flowers. Or maybe it was just litter.
Burroughs was quiet and uneasy, the broad grassy boulevards empty, their green as shocking as a hallucination or an afterimage of looking into the Wsuhni.le waiting for the train to Elysium, Frank went to the station's storage room and reclaimed the contents of his Burroughs room, which he had left behind. The attendant returned with a single large box, containing a bachelor's kitchen equipment, a lamp, some
jumpers, a lecternH.
e didn't remember any of Hite.
put the lectern in his pocket and tossed the rest of it
in a trash dumperW. asted years; he couldn't remember a day of thTehme. treaty negotiation, now revealed as pure theater, as if someone had kicked a backstage strut and brought down the whole backdrop, revealing real history on the back steps, two men exchanging a handshake and a nod.
The Russian office in Burroughs wanted Maya to stay and deal with some business there, and so Frank took a train on to Elysium by himself, and then joined a rover caravan out to HeTpheespteuos.ple in
his car were subdued by his presence, and irritably he ignored them and glanced through his old lectern. A standard selection for the most part, a great book series only slightly augmented by some political philosophy packages.A hundred thousand volumes; lecterns today beat that a hundredfold, although it
was a pointless improvement, athsere was no longer time to read even a single Hboeokh.ad been fond of Nietschze in those days, apparentAlyb. out half the marked passages were from him, and glancing through them Frank couldn't see why, it was all windy dArinvdel.then he read one that made him
shudder: "The individual is, in his future and his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that willTobes. ay to him 'change yourself' means to demand that everything should change, even in the past. . . ."
In Hephaestus a new mohole crew was settling in, old timers for the most part, tech and engineering
types, but much more sophisticated than the newcomers on PavFornainsk.
talked with quite a few of
them, asking about those who had disappeared, and one morning at breakfast, next to a window that looked out on the mohole's solid white termal plume, an American woman who reminded him of Ursula said, "These people have seen the videos all their life, they're students of Mars, they believe in it like a grail, and organize their lives around getting hTerhee.y work for years, and save, and then sell everything
they have to get passage, because they have an idea of what it willAbned ltihken.
they get here and
they're incarcerated, or at best back in the old rut, in indoor jobs so it's all just like it's Astnildl oson TV. they disappear.Because they're looking for more the kind of thing they came here for."
"But they don't know how the disappeared live!" Chalmers obj"eOctrede.ven if they survive at all!" The woman shook her hea"dW. ord gets aroundP. eople come backT. here are one-play videos that
show up occasionally."The people around her nodde"dA. nd we can see what's coming up from Earth
after us.Best to get into the country while the chance is still there."
Frank shook his head, amazeIdt .was the same thing the benchpresser in the mining camp had been saying, but coming from this calm middle-aged woman it was somehow more disturbing.
That night, unable to sleep, he put out a call for Arkady, and got him half anAhrokuardylatwera.s on

Olympus Mons of all places, up at the observa"toWryh.at do you want?" Frank sa"idW. hat do you imagine will happen if everyone here slips away into the highlands?"
Arkady grinned". Why then we will make a human life, FrWanek.will work to support our needs, and do science, and perhaps terraform a bit mWore will sing and dance and walk around in the sun, and work like maniacs for food and curiosity."
"It's impossible," Frank exclaime"dW.
e're part of the world, we can't escape it."
"Can't we?It's only the blue evening star, the world you speaTkhiosf.red world is the only real one for us, now."
Frank gave up, exasperateHd.e had never been able to talk to Arkady, nWeviethr. John it had been different; but then he and John had been friends.
He trained back to ElysiuTmh.e Elysium Massif rose over the horizon like an enormous saddle dropped on the desert; the steep slopes of the two volcanoes were pinkish white now, deep in snows that had packed down to firn, and would become glaciers before too Hloengh.ad always thought of the Elysium cities as a counterweight to Tharsis; older, smaller, more manageable andBsuatnne.ow people there
were disappearing by the hundreds; it was a jump-off point into the unknown nation, hidden out there in the cratered wilderness.
In Elysium they asked him to give a speech to a group of American newcomers, on the first evening of their orientation.A formal speech, but there was an informal gathering before, and Frank wandered
around asking questions as usua"l.Of course we'll get out if we can," one man said to him boldly.
Others chipped in immediatel"yT. hey told us not to come here if we wanted to get outdoorsIt'ms uch. not like that on Mars, they said."
"Who do they think they're fooling?"
"We can see the video you sent back as well as they can."
"Hell, every other article you read is about the Mars underground, and how they're communists or nudists or Rosicrucians-"
"Utopias or caravans or cave-dwelling primitives-" "Amazons or lamas or cowboys-"
"What it is, is everyone's projecting their fantasies out here because it's so bad back there, do you understand?"
"Maybe there's a single co-ordinated counterworld-" "That's another big fantasy, the totalizing fantasy-"
"The true masters of the planet, why nHoitd?den away, maybe led by your friend Hiroko, maybe in contact with your friend Arkady, maybe nWoth. o knows?No one knows for sure, not on Earth they don't."

"It's all storiesI.t's the best story going right now, and millions of people on Earth are into it, they're
addicted to itA.
lot of them want to come, but only a few of usAgnedt ato.good percentage of those
of us who got chosen went through the whole selection process lying through our teeth to get here."
"Yes, yes," Frank interjected gloomi"lyW. e all did that.I"t reminded him of Michel's old joke; since they were all going to go crazy anyway. . . .
"Well there you arWe! hat did you expect?"
"I don't know.H" e shook his head unhappil"yB. ut it's all fantasy, do you understanTdh?e need to stay hidden would hamper any community in a crippling wIt'asy.all stories, when you get right down to it."
"Then where are all the disappeared going?" Frank shrugged uneasily, and they grinned.
An hour later he was still thinking aboEutveirty. one had moved out into an open-air ampitheater, built from fixed salt blocks in classical Greek stTyhlee. semi-circle of rising white benches was filled with
bodies topped by attentive faces, waiting for his speech, curious to see what one of the first hundred
would say to them; he was a relic of the past, a character out of history, he had been on Mars ten years before some of the people in the audience were born, and his memories of Earth were of their
grandparents' time, on the other side of a vast and shadowy chasm of years.
The classical Greeks had certainly gotten the size and proportions right for a single orator; he hardly had to raise his voice, and they all heard Hhiem.told them some of the usual things, his standard address, all chopped and censored, as it was sadly tattered by current evItendtisd.n't sound very coherent, even to
him. "Look," he said, desperately revising as he spoke, ad libbing, searching through the faces in the crowd, "when we came up here we came to a different toplaacen,ew world, and that necessarily
makes us different beings than we were befNoroen. e of the old directives from Earth maItnteerv. itably
we will make a new Martian society, just in the nature of It icnogms.es out of the decisions we make together, by our collective actioAn.nd they are decisions that we're making in our time, in these years, right now at this very instaBntu. t if you dodge off into the outback and join one of the hidden colonies, you isolate yourself!You remain whatever you were when you came, never metamorphosing into a Martian human.And you also deprive the rest of us of your expertise and youIr kinnpouwt. this
personally, believe me." Pain lanced through him, he was astonished to "fAeesl yito: u know, some of the first hundred were the first to disappear, presumably under the leadership of HiroI ksotilAl id.on't understand why they did it, I really doBnu'tt. how we have missed her genius for systems design in the years since, I can hardly tell yWouh! y, I think you can accurately say that part of our problems now
result from her absence these many yearHs.e" shook his head, tried to gather his thoug"Ththse.
first time
I saw this canyon we're in, I was withIthwera. s one of the first explorations to this area, and I had
Hiroko Ai at my side, and we looked down into this canyon, its floor bare and flat, and she said to me, It's like the floor of a roomH.e" stared at the audience, trying to remember Hiroko's Yfaecse.. . . no.
Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away
from you."I've missed herI.
come here, and it's impossible to believe it's the same place, and so. . . it's
hard to believe I ever really knew hHere." paused, tried to focus on their fa"cDeso.
you understand?"
"No!" someone bellowed.
A flicker of his old anger boiled through his conf"uIs'mion.saying we have to make a new Mars here!
I'm saying we're completely new beings, God dammit, that nothing is the samNeohtheirneg!
same!"
is the

He had to give up, go sit doOwthne. r speakers took over, and their droning voices floated over him as he sat, stunned, looking out the open end of the ampitheater into a park of wide-set sycamore trees. Slender white buildings beyond, trees growing on their roofs and balcAonigerse. en and white vision.
He couldn't tell themN.o one could tell themO.nly time, and Mars itselAf.nd in the meantime they
would act in obvious contradiction to their own best inteIrteshtsa.ppened all the time, but how could it, how? Why were people so stupid?
He left the ampitheater, stalked through the park and the "tHoowwn. can people act against their own obvious material interests?" he demanded of Slusinski over his wris"tIpta'sd.crazy!Marxists were materialists, how did they explain it?"
"Ideology, sir."
"But if the material world and our method of manipulating it determine everything else, how can ideology happen? Where did they say it comes from?"
"Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real siTtuhaetyiona.cknowledged that imagination was a powerful force in human life."
"But then they weren't materialists at aHlle!"swore with disgus"t.No wonder Marxism is dead." "Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists."
"Shit!They might as well call themselves Zoroastrians, or Jansenists, or Hegelians." "Marxists are Hegelian, sir."
"Shut up," Frank snarled, and broke the connection.
Imaginary beings, in a real landscaNpeo. wonder he had forgotten the carrot and the stick, and wandered off into the realm of new being and radical difference and all thTartyicnrgapt.o be John
Boone. Yes, it was trueH! e was trying to do what John had dBonuet . John had been good at it; Frank
had seen him work his magic time after time in the old days, changing everything just by the way he talked. While for Frank the words were like rocks in his mEovuetnh. now, when it was just what they needed.
# # #
Maya met him at the Burroughs station, gave him aHehuegn.dured it stiffly, his bags hanging from his hand. Outside the tent low chocolate thunderheads billowed in a mauveHeskyco. uldn't meet her eye. "You were wonderful," she sai"dE. veryone is talking about it."
"For an hour.A" fter which the emigrants would disappear as befIotrew. as a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
He hurried off to the mesa offiMceas.ya came along and chattered at him as he checked into one of the yellow-walled rooms on the fourth floBora.mboo furniture, flowery sheets and couch cushioMnsa.ya
was full of plans, cheery, pleased with hSihme. was pleased with himH!e crushed his teeth together until
they hurt.Bruxism was giving him headaches and all kinds of facial pain, wearing through his crowns and

the cartilage in his jaw joints.
Finally he stood and walked to the d"oIohr.ave to go for a walk," he his peripheral visionh: urt surprise.As usual.
Asasid.he left he saw her face in
He walked quickly down to the sward, and paced off the long row of Bareiss columns, their disarray like bowling pins caught flyinOg.n the other side of the canal he sat at a round white table at the edge of a sidewalk café, and nursed a Greek coffee for an hour.
Suddenly Maya was standing before him.
"What do you mean by this?" she wrong now?"
Ssahied. gestured at the table, at his own annoyed sc"oWwhla. t is
He stared at his coffee cup, looked up at her; back down at Itthewacsupim.
possibleA.
sentence was
pronouncing itself in his mind, each word equally weighteId:
killed John.
"Nothing's wrong," he sai"dW.
hat do you mean."
The corners of her mouth tightened, making her glare look contemptuous, and her
Nfaecaerloyld.
eighty now.They were too old for thiAs.fter a long silence she sat down across from him.
"Look," she said slowl"yI.
don't care what happened in the paSsht.e"
stopped speaking, and he risked
a glance at her; she was staring down, looking inw"Warhda. t happened in the Ares, I mean, or in
Underhill. Or any of it."
His heart beat inside him like a child trying to eHscisapleu.ngs were coldS.he was still talking, but he
hadn't caught itD.
id she know?Did she know what he had done in NicoIst iaw?as impossible, or she
would not have been here (would she?); but she ought to have known. "Do you understand?" she asked.
He hadn't heard what she was referringHeto.continued to stare at his coffee cup, and suddenly she slapped it away with the back of her hand, it clattered under a nearby table anTdhebrwohkiet.e
ceramic semi-circle of the handle spun on the ground. "I said do you understand?"
Paralyzed, he continued to stare at the empty tableOvtoeprl.apping rings of brown coffee stainMs.aya leaned forward and put her face in her haSnhdes. was hunched tight over her stomach, not breathing.
Finally she breathed, pulled her head "uNpo.," she said, so quietly that at first he assumed she was addressing herself."Don't speak of iYt. ou think I care, and so you do allAths isi.f I would care more about then than now.S"he looked up at him and caught his g"aItzew. as thirty years ago," she said.
"Thirty-five since we met, and thirty since all that happIenaemd.
not that Maya Katarina ToitovIna.
don't know her, I don't know what she thought or felt, oTr hwathyw. as a different world, another lIitfe.
doesn't matter to me nowI .have no feeling for Nito. w I am here, and this is mSeh.e" between the breasts with a thum"bA.nd look;I love you."
poked herself
She let the silence stretch, her last words drifting out like ripples onHae pcoonudld. n't stop looking at
her; then he pulled his gaze away, he glared up at the faint twilight stars overhead, let their position seep

into his memoryW.
hen she said I love you, Orion stood tall in the southerTnheskmy.etal chair under
you was hardY.
our feet were cold.
"I don't want to think about anything but that," she said.
She didn't know; and he dBidu.t everyone has to assume their past somehTowhe.y were eighty-odd
years old, and healthyT. here were people who were now a hundred and ten years old, healthy, vigorous, strong. Who knew how long it would laTsth?ey were going to have a lot of past to asAsunmde.as it
went on, and those years of their youth receded into the distant past, all those searing passions that had cut so deep. . . could they really be only sWcaerrse?n't they crippling wounds, a thousand amputations?
But it wasn't a physical thiAngm. putations, castrations, hollowing out; they were all in the imagination. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. . . .
"The brain is a funny animal," he muttered.
She cocked her head, looked curiously at
Shiumdd. enly he was afraid; they were their pasts, they had
to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past; and so when they said what they said, how could they know what their deeper minds were really feeling, thinking, sayinTgh?ey didn't know, not reallRy.elationships were for
that reason utterly mysterious; they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to beDriidghtth. at Maya down at the deepest level know or not know, remember or forget, swear vengeance or foTrghievree? was no way of telling,
he could never be surIet. was impossible.
And yet there she was, sitting there miserably, looking as if he could shatter her like a coffee cup, shatter her with a single flick of his finIgferh.e didn't at least pretend to believe her, what Wthhenat? then?How
could he shatter her like thaSth?e would hate him for it-for forcing her to remember the past, to care about it. And so. . . . one had to go on, to act.
He lifted his hand, so frightened that the movement felt like teleopeHraetiowna.s a dwarf in a waldo, a waldo that was stiff, touchy, unfamililairf:t, quick modulate!To the left, hold; return, hold; steaDdyo.wn
gently. Gently gently onto the back of her haCnlda.sp, very gentlyH. so was his.
She looked wanly at him.
"Let's-"He had to clear his thro"aLt.et's go back to our rooms."
# # #
er hand was really very cold; and
For weeks after that he remained physically clumsy, as if he had withdrawn into some other space, and had to operate his body from a distanTceele. operation. It made him aware of how many muscles he had. Sometimes he knew them so well he could snake through the air; but most of the time he jerked across the landscape like Frankenstein's monster.
Burroughs was flooded with bad news; life in the city seemed fairly normal, but the video screens piped in scenes of a world Frank could scarcely beliRevioet.s in Hellas; the domed crater New Houston
declaring itself an independent republic; and that same week, Slusinski sent tape of an American orientation in which all five dorms had voted to leave for Hellas without the proper travel permits. Chalmers contacted the new UNOMA factor, and got a detachment of UN security police to go there;

and ten men arrested five hundred, by the simple expedient of overriding the tent's physical plant computer and ordering the helpless occupants to board a series of train cars, before the tent's air was released. They had then been trained off to Korolyov, which was now in effect a priIstosn city. transformation into a prison had become general knowledge sometime recently; it was hard to recall exactly when, as it had an air of already-always about it, perhaps because the parts of a prison system had already existed for several years, scattered planetwide.
Chalmers interviewed some the prisoners over their room videos, two or three at"Yaoutimsee how
easy it was to detain you," he told th"eTmha.t's the way it will be all oTvehre.
life support systems are so
fragile that they're impossible to defenEdv.en on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implement than ever before, but here it's absurdly easy."
"Well, you got us when it was easiest," replied a man in his"Wsihxitciehs. was smartO.
nce we get free
I'd like to see you catch uAst. and yours is more visible."
that point your life support system is as vulnerable to us as ours is to you,
"You should know better than thAatll!
life support here is hooked back ultimately to EBaurt .they
have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and weYoduona'tn. d all your friends are trying
to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn't like that hereT!he analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality,
the true nature of our dependence and their mTighhety.
keep you from seeing that it's a fantasy!"
"I'm sure there was many a good Tory neighbor arguing the same case in the colonies," the man said with a grin."Actually the analogy is in many ways a goodWone'er.e not just cogs in the machine here, we're individual people, most of us ordinary, but there's some real characters too, we're going to see our Washingtons and Jeffersons and Paines, I guarantee yAouls.o the Andrew Jacksons and Forrest
Mosebys, the brutal men who are good at getting what they want." "This is ridiculous!" Frank crie"dIt.'s a false analogy!"
"Well, it's more metaphor than analogy anywTahye.re are differences, but we intend to respond to those creatively. We won't be hefting muskets over rock walls to take potshots at you."
"Hefting mining lasers over craters walYlso?u think that's different?"
The man flicked at him, as if the camera in his room were a m"Iossquupiptoo.se the real question is, will we have a Lincoln?"
"Lincoln is dead," Frank snappe"dA. nd historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation."He cut the connection.
Reason was uselessA. lso anger, also sarcasm, not to mention iroHney.could only try to match them in fantasyland. So he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was,
how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically
Martian in its nature, "with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world's only real beauty, damn it!"
Useless.He tried to arrange meetings with some of the disappeared, and once he talked with a group by phone, and asked them to pass the word along to Hiroko if possible, that he urgently needed to talk to her. But no one seemed to know where she was.

Then one day he got a message from her, in print faxed down from Phobos. He'd be better off talking to
Arkady, it saidB. ut Arkady had disappeared while down in Hellas, and was no longer takin"gIt'csalls. like playing fucking hide and seek," Frank exclaimed bitterly to Maya on"eDiddayy.ou have that game
in Russia?I remember playing with some older kids one time, it was around sunset and a storm over the water making it really dark, and there I was, wandering around empty streets knowing I'd never find any of them."
"Forget the disappeared," she advise"dC.oncentrate on who you can seTeh.e disappeared will be monitoring you anywayI.t doesn't matter if you can't see them or if they don't reply."
He shook his head.
Then there was a new wave of emigraHtioen.shouted for Slusinski and ordered him to get an explanation from Washington.
"Apparently, sir, the elevator consortium has been bought in a hostile takeover by Subarashii, so its
assets are in Trinidad Tobago and it is no longer interested in responding to American concerns about the matter. Infrastructure construction capability is now in line with a moderate emigration rate, they say."
"Damn them!" Frank sai"dT. hey don't know what they're doing with this!"
He walked in a circle, grinding his teTehteh. words spilled quietly out of him, in a monologue of their
own making;"You see but you don't understanIdt's.
like John used to say, there's parts of Martian
reality that don't make it across the vacuum, not just the feel of the gravity, but the feel of getting up in a dorm and going down to the baths, and then across the alley to a dinAinngd hsaoll.you're getting it all
wrong, you arrogant, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches. . . . "
He and Maya took the train from Burroughs back up to PavonisAMll odnusr.ing the trip he sat by the window and watched the red landscape rise and fall, contract in to the flatland five kilometers and then, as they rose, extend out to forty kilometers, or a hunSdurcehd. a big bulge in the planet, Tharsis.
Something inside, breaking ouAt. s in the current situationY. es, they were stuck on the side of the
Tharsis bulge of Martian history, with the big volcanoes about to pop.
And then there one was, Pavonis Mons, an enormous dream mountain, as if the world were a print by
Hokusai. Frank found it difficult to taHlke.
avoided looking at the TV at the front of the car; news
flashed up and down the train almost instantly anyway, in snatches of overheard conversation or the looks on people's facesI.t was never necessary to watch the video to find out the really important news. The train ran through a forest of Acheron pines, tiny things with bark like black iron, and cylindrical bushes of needles; but the needles were all yellow and drooHpeingh.ad heard about this, there was
some kind of problem with the soil, too much salt or too little nitrogen, they werHene'ltmseutered.
figures stood around one on a ladder, plucking specimens of the sick ne"eTdhlaets's.
me," Frank said to
Maya under his breath, as she was asle"ePpla.ying with needles when the roots are sick."
In the Sheffield offices he started meeting with the new elevator administrators, at the same time beginning another round of simultaneous meetings with WashingIttontu. rned out Phyllis was still in control of the elevator, having aided Subarishii in the hostile takeover.
Then they heard that Arkady was in Nicosia, just down the slope from Pavonis, and that he and his followers had declared Nicosia a free city like New HouNstiocno.sia had become a big jump-off point
for the disappeared; you could slip into Nicosia and never be heard of again, it had happened hundreds of times, so many that it was clear there was some system there, of contact and transmission, an

underground railroad kind of thing that no undercover agent had yet been able to penetrate, or at least to
return from."Let's go down there and talk to him," Frank said to Maya when h"eI hrearlldy. confront him in person."
want to
"It won't do any good," Maya said darBkulyt . Nadia was supposed to be there as well, as so she came along.
All down the slope of Tharsis they rode in silence, watching the frosted rocAkt flNyicboys.ia the station opened for their train as if there was not even a question of refusinBgutthAemrk.ady and Nadia were not in the small crowd that greeted them; instead it was Alexander Zhalin, aBndacRk aautl. the
city manager's offices, they called up Arkady on a vidlink; judging by the sunlight behind him, he was already many kilometers to the eaAstn. d Nadia, they said, had never been in Nicosia at all.
Arkady looked the same as ever, expansive and rela"Txehdis.
is madness," Frank said to him, furious
that he had not gotten him in pers"oYno.u can't hope to succeed."
"But we can," Arkady sa"idW. e do."His luxuriant red-and-white beard was an obvious revolutionary badge, as if he were the young Fidel about to enter H"aOvafnaco. urse it would be easier with your help, Frank. Think about it!"
Then before Frank could say more, someone offscreen got Arkady's atteAntimonu.ttered conversation in Russian, and then Arkady faced him ag"aSino.rry, Frank," he said".I must attend to somethinIg'l.l get back to you as soon as possible."
"Don't you go!" Frank shouted, but the connection was "gGoonde. damn it!"
Nadia came on the linSeh.e was in Burroughs, but had been linked into the exchange, such asInit was. contrast to Arkady she was taut, brusque, unhap"pYyo.u can't support what he's doing!" Frank cried.
"No," Nadia said griml"yW.
e aren't talkingW.
e still have this phone contact, which is how I knew
where you were, but we don't use it direct anymNoorep. oint." "You can't influence him?" Maya said.
"No."
Frank could see that this was hard for Maya to believe, and it almost made hnimot ilnafulguhen: ce a man, not manipulate himW? hat was Nadia's problem?
# # #
That night they stayed at a dorm near the stAatfitoenr. supper Maya went back to the city manager's
office, to talk to Alexander and Dmitri and Elena and Raul; Frank wasn't interested, it was a waste of time. Restlessly he walked the circumference of the old town, through alleys running against the tent wall, remembering that night so long agOon. ly nine years, in fact, though it felt like a hunNdirceods.ia looked
little these daysT. he park at the western apex still had a good view of the whole, but a blackness filled things so that he could scarcely see.
In the sycamore grove, now mature, he passed a short man hurrying the otThehre wmaayn. and stared at Frank, who was under a streetla"mChpa. lmers!" the man exclaimed.
stopped

Frank turnedT. he man had a thin face, long tangled dreadlocks, darkNsokino.ne he knewB. ut seeing him, he felt a chi"llY. es?" he snapped.
The man regarded himH.e said, "You don't know me, do you." "No I don'tW. ho are you?"
The man's grin was assymetrical, as if his face had been cracked at the point oUf ntdheernjeaawth. streetlight it looked warped, half-crazed.
"Who are you?" Frank said again.
the
The man raised a finger. "The last time we met, you were bringing down
Ha!" He strode off laughing, each sharp "ha!" higher than the last.
Tthoenitgohwt ni.t's my turn.
Back at the city manager's, Maya clutched his "aIrmw.as worried, you shouldn't be walking around alone in this town!"
"Shut up."He went to a phone and called the physical pElvaenrty. thing was normalH. e called the
UNOMA police, and told them to mount an armed guard at the plant and the traiHn estwataiosns.till
repeating the order to someone higher up the chain of command, and it seemed likely it would go all the way up to new factor for final confirmation, when the screen wentTbhlearnek.was a tremor underfoot,
and every alarm bell in town went off at oAncec.oncerted, adrenal brinnnnng!
Then there was a sharp jTolht.e doors all hissed shut; the building was sealing, meaning pressures
outside had made a rapid droHpe.
and Maya ran to the window and lookedTohuet.tentover Nicosia
was down, in some places stretched over the tallest rooftops like saran wrap, in others blowing away on the wind.People down on the street were pounding on doors, running, collapsing, huddled in on
themselves like the bodies in PompeFiri.ank wheeled away, his teeth bursting with hot pain.
Apparently the building had sealed successfulBlye.low all the noise Frank could hear or feel the hum of
a generator.The video screens were blank, which had the effect of making it hard to believe the view out the window.Maya's face was pink, but her manner ca"lTmh.e tent is down!"
"I know."
"But what happened?" He didn't reply.
She was working away at the video scre"eHnasv. e you tried the radio yet?"
"No."
"Well?" she cried, exasperated by his silen"Dceo.
you know what's going on?"
"Revolution," he said.

Part Seven
Senzeni Na
-+=*=+-
On the fourteenth day of the revolution Arkady Bogdanov dreamed he and his father sat on a wooden box, before a small fire at the edge of the clearing; a kind of campfire, except that the long low tin-roofed buildings of Ugoly were just a hundred meters behind their bTahcekys. had their bare hands extended to
the radiant heat, and his father was once again telling the story of his encounter with the snoIwt was windy and the flames gusteTdh.en a fire alarm rang out behind them.
leopard.
It was Arkady's alarm, set for 4 AHMe . got up and took a hot sponge bAanth.image from the dream
re-occurred to himH.
e had not slept much since the revolt's beginning, just a few hours snatched here or
there, and his alarm had awakened him from several deep sleep dreams, the kind one normally did not remember. Almost all had been undistorted memories of his childhood, memories never once recalled before. It made him wonder just how much the memory held, and if its storage might not be immensely more powerful than its retrieval mechanisMm.ight one be able to remembere every second of one's life,
but only in dreams that were always lost on wakMinight this be necessary, somehowA?nd if so, what would happen if people started livifnogr two or three hundred years?
Janet Blyleven came by, looking worri"eTdh. ey've blown up NemesisR. oald has analyzed the video, and guesses they hit it with a bunch of hydrogen bombs."
They went next door to Carr's big city offices, where Arkady had spent most of the previous two
weeks. Alex and Roald were inside watching the
RTVoa.ld said, "Screen, replay tape one for Arkady."
An image flickered and hebldla: ck space, the thick net of stars, and midscreen a dark irregular asteroid, visible mostly as a patch of occluded stFaorsr. a few moments the image held, and then a white light appeared on the side of the asteroTidh.e expansion and dispersal of the asteroid was immed"iFataes.t
work," Arkady remarked.
"There's another angle from a camera farther away."
This clip showed the asteroid as oblong, and it was possible to make out the silver blisters of its mass driver. Then there was a white flash, and when the black sky returned the asteroid was gone; a shimmering of stars to the right of the screen indicated the passage of fragments, then they steadied and it was over.No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter's tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters' doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun.
"I never did like the idea," Arkady
"sIatidw. as mutual assured destruction all over again."
Roald said, "But if there's mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability. . . ."

"We haven't lost the capability here, thouAgnhd.
they value what's here as much as weSodon.ow
we're back to the Swiss defenseD."estroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.
"It's weaker," Roald said bluntHlye. course toward the Earth.
had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its
Arkady noddedI.t couldn't be denied that one term had been erased from the eqBuaut oint .wasn't clear if the balance of power had changed orNneomt.esis had not been his idea; Mikhail Yangel had proposed it, and the group in the asteroids had carried it out on the thNeiorwowanl.ot of them were
dead, killed by the big explosion or by smaller ones out in the belt; while Nemesis itself had created the impression that the rebels would countenance mass destruction on EAartbha. d idea, as Arkady had
pointed out.
But that was life in a revolutNioon. one was in control, no matter what people sAanidd. for the most
part it wasbetter that way, especially here on MaFrisg.hting had been severe in the first week,UNOMA
and the transnationals had beefed up their security forces in the previouAs yleoatr.ofthe big cities had
been instantly seized by them, aintdmight have happened everywhere except that there turned out to be so many more rebel groups than they or anyone else had knownOavbeoruts.ixtytowns and stations
had gotten on the net and declared independence, they had popped out of the labs and the hills and simply taken overA. nd now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not.
A call came from the physical plTanhte.y were having some trouble with the computers, and wanted
Arkady to come have a look.
He left the city offices and walked across Menlo Park to theIt pwlaanst.just after sunrise, and most of
Carr Crater was still in shadow; only the west wall and the tall concrete buildings of the physical plant were in sunlight at this hour, their walls all yellow in the raw morning light, the pistes running up the crater wall like gold ribbonsI.n the shadowed streets the city was just wakAinglo. t of rebels had come in from
other towns or the cratered highlands, and they slept on the parkPegorapsles. sat up, sleeping bags still draped over their legs, eyes puffy, hair wNilidg.ht temperatures were being kept up, but it was still cool
at dawn, and those out of their bags crouched around stoves, blowing into their hands and puttering with coffee pots and samovars, and checking to the west to see how close the line of sunlight Whahdencrept.
they saw Arkady they waved, and more than once he was stopped by people who wanted to get his opinion of the news, or give him advAicrek.ady answered them all cheerfullAy.gain he felt that
difference in the air, the sense that they were all in a new space together, everyone facing the same problems, everyone equal, everyone (seeing a heating coil, glowing under a coffe pot) incandescent with the electricity of freedom.
He walked feeling lighter, chattering into his wristpad's diary file as h"eThweenpta. rk reminds me of
what Orwell said about Barcelona in the hands of the anarchists; it is the euphoria of a new social contract, of a return to that child's dream of fairness we all began with-"
His wristpad beeped and Phyllis's face appeared on the tiny screen, which was ann"oWyhinagt. do you want?" he asked.
"Nemesis is goneW. e want you to surrender before any more damage is Idt'osnsei.mple now, Arkady. Surrender or die."

He almost laughedS. he was like the wicked witch in the Oz movie, appearing unexpectedly in his crystal ball.
"It's no laughing matter!" she exclaimSeudd. denly he saw that she was scared. "You know we had nothing to do with Nemesis," he"Itsaiisd.irrelevant."
"How can you be such a fool!" she cried.
"It is not foolishnesLs.isten, you tell your masters this; if they try to subdue the free cities here, we will destroy everything on Mars.T"hat was the Swiss defense.
"Do you think that mattersS?h"e was white-lipped, her tiny image like a primitive fury mask.
"It mattersL. ook, Phyllis, I'm only the polar cap of this, there's a massive underground lens that you can't see; it's really vast, and they've got the means to strike back at you if they want."
She must have let her arm fall, because the image on his little screen swung wildly, then showed a floor.
"You were always a fool," her disembodied voice
"sEaivde. n back on the Ares."
The connection went dead.
Arkady walked on, the city's bustle no longer as exhilarating as it haIdf Pbheyelnli.s were frightened. . .
.
At the physical plant they were busy running a malfunction sAearccohu.ple of hours before, oxygen levels in the city had begun to rise, and no warning lights had gone off; a tech had discovered it accidentally.
Half an hour's work and they founAd ipt.rogram had been substitutedT.hey replaced it, but Tati Anokhin was not happy".Look, that had to be sabotage, and there's still more oxygen than even this accounts for.Look, it's nearly forty percent out there right now."
"No wonder everyone is in such a good mood this morning." "I'm notB. esides that mood thing is a myth."
"Are you sureG? o through the programming again, and look at the encryption IDs, and see if there are any other substitutions hidden under this one."
He headed back to the city offiHcees. was halfway there when there was a loud pop overHhe d.
looked up and saw a small hole in the dTohmee.air suddenly took on an irridescent shimmer, as if they were inside a great soap bubbAle. bright flash and a loud boom knocked him to hisStfreuegtg. ling
back up, he saw everything ignite simultaneously; people wbuerrneing like torches; and right before his eyes his arm caught fire.
-+=*=+-

It was not hard to destroy Martian towNnos.harder than breaking a window, or popping a balloon.
Nadia Chernevsky discovered this while holed up in the city offices of Lasswitz, a tent town which had been punctured one night just after sunsAeltl. the surviving occupants were now huddled in the city
offices or the physical planFt.or three days they had spent their time going out to try to repair the tent, and watching TV to try and figure out what was goinBgutonth. e Terran news packages were
concerned with its own wars, which seemed to be coalescing intoOnolnye.infrequently were there a
brief report on the wrecked Martian towOnsn.e said that many domed craters had been hit by missiles from over the horizon, usually in a sequence where oxygen or aerated fuels were introduced and then quickly followed by an ignitor that caused explosions of varying severity-from anti-personnel fires, to blasts that blew the domes off, to really big explosions that in effect re-excavated the crater.
Anti-personnel oxygen fires appeared to be the most common; these left the infrastructure intact, for the most part.
Tent towns were simpler stMill.ost of them had been punctured by Phobob-based lasers; some had had their physical plants targeted by guided cruise missiles; others had been invaded by troops of one kind or another, their spaceports seized, armored rovers crashing through city walls, and in rare cases
rocketpack paratroopers descending from above.
Nadia watched the jiggling video images that so clearly revealed the fear of the camera operators, her stomach collasping to a tight walnut inside h"eWr.hat are they doing, testing methods?" she cried.
"I doubt it," said Yeli Zud"oIvt'.s probably just a matter of different groups using different methods.
Some look like they're trying to do as little damage as possible, others seem to want to kill as many of us as they can.Make more room for emigration."
Nadia turned away, sickeneSd.he got up and took off for the kitchen, bent slightly over her collapsed
stomach, desperate to do somethinIgn.
the kitchen they had turned on a generator and were
microwaving frozen dinnersS. he helped hand them out, moving up and down a line of people sitting in the hall outside.Unwashed faces, splashed with black frostnip blistesrosm: e people talked animatedly,
others sat like statues, or slept leaning against each oMthoesrt.
of them had been residents of Lasswitz,
but a good number had driven in from tents or hideouts that had been destroyed from space, or attacked by ground forces". Is stupid," an old Arab woman was saying to a gnarled littl"eMmyanp,arents were
Red Crescent in Bagdad when the Americans bombed it, if they have the sky is nothing you can do, nothing! We have to surrenderS.urrender as soon as possible!"
"But to whom?" the little man asked wea"rAilnyd.
for whom?And how?"
"To anyone, from everybody, and by radio, of couTrshee!"woman glared at Nadia, wshhorugged.
Then her wristpad beeped, and Sasha Yefremov babbled in a tinny wristphone voice; the water station north of town had gone up in an explosion, and the well it had capped was now fountaining in an artesian eruption of water and ice.
"I'll be right there," Nadia said, shockTehde.
town's water station tapped the lower end of the Lasswitz
aquifer, which was a big one; if any significant part of the aquifer broached the surface, the water station and the town and the entire canyon they lay in would disappear in a catastrophic flood-and worse, Burroughs was located only two hundred kilometers down the slope of Syrtis and Isidis, and the flood could very conceivably run that fBaru. rroughs! Its population was far too large to evacuate, especially
now that it had become a refuge for people escaping the war; there was simply no other place to go.

"Surrender!" the Arab woman insisted from the "hAall. surrender!"
"I don't think that will work anymore," Nadia said, and ran for the building's lock.
# # #
A part of her was immensely relieved to be able to do something, to stop huddling in a building watching disasters on TV, and do somethinAg.nd Nadia had platted and overseen the construction of Lasswitz,
only six years before, so now she had an idea what Tthoedtoo.wn was a Nicosia-class tent, with the farm and physical plant in separate structures, and the water station well off to thAell ntohreth.
structures were down on the floor of a big east-west rift called Arena Canyon, the walls of which were nearly vertical and half a kilometer hiTghe water station was located only a couple hundred meters
from the canyon's north wall, which in that area had an impressive overhang atAtsheNtaodpi.a drove with Sasha and Yeli to the water station, she quickly outlined he"rI ptlhaink we can bring down the cliff onto the station, and if we can, the landslide ought to be enough to cap the leak."
"Won't the flood just carry the landslide's rock away?" Sasha asked.
"It will if it's a full aquifer outbreak, Bsute.if we cover it when it's still just an uncapped well, then the escaping water will freeze in the landslide, and hopefully form a dam heavy enough toHyhdorlodstaitt.ic
pressure in this aquifer is only a bit greater than the lithostatic pressure of the rock over it, so the artesian flow isn't all that higIhf. it were we'd be dead already."
She braked the roverO. ut the windshield they could see the remains of the water station, under a cloud
of thin frost steamA.
rover came bouncing full speed toward them, and Nadia flashed their headlights
and turned the radio to the common baItndw. as the water station crew, a couple named Angela and Sam, rabid with the adventures of the last hWouhre.n they had driven alongside and finished their story, Nadia explained to them what she had in mind. "It could work," Ange"lCa esrataiidn.ly nothing else will
stop it now, it's really pumping."
"We'll have to hurry," Sam sa"iIdt'.s eating the rock at an unbelievable rate."
"If we don't cap it," Angela said with a certain morbid enthusiasm, "it'll look like when the Atlantic first
broke through the Straits of Gibraltar and flooded the Mediterranean lasted ten thousand years."
Tbahsaitn.was a waterfall that
"I never heard of that one," Nadia
"saCiodm.
e on with us to the cliff and help us get the robots going."
During the ride over she had directed all the town's construction robots from their hangar to the foot of the north wall, next to the water station; when the two rovers got there, they found a few of the faster robots had already arrived, and the rest were grinding over the canyon floor towarTdhethremw. as a
small talus slope at the foot of the cliff, which towered over them like an enormous frozen wave, gleaming in the noon lighNt. adia linked into the earthmovers and bulldozers and gave them instructions to clear
paths through the talus; when that was done, tunnelers would bore straight into t"hSeeec,l"iffN. adia
said, pointing at an areological map of the canyon that she had called onto the rover's screen, "there's a big fault there behind that whole overhanging piIetc'se.causing the lip of the wall to slump a bit, see that slightly lower shelf at the toIpf?we set off all the explosives we've gtohte abtottom of that fault, it's sure
to bring down the overhang, don't you think?" "I don't know," Yeli sa"idIt.'s worth a try."

The slower robots arrived, bringing an array of explosives left over from the excavation of the town's foundation. Nadia went to work programming the vehicles to tunnel into the bottom of the cliff, and for most of an hour she was lost to the wWorhlde.n she was finished she said, "Let's get back to town and
get everyone evacuatedI.
can't be sure how much of the cliff might come down, and we don't want to
bury everyone.We've got four hours."
"Jesus, Nadia!"
"Four hours."She typed in the last command and started up their cheer.
"You don't seem very sorry to leave," Yeli said to them. "Hell, it was boring!" Angela said.
"I don't think that's going to be much of a problem anymore."
"Good."
Aronvgeer.la and Sam followed with a
The evacuation was difficult; a lot of the town's occupants didn't want to leave, and there was barely room for them in the rovers at haFninda. lly they were all stuffed into one vehicle or another, and off on the transponder road to Burroughs. Lasswitz was emNptayd.ia spent an hour trying to contact Phyllis by satellite phone, but the comm channels were disrupted by what sounded like a number of different jamming efforts. Nadia left a message on the satellite itse"lWf: e're non-combatants in Syrtis Major,
trying to stop the Lasswitz aquifer from flooding BurrouSgohsl.eave us alone!A"
surrender of sorts.
Nadia and Sasha and Yeli were joined in their rover by Angela and Sam, and they drove up the steep switchbacks of the cliff road, onto the south rim of Arena CaAnycorons.s from them was the imposing
north wall; below to the left lay the town, looking almost normal; but to the right it was clear something was wrong:the water station was broken in the middle by a thick white geyser, which plumed like a broken fire hydrant, and then fell into a jumble of dirty red-white ice Tbhliosckws.eird mass shifted even
as they watched, briefly exposing black flowing water which frost-steamed madly, white mists pouring out of the black cracks and then whipping downcanyon on the Twheindro. ck and fines of the martian surface were so dehydrated that when water splashed onto them they seemed to explode in violent
chemical reactions, so when the water ran over dry ground, great clouds of dust fired off into the air and joined the frost steam swirling off the water.
"Sax will be pleased," Nadia said grimly.
At the appointed hour, four plumes of smoke shot out of the base of the nortFheorrn swevaelrl.al
seconds nothing else happened, and the observers groanTehde.n the cliff face jerked, and the rock of the overhang slipped down, slowly and majesticaTllyh.ick clouds of smoke shot up from the bottom of the cliff, and then sheets of ejecta shot out, like water from under a calvingAicleobwergr.oar shook
their rover, and Nadia cautiously backed it away from the soutJhusrtimb.efore a massive cloud of dust cut off their view, they saw the water station covered by the swift tumbling edge of the landslide.
Angela and Sam had been cheeri"nHg.ow will we tell if it's worked?" Sasha asked.
"Wait till we can see it again," Nadia "sHaiodp.efully the flood downstream will have gone whNitoe. more open water, no more movement."

Sasha noddedT. hey sat looking down into the ancient canyon, waiNtinagd.ia's mind was mostly blank;
the thoughts that did occur to her were blSehaek. needed more action like the last few hotuhres',kind
of intense activity that gave her no time to think; even a moment's pause and the whole miserable situation crashed back in on her, the wrecked cities, the dead everywAhrekraed, y's disappearance.And no one
in control, apparentlyN.
o plan to any of Pito.lice troops were wrecking towns to stop the rebellion, and
rebels were wrecking towns to keep the rebellion aIltivwe.ould end with everything destroyed, her whole life's work blown up before her eyes; and for no rNeaosorne!ason at all.
She couldn't afford to thinDko. wn there a landslide had overrun a water station, hopefully, and the water rushing up the well had been blocked and frozen, making a compositeAfdtearmt.hat it was hard to say.If the hydrostatic pressure in the aquifer was high enough, a new breakout might beBuftoricf ed. the dam were thickenough. . . well, nothing to be done aboAutlthito. ugh if they could create some
kind of escape valve, to take the pressure off the landslide dam. . . .
Slowly the wind tattered the dust awHaeyr. companions cheered; the water station was gone, covered
by a fresh black landslide that spilled out from the northern wall, which now had a big new arc in its rim. But it had been a close thing, not anywhere near as big a landslide as she would have hoped; Lasswitz itself was still there, and it appeared that the layer of rock over the water station was not all that thick. The flood seemed to have stopped, it was true; it was motionless, a chunky, dirty white swath, like a
glacier running down the middle of the canyAonnd.
.
there was very little frost steam rising froSmtilli.t. . .
"Let's go back down to Lasswitz and look at the aquifer monitors," Nadia said.
They drove back down the canyon wall road and into Lasswitz's
Tgahreaygew. alked down the empty
streets in walkers and helmetTs.he aquifer study center was located next to the city ofIfticwesa.s odd to see their refuge of the last few days empty.
Inside the aquifer center they studied the readouts from the array of underground Asenlostoros.f them
were no longer functioning, but those that were showed that hydrostatic pressure inside the aquifer was
higher than ever before, and increasinAgs.
if to emphasize the point a small tremblor shook the ground,
vibrating the soles of their booNtso. ne of them had ever felt such a thing on Mars b"eSfhoitr!e". Yeli said, "it's going to blow again for sure!"
"We have to drill a runoff well," Nadia "sAaidk.ind of pressure valve." "But what if it breaks out like the main one?" Sasha asked.
"If we put it at the upper end of the aquifer, or midway so that it takes some flow, it shJouustld be fine.
as good as the old water station, which someone probably blew up, or else it would still be working fine."
She shook her head bitterl"yW.
e have to risk
Iitf. it works, it workIsf. it doesn't, then maybe we cause
an outbreak.But if we don't do something, it looks like there'll be an outbreak anyway."
She led the little group down the main streeet to the robot warehouse in the garage, and sat down in the command center to begin programming agaAin. standard drilling operation, with maximum blowout
baffling. The water would come to the surface under artesian pressure, and then they would direct it into
a pipeline, which they would instruct a robot crew to lay in some direction that would take it out of the
Arena canyon regionS. he and the others studied topographic maps, and ran simulated floods down several canyons paralleling Arena to north and soTuthhe.y found that the watershed was huge, everything on Syrtis drained down toward Burroughs, the land was a big bowTlhehyerew. ould have to

pipe the water north for nearly three hundred kilometers to get it into the next watershed. "Look," Yeli said, "released into the Nili Fossae, it will run straight north onto Utopia Planitia, and freeze on the northern dunes."
"Sax must be loving this revolution," Nadia said a"gHaein's. approved."
getting stuff they never would have
"But a lot of his projects must be getting wrecked too," Yeli pointed out.
"I bet it's still a net gain, in Sax's tAerlml
sth. is water on the surface. . . ."
"We'll have to ask him."
"If we ever see him again."
Yeli was silenTt.hen he said": Is it that much water, really?"
"It's not just Lasswitz," Sam sa"iId.saw a news bit a while ago-they've broken the Lowell aquifer, a big breakout like the ones that cut the outflow chanInte'll .rip billions of kilos of regolith downslope, and I don't know how much wateIrt.'s unbelievable."
"But why?" Nadia said.
"It's the best weapon they have, I guess."
"Not much of a weapoTnh!ey can't aim it or stop it!"
"No.But neither can anyone elsAe.nd think about it-all the towns downslope from Lowell are
gone-Franklin, Drexler, Osaka, Galileo, I imagine even SilverAtonnd. A lot of channel mining towns are vulnerable, I should think."
all those were transnational towns.
"So both sides are attacking the infrastructure," Nadia said dully. "That's right."
She had to work, there was no other chSohicee.got them going again on robot programming, and they
spent the rest of that day and the next getting the robot teams out to the drilling site, and making sure the start-up went rightT. he drilling was straightforward; it was only a matter of making sure that pressures in
the aquifer didn't cause a blowoAutn. d the pipeline to transfer the water north was even simpler, an
operation that had been fully automated for years; but they doubled up on all the equipment, just to make sure. Up the north canyon road bed, and on northward from Nthoeren.eed to include pumps; artesian
pressure would regulate the flow quite nicely, because when the pressure dropped low enough to stop pushing water out of the canyon, the danger of a breakout at the lower end would presumably be past. So when the mobile magnesium mills were grinding along, scooping up fines and making pipe, and when the forklifts and frontloaders were taking these pipe segments to the assembler, and when that great moving building was taking in the segments and extruding pipe behind it as it rolled slowly along up the road, and when another mobile behemoth was going over the completed pipe, and wrapping it in aerolattice insulation made from tailings from the refinery; and when the first segment of the pipline was heated and running-then they declared the system operational, and hoped it would make it three hundred kilometers farther.The pipeline would be built at about a kilometer an hour, for twenty-four and a half hours a day; so if all went well, about twelve days to Nili AFtostshaaet. rate the pipeline would be done

very soon after the well was drilled and reAadnyd. if the landslide dam held that long, then they would have their pressure valve.
So Burroughs was safe, or as safe as they could make it by theiTr heefyforctos.uld goB. ut it was a question what their destination should bNea. dia sat slumped over a microwaved dinner, watching a terran news show, listening to her companions debate the iHssoureri.ble how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth:extremists, communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorisNtse. ver the words rebel
or revolutionary, words of which half the Earth (at least) might apNproo,veth. ey were isolated groups of
insane, destructive terroristsA.
nd it didn't help Nadia's mood that there was, she felt, some truth to the
description; it only made her angrier.
"We should join whoever we can, and help fight!" Angela said.
"I'm not fighting anyone," Nadia said mulis"hIlty's. won't fight."
stupid.I won't do itI.'ll fix things where I can, but I
A message came over the radFioo.urnier Crater, about eight hundred and sixty kilometers away, had a cracked dome.The populace was trapped in sealed buildings, and running out of air.
"I want to go there," Nadia s"aTidh.ere's a big central warehouse of construction robots thTehrey. could fix the dome, and then be set to other repairs down on Isidis."
"How will you get there?" Sam asked.
Nadia thought it over, took a deep bre"aUthlt.ralite, I guessT. here's some of those new 17Ds up on the south rim airstripT. hat would be the fastest way for sure, and maybe even the safest, who Skhneows."
looked at Yeli and Sash"aW.
ill you fly with me?"
"Yes," Yeli saidS.asha nodded.
"We want to come with you," Angela
"sIati'dll. be safer with two planes anyway."
They took two planes that had been built by Spencer's aeronautic factory in Elysium, the latest things, called simply 17Ds, ultralite delta-winged four-seat turbojets, made mostly of aerogel and plastics, dangerous to fly because they were so liBghutt. Yeli was an expert flier and Angela said she was too, so they climbed into two of them the next morning, after spending the night in the empty little airport, and taxied out to the packed dirt runway and took off directly into tIhtetosoukn. them a long time to rise to
a thousand meters.
The planet below looked deceptively normal, its old harsh face only a bit whiter on the north faces, as if aged by its parasite infestatioBn.ut then they flew out over Arena Canyon, and saw running down it a
dirty glacier, a river of broken ice bloTckhse.
glacier widened frequently where the flood had pooled for
a time.The ice blocks were sometimes pure white, but more often stained one martian shade or other, then broken and tumbled into a mix, so that the glacier was a shattered mosaic of frozen brick, sulfur, cinnamon, coal, fertilizer, cream, blood. . . . spilling down the flat bed of the canyon all the way to the

horizon, some seventy-five kilometers away.
Nadia asked Yeli if they could fly north and inspect the land that the robots were going to build the pipeline over.Soon after they turned they received a weak radio message on the first hundred band, from Ann Clayborne and Simon FrazieTr.hey were trapped in Peridier Crater, which had lost its dome; it was
to the north also, so they were already on the right course.
The land they crossed that morning appeared negotiable to the robot team; it was flat, and though littered with ejecta, there were no little stopper escarpmeFnatsrt.her on in this region the Nili Fossae
began, very gradually at first, just four very shallow depressions, curving down to the northeast like the
fingertips of a faint handprinAt.
hundred kilometers farther north, however, and they were parallel
chasms each five hundred meters deep, separated by dark land that had been heavily bashed by craters-a kind of lunar configuration, reminding Nadia of a messy constructioFnarstihter north still,
they got a surprisew: here the easternmost canyon debouched onto Utopia, there was another aquifer
outbreak. At its upper end it was simply a new slump, a big bowl of land shattered like a broken plate of glass; lower down, patches of frosting black and white water surged right out of the broken land, ripping
at the new blocks and carrying them away even as they watched, in a steaming flood that caused the land it touched to explodeT. his shocking wound was at least thirty kilometers across, and ran right over the horizon to the north, with no sign of dissipating.
Nadia stared at the sight and asked Yeli to fly n"Ieawrear.nt to avoid the steam," Yeli said, absorbed in
the sight himselfM.
ost of the white frost cloud was blowing east and falling down onto the landscape, but
the wind was fitful, and sometimes the thin white veil would rise straight up, obscuring the swath of black water and white ice.The outflow was as big as one of the big Antarctic glaciers, or evenCubtitgingger.
the red landscape in two.
"That is a hell of a lot of water," Angela said.
Nadia switched to the first hundred band, and called Ann down in P"eArindni,erd. o you know about
this?" She described what they were flying ov"eAr.nd it's still running, the ice is moving, and we can see patches of open water, it looks black or sometimes red, you know."
"Can you hear it?"
"Just sort of like a ventilator hum, and some cracks and pops from the iBceu,t yweea'hre. up here ourselves."
"Hell of a lot of water!"
"Well," Ann said, "That aquifer isn't very big compared to some."
"How are they breaking them opeCna?n people really break those open?"
pretty loud
"Some of them," Ann sa"idT.he ones with hydrostatic pressure greater than lithostatic pressure are in essence lifting the rock up, and it's the permafrost layer that is forming a kind of dam, aInf yicoeu dam.
drilled a well and blew it up, or if you me.lte. d. i.t ."
"But how?"
"Reactor meltdown."

Angela whistled.
"But the radiation!" Nadia cried.
"Sure.But have you looked at your counter lateIlyfi?gure three or four of them must have gone." "Wow!" Angela cried.
"And that's just so farA."nn's voice had that distant, dead tone it took on when she wasShaengry. answered their questions about the flood very brieAflyf.lood that big caused extreme pressure
fluctuations; bedrock was smashed then plucked away, and it was all swept downstream in a pulverizing rush, a ripping, gaseous, boulder-filled slur"ryA.re you going to come over to Peridier?" she asked when their questions trailed off.
"We're just turning east now," Yeli repl"iIedw. anted to get a visual fix on Crater Fv first." "Good idea."
They flew onT.he astounding roil of the flood dropped beneath the horizon, and they flew over the familiar old stone and sand agaSino.on Peridier appeared over the horizon ahead, a low, much-eroded crater wall.Its dome was gone, tattered sheets of the fabric thrown aside, still rolling this way and that over the crater rampart, as if a seed pod had Tbhuerstp. iste running south reflected the sun like a silver thread. They flew over the arc of the crater wall, and Nadia peered down at the dark buildings through binoculars, cursing in a low Slavic chaHnot.w? Who? Why? There was no way to teTllh.ey flew on to
the airstrip out on the far crater rampNaortn. e of the hangars were working, and they had to suit up and drive some little cars over the rim into town.
All the survivng occupants of Peridier were holed up in the physicaNl apdliaanta. nd Yeli went through its lock and gave Ann and Simon a hug, and then they were introduced to thTeheortehewrse. re about
forty of them, living off emergency supplies, struggling to balance the gas exchange in the sealed buildings. "What happened?" Angela asked them, and they told the story in a kind of Greek chorus, interrupting
each other frequentlya:
single explosion had burst the dome like a balloon, causing an instantaneous
decompression that had also blown up many of the town's builLdiuncgksi.ly the physical plant was
reinforced, and had withstood the internal pressures of its own air supply; and those inside had survived. Those out on the streets, or in the other buildings, had not.
"Where's Peter?" Yeli asked, startled and fearful.
"He's on Clarke," Simon said quick"lHy.e called us right after this all begHaen's.
been trying to get a
spot on one of the elevators down, but it's all police at this point, I guess there were a lot of them in orbi
He'll get down when he caInt's. see him."
safer up there right now anyway, so I'm not in that much of a hurry to
This made Nadia think of Arkady agBaiunt. there was nothing to be done; and quickly she set herself to the task of rebuilding PeridieSr.he first asked the survivors what their plans were, and when they
shrugged, she suggested that they start by setting up a much smaller tent than the dome had been, using
tenting material stored in the construction warehouses out at the aiTrphoere.
were a lot of older robots
mothballed out there, and so reconstruction would be possible without too much preliminary Ttohoeling. occupants were enthusiastic; they had not known about the contents of the airport wareNhoaduisaes. shook her head at thi"sI.t's in all the records," she said to Yeli later, "they only hadTthoeyasjku.st
weren't thinking.They were just watching the TV, watching and waiting."

"Well, it's a shock to have a dome go like that, TNhaedyiah. ad to make sure the building was secure first."
"I guess."
But there were very few engineers or construction specialists amongTtheym.were mostly
escarpment areologists, or minersB. asic construction was something that robots did, or so they seemed
to think.It was hard to say how long they would have gone before they would have started in on the reconstruction themselves, but with Nadia there to point out what could be done, and drive them with a brief burst of withering scorn at their inactivity, they were soon undeNr awdiaay.worked eighteen and
twenty hours a day for a few days, and got a foundation wall laid, and tenting cranes into action over the rooftops; after that it was mostly a matter of superviRsieosntl.essly Nadia asked her companions from
Lasswitz if they would join her in the planes again, and moTvheeyona. greed; and so about a week after their arrival they took off again, with Ann and Simon joining them in Angela and Sam's plane.
# # #
As they flew south, down the slope of Isidis toward Burroughs, a coded message clittered abruptly over
their radio speakersN.
adia dug through her pack and found a bag of stuff Arkady had given her,
including a bunch of files; she found the one she wanted and plugged it into the plane's AI, and they ran the message through Arkady's decryption prograAmf.ter a few seconds the AI spoke the message in its
even tones:
"UNOMA is in possession of Burroughs, and detaining everyone who comes here."
There was silence in the two planes, winging south through the empty pBinekloswkyt.hem the plain of
Isidis sloped down to the left.
Ann said, "Let's go there anywWaye.
can tell them in person to stop the assaults."
"No," Nadia replied".I want to be able to woArkn.d if they lock us up. . . Besides, why do you think they'd listen to what we tell them about the assaults?"
No answer from Ann.
"Can we make it to Elysium?" Nadia asked Yeli. "Yes."
So they turned east, and ignored radio queries from Burroughs air traffic "cTohnetryol.won't come after
us," Yeli said with assuranc"eL. ook, the satellite radar shows there's a lot of planes up and around, too many to go after all of theAmn.d it would be a waste of time anyway, because I suspect most of them are decoys.Someone's sent up a whole lot of drones, which confuses the issue nicely as far as we're concerned."
"Someone really put a lot of effort into this," Nadia muttered as she looked at the raFdaivreimorage. six objects were glowing in the southern quadr"aWnt.as it you, ArkadyD? id you hide that much from me?"
She thought of that radio transmitter of his, which she had just run across in"Ohrermbaaygb.e it wasn't

hid. Maybe I just didn't want to see it."
# # #
They flew to Elysium, and landed next to South Fossa, the largest roofed canyon ofTthheeymfoaulln.d
that the roof was still there; but only, it turned out, because the city had been depressurized before it had been punctured.So the inhabitants were trapped in any number of intact buildings, and trying to keep the farm alive.There had been an explosion at the physical plant, and several others in the towSno itself.
there was a lot of work to be done, but there was a good base for a quick recovery, and a more enterprising population than the group in PeridSieor. Nadia threw herself into it as before, determined to fill every waking moment with worSkh. e could not stand to be idle; she worked every moment she was awake, her old jazz tunes running through her mind-nothing appropriate, there was no jazz or blues appropriate to this-it was all completely incongruous, "On the Sunny Side of the "SPterneenti,e"s From Heaven," "A Kiss To Build a Dream On". . . .
And in those hectic days on Elysium she began to realize just how much power the rIonboatlsl heard.
years of construction she had never really tried to exert that power to the full; there simply had been no need. But now there were hundreds of jobs to be done, more than could be accomplished even with a total effort, and so she took the system right out to the bleeding edge as programmers would say, and saw just how much that effort could do, even as she tried to figure out how toShdeo hmadorea.lways considered teleoperation to be a basically local procedure, for instance, but it wasn't necessarily so; using relay satellites she could drive a bulldozer in the other hemisphere, and now, whenever she could
establish a good link, she did sSoh.e did not stop working for even a single waking second; she worked
as she ate, she read reports and programs in the bathroom, and she never slept except when exhaustion
knocked her outW.
hile in this timeless state she told anyone and everyone she worked with what to do,
without regard for their opinion or comfort; and in the face of her monomaniacal concentration, and the authority of her grasp of the situation, people obeyed her.
Despite all this effort, they could not do enough; so that it always came back to Nadia, and she alone through the sleepless hours gave the system a full stretch, out on the bleeding edge all Athned time.
Elysium had a huge fleet of construction robots already built, so that it was possible to atotafckthemost
pressing problems simultaneouslyM.
ost of those were located among the canyons on Elysium's western
slope. All the roofed canyons had been broken otpoenone degree or another, but most of their physical plants were untouched, and there were a great number of survivors hunkered down in individual buildings running on emergency generators, as in South FoWssah.en South Fossa was covered and heated and
pumped up, she directed teams to go out and find all the survivors on the western slope, and they were pulled out of the other canyons and brought to South, and then sent back out with jTobhse to do.
roofing crews moved from canyon to canyon, and their ex-occupants went to work underneath, readying
for the pump-upsA.
t that point Nadia turned her attention to other matters, programming toolmakers,
starting robot linemen along the brokpeinpelines from Chasma Borealis". Who did all this?" she said with disgust, staring one night at the TV's image of burst water pipes.
The question was torn out of her; in reality she didn't want toShkenodwid. n't want to think about the bigger picture, about anything but that pipeline there, broken on the Bd ut eYs.eli took her at her word, and said, "It's hard to teTllh.e Terran news programs are all about Earth now, there's only an occasional clip from here, and they don't know what to make of itAepitphaerre.ntly the next few shuttles are
bringing UN troops, who are supposed to restore orBduetr. most of the news is about Earth-the Middle East war, the Black Sea, Africa, you namAe ilto. t of the Southern Club is bombing flag of convenience countries, and the Group of Seven has declared they're going to defendAtnhdemth.ere's a biological
agent loose in Canada and Scandinavia-"

"And maybe here too," Sasha interrupt"eDd.id you see that clip of AcheroSno?mething happened
there, the windows of the habitat are all blown out, and the land underneath the fin is covered with these growths of God knows what, no one wants to get near enough to find out. . . ."
Nadia closed her mind to their talk, and concentrated on the problem of the Wpihpenlinseh. e returned
to real time, she found that every single robot she could find was in action reconstituting the towns, and the factories were busily pumping out more bulldozers, earthmovers, dump trucks, backhoes,
frontloaders, steamrollers, framers, foundation diggers, welders, cement makers, plastic makers, roofers,
everything. The system was at full pump, and there wasn't enough to occupy her anAynmdorseo.
she
told the others she wanted to take off again, and Ann and Simon and Yeli and Sasha decided to accompany her;Angela and Sam had met friends in South Fossa, and were going to stay.
So the five climbed into their two planes, and took offTahgisainw.as the way it would happen
everywhere, Yeli asserted; whenever members of the first hundred encountered each other, they would not separate.
# # #
They headed in the two planes south, toward HPelalsassi.ng over Tyrrhena Mohole, next to Hadriaca
Patera, they landed briefly; the mohole town was punctured, and needed help to start the rebuilding.
There were no robots on hand, but Nadia had found she could start an operation with as small a seed as her programs, a computer, and an air miTnehra.t kind of spontaneous generation of machinery was
another aspect of their poweIrt. was slower, no doubt of that; still, within a month these three
components together would have conjured obedient beasts out of the
fsiarnstd:the factories, then the
assembly plants, then the construction robots themselves, vehicles as big and articulated as a city block, doing their work in their absencIet. really was confounding, their new power.
And yet all of it was as nothing in the face of human destrucTtivhe efisvse.
travelers flew from ruin to
ruin, becoming numb to the damage and to the dNeaodt . that they were insensible to their own danger; after passing over a number of wrecked planes in the Hellas-Elysium flight corridor, they switched to night flights.These flights were more dangerous than day flights in many ways, but Yeli was more comfortable with their level of stealTthh.e 17Ds were nearly invisible to radar, and would leave only the faintest traces on the most powerful tight-focus IR detecAtolrls.of them were willing to take the risk of that minute exposure.Nadia didn't care at all, she would have been happy to fly bSyhedlaiyv.ed in the
moment as much as she could, her thoughts ran in circles as she kept trying to drag them back to the moment; stunned by the waste of all that had been destroyed, she was becoming far distanced from her emotions. She only wanted to work.
And Ann, some part of Nadia noticed, was wOorfsec.ourse she must have been worried about Peter.
And then all the destruction as well; for her it was not the structures but the land itself, the floods, the
mass wasting, the snow, the radiatioAnn. d she had no work to distract
Hheerr. work would have been
the study of the damagAe.nd so she did nothing, or tried to help Nadia when she could, moving around
like an automatonD.
ay after day they worked at initiating the repair of one ruined structure or another, a
bridge, a pipeline, a well, a power station, a piste, a Tthoewyn.lived in what Yeli called Waldo World, ordering robots about as if they were slavemasters or magicians, or gods; and the machines went to work, trying to reverse the film of time and make broken things fly back toWgeithert.he luxury of
haste they could be sloppy, and it was incredible how fast they could initiate construction, and then fly on. "In the beginning was the word," Simon said wearily one evening, punching at his wArisbtpraiddg. e
crane swung across the setting suAnn. d then they were off again.
# # #

They started up containment and burial programs for three blown reactors, staying safely over the horizon and working by teleoperatioWn. hile watching the operations, Yeli sometimes switched channels and had a look at the newOsn.ce the shot was from orbait:full disk shot ofthe Tharsis hemisphere, in daytime for all but the western limFrbo.m that height they could see no sign of the outfBlouwt st.he
voiceover claimed they had occurred in all the old outflow channels that ran north from Marineris into Chryse; and the image jumped to a telescopic shot, which showed whitish pink bands in that region. Canals at last, of a sort.
Nadia snapped the TV back to their wSoorkm.
uch destroyed, so many people killed, people who
might have lived a thousand years-and, of course, no word of AIrtkahdayd. been twenty days now.
People were saying he might have been forced into complete hiding, to avoid being killed by a strike from orbit. But Nadia no longer believed this, except in moments of extreme desire and pain, the two emotions surging up through the obsessive work mode in a brand-new mixture, a new feeling that she hated and feared: desire causing pain, pain causing desire-a hot fierce desire, that things not be as thHeyowwere.
painful such a desire wasB! ut if she worked hard enough, there was no time Nfoor tiitm. e to think or feel.
They flew over the bridge spanning Harmakhis Vallis, on the eastern border of Hellas; it was down. Repair robots were cached in endhouses on all major bridges, and these could be adapted to total reconstruction of the spans, although they would be slowTahteitt.ravelers got them going, and that
evening, after finishing the last programs, they sat down to microwaved spagetti in the plane's cabins, and
Yeli turned on the Terran TV channel agTaihne.re was nothing but static and a snaking, destroyed image. He tried switching channels, but all the channels were the sDamenes.e, buzzing static.
"Have they blown up Earth too?" Ann said.
"No no," Yeli sai"dS. omeone's jamming it. The sun is between us and it, these days, and you would only have to interfere with a few relay stations to cut contact."
They stared glumly at the fizzing screIenn.recent days the local areosynchronous communications satellites had been going down left and right; shut down or sabotaged, it was impossiblNe otwo , say. without the Terran news, they would really be in the Sduarrfka.ce-to-surface radio was limited indeed, given the tight horizons and the lack of an ionosphere; not much more range than walker intercoms,
really. Yeli tried a variety of stochastic resonance patterns, to see if he could cut through the jamming.
The signals were scrambled beyond repaHire.
gave up with a grunt, punched out a search proTgrhaem.
radio oscillated up and down through the hertz, gathering static and stopping at the occasional faint punctuation: coded clicking, irretrievable snatches of musGich. ost voices gabbling in unrecognizable
languages, as if Yeli had succeeded where SETI had failed, and finally, now that it was pointless, gotten messages from the starsP.robably just stuff from the asteroid mineInrs.any case incomprehensible,
useless. They were alone on the face of Mars, five people in two small airplanes.
It was a new and very peculiar sensation, which only became more acute in the days that followed, when it didn't go away, and they understood that they were going to have to proceed with all their TVs and radios blanked by white noisIet. was an experience unique not only in their martian experience, but in
their whole livesA. nd they quickly found thlaotsing the electronic information net was like losing one of their senses; Nadia kept glancing down at her wristpad, on which, until this breakdown, Arkady could have appeared any second; on which any of the first hundred might have showed up, and declared
themselves safe; and then she would look up from the little blank square at the land around her, suddenly so much bigger and wilder and emptier than it had ever been bItefworaes. frightening, trulyN. othing
but jagged rust hills for as far as the eye could see, even when flying in the airplanes at dawn and looking

for one of the little landing strips marked on the map, which when spotted would resemble little tan pencils. Such a big worldA! nd they were alone in Eitv.en navigation could no longer be taken for
granted, no longer be left to the computers; they had to use road transponders, and dead reckoning, and visual fixes, peering down anxiously in the dawn twilight to spot the next airstrip in the wOilndceerneitss.
took them well into the morning to find a strip near Dao Vallis; after that Yeli began to follow pistes, flying low through the night and watching the silvery ribbon snake below them through the starlight, checking transponder signals against the maps.
And so they managed to fly down in the broad lowland of Hellas basin, following the piste to Low Point Lakefront. Then in the horizontal red light and long shadows of sunrise, a sea of shattered ice came over the horizon into viewI.t filled the whole western part of HeAllass.ea.
The piste they had been followrianng right into iceT.he frozen shorelinewas a jagged tangle of ice
plates that were black or red or white or even blue, or a rich jade green-all piled together, as if a tidal wave had crushed Big Man's butterfly collection, and left it strewn over a barrenBebyeoancdh. it the
frozen sea stretched right over the horizon.
After many second's silence, Ann said, "They must have broken the Hellespontus Taqhuatifewr.as a really big one, and it would drain down to Low Point."
"So the Hellas mohole must be flooded!" Yeli said.
"That's rightA. nd the water at the bottom of it will heaPtroubpa.bly hot enough to keep the surface of
the lake from freezingH. ard to sayT. he air is cold, but with the turbulence there might be a clear spot. If not, then right under the surface it will be liquid forMsuusrte.be some strong currents in faBcut.t the
surface. . . ."
Yeli said, "We'll see pretty soon, we're going to fly over it." "We should be landing," Nadia observed.
"Well, we will when we cBane.sides, things seem to be calming down a bit." "That's just a function of being cut off from news."
"Hmm."
As it turned out they had to fly all the way across the lake, and land on theItowthaesr saindee.erie
morning, flying low across a shattered surface reminiscent of the Arctic Sea, except here the ice flows were frosting like an open freezer door, and they were colored across the whole spectrum, heavy on the reds of course, but this only made the occasional blues and greens and yellows stand out more vividly, the focus points of an immense, chaotic mosaic.
And there at its center-where, even flying as high as they were, the ice sea still extended to the horizon in every direction-there was an enormous steam cloud, rising thousands of meters into Cthireclianigr. this
cloud cautiously,they saw that the ice underneath it was broken into bergs and floes, floating
tight-packed in roiling, steaming black watTerh.e dirty bergs rotated, collided, turned turtle and caused
thick walls of red-black water to splash upward; when these walls fell back down, waves expanded out in concentric circles, bobbing all the bergs up and down as they passed.
There was silence in the two planes as they stared down at this most unmartian Fspineacltlayc,lea.fter

two mute circumnavigations of the steam column, they flew on westward over the shattered"Sawxaste. must be loving this revolution," Nadia said as she had before, breaking the "sDileoncyeo.u think he's
part of it?"
"I doubt it," Ann sa"idH.e probably wouldn't risk his Terran investmeNnot.r an orderly progression to the project, or some kind of contrBoul.t I'm sure he's evaluating it in terms of how it affects the terraforming. Not who's dying, or what's getting wrecked, or who's taking overJuhset reh.ow it affects the project."
"An interesting experiment," Nadia said.
"But hard to model," Ann saTidh.ey both had to laugh.
# # #
Speak of the devil-they landed west of the new sea (Lakefront was drowned), and spent the day resting;
and the next night as they followed the piste northwest toward Marineris, they flew over a transponder that was blinking S.O.S. in Morse coTdhe.ey circled the transponder until dawn, and landed on the piste itself, just beyond a disabled rovAern. d next to it was Sax, in a walker, fiddling with the transponder to send his manual S.O.S.
Sax climbed into their plane and slowly took off his helmet, blinking and purse-mouthed, his usual bland
self. Tired, but looking like the rat that ate the canary, as Ann said to NadHiea
slaiedr.littleH.
e had
been stuck on the piste in the rover for three days, unable to move; the piste was dead, and the rover had no emergency fuelL. akefront had indeed drowned: "I was leaving for Cairo," he said, "to meet with
Frank and Maya, because they think it would help to have the whole first hundred together, to form some
kind of authority to negotiate with the UNOMA police, and get them toHestohpa.d"
taken off, and was
in the Hellspontus foothills when the Low Point mohole's thermal cloud had suddenly turned yellow, and plumed twenty thousand meters into the s"kIyt . turned into a mushroom cloud like a nuclear explosion,
but with a smaller cap," he note"dT.he temperature gradient isn't so steep in our atmosphere."
After that he had turned back, and gone to the edge of the basin to see some of thTeheflowoadtienrg.
running down the basin from the north had been black but kept going white, icing over in big segments almost instantaneously, except around Lakefront, where it had bubbled "like water on the stove. Thermodynamics were pretty complex there for a while, but the water cooled the mohole pretty fast,
and-"
"Shut up, Sax," Ann said.
Sax lifted his eyebrows, and went to work improving the plane's radio receiver.
# # #
They flew on, six of them now, Sasha and Yeli, Ann and Simon, Nadia saixndofSathxe:
first hundred,
gathered together as if by magnetisTmh.ere was a lot to talk about that night, and they exchanged stories, information, rumors, speculationsB. ut Sax could add little concrete to the overall picHtuereh. ad been cut off from the news just like theyAhgaadi.n Nadia shuddered as if at a lost sense, realizing that this was a problem that wasn't going to go away.
The next morning at sunrise they landed at Bakhuysen's airstrip, and were met by a dozen people carrying police stun gunsT.his little crowd kept their gun barrels down, but escorted the six with very

little ceremony into the hangar inside the crater wall.
There were more people in the hangar, and the crowd grew all thEevetnimtuea.lly there were about fifty of them, about thirty of them womTenh.ey were perfectly polite, and, when they discovered the
travelers' identities, even friendly".We just have to make sure who we're dealing with," one of them said, a big woman with a strong Yorkshire accent.
"And who are you?" Maya asked boldly.
"We're from Korolyov Prime," she sa"iWd.e escaped."
They took the travelers into their dining hall, and treated them to a big bWreahkefnasth. ey were all
seated, people took up magnesium jugs and reached across the table to pour their neighbor's apple juice,
and their neighbors did likewise, until everyone was serTvheden.
over pancakes the two groups
exchanged stories.The Bakhuysen crowd had escaped from Korolyov Prime in the first day of the
revolt, and had made their way this far south, with plans to go all the way down to the southern polar region. "That's a big rebel location," the Yorkshire woman (whom it turned out was really Finnish) told them. "There are these stupendous bench terraces with overhangs, you see, so in effect they're these long open-sided caves, a couple klicks long most of the time, and quite widePerrefaelclyt . for staying out of
satellite view but having a bit of Aairk. ind of a Cro-Magnon cliff-dweller life they're setting up down there. Lovely, really."Apparently these long caves had been famous in Korolyov, and a lot of the prisoners had agreed to rendezvous there if a breakout ever occurred.
"So are you with Arkady?" Maya asked. "Who?"
It turned out they were followers of the biologist Schnelling, who from the sound of it had been a kind of red mystic, held in Korolyov with them, where he had died a few yearsHbeefhoarde. given wrist
lectures that had been very popular on Tharsis, and after his incarceration many of the prisoners in Korolyov had become his studentAs.pparently he taught them a kind of martian communalism based on principles of the local biochemistry; the group at Bakhuysen wasn't very clear about it, but now they were out, and hoping to contact other rebel forTcehse.y had succeeded in establishing contact with a stealthed satellite, programmed to operate in directed microbursts; they had also managed briefly to monitor a channel being used by security forces on PhobSo .they had a little newPs.hobos, they said, was
being used as a surveillance and attack station by transnational and UNOMA police forces, recently arrived on the latest continuous shuttlTe.hese same forces had control of the elevator, of Pavonis Mons, and of most of the rest of Tharsis; the Olympus Mons observatory had rebelled, but been firestormed from orbit; and transnational security forces had occupied most of the great escarpment, effectively cutting the planet in twAo.nd the war on Earathppeared to be continuing, although they had the
impression it was hottest in Africa, Spain, and the US-Mexican border.
They thought it was useless to try going to Pavonis; "they'll either lock you up or kill you," as Sonja put it. But when the six travelers decided to try anyway, they were given precise directions to a refuge a night's flight to the west; it was the Southern Margaritifer weather station, the Bakhuysen people told
them. Occupied byBogdanovists.
Nadia's heart leaped when she heard that word, she couldn't hBeulpt Ait.rkady had a lot of friends and followers, and none of them seemed to know where heStwilal,s.she found herself unable to sleep that day, her stomach again tied in a kTnohta.t night at sunset she was happy to return the planes and take
off. The rebels in Bakhuysen sent them on their way so laden with hydrazine and gases and freeze-dried

food that their planes had a hard time getting off the ground.
# # #
Their night flights had taken on a strangely ritual aspect, as if they were in the process of inventing a new and exhausting pilgrimageT. he two planes were so light that they were buffeted hard by the prevailing
western winds,sometimes bouncing wildly ten meters up or down, so that it was impossible to sleep for long even when one was not flying; a sudden drop or lift and one was awake again, in the dark little cabin, staring out the window at the black sky and stars above, or the starless black worTldheybelow. spoke hardly at alTl.he pilots hunched forward, expending their energy on keeping a visual fix on the other plane.The planes hummed along, winds keening over their long flexible wItinwgsa.s sixty degrees
below zero outside, the air only 150 millibars and poisonous; and there was no shelter on the black planet below, for many kilometers in every directNioand.ia would pilot for a while, then move to the
back, and twist and turn, and try to slOeeftpe.n the click of a transponder over the radio, combined with
the general aspect of their situation, would remind her of the time she and Arkady had ridden the storm in the Arrowhead.She would see him then, striding red-bearded and naked through the broken interior of
the dirigible, tearing away paneling to throw overboard, laughing , fines floating in a nimbus around him-then the 17D would jerk her awake, and she would twist with the discomfort ofIthewr ofueladr.
have helped to pilot again, but Yeli wanted to as much as she, at least for the first couple of hours of his watch. There was nothing for it but to help him watch for the other plane, always a kilometer to the right
if all was welTl.hey had occasional radio contact with the other plane, but microbursted the calls, and
kept them to a minimum; hourly checks, or inquiries if one fell
Ebevheirnydth. ing had taken on ritualistic
qualities, and in the dead of night it sometimes seemed this was all any of them had ever done, it was hard to recall what life had been like before the reAvnodlt. what had it been, twenty-four dayTsh?ree weeks,
though it felt like five years.
And then the sky would begin to bleed behind them, high cirrus clouds turning purple, rust, crimson, lavender, and then swiftly to metal shavings, in a rosy sky; and the incredible fountain of the sun would pour over some rocky rim or scarp, and they would search anxiously as they ghosted over the pocked and shadowed landscape, looking for some sign of an airstrip by theAfpteisrtet.he eternal night it
seemed impossible that they would have navigated successfully to anything at all, but there lay the gleaming piste below, which they could land on directly in an emerAgenndcyt.he transponders being all individually identifiable, and pegged to the map, their navigation was always more sure than it seemed; so every dawn they would spot a strip down in the shadows ahead, a welcome blond pencil strip of perfect flatness. Down they would glide, thump against the ground, slow down, taxi to whatever facilities they
could find; stop the engines, slump back in the sFeeaetls.the strange lack of vibration, the stillness of another day.
# # #
That morning they landed at the strip by the Margaritifer station, and were met at their planes by a dozen men and women who were extravagantly enthusiastic in their welcome, hugging and kissing the six
travelers countless times, and laughing as they didThseo. six clumped together, more alarmed by this than by the wary greeting of the day beTfohrei.r welcomers did not neglect to run laser readers over their wrists to identify them, which was reassuring; but when the AI confirmed that they were indeed receiving six of the first hundred, thebyurst into cheers, and carried on in the very highest of Isnpirits.
fact when the six were lead through a lock into a commons, several their hosts went over immediately to some small tanks, and breathed in hits of what proved to be nitrous oxygen and an pandorphin aerosol, after which they laughed themselves silly.
One of them, a slender fresh-faced American, introduced him"Is'emlf.Steve, I trained with Arkady on

Phobos in 12, and worked with him on ClaMrkoes.t of us here worked with him on ClaWrkee.were in
Schiaparelli when the revolution began."
"Do you know where Arkady is?" Nadia asked.
"Last we heard he was in Carr, but now he's out of the net, which is the way it should be."
A tall skinny American shambled up to Nadia, and put his hand on her shoulder and said, "We're not always like this!" and laughed.
"We're not!" Steve agree"dB. ut it's a holiday todayY! ou haven't heard?
A giggling woman scraped her face off the table and cried, "Independence Day! Fourteen the
Fourteenth!"
"Watch, watch this," Steve said, and pointed at their TV.
An image of space flickered onto the screen, and suddenly the whole group was yelling and cheering. They had locked onto a coded channel from Clarke, Steve explained, and though they could not decode its messages, they had used it as a beacon to aim their station's optical teTlehsecoipmea.ge from the
telescope had been transferred onto the commons TV, and there it was, the black sky and the stars blocked at the center by the shape they had all learned to recognize, the squared-off metallic asteroid with the cable extending out of"Nit.ow watch!" they yelled at the puzzled travel"eWrsa. tch!"
They howled again, and some of them began a ragged countdown, starting at one Shoumndereodf.
them were inhaling helium as well as nitrous oxide, and these stood below the big screen singing, "We're off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard ofBOecza!use, because, because, because, because of the wonderful things she doesW! e're off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard oWf Oe'zre!. . . . off to
see the wizard! . . ."
Nadia found herself shiverinTg.he shouted countdown got louder and loudrea,ched a shrieked
"Zero."
A gap appeared between the asteroid and the cCablalrek. e disappeared from the screen instantTlyh.e cable, gossamer among the stars, dropped out of view almost as fast.
Wild cheers filled the room, for a moment at Bleuatst.it caught, as if on a hitch, as some of the celebrants were distracted by Ann leaping to her feet, both fists at her mouth.
"He's sure to be down by now!" Simon cried to Ann over th"eHire'sdisnu. re to be downIt!'s been weeks since he called!"
Slowly it got quieNt.adia found herself at Ann's side, across from Simon and SSahsehad. idn't know
what to sayA.
nn was rigid, her eyes bugged out horribly.
"How did you break the cable?" Sax asked.
"Well, the cable's pretty much unbreakablSet,e"ve replied. "You broke the cable?" Yeli exclaimed.

"Well, no, we separated the cable from Clarke, is what wBeutditdh.e effect is the samTeh.at cable is on its way down."
The group cheered again, somewhat more weaSktleyv. e explained to the travelers over the no"iTseh:e cable itself was pretty much impervious, it's graphite whisker with a diamond sponge-mesh gel double-helixed into it, and they've got smart pebble defense stations every hundred kilometers, and security on the cars that was intenSsoe. Arkady suggested we work on Clarke itsSeelfe., the cable goes
right through the rock to the factories in the interior, and the actual end of it was physically as well as magnetically bonded to threock of the asteroidB. ut we landed with a bunch of our robots in a shipment
of stuff from orbit, and dug into the interior and placed thermal bombs outside the cable casing, and around the magnetic generatorT.hen today we set them all off at once, and the rock went liquid at the
same time the magnets were interrupted, and you know Clarke is going like a bullet, so it slipped right off the cable end just like thAat!nd we timed it so that it's going directly away from the sun, and twenty-four degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic as well! So it'll be damned hard to trackAtitledaoswt nw. e hope
so!"
"And the cable itself?" Sasha said.
It got loud with cheers again, and it was Sax who answered her, in the next quie"tFamlloinmg,e"nth:e
said. He was at a computer console, typing as fast as he could, but Steve called out to him, "We have the figures on the descent if you want thIetm's .pretty complex, a lot of partial differential equations."
"I know," Sax said.
"I can't believe it," said SimHone. still had his hands on Ann's arm, and he looked around at the revelers, his face grim".The impact's going to kill a lot of people!"
"Probably not," one of them repli"eAd.nd those it does kill will mostly be UN police, who have been using the elevator to get down and kill people here on the ground."
"He's probably been down a week or two," Simon repeated emphatically to Ann, who was now white-faced.
"Maybe," she said.
Some people heard this, and quieted down; others did not want to hear, and continued to celebrate. "We didn't know," Steve said to Ann and SiHmiosne. xpression of triumph was gone, he was frowning
with concern."If we had known, I guess we could have tried to contacBtuht imw.e didn't knowI.'m sorry. Hopefully-" he swallowed". Hopefully he wasn't up there."
Ann walked back to their table, sat doSwimn.on hovered anxiously at her sidNee. ither of them appeared to have heard anything Steve had said.
# # #
Radio traffic increased somewhat, as those in control of the remaining communcations satellites got the news about the cableS.ome of the celebrating rebels got busy monitoring and recording these messages; other continued to party.
Sax was still absorbed by the equations on the sc"Greoenin.g east," he remarked.

"That's right," Steve sai"dI.t'll make a big bow in the middle at first, as the lower part pulls down, and then the rest will follow."
"How fast?"
"That's hard to say, but we think about four hours for the first time around, and then an hour for the second time around."
"Second time around!" Sax said.
"Well, you know, the cable is 37,000 kilometers long, and the circumference at the equator is twenty-one thousand.So it'll go around almost twice."
"The people on the equator had better move fast," Sax said.
"Not exactly the equator," Sam sa"iTdh. e Phobos oscillation will cause it to swerve away from the equator to a certain extenTt.hat's actually the hardest part to calculate, because it depends where the cable was in its oscillation when it began to fall."
"North or south?"
"We should know in the next couple of hours."
The six travelers stared helplessly at the scrIetewn.as quiet for the first time since their arTrihveal.
screen showed nothing but starNs.o vantage point existed from which to view the elevator's fall; the
cable, never visible for more than a fraction of its length to any single observer, would stay invisible to the end. Or visible only as a falling line of fire.
"So much for Phyllis's bridge," Nadia said. "So much for Phyllis," said Sax.
# # #
The Margarifiter group re-established contact with the satellite transmissions they had located, and they found they were also able to poach a number of security satellites. From all these channels they were able
to piece together a partial account of the cable'sFrfaolml.
Nicosia, a UNOMA team reported that the
cable had fallen north of them, crumpling down vertically while yet still rapidly covering ground, as if it were cutting through the turning planTeth.ough north of them, they thought it was south of the eqAuator. staticky, panicky voice from Sheffield asked them for confirmation of this; the cable had already fallen
across half the city and a line of tents east of it, all the way down the slope of Pavonis Mons and across east Tharsis, flattening a zone ten kilometers wide with its sonic boom; it would have been worse, but the air was so thin at that elevation that it did not carry muchNofworcteh.e survivors in Sheffield wanted to
know whether to run south to escape the next wrapping, or try to get around the caldera to the north.
They got no replBy.ut more escapees from Korolyov, on the south rim of Melas Chasma in Marineris, reported over one of the rebel channethlse: cable was now falling so hard it was shattering on impact.
Half an hour later an Aureum drilling operation called in; they had gone out after the sonic booms, and found a mound of glowing brecciated debris, stretching from horizon to horizon.

There was an hour's absence of any new hard information, nothing but questions and speculation and rumor. Then one of the headphoned listeners leaned back and showed thumbs up to the rest of them, and clicked on the intercom, and an excited voice came on yelling through the"Its'stateixc:ploding! It came
down in about four seconds, it was burning top to bottom and when it hit the ground everything jumped
right under our feet!We're having trouble with a leak heWree.
figure we're about eighteen kilometers
south of where it hit, and we're twenty-five south of the equator, so you should be able to calculate the rest of the wrap from that, I hoItpew. as burning from top to bottomLi!ke this white line cutting the sky
in half! I've never seen anything like Ii'vt.e still got afterimages in my vision, they're bright gIrteewna. s
like a shooting star had stretched. . . . Wait, Jorge is on the intercom, he's out there and saying it's only about three meters high where he is. It's soft regolith here, so the cable's in a trench it smashed for itself. He says it's so deep in places you could bury it and have a levelTshuorsfea'clle.be like fords, he says,
because in other places it stands five or six meters Ihgiguhe.ss it'll do that for hundreds of kilometers at a stretch! It'll be like the Great Wall of China."
Then a call came in from Escalante Crater; it was right on the equator, and they had evacuated immediately on news of the break with Clarke, but had gone south, so that the arrival of the cable had turned out to be a close thiTngh.e cable was now exploding on impact, they reported, and sending
sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.
During all this time Sax never left his screen, and now he was muttering through pursed lips as he typed and read the screenT. he second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers
an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it-a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away-it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a sSeocnoincd.booms to follow.
"Let's go out and have a look," Steve suggested with a guilty glance at Ann anAd lSoitmoofn.them suited up and went outsidTe.he travelers contented themselves with a video image piped in from the exterior camera, alternating that with video clips gleaned from the sateCllliitpess. shot from the night side
surface were spectacular; they showed a blazing curved line, cutting down like the edge of a white scythe that was trying to chop the planet in two.
Even so they found it hard to concentrate, hard to focus on what they were seeing and understand it, much less feel anything about Tith.ey had been exhausted when they had landed, and now they were
even more exhausted, and yet it was impossible to sleep; more and more video clips were being passed along, some from robot cameras flying in drones on the day side, showing a blackened steaming swath of desolation-the regolith blasted to the side in two long parallel ejecta dikes, banking a canal full of blackness, black all studded with a brecciated mix of stuff which got more exotic as the impact became
more severe, until finally a drone camera sent along a clip of a horizon-to-horizon trench of what Sax said must be rough black diamonds.
The impact in the last half hour of the fall was so strong that everything far to north and south was flattened; people were saying that no one close enough to actually see the cable hit survived it, and most of the drone cameras had been smashed as wFoerll.the final thousands of kilometers of the fall, there
were no witnesses.
A late clip came in from the west side of Tharsis, from the second pass up that gItrewatasslobpriee.f but powerful:a white blaze in the sky, and a explosion running up the west side of theAvnooltchaenro.
shot, from a robot in West Sheffield, showed the cable blasting by just to the south; then an earthquake or sonic blast struck, and the whole rim district of Sheffield fell off the rim in a mass, dropping slowly to the caldera floor four kilometers below.

After that there were any number of video clips bouncing around the fragmented system, but they proved to be only repeats, or late arrivals, or film of the afteArmndathth.en the satellites began to shut down again.
It had been five hours since the fall bTeghaen.six travelers slumped in their chairs, watching or not watching the TV, too tired to feel anything, too tired to think.
"Well," Sax said, "now we've got an equator just like the one I thought the Earth had when I was four years old.A big black line running right around the planet."
Ann glared at Sax so bitterly that Nadia worried she would get up andBhuitt nhoinme. of them moved. The images on the TV flickered, and the speakers hissed and crackled.
# # #
They saw the new equator line in person, the southernmost one anyway, on the second night of their flight toward Shalbatana VallisI.n the dark it was a broad straight black swath, leading themAswest.
they flew over it Nadia stared down sombeIrtlyh.adn't been her project, but it was work, and work destroyed. A bridge brought down; and bringing down a bridge was always a dubious proposition.
And that black line was also a graNvoet. many people on the surface had been killed, except on the
east side of Pavonis, but most if not all of those on the elevator must have been, and that in itself meant
several thousand peopleM.
ost of whom had probably been all right until their part of the cable hit the
atmosphere and burned up.
As they flew over the wreckage Sax intercepted a new video of tShoemfeaolln. e had already stitched
up a chronological montage from all the images that had been sent onto the net live or in the hours immediately afterward.In this montage, a very effective bit of work, the final clip was of the last section of the cable, exploding into the landscaTphe.e impact zone was never anything but a moving white blob, like a flaw in the tape; no video was capable of registering such illumBinuattiaosn.the montage
continued the images had been slowed down and processed in every way possible, and one of these processed images was the final clip, an ultra-slow motion shot in which one could see details that would have been impossible to spot livAen. d so they could see that as the line had crossed the sky, the burning graphite had stripped away first, leaving an incandescent double helix of diamond, flowing majestically
out of a sunset sky.
All a gravestone, of course, the people on it already dead at that point, burned away; but it was hard to think of them when the image was so utterly strange and beautiful, a vision of some kind of fantasy DNA, DNA from a macroworld made of pure light, plowing into our universe to germinate a barren planet. . . .
Nadia stopped watching the TV, moved into the copilot's seat to help spot the othAerllptlhaante.long
night she stared out the window, unable to sleep, unable to get the image of that diamond descent out of
her mind's eyeI.t was the longest night of their trip so far, foIrt sheeerm. dawn came.
ed a kind of eternity before
But time passed, another night of their lives, and at last dawnSocoanmea.fter sunrise they landed at a
pipeline service airstrip above Shalbatana, and stayed with a group of refugees who had been working on the pipeline, and were now caught theTrhe.is group had no political stance in common, and wanted only
to survive until things got back to normNad.ia found their attitude only partly refreshing, and tried to get them to go out and repair pipelines; but she did not think they were convinced.

# # #
That evening they took off once more, again laden with supplies given to them by thAenird htohsets. following dawn they landed on the abandoned airstrip of Carr CBraetfeorr.e eight, Nadia and Sax and Ann and Simon and Sasha and Yeli were out in walkers, and up to the crater rim.
The dome was gonTe.here had been a fire beloAwl.l the buildings were intact but scorched, and almost all their windows had been broken or melPtelads.tic walls were bent or deformed; concrete was
blackened. There were splashes of soot scattered everywhere, and piles of soot scattered here and there on the ground, little heaps of blackened carbSoonm. etimes they looked like Hiroshima shadowYse. s,
they were bodiesT. he outlines of people trying to claw down through the sidew"Talhkes.city's air was hyperoxygenated," Sax venturedI.n such an atmosphere human skin and flesh were combustible and flammable. That was what had happened to those early Apollo astronauts, stuck in a test capsule filled with an atmosphere of pure oxygen; when the fire started they had burnt like parrafin.
And so hereE. veryone on the streets had caught fire and rushed around like torches, one could see that by the placement of the soot piles.
The six old friends walked down together into the shadow of the eastern craUtenrdewralal. circular dark pink sky they stopped at the first clutch of blackened bodies, and then walked quTichkelyy on.
opened doors in buildings when it was possible, and knocked on all the jammed doors, and listened at the walls with a stethoscope device Sax had brought aNloongs.ound but their own heartbeats, loud and
fast at the backs of their coppery throats.
Nadia stumbled around, her breath harsh and ragSgheed. forced herself to look at the bodies she passed, trying to estimate heights from the black piles of caLribkoen.Hiroshima, or PompeiPi.eople were taller nowT. hey still burnt to the bone, though, and even the bones were thin black sticks.
When she came to a likely-sized pile, she stood staringAfatet rita.
while she approached, and found
the right arm, and scraped with her three-fingered glove at the back of the charred wristbones, looking for the dotcode tagS.he found it, cleaned it. Ran her laser over it like a grocery clerk pricing goods. Emily Hargrove.
She moved on, did it again with another likely-sizedThpailbeo. against dental records; but she wouldn't have done that.
Moeti.It was better than checking teeth
She was light-headed and numb when she came to a soot pile near the city offices, alone, its right hand splayed out so that she only had to chSehcek. cleaned the tag and checkeAdr.kady Nikoleyevich
Bogdanov.
They flew west for eleven more days, hiding through the daylight hours under stealth blankets, or taking shelter with people they encountered en rouDteu.ring the nights they followed transponders, or the
directions of the last group with whtihcehy had stayedT. hough these groups often knew of each others' existence and location, they were definitely not parts of a single resistance, or coordinated in any way:

some hoped to make it to the south polar cap like the prisoners from Korolyov, others had never heard of this refuge; some were Bogdanovists, others were revolutionaries following different leaders; some
were religious communes or utopian experiments, or nationalist groups trying to contact their
governments back home; and some were merely collections of survivors without a program, orphaned by the violence.The six travelers even stopped at Korolyov itself, but they did not attempt to enter when they saw the naked frozen bodies of guards outside the locks, some of them propped in standing positions like statues.
After Korolyov, they encountered no oTnhe.e radios and TVs went dead as satellites were shot out; the pistes were empty; the Earth was on the other side of thTehesulna.ndscape seemed as barren as before their arrival, except for the spreading patches of frTohste.y flew on as if they were the only people in the world, the sole survivors.
White noise buzzed in Nadia's ear, something to do with the plane's ventilators nSohedocuhbet.cked
the ventilators, but they were okaTyh.e others gave her chores to do, let her go on walks by herself before take-off, and after landinTg.hey were stunned themselves by what they had found at Carr and Korolyov, and unable to bring much to the effort of cheering her up, which she founAd nan raenlidef.
Simon were still worried about PetYere. li and Sax were worried about their food supplies, dropping all the time; the plane's cabinets were nearly bare.
But Arkady was dead, and so none of that matTtehredr.evolt seemed to Nadia more a waste than ever, an unfocused spasm of rage, the ultimate cutting off one's nose to spite onTe'hsefawche.ole
world, wrecked!She told the others to send out a radio message on one of the general channels,
announcing that Arkady was deadS. asha agreed, and helped convince the others to stop things more quickly," Sasha said.
"dIot witi.ll help
Sax shook his hea"dI.nsurrections don't have leaders," he sa"idB.esides, no one is likely hear it."
But a couple days later, it was clear some people had hTeahredy irte. ceived a microburst in response from Alex Zhalin". Look, Sax, this isn't the American Revolution, or the French or the Russian or the English. It's all the revolutions at once, and everywhAerew! hole world in revolt, with a land area equal
to Earth's, and only a few thousand people trying to stop it, and most of those still in space, where they have a good view but are very vulneraSbole.if they manage to subdue a force in Syrtis, there is another
in the HellespontusI.magine space-based forces trying to stop a revolution in Cambodia, but also in Alaska, Japan, Spain, MadagascarH. ow do you do iYt?ou can't.I only wish that Arkady Nikolayevich had lived to see it, he would have-"
The microburst ended abruptlPy.erhaps a bad sign, perhaps nBotu. t even Alex hadn't been able to keep a note of discouragement out of his voice, when he talked about AItrkwaadsy.impossible;
Arkady had been so much more than a political leader-everybody's brother, a natural force, the voice of one's conscience.One's innate sense of what was fair and Ojunset.'s best friend.
Nadia stumped through her grief, helping to navigate their flights by night, sleeping as much as she could through the daysS. he lost weightH. er hair turned pure white, all the remaining gray and black hairs
coming out in her brusSh.he found it hard to speaIkt .felt like her throat and guts had petriSfiheed. was
a stone, it was impossible to weSehpe.
went about her business insteaNdo.
one they met had any food
to spare, and they were running out themselTvehse.y set a strict rationing schedule, dividing meals in half.
And on the thirty-second day of their journey from Lasswitz, after a journey of some ten thousand kilometers, they came to Cairo, up on the southern rim of Noctis Labyrinthus, just to the south of the southernmost strand of the fallen cable.

# # #
Cairo was under the de facto control of UNOMA, in that no one in the city had ever claimed otherwise, and like all the rest of the big tent cities it lay helpless under the orbiting lasers of UNOMA police ships, which had burned into orbit sometime in the last mAonlstoh. most of the inhabitants of Cairo at the
beginning of the war had been Arab and Swiss, and in Cairo, at least, people of both nationalities seemed only to be trying to stay out of harm's way.
Now, however, the six travelers were not the only refugees arriving; a flood of them had just come down Tharsis from the devastation in Sheffield and the rest of Pavonis; others were driving up from Marineris, through the maze of NoctiTs.he city was at quadruple capacity, with crowds living and sleeping in the
streets and parks, the physical plant strained to the breaking point, and food and gases running out.
The six travelers were told this by an airstrip worker who was still stubbornly doing her job, although none of the strip shuttles were running any mAofrtee.r guiding them into parking places among a great
fleet of planes at one end of the strip, she told them to suit up and walk the kilometer to tIht e city wall. made Nadia unreasonably nervous to leave the two 17Ds behind and walk into a city; and she was not reassured once through the lock, when she saw that most people inside were wearing their walkers and carrying their helmets with them, ready for depressurization if it came.
They went to the city offices, and there found Frank and Maya, as well as Mary Dunkel and Spencer Jackson. They all greeted each other with relief, but there was no time for catching up on their various adventures; Frank was busy before a screen, talking to someone in orbit by the sound of it, and he shrugged off their hugs and kept talking, waving once later to acknowledge their appeAaprapnacren. tly
he was hooked into a functioning communications system, or even more than one, because he stayed in front of the screen talking to one face or another for the next six hours straight, pausing only to sip water or make another call, not sparing another glance for his old compaHtreiostse.emed to be in a permanent
fury, his jaw muscles bunching and unbunching rhythmically; other than that he was in his element, explaining and lecturing, wheedling and threatening, inquiring and then commenting impatiently on the
answers he gotW.
heeling and dealing in his old style, in other words, but with an angry, bitter, even
frightened edge, as if he had walked off a cliff and was trying to argue his way back to ground.
When he finally clicked off, he leaned back in his seat and sighed histrionically, then rose stiffly from his seat and came over to greet them, putting a hand briefly on Nadia's shAosuidldeerf.rom that he was
brusque with all of them, and completely uninterested in how they had managed to make itHteo Cairo. only wanted to know whom they had met, and where, and how well these scattered parties were doing, and what they intendedO. nce or twice he went back to his screen and contacted these groups
immediately upon being informed of their location, an ability that stunned the travelers, who had assumed
that everyone was as cut off as they had b"UeeNnO.
MA links," Frank explained, running a hand over
his swarthy jaw". They're keeping some channels open for me."
"Why?" Sax said.
"Because I'm trying to stop thI'ims. joined by all."
"But under whose direction?"
trying for a cease-fire, then a general amnesty, then a reconstruction
"UNOMA's, of courseA. nd the national offices."

"But UNOMA agrees only to the cease-fire?" Sax vent"uWrehdi.le the rebels only agree to the general amnesty?"
Frank nodded curtly".And neither like the reconstruction joined by Baullt. the current situation is so bad
they may go for
Fito. ur more aquifers have blown since the cable came dTohweny.'re all equatorial, and
some people are saying it's cause and effect."
Ann shook her head at this, and Frank looked pleased to"Tseheeyit.were broken open, I was pretty sure. They broke one at the mouth of Chasma Borealis, it's pouring out onto the Borealis dunes."
"The weight of the polar cap probably puts that one under a good bit of pressure," Ann said. "Do you know what happened to the Acheron group?" Sax asked Frank.
"No.They've disappeared.It might be like with Arkady, I'm afraHide." glanced at Nadia, pursed his lips unhappily."I should get back to work."
"But what's happening on Earth?" Ann demand"Wed.hat does the UN have to say about all this?" " 'Mars is not a nation but a world resource,' " Frank quoted "hTehaevyi'lrye. saying that the tiny
fraction of humanity that lives here can't be allowed to control the resources, when the human material
base as a whole is so deeply stressed."
"That's probably true," Nadia heard herself spoken in days.
Frank shrugged.
Hsaeyr.
voice was harsh, a croaIkt .felt like she hadn't
Sax said, "I suppose that's why they've given the transnationals such a freIet sheaenmd.s to me there's more of their security here than UN police."
"That's right," Frank sai"dI.t took the UN a while to agree to deploy their peacekeepers." "They don't mind having the dirty work done by someone else."
"Of course not."
"And Earth itself?" Ann asked again.
Frank shrugged". The group of seven seems to be getting things under conHtreols."hook his head".It's hard to say from here, it really is."
He went to his screen to make more
Tcahlels.others went off to eat, to clean up, to sleep, to catch up
on friends and acquaintances, on the rest of the first hundred, on what news there was frTomhe Earth. flags of convenience had been destroyed by attacks from the have-nots in the south, but apparently the transnationals had fled to the group of seven, and had been taken in and defended by the seven's giant militaries. The twelfth attempt at a cease fire had held for several days now.
So, a bit of time to try and recBovuet r.when they wentht rough the comm room, Frank would still be
there, shifting ever more surely into a bitter black fury, snapping his way through what seemed an endless
nightmare of screen diplomacy, talking on and on in an urgent, scornful, bitinHgetownaes.
past cajoling

anyone into anything, now; it was purely an exertion ofTrwyinl.g to move the world without a fulcrum,
or with the weakest of fulcrums, his leverage consisting mainly of his old American connections and his current personal standing with a variety of insurrection leaders, both nearly severed by events and the TV blackouts. And both becoming less important daily on Mars itself, as UNOMA and the transnational
forces took over town after towInt .seemed to Nadia that Frank was now trying to muscle the process along by the sheer force of his anger at his lack of infSluheencfeo.und she could not stand to be around him; things were bad enough without his black bile.
But with Sax's help, he got an independent signal to Earth, by contacting Vega and getting the technicians there to transmit messages back and foTrthha.t meant a few hours between transmission and reception, but in a long couple of days after that, he got in five coded exchanges with Secretary of State Wu, and while waiting through the night for return messages, the people on Vega filled the gaps with
tapes of Terran news programs that they had not Aselel nt.hese reports, when they referred to the Martian situation at all, portrayed the insurrection as a minor disruption caused by criminal elements, prinicipally by escaped prisoners from Korolyov, who had gone on a rampage of senseless property
damage, in the process killing great numbers of innocent civiClialinpss.
of the frozen naked guards
outside Korolyov were featured prominently in these reports, as were satellite telephotos of the aquifer outbursts. The most skeptical programs mentioned that these and all other clips from Mars were
provided by UNOMA; and some stations in China and the Netherlands even questioned the accuracy of the UNOMA accountsB. ut they provided no alternative explanation of events, and for the most part, the Terran media disseminated the transnationals' version of thinWghs.en Nadia pointed this out, Frank
snorted. "Of course," he said contemptuousl"yT. erran news is a transnationalH."e turned off the sound.
Behind him Nadia and Yeli leaned forward instinctively on the bamboo couch, as if that might help them to hear the silent clip bettTerh.eir two weeks of being cut off from outside news had seemed like a year, and now they watched the screen helplessly, soaking in whatever information theyYceolui ldev. en stood
to turn the sound back up, but a view of Frank from the side stopped him; Frank was asleep in his chair, his chin on his chesWt. hen a message from the State Department came in he jerked awake, turned up
the sound, stared at the tiny faces on the screen, snapped out a reply in a hoTahrseen rhaespc. losed his eyes and slept again.
At the end of the second night of the Vega link, he had gotten Secretary Wu to promise to press the UN
in New York to restore communications, and halt all police action until the situation could be assessed. Wu was also going to try to get transnational forces ordered back to Earth, though that, Frank noted, would be impossible.
The sun had been up for a couple of hours when Frank sent a final acknowledgment to Vega, and shut down. Yeli was asleep on the floor. Nadia stood up stiffly and went for a walk around the park, taking advantage of the light to have a look aroSuhned. had to step over bodies sleeping in the grass, in groups
of three or four spooned together for warmTthhe.
Swiss had set up big kitchens, and rows of outhouses
lining the city wall; it looked like a construction site, and suddenly she found tears running down her face. On she walked.It was nice to be able to walk around in the open light of day.
Eventually she returned to the city offiFcerasn. k was standing over Maya, who was asleep on a couch. He stared down at her with a blank expression, then looked up bleary-eyed at"SNhea'dsiar.eally out."
"Everyone's tired."
"Hmph.What was it like at Hellas?" "Under water."

He shook his hea"dS. ax must be loving it."
"That's what I kept sayinBgu. t I think it's too out of control for him."
"Ah yes."He closed his eyes, appeared to sleep for a second o"rI'tmwos.orry about Arkady." "Yes."
Another silence". She looks like a girl."
"A little."Actually Nadia had never seen Maya look olTdehre.y were all pushing eighty, they couldn't keep the pace, treatments or nIont. their minds they were old.
"The folks on Vega told me that Phyllis and the rest of the people on Clarke are going to try to get across to them in an emergency rocket."
"Aren't they out of the plane of the ecliptic?"
"They are now, but they're going to try to push down to Jupiter, and use it to swing back downsystem." "That'll take a year or two, won't it?"
"About a yearH. opefully they'll miss entirely, or fall into JupOiterr.run out of food." "I take it you're not happy with Phyllis."
"That bitchS. he's responsible for a lot of thPiusl.ling in all those transnats with promises of every metal
ever put to use-she figured she would be queen of Mars with all those folks backing her, you should have seen her up there on Clarke, looking down at the planet like a littleI ticnouglodd.have strangled her.
How I wish I could have seen her face when Clarke took off and wentHfelylianugg!"hed harshly.
Maya stirred at the sound, woTkhe.ey pulled her up and went out into the park in search of a meal.
They got in a line of people huddled in their walkers, coughing, rubbing their hands together, blowing out plumes of frost like white cotton baVllse.ry few talkedF. rank surveyed the scene with a disgusted look,
and when they got their trays of röshti and tabouli he devoured his and began conversing to his wristpad in Arabic."They say Alex and Evgenia and Samantha are coming up Noctis with some Bedouin friends
of mine," he told them when he shut down.
That was good news; Alex and Evgenia had been heard from last in Aureum Overlook, a rebel bastion that had destroyed a number of orbiting UN ships before being incinerated by missile fire from Phobos. And no one had heard from Samantha the whole month of the war.
So all the first hundred in town went to the north gate of Cairo that afternoon to
Cgraeierto'sthem.
north gate looked down a long natural ramp that ran into one of the southernmost canyons of Noctis; the road rose up from the canyon floor on this ramp, and they could see all the way down it to the canyon bottom. There, in the early afternoon, came a rover caravan, churning up a small dust cloud and moving slowly.
It was nearly an hour before the cars rolled up the last part of tThheeyramwpe.re no more than three kilometers away when great gouts of flame and ejecta burst into being among them, knocking some

rovers into the cliff wall, some over the ramp into sTphaecer.est twisted to a halt, shattered and burning.
Then an explosion rocked the north gate, and they dove for thCeriwesalal.nd shouts over the common band. Nothing more; they stood back uTph.e fabric of the tent still held, although the gate lock was apparently stuck fast.
Down on the road thin plumes of tan smoke lofted into the air, tattering to the east, pulled back down into Noctis on the dusk winNda. dia sent a robot rover down to check for surviWvorriss.tpads crackled
with static, nothing but static, and Nadia was thankful for that; what could they have hoped for?
Screams? Frank was cursing into his wristpad, switching between Arabic and EnTgrlyisinhg.
vainly to
find out what had happeneBd.ut Alexander, Evgenia, Samantha. . N. a.dia looked fearfully at the little images on her wrist, directing the robot cameras with dSrehaadtt.ered rovers.Some bodies.Nothing moved. One rover still smoked.
"Where's Sasha?" Yeli's voice crie"dW. here's Sasha?"
"She was in the lock," someone s"aSidh.e was going out to greet them."
They went to work opening the inner lock door, Nadia at the front punching all the codes and then
working with tools and finally a shape charge that someone handed Ttohehyerm.
oved back and the
lock lock blew out like a crossbow bolt, and then they were there, crowbarring the heavy door back. Nadia rushed in and dropped to her knees by Sasha, who was huddled head-in-jacket, in the emergency posture; but she was dead, the flesh of her face martian red, her eyes frozen.
Feeling that she had to move or else turn to stone on the spot, Nadia broke and ran back to the town cars they had come iSn.he jumped in one and drove away; she had no plan, and the car seemed to
choose the directionH.
er friends' voices cut through the crackle on her wristpad, sounding like crickets in
a cage, Maya muttering viciously in Russian, crying, only Maya was tough enough to keep feeling in all of this: "That was Phobos again!" her little voice cried. "They're psychotic up there!"
The others were in shock, their voices like AIs'. "They're not psychotic," Frank said. "It's perfectly rational. They see a political settlement coming and they're getting in as many shots as they can."
"Murderous bastards!" Maya crie"dK. GB fascists. . . ."
The town car stopped at the city offNicaeds.ia ran inside, to the room where she had stashed her stuff, at this point no more than her old blue backpSahcek.dug in it, still unaware of what she was looking for until her claw hand, still the strong one, reached into a bag and pulleAdrkitadoyu'st. transmitter.Of
course. She ran back to the car and drove to the southSagxatea.nd Frank were still talking, Sax
sounding the same as always, but saying, "Every one of us whose location is known is either here, or else
has been killedI.
think they're after the first hundred in particular."
"Singling us out, you mean?" Frank said.
"I saw some Terran news that said we were the ringleAandderst.wenty-one of us have died since the revolt began.Another forty missing."
The town car arrived at the south gNaated.ia turned off her intercom, got out of the car, went into the
lock and put on boots, helmet, glovSehse.
pumped up and checked out, then slammed the open button
and waited for the lock to empty and oApesn.it had on SashTa.hey had lived a lifetime together in just

the last month aloneT.hen it was out onto the surface, into the glare and push of a windy hazy day, feeling the first diamond bite of the cSohlde. kicked through drifts of fines and red puffs blew out ahead of her.The hollow woman, kicking blooOd.ut the other gate were the bodies of her friends and others, their dead faces purplish and bloated, as after construction accidents; Nadia had seen several of those
now, seen death several times, and each had been a horror-and yet here they were deliberately creating as many of these horrible accidents as they coTuhlda!t was war; killing people by every means possible.
People who might have lived a thousand yeaSrhse.
thought of Arkady and of a thousand years, and
hissed. They had quarreled so in recent years, mostly about polYitoicusr. plans are all anachronism,
Nadia had saidY.
ou don't understand the worldH. a! he had laughed, offendeTd.his world I
understand. With an expression as dark as any she had ever seen fromAnhdimsh. e remembered when
he had given her the transmitter, how he had cried for John, how crazy he had been with rage and grief. Just in case, he had said to her refusals, pleaJduinstg.in case.
And now it had happeneSdh.e couldn't believe iSt.he took the box from her walker's thigh pocket, turned it over in her hanPdh.obos shot up over the western horizon like a gray pTohtaetos.un had just
set, and the alpenglow was so strong that it looked like she was standing in her own blood, as if she were a creature as small as a cell standing on the corroded wall of her heart, while around her swept the winds of her own dusty plasmRa.ockets were landing at the spaceport north of the Tchitey.dusk mirrors
gleamed in the western sky like a cluster of evening Astabrus.sy skyU. descending.
N ships would soon be
Phobos crossed the sky in four and a quarter hours, so she didn't have to wItahitadlonrigs.en as a half moon, but now it was gibbous, almost full, halfway to the zenith, moving at its steady clip across the coagulating sky.She could make out a faint point of light inside the gratyheditswk:o little domed
craters, Semenov and LeveykinS.he held the radio transmitter out and tapped in the ignition code, MANGALA. It was like using a TV remote.
And then a bright light flared on the leading edge of the little gTrahye dtwisko. faint lights went oTuth.e bright light flared even brighteCr.ould she really perceive the deceleratioPnr?obably not; but it was there.
Phobos was on its way down.
# # #
Back inside Cairo, she found that the news had already sTphreeadfl.are had been bright enough to
catch peoples' eyes, and after that they had clumped together around the blank TV screens, by habit, and exchanged rumors and speculation, and somehow the basic fact had gotten around, or been worked out independently. Nadia strolled past group after group, and heard people saying "Phobos has been hit!
Phobos has been hit!A" nd someone laughed, "They brought the Roche limit up to it!"
She thought she was lost in the medina, but almost directly she came to the ciMtyaoyfaficweas.s outside: "Hey Nadia!" she cried",Did you see Phobos?"
"Yes."
"Roger says when they were up there in year One, they built a system of explosives and rocketry into it! Did Arkady ever tell you about it?"
"Yes."

They went in to the offices, Maya thinking a"loIfudth: ey manage to slow it down very much, it'll come down. I wonder if it'll be possible to calculate whWeree'r.e pretty damn close to the equator right here."
"It'll break up, surely, and come down in a lot of places." "True. I wonder what Sax thinks."
They found Sax and Frank bunched before one screen, Yeli and Ann and Simon beforeAanother. UNOMA satellite was tracking Phobos with a telescope, and Sax was measuring the moon's speed of passage across the martian landscape to get a fix on its veIlnoctihtye. image on the screen Stickney's
dome shone like a Faberge egg, but the eye was drawn away from that to the moon's leading edge, which was blurry and streaked with white flashes of ejecta and "gLaosoeks. how well balanced the
thrust is," Sax said to no one in partic"uTlaoro.
sudden a thrust and the whole thing would have
shattered. And an unbalanced thrust would have set it spinning, and then the thrust would have pushed it all over the place."
"I see signs of stabilizing lateral thrusts," his AI said.
"Attitude jets," Sax sai"dT. hey turned Phobos into a big rocket."
"They did it in the first year," Nadia Sshaeid.wasn't sure why she was speaking, she still seemed out of control, observing her actions from several seconds beh"inAd.lot of the Phobos crew was from
rocketry and guidanceT. hey processed the ice veins into liquid oxygen and deuterium, and stored it in lined columns buried in the chondriTteh.e engines and the control complex were buried centrally."
"So it is a big rockeSta."x was nodding as he type"dP.eriod of Phobos, 27, 547 secondSso.
it's going.
. .2.146 kilometers per second, approximately, and to bring it down it needs to decelerate to. . . . to
1.561 kilometers per secondS.o, .585 kilometers per second slowFero.r a mass like Phobos. . . wow. That's a lot of fuel."
"What's it down to now?" Frank askHeed.was black-faced, his jaw muscles pulsing under the skin like little biceps-furious, Nadia saw, at his inability to predict what would happen next .
"About one point seveAn.nd those big thrusters still burninItg'l.l come downB. ut not in one piecTe.he descent will break it up, I'm sure."
"The Roche limit?"
"No, just stress from aerobraking, and with all these empty fuel chambers. . . ." "What happened to the people on it?" Nadia heard herself ask.
"Someone came on and said it sounded like the whole population had baiNleod oonuet. stuck around to try and stop the firing."
"Good," Nadia said, sitting down heavily on the couch. "So when will it come down?" Frank demanded.
Sax blinked". Impossible to sayD.
epends on when it breaks up, and hBowut. pretty soon, I'd guess.
Within a dayA. nd then there'll be a stretch somewhere along the equator, probably a big stretch of it, in

big trouble.It's going to make a fairly large meteor shower."
"That will clear away some of the elevator cable," Simon said wHeeakwlya.s stitting beside Ann,
watching her with concernS.he stared at Simon's screen bleakly, showed no sign of hearing any of them.
There never had been word of their son PWetears.
that better or worse than a soot pile, a dot code
name coming up on your wristpaBd?etter, Nadia decidedB. ut still hard. "Look," Sax said, "it's breaking up."
The satellite telescopic camera gave them an excellent view: the dome over Stickney bursting outward in great shards, the crater pit lines that had always marked Phobos suddely puffing with dust, yawning open; and then the little potato-shaped world blossomed, fell apart into a scattering of irregular Achhuanlkfs.a
dozen large ones slowly spread out, the largest one leading theOwneayc.hunk flew off to the side, apparently powered still by one of the rockets that had lain buried in the moon'sTihnetereosrt. of the rocks began to spread out in an irregular line, tumbling each at a different speed.
"Well, we're kind of in the line of fire," Sax remarked, looking up at the res"tTohfe tbhiegmge.st chunks will hit the upper atmosphere soon, and then it'll happen pretty quickly."
"Can you determine where?"
"No, there's too many unknownAsl.ong the equator, that's aWll. e're probably far enough south to miss most of it, but there may be quite a scatter effect."
"People on the equator ought to head north or south," Maya said.
"They probably know thaAt.nyway the fall of the cable probably cleared the area pretty effectively already."
There was little to do but wNaoitn. e of them wanted to leave the city and head south, it seemed they were past that kind of effort, too hardened or too tired to worry about longshFortanrkiskpsa. ced the
room, his swarthy face working with anger; finally he couldn't stand it, and got back on his screen to send off a sequence of short pungent messagOesn.e came back in, and he snort"eWd.e've got a grace
period, because the UN police are afraid to come down here until after the sAhifterfaltlhsa.t they'll be
on us like hawksT.hey're claiming that the command initiating the Phobos explosions originated here, and they're tired of a neutral city being used as a command center for the insurrection."
"So we've got until the fall is over," Sax said.
He clicked into the UNOMA network, and got a radar composite of the fraAgfmteernttsh.at there was nothing to doT. hey sat; they stood and walked around; they looked at the screens; they ate cold pizza; they napped.Nadia did none of these thingSsh.e could only manage to sit, hunched over her stomach, which felt like an iron walnut in Shhere. waited.
Near midnight and the timeslip, something on the screens caught Sax's attention, and with some furious
typing on Frank's channels he got through to the Olympus Mons observItatowrays.
just before dawn
there, still dark, and one of the observatory cameras gave them its low space view southward, the black curve of the planet blocking the staArsn.d then there were shooting stars blazing down at an angle out of
the western sky, as fast and bright as if they were perfectly straight lightning bolts, or titanic tracer bullets, spraying in a sequence eastward, breaking apart in the last moments before impact, causing phosphor
blobs to burst into existence at every impact point, like the first moments of a whole string of nuclear

explosions. In less than ten seconds the strike was over, leaving the black field dotted with a line of glowing yellow smoke-obscured patches.
Nadia closed her eyes, saw swimming afterimages of the sSthriekeo. pened them again, looked at the
screen. Clouds of smoke were surging up into the pre-dawn sky over west Tharsis, pouring so high that they got up out of the shadow of the planet and were lit by the rising sun; they were mushroom clouds, their heads a bright pale pink, their dark gray stalks illuminated by reflection fromSloabwolvye.the
sunlight moved down the tumultuous stalks, until they were all burnished by the new mornTihnegn sun.
the lofty line of yellow and pink mushroom clouds drifted across a sky that was a delicate shade of indigo pastel: it looked like a Maxfield Parrish nightmare, too strange and beautiful a sight to Nbaedliieave.
thought of the cable's last moment, that image of the incandescent double helix of diamonds. How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scaleWoafs itth?ere some shadow in
people, lusting for itO? r was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty had no moral dimensionS?he stared and stared at the image, focused all her will on it; but she could not make it make sense.
"That may be enough particulate matter to trigger another global dust storm," Sax o"bAseltrhvoeudg.h the net heat addition to the system will surely be considerable."
"Shut up, Sax," Maya said.
Frank said, "It's about our turn to get hit, right?" Sax nodded.
They left the city offices and went out into theEvpearyko. ne stood facing northwesIt.t was silent, as if they were performing some religious rituIatl.felt completely different than waiting for bombardment by the police.By now it was mid-morning, the sky a dull dusty pink.
Then over the horizon lanced a painfully bright comet; there was a collective indrawn gasp, punctuated by scattered criesT. he brilliant white line curved down toward them, then shot over their heads in an instant, disappearing over the eastern horizoTnh.ere hadn't even been time to catch one's breath as it passed. A moment later the ground trembled slightly under their feet, and the silence was broken by exclamations. To the east a cloud shot up, redefining the height of the sky's pink dome; it must have plumed twenty thousand meters.
Then another brilliant white blaze crossed the sky overhead, trailing comet tailsTohfenfiraen.other, and
another, and a whole blazing cluster of them, all crossing the sky and dropping over the eastern horizon, down into great MarinerisF.inally the shower stopped, leaving the witnesses in Cairo half-blinded,
staggering, afterimages bouncing in their sigThth.ey had been passed over.
# # #
"Now comes the UN," Frank sa"iAd.t best."
"Do you think we ought to. . . ." Maya"Dsoaidy.ou think we're. . . ." "Safe in their hands?" Frank said acidly.
"Maybe we should take to the planes again."

"In daylight?"
"Well, it might be better than staying here!" she ret"oIrteddo.n't know about you, but I don't want to just get lined up against a wall and shot!"
"If they're UNOMA they won't do that," Sax said.
"You can't be sure," Maya sa"iEdv. eryone on Earth thinks we're the ringleaders." "There aren't any ringleaders!" Frank said.
"But they want there to be ringleaders," Nadia said. This stilled them.
Sax said mildly, "Someone may have decided things will be easier to control without us around."
# # #
More news of impacts in the other hemisphere came in, and Sax settled down before the screens to follow it. Helplessly Ann stood over his right shoulder to observe it as well; these kinds of strikes had happened all the time back in the Noachian, and the chance to see one live was too much for her to pass up, even if it was the result of human agency.
While they watched, Maya continued to urge them to do something-to leave, to hide, whatever, just
something. She swore at Sax and Ann both when they didn't resFproanndk.
left to see what was
happening at the spaceporNt. adia accompanied him to the door of the city offices, afraid that Maya was right, but unwilling to listen anymoSreh.e said good-bye to Frank and stood before the city building, looking at the skyI.t was afternoon, and the prevailing westerlies were beginning to sweep down the
slope of Tharsis, bringing with thedmust from the impacts; it looked like smoke in the sky, as if there were a forest fire on the other side of ThTarhseis.light inside Cairo dimmed as the dust clouds obscured
the sun, and the tent's polarization created short rainbows and sundogs, as if the very fabric of the world were unravelling into kaleidscopic partHs.uddled masses, under a burning skNya. dia shivered.A
thicker cloud covered the sun like an ecliSpshee. went indoors, out of its shadow, back into the offices. Sax was saying, "Very likely to begin another global."
"I hope it does," Maya saSihde. escape."
"Escape where?" Sax asked.
was pacing back and forth like a great cat in a"Itcawgiell.
help us
Maya sucked air in through her te"eTthh.e planes are stockedW. e could go back to the Hellespontus
Montes, to the habitats there." "They'd see us."
Frank came onto Sax's screen; he was staring into his wristpad, and the image q"Iu'miveraetdt.he west gate with the mayorT.here's a bunch of rovers outsidWe.e've locked all the gates because they won't identify themselves.Apparently they've surrounded the city, and are trying to broach the physical plant from the outsideS. o everyone should get their walkers on, and be ready to go."

"I told you we should have left!" Maya cried.
"We couldn't have," Sax sa"idA.nyway, our chances may be just as good in some sort of Imf elee. everyone makes a break for it at once, they might be overwhelmed by nuNmowberlso.ok, if anything happens, let's all meet at the east gate, okYaoyu? go ahead and gFo.rank," he said to the screen, "you should get over there too when you cI'amn. going to try some things with the physical plant robots that should keep those people out until dark at least."
It was now three PM, although it seemed like twilight, as the sky was thick with high, rapidly-moving dust clouds.The forces outside identified themselves as UNOMA police, and demanded to be let in.
Frank and Cairo's mayor asked them for authorization from UN Geneva, and declared a ban on all arms in the cityT. he forces outside made no reply.
At 4:30 alarms went off all over theTchitey.tent had been broached, apparently catstrophically,
because a sudden wind whipped west through the streets, and pressure sirens went off in every building.
The electricity went off; and just that quick it went from a town to a broken shell, full of running figures in walkers and helmets, all of them rushing about, crowding toward the gates, knocked down by gusts of
wind or by each otheWr. indows popped out everywhere, the air was full of clear plastic shrapnel.
Nadia, Maya, Ann and Simon and Yeli left the city building, and fought their way through crowds toward the east gateT. here was a great crush of people around it because the lock was open, and some people were squeezing through; a deadly situation for anyone who fell underfoot, and if the lock were blocked in
any way, it could turn deadly for everyoAnned.
yet it all happened in silence, except for helmet
intercoms and some background impactTs.he first hundred were tuned to their old band, and over the
static and exterior noises Frank's voice came "oI'nm.
at the east gate noGwe. t out of the crush so I can
find you." His voice was low, businesslik"eH. urry up, there's something happening outside the lock."
They worked their waoyut of the crowd, and saw Frank just inside the wall, waving a hand overhead.
"Come on," the distant figure said in their
"eDaros.n't besuch sheep, there's no reason to join the
toothpaste when the tent's lost its integrity, we can cut through anywhere wLe ewt'sangto. the planes."
straight for
"I told you," Maya began, but Frank cut he"rShoufft: up, Maya, we couldn't leave like this until something like this happened, remember?"
It was near sunset now, the sun pouring through a gap between Pavonis and the dust cloud, illuminating the clouds from below in a garish display of violent martian tones, casting a hellish light over the milling scene. And now figures in camoflaged uniforms were pouring in through rents in tThehetreentw. ere big
spaceport shuttle buses parked outside, with more troops emerging from them.
Sax appeared out of an all"eIy.don't think we'll be able to get to the planes," he said.
A figure in walker and helmet appeared out of the "mCoumrke.
on," it said on their ba"nFdo.llow me."
They stared at this strang"eWr. ho are you?"Frank demanded.
"Follow me!"The stranger was a small man, and behind his face place they could see a bright ferocious grin. Brown thin faceT. he man took off into an alley leading to the medina, and Maya was the first to follow. Helmeted people ran everywhere; those without helmets were sprawled on the ground, dead or dying. They could hear sirens through their helmets, very faint and attenuated, and there were soundlike vibrations underfoot, seismic booms of some kind; but other than that all the hectic activity occurred in silence, broken only by the sounds of their own breathing, and their voices in each other's ears, "Where

to?" "Sax are you there?""He went down that one," and so forth, a strangely intimate conversation, given the dusky chaos they ran througLho.oking around Nadia almost kicked the body of a dead cat, lying in the streetgrass as if asleep.
The man they were following appeared to be humming a tune over their band, an absorbed little bum, bum, ba-dum-dum dum-Peter's theme from Peter and the Wolf, perHhaepsk. new the streets of Cairo
well, making turns in medina's tight warren without a moment's pause for thought, and leading them to the city wall in less than ten minutes.
At the wall they peered through the warped tenting; outside in the murk, anonymous suited figures were running off alone or in groups of two or three, in a kind of Brownian dispersion onto the south Noctis rim. "Where's Yeli?" Maya exclaimed suddenly.
No one knew.
Then Frank pointed".Look!"
Down the road to the east, a number of rovers had appeared out of Noctis LabTyhreinythwuesr.e very fast cars of an unfamiliar shape, coming up out of the dusk without headlights.
"Who now?"Sax said.He turned to look at their guide for an answer; but the man was gone, disappeared back into the alleyways.
"Is this still the first hundred's frequency?" a new voice said. "Yes!" Frank replied".Who is this?"
Maya cried, "Isn't that Michel?"
"Good ear, MayaY. es, it's MichelL. ook, we're here to take you away if you want Itto agpop.ears
they are systematically eliminating any of the first hundred they can get their haSnodswoen.thought you would be willing to join us."
"I think we are all ready to join you," Frank"Bsuatidh. ow?"
"Well, that's the tricky paDrti.d a guide show up and lead you to the wall?" "Yes!"
"Good.That was Coyote, he's good at things like Sthoa,t.wait there; we will create some diversions elsewhere, and then come right to your section of the wall."
In only a matter of minutes, though it seemed like an hour, explosions rockedTthheey csiatyw.
flashes
of light to the north, toward the spacepMoritc.hel came back on":Shine a headlamp east for just a second."
Sax put his face to the tent wall and turned on his headlamp, briefly illuminating a cone of smoke-choked air. Visibility had dropped to a hundred meters or less, and seemed to still be dimBinuisthMingic.hel's
voice said,
"Contact.Now, cut through the wall and step outside, we're almost Wthe'lel. take offagain when

you're all in our rover locks, so be prepaHreodw.
many are you?"
"Six," Frank said after a pause.
"Wonderful.We have two cars, so it won't be too Tbharde.e of you in each, okaGy?et ready, let's do this fast."
Sax and Ann cut at the tent fabric with little knives from their wristpad tool kits; they looked like kittens clawing at drapes, but quickly made holes big enough to crawl through, and they all clambered over the
waist-high coping, and out onto the smoothed regolith of the wallBeskhintd.
them explosions were
blowing the physical plant into the sky, illuminating the wrecked city in flashes that cut through the haze like photographic strobes, freezing moments before they disappeared in the murk.
Suddenly the strange rovers they had seen appeared out of the dust and skidded to a halt before them. They yanked open the outer lock doors and piled in, Sax and Ann and Simon in one, Nadia with Maya and Frank in the other, and they were tumbled head over heels when the rover jerked into motion and accelerated away."Ow!" Maya cried.
"All aboard?" Michel asked. They called out their names.
"Good.I'm glad we have youM!"ichel said."It's getting pretty hardD. mitri and Elena are dead, I just heard. Killed at Echus Overlook."
In the silence that ensued they could hear the tires, grinding over the gravel of the road. "These rovers are really fast," Sax remarked.
"Yes.And great shock absorbersM. ade for just this kind of situation, I'm afWraied'l.l have to abandon them once we get down into Noctis; they're much too visible."
"You have invisible cars?" Frank asked. "In a manner of speaking."
After half of hour of bouncing in the lock they stopped briefly, and transferred into the rovers' main rooms. And there in one was Michel Duval, white-haired, wrinkled-an old man, gazing at Maya and Nadia and Frank with tears in his eHyees. embraced them one by one, laughing an odd, choked laugh.
"You're taking us to Hiroko?" Maya said.
"Yes, we will trBy.ut it's a long way, and conditions are not gBouotd.I think we can doOiht., I am so glad we have found youY!ou don't know how horrible it has been to look and look, and find only bodies."
"We know," Maya sai"dW.
e found Arkady, and Sasha was just killed today, and Alex and Edvard and
Samantha, and I guess Yeli too, just now. . . ."
"Yes.Well. We will try to make sure there aren't any more."

The rover's TV showed the interior of the following car, where Ann and Simon and Sax were having a similar reunion with IwaoT.heir own car's driver exclaimed at something, and Michel turned to look over
his shoulder, out the windshielTd.hey were at the head of one of the many box canyons leading down into Noctis, a rounded canyon end that dropped rapidly aTwhaey.road that descended this headwall
had followed a artificial ramp which had been built to support it; but now the ramp was gone, blasted away, and the road with it.
"We will have to walk," Michel said after a w"Whiele.would have had to abandon these cars at the bottom anyway.It's only about five kilometerAs.re your suits fully supplied?"
They refilled their tanks from the rover, and put their helmets bTachkenonit. was back out through the locks.
When they were all out, they stood staring at each thoethesrix:
refugees, Michel and Iwao, and two
younger drivers, one man and one womTanh.e ten of them set off on foot, in darkness, using headlamps only during the tricky climb down the broken-off section of the roadOrnacmep.back on the road, they
turned their headlamps off and strode down the steeply sloping gravel path, falling naturally into the long lope that was the most comfortable pace in this angle of deTshcennt.ight was starless, and the wind
whistled downcanyon around them, sometimes in gusts so strong that it felt like they were being shoved in the back.It felt like another dust storm was indeed beginning; Sax muttered about equatorial versus
global, but it was impossible to tell what it woul"dLebte's. hope it goes global," Michel sa"iWd.e can use the cover."
"I doubt it will," Sax said.
"What's our destination?" Nadia asked.
"Well, there is an emergency station in Aureum Chaos."
So they had to thread the entire length of Valles Marineris-five thousand kilo"mHeotwersw! ill we do it!" Maya cried.
"We have canyon cars," Michel said brie"fYlyo.u'll see."
The road was a steep one, and they kept up the fast pace, punishing theNiradjioai'ns tsr.ight knee
began to throb, and her ghost finger itched for the first time inShyeeawrsa.s thirsty, and cold in the old diamond pattern.It got so dusty and dark that they turned on their headlamps; each bobbing cone of yellow light barely reached to the road surface, and glancing back up Nadia thought they looked like a string of deep sea fish, their luminous spots glowing on a great oceaOn rflloikoer. miners in some fluid
smoky tunnel.Some part of her began to enjoy the situation; it was a tiny stirring, a sensation mostly physical, but still, the first positive feeling she could remember since finding APrlkeadsuyr.e like the
ghost itching of her lost finger, faint and slightly irritating.
It was still the middle of the night when they came to the bottom of the canyon, a broad U, very commo to all the Noctis Labyrinth canyonMs.ichel approached a boulder, pushed its side with a finger; then
lifted a hatch in the boulder's si"dGe.et in," he said.
There were two of these boulder cars, it turned out; big rovers, shelled by a thin layer of actual basalt. "What about their thermal signals?" Sax asked as he ducked into one.
"We direct all the heat into coils, and bury theScooitlhse. re's no signal to speak of."

"Good idea."
The young man who had driven Michel's fast rover helped them into the n"eLwet'csargse.t out of here," he said brusquely, almost shoving them through the outer lock Ldiogohrts.from the lock illuminated his face, framed by his helmAets:ian, perhaps twenty-five, he aided the refugees without
meeting their eye, appearing disgruntled, disgusted, perhaps frightenHeed.said to them scornfully, "Next time you have a revolution you'd better try some other way."
Part Eight
Shikata Ga Nai
-+=*=+-
When the occupants of the elevator car Bangkok Flreieanrnded that Clarke had broken away and the
cable was falling, they hurried to the foyer and the locker room and pulled on emergency spacesuits as fast as they could, and for a wonder there was no general panic, it all happened in the heart, on the surface everyone was businesslike and attentive to the small group at the lock door who were trying to determine where exactly they were, and when they should abandon thTehicsars.teadiness amazed
Peter Clayborne, whose own blood was hammering through his body in great adrenal shocks; he wasn't sure he could have spoken if he hadAtom. an in the group at the front told them in level tones that they were approaching the areosynchronous point and so they all pulled into the lock together until they were jammed in like the suits had been in the storage closet, and then they locked the lock and sucked the air. The outer door slid open and there it was, a big rectangle of starry death blaIctk wsapsacdea.unting
indeed to launch into it in an untethered spacesuit, it felt to the young man like suicide; but the ones at the front pulled out and the rest followed, like spores from an exploding seed pod.
The car and the elevator dwindled eastward and quickly disappeTahredc. loud of spacesuits began to disperse. Many of them stabilized with their feet toward Mars, which lay below them like a dirty basketball; when steady, they ignited their main rockets and lofted upTwhaerdg. roup doing the calculations was still on the common band, talking it over as if it were a chessTphreoyblewme.re near
the areosynchronous orbit, but with a downward velocity of several hundred kilometers an hour; burning half their main packs' fuel would counteract most of that, and then they would be in an orbit much more stable than would be strictly necessary, given their air supIpnlieost.her words they would die later of asphyxiation rather than sooner of reentry heBaut.t then that had been the whole point of bailing out in
the first placeI.t was possible rescuers might appear in the grace period, one neverCklenaerwly. people were willing to give it a try.
most

The young man pulled his rocket control rods out of his wrist consoles and put his fingers and thumbs on the buttons and got the world between his boots, and shot away from it forSaomwehiolef. the others
were trying to stay together, but he judged it impossible and a waste of fuel, and let them drift off above him until they were just more staHrse. wasn't as frightened as he had been in the locker, but he was
angry and sad:he didn't want to dieA.
spasm of grief for his lost future shook through him and he cried
aloud, and weptA.
fter a while the physical manifestations went away, even though he felt just as
miserable as beforeH.
e stared dully at the staOrsc. casional gusts of fright or despair shuddered through
him, but they became less frequent as the minutes draged on and then thHe ehotruiresd.
to slow his
metabolism but the effort had the opposite effect to that intended, and he decided to forget about it, although first he did call up his pulse rate on his wrist c1o0n8solbee:ats a minuteL. ucky he hadn't
checked when they were suiting up and bailing Hoeut.grimaced and tried identifiying constellations. Time dragged by.
He woke up, and when he realized he had fallen asleep he was both appalled and amused, and promptly fell back asleepT. hen after a time he was awake again, this time forTghoeodo.ther refugees from the
car were out of sight, though some stars seemed to move against the backdrop, and could have been them. No sign of the elevator, in space or down on the planet's surface.
It was an odd way to Sgoom. ething like the night before a date with the firing squad, perhaps, spent in a
dream of spaceD.
eath would be like space, except without the stars or the thiIntkwinags.
a tedious
wait in some ways; it made him impatient and he considered turning off his heating system and having done with itK. nowing he could do that made the wait easier, and he figured he would do it when the air supply was about to run oTuth.e thought put his pulse up to 130, and he tried to concentrate on the
planet below.Home sweet homeH.
e was still in almost areosynchronous orbit, it had been hours and
Tharsis was still below, though a bit further wHeest.was over Marineris.
Hours passed and without intending to, he fell asleep
Wagahienn.
he woke there was a small silver
spacecraft hanging before him like a UFO and he shouted with surprise, and started tumbling helplessly. He worked the rockets feverishly to bring himself under control, and when he managed it the craft was still there.There was a woman's face in a side window port, talking to him and pointing tHo eher ear.
turned on the common band but she wasn't on it; he couldn't fiHnde
hroecr.keted over toward the craft
and scared the woman by nearly crashing intHo eit.managed to arrest and draw back aTbhiet. woman was gesturing; did he want iHn?e made a clumsy circle with gloved forefinger and thumb, nodding so
vigorously that he started tumbling agaAins.
he spun he saw a bay door open behind the window, on top
of the craftH.
e got the suit stabilized and puffed toward the bay, wondering if it would be real when he
got to itH.
e touched the open doorway and tears sprang to his eyes; he blinked and the teardrop
spheres floated into his faceplate as he flattened against the bottom of tHhee bhaayd.
an hour of air left.
When the bay was closed and pumped he unsealed his helmet and lifteTdheit aoirff.was thin and oxygen-rich, and coolT. he bay lock door opened and he pushed through.
Women were laughingT.here were two of them aboard, and they were in high going to do, land in that?" one asked.
"spWirhitast. were you
"I was on the elevator," he said, voice crac"kWineg. had to jump ofHf.ave you picked up anyone else?"
"You're the only one we've seWena. nt a ride down?" He could only gulTp.hey laughed at him.

"We're amazed to run into anyone out here, Hbowy! many gees are you comfortable with?" "I don't know-three?"
They laughed again.
"Why, how many can you take?"
"A lot more than that," said the woman who had looked out at him. "A lot more," he scoffe"dH.ow many more can a person take?"
"We'll find out," the other woman said, and laugThheed.little craft began to accelerate down toward
Mars. The youth lay exhausted in a gee chair behind the two women, asking questions and sucking down water and cheddar cheese from a tuTbhe.ey had been on one of the mirror complexes and had hijacked
this emergency descender after sending the mirrors tumbling in a tangle of molecule-thinTshheeyets.
were complicating their descent by shifting into a polar orbit; they were going to land near the south polar cap.
Peter absorbed this in silencTeh.en they were bouncing wildly and the windows went white, then
yellow, then a deep angry orangGer.avity forces jammed him back in his chair, his vision blurred and his neck hurt."What a lightweight," one of the women said, and he didn't know if they meant him or the descender.
Then the gee forces let off and the window cleHaeredlo. oked out; they were dropping toward the planet in a steep dive, and were only a few thousand meters above the Hsuerfcaocuel.dn't believe it.
The women kept the craft in its radical stoop until it seemed they were going to spear the sand, and then at the last minute they flattened out and again he was shoved back into h"iSswceheat,i"r. one of the
women commented, and then boom, they were down and running over the layered terrain.
Gravity againP. eter clambered out of the descender after the two women, down a walktube and into a big rover, feeling stunned and ready to Tcrhye.re were two men in the rover, shouting greetings and
hugging the women". Who's this?" they cried".Oh, we picked him up up there, he jumped off the elevator. He's a bit spaced stiHll.ey," she said to him with a smile, "we're down, it's okay."
-+=*=+-
Some mistakes you can never make good.
Ann Clayborne sat in the back of Michel's rover, sprawled across three seats, feeling the wheels rise and fall over the rocksH. er mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love
with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy.
Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forIenvseidr.e, the main room was lit by floor-level windows, which gave a snake's eye view out under the skirt of the rover's stoRnoeugrohofg.ravel road, scattered rockfall in the waTy.hey were on the Noctis Highway, but a lot of rock had falleMn icohnelit. wasn't bothering to drive around the smaller samples; they rolled along at about sixty kmph, and when

they hit a big one they all jounced in their "sSeoartrsy. ," Michel said". We have to get out of the
Chandelier as soon as possible." "The Chandelier?"
"Noctis Labyrinthus."
The original name, Ann knew, given to it by the terran geologists staring at MarineBrupt hsohteos. didn't speak.The will to speech had left her.
Michel talked on, his voice low and conversation, reassu"rTinhge.re's several places where if the road were cut it would be impossible to get the cars dTorwanns.verse scarps that run from wall to wall, giant boulder fields, that kind of thinOgn. ce we get into Marineris we'll be okay, there's all kinds of
cross-country routes there."
"Are these cars supplied for a drive down the whole canyon?" Sax asked.
"No.We've got caches all over the place, thougAhp."parently the great canyons had been some of the principal transport corridors for the hidden coloWnyh. en the official Canyon Highway was built it had caused them problems, cutting off a lot of their routes.
From her corner Ann listened to Michel as attentively as the rest; she couldn't help being curious about the hidden colonyT. heir use of the canyons was ingenious. Rovers designed to stay down in them were disguised to look like one of the millions of boulders that lay in great talus piles sloping out from the cliffs.
The roofs of the cars actually were boulders, hollowed out from bHeeloavwy.
insulation kept the rock
roof of the car from heating up, so there was no IR signal, "especially since there's still any number of
Sax's windmills scattered around down here, and they confuse the picTtuhree."rover was insulated on its underside as well, so that it left no snail's track of heat to reveal itsThpeashsienagt. from the
hydrazine motor was used to warm the living quarters, and any excess was directed into coils for later use; if they built up too much while moving, the coils were dropped into holes dug under the car, and buried with regolith mixed with liquid oxygBeny. the time the ground over the coil warmed up, the rover was long goneS. o they left no heat signal, and they never used the radio, and they moved only at night.
During the day they sat in place among other boulders, "and even if they compared daily photos and saw we were new in the area, we would just be one in a thousand new boulders that had fallen off the cliffs that night.Mass wasting has really accelerated since you started the terraforming, because it's freezing
and thawing every dayI.n the mornings and evenings there's something coming down every few minutes." "So there's no way they can see us," Sax said, sounding surprised.
"That's rightN. o visual signal, no electronic signal, no heat signal."
"A stealth rover," Frank said over the intercom from the other car, and laughed his harsh bray. "That's rightT. he real danger down here is the very rockfall that's hidingA urse."d light on the dash
went off, and Michel laughe"dW.
e're going so well we'll have to stop and bury a coil."
"Won't it take a while to dig a hole?" Sax said.
"There's one already dug, if we can get Atonoitth. er four kilometersI.
think we'll make it."
"You have quite a system here."

"Well, we've been living underground for fourteen years now, fourteen martian years TIhmermeaanl. disposal engineering is a big thing for us."
"But how do you do it for your permanent habitats, assuming you have any?"
"We pipe it down into the deep regolith, and melt ice for ouOr rwealtseer. we pipe it out to vents disguised as your little windmill heateArsm. ong other methods."
"Those were a bad idea," Sax sFarido.m the next car Frank laughed at hOimnl.y thirty years late with that realization, Ann would have said if she were speaking.
"But no, an excellent idea!" Michel s"aTidh.ey must have added millions of kilocalories to the atmosphere by now."
"About an hour from any of the moholes," Sax said primly.
He and Michel began to discuss the terraforming proAjencnts.let their voices drift into glossolalia; it
was amazingly easy, conversations these days were always right on the edge of meaninglessness for her, she had to exert herself to understand, rather than the reSvehreser.elaxed away from them, and felt
Mars bounce and jumble under hTerh.ey stopped briefly to bury a heating cTohile.
road got smoother
when they started againT.hey were deep in the labyrinth now, and in a normal rover she would have been looking through the skylights at tight steep canyon wRaifltls.valleys, enlarged by slumping; there
had been ice in this ground, once upon a time, now all migrated down to the Compton aquifer at the bottom of Noctis, presumably.
Ann thought of Peter and shuddered helplesOslnye.
couldn't assume things, but the fear gnawed at her.
Simon watched her surreptitiously, the worry plain on his face, and suddenly she hated his doggy loyalty, his doggy loveS. he didn't want anyone to care for her like that, it was an unbearable burden, an imposition.
At dawn they stoppeTd.he two boulder rovers parked at the edge of a patch of similar boAulllders.
day they sat in one of the cars together, lingering over small rehydrated or microwaved meals, trying to find TV or radio transmissionTs.here weren't any to speak of, only the occasional burst in a number of languages and encryptionsA. n ether junkyard, adding up to an incoherent mHasahrs.h blasts of static
seemed to indicate electromagnetic pulseBs.ut the rover's electronics were hardened, Michel sHaied.
sat in a chair asmifeditating. A new calm for Michel Duval, Ann thouAghst.if he were used to waiting out his days in hidinHg.is companion, the youth driving the other car, was named KHaiseiv.oice had a permanent tone of grim disapprovaWl. ell, they deserved iIt.n the afternoon Michel showed Sax and Frank where they were, on a topo map he clicked onto both cars' sTchreiernsr.oute through Noctis
was to run a course southwest to northeast, along one of the biggest canyons of the labyrinth; emerging from that it zigzagged eastward, droppisntgeeply until they were at the big area between Noctis and the heads of Ius and Tithonium ChasmMs.ichel called this area the Compton Break, and it was chaotic
terrain; and until they had crossed it, and gotten down into Ius Chasm, Michel would not feel comfortable. For without their surreptitious road, he said, the area was basically impas"sAanbdle.if they figure we went this way out of Cairo, they may bomb the Trohueyte."had traveled nearly five hundred
kilometers the previous night, almost the whole length of Noctis; another good night and they would be down into Ius, and beyond their complete reliance on a single route.
It was a dark day, the air thick with brown fines, the winAdsnohtihgehr. dust storm, no doubt about it. Temperatures were plummetingS. ax sniffed at a radio voice which claimed the dust storm was going

global. Michel, however, was pleasedI.t meant they could travel during the day as well, cutting their travel time in half".We've got five thousand kilometers to go, and most of it offI-trowaidll. be wonderful to be able to travel by day, I haven't done that since the Great Storm."
So he and Kasei began driving round the clock, taking shifts of three hours at tAhenowthheereld.ay and they were down the Compton Break, and into tight-walled Ius Chasm, and Michel relaxed.
Ius was the narrowest of all the canyons in the Marineris system, only twenty-five kilometers wide when it left the Compton Break, dividing Sinai Planum from Tithania CTatheenac. anyon was a deep slash
between these two plateaus, its side cliffs a full three kilometers high; a long, narrow, gianBt uotf a rift. they only saw the walls in glimpses, through bubbles of opienn thaeir blowing dusTt.hey continued to
follow a level but rockstrewn route, making good progress through all of a long dItimwadsayq.uiet in
the car, the radio turned down to decrease the irritation of theTshteaticca.meras' views, higher than the windows, were of dust whipping past them so that it seemed they hardly Omfotevnedi.t looked as if
they were slewing sidewaysI.t was hard driving, and Simon and Sax spelled Michel and Kasei, following their directions.Ann was still not talking, and they did not ask her toSadxrivder.ove with one eye on his
AI screen, which was giving him atmospheric readoSuhtse. could tell from across the car that the AI was indicating that the impact of Phobos was thickening the atmosphere a great deal, projected to as much a fifty millibar addition, an extraordinary amouAntn. d the newly smashecdraters were still outgassingS.ax
noted this change with his owlish satisfaction, oblivious to the death and destruction that camHe ewith it. noticed her glare and said, "Like the Noachian Age, I suppHoesen."early added more, but Simon
silenced him with a look, and changed the subject.
In the next car Maya and Frank passed the hours by calling over and asking Michel questions about the hidden colony, or discussing with Sax the the physical changes occurring, or speculating about the war. Hashing it all over endlessly, trying to make sense of it, to figure out what had hTaaplkpienngedta. lking
talking. On Judgement Day, Ann thought, as all the quick and the dead staggered around together, Maya and Frank would still be talking, trying to figure out what had hapWpehneerde. they had gone wrong.
Their third night out, the two cars ran down the lower end of Ius, and camelemtoniascalotengfin dividing the canyon. They followed the official trans-Marineris Highway down the soutIhn ftohrek. last
hour before dawn, they caught sight of some clouds overhead, and the dawn was much lighter than those of the previous daysI.t was enough to send them to cover, and they stopped in a fall of boulders stacked against the foot of the canyon's south wall, and gathered in the lead car to wait out the day.
Here they had a view out over the broad expanse of Melas Chasma, the biggest canyon oIfust'hsem all. rock was rough and blackish in comparison to the smooth red floor of Melas; it seemed to Ann possible that the two canyons were made of rock from ancient tectonic plates, once moving past each other, now juxtaposed forever.
They sat through a long day, talked out, tense, exhausted, their hair oily and uncombed, their faces grimy with the ubiquitous red fines of a dust stSoromm.etimes there were clouds, sometimes haze, sometimes
sudden pockets of clarity.
In mid-afternoon, without any warning at all, the rover rocked on its shock abSsotarbrtelersd. to
attention, they jerked up to look at the TTVhes. rover's rear camera was pointed back up Ius, and suddenly Sax tapped the screen displaying its vi"eFwro. st," he said". I wonder. . . ."
The camera showed the frost steam thickening, moving downcanyon towardTthemh.ighway was up
on a bench above the main floor of Ius's south fork; and this was lucky, because with a roar that shook the rover, that main floor disappeared, overwhelmed by a low wall of black water and dirty white mush.

It was a juggernaut of ice chunks, tumbling rocks, foam, mud and water, a slurry throwing itself down the middle of the canyonT.he roar was like thunder, even inside the car; it was too loud to talk, and the car trembled under them.
Below their bench, the canyon floor proper was perhaps fifteen kilometers Tahcreosfslo. od filled this
whole expanse in a matter of minutes, and promptly began to rise against a long talus slope that ran out from the cliff downcanyon from theTmh.e surface of the flood settled as it pooled against this dam, and
froze solid as they watchead: lumpy discolored chaos of ice, strangely stilNleodw.
they could hear
themselves shout over the cracks and booms and omnipresent roaring, but there was nothing to say; they only stared out the low windows or at the TVs, stuTnhnedf.rost steam coming off the flood's surface
lessened to a light foBg.ut no more than fifteen minutes later the ice lake burst at its lower end, rupturing in a surge of black steaming water that tore the talus dam away, with an explosive roar of avalanching rock. The flood poured downcayon again, its leading edge beyond their view, down the great slope from Ius into Melas Chasma.
# # #
Now there was a river running down Valles Marineris, a broad, steaming, ice-chokedAdnenluhgaed.
seen videotape of the outbreaks in the north, but she hadn't been able to get to one, to see it in person.
Here in the flesh, she found it almost impossible to
Tgrhaespl.andscape itself was now speaking a kind
of glossolalia.The inchoate roar smashed at the air, and quivered their stomachs like some bass tearing of the world's fabric; and it was visual chaos as well, a meaningless jumble that she couldn't seem to focus
on, to distinguish near from far, or vertical from horizontal, or moving from still, or light fSrohme
dark.
was losing the ability to read meaning from her seOnsnelys. with great difficulty could she understand her companions in the carS.he wasn't sure if it was her hearing orShneot.couldn't stand to look at Sax, but
then Sax she at least understooHde.
was trying to hide it from her, but it was clear he was excited by
what was happeningT. hat calm dead exterior had always been a mask over a passionate nature, and she had always known iNt. ow he was high-colored as if he had a fever, and he never met her eye; he knew that she knew what he feSlth.e despised his shirking inability to confront her, even if it did arise from
some kind of consideration for hAern. d the way he stayed always busy at his scSreheen.had never
seen him get down and actually look out the low floor windows of the rover, to see the flood with his own eyes.The cameras have a better view, he would say mildly when Michel urged him to have a look. And after only a half hour of watching the first arrival of the flood on the TVs, he had gone to his AI
screen to work out what it might mean to his prWojaetcetr.
rushing down Ius, freezing, breaking up and
rushing down again; certainly into Melas; whether there would be enough water to make it into Coprates, and then down into Capri and Eos, and then down into the Aureum chaos. . . it seemed unlikely on the face of it, but the Compton Aquifer had been big, one of the biggest eveMr faoriunnedri.s very likely
owed its existence to outbreaks from earlier incarnations of the same aquifer, and the Tharsis bulge had never stopped outgassing. . S. h.e found she was lying on the floor of the rover, watching the flood,
trying to comprehend iSt.he tried to calculate its flow in her head, just as a way to focus better on what she saw, to bring it back out of the meaninglessness that threatened to overwheDlmesphiteer.herself
she felt the fascination of the calculation, and of the view, and even of the flood itself ; this had happened on Mars before, billions of years ago, and probably just likTe htehries. were signs of catastrophic floods
all over, beach terraces, lemniscate islandcsh,annel beds, scablands. . . . And the old broken aquifers had refilled, from the Tharsis upwelling and all the heat and outgassing that that engIetndweoreudld.
have been slow, but give it two billion years. . . .
She forced herself to focus, to
Tsehee.
near edge of the flood was about a kilometer away, and two
hundred meters below themT.he foot of the northern wall of Ius was about fifteen kilometers away, and the flood stretched right to Tith.e flood was perhaps ten meters deep, judging by the giant boulders that rolled downstream like Big Man's bowling balls, smashing ice to shards and leaving steaming black

polnyaps in their wakeT.he water in the open patches seemed to be moving at perhaps thirty kilometers an hour.So (punching figures into her wristpad) perhaps four and a half million cubic meters per hour. That was about a hundred Amazons out there, but running irregularly, freezing and bursting in a perpetual series of ice dams building and failing, whole steaming lakes leaping downhill over whatever channel or
slope they found themselves on, stripping the land down to bedrock and then tearing the bedrock away. .
. Lying on the floor of the rover, Ann could feel that assault in her cheekbones, vibrating the ground in a rapid pounding.Such tremors hadn't been felt on Mars in millions of years, which explained something
else that she had seen but not been able to comprehend; the northern wall of Ius waTs hme orvoicnkg.
of the cliffs was flaking off and falling into the canyon, which shook the ground, and triggered more collapses, and giant waves that washed out into the flood, water pouring back upstream over the ice, the rock bursting apart in explosions hoyfdration, the frost steam pouring so thickly into the dust-choked air
that she could see the northern wall only in snatches.
And without a doubt the southern wall would be collapsing in a similar way, although their view of this wall, which loomed over their road to the right, was foreshortened and Bcuutt oitffh. ad to be falling.
And if it flaked off above them, then they were dead foIrt swuares. quite possible-very possible. Judging by her glimpses of the north wall, the chances might be as high as fiftyBuptertcheennt. it was
probably worse over there; the northern wall appeared to be undercut by the flood, while the south wall was removed from it by the bench they were driving Soovethr.e southern cliffs should be a bit more
stable-
But then something drew her eye forward, downstream from Uthpemth. ere the south wall was indeed collapsing, falling in great sheets of roTckh.e base of the cliff exploded in a cloud of dust that bloomed
over the talus, and the upper sections of the cliff slid down into this new cloud of dust and disappeared. After a second the whole mass reappeared flying horizontally out of the cloud, a stranTgheesingohits.e
was painfully loud, even inside the car; then it was just a long, slow landslide, down into the flood, the rocks crushing the ice and blocking the flow beneAanth.instant dam, cutting off much of the flow downcanyon; and so the banks of the flood began toArninse.watched the icy sheet of the shoreline
below her rupture, and then it was chunks of ice, jostling in a sea of black smoking fizzing water, rising swiftly toward the roverI.t would engulf them if the landslide dam lasted long enAoungnh.peered at the
long black spill of rock ahead of them; only a strip of it was still visible aboveBtuhte thfleoosdlu. sh beneath her continued to risIet. was a race of sorBtsi.g Man's bathtub, draining while he poured new
bucketfulls in.The speed of the lake's ascent caused Ann to raise her estimate of the flSohwe
rfealtte.
paralyzed, disconnected, in some curious sense serene; it was a matter of indifference to her whether or not the dam broke before the flood reached thAenmd. in the overwhelming roar she felt no need to communicate with the others about this; it was impossSibhlee. found that in a way she was cheering the flood on.It would serve them all right.
But then the landslide dam disappeared under the discolored slurry, and it all rolled off downstream in a stately collapse, the short-lived lake dropping as she watched, ice blocks on its surface clattering
together, shriekingand booming as they collided and jumbled aroundshanodt high into the air, all fantastically loud, every audible pitch roaring at onItceh.ad to be well over a hundred decibSehles. had her fingers in her ears, but couldn't remember for how Tlhoengc. ar was bouncing up and dowSnh.e
could see more landslides from the cliffs farther downstream, no doubt undercut by the sudden surge of the flood; and the tremors they caused were triggering further collapses, until it looked like the whole canyon would fillI.t seemed impossible in all the noise and vibration that their little cars would survive.
The travelers clutched their chair arms or lay there on the floor like Ann, isolated by the roar, their veins pumping with an awful mix of ice and adrenalin; even Ann, who did not care, found her breath short, her muscles tensed against the kinetic assault.
When they could hear each other's shouts again, they asked Ann what had haDpuplelnyedsh. e stared

out the window, ignoring themA.pparently they were going to survive, for the moment at Tlheaestf.lood
surface was now the most shattered chaotic terrain she had ever seen, the ice pulverized to a plain of wicked shards. The high point of the lake had climbed their bench until it had been only a hundred meters downslope from them; the re-exposed wet ground down there had turned from rusty black to dirty white in less than twenty seconFdrse.ezing time on Mars.
# # #
Sax had stayed in his seat through all that, absorbed by flickering on hiAs slcorteeonf. water would evaporate, or rather freeze and sublime, he muttered to no one as he wItorwkeads. a heavily carbonated saline brine, but it would end up as dust-filled snow, falling somewheTreheelasetm. osphere
might get hydrated enough so that it would snow several times, or even on a regular basis, in cycles of precipitation and sublimationT. hus the floodwater would get distributed pretty evenly planetwide, except perhaps at the highest altitudeAs.lbedo would rise dramaticallyT.hey would have to lower it, presumably
by encouraging the snow algae that the Acheron group had cr(eBatuetd.there was no more Acheron, Ann said to him in her minBdl.a)ck ice would melt by day, then freeze at nSiugbhlti.mate and
precipitate. And thus they would have a waterscasptere:ams collecting, pooling, running downstream, freezing and expanding in cracks in the rock, subliming and snowing and melting and runninAg again. glaciated or muddy world, most of the tiBmuet. a waterscape nevertheless.
And every single feature of the primal Mars would melt RaewdayM. ars was gone.
Ann lay there on the floor by the winHdoewr .tears poured out of her to join the flood; over the dam of her nose, downstream until her right cheek and ear and the whole side of her face was wet.
# # #
"This will complicate the process of getting downcanyon," Michel said with a little Gallic smile, and from the next car Frank laughedI.n fact it looked as if it would be impossible for them to proceed even five kilometers. Directly before them the canyon highway was buried under the great landslide, completely
gone. The new spill of rock was shattered and unstable, sapped from below by the flood, pounded from above by subsequent mass wasting of the new slope.
For a long time the others debated even making Tahetryy.had to speak loudly to be heard over the jet engine roar of the flood, which still swept past with no sign of aNaledti-aupc.onsidered the slope
suicidal, but Michel and Kasei were pretty sure they could find a way, and after a long day's reconaissance on foot they managed to convince Nadia to agree to try it, and the rest were willing if Nadia was.And so the day after that, protected from surveillance by the general dust storm and the flood's steam, they divided into the two cars and drove slowly out onto the slide.
It was a rough mass of gravel and sand, liberally sprinkled with bTouhledreersw. as, however, a zone corresponding to the bench below it, which was relatively lTehviesl. zone was the only thing that made passage possible; it was a matter of finding an unobstructed way over a surface like poorly mixed cement, around boulders and past the occasional gaping hMoliec.hel drove the lead car boldly, with a stubborness verging on the reckles"sD. esperate measures," he declared cheeril"yC. an you imagine
getting on this kind of ground in the normal course of tIhtinwgos?uld be insane." "It's insane now," Nadia said sourly.
"Well, what can we dWo?e can't go back, and we can't giveTuhpes. e are the times that try men's souls."

"Women, however, do fine."
"I was quotingY. ou know what I meaTn.here's simply no possibility of going baTckh.e head of Ius will be flooded wall to walIl. suppose it's this that makes me somehow haHppayv.e we ever been so free of choices?The past is wiped out, all that matters is Tnhoew.present and the futurAe.nd the future is
this field of stones, and here we Aarned. , you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there's no way back, no way to go but onward."
And so onward they weBntu. t Michel's sanguinity was sharply reduced when the second car collapsed into a hole that had been concealed by a kind of trapdoor arrangement of bWouitlhdersso.me work
they were able to open the front lock and pull out Kasei, Maya, Frank anBd uNt athdeiar.e was no chance whatsoever of freeing the second car, they didn't have the lift or the lSevoertahgeey. transferred
all the supplies out of it, until the lead car was absolutely sAtunffdedt.hey moved on, eight of them and their supplies, all now in a single car.
# # #
Beyond the landslide, however, it got easTiehre.y followed the canyon highway down into Melas
Chasma, and found that the road had been built close to the south wall, and as Melas was so broad canyon, the flood had had room to spread out, and had bowed off some ways to Itthestinllorth.
sounded like air miners were running at full capacity right outside their lock, but the road was well above and to the south of the flood, which was releasing veils of frost steam that filled the chasm, and obscured any views farther north.
So they proceeded without difficulty for a couple of nights, until they came to the Geneva Spur, which stuck out from the gigantic south wall nearly to the edge of theHefrloeotdh.e official road had swung
out into what was now the course of the deluge, and they had to find a higThhere rroouctkey.
traverses
they made around the lower slopes of the Spur were really difficult for thOe nrcoevetrh.ey were nearly hung up on an obtruding rounded rock, and Maya shouted at Michel, accusing him of reckSlehsesness. took over the driving while Michel and KaseiNaanddia went out in walkerTs.hey jacked them off the rock, and then walked ahead to reconnoiter the route of the traverse.
Frank and Simon helped Maya look for obstructions as she Sdaroxvec.ontinued to spend all his time at
his screen.From time to time Frank would turn on the TV and run a search for signals, trying to piece
together news from the occasional staticky voices the radio found in the jamOmn inthge.
very spine of
the Geneva Spur, as they were crossing the absurdly thin concrete thrtehaed Torfanscanyon Highway,
they were far enough out from the south wall to briefly get some transmissions; something about it not becoming a global dust storm after Aalnl.d indeed the days were sometimes only hazy, rather than
clotted with the dusSt.ax claimed this as proof of the relative success of the dust-fixing strategies pursued since the Great StormN. o one responded to thiTs.he haze that was in the air, Frank observed, seemed actually to help clarify weak radio signTalhs.at was stochastic resonance, Sax saTidh.e phenomenon
was counter-intuitive, and Frank questioned Sax closely for an explanationWohf eint. he understood,
the room rang with his mirthless br"aMy:aybe all the emigration was stochastic resonance, enhancing the weak signal of the revolution."
"I don't think it helps to make analogies between the phaynsdicsaol cial worlds," Sax said primly. "Shut up, SaxG. o back to your virtual reality."
Frank was still angry, still filled with bitter bile; it sublimed from him like the frost steam ofHf ethe flood.

snapped questions at Michel about the hidden colony, his curiosity bursting out two or three times a day. Ann was happy to think she would not be Hiroko when Frank first mMeitchheelr.answered these
accusing questions calmly, ignoring the sarcasm and the furious gleam in FrankM'saeyyae's.
attempts to
cool Frank only increased his rage, but she kept at it; Ann was impressed at how persistent she was, how insensitive to Frank's brusque rejectionIts.was a side of Maya that Ann had never seen before; Maya was usually the most volatile person arouBnudt. not now, not when the pressure was really on.
Eventually they rounded the Geneva Spur, and got back on the bench under the southern escarpment. The way east was often interrupted by landslides, but they always had room to veer left around them. Progress was good.
But then they came to the eastern end of MHeelraes.the greatest chasm of them all narrowed, and
dropped several hundred meters down into the two parallel canyons of Coprates, which were separated by a long narrow plateaSu.outh Coprates dead-ended in a cliffy headwall some two hundred and fifty kilometers away; North Coprates connected with the lower canyons farther east, and therefore was the one they wanted to takNe.orth Coprates was the longest single segment of the Marineris system; Michel
called it La Manche, and it, like the English Channel, narrowed as it progressed eastward, until at around
60° longitude it narrowed and reared into a gigantic gsohregeer: cliffs four kilometers high, facing each other across a gap only twenty-five kilometers acrMosisc.hel called this gorge the Dover Gate; apparently the cliff walls in this gap were whitish, or had been.
So they made their way down North Coprates, and the cliffs closed in on them more Tevhe y day. flood filled almost the whole width of the canyon floor, and its flow was so rapid that the ice on its surface had broken into small bergs, which flew off the lips of standing waves and crashed back into the cascade: a furious whitewater rapid with the flow of a hundred Amazons, topped by icTebhe gs.
canyon floor was being ripped away, torn free of its bed and rushing down in red jolts of water like massive pulses of rusty blood, as if the planet were bleeding toTdheeatnho. ise was incredible, a roar so continuous and pervasive that it dulled thought, and made talk almost impossible; they had to shout everything at the top of their lungs, which quickly reduced them to communicating only the basic necessities.
But then there was a very basic necessity to shout about, for when they came to the Dover Gate they found that the canyon floor was almost completely covered by the flood; their bench below the southern wall of the gorge was no more than two kilometers wide, and dimishing everyItmsieneumtee. d possible
the whole bench might be torn away in a fMlaasyha.
cried that it was too dangerous to go on, and
argued for a retreaIt.f they circled around and drove up to the dead end of south Coprates, she shouted, and managed to climb to the plateau above, then they could drive past the pits of Coprates Catena, and proceed onward to Aureum.
Michel shouted his insistence that they press forward, and get through the Gate on th"Ief bweench. hurry we can make iWt! e must try!"And when Maya continued to protest, he added forcef"uTllhye: head of south Coprates is steeTph!e car would never get up it, it's a cliff like Athnedsew! e don't have the supplies to add so many extra days to our trip! We can't go back!"
The insane roar of the flood was his only anTshweeyr. sat in the car, in their separate thoughts, separated by the roar as if by many kilometers of sApnance.found herself wishing the bench would slide
from under them, or a piece of the south wall fall onto them, and put an end to their indecision, and to th awful, maddening noise.
They drove onF.rank and Maya and Simon and Nadia stood behind Michel and Kasei, watching them drive; Sax sat at his screen, stretching like a cat, staring myopically at the little picture of thTehedeluge.

surface calmed for a moment, and froze over, and the explosive noise reduced to a violent low rumble. "It's like the Grand Canyon on a kind of super-Himalayan scale," Sax said, apparently to himself,
although only Ann would be able to hear "hTimhe.
Kala Gandaki Gorge is like three kilometers deep,
isn't it?And Dhalagiri and Annapurna only forty or fifty kilometers apart, IFtihllintkh.at with a flood like.
. . "He failed to recall any comparable flo"oId.wonder what all that water was doing so high on the
Tharsis bulge."
Cracks like gunshots announced another surTghe.e white surface of the flood blew apart and tumbled downstream. White noise suddenly enveloped them, battening everything they said or thought, as if the
universe were vibratingA.
bass tuning fork. . . .
"Outgassing," Ann said".Outgassing." Her mouth was stiff, she could feel in her face how long it had been since she had last spoke"nT.harsis rests on an upwelling of magmRao.ck alone couldn't sustain the weight; the bulge would have subsided if it weren't being supported by an upwelling current in the mantle."
"I thought there was no mantlSeh."e could just hear him through the noise.
"No no."She didn't care if he could hear her or"Int'ost.just slowed downB. ut currents are still there.
And since the last great floods, they have refilled the high aquifers on
AThnadrskise.pt aquifers like
Compton warm enough to stay liquid. Eventually the hydrostatic pressures were exBtruetmwe.ith less vulcanism, and fewer big meteor strikes, nothing set itIt omffi.ght have been full for a billion years."
"Do you think Phobos broke it open?" "Maybe.More likely a reactor meltdown."
"Did you know Compton was this big?" Sax asked. "Yes."
"I never heard of it." "No."
Ann stared at himH.ad he heard her say that?
He hadC. oncealing data:he was shocked, she could teHlle.
couldn't imagine any reason good enough
to conceal dataP. erhaps this was the root of their inability to understand each Voathlueer. systems based on entirely different assumptionCs.ompletely different kinds of science.
He cleared his throa"tD. id you know it was liquid?" "I thought soB. ut now we know."
Sax twitched, and called up on his screen the image from the left sideBclaacmkerfaiz.zing water, gray
debris, shattered ice, boulders like great tumbling dice; standing waves freezing in place, collapsing and sweeping away in clouds of frost steam. . . the noise had risen back to its crackling jet howl.
"I wouldn't have done it this way!" Sax exclaimed.

Ann stared at himH.e steadfastly regarded the TV.
"I know," she saiAd.nd then she was tired of talk again, tired of its uselesIst nheassd. never been any more than it was noww:hispers against the great roar of the world, half-heard and less understood.
# # #
They drove as quickly as they could through the Dover Gate, following the Calais Ramp as Michel called their benchP. rogress was nerve-rackingly slow, it was a bitter struggle to get the rover over the rockfall covering this narrow terrace; boulders were scattered everywhere, and the flood ate away at the land to their left, narrowing the bench at a perceptibleLarantdes.lides from the cliff walls fell ahead and
behind them, and more than once individual rocks crashed into the car's roof, making them Iatll jump.
was perfectly possible that a bigger rock would hit them and smash them like bugs, without a single bit of warning. That possibility subdued them all, which was fine by EAvnenn. Simon left her alone, throwing
himself into the navigational effort and going out on scouting trips with Nadia or Frank or Kasei, happy, she thought, to have some excuse to get away fromAnhder.why not?
They bumped along at a couple kilometers per
Thohueyr. traveled through a night and then the following
day, even though the haze had diminished to the point where it was possible they were visible from satellites. There was no other choice.
And then finally they were through the Dover Gate, and Coprates opened up again, giving them some leeway. The flood veered a few kilometers to the north.
At dusk they stopped the cTahr.ey had been driving for some forty hours straTighhety.
stood up and
stretched, shuffled around, and then sat back down and ate a microwaved meal toMgeatyhae,r. Simon,
Michel and Kasei were in good spirits, cheerful to have gotten through the Gate; Sax was the same as always; Nadia and Frank a bit less grim than uTshueal.surface of the flood was frozen over for the moment, and it was possible to speak without hurting one's throat, and still bAe nhdeasrod. they ate, concentrating on the small portions of food, talking in a desultory manner.
Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptabilityH. ere they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining room conviviality; it might have been anywhere anytime, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together-while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and rockfall could annihilate them at any iAnsntadnti.t came to her
that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory
as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into exGisrtoenucpes. of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would laTsht.e illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded Ainn.d so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's
company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the cities huddling under bombardment.
And so, in this moment of the storm, Ann Clayborne exerted
Shehreseslft.ood up, she went to the
table. She picked up Sax's plate, Sax who had first drawn her out; and then Nadia's andSSheimon's.
carried the plates over to their little magnesium sAinnkd.
as she cleaned the dishes, she felt her stiff
throat move; she croaked out her part of the conversation, and helped, with her little strand, to weave the human illusion."A stormy night!" Michel said to her as he stood beside her drying plates, "sAmiling.
stormy night indeed!"

# # #
The next morning she woke before the rest, and looked at the faces of her sleeping companions, now revealed in the daylight to be utterly disheveled-grimy, puffy, black with frostnip, open-mouthed in the
total sleep of exhaustionT. hey looked deadA.
nd she had been no help to them-on the contSrahrey!had
been a drag on the group; every time they had come back in the car they had had to step by the madwoman on the floor, lying there refusing to speak, often crying, clearly in the throes of severe depression. Just what they had needed!
Ashamed, she got up and quietly finished cleaning up the main room and the drivAernsd' alaretear.
that
day she took her turn driving the rover, doing a six hour shift, and ending up exBhuatusheed.got them well east of the Dover Gate.
Their troubles, however, were not ovCeor.prates had opened up a bit, yes, and the south wall had for the most part held; but in this area there was a long ridge, now arnuninslianngd,down the middle of the canyon, dividing it into north and south channels; and unfortunately the southern channel was lower than
the northern one, so that the bulk of the flood was running down it, and crowding them tight against the southern wall.Happily the bench terrace gave them some five kilometers between the deluge and the wall proper; but with the flood so close on their left, and the steep cliffs on their right, they never lost the sense of danger.And they had to raise their voices to talk at least half the time; and the crackling roar of the surges seemed to invade their heads, making it harder than ever to concentrate, or to pay attention, or indeed to think at all.
One day Maya crashed her fist against the table and cried, "Couldn't we wait for the island ridge to get torn away?"
After an awkward pause Kasei said, "It's a hundred kilometers long."
"Well, shit-couldn't we just wait until this flood sItopmse?an, how long can it go on like this?" "A few months," Ann said.
"Can't we wait that long?"
"We're running low on food," Michel explained.
"We have to keep going," Frank snapped at M"Dayoan.'t be stupid."She glared at him and turned
away, clearly furiousT. he rover suddenly seemed much too small, as if a bunch of tigers and lions had been thrown together in a dog's kennSeilm. on and Kasei, oppressed by the tension, suited up and went out to scout what lay ahead.
# # #
Beyond what they called Island Ridge, Coprates opened up like a funnel, with deep troughs under the diverging canyon wallsT. he northern trough was Capri Chasma, the southern trough was Eos Chasma, which ran on as a continuation of Coprates; because of the flood they had no choice but to follow Eos, but Michel said it was the way they would have wanted anHyewraeyt.he southern cliff finally lowered a
bit, and was cut with deep embayments, and shattered by a couple of good-sized meteorCcarpartiers. Chasma curved out of their sight to the northbeaestwt;een the two trough canyons was a low triangular
mesa, now a peninsula dividing the course of the flood in two. Unfortunately the great bulk of the water ran into the somewhat lower Eos, so that even though they were out of the tight constriction of Coprates,

they were still pressed against a cliff, and moving slowly, off any road or trail, and with diminishing supplies of food and gaseTs.he cupboards were nearly bare.
And they were tired, very tirIetd.had been twenty-three days since they had escaped from Cairo, now
2500 kilometers upcanyon; and all that time they had been sleeping in shifts, and driving almost
constantly, and living in the aural assault of the flood, the roar of a world falling down in pieces on their heads. They were too old for this, as Maya said more than once, and nerves were frayed; they were fudging things, making little mistakes, falling into little microbursts of sleep.
The bench that was their road between cliff and flood became an immense boulder field, the boulders mostly ejecta from nearby craters, or detritus from really extensive mass wIatstlionogk. ed to Ann like
the big fluted and scalloped embayments in the southern cliff were sappings that would initiate tributary subsidence canyons; but she didn't have the time to look very cOlofsteelny. it seemed that they were
going to have their way blocked entirely by boulders, that after all these days and kilometers, after negotiating most of Marineris in the midst of a most violent cataclysm, they were going to be halted just short of the tremendous washes leading out of its lower end.
But then they found a way; and were stopped; and found a way; and were stopped; and found a way;
and so on, for day after day after Tdhayey.
went to half rationAs.nn drove more than anyone else, as
she seemed to be fresher than the rest, and was the best driver there anyway with the possible exception of Michel.And she felt she owed it to them after her shameful collapse during the greater part of their journey. She wanted to do everything she could, and when she wasn't driving, she went out to scout the way. It was still numbingly loud outside, and the ground trembled undeIrtfowoat.s impossible to get
used to that, though she did her best to ignoSruenliitg. ht burned through the mist and haze in broad lurid splashes, and in the sunset hour icebows and sundogs appeared in the sky, along with rings of light around the dulled sun; often the whole sky seemed afire, a Turner vision of the apocalypse.
Soon enough Ann too wore down, and the work became exhauSshteingu.nderstood now why her companions had been so tired, why they had been so short with her and with eaMchichoethl ehr.ad
been unable to locate the last three caches they had passed; buried or drowned, it didn'Tt hme ahttaelrf. rations were 1200 calories a day, much less than they were expeLnadcinkg.of food, lack of sleeapn:d
then, for Ann at least, the same old depression, persistent as death, rising in her like a flood, like a black slurry of mud, steam, ice, shDito. ggedly she kept at the work, but her attention kept blinking out and the glossolalia kept returning, washing everything away in the white noise of despair.
The way got hardeOr.ne day they made only a kilomeTtehr.e following day they seemed completely stopped, the boulders arrayed across the bench like tankstoppers in Big Man's MaginoItt Lwinaes. a perfect fractal plane, Sax remarked, of about 2.7 dimensiNonos.one bothered to answer him.
Kasei, wandering on foot, found a passage right down on the bank of thFeorfltohoed.moment the whole visible expanse of the deluge was frozen, as it had been for the last coupleIt osftredtacyhse.d out
to the horizon, a jumbled surface like Earth's Arctic Sea, only much dirtier, a great mix of black and red and white lumpsT. he ice just offshore was flat, however, and in many placesTchleyar.could look
down into it, and see that it appeared to be only a couple meters deep, and frozen right down to the bottom. So they drove down to this icy shore and ran along it, and when rocks in the way forced her to, Ann put the left wheels of the rover out onto the ice, and then the entire car; and it held like any other surface. Nadia and Maya snorted at the others' nervousness about this co"Wursee:spent all winter
driving on the rivers in Siberia," Nadia s"aTidh.ey were the best roads we had."
So for an entire day Ann drove along the ragged edge of the flood, and out onto its surface, and they made a hundred and sixty kilometers, their best day in two weeks.

Near sunset it began to snoTwh.e west wind poured out of Coprates, drivinggrbititgy clumps of snow
past them as if they weren't moving atThalely.
came to a fresh slide zone, which spilled right out onto the
ice of the floodB. ig boulders scattered over the ice gave it the air of an abandoned neighborhood, old houses half demolishedT. he light was dusky graTy.hey needed a foot guide through this maze, and in an exhausted conference Frank volunteered, and went out to do theAtjotbh.is point he was the only one
of them with any strength left, more even than the younger Kasei; still burning with the force of his anger, a breeder fuel that would never give out.
Slowly he walked ahead of the car, testing routes and returning, either shaking his head or waving Ann on. Around them thin veils of frost steam lofted into the falling snow, the two mixing and gusting off together on the powerful evening wind, off into the mWuarktc.hing the dark spectacle of one hard gust,
Ann misread the configuration of the ice's meeting with the ground, which was hard to see in any case; and the rover ran up onto a round rock right at the frozen shoreline, lifting the left rear wheel off the ground. Ann gunned the front wheels to roll them over the rock, but they dug into a patch of sand and snow, and suddenly both rear wheels were barely touching the ground, while the front two merely spun in the holes they had duSg.he had run the rover aground.
It had happened before several times, but she was annoyed with herself for getting distracted by the irrelevant spectacle of the sky.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Frank shouted over the inteArcnonmj.umped in her chair; she would never get used to Frank's biting vehemen"cGe.et going!" he shouted.
"I ran it onto a rock," she said.
"Damn you!Why don't you watch where you're goinHge!re, stop the wheels, stop themI'm!
gonna put
the grip cloths under the front wheels and lever you forward, and then you get it off this rock and up the slope as quick as you can, understand? There's another surge coming!"
"Frank!" Maya cried".Get inside!"
"Soon as I get the fucking pads doBwen!ready to go!"
The pads were strips of spiked metal mesh, set under wheels that had dug holes into sand, and then pegged out ahead so that the wheels had something toAgnripa.ncient desert method, and Frank ran
around the front of the rover cursing under his breath and snapping directions to Ann, who obeyed with her teeth clenched and her stomach knotted.
"Okay go!" Frank shoute"dG. o!" "Get in first!" Ann cried.
"There's no time, go it's almost hIe'lrle!hang on the side, go, damn it, go!"
So Ann gently accelerated the front wheels, and felt them catch on the grips and scrape the car forward over the rock, until the rear wheels touched down again and they scraped off and wBeurte tfhreeer.oar
of the flood suddenly doubled and redoubled behind them, and then there were chunks of ice bounding past the car, bursting along with a hideous cracking, and then the ice was overwhelmed by a dark wave of steaming bubbling slurry, a surge that washed up over the windows of Athnen cfalor;ored the
accelerator and held the wheel with a death grip as it bounced in heMr hixaenddsw. ith the crashing of

the surge wave she heard Frank's voice shouting "Go, idiot, go!" and then they were hit hard and the car
slewed off to the left, out of contAronln.
hung onto the wheel as it threw her from side tHo esridlef.t
ear throbbed with pain, she had hit something wiSthheit.held on to the wheel and kept her foot jamming the accelerator to the flooTr.he wheels caught on something and the rover ground through water, they
were rolling through water, it poured from right to left and there was a dull banging against the side of the car. "Go!" She kept the accelerator floored and turned uphill, bouncing wildly in the driver's seat, all the windows and TV screens liquid madneTssh.en the water ran under the rover, and the windows were
clear. The rover's headlights showed rocky ground, falling snow, and ahead a bare flAatnnarekae.pt it floored and jounced wildly toward it, the flood still roaring behindWthheemn. she reached the flat rise
she had to pull her leg and foot away from the accelerator with heTr hheancdasr.
stoppedT. hey were
above the flood, on a narrow bench terraItcel.ooked like the surge was already recedBinugt. Frank
Chalmers was gone.
# # #
Maya insisted that they return and look for him, and as it was likely that the initial surge would be the largest one they did so, but it was fuIntileth. e twilight the headlights cut fifty meters into the snowfall, and
in the two intersecting yellow cones, and the dark gray world outside them, they saw only the ragged surface of the flood, a pouring sea of flotsam and jetsam without the slightest hint of any regular shape; in fact it looked like a world in which such shapesimwpeoressible. No one could survive in such madness.
Frank was gone, either knocked off the car in its jouncing, or swept off it in its brief and nearly fatal encounter with the wave.
His final curses still seemed to bubble out of the static on the intercom, out of the roar oHfisthe flood. final imprecation rang in Ann's ears like the judgement they Gwoe,rei:diot, go!It had been her fault, all
her fault-
Maya was weeping, choking on sobs, doubling over her stomach as if cramping, "No!" she cried. "Frank, Frank!We have to look for himT!h"en she was crying too hard to speSaakx. went over and
dug into the medicine chest, and walked over to her and crouched by h"eHresreid, eM.
aya, do you
want a sedative?"And she uncoiled and dashed the pills from his hand, "No!" she screamed, "they're my feelings, they're my men, do you think I'm a coward, do you think I would want to be a zombie like you!"
She collapsed into helpless, involuntary, racking soSbasx. stood over her, blinking, face twisted with a stricken look; Ann found herself cut to the quick by that look, "Please," s"hPelesaasied,. please."She
got up from the driver's seat, went back to them and held Sax briefly bySthhee carromu.ched to help
Nadia and Simon pick Maya up off the floor, and get her to hAelrrebadedy. Maya was quieter,
withdrawing from them, her eyes red and her nose running, off in her own grief, one hand clenched in a death grip over Nadia's wrisNt. adia looked down at her with a doctor's detached expression,
withdrawn in her own way, murmuring in Russian.
"Maya, I'm sorry," Ann saHide. r throat was cramped, it hurt to t"aIltk.was my faulIt.'m sorry." Maya shook her hea"dI.t was accident."
Ann couldn't bring herself to say aloud that she had stopped paying atTtehnetiowno. rds stuck in her throat, and another spasm of sobs racked Maya, and the chance to speak was gone.
Michel and Kasei took over the drivers' seats, and started the rover along the bench again.

# # #
Not far east of that, the southern canyon wall finally sank down into the surrounding plain, and they were free to move away from the flood, which was in any case following Eos Chasma in a swing to the north, off to a distant reunion with Capri ChasMmaic.hel ran across the hidden colony's trail, but lost it again,
as the trail ducks were often buried in snHoew.tried throughout all one day to locate a cache he thought was nearby, but failedR. ather than waste more time they decided to drive on at full speed, a bit north of east, toward the refuge they had been trying to reach, which Michel said was in the broken terrain just south of Aureum Chaos".It's not our main colony anymore," he explained to the o"tIhte'srsw. here we
went first, after we left UnderhBillu. t Hiroko wanted to leave for the south, and after a few years we did. She said she didn't like this first shelter because Aureum is a sink, and she thought it might become a lake someday.I thought that was crazy, but I see now that she wasIt rliogohkt.s like Aureum may even
be the final drainage for this flood, I don't kBnouwt .the refuge is at a higher elevation than we are now, so it will be okaIyt. may be empty, but it will be stocked with supApnlides.any port in a storm, yes?"
No one had the spirit to reply.
On the second day of hard driving the flood disappeared over the horizon to tThheenroorathr. of it
went away soon afterT.he ground, covered with a meter of dirty snow, no longer trembled underfoot;
the world seemed dead, strangely silent and ssthilrlo, uded in whiteW.
hen it wasn't snowing the sky was
still hazy, but it seemed clear enough for them to be spotted from above, so they stopped traveling by day. They moved at night without headlights, across a snowscape that glowed faintly under the stars.
Ann drove through these nighStsh.e never told anyone about her moment of inattention at the wheel. And she never even came close to doing it again; she stayed focused with a desperate concentration, biting the inside of her mouth till it bled, oblivious to everything but what lay in the cones of light before her. She usually drove all night, forgetting to wake the next watch's driver, or decidingFrannokt to.
Chalmers was dead, and it was her fault; desperately she wished she could reach back and change things, but it was hopelesSs.ome mistakes you can never make goTodh.e white landscape was marred
by an infinity of stones, each capped with its own cake of snow, and the salt-and-pepper landscape was such a patchwork that it was hard at night for the eye to make sense of it; sometimes they seemed to be plowing underground, or floating five meters oveAr itw. hite worldS. ome nights she understood she was
driving a hearse, across the body of the deceaTshede. widows Nadia and Maya in baAckn.d now she knew that Peter was dead too.
Twice she heard Frank calling out to her over the intercom, once asking for her to turn back and help him; the other crying Go, idiot, go!
Maya was bearing up weSllh.e was tough, somehow, despite all her mooNdasd. ia, whom Ann used to think of as the tough one, was silent most of theSatixmes.tared at his screen and workMedi.chel tried
to talk to his old friends, and gave up unhappily when it was clear no one wanted toSitmalokn back. watched Ann anxiously as always, with unbearable concern; she couldn't stand it, and avoided his gaze. Poor Kasei must have felt like he was trapped in an asylum for the aged insane, it was almost funny to think of it, except that his spirit seemed to be somehow broken, she did not know why, perhaps the waste, perhaps the increasing likelihood that they would not survive; perhaps simple hunger, there was no way of tellingT. he young were oddB. ut he reminded her of Peter, and so she didn't look at him either.
The snow made each night glow and pAullsle.of it would melt eventually, carve new streambeds and
carry her Mars awayM. ars was goneM.
ichel sat beside her through the second shifts of the night,
looking for signs of the wa"yA.re we lost?" Maya asked him once, just before dawn.

"No, not at aIllt.'s just. . . we're leaving tracks in the sInodwon. 't know how long they'll last, or how
visible they are, but if. . . well, just in case they do last, I want to leave the car, and walk the last part o the way.So I want to be precisely sure of where we are before we Wdoe'vtheatg.ot some standing
stones and dolmens erected that will tell us for sure, but I have to find one of Tthhoesye'llfisrhsto.w on the horizon, you knowB. oulders a bit taller than usual, or columns."
"It will be easier to see those by day," Simon said.
"True.We'll have a look around tomorrow, and that should do it-we'll be in an area Tohfeythewme.re designed to help people lost like Wuse. 'll be okay."
Except that their friends were deHade.r only child was deaAd.nd their world was gone for goLoydi.ng down by the windows at dawn, Ann tried to imagine life in the hiddenUsnhdeelrtegrr.ound for years and years. She couldn't do iGt. o, idiot, go!Damn you!
At dawn Kasei hooted with hoarse triumopuht: there on the northern horizon was a trio of standing stones. A lintel bridging two pillars, as if a single fragment of Stonehenge had flowHnomhe ew. as that way, said Kasei.
But first they would wait through the Mdaiych. el was becoming extremely cautious about being seen
from satellites, and wanted to continue on by nTighhety.
settled down to get some sleep.
Ann couldn't sleep, she found herself energized by a new reWsohlvene. the rest were out cold, Michel snoring happily, all of them asleep for the first time in about fifty hours, she tugged into her walker and tiptoed into the lockS.he looked back and surveyed them; a hungry, raggedNalodti.a's crippled hand
stuck out from her sideG. etting out the lock made some unavoidable noise, but everyone was used to sleeping through noise, and the whirrs and clicks of the life support system partially coveredSher exit. got out without waking anyone.
The planet's basal chiSll.he shuddered in it, and set off west, walking in the rover's tracks so she couldn't be followedT. he sun was cutting through the mSisnto. w was falling again, tinted pink in shafts of sunlight. She trudged along until she came on a little drumlin ridge, with its steep side clearShoef snow. could traverse along the bare rock without leaving traSchkes. did so until she got tirIetd.was really cold
out, the snow falling straight down in tiny flakes, probably accreted around sandAgtrathines.end of the drumlin was a fat low bouldSerh.e sat in its leSe.he turned off her walker's heating unit, and covered the blinking alarm light on her wristpad with a clump of snow.
It got colder fasTt.he sky was an opaque gray now, tinged with faint Spnionwk. fell out of the pinkness onto her faceplate.
She had just stopped shivering, and was getting comfortably chill, when a boot kicked her hard in the helmet, and she was dragged up to her knees with her head rAingsiunigte. d figure banged its faceplate
into hers, hardT. hen hands with a vise's grip took her by the shoulders and flung her down to the ground. "Hey," she cried weaklyS.he was yanked by her shoulders to her feet, and her left arm was pulled back and held up high behind her baHcke.r assailant worked at her wristpad, and then shoved her painfully forward, her arm still held higShh.e couldn't fall without breaking her armSh. e could feel the diamond
pattern of her suit's heating elements begin to flare against her skin, burning their patternEivnetory her. few steps she was slapped hard in the helmet.
The figure marched her right back to their own rover, which astonishSehde hwera.s shoved into the
lock, and the figure tumbled in after her, and closed and pumped the chamber, and tore off her helmet,

and then his, and to her utter amazement it was her Simon, purple-faced and shouting at her, striking her still, his face soaking wet with tears-this her Simon, the quiet one, now yelling at heWr h"yW? hDya?mn
you, you always do this, it's always just you you you, off in your own world, you are Vsooisce fish!" rising to a final painful shriek, her Simon who never said anything, never raised his voice, never spoke more than a word, now striking her and shrieking in her face, literally spitting, gasping with fury; and suddenly it made her maWd. hy not before, why not when she had needed someone with some life in him? Why had it taken this to rouse hSimhe? punched him right in the chest, hard, and he fell back. "Leave me alone," she shoute"dL. eave me alone!"And then the anguish shuddered through her, the
chilled shiver of martian deat"hW:
hy didn't you leave me alone?"
He regained his balance, lunged forward and seized her by both shoulders, shoSohke hard.
never
noticed how powerful his hands we"reB.ecause," he shouted, and paused to lick his lips and catch his breath- "Because-"And his eyes bugged out, and his face darkened even further, as if a thousand sentences had all jammed in his throat at once, this her mild Simon! -and then he gave up on saying it, and roared, and shook her in his arms, shouting "BecBauescea!use! Because!"
-+=*=+-
Snow fellT. hough it was early morning, it was dWimin. d whipped across the chaos, swirling the
spindrift over the shattered landB. oulders as big as city blocks lay jumbled against each other, and the landscape was broken in a million little cliffs, holes, mesas, ridges, peaks-also many peculiar spikes, and towers, and balancing rocks, held in place by kami aAlolnl et.he steep or vertical stone in this chaotic
terrain was still black, while flatter areas were now white with snow, so that the landscape was a densely variegated black and white, all swirling in and out of visibility as billows and veils of snow gusted by.
Then the snow stoppeTd.he wind diedT. he black verticals and white horizontals gave the world a
definition it didn't usually havIen.
the overcast there were no shadows, and the landscape glowed as if
light were pouring up through the snow onto the bottoms of the dusky lowEvcleoruytdhsi.ng was sharp-edged and distinct, as if captured in glass.
Over the horizon appeared moving figurOesn.e by one they appeared, until there were seven of them, in a ragged line. They moved slowly, their shoulders slumped, their helmets bent foTrhweayrdm. oved as if
they had no destinationT.he two in front looked up from time to time, but they never paused, or pointed the way.
The eastern clouds gleamed like mother of pearl, the only sign on that dull day that the sunThhead risen. figures walked up a long ridge that emerged from the blasted landFsrcoampe.the upper slopes of the
ridge one could see a long way in every direction.
It took a long time for the figures to climb theFirnidaglley. they approached a peak, a bouldery knob where the ridge began to descend agaAint. the summit of the knob was a curious tahinbgig:
flat-bottomed boulder standing high in the air, balanced on six slender stone pillars.
The seven figures approached this megalTithey stopped and regarded it for a time, under the dark bruised clouds.Then they stepped between the pillars, and under the bouItldsetro. od well over them, a massive roof.The circular floor beneath it was flat, made of cut polished stone.

One of the figures walked to a far column, and touched it with Tahfeinogtehre. rs looked out at the
motionless snowy chaosA.
trapdoor slid open in the floTohr.e figures went to it, and one by one
stepped down into the ridge.
When they were gone the six slender columns began to sink into the floor, and the great dolmen that they held aloft descended on them, until the columns disappeared and the great rock rested on the ridge,
returned to its ancient existence as an impressive peak bouBldeeyro.nd the clouds the sun had set, and the light leaked out of the empty land.
-+=*=+-
It was Maya who kept them going, Maya who drove them into headinTghseourethfu. ge under the
dolmen was just that, a sequence of small caves in the ridge, stocked with emergency rations and gas supplies, but otherwise emptyA. fter a few days to rest and catch up on sleep and food, Maya began to complain. It was no way to live, she said, it was no more than a kind of death-in-life; where were all the others? Where was Hiroko?Michel and Kasei explained again that the hidden colony was in the south,
that they had moved down there long aAglol. right, Maya said, then we will go southThtoeor.e were
other boulder cars in the refuge's garage, they could caravan down by night, she said, and out of the canyons they would be safTe.he refuge was no longer self-sustaining in any case, its supplies were large but limited, so they would have to go sooner or Blaetsetr.to go while the dust storm would still provide some cover for the triBp.est to go.
So she drove the tired little group to acTtihoeny.
loaded two cars, and took off again, south across the
great rumpled plains of Margarifiter SinuFsr.ee from the restrictions of Marineris, they made hundreds of kilometers per night, and slept through the days, and in a nearly speechless journey of several days they passed between Argyre and Hellas, through the endless craterland of the southern higIhtlabnedgsa. n to
seem that they had never done anything but drive onward in their little cars, that the journey would last forever.
But then one night they drove onto the layered terrain of the polar region, and near dawn the horizon ahead gleamed, and then became a dim white bar, which thickened and thickened as they proceeded, until it was a white cliff standing before thTehme. southern polar cap, evidentlMy. ichel and Kasei took
over the two drivers' seats, and conferred over the intercom in low Tvhoeicyesd. rove on unttihl ey
reached the white cliff, and they continued to drive straight at it, until they were on frozen crusted sand that was under the bulk of the iTche.e cliff was an enormous overhang, like a wave stopped in the moment it was about to crash onto a beTahcher.e was a tunnel cut into the ice at the bottom of the cliff, and a figure in a walkaeprpeared, and directed the two rovers into it.
The tunnel led them straight into the ice for what must have been a kilometeTrhaet tluenanste.l was
wide enough for two or three rovers, and had a low ceiling; the ice around them was a pure white, dry ice only lightly streaked by stratificatioTnh.ey passed through two locks filling the tunnel; and in the third
lock Michel and Kasei stopped the rovers, and opened the locks, and climbedMdaoywa,n.Nadia, Sax, Simon and Ann followed them out of the Tchaersy. walked down the tunnel in silenTche.en the tunnel opened up and they all stopped, stilled by the sight that met them.
They had just walked out under the edge of an enormous dome of gleaming wThetye
sictoe.od under
it as if under a giant overturned boTwhle.
dome was several kilometers in diameter, and at least a

kilometer high, maybe more; it rose swiftly from the perimeters, and then bowled gently across the
center. The light was diffuse but fairly strong, as if on a cloudy day, and it seemed to come from the white dome itself, which gleamed.
The ground under the dome was gently rolling reddish sand, grassy in the hollows, with frequent stands of tall bamboo and gnarled pinTeh.ere were some small hillocks to the right, and clustered in these hills
was a little village, one and two-story houses painted white and blue, interspersed with large trees which had bamboo rooms and staircases set in their thick branches.
Michel and Kasei were walking toward this village, and the woman who had guided their cars into the tunnel lock was running ahead, shouti"nTghey're here, they're here!"Under the other side of the dome
there was a lake of faintly steaming open water, its surface a white sheen lined by waves that broke on
the near shoreO.
n the far shore stood the blue bulk of a Rickover, its reflection a smear of blue across
the white waterG.
usts of cold damp wind nipped at their ears.
Michel came back and retrieved his old friends, who were standing like statues. "Come on, it's cold out," he said with a smil"eT. here's a water ice layer stuck to the dome, so we have to keep the air below freezing all the time."
People were spilling out of the village, callingDowt.n by the little lake a young man appeared
sprinting toward them, gazelling over the dunes in great lEeavpesn.
after all their years on Mars such a
flying run still looked dreamlike to the first hundred, and it took a while before Simon clutched Ann by the arm and cried "That's PeteTr!hat's Peter!"
"Oh my God," she said.
And then they were in a crush of people, many of them young folk and children, strangers, but with familiar faces everywhere making their way to the fore, Hiroko and Iwao, Raul, Rya, Gene, Peter
crashing in to hug Ann and Simon, and there were Vlad and Ursula and Marina and several others from the Acheron group, all clustered around them, reaching to touch them, to embrace them.
"What is this place?" Maya cried.
"This is home," Hiroko sa"idT.his is where we start again."