Part One 
 
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         Blue 
----------Mars
 
Kim Stanley Robinson
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
PART ONE
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---Peacock Mountain
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Mars is free now. We’re on our own. No one tells us what to do.
Ann stood at the front of the train as she said this.
But it’s so easy to backslide into old patterns of behavior. Break one hierarchy 
and another springs up to take its place. We will have to be on guard for that, 
because there will always be people trying to make another Earth. The areophany 
will have to be ceaseless, an eternal struggle. We will have to think harder 
than ever before what it means to be Martian.
Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out the windows at the terrain 
flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed Reds. In the 
harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land outside bare except 
for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked all Earthly power off 
Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by a burst of furious action following 
the great flood on Terra; and they were tired.
We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain 
purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that we 
had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So we acted. 
We are making a better way to live.
This was’ the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to them 
again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered the 
revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police into 
Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Tenons up to 
Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of Sheffield, 
up the space cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be done. But in 
the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great victory, and some of 
the blank faces staring at Ann or out the window seemed to want a break, a 
moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.
Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train’s 
levitation over the land.
Ann shook her head. Hiroko is a green, she said, the original green.
Hiroko invented the areophany, the young native countered. That’s her first 
concern: Mars. She will help us, I know. I met her. She told me.
Except she’s dead, someone else said.
Another silence. The world flowed under them.
Finally a tall young woman stood up and walked down the aisle, and gave Ann a 
hug. The spell was broken; words were abandoned; they got to their feet and 
clustered in the open space at the front of the train, around Ann, and hugged 
her, or shook her hand—or simply touched her, Ann Clayborne, the one who had 
taught them to love Mars for itself, who had led them in the struggle for its 
independence from Earth. And though her bloodshot eyes were still fixed, gazing 
through them at the rocky battered expanse of the Tyrrhena massif, she was 
smiling. She hugged them back, she shook their hands, she reached up to touch 
their faces. It will be all right, she said. We will make Mars free. And they 
said yes, and congratulated each other. On to Sheffield, they said. Finish the 
job. Mars will show us how.
Except she’s not dead, the young man objected. I saw her last month in Arcadia. 
She’ll show up again. She’ll show up somewhere.


 
 
 
 
 
At a certain moment before dawn the sky always glowed the same bands of pink as 
in the beginning, pale and clear in the east, rich and starry in the west. Ann 
watched for this moment as her companions drove them west, toward a mass of 
black land rearing into the sky—the Tharsis Bulge, punctuated by the broad cone 
of Pavonis Mons. As they rolled uphill from Noctis Labyrinthus they rose above 
most of the new atmosphere; the air pressure at the foot of Pavonis was only 180 
millibars, and then as they drove up the eastern flank of the great shield 
volcano it dropped under 100 millibars, and continued to fall. Slowly they 
ascended above all visible foliage, crunching over dirty patches of wind-carved 
snow; then they ascended above even the snow, until there was nothing but rock, 
and the ceaseless thin cold winds of the jet stream. The bare land looked just 
as it had in the prehuman years, as if they were driving back up into the past.
It wasn’t so. But something fundamental in Ann Clay-borne warmed at the sight of 
this ferric world, stone on rock in the perpetual wind, and as the Red cars 
rolled up the mountain all their occupants grew as rapt as Ann, the cabins 
falling silent as the sun cracked the distant horizon behind them.
Then the slope they ascended grew less steep, in a perfect sine curve, until 
they were on the flat land of the round summit plateau. Here they saw tent towns 
ringing the edge of the giant caldera, clustered in particular around the foot 
of the space elevator, some thirty kilometers to the south of them.
They stopped their cars. The silence in the cabins had shifted from reverent to 
grim. Ann stood at one upper-cabin window, looking south toward Sheffield, that 
child of the space elevator: built because of the elevator, smashed flat when 
the elevator fell, built again with the elevator’s replacement. This was the 
city she had come to destroy, as thoroughly as Rome had Carthage; for she meant 
to bring down the replacement cable too, just as they had the first one in 2061. 
When they did that, much of Sheffield would again be flattened. What remained 
would be located uselessly on the peak of a high volcano, above most of the 
atmosphere; as time passed the surviving structures would be abandoned and 
dismantled for salvage, leaving only the tent foundations, and perhaps, a 
weather station, and, eventually, the long sunny silence of a mountain summit. 
The salt was already in the ground.
 
A cheerful Tharsis Red named Irishka joined them in a small rover, and led them 
through the maze of warehouses and small tents surrounding the intersection of 
the equatorial piste with the one circling the rim. As they followed her she 
described for them the local situation. Most of Sheffield and the rest of the 
Pavonis rim settlements were already in the hands of the Martian 
revolutionaries. But the space elevator and the neighborhood surrounding its 
base complex were not, and there lay the difficulty. The revolutionary forces on 
Pavonis were mostly poorly equipped militias, and they did not necessarily share 
the same agenda. That they had succeeded as far as they had was due to many 
factors: surprise, the control of Martian space, several strategic victories, 
the support of the great majority of the Martian population, and the 
unwillingness of the United Nations Transitional Authority to fire on civilians, 
even when they were making mass demonstrations in the streets. As a result the 
UNTA security forces had retreated from all over Mars to regroup in Sheffield, 
and now most of them were in elevator cars, going up to Clarke, the ballast 
asteroid and space station at the top of the elevator; the rest were jammed into 
the neighborhood surrounding the elevator’s massive base complex, called the 
Socket. This district consisted of elevator support facilities, industrial 
warehouses, and the hostels, dormitories, and restaurants needed to house and 
feed the port’s workforce. “Those are coming in useful now,” Irishka said, 
“because even so they’re squeezed in like trash in a compactor, and if there 
hadn’t been food and shelter they would probably have tried a breakout. As it 
is, things are still tense, but at least they can live.”
It somewhat resembled the situation just resolved in Burroughs, Ann thought. 
Which had turned out fine. It only took someone willing to act and the thing 
would be done— UNTA evacuated to Earth, the cable brought down, Mars’s link to 
Earth truly broken. And any attempt to erect a new cable could be balked 
sometime in the ten years of orbital construction that it took to build one.
So Irishka led them through the jumble that was east Pavonis, and their little 
caravan came to the rim of the caldera, where they parked their rovers. To the 
south on the western edge of Sheffield they could just make out the elevator 
cable, a line that was barely visible, and then only for a few kilometers out of 
its 24,000. Nearly invisible, in fact, and yet its existence dominated every 
move they made, every discussion—every thought they had, almost, speared and 
strung out on that black thread connecting them to Earth.
 
When they were settled in their camp Ann called her son Peter on the wrist. He 
was one of the leaders of the revolution on Tharsis, and had directed the 
campaign against UNTA that had left its forces contained in the Socket and its 
immediate neighborhood. A qualified victory at best, but it made Peter one of 
the heroes of the previous month.
Now he answered the call and his face appeared on her wrist. He looked quite 
like her, which she found disconcerting. He was absorbed, she saw, concentrating 
on something other than her call.
“Any news?” she asked.
“No. We appear to be at something of an impasse. We’re allowing all of them 
caught outside free passage into the elevator district, so they’ve got control 
of the train, station and the south rim airport, and the subway lines from those 
to the Socket.”
“Did the planes that evacuated them from Burroughs come here?”
“Yes. Apparently most of them are leaving for Earth. It’s very crowded in 
there.”
“Are they going back to Earth, or into Mars orbit?”
“Back to Earth. I don’t think they trust orbit anymore.”
He smiled at that. He had done a lot in space, aiding Sax’s efforts and so on. 
Her son the spaceman, the Green. For many years they had scarcely spoken to each 
other.
Ann said, “So what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see that we can take the elevator, or the Socket either. 
It just wouldn’t work. Even if it did, they could always bring the elevator 
down.”
“So?”
“Well—” He looked suddenly concerned. “I don’t think that would be a good thing. 
Do you?”
“I think it should come down.”
Now he looked annoyed. “Better stay out of the fall line then.”
“I will.”
“I don’t want anyone bringing it down without a full discussion,” he told her 
sharply. “This is important. It should be a decision made by the whole Martian 
community. I think we need the elevator, myself.”
“Except we have no way to take possession of it.”
“That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it’s not something for you to take into 
your own hands. I heard what happened in Burroughs, but it’s different here, you 
understand? We decide strategy together. It needs to be discussed.”
“It’s a group that’s very good at that,” Ann said bitterly. Everything was 
always thoroughly discussed and then always she lost. It was past time for that. 
Someone had to act. But again Peter looked as if he were being taken from his 
real work. He thought he would be making the decisions about the elevator, she 
could see that. Part of a more general feeling of ownership of the planet, no 
doubt, the birthright of the nisei, displacing the First Hundred and all the 
rest of the issei. If John had lived that would not have been easy, but the king 
was dead, long live the king—her son, king of the nisei, the first true 
Martians.
But king or not, there was a Red army now converging on Pavonis Mons. They were 
the strongest military operation left on the planet, and they intended to 
complete the work begun when Earth had been hit by its great flood. They did not 
believe in consensus or compromise, and for them, knocking down the cable was 
killing two birds with one stone: it would destroy the last police stronghold, 
and it would also sever easy contact between Earth and Mars, a primary Red goal. 
No, knocking down the cable was the obvious thing to do.
But Peter did not seem to know this. Or perhaps he did not care. Ann tried to 
tell him, but he just nodded, muttering “Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.” So arrogant, 
like all the greens, so blithe and stupid with all their prevaricating, their 
dealing with Earth, as if you could ever get anything from such a leviathan. No. 
It was going to take direct action, as in the drowning of Burroughs, as in all 
the acts of sabotage that had set the stage for the revolution. Without those 
the revolution wouldn’t even have begun, or if it had it would have been crushed 
immediately, as in 2061.
“Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then,” Peter said, looking as annoyed at 
her as she felt at him.
“Yeah yeah,” Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could 
assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.
“I’ll try to set one up,” Peter said. She had gotten his attention at last, she 
saw; but there was an unpleasant look on his face, as if he had been threatened. 
“Before things get out of hand.”
“Things are already out of hand,” she told him, and cut the connection.
 
She checked the news on the various channels, Manga-lavid, the Reds’ private 
nets, the Terran summaries. Though Pavonis and the elevator were now the focus 
of everyone on Mars, the physical convergence on the volcano was only partial. 
It appeared to her that there were more Red guerrilla units on Pavonis than the 
green units of Free Mars and their allies; but it was hard to be sure. Kasei and 
the most radical wing of the Reds, called the Kakaze (“fire wind”), had recently 
occupied the north rim of Pavonis, taking over the train station and tent at 
Lastflow. The Reds Ann had traveled with, most of them from the old Red 
mainstream, discussed moving around the rim and joining the Kakaze, but decided 
in the end to stay in east Pavonis. Ann observed this discussion silently but 
was glad at the result, as she wanted to keep her distance from Kasei and Dao 
and their crowd. She was pleased to stay in east Pavonis.
Many Free Mars troops were staying there as well, moving out of their cars into 
the abandoned warehouses. East Pavonis was becoming a major concentration of 
revolutionary groups of all kinds; and a couple days after her arrival, Ann went 
in and walked over compacted regolith to one of the biggest warehouses in the 
tent, to take part in a general strategy session.
The meeting went about as she expected. Nadia was at the center of the 
discussion, and it was useless talking to Nadia now. Ann just sat on a chair 
against the back wall, watching the rest of them circle the situation. They did 
not want to say what Peter had already admitted to her in private: there was no 
way to get UNTA off the space elevator.
Before they conceded that they were going to try to talk the problem out of 
existence.
Late in the meeting, Sax Russell came over to sit by her side.
“A space elevator,” he said. “It could be ... used.”
Ann was not the least bit comfortable talking to Sax. She knew that he had 
suffered brain damage at the hands of UNTA security, and had taken a treatment 
that had changed his personality; but somehow this had not helped at all. It 
only made things very strange, in that sometimes he seemed to her to be the same 
old Sax, as familiar as a much-hated brother; while at other times he did indeed 
seem like a completely different person, inhabiting Sax’s body. These two 
contrary impressions oscillated rapidly, even sometimes coexisted; just before 
joining her, as he had talked with Nadia and Art, he had looked like a stranger, 
a dapper old man with a piercing glare, talking in Sax’s voice and Sax’s old 
style. Now as he sat next to her, she could see that the changes to his face 
were utterly superficial. But though he looked familiar the stranger was now 
inside him—for here was a man who halted and jerked as he delved painfully after 
what he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out with something 
scarcely coherent.
“The elevator is a, a device. For ... raising up. A ... a tool.”
“Not if we don’t control it,” Ann said to him carefully, as if instructing a 
child.
“Control...” Sax said, thinking over the concept as if it were entirely new to 
him. “Influence? If the elevator can be brought down by anyone who really wants 
to, then ...” He trailed away, lost in his thoughts.
“Then what?” Ann prompted.
“Then it’s controlled by all. Consensual existence. It’s obvious?”
It was as if he were translating from a foreign language. This was not Sax; Ann 
could only shake her head, and try gently to explain. The elevator was the 
conduit for the metanationals to reach Mars, she told him. It was in the 
possession of the metanats now, and the revolutionaries had no means to kick 
their police forces off of it. Clearly the thing to do in such a situation was 
to bring it down. Warn people, give them a schedule, and then do it. “Loss of 
life would be minimal, and what there was would be pretty much the fault of 
anyone so stupid as to stay on the cable, or the equator.”
Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and she shook her 
head so violently that her cropped gray locks flew out like a clown’s ruff. She 
was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good reason at all, and so 
Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said curtly, “We need the 
elevator. It’s our conduit to Terra just as much as it’s their conduit to Mars.”
“But we don’t need a conduit to Terra,” Ann said. “It’s not a physical 
relationship for us, don’t you see? I’m not saying we don’t need to have an 
influence on Terra, I’m not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we 
need to try to work on them. But it’s not a physical thing, don’t you see? It’s 
a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It’s an information 
exchange. At least it is when it’s going right. It’s when it gets into a 
physical thing—a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police control— 
that’s when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took it down 
we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not yours.”
It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn’t imagine.
Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic-table style said, “If we can 
bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down,” blinking and 
everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the 
terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again—Saxifrage Russell 
his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments she 
always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words’ inadequacy right in her 
mouth.
Still she tried. “People act on what’s there, Sax. The meta-nat directors and 
the UN and the governments will look up and see what’s there, and act 
accordingly. If the cable’s gone they just don’t have the resources or the time 
to mess with us right now. If the cable’s here, then they’ll want us. They’ll 
think, well, we could do it. And there’ll be people screaming to try.”
“They can always come. The cable is only a fuel saver.”
“A fuel saver which makes mass transfers possible.”
But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay 
attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about control of orbit and 
safe-conduct passes and the like.
The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said, “We’ve 
promised to ... help them out.”
“By sending them more metals?” Ann said. “Do they really need those?”
“We could ... take people. It might help.”
Ann shook her head. “We could never take enough.”
He frowned. Nadia saw they weren’t listening to her, returned to the table. Sax 
and Ann fell into silence.
Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing 
was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different 
things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very 
long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. 
But that had been so long ago she couldn’t even remember when exactly it was. In 
Antarctica? Somewhere. But not on Mars.
“You know,” Sax said in a conversational tone, again very un-Sax-like but in a 
different way, “it wasn’t the Red militia that caused the Transitional Authority 
to evacuate Burroughs and the rest of the planet. If guerrillas had been the 
only factor then the Terrans would have gone after us, and they might well have 
succeeded. But those mass demonstrations in the tents made it clear that almost 
everyone on the planet was against them. That’s what governments fear the most; 
mass protests in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of people going into the 
streets to reject the current system. That’s what Nirgal means when he says 
political power comes out of the look in people’s eye. And not out of the end of 
a gun.”
“And so?” Ann said.
Sax gestured at the people in the warehouse. “They’re all greens.”
The others continued debating. Sax watched her like a bird.
Ann got up and walked out of the meeting, into the strangely unbusy streets of 
east Pavonis. Here and there militia bands held posts on street corners, keeping 
an eye to the south, toward Sheffield and the cable terminal. Happy, hopeful, 
serious young natives. There on one corner a group was in an animated 
discussion, and as Ann passed them a young woman, her face utterly intent, 
flushed with passionate conviction, cried out “You can’t just do what you want!”
Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy, without knowing why. 
This is how people change— in little quantum jumps when struck by outer 
events—no intention, no plan. Someone says “the look in people’s eye,” and the 
phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face glowing with passionate 
conviction, another phrase: you can’t just do what you want! And so it occurred 
to her (the look on that young woman’s face!) that it was not just the cable’s 
fate they were deciding—not just “should the cable come down,” but “how do we 
decide things?” That was the critical postrevolutionary question, perhaps more 
important than any single issue being debated, even the fate of the cable. Up 
until now, most people in the underground had operated by a working method which 
said if we don’t agree with you we will fight you. That attitude was what had 
gotten people into the underground in the first place, Ann included. And once 
used to that method, it was hard to get away from it. After all, they had just 
proved that it worked. And so there was the inclination to continue to use it. 
She felt that herself.
But political power ... say it did come out of the look in people’s eye. You 
could fight forever, but if people weren’t behind you. . . .
 
Ann continued to think about that as she drove down into Sheffield, having 
decided to skip the farce of the afternoon strategy session in east Pavonis. She 
wanted to have a look at the seat of the action.
It was curious how little seemed to have changed in the day-to-day life of 
Sheffield. People still went to work, ate in restaurants, talked on the grass of 
the parks, gathered in the public spaces in this most crowded of tent towns. The 
shops and restaurants were jammed. Most businesses in Sheffield had belonged to 
the metanats, and now people read on their screens long arguments over what to 
do—what the employees’ new relationship to their old owners should be— where 
they should buy their raw materials, where they should sell—whose regulations 
they ought to obey, whose taxes they ought to pay. All very confusing, as the 
screen debates and the nightly news vids and the wrist nets indicated.
The plaza devoted to the food market, however, looked as it always had. Most 
food was grown and distributed by co-ops; ag networks were in place, the 
greenhouses on Pavonis were still producing, and so in the market things ran as 
usual, goods paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit. Except once or twice Ann 
saw sellers in their aprons shouting red-faced at customers, who shouted right 
back, arguing over some point of government policy. As Ann passed by one of 
these arguments, which were no different than those going on among the leaders 
in east Pavonis, the disputants all stopped and stared at her. She had been 
recognized. The vegetable seller said loudly, “If you Reds would lay off they 
would just go away!”
“Ah come on,” someone retorted. “It isn’t her doing it.”
So true, Ann thought as she walked on.
A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems were still 
running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which was not 
something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did;Tjut every 
tent’s operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their raw 
materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and nuclear 
reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were physically fragile, 
but if left alone, they could very well become politically autonomous; there was 
no reason for them to be owned, no justification for it.
So the necessities were served. Daily life plodded on, barely perturbed by 
revolution.
Or so it seemed at first glance. But there in the streets also were armed 
groups, young natives in threes and fours and fives, standing on street corners. 
Revolutionary militias around their missile launchers and remote sensing dishes— 
green or red, it didn’t matter, though they were almost certainly greens. People 
eyed them as they walked by, or stopped to chat and find out what they were 
doing. Keeping an eye on the Socket, the armed natives said. Though Ann could 
see that they were functioning as police as well. Part of the scene, accepted, 
supported. People grinned as they chatted; these were their police, they were 
fellow Martians, here to protect them, to guard Sheffield for them. People 
wanted them there, that was clear. If they hadn’t, then every approaching 
questioner would have been a threat, every glance of resentment an attack; which 
eventually would have forced the militias from the street corners into some 
safer place. People’s faces, staring in concert; this ran the world.
 
So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she took a rim 
train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to the north arc 
of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze were occupying apartments in the 
little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had forcibly evicted some noncombatant 
residents, who naturally had trained down to Sheffield in fury, demanding to be 
reinstated in their homes, and reporting to Peter and the rest of the green 
leaders that the Reds had set up truck-drawn rocket launchers on the north rim, 
with the rockets aimed at the elevator and Sheffield more generally.
So Ann walked out into Lastflow’s little station in a bad mood, angry at the 
Kakaze’s arrogance, as stupid in its way as the greens’. They had done well in 
the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dike very visibly to give everyone a 
warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dike after all the other 
revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the south, ready to rescue 
the city’s civilian population while the metanat security were forced to 
retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been needed and they had done it, without 
getting bogged down in debate. Without their decisiveness everyone would still 
be gathered around Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing a Terran 
expeditionary force to relieve it. It had been a perfectly delivered coup.
Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.
Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a fan-shaped lava flow 
extending more than a hundred kilometers down the northeast flank of the 
mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise a flawlessly circular 
summit cone and caldera, and clearly it had come very late in the volcano’s 
history of eruptions. Standing down in the depression, one’s view of the rest of 
the summit was cut off—it was like being in a shallow hanging valley, with 
little visible in any direction—until one walked out to the drop-off at rim’s 
edge, and saw the huge cylinder of the caldera coring the planet, and on the far 
rim the skyline of Sheffield, looking like a tiny Manhattan over forty 
kilometers away.
The curtailed view perhaps explained why the depression had been one of the last 
parts of the rim to be developed. But now it was filled by a fair-sized tent, 
six kilometers in diameter and a hundred meters high, heavily reinforced as all 
tents up here had to be. The settlement had been home mostly to commuter 
laborers in the rim’s many industries. Now the rimfront district had been taken 
over by the Kakaze, and just outside the tent stood a fleet of large rovers, no 
doubt the ones that had caused the rumors about rocket launchers.
As Ann was led to the restaurant that Kasei had made his headquarters, she was 
assured by her guides that this was indeed the case; the rovers did haul rocket 
launchers, which were ready to flatten UNTA’s last refuge on Mars. Her guides 
were obviously happy about this, and happy also to be able to tell her about it, 
happy to meet her and guide her around. A varied bunch—mostly natives, with some 
Terran newcomers and old-timers, of all ethnic backgrounds. Among them were a 
few faces Ann recognized: Etsu Okakura, al-Khan, Yussuf. A lot of young natives 
unknown to her stopped them at the restaurant door to shake her hand, grinning 
enthusiastically. The Kakaze: they were, she had to admit to herself, the wing 
of the Reds for which she felt the least sympathy. Angry ex-Terrans or 
idealistic young natives from the tents, their stone eyeteeth dark in their 
smiles, their eyes glittering as they got this chance to meet her, as they spoke 
of kami, the need for purity, the intrinsic value of rock, the rights of the 
planet, and so on. In short, fanatics. She shook their hands and nodded, trying 
not to let her discomfort show.
Inside the restaurant Kasei and Dao were sitting by a window, drinking dark 
beer. Everything in the room stopped on Ann’s entrance, and it took a while for 
people to be introduced, for Kasei and Dao to welcome her with hugs, for meals 
and conversations to resume. They got her something to eat from the kitchen. The 
restaurant workers came out to meet her; they were Kakaze as well. Ann waited 
until they were gone and people had gone back to their tables, feeling impatient 
and awkward. These were her spiritual children, the media always were saying; 
she was the original Red; but in truth they made her uncomfortable.
Kasei, in excellent spirits, as he had been ever since the revolution began, 
said “We’re going to bring down the cable in about a week.”
“Oh you are!” Ann said. “Why wait so long?”
Dao missed her sarcasm. “It’s a matter of warning people, so they have time to 
get off the equator.” Though normally a sour man, today he was as cheery as 
Kasei.
“And off the cable too?”
“If they feel like it. But even if they evacuate it and give it to us, it’s 
still coming down.”
“How? Are those really rocket launchers out there?”
“Yes. But those are there in case they come down and try to retake Sheffield. As 
for bringing down the cable, breaking it here at the base isn’t the way to do 
it.”
“The control rockets might be able to adjust to disruptions at the bottom,” 
Kasei explained. “Hard to say what would happen, really. But a break just above 
the areosyn-chronous point would decrease damage to the equator, and keep New 
Clarke from flying off as fast as the first one did. We want to minimize the 
drama of this, you know, avoid any martyrs we can. Just the demolition of a 
building, you know. Like a building past its usefulness.”
“Yes,” Ann said, relieved at this sign of good sense. But it was curious how 
hearing her idea expressed as someone else’s plan disturbed her. She located the 
main source of her concern: “What about the others—the greens? What if they 
object?”
“They won’t,” Dao said.
“They are!” Ann said sharply.
Dao shook his head. “I’ve been talking to Jackie. It may be that some of the 
greens are truly opposed to it, but her group is just saying that for public 
consumption, so that they look moderate to the Terrans, and can blame the 
dangerous stuff on radicals out of their control.”
“On us,” Ann said.
They both nodded. “Just like with Burroughs,” Kasei said with a smile.
Ann considered it. No doubt it was true. “But some of them are genuinely 
opposed. I’ve been arguing with them about it, and it’s no publicity stunt.”
“Uh-huh,” Kasei said slowly.
Both he and Dao watched her.
“So you’ll do it anyway,” she said at last.
They continued to watch her. She saw all of a sudden that they would no more do 
what she told them to do than would boys ordered about by a senile grandmother. 
They were humoring her. Figuring out how they could best put her to use.
“We have to,” Kasei said. “It’s in the best interest of Mars. Not just for Reds, 
but all of us. We need some distance between us and Terra, and the gravity well 
reestablishes that distance. Without it we’ll be sucked down into the 
maelstrom.”
It was Ann’s argument, it was just what she had been saying in the meetings in 
east Pavonis. “But what if they try to stop you?”
“I don’t think they can,” Kasei said.
“But if they try?”
The two men glanced at each other. Dao shrugged.
So, Ann thought, watching them. They were willing to start a civil war.
 
People were still coming up the slopes of Pavonis to the summit, filling up 
Sheffield, east Pavonis, Lastflow and the other rim tents. Among them were 
Michel, Spencer, Vlad, Marina, and Ursula; Mikhail and a whole brigade of 
Bog-danovists; Coyote, on his own; a group from Praxis; a large train of Swiss; 
rover caravans of Arabs, both Sufi and secular; natives from other towns and 
settlements on Mars. All coming up for the endgame. Everywhere else on Mars, the 
natives had consolidated their control; all the physical plants were being 
operated by local teams, in cooperation with Separation de I’Atmosphere. There 
were some small pockets of metanat resistance, of course, and there were some 
Kakaze out there systematically destroying terraform-ing projects; but Pavonis 
was clearly the crux of the remaining problem—either the endgame of the 
revolution or, as Ann was beginning to fear, the opening moves of a civil war. 
Or both. It would not be the first time.
So she went to the meetings, and slept poorly at night, waking from troubled 
sleep, or from naps in the transit between one meeting and the next. The 
meetings were beginning to blur: all contentious, all pointless. She was getting 
tired, and the broken sleep did not help. She was nearly 150 years old, after 
all, and had not had a gerontological treatment in 25 years, and she felt weary 
all through, all the time. So she watched from a well of growing indifference as 
the others chewed over the situation. Earth was still in disarray; the great 
flood caused by the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet was indeed proving 
to be the ideal trigger mechanism for which General Sax had waited. Sax felt no 
remorse for taking advantage of Earth’s trouble, Ann could see; he never thought 
once about the many deaths the flood had caused down there. She could read his 
face thought by thought as he talked about it—what would be the point of 
remorse? The flood was an accident, a geological catastrophe like an ice age or 
a meteor impact. No one should waste time feeling remorse for it, not even if 
they were taking advantage of it for their own purposes. Best to take what good 
one possibly could from the chaos and disorder, and not worry. All this was 
right on Sax’s face as he discussed what they should do next vis-a-vis Earth. 
Send a delegation, he suggested. Diplomatic mission, personal appearance, 
something about throwing things together; incoherent on the surface, but she 
could read him like a brother, this old enemy! Well, Sax—the old Sax anyway—was 
nothing if not rational. Therefore easy to read. Easier than the young fanatics 
of the Kakaze, now that she thought of it.
And one could only meet him on his own ground, speak to him on his own terms. So 
she sat across from him in the meetings and tried to concentrate, even though 
her mind seemed to be hardening somehow, petrifying right inside her head. Round 
and round the arguments went: what to do on Pavonis? Pavonis Mons, Peacock 
Mountain. Who would ascend the Peacock Throne? There were potential shahs 
everywhere—Peter, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Kasei, Maya, Nadia, Mikhail, Ariadne, 
the invisible Hiroko.. ..
Now someone was invoking the Dorsa Brevia conference as the framework for 
discussion they should use. All very well, but without Hiroko among them the 
moral center was gone, the one person in all Martian history, aside from John 
Boone, to whom everyone would defer. But Hiroko and John were gone, along with 
Arkady, and Frank, who would have come in useful now, if he had been on her 
side, which he wouldn’t have been. All gone. And they were left with anarchy. 
Curious how at a crowded table those absent could be more visible than those 
present. Hiroko, for instance; people referred to her frequently; and no doubt 
she was somewhere in the outback, deserting them as usual in their hour of need. 
Pissing them out of the nest.
Curious too how the only child of their lost heroes, Kasei the son of John and 
Hiroko, should be the most radical leader there, a disquieting man even though 
he was on her side. There he sat, shaking his gray head at Art, a small smile 
twisting his mouth. He was nothing like either John or Hiroko—well, he had some 
of Hiroko’s arrogance, some of John’s simplicity. The worst of both. And yet he 
was a power, he did what he wanted, and a lot of people followed him. But he was 
not like his parents had been.
And Peter, sitting just two seats away from Kasei, was nothing like her or 
Simon. It was hard to see what blood relationships meant; nothing, obviously. 
Though it did twist her heart to hear Peter speak, as he argued with Kasei and 
opposed the Reds at every point, making a case for some kind of interplanetary 
collaborationism. And never in these sessions addressing her, or even looking at 
her. It was perhaps intended as some kind of courtesy—I will not argue with you 
in public. But it looked like a slight—I will not argue with you because you 
don’t matter.
He continued to argue for keeping the cable, and agreed with Art about the Dorsa 
Brevia document, naturally, given the green majority that had existed then and 
persisted now. Using Dorsa Brevia as a guide would assure the cable’s survival. 
Meaning the continued presence of the United Nations Transitional Authority. And 
indeed some of them around Peter were talking about “semiautonomy” in relation 
to Terra, instead of independence, and Peter went along with that; it made her 
sick. And all without meeting her eye. It was Simon-like, somehow, a kind of 
silence. It made her angry.
“We have no reason to talk about long-term plans until we have solved the cable 
problem,” she said, interrupting him and earning a very black look indeed, as if 
she had broken an understanding; but there was no understanding, and why should 
they not argue, when they had no real relationship—nothing but biology . . . ?
Art claimed that the UN was now saying that it would be willing to agree to 
Martian semiautonomy, as long as Mars remained in “close consultation” with 
Earth, and an active aid in Earth’s crisis. Nadia said she was in communication 
with Derek Hastings, who was now up in New Clarke. Hastings had abandoned 
Burroughs without a bloody battle, it was true; and now she claimed he was 
willing to compromise. No doubt; his next retreat would not be so easy, nor 
would it take him to a very pleasant place, for despite all the emergency 
action, Earth was now a world of famine, plague, looting—breakdown of the social 
contract, which was so fragile after all. It could happen here too; she had to 
remember that fragility when she got angry enough, as now, to want to tell Kasei 
and Dao to abandon the discussions and fire away. If she did that it very likely 
would happen; a strange sensation of her own power came over her then, as she 
looked around the table at the anxious angry unhappy faces. She could tip the 
balance; she could knock this table right over.
Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way or the other. 
More were in favor of cutting the cable than Ann would have guessed, not just 
Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt most threatened by 
the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth: Bedouins, the Polynesians, 
the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier natives. Still, they were in the 
minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority. Isolationist versus interactive; 
yet another fracture to add to all the others rending the Martian independence 
movement.
Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favor of keeping the 
cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with expulsion from 
Martian’society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular, and afterward 
Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtle. It made Ann so 
angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to argue for bringing 
the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from Peter, but it scarcely 
registered—she talked in a white heat, forgetting all about the five-minute 
limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and on, though she had no 
idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of what she had already said. 
Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a lawyer’s brief—hopefully 
so—on the other hand, a part of her thought as her mouth ran on, perhaps she was 
just saying the word Mars over and over again, or babbling, and the audience 
simply humoring her, or else miraculously comprehending her in a moment of 
glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their heads like caps of jewels—and 
indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal, the old men’s bald pates like 
chunks of jasper, inside which all languages dead and living were understood 
equally; and for a moment they appeared all caught up together with her, all 
inside an epiphany of red Mars, free of Earth, living on the primal planet that 
had been and could be again.
She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate her, as it had been so 
many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at her 
open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at each 
other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no idea. 
She only knew she had gotten his attention at last.
This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and 
calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation. 
Despite the great flood, Earth’s nations and metanationals were still incredibly 
powerful, and in some ways the crisis of the flood had drawn them together, 
making them even more powerful. So Nadia spoke of the need to compromise, the 
need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply contradictory, Ann thought; 
because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they could not afford to offend, and 
therefore they must change all Terran social reality.
“But how!” Ann cried. “When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a world! No 
fulcrum, no lever, no force—”
“It isn’t just Earth,” Nadia replied. “There are going to be other settlements 
in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the asteroids. We’ve 
got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re the natural 
leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all that—a reduction 
in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.”
“Getting in the way of progress,” Ann said bitterly. “Think what Arkady would 
have said to that. No, look. We had a chance here to make something different. 
That was the whole point. We still have that chance. Everything that increases 
the space within which we can create a new society is a good thing. Everything 
that reduces our space is a bad thing. Think about it!”
Perhaps they did. But it made no difference. Any number of elements on Earth 
were sending up their arguments for the cable—arguments, threats, entreaties. 
They needed help down there. Any help. Art Randolph continued energetically 
lobbying for the cable on behalf of Praxis, which was looking to Ann like it 
would become the next transitional authority, metanationalism in its latest 
manifestation or disguise.
But the natives were being slowly won over by them, intrigued by the possibility 
of “conquering Earth,” unaware of how impossible this was, incapable of 
imagining Earth’s vastness and immobility. One could tell them and tell them, 
but they would never be able to imagine it.
Finally it came time for an informal vote. It was representative voting, they 
had decided, one vote for each of the signatory groups to the Dorsa Brevia 
document, one vote also to all the interested parties that had arisen since 
then— new settlements in the outback, new political parties, associations, labs, 
companies, guerrilla bands, the several red splinter groups. Before they started 
some generous naive soul even offered the First Hundred a vote, and everyone 
there laughed at the idea that the First Hundred might be able to vote the same 
way on anything. The generous soul, a young woman from Dorsa Brevia, then 
proposed that each of the First Hundred be given an individual vote, but this 
was turned down as endangering the tenuous grasp they had on representative 
governance. It would have made no difference anyway.
So they voted to allow the space elevator to remain standing, for the time 
being—and in the possession of UNTA, down to and including the Socket, without 
contestation. It was like King Canute deciding to declare the tide legal after 
all, but no one laughed except Ann. The other Reds were furious. Ownership of 
the Socket was still being actively contested, Dao objected loudly, the 
neighborhood around it was vulnerable and could be taken, there was no reason to 
back off like this, they were only trying to sweep a problem under the rug 
because it was hard! But the majority were in agreement. The cable should 
remain.
 
Ann felt the old urge: escape. Tents and trains, people, the little Manhattan 
skyline of Sheffield against the south rim, the summit basalt all torn and 
flattened and paved over.... There was a piste all the way around the rim, but 
the western side of the caldera was very nearly uninhabited. So Ann got in one 
of the smallest Red rovers, and drove around the rim counterclockwise, just 
inside the piste, until she came to a little meteorological station, where she 
parked the rover and went out through its lock, moving stiffly in a walker that 
was much like the ones they had gone out in during the first years.
She was a kilometer or two away from the rim’s edge. She walked slowly east 
toward it, stumbling once or twice before she started to pay proper attention. 
The old lava on the flat expanse of the broad rim was smooth and dark in some 
places, rough and lighter in others. By the time she approached the edge she was 
in full areologist mode, doing a boulder ballet she could sustain all day, 
attuned to every knob and crack underfoot. And this was a good thing, because 
near the rim’s drop-off the land collapsed in a series of narrow curving ledges, 
the drops sometimes a step, sometimes taller than she was. And always the 
growing sense of empty air ahead, as the far side of the caldera and the rest of 
the great circle became visible. And then she was climbing down onto the last 
ledge, a bench only some five meters wide, with a curved back wall, 
shoulder-high: and below her dropped the great round chasm of Pavonis.
This caldera was one of the geological marvels of the solar system, a hole 
forty-five kilometers across and a full five kilometers deep, and almost 
perfectly regular in everyway— circular, flat-floored, almost vertically 
walled—a perfect cylinder of space, cut into the volcano like a rock sampler’s 
coring. None of the other three big calderas even approached this simplicity of 
form; Ascraeus and Olympus were complicated palimpsests of overlapping rings, 
while the very broad shallow caldera of Arsia was roughly circular, but 
shattered in every way. Pavonis alone was a regular cylinder: the Platonic ideal 
of a volcanic caldera.
Of course from this wonderful vantage point she now had, the horizontal 
stratification of the interior walls added a lot of irregular detail, rust and 
black and chocolate and umber bands indicating variations in the composition of 
the lava deposits; and some bands were harder than those above and below, so 
that there were many arcuate balconies lining the wall at different 
elevations—isolated curving benches, perched on the side of the immense rock 
throat, most never visited. And the floor so flat. The subsidence of the 
volcano’s magma chamber, located some 160 kilometers below the mountain, had to 
have been unusually consistent; it had dropped in the same place every time. Ann 
wondered if it had been determined yet why that had been; if the magma chamber 
had been younger than the other big volcanoes, or smaller, or the lava more 
homogenous.... Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon; no doubt she 
could look it up on the wrist. She tapped out the code for the Journal of 
Analogical Studies, typed in Pavonis: “Evidence of Strombolian Explosive 
Activity Found in West Tharsis Clasts.” “Radial Ridges in Caldera and Concentric 
Graben Outside the Rim Suggest Late Subsidence of the Summit.” She had just 
crossed some of those graben. “Release of Juvenile Volatiles into Atmosphere 
Calculated by Radiometric Dating of Lastflow Mafics.”
She clicked off the wristpad. She no longer kept up with all the latest 
areology, she hadn’t for years. Even reading the abstracts would have taken far 
more time than she had. And of course a lot of areology had been badly 
compromised by the terraforming project. Scientists working for the metanats had 
concentrated on resource exploration and evaluation, and had found signs of 
ancient oceans, of the early warm wet atmosphere, possibly even of ancient life; 
on the other hand radical Red scientists had warned of increased seismic 
activity, rapid subsidence, mass wasting, and the disappearance of even a single 
surface sample left in its primal condition. Political stress had skewed nearly 
everything written about Mars in the past hundred years. The Journal was the 
only publication Ann knew of which tried to publish papers delimiting their 
inquiries very strictly to reporting areology in the pure sense, concentrating 
on what had happened in the five billion years of solitude; it was the only 
publication Ann still read, or at least glanced at, looking through the titles 
and some of the abstracts, and the editorial material at the front; once or 
twice she had even sent in a letter concerning some detail or other, which they 
had printed without fanfare. Published by the university in Sabishii, the 
Journal was peer-reviewed by like-minded areologists, and the articles were 
rigorous, well researched, and with no obvious political point to their 
conclusions; they were simply science. The Journal’s editorials advocated what 
had to be called a Red position, but only in the most limited sense, in that 
they argued for the preservation of the primal landscape so that studies could 
be carried on without having to deal with gross contaminations. This had been 
Ann’s position from the very start, and it was still where she felt most 
comfortable; she had moved from that scientific position into political activism 
only because it had been forced on her by the situation. This was true for a lot 
of areologists now supporting the Reds. They were her natural peer group, 
really—the people she understood, and with whom she sympathized.
But they were few; she could almost name them individually. The regular 
contributors to the Journal, more or less. As for the rest of the Reds, the 
Kakaze and the other radicals, what they advocated was a kind of metaphysical 
position, a cult—they were religious fanatics, the equivalent of Hi-roko’s 
greens, members of some kind of rock-worshiping sect. Ann had very little in 
common with them, when it came down to it; they formulated their redness from a 
completely different worldview.
And given that there was that kind of fractionization among the Reds themselves, 
what then could one say about the Martian independence movement as a whole? 
Well. They were going to fall out. It was happening already.
Ann sat down carefully on the edge of the final bench. A good view. It appeared 
there was a station of some kind down there on the caldera floor, though from 
five thousand meters up, it was hard to be sure. Even the ruins of old Sheffield 
were scarcely visible—ah—there they were, on the floor under the new town, a 
tiny pile of rubble with some straight lines and plane surfaces in it. Faint 
vertical scorings on the wall above might have been caused by fall of the city 
in ‘61. It was hard to say.
The tented settlements still on the rim were like toy villages in paperweights. 
Sheffield with its skyline, the low warehouses across from her to the east, 
Lastflow, the various smaller tents all around the rim .. . many of them had 
merged, to become a kind of greater Sheffield, covering almost 180 degrees of 
the rim, from Lastflow around to the southwest, where pistes followed the fallen 
cable down the long slope of west Tharsis to Amazonis Planitia. All the towns 
and stations would always be tented, because at twenty-seven kilometers high the 
air would always be a tenth as thick as it was at the datum—or sea level, one 
could now call it. Meaning the atmosphere up here was still only thirty or forty 
millibars thick.
Tent cities forever; but with the cable (she could not see it) spearing 
Sheffield, development would certainly continue, until they had built a tent 
city entirely ringing the caldera, looking down into it. No doubt they would 
then tent the caldera itself, and occupy the round floor—add about 1,500 square 
kilometers to the city, though it was a question who would want to live at the 
bottom of such a hole, like living at the bottom of a mohole, rock walls rising 
up around you as if you were in some circular roofless cathedral ... perhaps it 
would appeal to some. The Bogda-novists had lived in moholes for years, after 
all. Grow forests, build climber’s huts or rather millionaires’ penthouses on 
the arcuate balcony ledges, cut staircases into the sides of the rock, install 
glass elevators that took all day to go up or down ... rooftops, row houses, 
skyscrapers reaching up toward the rim, heliports on their flat round roofs, 
pistes, flying freeways ... oh yes, the whole summit of Pa-vonis Mons, caldera 
and all, could be covered by the great world city, which was always growing, 
growing like a fungus over every rock in the solar system. Billions of people, 
trillions of people, quadrillions of people, all as close to immortal as they 
could make themselves....
She shook her head, in a great confusion of spirits. The radicals in Lastflow 
were not her people, not really, but unless they succeeded, the summit of 
Pavonis and everywhere else on Mars would become part of the great world city. 
She tried to concentrate on the view, she tried to feel it, the awe of the 
symmetrical formation, the love of rock hard under her bottom. Her feet hung 
over the edge of the bench, she kicked her heels against basalt; she could throw 
a pebble and it would fall five thousand meters. But she couldn’t concentrate. 
She couldn’t feel it. Petrification. So numb, for so long. . .. She sniffed, 
shook her head, pulled her feet in over the edge. Walked back up to her rover.


 
 
 
 
 
She dreamed of the long run-out. The landslide was rolling across the floor of 
Melas Chasma, about to strike her. Everything visible with surreal clarity. 
Again she remembered Simon, again she groaned and got off the little dike, going 
through the motions, appeasing a dead man inside her, feeling awful. The ground 
was vibrating—
She woke, by her own volition she thought—escaping, running away—but there was a 
hand, pulling hard on her arm.
“Ann, Ann, Ann.”
It was Nadia. Another surprise. Ann struggled up, disoriented. “Where are we?”
“Pavonis, Ann. The revolution. I came over and woke you because a fight has 
broken out between Kasei’s Reds and the greens in Sheffield.”
The present rolled over her like the landslide in her dream. She jerked out of 
Nadia’s grasp, groped for her shirt. “Wasn’t my rover locked?”
“I broke in.”
“Ah.” Ann stood up, still foggy, getting more annoyed the more she understood 
the situation. “Now what happened?”
“They launched missiles at the cable.”
“They did!” Another jolt, further clearing away the fog. “And?”
“It didn’t work. The cable’s defense systems shot them down. They’ve got a lot 
of hardware up there now, and they’re happy to be able to use it at last. But 
now the Reds are moving into Sheffield from the west, firing more rockets, and 
the UN forces on Clarke are bombing the first launch sites, over on Ascraeus, 
and they’re threatening to bomb every armed force down here. This is just what 
they wanted. And the Reds think it’s going to be like Burroughs, obviously, 
they’re trying to force the action. So I came to you. Look, Ann, I know we’ve 
been fighting a lot. I haven’t been very, you know, patient, but look, this is 
just too much. Everything could fall apart at the last minute—the UN could 
decide the situation here is anarchy, and come up from Earth and try to take 
over again.”
“Where are they?” Ann croaked. She pulled on pants, went to the bathroom. Nadia 
followed her right in. This too was a surprise; in Underbill it might have been 
normal between them, but it had been a long long time since Nadia had followed 
her into a bathroom talking obsessively while Ann washed her face and sat down 
and peed. “They’re still based in Lastflow, but now they’ve cut the rim piste 
and the one to Cairo, and they’re fighting in west Sheffield, and around the 
Socket. Reds fighting greens.”
“Yes yes.”
“So will you talk to the Reds, will you stop them?”
A sudden fury swept through Ann. “You drove them to this,” she shouted in 
Nadia’s face, causing Nadia to crash back into the door. Ann got up and took a 
step toward Nadia and yanked her pants up, shouting still: “You and your smug 
stupid terraforming, it’s all green green green green, with never a hint of 
compromise! It’s just as much your fault as theirs, since they have no hope!”
“Maybe so,” Nadia said mulishly. Clearly she didn’t care about that, it was the 
past and didn’t matter; she waved it aside and would not be swerved from her 
point: “But will you try?”
Ann stared at her stubborn old friend, at this moment almost youthful with fear, 
utterly focused and alive.
“I’ll do what I can,” Ann said grimly. “But from what you say, it’s already too 
late.”
 
*      *        *
 
It was indeed too late. The rover camp Ann had been staying in was deserted, and 
when she got on the wrist and called around, she got no answers. So she left 
Nadia and the rest of them stewing in the east Pavonis warehouse complex, and 
drove her rover around to Lastflow, hoping to find some of the Red leaders based 
there. But Lastflow had been abandoned by the Reds, and none of the locals knew 
where they had gone. People were watching TVs in the stations and cafe windows, 
but when Ann looked too she saw no news of the fighting, not even on Mangalavid. 
A feeling of desperation began to seep into her grim mood; she wanted to do 
something but did not know how. She tried her wrist-pad again, and to her 
surprise Kasei answered on their private band. His face in the little image 
looked shockingly like John Boone’s, so much so that in her confusion Ann didn’t 
at first hear what he said. He looked so happy, it was John to the life!
“. . . had to do it,” he was telling her. Ann wondered if she had asked him 
about that. “If we don’t do something they’ll tear this world apart. They’ll 
garden it right to the tops of the big four.”
This echoed Ann’s thoughts on the ledge enough to shock her again, but she 
collected herself and said, “We’ve got to work within the framework of the 
discussions, Kasei, or else we’ll start a civil war.”
“We’re a minority, Ann. The framework doesn’t care about minorities.”
“I’m not so sure. That’s what we have to work on. And even if we do decide on 
active resistance, it doesn’t have to be here and now. It doesn’t have to be 
Martians killing Martians.”
“They’re not Martian.” There was a glint in his eye, his expression was 
Hiroko-like in its distance from the ordinary world. In that sense he was not 
like John at all. The worst of both parents; and so they had another prophet, 
speaking a new language.
“Where are you now?”
“West Sheffield.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Take the Socket, and then bring down the cable. We’re the ones with the weapons 
and the experience. I don’t think we’ll have much trouble.”
“You didn’t bring it down first try.”
“Too fancy. We’ll just chop it down this time.”
“I thought that wasn’t the way to do it.”
“It’ll work.”
“Kasei, I think we need to negotiate with the greens.”
He shook his head, impatient with her, disgusted that she had lost her nerve 
when push came to shove. “After the cable is down we’ll negotiate. Look Ann, 
I’ve gotta go. Stay out of the fall line.”
“Kasei!”
But he was gone. No one listened to her—not her enemies, not her friends, not 
her family—though she would have to call Peter. She would have to try Kasei 
again. She needed to be there in person, to get his attention as she had 
Nadia’s—yes, it had come to that: to get their attention she had to shout right 
in their faces.
 
The possibility of getting blocked around east Pavonis kept her going west from 
Lastflow, circling counterclockwise as she had the day before, to come on the 
Red force from its rear, no doubt the best approach anyway. It was about a 
150-kilometer drive from Lastflow to the western edge of Sheffield, and as she 
sped around the summit, just outside the piste, she spent the time trying to 
call the various forces on the mountain, with no success. Explosive static 
marked the fight for Sheffield, and memories of ‘61 erupted with these brutal 
bursts of white noise, frightening her; she drove the rover as fast as it would 
go, keeping it on the piste’s narrow outside apron to make the ride smoother and 
faster—a hundred kilometers per hour, then faster— racing, really, to try to 
stave off the disaster of a civil war— there was a terrible dreamlike quality to 
it. And especially in that it was too late, too late. In moments like these she 
was always too late. In the sky over the caldera, starred clouds appeared 
instantaneously—explosions, without a doubt missiles fired at the cable and shot 
down in midflight, in white puffs like incompetent fireworks, clustered over 
Sheffield and peaking in the region of the cable, but puffing into existence all 
over the vast summit, then drifting off east on the.jet stream. Some of those 
rockets were getting nailed a long way from their target.
Looking up at the battle overhead she almost drove into the first tent of west 
Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown westward new tents 
had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava; now the 
construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits of 
framework, like shards of glass, and the tent fabric was missing in the 
remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt 
rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were 
stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover’s own lock, 
left the car. Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed 
over it into Sheffield.
The streets were deserted. Glass and bricks and bamboo shards and twisted 
magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgrass. At this elevation, tent 
failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty and 
dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay scattered, 
like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or dusted. There 
would be a lot of dead, people weren’t used to thinking about decompression 
anymore, it was an old settlers’ worry. But not today.
Ann kept walking east. “Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter,” she said to 
her wrist again and again. But no one replied.
She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the tent. Harsh 
sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their windows in 
place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course. Ahead the 
cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky out of east 
Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.
The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly varying wavelength, 
synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This system cut 
through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was surprised 
when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, “Ann, it’s Dao. Up here.”
He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a building’s little 
emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were working with a trio of 
mobile rocket launchers out in the street. Ann ran over to them, ducked into the 
doorway beside Dao. “This has to stop!” she cried.
Dao looked surprised. “We’ve almost got the Socket.”
“But what then?”
“Talk to Kasei about that. He’s up ahead, going for Arsia-view.”
One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin air. Dao was 
back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she could to the 
buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that moment she didn’t 
care if she was killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was somewhere in 
Sheffield, in command of the green revolutionaries who had been there from the 
beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the UNTA security 
forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no means the 
hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and Dao seemed 
to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an attack on her 
only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her blessing. As once 
they had. But now—
She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning 
to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where 
she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron 
car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she looked 
closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their fronts, 
where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang. Anyone 
inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent wall, 
heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that a 
single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried 
again over the wrist.
While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.
“It isn’t logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming goals,” 
he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her. “The cable 
could be tethered to quite a cold planet.”
It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was on, 
because he stared owlishly into his wrist’s little camera and said, “Listen Ann, 
we can take history by the arm and break it—make it. Make it new.”
Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly 
distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights 
she had ever seen, actually: “They love you, Ann. It’s that that can save us. 
Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and 
devolution—devotion. You’re the—the personification of certain values—for the 
natives. You can’t escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da Vinci, 
and it proved—helpful. Now it’s your turn. You must. You must— Ann—just this 
once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your iconic 
value.”
So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted again, 
he seemed to pull himself together. “... logical procedure is to establish some 
kind of equation for conflicting interests.” Just like his old self.
Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the 
incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black 
expression on his face that she had never seen before.
“Ann!” He stared intently at his own wristpad. “Listen, Mother—I want you to 
stop these people!”
“Don’t you Mother me,” she snapped. “I’m trying. Can you tell me where they 
are?”
“I sure as hell can. They’ve just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving 
through—it looks like they’re trying to come up on the Socket from the south.” 
Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. “Right.” He looked back at 
her. “Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you’re 
trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it’s only a few 
extremists, and stay out of it. He’s going to do what he has to to keep the 
cable up, and I’m afraid he’s about to kill us all.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have 
said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on 
the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for 
the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.
“I’m Ann Clayborne,” she said, and as his face twisted even further, she added, 
“I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not represent Red 
party policy.”
Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her 
throat. But she went on: “It’s the work of a splinter group, called the Kakaze. 
They’re the ones who broke the Burroughs dike. We’re trying to shut them down, 
and expect to succeed by the end of the day.”
It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt like Frank 
Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth, she couldn’t stand the 
sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her face 
betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without having 
said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter’s, who did not know she was back 
on-line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall, “If they don’t 
stop on their own we’ll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will and it’ll all 
go to hell. Get everything ready for a counterattack, I’ll give the word.”
“Peter!” she said without thinking.
The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.
“You deal with Hastings,” she choked out, barely able to look at him, traitor 
that he was. “I’m going for Kasei.”
 
Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which snaked 
overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent’s ventilation patterns. 
Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and shards of clear 
framework plastic were scattered on the green grass of the street. Ann stumbled 
past a body curled just like the figures modeled in ash in Pompeii. Arsiaview 
was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should go. The whoosh of 
rocket launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the magnet of the 
madness—like a monopole, discharging Earth’s insanity onto them.
There might be a plan revealed here; the cable’s defenses seemed to be capable 
of handling the Reds’ lightweight missiles, but if the attackers thoroughly 
destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for UNTA to come 
down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging overhead. It 
was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.
But it was a bad plan. Burroughs was down in the lowlands, where there was an 
atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while. Sheffield was 
high, and so they were back in the past, back in ‘61 when a broken tent meant 
the end for everyone in it exposed to thfe elements. At the same time most of 
Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the wall of the 
caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down there, and if the 
fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a nightmare. But up on the 
surface where fighting was possible, people were exposed to fire from the cable 
above. No, it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even possible to see what was happening. 
There were more explosions near the Socket, static over the intercom, isolated 
words as the receiver caught bits of other coded frequencies cycling through: 
“—taken Arsiaviewpkkkkkk—” “We need the AI back but I’d say x-axis three two 
two, y-axis eightpkkkkk—”
Then another barrage of missiles must have been launched at the cable, for 
overhead Ann caught sight of an ascending line of brilliant explosions of light, 
no sound to them at all; but after that, big black fragments rained down on the 
tents around her, crashing through the invisible fabrics or smashing onto the 
invisible framework, then falling the last distance onto the buildings like the 
dropped masses of wrecked vehicles, loud despite the thin air and the 
intervening tents, the ground vibrating and jerking under her feet. It went on 
for minutes, with the fragments falling farther outward all the time, and any 
second in all those minutes could have brought death down on her. She stood 
looking up at the dark sky, and waited it out.
Things stopped falling. She had been holding her breath, and she breathed. Peter 
had the Red code, and so she called his number and tapped in a patch attempt, 
heard only static. But as she was turning down the volume in her earphones, she 
caught some garbled half phrases—Peter, describing Red movements to green 
forces, or perhaps even to UNTA. Who could then fire rockets from the cable 
defense systems down onto them. Yes, that was Peter’s voice, bits of it all cut 
with static. Calling the shots. Then it was only static.
At the base of the elevator brief flashes of explosive light transformed the 
lower part of the cable from black to silver, then back to black again. Every 
alarm inside Arsiaview began ringing or howling. All the smoke whipped away 
toward the east end of the tent. Ann got into a north-south alley and leaned 
back against the east wall of a building, flat against concrete. No windows on 
the alley. Booms, crashes, wind. Then the silence of near airlessness.
She got up and wandered through the tent. Where did one go when people were 
being killed? Find your friends if you can. If you can tell who they are.
She collected herself and continued looking for Kasei’s group, going to where 
Dao had said they would be, and then trying to think where they would go next. 
Outside the city was a possibility; but having come inside they might try for 
the next tent to the east, try to take them one by one, decompress them, force 
everyone below and then move on. She stayed on the street paralleling the tent 
wall, jogging along as fast as she could. She was in good shape but this was 
ridiculous, she couldn’t catch her breath, and she was soaking the inside of her 
suit with sweat. The street was deserted, eerily silent and still, so that it 
was hard to believe she was in the middle of a battle, and impossible to believe 
she would ever find the group for which she was looking.
But there they were. Up ahead, in the streets around one of the triangular 
parks—figures in helmets and suits, carrying automatic weapons and mobile 
missile launchers, firing at unseen opponents in a building fronted with chert. 
The red circles on their arms, Reds—
A blinding flash and she was knocked down. Her ears roared. She was at the foot 
of a building, pressed against its polished stone side. Jaspilite: red jasper 
and iron oxide, in alternating bands. Pretty. Her back and bottom and shoulder 
hurt, and her elbow. But nothing was agonizing. She could move. She crawled 
around, looked back to the triangle park. Things were burning in the wind, the 
flames little oxygen-starved orange spurts, going out already. The figures there 
were cast about like broken dolls, limbs akimbo, in positions no bones could 
hold. She got up and ran to the nearest knot of them, drawn by a familiar 
gray-haired head that had come free of its helmet. That was Kasei, only son of 
John Boone and Hiroko Ai, one side of his jaw bloody, his eyes open and 
sightless. He had taken her too seriously. And his opponents not seriously 
enough. His pink stone eyetooth lay there exposed by his wound, and seeing it 
Ann choked and turned away. The waste. All three of them dead now.
She turned back and crouched, undipped Kasei’s wrist-pad. It was likely that he 
had a direct access band to the Kakaze, and when she was back in the shelter of 
an obsidian building marred by great white shatterstars, she tapped in the 
general call code, and said, “This is Ann Clayborne, calling all Reds. All Reds. 
Listen, this is Ann Clayborne. The attack on Sheffield has failed. Kasei is 
dead, along with a lot of others. More attacks here won’t work. They’ll cause 
the full UNTA security force to come back down onto the planet again.” She 
wanted to say how stupid the plan had been in the first place, but she choked 
back the words. “Those of you who can, get off the mountain. Everyone in 
Sheffield, get back to the west and get out of the city, and off the mountain. 
This is Ann Clayborne.”
Several acknowledgments came in, and she half listened to them as she walked 
west, back throtfgh Arsiaview toward her rover. She made no attempt to hide; if 
she was killed she was killed, but now she didn’t believe it would happen; she 
walked under the wings of some dark covering angel, who kept her from death no 
matter what happened, forcing her to witness the deaths of all the people she 
knew and all the planet she loved. Her fate. Yes; there was Dao and his crew, 
all dead right where she had left them, lying in pools of their own blood. She 
must have just missed it.
And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in its center, was 
another knot of bodies—not Reds— they wore green headbands, and one of them 
looked like Peter, it was his back—she walked over weak-kneed, under a 
compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally circled it. 
But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like Peter’s, poor 
thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.
She moved on carelessly. She came to her little rover without incident, got in 
and drove to the train terminal at the west end of Sheffield. There a piste ran 
down the south slope of Pavonis, into the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia. 
Seeing it she conceived a plan, very simple and basic, but workable because of 
that. She got on the Kakaze band and made her recommendations as though they 
were orders. Run away, disappear. Go down into South Saddle, then around Arsia 
on the western slope above the snowline, there to slip into the upper end of 
Aganippe Fossa, a long straight canyon that contained a hidden Red refuge, a 
cliff dwelling in the northern wall. There they could hide and hide and start 
another long underground campaign, against the new masters of the planet. UNOMA, 
UNTA, metanat, Dorsa Brevia— they were all green.
She tried calling Coyote, and was somewhat surprised when he answered. He was 
somewhere in Sheffield as well, she could tell; lucky to be alive no doubt, a 
bitter furious expression on his cracked face.
Ann told him her plan; he nodded.
“After a time they’ll need to get farther away,” he said.
Ann couldn’t help it: “It was stupid to attack the cable!”
“I know,” Coyote said wearily.
“Didn’t you try to talk them out of it?”
“I did.” His expression grew blacker. “Kasei’s dead?”
“Yes.”
Coyote’s face twisted with grief. “Ah, God. Those bastards.”
Ann had nothing to say. She had not known Kasei well, or liked him much. Coyote 
on the other hand had known him from birth, back in Hiroko’s hidden colony, and 
from boyhood had taken him along on his furtive expeditions all over Mars. Now 
tears coursed down the deep wrinkles on Coyote’s cheeks, and Ann clenched her 
teeth.
“Can you get them down to Aganippe?” she asked. “I’ll stay and deal with the 
people in east Pavonis.”
Coyote nodded. “I’ll get them down as fast as I can. Meet at west station.”
“I’ll tell them that.”
“The greens will be mad at you.”
“Fuck the greens.”
 
Some part of the Kakaze snuck into the west terminal of Sheffield, in the light 
of a smoky dull sunset: small groups wearing blackened dirty walkers, their 
faces white and frightened, angry, disoriented, in shock. Wasted. Eventually 
there were three or four hundred of them, sharing the day’s bad news. When 
Coyote slipped in the back, Ann rose and spoke in a voice just loud enough to 
carry to all of them, aware as she never had been in her life of her position as 
the first Red; of what that meant, now. These people had taken her seriously and 
here they were, beaten and lucky to be alive, with dead friends everywhere in 
the town east of them.
“A direct assault was a bad idea,” she said, unable to help herself. “It worked 
in Burroughs, but that was a different kind of situation. Here it failed. People 
who might have lived a thousand years are dead. The cable wasn’t worth that. 
We’re going to go into hiding and wait for our next chance, our next real 
chance.”
There were hoarse objections to this, angry shouts: “No! No! Never! Bring down 
the cable!”
Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they went silent 
again.
“It could backfire all too easily if we fight the greens now. It could give the 
metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse than dealing with a 
native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The environmental part of 
the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We’ll just have to keep 
working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you understand?”
This morning they wouldn’t have. Now they still didn’t want to. She waited out 
the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed glare of Ann 
Clayborne.... A lot of them had joined the fight because of her, back in the 
days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual working 
alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on the same 
side....
They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne was against 
them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that—without Kasei, without 
Dao— with the bulk of the natives green, and firmly behind the leadership of 
Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor. . . .
“Coyote will get you off Tharsis,” Ann said, feeling sick. She left the room, 
walked through the terminal and out the lock, back into her rover. Kasei’s 
wristpad lay on the car’s dashboard, and she threw it across the compartment, 
sobbed. She sat in the driver’s seat and composed herself, and then started the 
car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.
 
Eventually she found herself back in east Pavonis, and there they were, all 
still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they stared at her 
as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was personally 
responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day and 
throughout the revolution—just as they had stared at her after Burroughs, in 
fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him, and 
ignored the rest, or tried to, Irishka frightened, Jackie red-eyed and furious, 
her father killed this day after all, and though she was in Peter’s camp and so 
partly responsible for the crushing response to the Red offensive, you could see 
with one look at her that someone would pay—but Ann ignored all that, and walked 
across the room to Sax—who was in his nook in the far corner of the big central 
room, sitting before a screen reading long columns of figures, muttering things 
to his AI. Ann waved a hand between his face and his screen and he looked up, 
startled.
Strangely, he was the only one of the whole crowd who did not appear to blame 
her. Indeed he regarded her with his head tilted to the side, with a birdlike 
curiosity that almost resembled sympathy.
“Bad news about Kasei,” he said. “Kasei and all the rest. I’m glad that you and 
Desmond survived.”
She ignored that, and told him in a rapid undertone where the Reds were going, 
and what she had told them to do. “I think I can keep them from trying any more 
direct attacks on the cable,” she said. “And from most acts of violence, at 
least in the short term.”
“Good,” Sax said.
“But I want something for it,” she said. “I want it and if I don’t get it, I’ll 
set them on you forever.”
“The soletta?” Sax asked.
She stared at him. He must have listened to her more often than she had thought. 
“Yes.”
His eyebrows came together as he thought it over. “It could cause a kind of ice 
age,” he said.
“Good.”
He stared at her as he thought about it. She could see him doing it, in quick 
flashes or bursts: ice age—thinner atmosphere—terraforming slowed—new ecosystems 
destroyed— perhaps compensate—greenhouse gases. And so on and so forth. It was 
almost funny how she could read this stranger’s face, this hated brother looking 
for a way out. He would look and look, but heat was the main driver of 
terraforming, and with the huge orbiting array of mirrors in the soletta gone, 
they would be at least restricted to Mars’s normal level of sunlight, thus 
slowed to a more “natural” pace. It was possible that the inherent stability of 
that approach even appealed to Sax’s conservatism, such as it was.
“Okay,” he said.
“You can speak for these people?” she said, waving disdainfully at the crowd 
behind them, as if all her oldest companions were not among them, as if they 
were UNTA technocrats or metanat functionaries....
“No,” he said. “I only speak for me. But I can get rid of the soletta.”
“You’d do it against their wishes?”
He frowned. “I think I can talk them into it. If not, I know I can talk the Da 
Vinci team into it. They like challenges.”
“Okay.”
It was the best she could get from him, after all. She straightened up, still 
nonplussed. She hadn’t expected him to agree. And now that he had, she 
discovered that she was still angry, still sick at heart. This concession—now 
that she had it, it meant nothing. They would figure out other ways to heat 
things. Sax would make his argument using that point, no doubt. Give the soletta 
to Ann, he would say, as a way of buying off the Reds. Then forge on.
She walked out of the big room without a glance at the others. Out of the 
warehouses to her rover.
For a while she drove blindly, without any sense of where she was going. Just 
get away, just escape. Thus by accident she headed westward, and in short order 
she had to stop or run over the rim’s edge.
Abruptly she braked the car.
In a daze she looked out the windshield. Bitter taste in her mouth, guts all 
knotted, every muscle tense and aching. The great encircling rim of the caldera 
was smoking at several points, chiefly from Sheffield and Lastflow, but also 
from a dozen other places as well. No sight of the cable over Sheffield—but it 
was still there, marked by a concentration of smoke around its base, lofting 
east on the thin hard wind. Another peak banner, blown on the endless jet 
stream. Time was a wind sweeping them away. The plumes of smoke marred the dark 
sky, obscuring some of the many stars that shone in the hour before sunset. It 
looked like the old volcano was waking again, rousing from its long dormancy and 
preparing to erupt. Through the thin smoke the sun was a dark red glowing ball, 
looking much like an early molten planet must have looked, its color staining 
the shreds of smoke maroon and rust and crimson. Red Mars.
But red Mars was gone, and gone for good. Soletta or not, ice age or not, the 
biosphere would grow and spread until it covered everything, with an ocean in 
the north, and lakes in the south, and streams, forests, prairies, cities and 
roads, oh she saw it all; white clouds raining mud on the ancient highlands 
while the uncaring masses built their cities as fast as they could, the long 
run-out of civilization burying her world.


 
 
PART TWO
               ------------
---Areophany
               -----------
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
To Sax it looked like that least rational of conflicts, civil war. Two parts of 
a group shared many more interests than disagreements, but fought anyway. 
Unfortunately it was not possible to force people to study cost-benefit 
analysis. Nothing to be done. Or—possibly one could identify a crux issue 
causing one or both sides to resort to violence. After that, try to defuse that 
issue.
Clearly in this case a crux issue was terraforming. A matter with which Sax was 
closely identified. This could be viewed as a disadvantage, as a mediator ought 
ideally to be neutral. On the other hand, his actions might speak symbolically 
for the terra-forming effort itself. He might accomplish more with a symbolic 
gesture than anyone else. What was needed was a concession to the Reds, a real 
concession, the reality of which would increase its symbolic value by some 
hidden exponential factor. Symbolic value: it was a concept Sax was trying very 
hard to understand. Words of all kinds gave him trouble now, so much so that he 
had taken to etymology to try to understand them better. A glance at the wrist: 
symbol, “something that stands for something else,” from the Latin symbolum, 
adopted from a Greek word meaning “throw together. “Exactly. It was alien to his 
understanding, this throwing together, a thing emotional and even unreal, and 
yet vitally important.
The afternoon of the battle for Sheffield, he called Ann on the wrist and got 
her briefly, and tried to talk to her, and failed. So he drove to the edge of 
the city’s wreckage, not knowing what else to do, looking for her. It was very 
disturbing to see how much damage a few hours’ fighting could do. Many years of 
work lay in smoking shambles, the smoke not fire ash particulates for the most 
part but merely disturbed fines, old volcanic ash blown up and then torn east on 
the jet stream. The cable stuck out of the ruins like a black line of carbon 
nanotube fibers.
There was no sign of any further Red resistance. Thus no way of locating Ann. 
She was not answering her phone. So Sax returned to the warehouse complex in 
east Pavonis, feeling balked. He went back inside.
And then there she was, in the vast warehouse walking through the others toward 
him as if about to plunge a knife in his heart. He sank in his seat unhappily, 
remembering an overlong sequence of unpleasant interviews between them. Most 
recently they had argued on the train ride out of Libya Station. He recalled her 
saying something about removing the soletta and the annular minor; which would 
be a very powerful symbolic statement indeed. And he had never been comfortable 
with such a major element of the terraforming’s heat input being so fragile.
So when she said “I want something for it,” he thought he knew what she meant, 
and suggested removing the minors before she could. This surprised her. It 
slowed her down, it took the edge off her terrible anger. Leaving something very 
much deeper, however—grief, despair-—he could not be sure. Certainly a lot of 
Reds had died that day, and Red hopes as well. “I’m sorry about Ka-sei,” he 
said.
She ignored that, and made him promise to remove the space minors. He did, 
meanwhile calculating the loss of light that would result, then trying to keep a 
wince off his face. Insolation would drop by about twenty percent, a very 
substantial amount indeed. “It will start an ice age,” he muttered.
“Good,” she said.
But she was not satisfied. And as she left the room, he could see by the set of 
her shoulders that his concession had done little if anything to comfort her. 
One could only hope her cohorts were more easily pleased. In any case it would 
have to be done. It might stop a civil war. Of course a great number of plants 
would die, mostly at the higher elevations, though it would affect every 
ecosystem to some extent. An ice age, no doubt about it. Unless they reacted 
very effectively. But it would be worth it, if it stopped the fighting.


 
It would have been easy to just cut the great band of the annular mirror and let 
it fly away into space, right out of the plane of the ecliptic. Same with the 
soletta: fire a few of its positioning rockets and it would spin away like a 
Catherine wheel.
But that would be a waste of processed aluminum silicate, which Sax did not like 
to see. He decided to investigate the possibility of using the mirrors’ 
directional rockets, and their reflectivity, to propel them elsewhere in the 
solar system. The soletta could be located in front of Venus, and its mirrors 
realigned so that the structure became a huge parasol, shading the hot planet 
and starting the process of freezing out its atmosphere; this was something that 
had been discussed in the literature for a long time, and no matter what the 
various plans for terraforming Venus included, this was the standard first step. 
Then having done that, the annular mirror would have to be placed in the 
corresponding polar orbit around Venus, as its reflected light helped to hold 
the soletta/parasol in its position against the push of solar radiation. So the 
two would still be put to use, and it would also be a gesture, another symbolic 
gesture, saying Look here—this big world might be terraformable too. It wouldn’t 
be easy, but it was possible. Thus some of the psychic pressure on Mars, “the 
only other possible Earth,”  might be relieved. This was not logical, but it 
didn’t matter; history was strange, people were not rational systems, and in the 
peculiar symbolic logic of the limbic system, it would be a sign to the people 
on Earth, a portent, a scattering of psychic seed, a throwing together. Look 
there! Go there! And leave Mars alone.
So he talked it over with the Da Vinci space scientists, who had effectively 
taken over control of the mirrors. The lab rats, people called them behind their 
backs, and his (though he heard anyway); the lab rats, or the saxaclones. 
Serious young native Martian scientists, in fact, with just the same variations 
of temperament as grad students and postdocs in any lab anywhere, anytime; but 
the facts didn’t matter. They worked with him and so they were the saxaclones. 
Somehow he had become the very model of the modern Martian scientist; first as 
white-coated lab rat, then as full-blown mad scientist, with a crater-castle 
full of eager Igors, mad-eyed but measured in manner, little Mr. Spocks, the men 
as skinny and awkward as cranes on the ground, the women drab in their 
protective noncoloration, their neuter devotion to Science. Sax was very fond of 
them. He liked their devotion to science, it made sense to him—an urge to 
understand things, to be able to express them mathematically. It was a sensible 
desire. In fact it often seemed to him that if everyone were a physicist then 
they would be very much better off. “Ah, no, people like the idea of a flat 
universe because they find negatively curved space difficult to deal with.” 
Well, perhaps not. In any case the young natives at Da Vinci Crater were a 
powerful group, strange or not. At this point Da Vinci was in charge of a lot of 
the underground’s technological base, and with Spencer fully engaged there, 
their production capability was staggering. They had engineered the revolution, 
if the truth were told, and were now in de facto control of Martian orbital 
space.
This was one reason why many of them looked displeased or at least nonplussed 
when Sax first told them about the removal of the soletta and annular mirror. He 
did it in a screen meeting, and their faces squinched into expressions of alarm: 
Captain, it is not logical. But neither was civil war. And the one was better 
than the other.
“Won’t people object?” Aonia asked. “The greens?”
“No doubt,” Sax said. “But right now we exist in, in anarchy. The group in east 
Pavonis is a kind of proto-government, perhaps. But we in Da Vinci control Mars 
space. And no matter the objections, this might avert civil war.”
He explained as best he could. They got absorbed in the technical challenge, in 
the problem pure and simple, and quickly forgot their shock at the idea. In fact 
giving them a technical challenge of that sort was like giving a dog a bone. 
They went away gnawing at the tough parts of the problem, and just a few days 
later they were down to the smooth polished gleam of procedure. Mostly a matter 
of instructions to AIs, as usual. It was getting to the point where having 
conceived a clear idea of what one wanted to do, one could just say to an AI, 
“please do thus and such”— please spin the soletta and annular mirror into 
Venusian orbit, and adjust the slats of the soletta so that it becomes a parasol 
shielding the planet from all of its incoming insolation; and the AIs would 
calculate the trajectories and the rocket firings and the mirror angles 
necessary, and it would be done.
People were becoming too powerful, perhaps. Michel always went on about their 
godlike new powers, and Hiroko in her actions had implied that there should be 
no limit to what they tried with these new powers, ignoring all tradition. Sax 
himself had a healthy respect for tradition, as a kind of default survival 
behavior. But the techs in Da Vinci cared no more for tradition than Hiroko had. 
They were in an open moment in history, accountable to no one. And so they did 
it.
 
Then Sax went to Michel. “I’m worried about Ann.” They were in a corner of the 
big warehouse on east Pavonis, and the movement and clangor of the crowd created 
a kind of privacy. But after a look around Michel said, “Let’s go outside.”
They suited up and went out. East Pavonis was a maze of tents, warehouses, 
manufactories, pistes, parking lots, pipelines, holding tanks, holding yards; 
also junkyards and scrap heaps, their mechanical detritus scattered about like 
volcanic ejecta. But Michel led Sax westward through the mess, and they came 
quickly to the caldera rim, where the human clutter was put into a new and 
larger context, a logarithmic shift that left the pharaonic collection of 
artifacts suddenly looking like a patch of bacterial growth.
At the very edge of the rim, the blackish speckled basalt cracked down in 
several concentric ledges, each lower than the last. A set of staircases led 
down these terraces, and the lowest was railed. Michel led Sax down to this 
terrace, where they could look over the side into the caldera. Straight down for 
five kilometers. The caldera’s large diameter made it seem less deep than that; 
still it was an entire round country down there, far far below. And when Sax 
remembered how small the caldera was proportional to the volcano entire, Pavonis 
itself seemed to bulk under them like a conical continent, rearing right up out 
of the planet’s atmosphere into low space. Indeed the sky was only purple around 
the horizon, and blackish overhead, with the sun a hard gold coin in the west, 
casting clean slantwise shadows. They could see it all. The fines thrown up by 
the explosions were gone, everything returned to its normal telescopic clarity. 
Stone and sky and nothing more—except for the thread of buildings cast around 
the rim. Stone and sky and sun. Ann’s Mars. Except for the buildings. And on 
Ascraeus and Arsia and Elysium, and even on Olympus, the buildings would not be 
there.
“We could easily declare everything above about eight kilometers a primal 
wilderness zone,” Sax said. “Keep it like this forever.”
“Bacteria?” Michel asked. “Lichen?”
“Probably. But do they matter?”
“To Ann they do.”
“But why, Michel? Why is she like that?”
Michel shrugged.
After a long pause he said, “No doubt it is complex. But I think it is a denial 
of life. A turning to rock as something she could trust. She was mistreated as a 
girl, did you know that?”
Sax shook his head. He tried to imagine what that meant.
Michel said, “Her father died. Her mother married her stepfather when she was 
eight. From then on he mistreated her, until she was sixteen, when she moved to 
the mother’s sister. I’ve asked her what the mistreatment consisted of, but she 
says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Abuse is abuse, she said. She doesn’t 
remember much anyway, she says.”
“I believe that.”
Michel waggled a gloved hand. “We remember more than we think we do. More than 
we want to, sometimes.”
They stood there looking into the caldera.
“It’s hard to believe,” Sax said.
Michel looked glum. “Is it? There were fifty women in the First Hundred. Odds 
are more than one of them were abused by men in their lives. More like ten or 
fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated, struck, 
mistreated ... that’s just the way it was.”
“It’s hard to believe.”
“Yes.”
Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless with a single 
blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had needed to do it, 
though. Or so it had felt at the time.
“Everyone has their reasons,” Michel said, startling him. “Or so they think.” He 
tried to explain—tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it something other 
than plain evil. “At the base of human culture,” he said as he looked down into 
the country of the caldera, “is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic 
wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic 
bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then sometime in late infancy we 
come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our 
mother and everyone else. This is a blow from which we never completely recover. 
There are several neurotic strategies used to try to deal with it. First, 
merging back into the mother. Then denying the mother, and shifting our ego 
ideal to the father—this strategy often lasts forever, and the people of that 
culture worship their king and their father god, and so on. Or the ego ideal 
might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to the brotherhood of men. There are 
names and full descriptions for all these complexes—the Dionysian, the Persean, 
the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all exist, and they are all neurotic, in 
that they all lead to misogyny, except for the Dionysian complex.”
“This is one of your semantic rectangles?” Sax asked apprehensively.
“Yes. The Apollonian and the Heraclean complexes might describe Terran 
industrial societies. The Persean its earlier cultures, with strong remnants of 
course right up to this day. And they are all three patriarchal. They all denied 
the maternal, which was connected in patriarchy with the body and with nature. 
The feminine was instinct, the body, and nature; while the masculine was reason, 
mind, and law. And the law ruled.”
Sax, fascinated by so much throwing together, said only, “And on Mars?”
“Well, on Mars it may be that the ego ideal is shifting back to the maternal. To 
the Dionysian again, or to some kind of postoedipal reintegration with nature, 
which we are still in the process of inventing. Some new complex that would not 
be so subject to neurotic overinvestment.”
Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborated a pseudoscience could 
get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like 
physics. But what they did not understand was that physics, while admittedly 
complicated, was always trying very hard to become simpler.
Michel, however, was continuing to elaborate. Correlated to patriarchy was 
capitalism, he was saying, a hierarchical system in which most men had been 
exploited economically, also treated like animals, poisoned, betrayed, shoved 
around, shot. And even in the best of circumstances under constant threat of 
being tossed aside, out of a job, poor, unable to provide for loved dependents, 
hungry, humiliated. Some trapped in this unfortunate system took out their rage 
at their plight on whomever they could, even if that turned out to be their 
loved ones, the people most likely to give them comfort. It was illogical, and 
even stupid. Brutal and stupid. Yes. Michel shrugged; he didn’t like where this 
train of reasoning had led him. It sounded to Sax like the implication was that 
many men’s actions indicated that they were, alas, fairly stupid. And the limbic 
array got all twisted in some minds, Michel was going on, trying to veer away 
from that, to make a decent explanation. Adrenaline and testosterone were always 
pushing for a fight-or-flight response, and in some dismal situations a 
satisfaction circuit got established in the get hurt/hurt back axis, and then 
the men involved were lost, not only to fellow feeling but to rational 
self-interest. Sick, in fact.
Sax felt a litle sick himself. Michel had explained away male evil in several 
different ways in no more than a quarter of an hour, and still the men of Earth 
had a lot to answer for. Marsmen were different. Although there had been 
torturers in Kasei Vallis, as he well knew. But they had been settlers from 
Earth. Sick. Yes, he felt sick. The young natives were not like that, were they? 
A Marsman who hit a woman or molested a child would be ostracized, excoriated, 
perhaps beaten up, he would lose his home, he would be exiled to the asteroids 
and never allowed back. Wouldn’t he?
Something to look into.
Now he thought again of Ann. Of how she was: her manner, so obdurate; her focus 
on science, on rock. A kind of Apollonian response, perhaps. Concentration on 
the abstract, denial of the body and therefore of all its pain. Perhaps.
“What would help Ann now, do you think?” Sax said.
Michel shrugged again. “I have wondered that for years. I think Mars has helped 
her. I think Simon helped her, and Peter. But they have all been at some kind of 
distance. They don’t change that fundamental no in her.”
“But she—she loves all this,” Sax said, waving at the cal-dera. “She truly 
does.” He thought over Michel’s analysis. “It’s not just a no. There’s a yes in 
there as well. A love of Mars.”
“But if you love stones and not people,” Michel said, “it’s somehow a little ... 
unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know—”
“I know—”
“—and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content with it.”
“She doesn’t like what’s happening to her world.”
“No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most? I’m not so sure. 
It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.”
Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology 
any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of 
thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to 
hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when 
they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the 
early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the 
twenty-first. .. and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. 
Application of heat, pressure buildup, pressure displacement, venting, all 
shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought 
it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind 
was more like—what?—an ecology—a fell-field—or else a jungle, populated by all 
manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black 
holes. Well—a bit grandiose, that—really it was more like a complex collection 
of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in 
an atmosphere. That was better—weather—storm fronts of thought, high-pressure 
zones, low-pressure cells, hurricanes—the jet streams of biological desires, 
always making their swift powerful rounds ... life in the wind. Well. Throwing 
together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.
“What are you thinking?” Michel asked.
“Sometimes I worry,” Sax admitted, “about the theoretical basis of these 
diagnoses of yours.”
“Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very 
accurate.”
“Both precise and accurate?”
“Well, what, they’re the same, no?”
“No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true 
value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or 
minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus 
fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still 
being not very precise. Often true values aren’t really determinable, of 
course.”
Michel had a curious expression on his face. “You’re a very accurate person, 
Sax.”
“It’s just statistics,” Sax said defensively. “Every once in a while language 
allows you to say things precisely.”
“And accurately.”
“Sometimes.”
They looked down into the country of the caldera.
“I want to help her,” Sax said.
Michel nodded. “You said that. I said I didn’t know how. For her, you are the 
terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help her. Do you 
think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?”
Sax thought about it for a while. “It could get her outdoors. Outdoors without 
helmets, eventually without even masks.”
“You think she wants that?”
“I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum. The animal, you 
know. It feels right.”
“I don’t know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.”
Sax considered it.
Then the whole landscape darkened.
They looked up. The sun was black. Stars shone in the sky around it. There was a 
faint glow around the black disk, perhaps the sun’s corona.
Then a sudden crescent of fire forced them to look away. That was the corona; 
what they had seen before had probably been the lit exosphere.
The darkened landscape lightened again, as the artificial eclipse came to an 
end. But the whole sun that returned was distinctly smaller than what had shone 
just moments before. The old bronze button of the Martian sun! It was like a 
friend come back for a visit. The world was dimmer, all the colors of the 
caldera one shade darker, as if invisible clouds obscured the sunlight. A very 
familiar sight, in fact— Mars’s natural light, shining on them again for the 
first time in twenty-eight years.
“I hope Ann saw that,” Sax said. He felt chilled, although he knew there had not 
been enough time for the air to have cooled, and he was suited up in any case. 
But there would be a chill. He thought grimly of the fellfields scattered all 
over the planet, up at the four- or five-kilometer elevation, and lower in the 
mid and high latitudes. Up at the edge of the possible, whole ecosystems would 
now start dying. Twenty percent drop in insolation: it was worse than any Terran 
ice age, more like the darkness after the great extinction events—the KT event, 
the Ordovician; the Devonian, or the worst one of all, the Permian event 250 
million years ago, which killed up to ninety-five percent of all the species 
alive at the time. Punctuated equilibrium; and very few species survived the 
punctuations. The ones that did were tough, or just lucky.
Michel said, “I doubt it will satisfy her.”
This Sax fully believed. But for the moment he was distracted by thinking how 
best to compensate for the loss of the soletta’s light. It would be better not 
to have any biomes suffering great losses. If he had his way, those fellfields 
were just something Ann was going to have to get used to.
 
*      *        *
 
It was Ls 123, right in the middle of the northern summer/southern winter, near 
aphelion, which along with higher elevation caused the south’s winter to be much 
colder than the north’s; temperatures regularly dipped to 230 K, not much warmer 
than the primal colds that had existed before their arrival. Now, with the 
soletta and annular mirror gone, temperatures would drop further still. No doubt 
the southern highlands were headed for a record winterkill.
On the other hand, a lot of snow had already fallen in the south, and Sax had 
gained a great respect for snow’s ability to protect living things from cold and 
wind. The sub-nivean environment was quite stable. It could be that a drop in 
light, and subsequently in surface temperature, would not do that much harm to 
snowed-over plants, already shut down by their winter hardening. It was hard to 
say. He wanted to get into the field and see for himself. Of course it would be 
months or perhaps years before any difference would be quantifiable. Except in 
the weather itself, perhaps. And weather could be tracked merely by watching the 
meteorological data, which he was already doing, spending many hours in front of 
satellite pictures and weather maps, watching for signs. It made for a useful 
diversion when people came by to remonstrate with him for removing the mirrors, 
an event so common in the week following the event that it became tiresome.
Unfortunately weather on Mars was so variable that it was difficult to tell if 
the removal of the big mirrors was affecting it or not. A very sad admission of 
the state of their understanding of the atmosphere, in Sax’s opinion. But there 
it was. Martian weather was a violent semichaotic system. In some ways it 
resembled Earth’s, not surprising given that it was a matter of air and water 
moving around the surface of a spinning sphere: Coriolis forces were the same 
everywhere, and so here as on Earth there were tropical easterlies, temperate 
westerlies, polar easterlies, jet-stream anchor points and so on; but that was 
almost all one could say for sure about Martian weather. Well—you could say that 
it was colder and drier in the south than in the north. That there were rain 
shadows downwind of high volcanoes or mountain chains. That it was warmer near 
the equator, colder at the poles. But this sort of obvious generalization was 
all that they could assert with confidence, except for some local patterns, 
although most of those were subject to lots of variation—more a matter of highly 
analyzed statistics than lived experience. And with only fifty-two m-years on 
record, with the atmosphere thickening radically all the while, with water being 
pumped onto the surface, etc., etc., it was actually fairly difficult to say 
what normal or average conditions might be.
Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on east Pavonis. People kept 
interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile political 
situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weather’s. Already it 
was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds; there were 
sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent 
fights in defense of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced 
himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were 
trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict 
with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the 
Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a 
springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not 
going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the 
day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-meter rise in sea 
level was going to push them off stage.
Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel 
for supper out in his rover.
“There’s no such thing as a fresh start,” he said as he put water on to boil.
“The Big Bang?” Michel suggested.
“As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the—the dumpiness of the 
early universe was caused by the earlier—dumpiness of the previous universe, 
collapsing down into its Big Crunch.”
“I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.”
“Singularities are strange—outside their event horizons, quantum effects allow 
some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting those particles out 
apparently caused small clumps to start and become big ones.” Sax frowned; he 
was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. “But I was referring to the flood 
on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of conditions as a singularity, 
by any means. In fact there must be people down there who don’t think of it as a 
break at all.”
“True.” For some reason Michel was laughing. “We should go there and see, eh?”
As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, “I want to get out in the 
field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going 
away.”
“You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim.. 
..” Michel shuddered.
“Yes, but that only makes me more curious.”
“Well—we’ll hold down the fort for you.”
As if one had to physically occupy any given space in order to be there. “The 
cerebellum never gives up,” Sax said.
Michel grinned. “Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.”
Sax frowned.
Before he left, he called Ann.
“Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to south Tharsis, to, to, to 
examine the upper boundary of the ar-eobiosphere, together?”
She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she thought it over—the 
cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her conscious verbal 
response: “No.” And then she cut the connection, looking somewhat frightened.
Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for going into the 
field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the rocky first biomes 
of the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they were. Talking to her. 
Something like that. His mental image of what he would say to her if he actually 
got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her. Make her see it.
Well, one couldn’t make people see things.
He went to say good-bye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make people see 
things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when he talked 
about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now and still she 
hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made Sax smile a 
little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who obviously 
loved Ann.
As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was in the nature 
of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it—to fall in love with all the 
objects of his “scientific study.” Every astronomer loves the stars. Well, who 
knew. Sax reached out and clasped Michel’s upper arm, who smiled happily at this 
un-Sax-like behavior, this “change in thinking.” Love, yes; and how much more so 
when the object of study consisted of women known for years and years, studied 
with the intensity of pure science—yes, that would be a feeling. A great 
intimacy, whether they cooperated in the study or not. In fact they might even 
be more beguiling if they didn’t cooperate, if they refused to answer any 
questions at all. After all if Michel wanted questions answered, answered at 
great length even when they weren’t asked, he always had Maya, Maya the 
all-too-human, who led Michel on a hard steeplechase across the limbic array, 
including throwing things at him, if Spencer was to be believed. After that kind 
of symbolism, the silence of Ann might prove to be very endearing. “Be careful,” 
Michel said: the happy scientist, with one of his areas of study standing before 
him, loved like a brother.


 
 
 
 
 
Sax took a solo rover and drove it down the steep bare southern slope of Pavonis 
Mons, then across the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia Mons. He contoured around 
the great cone of Arsia Mons on its dry eastern side. After that he drove down 
the southern flank of Arsia, and.of the Tharsis Bulge itself, until he was on 
the broken highlands of Dae-dalia Planitia. This plain was the remnant of a 
giant ancient impact basin, now almost entirely erased by the uptilt of Tharsis, 
by lava from Arsia Mons, and by the ceaseless winds, until nothing was left of 
the impact basin except for a collection of areologists’ observations and 
deductions, faint radial arrays of ejecta scrapes and the like, visible on maps 
but not in the landscape.
To the eye as one traveled over it, it looked like much of the rest of the 
southern highlands: rugged bumpy pitted cracked land. A wild rockscape. The old 
lava flows were visible as smooth lobate curves of dark rock, like tidal swells 
fanning out and down. Wind streaks both light and dark marked the land, 
indicating dust of different weights and consistencies: there were light long 
triangles on the southeast sides of craters and boulders, dark chevrons to the 
northwest of them, and dark splotches inside the many rimless craters. The next 
big dust storm would redesign all these patterns.
Sax drove over the low stone waves with great pleasure, down down up, down down 
up, reading the sand paintings of the dust streaks like a wind chart. He was 
traveling not in a boulder car, with its low dark room and its cockroach scurry 
from one hiding place to the next, but rather in a big boxy areologist’s camper, 
with windows on all four sides of the third-story driver’s compartment. It was a 
very great pleasure indeed to roll along up there in the thin bright daylight, 
down and up, down and up, down and up over the sand-streaked plain, the horizons 
very distant for Mars. There was no one to hide from; no one hunting for him. He 
was a free man on a free planet, and if he wanted to he could drive this car 
right around the world. Or anywhere he pleased.
The full impact of this feeling took him about two days’ drive to realize. Even 
then he was not sure that he comprehended it. It was a sensation of lightness, a 
strange lightness that caused little smiles to stretch his mouth repeatedly for 
no obvious reason. He had not been consciously aware, before, of any sense of 
oppression or fear—but it seemed it had been there—since 2061, perhaps, or the 
years right before it. Sixty-six years of fear, ignored and forgotten but always 
there—a kind of tension in the musculature, a small hidden dread at the core of 
things. “Sixty-six bottles of fear on the wall, sixty-six bottles of fear! Take 
one down, pass it around, sixty-five bottles of fear on the wall!”
Now gone. He was free, his world was free. He was driving down the wind-etched 
tilted plain, and earlier that day snow had begun to appear in the cracks, 
gleaming aquati-cally in a way dust never did; and then lichen; he was driving 
down into the atmosphere. And no reason, now, why his life ought not to continue 
this way, puttering about freely every day in his own world lab, and everybody 
else just as free as that!
It was quite a feeling.
Oh they could argue on Pavonis, and they most certainly would. Everywhere in 
fact. A most extraordinarily contentious lot they were. What was the sociology 
that would explain that? Hard to say. And in any case they had cooperated 
despite their bickering; it might have been only a temporary confluence of 
interests, but everything was temporary now—with so many traditions broken or 
vanished, it left what John used to call the necessity of creation; and creation 
was hard. Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.
But they had certain capabilities now as a group, as a—a civilization. The 
accumulated body of scientific knowledge was growing vast indeed, and that 
knowledge was giving them an array of powers that could scarcely be 
comprehended, even in outline, by any single individual. But powers they were, 
understood or not. Godlike powers, as Michel called them, though it was not 
necessary to exaggerate them or confuse the issue—they were powers in the 
material world, real but constrained by reality. Which nevertheless might 
allow—it looked to Sax as if these powers could— if rightly applied—make a 
decent human civilization after all. After all the many centuries of trying. And 
why not? Why not? Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level 
possible? They could provide for everyone in an equitable way, they could cure 
disease, they could delay senescence until they lived for a thousand years, they 
could understand the universe from the Planck distance to the cosmic distance, 
from the Big Bang to the eskaton—all this was possible, it was technically 
achievable. And as for those who felt that humanity needed the spur of suffering 
to make it great, well they could go out and find anew the tragedies that Sax 
was sure would never go away, things like lost love, betrayal by friends, death, 
bad results in the lab. Meanwhile the rest of them could continue the work of 
making a decent civilization. They could do it! It was amazing, really. They had 
reached that moment in history when one could say it was possible. Very hard to 
believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately 
dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique. The 
odds were against that, it suggested that it was an artifact of perspective, one 
had to assume that things were more or less constant and that one lived in 
average times—the so-called principle of mediocrity. Never a particularly 
attractive principle, Sax had thought; perhaps it only meant that justice had 
always been achievable; in any case, there it was, an extraordinary moment, 
right there outside his four windows, burnished under the light touch of the 
natural sun. Mars and its humans, free and powerful.
It was too much to grasp. It kept slipping out of his mind, then reoccurring to 
him, and surprised by joy he would exclaim, “Ha! Ha!” The taste of tomato soup 
and bread; “Ha!”
The dusky purple of the twilight sky; “Ha!” The spectacle of the dashboard 
instrumentation, glowing faintly, reflected in the black windows; “Ha! Ha! Ha! 
My-oh-my.” He could drive anywhere he wanted to. No one told them what to do. He 
said that aloud to his darkened AI screen: “No one tells us what to do!” It was 
almost frightening. Vertiginous. Ka, the yonsei would say. Ka, supposedly the 
little red people’s name for Mars, from the Japanese ka, meaning fire. The same 
word existed in several other early languages as well, including 
proto-Indo-European; or so the linguists said.
Carefully he got in the big bed at the back of the compartment, in the hum of 
the rover’s heating and electrical system, and he lay humming to himself under 
the thick coverlet that caught up his body’s heat so fast, and put his head on 
the pillow and looked out at the stars.
 
The next morning a high-pressure system came in from the northwest, and the 
temperature rose to 262 K. He had driven down to five kilometers above the 
datum, and the exterior air pressure was 230 millibars. Not quite enough to 
breathe freely, so he pulled on one of the heated surface suits, then slipped a 
small air tank over his shoulders, and put its mask over his nose and mouth, and 
a pair of goggles over his eyes.
Even so, when he climbed out of the outer-lock door and down the steps to the 
sand, the intense cold caused him to sniffle and tear up, to the point of 
impeding his vision. The whistle of the wind was loud, though his ears were 
inside the hood of his suit. The suit’s heater was up to the task, however, and 
with the rest of him warm, his face slowly got used to it.
He tightened the hood’s drawstring and walked over the land. He stepped from 
flat stone to flat stone; here they were everywhere. He crouched often to 
inspect cracks, finding lichen and widely scattered specimens of other life: 
mosses, little tufts of sedge, grass. It was very windy. Exceptionally hard 
gusts slapped him four or five times a minute, with a steady gale between. This 
was a windy place much of the time, no doubt, with the atmosphere sliding south 
around the bulk of Tharsis in massed quantities. High-pressure cells would dump 
a lot of their moisture at the start of this rise, on the western side; indeed 
at this moment the horizon to the west was obscured by a flat sea of cloud, 
merging with the land in the far distance, out there two or three kilometers 
lower in elevation, and perhaps sixty kilometers away.
Underfoot there were only bits of snow, filling some of the shaded crack systems 
and hollows. These snowbanks were so hard that he could jump up and down on them 
without leaving a mark. Windslab, partially melted and then refrozen. One 
scalloped slab cracked under his boots, and he found it was several centimeters 
thick. Under that it was powder, or granules. His fingers were cold, despite his 
heated gloves.
He stood again and wandered, mapless over the rock. Some of the deeper hollows 
contained ice pools. Around midday he descended into one of these and ate his 
lunch by the ice pool, lifting the air mask to take bites out of a 
grain-and-honey bar. Elevation 4.5 kilometers above the datum; air pressure 267 
millibars. A high-pressure system indeed. The sun was low in the northern sky, a 
bright dot surrounded by pewter.
The ice of the pool was clear in places, like little windows giving him a view 
of the black bottom. Elsewhere it was bubbled or cracked, or white with rime. 
The bank he sat on was a curve of gravel, with patches of brown soil and black 
dead vegetation lying on it in a miniature berm—the high-water mark of the pond, 
apparently, a soil shore above the gravel one. The whole beach was no more than 
four meters long, one wide. The fine gravel was an umber color, piebald umber 
or.... He would have to consult a color chart. But not now.
The soil berm was dotted by pale green rosettes of tiny grass blades. Longer 
blades stood in clumps here and there. Most of the taller blades were dead, and 
light gray. Right next to the pond were patches of dark green succulent leaves, 
dark red at their edges. Where the green shaded into red was a color he couldn’t 
name, a dark lustrous brown stuffed somehow with both its constituent colors. He 
would have to call up a color chart soon, it seemed; lately when looking around 
outdoors he found that a color chart came in handy about once a minute. Waxy 
almost-white flowers were tucked under some of these bicolored leaves. Farther 
on lay some tangles, red-stalked, green-needled, like beached seaweed in 
miniature. Again that intermixture of red and green, right there in nature 
staring at him.
A distant wind-washed hum; perhaps the harping rocks, perhaps the buzz of 
insects. Black midges, bees ... in this air they would only have to sustain 
about thirty millibars of CO2, because there was so little partial pressure 
driving it into them, and at some point internal saturation was enough to hold 
any more out. For mammals that might not work so well. But they might be able to 
sustain twenty millibars, and with plant life flourishing all over the planet’s 
lower elevations, CO2 levels might drop to twenty millibars fairly soon; and 
then they could dispense with the air tanks and the face masks. Set loose 
animals on Mars.
In the faint hum of the air he seemed to hear their voices, immanent or 
emergent, coming in the next great surge of viriditas. The hum of distant 
voices; the wind; the peace of this little pool on its rocky moor; the Nirgalish 
pleasure he took in the sharp cold. . . . “Ann should see this,” he murmured.
Then again, with the space mirrors gone, presumably everything he saw here was 
doomed. This was the upper limit of the biosphere, and surely with the loss of 
light and heat the upper limit would drop, at least temporarily, perhaps for 
good. He didn’t like that; and it seemed possible there might be ways to 
compensate for the lost light. After all, the terraforming had been doing quite 
well before the mirrors’ arrival; they hadn’t been necessary. And it was good 
not to depend on something so fragile, and better to be rid of it now rather 
than later, when large animal populations might have died in the setback along 
with the plants.
Even so it was a shame. But the dead plant matter would only be more fertilizer 
in the end, and without the same kind of suffering as animals. At least so he 
assumed. Who knew how plants felt? When you looked closely at them, glowing in 
all their detailed articulation like complex crystals, they were as mysterious 
as any other life. And now their presence here made the entire plain, everything 
he could see, into one great fellfield, spreading in a slow tapestry over the 
rock; breaking down the weathered minerals, melding with them to make the first 
soils. A very slow process. There was a vast complexity in every pinch of soil; 
and the look of this fellfield was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.
 
*      *        *
 
To weather. This whole world was weathering. The first printed use of the word 
with that meaning had appeared in a book on Stonehenge, appropriately enough, in 
1665. “The weathering of so many Centuries of Years.” On this stone world. 
Weathering. Language as the first science, exact yet vague, or multivalent. 
Throwing things together. The mind as weather. Or being weathered.
There were clouds coming up over the nearby hillocks to the west, their bottoms 
resting on a thermal layer as levelly as if pressing down on glass. Streamers 
like spun wool led the way east.
Sax stood up and climbed out of the pool’s depression. Out of the shelter of the 
hole, the wind was shockingly strong—in it the cold intensified as if an ice age 
had struck full force that very second. Windchill factor, of course; if the 
temperature was 262 K, and the wind was blowing at about seventy kilometers an 
hour, with gusts much stronger, then the windchill factor would create a 
temperature equivalent of about 250 K. Was that right? That was very cold indeed 
to be out without a helmet. And in fact his hands were going numb. His feet as 
well. And his face was already without feeling, like a thick mask at the front 
of his head. He was shivering, and his blinks tended to stick together; his 
tears were freezing. He needed to get back to his car.
He plodded over the rockscape, amazed at the power of the wind to intensify 
cold. He had not experienced wind-chill like this since childhood, if then, and 
had forgotten how frigid one became. Staggering in the blasts, he climbed onto a 
low swell of the ancient lava and looked upslope. There was his rover—big, vivid 
green, gleaming like a spaceship—about two kilometers up the slope. A very 
welcome sight.
But now snow began to fly horizontally past him, giving a dramatic demonstration 
of the wind’s great speed. Little granular pellets clicked against his goggles. 
He took off toward the rover, keeping his head down and watching the snow swirl 
over the rocks. There was so much snow in the air that he thought his goggles 
were fogging up, but after a painfully cold operation to wipe the insides, it 
became clear that the condensation was actually out in the air. Fine snow, mist, 
dust, it was hard to tell.
He plodded on. The next time he looked up, the air was so thick with snow that 
he couldn’t see all the way to the rover. Nothing to do but press on. It was 
lucky the suit was well insulated and sewn through with heating elements, 
because even with the heat on at its highest power, the cold was cutting against 
his left side as if he were naked to the blast. Visibility extended now 
something like twenty meters, shifting rapidly depending on how much snow was 
passing by at the moment; he was in an amorphously expanding and contracting 
bubble of whiteness, which itself was shot through with flying snow, and what 
appeared to be a kind of frozen fog or mist. It seemed likely he was in the 
storm cloud itself. His legs were stiff. He wrapped his arms around his torso, 
his gloved hands trapped in his armpits. There was no obvious way of telling if 
he was still walking in the right direction. It seemed like he was on the same 
course he had been when visibility had collapsed, but it also seemed like he had 
gone a long way toward the rover.
There were no compasses on Mars; there were, however, APS systems in his 
wristpad and back in the car. He could call up a detailed map on his wristpad 
and then locate himself and his car on it; then walk for a while and track his 
positions; then make his way directly toward the car. That seemed like a great 
deal of work—which brought it to him that his thinking, like his body, was being 
affected by the cold. It wasn’t that much work, after all..
So he crouched down in the lee of a boulder and tried the method. The theory 
behind it was obviously sound, but the instrumentation left something to be 
desired; the wristpad’s screen was only five centimeters across, so small that 
he couldn’t see the dots on it at all well. Finally he spotted them, walked 
awhile, and took another fix. But unfortunately his results indicated that he 
should be hiking at about a right angle to the direction he had been going.
This was unnerving to the point of paralysis. His body insisted that it had been 
going the right way; his mind (part of it, anyway) was pretty certain that it 
was better to trust the results on the wristpad, and assume that he had gotten 
off course somewhere. But it didn’t feel that way; the ground was still at a 
slope that supported the feeling in his body. The contradiction was so intense 
that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal torque twisting him until it 
actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his body was twisting to the side 
against the pressure of what the wristpad was telling him—the physiological 
effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was amazing. It almost made one 
believe in the existence of an internal magnet in the body, as in the pineal 
glands of migrating birds—but there was no magnetic field to speak of. Perhaps 
his skin was sensitive to solar radiation to the point of being able to pinpoint 
the sun’s location, even when the sky was a thick dark gray everywhere. It had 
to be something like that, because the feeling that he was properly oriented was 
so strong!
Eventually the nausea of the disorientation passed, and in the end he stood and 
took off in the direction suggested by the wristpad, feeling horrible about it, 
listing a little uphill just to try to make himself feel better. But one had to 
trust instruments over instincts, that was science. And so he plodded on, 
traversing the slope, shading somewhat uphill, clumsier than ever. His nearly 
insensible feet ran into rocks that he did not see, even though they were 
directly beneath him; he stumbled time after time. It was surprising how 
thoroughly snow could obscure the vision.
After a while he stopped, and tried again to locate the rover by APS; and his 
wristpad map suggested an entirely new direction, behind him and to the left.
It was possible he had walked past the car. Was it? He did not want to walk back 
into the wind. But now that was the way to the rover, apparently. So he ducked 
his head down into the biting cold and persevered. His skin was in an odd state, 
itching under the heating elements crisscrossing his suit, numb everywhere else. 
His feet were numb. It was hard to walk. There was no feeling in his face; 
clearly frostbite was in the offing. He needed shelter.
He had a new idea. He called up Aonia, on Pavonis, and got her almost instantly.
“Sax! Where are you?”
“That’s what I’m calling about!” he said. “I’m in a storm on Daedalia! And I 
can’t find my car! I was wondering if you would look at my APS and my rover’s! 
And see if you can tell me which direction I should go!”
He put the wristpad right against his ear. “Ka wow, Sax.” It sounded like Aonia 
was shouting too, bless her. Her voice was an odd addition to the scene. “Just a 
second, let me check! . . . Okay! There you are! And your car too! What are you 
doing so far south? I don’t think anyone can get to you very quickly! Especially 
if there’s a storm!”
“There is a storm,” Sax said. “That’s why I called.”
“Okay! You’re about three hundred and fifty meters to the west of your car.”
“Directly west?”
“—and a little south! But how will you orient yourself?”
Sax considered it. Mars’s lack of a magnetic field had never struck him as such 
a problem before, but there it was. He could assume the wind was directly out of 
the west, but that was just an assumption. “Can you check the nearest weather 
stations and tell me what direction the wind is coming from?” he said.
“Sure, but it won’t be much good for local variations! Here, just a second, I’m 
getting some help here from the others.”
A few long icy moments passed.
“The wind is coming from west northwest, Sax! So you need to walk with the wind 
at your back and a touch to your left!”
“I know. Be quiet now, until you see what course I’m making, and then correct 
it.”
He walked again, fortunately almost downwind. After five or six painful minutes 
his wrist beeped.
Aonia said, “You’re right on course!”
This was encouraging, and he carried on with a bit more speed, though the wind 
was penetrating through his ribs right to his core.
“Okay, Sax! Sax?”
“Yes!”
“You and your car are right on the same spot!”
But there was no car in view.
His heart thudded in his chest. Visibility was still some twenty meters; but no 
car. He had to get shelter fast. “Walk in an ever-increasing spiral from where 
you are,” the little voice on the wrist was suggesting. A good idea in theory, 
but he couldn’t bear to execute it; he couldn’t face the wind. He stared dully 
at his black plastic wristpad console. No more help to be had there.
For a moment he could make out snowbanks, off to his left. He shuffled over to 
investigate, and found that the snow rested in the lee of a shoulder-high 
escarpment, a feature he did not remember seeing before, but there were some 
radial breaks in the rock caused by the Tharsis rise, and this must be one of 
them, protecting a snowbank. Snow was a tremendous insulator. Though it had 
little intrinsic appeal as shelter. But Sax knew mountaineers often dug into it 
to survive nights out. It got one out of the wind.
He stepped to the bottom of the snowbank, and kicked it with one numb foot. It 
felt like kicking rock. Digging a snow cave seemed out of the question. But the 
effort itself would warm him a bit. And it was less windy at the foot of the 
bank. So he kicked and kicked, and found that underneath a thick cake of 
windslab there was the usual powder. A snow cave might be possible after all. He 
dug away at it.
“Sax, Sax!” cried the voice from his wrist. “What are you doing!”
“Making a snow cave,” he said. “A bivouac.”
“Oh Sax—we’re flying in help! We’ll be able to get in next morning no matter 
what, so hang on! We’ll keep talking to you!”
“Fine.”
He kicked and dug. On his knees he scooped out hard granular snow, tossing it 
into the swirling flakes flying over him. It was hard to move, hard to think. He 
bitterly regretted walking so far from the rover, then getting so absorbed in 
the landscape around that ice pond. It was a shame to get killed when things 
were getting so interesting. Free but dead. There was a little hollow in the 
snow now, through an oblong hole in the windslab. Wearily he sat down and wedged 
himself back into the space, lying on his side and pushing back with his boots. 
The snow felt solid against the back of his suit, and warmer than the ferocious 
wind. He welcomed the shivering in his torso, felt a vague fear when it ceased. 
Being too cold to shiver was a bad sign.
Very weary, very cold. He looked at his wristpad. It was four P.M. He had been 
walking in the storm for just over three hours. He would have to survive another 
fifteen or twenty hours before he could expect to be rescued. Or perhaps in the 
morning the storm would have abated, and the location of the rover become 
obvious. One way or another he had to survive the night by huddling in a snow 
cave. Or else venture out again and find the rover. Surely it couldn’t be far 
away. But until the wind lessened, he could not bear to be out looking for it.
He had to wait in the snow cave. Theoretically he could survive a night out, 
though at the moment he was so cold it was hard to believe that. Night 
temperatures on Mars still plummeted drastically. Perhaps the storm might lessen 
in the next hour, so that he could find the rover and get to it before dark.
He told Aonia and the others where he was. They sounded very concerned, but 
there was nothing they could do. He felt irritation at their voices.
It seemed many minutes before he had another thought. When one was chilled, 
blood flow was greatly reduced to the limbs—perhaps that was true for the cortex 
as well, the blood going preferentially to the cerebellum where the necessary 
work would continue right to the end.
More time passed. Near dark, it appeared. Should call out again. He was too 
cold—something seemed wrong. Advanced age, altitude, CO2 levels—some factor or 
combination of factors was making it worse than .it should be. He could die of 
exposure in a single night. Appeared in fact to be doing just that. Such a 
storm! Loss of the mirrors, perhaps. Instant ice age. Extinction event.
The wind was making odd noises, like shouts. Powerful gusts no doubt. Like faint 
shouts, howling “Sax! Sax! Sax!”
Had they flown someone in? He peered out into the dark storm, the snowflakes 
somehow catching the late light and tearing overhead like dim white static.
Then between his ice-crusted eyelashes he saw a figure emerge out of the 
darkness. Short, round, helmeted. “Sax!” The sound was distorted, it was coming 
from a loudspeaker in the figure’s helmet. Those Da Vinci techs were very 
resourceful people. Sax tried to respond, and found he was too cold to speak. 
Just moving his boots out of the hole was a stupendous effort. But it appeared 
to catch this figure’s eye, because it turned and strode purposefully through 
the wind, moving like a skillful sailor on a bouncing deck, weaving this way and 
that through the slaps of the gusts. The figure reached him and bent down and 
grabbed Sax by the wrist, and he saw its face through the faceplate, as clear as 
through a window. It was Hiroko.
She smiled her brief smile and hauled him up out of his cave, pulling so hard on 
his left wrist that his bones creaked painfully.
“Ow!” he said.
Out in the wind the cold was like death itself. Hiroko pulled his left arm over 
her shoulder, and, still holding hard to his wrist just above the wristpad, she 
led him past the low escarpment and right into the teeth of the gale.
“My rover is near,” he mumbled, leaning hard on her and trying to move his legs 
fast enough to make steady plants of the foot. So good to see her again. A solid 
little person, very powerful as always.
“It’s over here,” she said through her loudspeaker. “You were pretty close.”
“How did you find me?”
“We were tracking you as you came down Arsia. Then today when the storm hit I 
checked you out, and saw you were out of your rover. After that I came out to 
see how you were doing.”
“Thanks.”
“You have to be careful in storms.”
Then they were standing before his rover. She let go of his wrist, and it 
throbbed painfully. She bonked her faceplate against his goggles. “Go on in,” 
she said.
He climbed carefully up the steps to the rover’s lock door; opened it; fell 
inside. He turned clumsily to make room for Hiroko, but she wasn’t in the door. 
He leaned back out into the wind, looked around. No sight of her. It was dusk; 
the snow now looked black. “Hiroko!” he cried.
No answer.
He closed the lock door, suddenly frightened. Oxygen deprivation—He pumped the 
lock, fell through the inside door into the little changing room. It was 
shockingly warm, the air a steamy blast. He plucked ineffectively at his 
clothes, made no progress. He went at it more methodically. Goggles and face 
mask off. They were coated with ice. Ah— possibly his air supply had been 
restricted by ice in the tube between tank and mask. He sucked in several deep 
breaths, then sat still through another bout of nausea. Pulled off his hood, 
unzipped the suit. It was almost more than he could do to get his boots off. 
Then the suit. His underclothes were cold and clammy. His hands were burning as 
if on fire. It was a good sign, proof that he was not substantially frostbitten; 
nevertheless it was agony.
His whole skin began to buzz with the same inflamed pain. What caused that, 
return of blood to capillaries? Return of sensation to chilled nerves? Whatever 
it was, it hurt almost unbearably. “Ow!”
He was in excellent spirits. It was not just that he had been spared from death, 
which was nice; but that Hiroko was alive. Hiroko was alive! It was incredibly 
good news. Many of his friends had assumed all along that she and her group had 
slipped away from the assault on Sabishii, moving through that town’s mound maze 
back out into their system of hidden refuges; but Sax had never been sure. There 
was no evidence to support the idea. And there were elements in the security 
forces perfectly capable of murdering a group of dissidents and disposing of 
their bodies. This, Sax had thought, was probably what had happened. But he had 
kept this opinion to himself, and reserved judgment. There had been no way of 
knowing for sure.
But now he knew. He had stumbled into Hiroko’s path, and she had rescued him 
from death by freezing, or asphyxiation, whichever came first. The sight of her 
cheery, somehow impersonal face—her brown eyes—the feel of her body supporting 
him—her hand clamped over his wrist... he would have a bruise because of that. 
Perhaps even a sprain. He flexed his hand, and the pain in his wrist brought 
tears to his eyes, it made him laugh. Hiroko!
After a time the fiery return of sensation to his skin banked down. Though his 
hands felt bloated and raw, and he did not have proper control of his muscles, 
or his thoughts, he was basically getting back to normal. Or something like 
normal.
“Sax! Sax! Where are you? Answer us, Sax!”
“Ah. Hello there. I’m back in my car.”
“You found it? You left your snow cave?”
“Yes. I—I saw my car, in the distance, through a break in the snow.”
They were happy to hear it.
He sat there, barely listening to them babble, wondering why he had 
spontaneously lied. Somehow he was not comfortable telling them about Hiroko. He 
assumed that she would want to stay concealed; perhaps that was it. Covering for 
her. . . .
He assured his associates that he was all right, and got off the phone. He 
pulled a chair into the kitchen and sat on it. Warmed soup and drank it in loud 
slurps, scalding his tongue. Frostbitten, scalded, shaky—slightly nauseous— once 
weeping—mostly stunned—despite all this, he was very, very happy. Sobered by the 
close call, of course, and embarrassed or even ashamed at his ineptitude, 
staying out, getting lost and so on—all very sobering indeed—and yet still he 
was happy. He had survived, and even better, so had Hiroko. Meaning no doubt 
that all of her group had survived with her, including the half dozen of the 
First Hundred who had been with her from the beginning, Iwao, Gene, Rya, Raul, 
Ellen, Evgenia. . . . Sax ran a bath and sat in the warm water, adding hotter 
water slowly as his body core warmed; and he kept returning to that wonderful 
realization. A miracle—well not a miracle of course—but it had that quality, of 
unexpected and undeserved joy.
When he found himself falling asleep in the bath he got out, dried off, limped 
on sensitive feet to his bed, crawled under the coverlet, and fell asleep, 
thinking of Hiroko. Of making love with her in the baths in Zygote, in the warm 
relaxed lubriciousness of their bathhouse trysts, late at night when everyone 
else was asleep. Of her hand clamped on his wrist, pulling him up. His left 
wrist was very sore. And that made him happy.


 
 
 
 
 
The next day he drove back up the great southern slope of Arsia, now covered 
with clean white snow to an amazingly high altitude, 10.4 kilometers above the 
datum to be exact. He felt a strange mix of emotions, unprecedented in their 
strength and flux, although they somewhat resembled the powerful emotions he had 
felt during the synaptic stimulus treatment he had taken after his stroke—as if 
sections of his brain were actively growing—the limbic system, perhaps, the home 
of the emotions, linking up with the cerebral cortex at last. He was alive, 
Hiroko was alive, Mars was alive; in the face of these joyous facts the 
possibility of an ice age was as nothing, a momentary swing in a general warming 
pattern, something like the almost-forgotten Great Storm. Although he did want 
to do what he could to mitigate it.
Meanwhile, in the human world there were still fierce conflicts going on 
everywhere, on both worlds. But it seemed to Sax that the crisis had somehow 
gotten beyond war. Flood, ice age, population boom, social chaos, revolution; 
perhaps things had gotten so bad that humanity had shifted into some kind of 
universal catastrophe rescue operation, or, in other words, the first phase of 
the postcapi-talist era.
Or maybe he was just getting overconfident, buoyed by the events on Daedalia 
Planitia. His Da Vinci associates were certainly very worried, they spent hours 
onscreen telling him every little thing about the arguments ongoing in east 
Pavonis. But he had no patience for that. Pavonis was going to become a standing 
wave of argument, it was obvious. And the Da Vinci crowd, worrying so—that was 
simply them. At Da Vinci if someone even raised his voice two decibels people 
worried that things were getting out of control. No. After his experience on 
Daedalia, these things simply weren’t interesting enough to engage him. Despite 
the encounter with the storm, or perhaps because of it, he only wanted to get 
back out into the country. He wanted to see as much of it as he could—to observe 
the changes wrought by the removal of the mirrors—to talk to various 
terraform-ing teams about how to compensate for it. He called Nanao in Sabishii, 
and asked him if he could come visit and talk it over with the university crowd. 
Nanao was agreeable.
“Can I bring some of my associates?” Sax asked.
Nanao was agreeable.
And all of a sudden Sax found he had plans, like little Athenas jumping out of 
his head. What would Hiroko do about this possible ice age? That he couldn’t 
guess. But he had a large group of associates in the labs at Da Vinci who had 
spent the last decades working on the problem of independence, building weapons 
and transport and shelters and the like. Now that was a problem solved, and 
there they were, and an ice age was coming. Many of them had come to Da Vinci 
from his earlier terraforming effort, and could be talked into returning to it, 
no doubt. But what to do? Well, Sabishii was four kilometers above the datum, 
and the Tyrrhena massif went up to five. The scientists there were the best in 
the world at high-altitude ecology. So: a conference. Another little Utopia 
enacted. It was obvious.
That afternoon Sax stopped his rover in the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia, at 
the spot called Four Mountain View—a sublime place, with two of the 
continent-volcanoes filling the horizons to north and south, and then the 
distant bump of Olympus Mons off to the northwest, and on clear days (this one 
was too hazy) a glimpse of As-craeus, in the distance just to the right of 
Pavonis. In this spacious sere highland he ate his lunch, then turned east, and 
drove down toward Nicosia, to catch a flight to Da Vinci, and then on to 
Sabishii.
He had to spend a lot of screen time with the Da Vinci team and many other 
people on Pavonis, trying to explain this move, reconciling them to his 
departure from the warehouse meetings. “I am in the warehouse in every sense 
that matters,” he said, but they wouldn’t accept that. Their cerebellums wanted 
him there in the flesh, a touching thought in a way. “Touching”—a symbolic 
statement that was nevertheless quite literal. He laughed, but Nadia came on and 
said irritably, “Come on, Sax, you can’t give up just because things are getting 
sticky, in fact that’s exactly when you’re needed, you’re General Sax now, 
you’re the great scientist, you have to stay in the game.”
But Hiroko showed just how present an absent person could be. And he wanted to 
go to Sabishii.
“But what should we do?” Nirgal asked him, and others too in less direct ways.
The situation with the cable was at an impasse; on Earth there was chaos; on 
Mars there were still pockets of meta-national resistance, and other areas in 
Red control, where they were systematically tearing out all terraforming 
projects, and much of the infrastructure as well. There were also a variety of 
small revolutionary splinter movements that were taking this opportunity to 
assert their independence, sometimes over areas as small as a tent or a weather 
station.
“Well,” Sax said, thinking about all this as much as he could bear to, “whoever 
controls the life-support system is in charge.”
Social structure as life-support system—infrastructure, mode of production, 
maintenance ... he really ought to speak to the folks at Separation de 
1’Atmosphere, and to the tentmakers. Many of whom had a close relation to Da 
Vinci. Meaning that in certain senses he himself was as much in charge as 
anyone. A bad thought.
“But what do you suggest we do?” Maya demanded; something in her voice made it 
clear she was repeating the question.
By now Sax was closing in on Nicosia, and impatiently he said, “Send a 
delegation to Earth? Or convene a constitutional congress, and formulate a first 
approximation constitution, a working draft.”
Maya shook her head. “That won’t be easy, with this crowd.”
“Take the constitutions of the twenty or thirty most successful Terran 
countries,” Sax suggested, thinking out loud, “and see how they work. Have an AI 
compile a composite document, perhaps, and see what it says.”
“How would you define most successful?” Art asked.
“Country Futures Index, Real Values Gauge, Costa Rica Comparisons—even Gross 
Domestic Product, why not.” Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience 
trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross 
domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches 
or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before. But 
what the hell—”Use several different sets of criteria, human welfare, ecologic 
success, what have you.”
“But Sax,” Coyote complained, “the very concept of the nation-state is a bad 
one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.”
“Could be,” Sax said. “But as a starting point.”
“All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,” Jackie said.
It was strange how certain elements of the greens were as obsessed by total 
independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, “In physics I often bracket the 
problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they don’t get 
solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that kind of 
problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.”
But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about the cable, 
what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds who had 
apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring all his 
suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for General Sax 
in the postrevolutionary world.
 
Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want to go into the 
town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of Spencer’s from Dawes’s 
Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built just before the revolt, 
in anticipation of the freedom from the need for stealth. As the AI pilot 
floated the big silver-winged craft over the great maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, 
the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom of the fuselage which had a 
large clear floor, so that they could look over the arms of their chairs at the 
view below; in this case, the immense linked network of troughs which was the 
Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth plateaus that stood between the 
canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice places to live, somewhat like 
Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a model town in a glass bottle.
The plane’s crew started talking about Separation de 1’Atmosphere, and Sax 
listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the revolution’s 
armaments and with basic materials research, while “Sep” as they called it had 
dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they still had a 
healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them functioning was 
a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of them said. 
Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.
Sep was associated with Praxis, apparently, and each tent or covered canyon was 
run by a separate organization. They pooled information and shared roving 
consultants and construction teams. Since they deemed themselves necessary 
services, they ran on a cooperative basis—on the Mondra-gon plan, one said, 
nonprofit version—though they made sure to provide their members with very nice 
living situations and lots of free time. “They think they deserve it, too. 
Because when something goes wrong they have to act fast or else.” Many of the 
covered canyons had had close calls, sometimes the result of meteor strike or 
other drama, other times more ordinary mechanical failures. The usual format for 
covered canyons had the physical plant consolidated at the higher end of the 
canyon, and this plant sucked in the appropriate amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and 
trace gases from the surface winds. The proportions of gases and the pressure 
range they were kept at varied from mesocosm to mesocosm, but they averaged 
around five hundred millibars, which gave some lift to the tent roofs, and was 
pretty much the norm for indoor spaces on Mars, in a kind of invocation of the 
eventual goal for the surface at the datum. On sunny days, however, the 
expansion of air inside the tents was very significant, and the standard 
procedures for dealing with it included simply releasing air back into the 
atmosphere, or else saving it by compressing it into huge container chambers 
hollowed out of the canyon cliffs. “So one time I was in Dao Vallis,” one of the 
techs said, “and the excess air chamber blew up, shattering the plateau and 
causing a big landslide that fell down onto Reullgate and tore open the tent 
roof. Pressures dropped to the local ambient, which was about two hundred and 
sixty, and everything started to freeze, and they had the old emergency 
bulkheads,” which were clear curtains only a few molecules thick but very 
strong, as Sax recalled, “and when they deployed automatically around the break, 
this one woman got pinned to the ground by the supersticky at the bottom of the 
bulkhead, with her head on the wrong side! We ran over to her and did some quick 
cut and paste and got her loose, but she almost died.”
Sax shivered, thinking of his own recent brush with cold; and 260 millibars was 
the pressure one would find on the peak of Everest. The others were already 
talking about other famous blowouts, including the time Hiranyagarba’s dome had 
fallen in its entirety under an ice rain, despite which no one had died.
Then they were descending over the great cratered high plain of Xanthe, coming 
down on the Da Vinci crater floor’s big sandy runway, which they had just 
started using during the revolution. The whole community had been preparing for 
years for the day when stealthing would become unnecessary, and now a big curve 
of copper-mirrored windows had been installed in the arc of the southern crater 
rim. There was a layer of snow in the bottom of the crater, which the central 
knob broke out of quite dramatically. It was possible they could arrange for a 
lake in the crater floor, with a central knob island, which would have as its 
horizon the circling cliffy hills of the crater rim. A circular canal could be 
built just under the rim cliffs, with radial canals connecting it to the inner 
lake; the resulting alternation of circular water and land would resemble 
Plato’s description of Atlantis. In this configuration Da Vinci could support, 
in near self-sufficiency, some twenty or thirty thousand people, Sax guessed; 
and there were scores of craters like Da Vinci. A commune of communes, each 
crater a city-state of sorts, its polls fully capable of supporting itself, of 
deciding what kind of culture it might have; and then with a vote in a global 
council of some kind. . . . No regional association larger than the level of the 
town, except for arrangements of local interchange . . . might it work?
Da Vinci made it seem like it might. The south arc of the rim was alive with 
arcades and wedge-shaped pavilions and the like, now all shot through with 
sunlight. Sax toured the whole complex one morning, visiting one lab after the 
next, and congratulating the occupants on the success of their preparations for 
a smooth removal of UNTA from Mars. Some political power came out of the end of 
a gun, after all, and some out of the look in the eye; and the look in the eye 
changed depending on whether a gun was pointed at it or not. They had spiked the 
guns, these people the saxaclones, and so they were in high spirits—happy to see 
him, and already looking for different work—back to basic research, or figuring 
out uses for the new materials that Spencer’s alchemists were constantly 
churning out; or studying the terraforming problem.
They were also paying attention to what was going on in space and on Earth. A 
fast shuttle from Earth, contents unknown, had contacted them requesting 
permission to make an orbital insertion without a keg of nails being thrown in 
its way. So a Da Vinci team was now nervously working out security protocols, in 
heavy consultation with the Swiss embassy, which had taken an office in a suite 
of apartments at the northwest end of the arc. From rebels to administrators; it 
was an awkward transition.
“What political parties do we support?” Sax asked.
“I don’t know. The usual array I guess.”
“No party gets much support. Whatever works, you know.”
Sax knew. That was the old tech position, held ever since scientists had become 
a class in society, a priest caste almost, intervening between the people and 
their power. They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants—empiricists, 
who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good 
for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people 
were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments, and other mass 
delusional systems of that sort.
The standard scientist politics, in other words. Sax had once tried to explain 
this outlook to Desmond, causing his friend for some reason to laugh 
prodigiously, even though it made perfect sense. Well, it was a bit naive, 
therefore a bit comical, he supposed; and like a lot of funny things, it could 
be that it was hilarious right up to the moment it turned horrible. Because it 
was an attitude that had kept scientists from going at politics in any useful 
way for centuries now; and dismal centuries they had been.
But now they were on a planet where political power came out of the end of a 
mesocosm aerating fan. And the people in charge of that great gun (holding the 
elements at bay) were at least partly in charge. If they cared to exercise the 
power.
Gently Sax reminded people of this when he visited them in their labs; and then 
to ease their discomfort with the idea of politics, he talked to them about the 
terraforming problem. And when he finally got ready to leave for Sabishii, about 
sixty of them were willing to come with him, to see how things were going down 
there. “Sax’s alternative to Pavonis,” he heard one of the lab techs describe 
the trip. Which was not a bad thought.
 
Sabishii was located on the western side of a five-kilometer-high prominence 
called the Tyrrhena massif, south of Jarry-Desloges Crater, in the ancient 
highlands between Isidis and Hellas, centered at longitude 275 degrees, latitude 
15 degrees south. A reasonable choice for a tent-town site, as it had long views 
to the west, and low hills backing it to the east, like moors. But when it came 
to living in the open air, or growing plants out in the rocky countryside, it 
was a bit high; in fact it was, if you excluded the very much larger bulges of 
Tharsis and Elysium, the highest region on Mars, a kind of bioregion island, 
which the Sabi-shiians had been cultivating for decades.
They proved to be severely disappointed by the loss of the big mirrors, one 
might even say thrown into emergency mode, an all-out effort to do what they 
could to protect the plants of the biome; but it was precious little. Sax’s old 
colleague Nanao Nakayama shook his head. “Winterkill will be very bad. Like ice 
age.”
“I’m hoping we can compensate for the loss of light,” Sax said. “Thicken the 
atmosphere, add greenhouse gases—it’s possible we could do some of that with 
more bacteria and suralpine plants, right?”
“Some,” Nanao said dubiously. “A lot of niches are already full. The niches are 
quite small.”
They settled in over a meal to talk about it. All the techs from Da Vinci were 
there in the big dining hall of The Claw, and many Sabishiians were there to 
greet them. It was a long, interesting, friendly talk. The Sabishiians were 
living in the mound maze of their mohole, behind one talon of the dragon figure 
it made, so that they didn’t have to look at the burned ruins of their city when 
they weren’t working on it. The rebuilding was much reduced now, as most of them 
were out dealing with the results of the mirror loss. Nanao said to Tariki, in 
what was clearly the continuation of a long-standing argument, “It makes no 
sense to rebuild it as a tent city anyway. We might as well wait, and build it 
in open air.”
“That may be a long wait,” Tariki said, glancing at Sax. “We’re near the top of 
the viability atmosphere named in the Dorsa Brevia document.”
Nanao looked at Sax. “We want Sabishii under any limit that is set.”
Sax nodded, shrugged; he didn’t know what to say. The Reds would not like it. 
But if the viable altitude limit was raised a kilometer or so, it would give the 
Sabishiians this massif, and make little difference on the larger bulges—so it 
seemed to make sense. But who knew what they would decide on Pavonis? He said, 
“Maybe we should focus now on trying to keep atmospheric pressures from 
dropping.”
They looked somber.
Sax said, “You’ll take us out and show us the massif?”
They cheered up. “Most happy.”
 
The land of the Tyrrhena massif was what the areologists in the early years had 
called the “dissected unit” of the southern highlands, which was much the same 
as the “cra-tered unit,” but further broken by small channel networks. The lower 
and more typical highlands surrounding the massif also contained areas of 
“ridged unit” and “hilly unit.” In fact, as quickly became obvious the morning 
they drove out onto the land, all aspects of the rough terrain of the southern 
highlands were on view, often all at once: cra-tered, broken, uneven, ridged, 
dissected, and hilly land, the quintessential Noachian landscape. Sax and Nanao 
and Tariki sat on the observation deck of one of the Sabishii University rovers; 
they could see other cars carrying other colleagues, and there were teams out 
walking ahead of them. On the last hills before the horizon to the east, a few 
energetic people were fell-running. The hollows of the land were all lightly 
dusted with dirty snow. The massif was centered fifteen degrees south of the 
equator, and they got a fair bit of precipitation around Sabishii, Nanao said. 
The southeast side of the massif was drier, but here, the cloud masses pushed 
south over the ice in Isidis Planitia and climbed the slope and dropped their 
loads.
Indeed, as they drove uphill great waves of dark cloud rolled in from the 
northwest, pouring over them as if chasing the fell-runners. Sax shuddered, 
remembering his recent exposure to the elements; he was happy to be in a rover, 
and felt he would need only short walks away from it to be satisfied.
Eventually, however, they stopped on a high point in a low old ridge, and got 
out. They made their way over a surface littered with boulders and knobs, 
cracks, sand drifts, very small craters, breadloafed bedrock, scarps and alases, 
and the old shallow channels that gave the dissected unit its name. In truth 
there were deformational features of every kind to be seen, for the land here 
was four billion years old. A lot had happened to it, but nothing had ever 
happened to destroy it completely and clean the slate, so all four billion years 
were still there to be seen, in a veritable museum of rockscapes. It had been 
thoroughly pulverized in the Noachian, leaving regolith several kilometers deep, 
and craters and deformities that no aeolian stripping could remove. And during 
this early period the other side of the planet had had its lithosphere to a 
depth of six kilometers blasted into space by the so-called Big Hit; a fair 
amount of that ejecta had eventually landed in the south. That was the 
explanation for the Great Escarpment, and the lack of ancient highlands in the 
north; and one more factor in the extremely disordered look of this land.
Then also, at the end of the Hesperian had come the brief warm wet period, when 
water had occasionally run on the surface. These days most areologists thought 
that this period had been quite wet but not really very warm, annual averages of 
well under 273° Kelvin still allowing for surface water sometimes, replenished 
by hydrothermal convection rather than precipitation. This period had lasted for 
only a hundred million years or so, according to current estimates, and it had 
been followed by billions of years of winds, in the arid cold Amazonian Age, 
which had lasted right up to the point of their arrival. “Is there a name for 
the age starting with m-1?” Sax asked.
“The Holocene.”
And then lastly, everything had been scoured by two billion years of ceaseless 
wind, scoured so hard that the older craters were completely rimless, everything 
stripped at by the relentless winds strata by strata, leaving behind a 
wilderness of rock. Not chaos, technically speaking, but wild, speaking its 
unimaginable age in polyglot profusion, in rimless craters and etched mesas, 
dips, hummocks, escarpments, and oh so many blocky pitted rocks.
Often they stopped the rover and walked around. Even small mesas seemed to tower 
over them. Sax found himself staying near their rover, but nevertheless he came 
upon all kinds of interesting features. Once he discovered a rover-shaped rock, 
cracked vertically all the way through. To the left of the block, off to the 
west, he had a view to a distant horizon, the rocky land out there a smooth 
yellow glaze. To the right, the waist-high wall of some old fault, pocked as if 
by cuneiform. Then a sand drift bordered by ankle-high rocks, some of them 
pyramidal dark basaltic ventifacts, others lighter pitted granulated rocks. 
There a balanced shat-tercone, big as any dolmen. There a sand tail. There a 
crude circle of ejecta, like an almost completely weathered Sto-nehenge. There a 
deep snake-shaped hollow—the fragment of a watercourse, perhaps—behind it 
another gentle rise— then a distant prominence like a lion’s head. The 
prominence next to it was like the lion’s body.
In the midst of all this stone and sand, plant life was unobtrusive. At least at 
first. One had to look for it, to pay close attention to color, above all else 
to green, green in all its shades, but especially its desert shades—sage, olive, 
khaki, and so on. Nanao and Tariki kept pointing out specimens he hadn’t seen. 
Closer he looked, and closer again. Once attuned to the pale living colors, 
which blended so well with the ferric land, they began to jump out from the rust 
and brown and umber and ocher and black of the rock-scape. Hollows and cracks 
were likely places to see them, and near the shaded patches of snow. The ctoser 
he looked, the more he saw; and then, in one high basin, it seemed there were 
plants tucked everywhere. In that moment he understood; it was all fellfield, 
the whole Tyrrhena massif.
Then, coating entire rockfaces, or covering the inside areas of drip catchments, 
were the dayglow greens of certain lichens, and the emerald or dark velvet 
greens of the mosses. Wet fur.
The diversicolored palette of the lichen array; the dark green of pine needles. 
Bunched sprays of Hokkaido pines, foxtail pines, Sierra junipers. Life’s colors. 
It was somewhat like walking from one great roofless room to another, over 
ruined walls of stone. A small plaza; a kind of winding gallery; a vast 
ballroom; a number of tiny interlocked chambers; a sitting room. Some rooms held 
krummholz bansei against their low walls, the trees no higher than their nooks, 
gnarled by wind, cut along the top at the snow level. Each branch, each plant, 
each open room, as shaped as any bonsai—and yet effortless.
Actually, Nanao told him, most of the basins were intensively cultivated. “This 
basin was planted by Abraham.” Each little region was the responsibility of a 
certain gardener or gardening group.
“Ah!” Sax said. “And fertilized, then?”
Tariki laughed. “In a manner of speaking. The soil itself has been imported, for 
the most part.”
“I see.”
This explained the diversity of plants. A little bit of cultivation, he knew, 
had been done around Arena Glacier, where he had first encountered the 
fellfields. But here they had gone far beyond those early steps. Labs in 
Sabishii, Tariki told him, were trying their best to manufacture topsoil. A good 
idea; soil in fellfields appeared naturally at a rate of only a few centimeters 
a century. But there were reasons for this, and manufacturing soil was proving 
to be extremely difficult.
Still, “We pick up a few million years at the start,” Nanao said. “Evolve from 
there.” They hand-planted many of their specimens, it seemed, then for the most 
part left them to their fate, and watched what developed.
“I see,” Sax said.
He looked more closely yet. The clear dim light: it was true that each great 
open room displayed a slightly different array of species. “These are gardens, 
then.”
“Yes ... or things like that. Depends.”
Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso 
Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, 
the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; 
others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or 
Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist 
Oskar Schnell-ing; and so on.
These were influences only, Tariki added. As they did the work, they developed 
visions of their own. They followed the inclination of the land, as they saw 
that some plants prospered, and others died. Coevolution, a kind of epige-netic 
development.
“Nice,” Sax said, looking around. For the adepts, the walk from Sabishii up onto 
the massif must have been an aesthetic journey, filled with allusions and subtle 
variants of tradition that were invisible to him. Hiroko would have called it 
areoformation, or the areophany. “I’d like to visit your soil labs.”
“Of course.”
They returned to the rover, drove on. Late in the day, under dark threatening 
clouds, they came to the very top of the massif, which turned out to be a kind 
of broad undulating moor. Small ravines were filled with pine needles, sheered 
off by winds so that they looked like the blades of grass on a well-mowed yard. 
Sax and Tariki and Nanao again got out of the car, walked around. The wind cut 
through their suits, and the late-afternoon sun broke out from under the dark 
cloud cover, casting their shadows all the way out to the horizon. Up here on 
the moors there were many big masses of smooth bare bedrock; looking around, the 
landscape had the red primal look Sax remembered from the earliest years; but 
then they would walk to the edge of a small ravine, and suddenly be looking down 
into green.
Tariki and Nanao talked about ecopoesis, which for them was terraforming 
redefined, subtilized, localized. Transmuted into something like Hiroko’s 
areoformation. No longer powered by heavy industrial global methods, but by the 
slow, steady, and intensely local process of working on individual patches of 
land. “Mars is all a garden. Earth too for that matter. This is what humans have 
become. So we have to think about gardening, about that level of responsibility 
to the land. A human-Mars interface that does justice to both.”
Sax waggled a hand uncertainly. “I’m used to thinking of Mars as a kind of 
wilderness,” he said, as he looked up the etymology of the word garden. French, 
Teutonic, Old Norse, gard, enclosure. Seemed to share origins with guard, or 
keeping. But who knew what the supposedly equivalent word in Japanese meant. 
Etymology was hard enough without translation thrown into the mix. “You know—get 
things started, let loose the seeds, then watch it all develop on its own. 
Self-organizing ecologies, you know.”
“Yes,” Tariki said, “but wilderness too is a garden now. A kind of garden. 
That’s what it means to be what we are.” He shrugged, his forehead wrinkled; he 
believed the idea was true, but did not seem to like it. “Anyway, ecopoesis is 
closer to your vision of wilderness than industrial terra-forming ever was.”
“Maybe,” Sax said. “Maybe they’re just two stages of a process. Both necessary.”
Tariki nodded, willing to consider it. “And now?”
“It depends on how we want to deal with the possibility of an ice age,” Sax 
said. “If it’s bad enough, kills off enough plants, then ecopoesis won’t have a 
chance. The atmosphere could freeze back onto the surface, the whole process 
crash. Without the mirrors, I’m not confident that the biosphere is robust 
enough to continue growing. That’s why I want to see those soil labs you have. 
It may be that industrial work on the atmosphere remains to be done. We’ll have 
to try some modeling and see.”
Tariki nodded, and Nanao too. Their ecologies were being snowed under, right 
before their eyes; flakes drifted down through the transient bronze sunlight at 
this very moment, tumbling in the wind. They were open to suggestion.
Meanwhile, as throughout these drives, their young associates from Da Vinci and 
Sabishii were running over the massif together, and returning to Sabishii’s 
mound maze babbling through the night about geomancy and areo-mancy, ecopoetics, 
heat exchange, the five elements, greenhouse gases, and so on. A creative 
ferment that looked to Sax very promising. “Michel should be here,” he said to 
Nanao. “John should be here. How he would love a group like this.”
And then it occurred to him: “Ann should be here.”


 
 
 
 
 
So he went back to Pavonis, leaving the group in Sabishii talking things over.
Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people, spurred on by Art 
Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional congress. Write an at 
least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then establish the government 
described.
“Good idea,” Sax said. “Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.”
Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout, others 
wouldn’t.
He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis—gone, people said, to a 
Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went there but Reds, they 
said.
After some thought Sax asked for Steve’s help, and looked up the outpost’s 
location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and flew north, 
past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past his old 
headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.
Ann too had no doubt flown this route, and thus gone by the first headquarters 
of the terraforming effort. Terraform-ing . . . there was evolution in 
everything, even in ideas. Had Ann noticed Echus Overlook, had she even 
remembered that small beginning? No way of telling. That was how humans knew 
each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way 
to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was 
strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing 
rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; 
but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo 
through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a book that 
had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the conclusion 
occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, shared a 
meal—then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their lives; for every 
world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as empty as Mars had 
been in the beginning.
He flew past the blackened curve of Kasei Vallis without noting it at all.
 
The Reds had long ago hollowed out a rock the size of a city block, in a 
promontory that served as the last dividing wedge in the intersection of two of 
the Tempe Fossa, just south of Perepelkin Crater. Windows under overhangs gave 
them a view over both of the bare straight canyons, and the larger canyon they 
made after their confluence. Now all these fossae cut down what had become a 
coastal plateau; Mareotis and Tempe together formed a huge peninsula of ancient 
highlands, sticking far into the new ice sea.
Sax landed his little plane on the sandy strip on top of the promontory. From 
here the ice plains were not visible; nor could he spot any vegetation—not a 
tree, not a flower, not even a patch of lichen. He wondered if they had somehow 
sterilized the canyons. Just primal rock, with a dusting of frost. And nothing 
they could do about frost, unless they wanted to tent these canyons, to keep air 
out rather than in. “Hmm,” Sax said, startled at the idea.
Two Reds let him in the lock door on the top of the promontory, and he descended 
stairs with them. The shelter appeared to be nearly empty. Just as well. It was 
nice only to have to withstand the cold gazes of two young women leading him 
through the rough-hewn rock galleries of the refuge, rather than a whole gang. 
Interesting to see Red aesthetics. Very spare, as might be expected—not a plant 
to be seen—just different textures of rock: rough walls, rougher ceilings, 
contrasted to a polished basalt floor, and the glistening windows overlooking 
the canyons.
They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave, no straighter 
than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were mosaics inlaid 
into the back wall, made of bits of colored stone, polished and set against each 
other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed almost to represent 
something, if only he could focus properly on them. The floor was a stone 
parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The gallery went on 
and on—big, dusty—the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps. Reds preferred 
their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as unfortunate 
necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have walked down 
the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and Sax felt that 
this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be unobtrusive 
before the land itself, to melt into it.
As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window seat. Sax stopped 
abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as an ignorant 
traveler might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting there. He 
looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didn’t see that much anymore, and the 
longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had told him, once, 
that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had been some years 
before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame. Now, with the Red 
rebellion quelled, she was ash. Gray flesh. It was an awful sight. She was 
somewhere around 150 years old, like all the First Hundred left alive, and 
without the treatments .. . she would soon die.
Well. Strictly speaking, she was at the physiological equivalent of being 
seventy or so, depending on when she had last had the treatments. So not that 
bad. Perhaps Peter would know. But the longer one went between treatments, he 
had heard, the more problems cropped up, statistically speaking. It made sense. 
It was only wise to be prudent.
But he couldn’t say that to her. In fact, it was hard to think what he could say 
to her.
Eventually her gaze lifted. She recognized him and shuddered, her lip lifting 
like a trapped animal’s. Then she looked away from him, grim, stone-faced. 
Beyond anger, beyond hope.
“I wanted to show you some of the Tyrrhena massif,” he said lamely.
She got up like a statue rising, and left the room.
Sax, feeling his joints creak with the pseudo-arthritic pain that so often 
accompanied his dealings with Ann, followed her.
He was trailed in his turn by the two stern-looking young women. “I don’t think 
she wants to talk to you,” the taller one informed him.
“Very astute of you,” Sax said.
Far down the gallery, Ann was standing before another window: spellbound, or 
else too exhausted to move. Or part of her did want to talk.
Sax stopped before her.
“I want to get your impressions of it,” he said. “Your suggestions for what we 
might do next. And I have some, some, some areological questions. Of course it 
could be that strictly scientific questions aren’t of interest to you anymore—”
She took a step toward him and struck him on the side of the face. He found 
himself slumped against the gallery wall, sitting on his butt. Ann was nowhere 
to be seen. He was being helped to his feet by the two young women, who clearly 
didn’t know whether to cheer or groan. His whole body hurt, more even than his 
face, and his eyes were very hot, stinging slightly. It seemed he might cry 
before these two young idiots, who by trailing him were complicating everything 
enormously; with them around he could not yell or plead, he could not go on his 
knees and say Ann, please, forgive me. He couldn’t.
“Where did she go?” he managed to say.
“She really, really doesn’t want to talk to you,” the tall one declared.
“Maybe you should wait and try later,” the other advised.
“Oh shut up!” Sax said, suddenly feeling an irritation so vehement that it was 
like rage. “I suppose you would just let her stop taking the treatment and kill 
herself!”
“It’s her right,”‘the tall one pontificated.
“Of course it is. I wasn’t speaking of rights. I was speaking of how a friend 
should behave when someone is suicidal.
Not a subject you are likely to know anything about. Now help me find her.”
“You’re no friend of hers.”
“I most certainly am.” He was on his feet. He staggered a little as he tried to 
walk in the direction he thought she had gone. One of the young women tried to 
take his elbow. He avoided the help and went on. There Ann was, in the distance, 
collapsed in a chair, in some kind of dining chamber, it seemed. He approached 
her, slowing like Apollo in Zeno’s paradox.
She swiveled and glared at him.
“It’s you who abandoned science, right from the start,” she snarled. “So don’t 
you give me that shit about not being interested in science!”
“True,” Sax said. “It’s true.” He held out both hands. “But now I need advice. 
Scientific advice. I want to learn. And I want to show you some things as well.”
But after a moment’s consideration she was up and off again, right past him, so 
that he flinched despite himself. He hurried after her; her gait was much longer 
than his, and she was moving fast, so that he had to almost jog. His bones hurt.
“Perhaps we could go out here,” Sax suggested. “It doesn’t matter where we go 
out.”
“Because the whole planet is wrecked,” she muttered.
“You must still go out for sunsets occasionally,” Sax persisted. “I could join 
you for that, perhaps.”
“No.”
“Please, Ann.” She was a fast walker, and enough taller than him that it was 
hard to keep up with her and talk as well. He was huffing and puffing, and his 
cheek still hurt. “Please, Ann.”
She did not answer, she did not slow down. Now they were walking down a hall 
between suites of living quarters, and Ann sped up to go through a doorway and 
slam the door behind her. Sax tried it; it was locked.
Not, on the whole, a promising beginning.
Hound and hind. Somehow he had to change things so that it was not a hunt, a 
pursuit. Nevertheless: “I huff, I puff, I blow your house down,” he muttered. He 
blew at the door. But then the two young women were there, staring hard at him.
 
*      *        *
 
One evening later that week, near sunset, he went down to the changing room and 
suited up. When Ann came in he jumped several centimeters. “I was just going 
out?” he stammered. “Is that okay with you?”
“It’s a free country,” she said heavily.
And they went out the lock together, into the land. The young women would have 
been amazed.
 
He had to be very careful. Naturally, although he was out there with her to show 
to her the beauty of the new biosphere, it would not do to mention plants, or 
snow, or clouds. One had to let things speak for themselves. This was perhaps 
true of all phenomena. Nothing could be spoken for. One could only walk over the 
land, and let it speak for itself.
Ann was not gregarious. She barely spoke to him. It was her usual route, he 
suspected as he followed her. He was being allowed to come along.
It was perhaps permissible to ask questions: this was science. And Ann stopped 
often enough, to look at rock formations up close. It made sense at those times 
to crouch beside her, and with a gesture or a word ask what she was finding. 
They wore suits and helmets, even though the altitude was low enough to have 
allowed breathing with only the aid of a CO2 filter mask. Thus conversations 
consisted of voices in the ear, as of old. Asking questions.
So he asked. And Ann would answer, sometimes in some detail. Tempe Terra was 
indeed the Land of Time, its basement material a surviving piece of the southern 
highlands, one of those lobes of it that stuck far into the northern plains—a 
survivor of the Big Hit. Then later Tempe had fractured extensively, as the 
lithosphere was pushed up from below by the Tharsis Bulge to the south. These 
fractures included both the Mareotis Fossae and the Tempe Fossa surrounding them 
now.
The spreading land had cracked enough to allow some latecomer volcanoes to 
emerge, spilling over the canyons. From one high ridge they saw a distant 
volcano like a black cone dropped from the sky; then another, looking just like 
a meteor crater as far as Sax could see. Ann shook her head at this observation, 
and pointed out lava flows and vents, features all visible once they were 
pointed out, but not at all obvious under a scree of later ejecta rubble and 
(one had to admit it) a dusting of dirty snow, collecting like sand drifts in 
wind shelters, turning sand-colored in the sunset light.
To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text, written by its own 
long past; that was Ann’s vision, achieved by a century’s close observation and 
study, and by her own native gift, her love for it. Something to behold, 
really—something to marvel at. A kind of resource, or treasure—a love beyond 
science, or something into the realm of Michel’s mystical science. Alchemy. But 
alchemists wanted to change things. A kind of oracle, rather. A visionary, with 
a vision just as powerful as Hiroko’s, really. Less obviously visionary, 
perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an acceptance of what was there; love of 
rock, for rock’s sake. For Mars’s sake. The primal planet, in all its sublime 
glory, red and rust, still as death; dead; altered through the years only by 
matter’s chemical permutations, the immense slow life of geophysics. It was an 
odd concept—abiologic life— but there it was, if one cared to see it, a kind of 
living, out there spinning, moving through the stars that burned, moving through 
the universe in its great systolic/diastolic movement, its one big breath, one 
might say. Sunset somehow made it easier to see that.
Trying to see things Ann’s way. Glancing furtively at his wristpad, behind her 
back. Stone, from Old English stdn, cognates everywhere, back to 
proto-Indo-European sti, a pebble. Rock, from medieval Latin rocca, origin 
unknown; a mass of stone. Sax abandoned the wristpad and fell away into a kind 
of rock reverie, open and blank. Tabula rasa, to the point where apparently he 
did not hear what Ann herself was saying to him; for she snorted and walked on. 
Abashed, he followed, and steeled himself to ignore her displeasure, and ask 
more questions.
There seemed to be a lot of displeasure in Ann. In a way this was reassuring; 
lack of affect would have been a very bad sign; but she still seemed quite 
emotional. At least most of the time. Sometimes she focused on the rock so 
intently it was almost like watching her obsessed enthusiasm of old, and he was 
encouraged; other times it seemed she was just going through the motions, doing 
areology in a desperate attempt to stave off the present moment; stave off 
history; or despair; or all of that. In those moments she was aimless, and did 
not stop to look at obviously interesting features they passed, and did not 
answer his questions about same. The little Sax had read about depression 
alarmed him; not much could be done, one needed drugs to combat it, and even 
then nothing was sure. But to suggest antidepressants was more or less the same 
as suggesting the treatment itself; and so he could not speak of it. And 
besides, was despair the same as depression?
Happily, in this context, plants were pitifully few. Tempe was not like 
Tyrrhena, or even the banks of the Arena Glacier. Without active gardening, this 
was what one got. The world was still mostly rock.
On the other hand, Tempe was low in altitude, and humid, with the ice ocean just 
a few kilometers to the north and west. And various Johnny Appleseed flights had 
passed over the entire southern shoreline of the new sea—part of Biotique’s 
efforts, begun some decades ago, when Sax had been in Burroughs. So there was 
some lichen to be seen, if you looked hard. And small patches of fellfield. And 
a few krummholz trees, half-buried in snow. All these plants were in trouble in 
this northern summer-turned-winter, except for the lichen of course. There was a 
fair bit of miniaturized fall color already, there in the tiny leaves of the 
ground-hugging koenigia, and pygmy buttercup, and icegrass, and, yes, arctic 
saxifrage. The reddening leaves served as a kind of camouflage in the ambient 
redrock; often Sax didn’t see plants until he was about to step on them. And of 
course he didn’t want to draw Ann’s attention to them anyway, so when he did 
stumble on one, he gave it a quick evaluative glance and walked on.
They climbed a prominent knoll overlooking the canyon west of the refuge, and 
there it was: the great ice sea, all orange and brass in the late light. It 
filled the lowland in a great sweep and formed its own smooth horizon, from 
southwest to northeast. Mesas of the fretted terrain now stuck out of the ice 
like sea stacks or cliff-sided islands. In truth this part of Tempe was going to 
be one of the most dramatic coastlines on Mars, with the lower ends of some 
fossae filling to become long fjords or lochs. And one coastal crater was right 
at sea level, and had a break in its sea side, making it a perfect round bay 
some fifteen kilometers across, with an entry channel about two kilometers 
across. Farther south, the fretted terrain at the foot of the Great Escarpment 
would create a veritable Hebrides of an archipelago, many of the islands visible 
from the cliffs of the mainland. Yes, a dramatic coastline. As one could see 
already, looking at the broken sheets of sunset ice.
But of course this was not to be noted. No mention at all of the ice, the jagged 
bergs jumbled on the new shoreline. The bergs had been formed by some process 
Sax wasn’t aware of, though he was curious—but it could not be discussed. One 
could only stand in silence, as if having stumbled into a cemetery.
Embarrassed, Sax knelt to look at a specimen of Tibetan rhubarb he had almost 
stepped on. Little red leaves, in a floret from a central red bulb.
Ann was looking over his shoulder. “Is it dead?”
“No.” He pulled off a few dead leaves from the exterior of the floret, showed 
her the brighter ones beneath. “It’s hardening for the winter already. Fooled by 
the drop in light.” Then Sax went on, as if to himself: “A lot of the plants 
will die, though. The thermal overturn,” which was when air temperatures turned 
colder than the ground temperatures, “came more or less overnight. There won’t 
be much chance for hardening. Thus lots of winterkill. Plants are better at 
handling it than animals would have been. And insects are surprisingly good, 
considering they’re little containers of liquid. They have supercooling 
cryoprotectants. They can stand whatever happens, I think.”
Ann was still inspecting the plant, and so Sax shut up. It’s alive, he wanted to 
say. Insofar as the members of a biosphere depend on each other for existence, 
it is part of your body. How can you hate it?
But then again, she wasn’t taking the treatment.
The ice sea was a shattered blaze of bronze and coral. The sun was setting, they 
would have to get back. Ann straightened and walked away, a black silhouette, 
silent. He could speak in her ear, even now when she was a hundred meters away, 
then two hundred, a small black figure in the great sweep of the world. He did 
not; it would have been an invasion of her privacy, almost of her thoughts. But 
how he wondered what those thoughts were. How he longed to say Ann, Ann, what 
are you thinking? Talk to me, Ann. Share your thoughts.
The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people 
meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would 
acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That 
alone. Oh Ann, please talk to me.
 
But she did not talk to him. On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect 
they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of 
her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer. 
Even though in the growing piles of wind-drifted snow, plants were scarcely 
visible anymore. It was getting dark, another storm was sweeping in, low over 
the black-and-copper sea. A pad of moss, a lichened rockface; mostly it was rock 
alone, just as it had ever been. Nevertheless.
Then as they were getting back into the refuge lock, Ann fell in a faint. On the 
way down she hit her head on the doorjamb. Sax caught her body as she was 
landing on a bench against the inner wall. She was unconscious, and Sax half 
carried her, half dragged her all the way into the lock. Then he pulled the 
outer door shut, and when the lock was pumped, pulled her through the inner door 
into the changing room. He must have been shouting over the common band, because 
by the time he got her helmet off, five or six Reds were there in the room, more 
than he had seen in the refuge so far. One of the young women who had so impeded 
him, the short one, turned out to be the medical person of the station, and when 
they got Ann up onto a rolling table that could be used as a gurney, this woman 
led the way to the refuge’s medical clinic, and there took over. Sax helped 
where he could, getting Ann’s walker boots off her long feet with shaking hands. 
His pulse rate—he checked his wrist-pad—was 145 beats a minute—and he felt hot, 
even lightheaded.
“Has she had a stroke?” he said. “Has she had a stroke?”
The short woman looked surprised. “I don’t think so. She fainted. Then struck 
her head.”
“But why did she faint?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked at the tall young woman, who sat next to the door. Sax understood 
that they were the senior authorities in the refuge. “Ann left instructions for 
us not to put her on any kind of life-support mechanism, if she were ever 
incapacitated like this.”
“No,” Sax said.
“Very explicit instructions. She forbade it. She wrote it down.”
“You put her on whatever it takes to keep her alive,” Sax said, his voice harsh 
with strain. Everything he had said since Ann’s collapse had been a surprise to 
him; he was a witness to his actions just as much as they were. He heard himself 
say, “It doesn’t mean you have to keep her on it, if she doesn’t come around. 
It’s just a reasonable minimum, to make sure she doesn’t go for nothing.”
The doctor rolled her eyes at this distinction, but the tall woman sitting in 
the doorway looked thoughtful.
Sax heard himself go on: “I was on life support for some four days, as I 
understand it, and I’m glad no one decided to turn it off. It’s her decision, 
not yours. Anyone who wants to die can do it without having to make a doctor 
compromise her Hippocratic oath.”
The doctor rolled her eyes even more disgustedly than before. But with a glance 
at her colleague, she began to pull Ann onto the life-support bed; Sax helped 
her; and then she was turning on the medical AI, and getting Ann out of her 
walker. A rangy old woman, now breathing with an oxygen mask over her face. The 
tall woman stood and began to help the doctor, and Sax went and sat down. His 
own physiological symptoms were amazingly severe, marked chiefly by heat all 
through him, and a kind of incompetent hyperven-tilation; and an ache that made 
him want to cry.
After a time the doctor came over. Ann had fallen into a coma, she said. It 
looked like a small heart-rhythm abnormality had caused her to faint in the 
first place. She was stable at the moment.
Sax sat in the room. Much later the doctor returned. Ann’s wristpad had recorded 
an episode of rapid irregular heartbeat, at the time she fainted. Now there was 
still a small arrhythmia. And apparently anoxia, or the blow to the head, or 
both, had initiated a coma.
Sax asked what exactly a coma was, and felt a sinking feeling when the doctor 
shrugged. It was a catchall term, apparently, for unconscious states of a 
certain kind. Pupils fixed, body insensitive, and sometimes locked into 
decorticate postures. Ann’s left arm and leg were twisted. And unconsciousness 
of course. Sometimes odd vestiges of re-sponsiveness, clenching hands and the 
like. Duration of coma varied widely. Some people never came out of them.
Sax looked at his hands until the doctor left him alone. He sat in the room 
until everyone else was gone. Then he got up and stood at Ann’s side, looking 
down at her masked face. Nothing to be done. He held her hand; it did not 
clench. He held her head, as he had been told Nirgal had held his when he was 
unconscious. It felt like a useless gesture.
He went to the AI screen, and called up the diagnostic program. He called up 
Ann’s medical data, and ran back the heart monitor data from the incident in the 
lock. A small arrhythmia, yes; rapid, irregular pattern. He fed the data into 
the diagnostic program, and looked up heart arrhythmia on his own. There were a 
lot of aberrant cardiac rhythm patterns, but it appeared that Ann might have a 
genetic predisposition to suffer from a disorder called long QT syndrome, named 
for a characteristic abnormal long wave in the electrocardiogram. He called up 
Ann’s genome, and instructed the AI to run a search in the relevant regions of 
chromosomes 3, 7, and 11. In the gene called HERG, in her chromosome 7, the AI 
identified a small mutation: one reversal of adenine-thymine and 
guanine-cytosine. Small, but HERG contained instructions for the assembly of a 
protein that served as a potassium ion channel in the surface of heart cells, 
and these ion channels acted as a switch to turn off contracting heart cells. 
Without this brake the heart could go arrhythmic, and beat too fast to pump 
blood effectively.
Ann also appeared to have another problem, with a gene on chromosome 3 called 
SCN5A. This gene encoded a different regulatory protein, which provided a sodium 
ion channel on the surface of heart cells. This channel functioned as an 
accelerator, and mutations here could add to the problem of rapid heartbeat. Ann 
had a CG bit missing.
These genetic conditions were rare, but for the diagnostic AI that was not an 
issue. It contained a symptomology for all known problems, no matter how rare. 
It seemed to consider Ann’s case to be fairly straightforward, and it listed the 
treatments that existed to counteract the problems presented by the condition. 
There were a lot of them.
One of the treatments suggested was the receding of the problem genes, in the 
course of the standard gerontological treatments. Persistent gene recodings 
through several longevity treatments should erase the cause of the problem right 
at the root, or rather in the seed. It seemed strange that this hadn’t been done 
already, but then Sax saw that the recommendation was only about two decades 
old; it came from a period after the last time Ann had taken the treatments.
For a long time Sax sat there, staring at the screen. Much later he got up. He 
began to inspect the Reds’ medical clinic, instrument by instrument, room by 
room. The nursing attendants let him wander; they thought he was distraught.
This was a major Red refuge, and it seemed likely to him that one of the rooms 
might contain the equipment necessary to administer the gerontological 
treatments. Indeed it was so. A small room at the back of the clinic appeared to 
be devoted to the process. It didn’t take much: a bulky AI, a small lab, the 
stock proteins and chemicals, the incubators, the MRIs, the IV equipment. 
Amazing, when you considered what it did. But that had always been true. Life 
itself was amazing: simple protein sequences only, at the start, and yet here 
they were.
So. The main AI had Ann’s genome record. But if he ordered this lab to start 
synthesizing her DNA strands for her (adding the recodings of HERG and SCN5A) 
the people here would surely notice. And then there would be trouble.
He went back to his tiny room to make a coded call to Da Vinci. He asked his 
associates there to start the synthesis, and they agreed without any questions 
beyond the technical ones. Sometimes he loved those saxaclones with all his 
heart.
After that it was back to waiting. Hours passed; more hours; more hours. 
Eventually several days had passed, with no change in Ann. The doctor’s 
expression grew blacker and blacker, though she said nothing more about 
unhooking Ann. But it was in her eye. Sax took to sleeping on the floor in Ann’s 
room. He grew to know the rhythm of her breathing. He spent a lot of time with a 
hand cradling her head, as Michel had told him Nirgal had done with him. He very 
much doubted that this had ever cured anybody of anything, but he did it anyway. 
Sitting for so long in such a posture, he had occasion to think about the brain 
plasticity treatments that Vlad and Ursula had administered to him after his 
stroke. Of course a stroke was a very different thing than a coma. But a change 
of mind was not necessarily a bad thing, if one’s mind was in pain.
More days passed without a change, each day slower and blanker and more fearful 
than the one before. The incubators in the Da Vinci labs had long since cooked 
up a full set of corrected Ann-specific DNA strands, and antisense rein-forcers, 
and glue-ons—the whole gerontological package, in its latest configuration.
So one night he called up Ursula, and had a long consultation with her. She 
answered his questions calmly, even as she struggled with the idea of what he 
wanted to do. “The synaptic stimulus package we gave you would produce too much 
synaptic growth in undamaged brains,” she said firmly. “It would alter 
personality to no set pattern.” Creating madmen like Sax, her alarmed look said.
Sax decided to skip the synaptic supplements. Saving Ann’s life was one thing, 
changing her mind another. Random change was not the goal anyway. Acceptance 
was. Happiness—Ann’s true happiness, whatever that might be— now so far away, so 
hard to imagine. He ached to think of it. It was extraordinary how much physical 
pain could be generated by thought alone—the limbic system a whole universe in 
itself, suffused with pain, like the dark matter that suffused everything in the 
universe.
“Have you talked to Michel?” Ursula asked.
“No. Good idea.”
He called Michel, explained what had happened, and what he had in mind to do. 
“My God, Sax,” Michel said, looking shocked. But in only a few moments he was 
promising to come. He would get Desmond to fly him to Da Vinci to pick up the 
treatment supplies, and then fly on up to the refuge.
So Sax sat in Ann’s room, a hand to her head. A bumpy skull; no doubt a 
phrenologist would have had a field day.
Then Michel and Desmond were there, his brothers, standing beside him. The 
doctor was there too, escorting them, and the tall woman and others as well; so 
everything had to be communicated by looks, or the absence of looks. 
Nevertheless everything was perfectly clear. Desmond’s face was if anything too 
clear. They had Ann’s longevity package with them. They only had to wait their 
chance.
Which came quite soon; with Ann settled into her coma, the situation in the 
little hospital was routine. The effects of the longevity treatment on a coma, 
however, were not fully known; Michel had scanned the literature, and the data 
were sparse. It had been tried as an experimental treatment in a few 
unresponsive comas before, and had been successful in rousing victims almost 
half the time. Because of that Michel now thought it was a good idea.
And so, soon after their arrival, the three of them got up in the middle of the 
night, and tiptoed past the sleeping attendant in the medical center’s anteroom. 
Medical training had had its usual effect, and the attendant was sound asleep, 
though awkwardly propped in her chair. Sax and Michel hooked Ann up to the IVs, 
and stuck the needles in the veins on the backs of her hands, working slowly, 
carefully, precisely. Quietly. Soon she was hooked up, the IVs were flowing, the 
new protein strands were in her bloodstream. Her breathing gre’w irregular, and 
Sax felt hot with fear. He groaned silently. It was comforting to have Michel 
and Desmond here, each holding an arm as if supporting him, keeping him from 
falling; but he wished desperately for Hiroko. This was what she would have 
done, he was certain of it. Which made him feel better. Hiroko was one of the 
reasons he was doing this. Still he longed for her support, her physical 
presence, he wished she would show up to help him like she had on Daedalia 
Planitia. To help Ann. She was the expert at this kind of radically 
irresponsible human experimentation, this would have been small potatoes to 
her....
When the operation was finished, they took out the IV needles and put the 
equipment away. The attendant slept on, mouth open, looking like the girl she 
was. Ann was still unconscious, but breathing easier, Sax felt. More strongly.
The three men stood looking down at Ann together. Then they slipped out, and 
tiptoed back down the hall to their rooms. Desmond was dancing on his toes like 
a fool, and the other two shushed him. They got back in their beds but couldn’t 
sleep; and couldn’t talk; and so lay there silently, like brothers in a big 
house, late at night, after a successful expedition out into the nocturnal 
world.
The next morning the doctor came in. “Her vital signs are better.”
The three men expressed their pleasure at this.
Later, down in the dining hall, Sax had a strong urge to tell Michel and Desmond 
about his encounter with Hiroko. The news would mean more to these two than 
anyone else. But something in him was afraid to do it. He was afraid of seeming 
overwrought, perhaps even delusional. That moment when Hiroko had left him at 
the rover, and walked off into the storm—he didn’t know what to think of that. 
In his long hours with Ann he had done some thinking, and some research, and he 
knew now that Terran climbers alone at high altitude, suffering from oxygen 
loss, not infrequently hallucinated companion climbers. Some kind of 
doppelganger figure. Rescue by anima. And his air tube had been partially 
clogged.
He said, “I thought this was what Hiroko would have done.”
Michel nodded. “It’s bold, I’ll hand you that. It has her style. No, don’t 
misunderstand me—I’m glad you did it.”
“About fucking time, if you ask me,” said Desmond. “Someone should have tied her 
down and made her take the treatment years ago. Oh my Sax, my Sax—” He laughed 
happily. “I only hope she doesn’t come to as crazy as you did.”
“But Sax had a stroke,” Michel said.
“Well,” Sax said, concerned to set the record straight, “actually I was somewhat 
eccentric before.”
His two friends nodded, mouths pursed. They were in high spirits, though the 
situation was still unresolved. Then the tall doctor came in; Ann had come out 
of her coma.
Sax felt that his stomach was still too contracted by tension to take in food, 
but he noted that he was disposing of a pile of buttered toast quite handily. 
Wolfing it down, in fact.
“But she’s going to be very angry at you,” Michel said.
Sax nodded. It was, alas, probable. Likely, even. A bad thought. He did not want 
to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company.
“You should come with us to Earth,” Michel suggested. “Maya and I are going with 
the delegation, and Nirgal.”
“There’s a delegation going to Earth?”
“Yes, someone suggested it, and it seems like a good idea. We need to have some 
representatives right there on Earth talking to them. And by the time we get 
back from that, Ann will have had time to think it over.”
“Interesting,” Sax said, relieved at the mere suggestion of an escape from the 
situation. In fact it was almost frightening how quickly he could think of ten 
good reasons for going to Earth. “But what about Pavonis, and this conference 
they’re talking about?”
“We can stay part of that by video.”   .
“True.” It was just what he had always maintained.
The plan was attractive. He did not want to be there when Ann woke up. Or 
rather, when she found out what he had done. Cowardice, of course. But still. 
“Desmond, are you going?”
“Not a fucking chance.”
“But you say Maya is going too?” Sax asked Michel.
“Yes.”
“Good. The last time I, I, I tried to save a woman’s life, Maya killed her.”
“What? What—Phyllis? You saved Phyllis’s life?”
“Well—no. That is to say, I did, but I was also the one who put her in danger in 
the first place. So I don’t think it counts.” He tried to explain what had 
happened that night in Burroughs, with little success. It was fuzzy in his own 
mind, except for certain vivid horrible moments. “Never mind. It was just a 
thought. I shouldn’t have spoken. I’m....”
“You’re tired,” Michel said. “But don’t worry. Maya will be away from the scene 
here, and safely under our eye.”
Sax nodded. It was sounding better all the time. Give Ann some time to cool off; 
think it over; understand. Hopefully. And it would be very interesting of course 
to see conditions on Earth firsthand. Extremely interesting. So interesting 
thatjio rational person could pass up the opportunity.


 
 
 
PART THREE
               -------------
---A New Constitution
               -------------
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
Ants came to Mars as part of the soil project, and soon they were everywhere, as 
is their way. And so the little red people encountered ants, and they were 
amazed. These creatures were just the right size to ride, it was like the Native 
Americans meeting the horse. Tame the things and they would run wild.
Domesticating the ant was no easy matter. The little red scientists had not even 
believed such creatures were possible, because of surface area-to-volume 
constraints, but there they were, clumping around like intelligent robots, so 
the little red scientists had to explain them. To get some help they climbed up 
into the humans’ reference books, and read up on ants. They learned about the 
ants’pheromones, and they synthesized the ones they needed to control the 
soldier ants of a particularly small docile red species, and after that, they 
were in business. Little red cavalry. They charged around everywhere on antback, 
having a fine old time, twenty or thirty of them on each ant, like pashas on 
elephants. Look close at enough ants and you’ll see them, right there on top.
But the little red scientists continued to read the texts, and learned about 
human pheromones. They went back to the rest of the little red people, awestruck 
and appalled. Now we know why these humans are such trouble, they reported. 
Humans have no more will than these ants we are riding around on. They are giant 
meat ants.
The little red people tried to comprehend such a travesty of life.
Then a voice said No they’re not, to all of them at once. The little red people 
talk to each other telepathically, you see, and this was like a telepathic 
loudspeaker announcement. Humans are spiritual beings, this voice insisted.
How do you know? the little red people asked telepathically. Who are you? Are 
you the ghost of John Boone?
I am the Gyatso Rimpoche, the voice answered. The eighteenth reincarnation of 
the Dalai Lama. I am traveling the Bardo in search of my next reincarnation. 
I’ve looked everywhere on Earth, but I’ve had no luck, and I decided to look 
somewhere new. Tibet is still under the thumb of the Chinese, and they show no 
signs of letting up. The Chinese, although I love them dearly, are hard 
bastards. And the other governments of the world long ago turned their backs on 
Tibet. So no one will challenge the Chinese. Something needs to be done. So I 
came to Mars.
Good idea, the little red people said.
Yes, the Dalai Lama agreed, but I must admit I am having a hard time finding a 
new body to inhabit. For one thing there are very few children anywhere. Then 
also it does not look like anyone is interested. I looked in Sheffield but 
everyone was too busy talking. I went to Sabishii but everyone there had their 
heads stuck in the dirt. I went to Elysium but everyone had assumed the lotus 
position and could not be roused. I went to Christian-opolis but everyone there 
had other plans. I went to Hiranyagarba but everyone there said we’ve already 
done enough for Tibet. I’ve gone everywhere on Mars, to every tent and station, 
and everywhere people are just too busy. No one wants to be the nineteenth Dalai 
Lama. And the Bardo is getting colder and colder.
Good luck, the little red people said. We’ve been looking ever since John died 
and we haven’t even found anyone worth talking to, much less living inside. 
These big people are all messed up.
The Dalai Lama was discouraged by this response. He was getting very tired, and 
could not last much longer in the Bardo. So he said, What about one of you?
Well, sure, the little red people said. We’d be honored. Only it will have to be 
all of us at once. We do everything like that together.
Why not? said the Dalai Lama, and he transmigrated into one of the little red 
specks, and that same instant he was there in all of them, all over Mars. The 
little red people looked up at the humans crashing around above them, a sight 
which before they had tended to regard as some kind of bad wide-screen movie, 
and now they found they were filled with all the compassion and wisdom of the 
eighteen previous lives of the Dalai Lama. They said to each other, Ka wow, 
these people really are messed up. We thought it was bad before, but look at 
that, it’s even worse than we thought. They’re lucky they can’t read each 
other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each 
other—they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the 
others. How ugly. How sad.
They need your help, the Dalai Lama said inside them all. Maybe you can help 
them.
Maybe, the little red people said. They were dubious, to tell the truth. 
Theyhadbeen trying to help humans ever since John Boone died, they had set up 
whole towns in the porches of every ear on the planet, and talked continuously 
ever since, sounding very much like John had, trying to get people to wake up 
and act decent, and never with any effect at all, except to send a lot of people 
to ear nose and throat specialists. Lots of people on Mars thought they had 
tinnitus, but no one ever understood their little red people. It was enough to 
discourage anyone.
But now the little red people had the compassionate spirit of the Dalai Lama 
infusing them, and so they decided to try one more time. Perhaps it will take 
more than whispering in their ears, the Dalai Lama pointed out, and they all 
agreed. We’ll have to get their attention some other way.
Have you tried your telepathy on them? the Dalai Lama asked.
Oh no, they said. No way. Too scary. The ugliness might kill us on the spot. Or 
at least make us real sick. 
Maybe not, the Dalai Lama said. Maybe if you blocked off your reception of what 
they thought, and just beamed your thoughts at them, it would be all right, fust 
send lots of good thoughts, like an advice beam. Compassion, love, 
agreeableness, wisdom, even a little common sense.
We’ll give it a try, the little red people said. But we’re all going to have to 
shout at the top of our telepathic voices, all in chorus, because these folks 
just aren’t listening.
I’ve faced that for nine centuries now, the Dalai Lama said. You get used to it. 
And you little ones have the advantage of numbers. So give it a try.
And so all the little red people all over Mars looked up and took a deep breath.


 
Art Randolph was having the time of his life.
Not during the battle for Sheffield, of course—that had been a disaster, a 
breakdown of diplomacy, the failure of everything Art had been trying to do—a 
miserable few days, in fact, during which he had run around sleeplessly trying 
to meet with every group he thought might help defuse the crisis, and always 
with the feeling that it was somehow his fault, that if he had done things right 
it would not have happened. The fight went right to the brink of torching Mars, 
as in 2061; for a few hours on the afternoon of the Red assault, it had 
teetered.
But fallen back. Something—diplomacy, or the realities of battle (a defensive 
victory for those on the cable), common sense, sheer chance—something had tipped 
things back from the edge.
And with that nightmare interval past, people had returned to east Pavonis in a 
thoughtful mood. The consequences of failure had been made clear. They needed to 
agree on a plan. Many of the radical Reds were dead, or escaped into the 
outback, and the moderate Reds left in east Pavonis, while angry, were at least 
there. It was a very uncomfortable and uncertain period. But there they were.
So once again Art began flogging the idea of a constitutional congress. He ran 
around under the big tent through warrens of industrial warehouses and storage 
zones and concrete dormitories, down broad streets crowded with a museum’s worth 
of heavy vehicles, and everywhere he urged the same thing: constitution. He 
talked to Nadia, Nir-gal, Jackie, Zeyk, Maya, Peter, Ariadne, Rashid, Tariki, 
Na-nao, Sung, and H. X. Borazjani. He talked to Vlad and Ursula and Marina, and 
to the Coyote. He talked to a few-score young natives he had never met before, 
all major players in the recent unrest; there were so many of them it began to 
seem like a textbook demonstration of the polycephalous nature of mass social 
movements. And to every head of this new hydra Art made the same case: “A 
constitution would legitimate us to Earth, and it would give us a framework for 
settling disputes among ourselves. And we’re all gathered here, we could start 
right away. Some people have plans ready to look at.” And with the events of the 
past week fresh in their minds, people would nod and say “Maybe so,” and wander 
off thinking about it.
Art called up William Fort and told him what he was doing, and got an answer 
back later the same day. The old man was at a new refugee town in Costa Rica, 
looking just as distracted as always. “Sounds good,” he said. And after that 
Praxis people were checking with Art daily to see what they could do to help 
organize things. Art became busier than he had ever been, doing what the 
Japanese there called nema-washi, the preparations for an event: starting 
strategy sessions for an organizing group, revisiting everyone he had spoken to 
before, trying, in effect, to talk to every individual on Pavonis Mons. “The 
John Boone method,” Coyote commented with his cracked laugh. “Good luck!”
Sax, packing his few belongings for the diplomatic mission to Earth, said, “You 
should invite the, the United Nations.”
Sax’s adventure in the storm had knocked him back a bit; he tended to stare 
around at things, as if stunned by a blow to the head. Art said gently, “Sax, we 
just went to a lot of trouble to kick their butts off this planet.”
“Yes,” Sax said, staring at the ceiling. “But now co-opt them.”
“Co-opt the UN!” Art considered it. Co-opt the United Nations: it had a certain 
ring to it. It would be a challenge, diplomatically speaking.
 
*      *        *
 
Just before the ambassadors left for Earth, Nirgal came by the Praxis offices to 
say good-bye. Embracing his young friend, Art was seized with a sudden 
irrational fear. Off to Earth!
Nirgal was as blithe as ever, his dark brown eyes alight with anticipation. 
After saying good-bye to the others in the outer office, he sat with Art in an 
empty corner room of the warehouse.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Art asked.
“Very sure. I want to see Earth.”
Art waggled a hand, uncertain what to say.
“Besides,” Nirgal added, “someone has to go down there and show them who we 
are.”
“None better for that than you, my friend. But you’ll have to watch out for the 
metanats. Who knows what they’ll be up to. And for bad food—those areas affected 
by the flood are sure to have problems with sanitation. And disease vectors. And 
you’ll have to be careful about sunstroke, you’ll be very susceptible—”
Jackie Boone walked in. Art stopped his travel advisory; Nirgal was no longer 
listening in any case, but watching Jackie with a suddenly blank expression, as 
if he had put on a Nirgal mask. And of course no mask could do justice to 
Nirgal, because the mobility of his face was its essential characteristic; so he 
did not look like himself at-all.
Jackie, of course, saw this instantly. Shut off from her old partner... 
naturally she glared at him. Something had gone awry, Art saw. Both of them had 
forgotten Art, who would have slipped out of the room if he could have, feeling 
like he was holding a lightning rod in a storm. But Jackie was still standing in 
the doorway, and Art did not care to disturb her at that moment.
“So you’re leaving us,” she said to Nirgal.
“It’s just a visit.”
“But why? Why now? Earth means nothing to us now.”
“It’s where we came from.”
“It is not. We came from Zygote.”
Nirgal shook his head. “Earth is the home planet. We’re an extension of it, 
here. We have to deal with it.”
Jackie waved a hand in disgust, or bafflement: “You’re leaving just when you’re 
needed here the most!”
“Think of it as an opportunity.”
“I will,” she snapped. He had made her angry. “And you won’t like it.”
“But you’ll have what you want.”
Fiercely she said, “You don’t know what I want!”
The hair on the back of Art’s neck had raised; lightning was about to strike. He 
would have said he was an eavesdropper by nature, almost a voyeur in fact; but 
standing right there in the room was not the same, and he found now there were 
some things he did not care to witness. He cleared his throat. The other two 
were startled by his noise. With a waggle of the hand he sidled past Jackie and 
out the door. Behind him the voices went on—bitter, accusatory, filled with pain 
and baffled fury.
 
Coyote stared gravely out the windshield as he drove the ambassadors to Earth 
south to the elevator, with Art sitting beside him. They rolled slowly through 
the battered neighborhoods that bordered the Socket, in the southwest part of 
Sheffield where the streets had been designed to handle enormous 
freight-container gantries, so that things had an ominous Speeresque quality to 
them, inhuman and gigantic. Sax was explaining once again to Coyote that the 
trip to Earth would not remove the travelers from the constitutional congress, 
that they would contribute by vid, that they would not end up like Thomas 
Jefferson in Paris, missing the whole thing. “We’ll be on Pavonis,” Sax said, 
“in all the senses that matter.”
“Then everyone will be on Pavonis,” Coyote said ominously. He didn’t like this 
trip to Earth for Sax and Maya and Michel and Nirgal; he didn’t seem to like the 
constitutional congress; nothing these days pleased him, he was jumpy, uneasy, 
irritable. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” he would mutter, “you mark my 
words.”
Then the Socket stood before them, the cable emerging black and glossy from the 
great mass of concrete, like a harpoon plunged into Mars by Earthly powers, 
holding it fast. After identifying themselves the travelers drove right into the 
complex, down a big straight passageway to the enormous chamber at the center, 
where the cable came down through the socket’s collar, and hovered over a 
network of pistes crisscrossing the floor. The cable was so exquisitely balanced 
in its orbit that it never touched Mars at all, but merely hung there with its 
ten-meter diameter end floating in the middle of the room, the collar in the 
roof doing no more than stabilizing it; for the rest, its positioning was up to 
the rockets installed up and down the cable, and, more importantly, to the 
balance between centrifugal force and gravity which kept it in its 
areosynchronous orbit.
A row of elevator cars floated in the air like the cable itself, though for a 
different reason, as they were electromagnet-ically suspended. One of them 
levitated over a piste to the cable, and latched onto the track inlaid in the 
cable’s west side, and rose up soundlessly through a valve door in the collar.
The travelers and their escorts got out of their car. Nirgal was withdrawn, 
already on his way; Maya and Michel excited; Sax his usual self. One by one they 
hugged Art and Coyote, stretching up to Art, leaning down to Desmond. For a time 
they all talked at once, staring at each other, trying to comprehend the moment; 
it was just a trip, but it felt like more than that. Then the four travelers 
crossed the floor, and disappeared into a jetway leading up into the next 
elevator car.
After that Coyote and Art stood there, and watched the car float over to the 
cable and rise through the valve door and disappear. Coyote’s asymmetrical face 
clenched into a most uncharacteristic expression of worry, even fear. That was 
his son, of course, and three of his closest friends, going to a very dangerous 
place. Well, it was just Earth; but it felt dangerous, Art had to admit. 
“They’ll be okay,” Art said, giving the little man a squeeze on the shoulder. 
“They’ll be stars down there. It’ll go fine.” No doubt true. In fact he felt 
better himself at his own reassurances. It was the home planet, after all. 
Humans were made for it. They would be fine. It was the home planet. But 
still....


 
 
 
 
 
Back in east Pavonis the congress had begun.
It was Nadia’s doing, really. She simply started working in the main warehouse 
on draft passages, and people started joining her, and things snowballed. Once 
the meetings were going people had to attend or risk losing a say. Nadia 
shrugged if anyone complained that they weren’t ready, that things had to be 
regularized, that they needed to know more, etc.; “Come on,” she said 
impatiently. “Here we are, we might as well get to it.”
So a fluctuating group of about three hundred people began meeting daily in the 
industrial complex of east Pavonis. The main warehouse, designed to hold piste 
parts and train cars, was huge, and scores of mobile-walled offices were set up 
against its walls, leaving the central space open, and available for a roughly 
circular collection of mismatched tables. “Ah,” Art said when he saw it, “the 
table of tables.”
Of course there were people who wanted a list of delegates, so that they knew 
who could vote, who could speak, and so on. Nadia, who was quickly taking on the 
role of chairperson, suggested they accept all requests to become a delegation 
from any Martian group, as long as the group had had some tangible existence 
before the conference began. “We might as well be inclusive.”
The constitutional scholars from Dorsa Brevia agreed that the congress should be 
conducted by members of voting delegations, and the final result then voted on 
by the populace at large. Charlotte, who had helped to draft the Dorsa Brevia 
document twelve m-years before, had led a group since then in working up plans 
for a government, in anticipation of a successful revolution. They were not the 
only ones to have done this; schools in South Fossa and at the university in 
Sabishii had taught courses in the matter, and many of the young natives in the 
warehouse were well versed in the issues they were tackling. “It’s kind of 
scary,” Art remarked to Nadia. “Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out 
of the woodwork.”
“Always.”
Charlotte’s group had made a list of potential delegates to a constitutional 
congress, including all Martian settlements with populations over five hundred. 
Quite a few people would therefore be represented twice, Nadia pointed out, once 
by location and again by political affiliation. The few groups not on the list 
complained to a new committee, which allowed almost all petitioners to join. And 
Art made a call to Derek Hastings, and extended an invitation to UNTA to join as 
a delegation as well; the surprised Hastings got back to them a few days later, 
with a positive response. He would come down the cable himself.
And so after about a week’s jockeying, with many other matters being worked on 
at the same time, they had enough agreement to call for a vote of approval of 
the delegate list; and because it had been so inclusive, it passed almost 
unanimously. And suddenly they had a real congress. It was made up of the 
following delegations, with anywhere from one to ten people in each delegation:
 
      Towns:
      Acheron
      Nicosia
      Cairo
      Odessa
      Harmakhis Vallis
      Sabishii
      Christianopolis
      Bogdanov Vishniac
      Hiranyagarba
      Mauss Hyde
      New Clarke
      Bradbury Point                          
      Sergei Korolyov
      DuMartheray Crater
      South Station
      Reull Vallis
      southern caravanserai
      Nuova Bologna
      Nirgal Vallis
      MontepulcianoSheffield
      Senzeni Na
      Echus Overlook
      Dorsa Brevia
      Dao Vallis
      South Fossa
      Rumi
      New Vanuatu
      Prometheus
      Gramsci
      Mareotis
      Burroughs refugees
      organization
      Libya Station
      Tharsis Tholus
      Overhangs
      Margaritifer Plinth
      Great Escarpment
      caravanserai
      Da Vinci
      The Elysian League
      Hell’s Gate
       

 
Political Parties and Other Organizations:
Booneans
Reds
Bogdanovists
Schnellingistas
Marsfirst
Free Mars
TheKa
Praxis
Qahiran Mahjari League
Green Mars
United Nations Transitional Authority
Kakaze
Editorial Board of The Journal ofAreological Studies
Space Elevator Authority
Christian Democrats
The Metanational Economic Activity Coordination
Committee
Bolognan Neomarxists
Friends of the Earth
Biotique
Separation de l’Atmosphere
 
General meetings began in the morning around the table of tables, then moved out 
in many small working groups to offices in the warehouse, or buildings nearby. 
Every morning Art showed up early and brewed great pots of coffee, kava, and 
kavajava, his favorite. It perhaps was not much of a job, given the significance 
of the enterprise, but Art was happy doing it. Every day he was surprised to see 
a congress convening at all; and observing the size of it, he felt that helping 
to get it started was probably going to be his principal contribution. He was 
not a scholar, and he had few ideas about what a Martian constitution ought to 
include. Getting people together was what he was good at, and he had done that. 
Or rather he and Nadia had, for Nadia had stepped in and taken the lead just 
when they had needed her. She was the only one of the First Hundred on hand who 
had everyone’s trust; this gave her a bit of genuine natural authority. Now, 
without any fuss, without seeming to notice she was doing it, she was exerting 
that power.
And so now it was Art’s great pleasure to become, in effect, Nadia’s personal 
assistant. He arranged her days, and did everything he could to make sure they 
ran smoothly. This included making a good pot of kavajava first thing every 
morning, for Nadia was one of many of them fond of that initial jolt toward 
alertness and general goodwill. Yes, Art thought, personal assistant and drug 
dispenser, that was his destiny at this point in history. And he was happy. Just 
watching people look at Nadia was a pleasure in itself. And the way she looked 
back: interested, sympathetic, skeptical, an edge developing quickly if she 
thought someone was wasting her time, a warmth kindling if she was impressed by 
their contribution. And people knew this, they wanted to please her. They tried 
to keep to the point, to make a contribution. They wanted that particular warm 
look in her eye. Very strange eyes they were, really, when you looked close: 
hazel, basically, but flecked with innumerable tiny patches of other colors, 
yellow, black, green, blue. A mesmerizing quality to them. Nadia focused her 
full attention on people—she was willing to believe you, to take your side, to 
make sure your case didn’t get lost in the shuffle; even the Reds, who knew she 
had been fighting with Ann, trusted her to make sure they were heard. So the 
work coalesced around her; and all Art really had to do was watch her at work, 
and enjoy it, and help where he could.
And so the debates began.
 
In the first week many arguments concerned simply what a constitution was, what 
form it should take, and whether they should have one at all. Charlotte called 
this the meta-conflict, the argument about what the argument was about—a very 
important matter, she said when she saw Nadia squint unhappily, “because in 
settling it, we set the limits on what we can decide. If we decide to include 
economic and social issues in the constitution, for instance, then this is a 
very different kind of thing than if we stick to purely political or legal 
matters, or to a very general statement of principles.”
To help structure even this debate, she and the Dorsa Brevia scholars had come 
with a number of different “blank constitutions,” which blocked out different 
kinds of constitutions without actually filling in their contents. These blanks 
did little, however, to stop the objections of those who maintained that most 
aspects of social and economic life ought not to be regulated at all. Support 
for such a “minimal state” came from a variety of viewpoints that otherwise made 
strange bedfellows: anarchists, libertarians, neotraditional capitalists, 
certain greens, and so on. To the most extreme of these antistatists, writing up 
any government at all was a kind of defeat, and they conceived of their role in 
the congress as making the new government as small as possible.
Sax heard about this argument in one of the nightly calls from Nadia and Art, 
and he was as willing to think about it seriously as he was anything else. “It’s 
been found that a few simple rules can regulate very complex behavior. There’s a 
classic computer model for flocking birds, for instance, which only has three 
rules—keep an equal distance from everyone around you—don’t change speed too 
fast— avoid stationary objects. Those will model the flight of a flock quite 
nicely.”
“A computer flock maybe,” Nadia scoffed. “Have you ever seen chimney swifts at 
dusk?”
After a moment Sax’s reply arrived: “No.”
“Well, take a look when you get to Earth. Meanwhile we can’t be having a 
constitution that says only ‘don’t change speed too fast.’ “
Art thought this was funny, but Nadia was not amused. In general she had little 
patience for the minimalist arguments. “Isn’t it the equivalent of letting the 
metanats run things?” she would say. “Letting might be right?”
“No, no,” Mikhail would protest. “That’s not what we mean at all!”
“It seems very like what you are saying. And for some it’s obviously a kind of 
cover—a pretend principle that is really about keeping the rules that protect 
their property and privileges, and letting the rest go to hell.”
“No, not at all.”
“Then you must prove it at the table. Everything that government might involve 
itself in, you have to make the case against. You have to argue it point by 
point.”
And she was so insistent about this, not scolding like Maya would have but 
simply adamant, that they had to agree: everything was at least on the table for 
discussion. Therefore the various blank constitutions made sense, as starting 
points; and therefore they should get on with it. A vote on it was taken, and 
the majority agreed to give it a try.
And so there they were, the first hurdle jumped. Everyone had agreed to work 
according to the same plan. It was amazing, Art thought, zooming from meeting to 
meeting, filled with admiration for Nadia. She was not your ordinary diplomat, 
she by no means followed the empty vessel model that Art aspired to; but things 
got done nevertheless. She had the charisma of the sensible. He hugged her every 
time he passed her, he kissed the top of her head; he loved her. He ran around 
with that wealth of good feeling, and dropped in on all the sessions he could, 
watching to see how he could help keep things going. Often it was just a matter 
of supplying people with food and drink, so that they could continue through the 
day without getting irritable.
At all hours the table of tables was crowded; fresh-faced young Valkyries 
towering over sunbaked old vets; all races, all types; this was Mars, m-year 52, 
a kind of de facto united nations all on its own. With all the potential 
fractiousness of that notoriously fractious body; so that sometimes, looking at 
all their disparate faces and listening to the melange of languages, English 
augmented by Babel, Art was nearly overwhelmed by their variety. “Ka, Nadia,” he 
said as they sat eating sandwiches and going over their notes for the day, 
“we’re trying to write a constitution that every Terran culture could agree to!”
She waved the problem away, swallowed. “About time,” she said.
 
*      *        *
 
Charlotte suggested that the Dorsa Brevia declaration made a logical starting 
point for discussing the content that would fill the constitutional forms. This 
suggestion caused more trouble than even the blanks had, for the Reds and 
several other delegations disliked various points of the old declaration, and 
they argued that using it was a way of pist-ing the congress from the start.
“So what?” Nadia said. “We can change every word of it if we want, but we have 
to start with something.”
This view was popular among most of the old underground groups, many of whom had 
been at Dorsa Brevia in m-39. The declaration that had resulted remained the 
underground’s best effort to write down what they had agreed on back when they 
were out of power, so it made sense to start with it; it gave them some 
precedent, some historical continuity.
When they pulled it out and looked at it, however, they found that the old 
declaration had become frighteningly radical. No private property? No 
appropriation of surplus value? Had they really said such things? How were 
things supposed to work? People pored over the bare uncompromising sentences, 
shaking their heads. The declaration had not bothered to say how its lofty goals 
were to be enacted, it had only stated them. “The stone-tablet routine,” as Art 
characterized it. But now the revolution had succeeded, and the time had come to 
do something in the real world. Could they really stick to concepts as radical 
as those in the Dorsa Brevia declaration?
Hard to say. “At least the points are there to discuss,” Nadia said. And along 
with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their section 
headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have 
to come to grips with: “Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of 
Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; 
Military and Police; Taxation; Election Procedures; Property Law; Economic 
Systems; Environmental Law; Amendment Procedures,” and so on, in some blanks for 
pages on end— all being juggled on everyone’s screens, scrambled, formatted, 
endlessly debated. “Just filling in the blanks,” as Art sang one night, looking 
over Nadia’s shoulder at one particularly forbidding flowchart pattern, like 
something out of Michel’s alchemical combinatoires. And Nadia laughed.


 
 
 
 
 
The working groups focused on different parts of government as outlined in a new 
composite blank constitution, now being called the blank of blanks. Political 
parties and interest groups gravitated to the issues that most concerned them, 
and the many tent-town delegations chose or were assigned to remaining areas. 
After that it was a matter of work.
For the moment, the Da Vinci Crater technical group was in control of Martian 
space. They were keeping all space shuttles from docking at Clarke, or 
aerobraking into Martian orbit. No one believed that this alone made them truly 
free, but it did give them a certain amount of physical and psychic space to 
work in—this was the gift of the revolution. They were also driven by the memory 
of the battle for Sheffield; the fear of civil war was strong among them. Ann 
was in exile with the Kakaze, and sabotage in the outback was a daily 
occurrence. There were also tents that had declared independence from anyone, 
and a few metanat holdouts; there was turmoil generally, and a sense of barely 
contained confusion. They were in a bubble in history, a moment only; it could 
collapse anytime, and if they didn’t act soon, it would collapse. It was, simply 
put, time to act.
This was the one thing everyone agreed on, but it was a very important thing. As 
the days passed a core group of workers slowly emerged, people who recognized 
each other for their willingness to get the job done, for their desire to finish 
paragraphs rather than posture. Inside all the rest of the debate these people 
went at it, guided by Nadia, who was very quick to recognize such people and 
give them all the help she could.
Art meanwhile ran around in his usual manner. Up early, supply drinks and food, 
and information concerning the work ongoing in other rooms. It seemed to him 
that things were going pretty well. Most of the subgroups took the 
responsibility to fill in their blank seriously, writing and rewriting drafts, 
hammering them out concept by concept, phrase by phrase. They were happy to see 
Art when he came by in the course of the day, as he represented a break, some 
food, some jokes. One judicial group tacked foam wings on his shoes, and sent 
him with a caustic message along to an executive group with whom they were 
fighting. Pleased, Art kept the wings on; why not? What they were doing had a 
kind of ludicrous majesty, or majestic ludicrousness—they were rewriting the 
rules, he was flying around like Hermes or Puck, it was perfectly appropriate. 
And so he flew, through the long hours into the night, every night. And after 
all the sessions had closed down for the evening, he went back to the Praxis 
offices he shared with Nadia, and they would eat, and talk over the day’s 
progress, and make a call to the travelers to Earth, and talk with Nirgal and 
Sax and Maya and Michel. And after that Nadia would go back to work at her 
screens, usually falling asleep there in her chair. Then Art would often go back 
out into the warehouse, and the buildings and rovers clustered around it. 
Because they were holding the congress in a warehouse tent, there was not the 
same party scene that had existed after hours in Dorsa Brevia; but the delegates 
often stayed up, sitting on the floors of their rooms drinking and talking about 
the day’s work, or the revolution just past. Many of the people there had never 
met before, and they were getting to know each other. Relationships were 
forming, romances, friendships, feuds. It was a good time to talk, and learn 
more about what was going on during the daytime congress; it was the underside 
of the congress, the social hour, out there scattered in concrete rooms. Art 
enjoyed it. And then the moment would come when he would suddenly hit the wall, 
a wave of sleepiness would roll over him and sometimes he wouldn’t even have 
time to stagger back to his offices, to the couch next to Nadia’s; he would 
simply roll over on the floor and sleep there, waking cold and stiff to hurry 
off to their bathroom, a shower, and back to the kitchens to start up that day’s 
kava and Java. Round and round, his days a blur; it was glorious.
 
In sessions on many different subjects people were having to grapple with 
questions of scale. Without any nations, without any natural or traditional 
political units, who governed what? And how were they to balance the local 
against the global, and past versus future—the many ancestral cultures against 
the one Martian culture?
Sax, observing this recurring problem from the rocket ship to Earth, sent back a 
message proposing that the tent towns and covered canyons become the principal 
political units: city-states, basically, with no larger political units except 
for the global government itself, which would regulate only truly global 
concerns. Thus there would be local and global, but no nation-states in between.
The reaction to this proposal was fairly positive. For one thing it had the 
advantage of conforming to the situation that already existed. Mikhail, leader 
of the Bogdanovist party, noted that it was a variant of the old commune of 
communes, and because Sax had been the source of the suggestion, this quickly 
got it called the “lab of labs” plan. But the underlying problem still remained, 
as Nadia quickly pointed out; all Sax had done was define their particular local 
and global. They still had to decide just how much power the proposed global 
confederation was going to have over the proposed semiautonomous city-states. 
Too much, and it was back to a big centralized state, Mars itself as a nation, a 
thought which many delegations abhorred. “But too little,” Jackie said 
emphatically in the human-rights workshop, “and there could be tents out there 
deciding slavery is okay, or female genital mutilation is okay, or any other 
crime based on some Terran barbarism is okay, excused in the name of ‘cultural 
values.’ And that is just not acceptable.”
“Jackie is right,” Nadia said, which was unusual enough to get people’s 
attention. “People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their 
culture—that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, 
Leninists,  metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it 
here, not if I can help it.”
Art noticed more than a few delegates frowning at this sentiment, which no doubt 
struck them as a version of Western secular relativism, or perhaps John Boone’s 
hyper-americanism. Opposition to the metanats had included many people trying to 
hold on to older cultures, and these often had their hierarchies pretty well 
intact; the ones at the top end of the hierarchies liked them that way, and so 
did a surprisingly large number of people farther down the ladder.
The young Martian natives, however, looked surprised that this was even 
considered an issue. To them the fundamental rights were innate and irrevocable, 
and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many emotional 
scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their traumatic 
dysfunctional Terran upbringings. Ariadne, one of the most prominent of the 
young natives, stood up to say that the Dorsa Brevia group had studied many 
Terran human-rights documents, and had written a comprehensive list of their 
own. The new master list of fundamental individual rights was available for 
discussion and, she implied, adoption wholesale. Some argued about one point or 
another; but it was generally agreed that a global bill of rights of some kind 
should be on the table. So Martian values as they existed in m-year 52 were 
about to be codified, and made a principal component of the constitution.
The exact nature of these rights was still a matter of controversy. The 
so-called political rights were generally agreed to be “self-evident”—things 
citizens were free to do, things governments were forbidden to do—habeus corpus, 
freedom of movement, of speech, of association, of religion, a ban on 
weapons—all these were approved by a vast majority of Martian natives, though 
there were some issei from places like Singapore, Cuba, Indonesia, Thailand, 
China, and so on, who looked askance at so much emphasis on individual liberty. 
Other delegates had reservations about a different kind of right, the so-called 
social or economic rights, such as the right to housing, health care, education, 
employment, a share of the value generated by natural-resource use, etc. Many 
issei delegates with actual experience in Terran government were quite worried 
about these, pointing out that it was dangerous to enshrine such things in the 
constitution; it had been done on Earth, they said, and then when it was found 
impossible to meet such promises, the constitution guaranteeing them was seen as 
a propaganda device, and flouted in other areas as well, until it became a bad 
joke.
“Even so,” Mikhail said sharply, “if you can’t afford housing, then it is your 
right to vote that is the bad joke.”
The young natives agreed, as did many others there. So economic or social rights 
were on the table too, and arguments over how actually to guarantee these rights 
in practice continued through many a long session. “Political, social, it’s all 
one,” Nadia said. “Let’s make all the rights work.”
 
So the work went on, both around the big table and in the offices where the 
subgroups were meeting. Even the UN was there, in the person of UNTA chief Derek 
Hastings himself, who had come down the elevator and was participating 
vigorously in the debates, his opinion always carrying a peculiar kind of 
weight. He even began to exhibit symptoms of hostage syndrome, Art thought, 
becoming more and more sympathetic the more he stood around in the warehouse 
arguing with people. And this might affect his superiors on Earth as well.
Comments and suggestions were also pouring in from all over Mars, and from Earth 
as well, filling several screens covering one wall of the big room. Interest in 
the congress was high everywhere, rivaling even Earth’s great flood in the 
public’s attention. “The soap opera of the moment,” Art said to Nadia. Every 
night the two of them met in their little office suite, and put in their call to 
Nirgal and the rest. The delays in the travelers’ responses got longer and 
longer, but Art and Nadia didn’t really mind; there was a lot to think about 
while waiting for Sax and the others’ part of the conversation to arrive.
“This global versus local problem is going to be hard,” Art said one night. 
“It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result of confused 
thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want freedom for the 
tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in contradiction.”
“Maybe the Swiss system,” Nirgal suggested a few minutes later. “That’s what 
John Boone always used to say.”
But the Swiss on Pavonis were not encouraging about this idea. “A countermodel 
rather,” Jurgen said, making a face. “The reason I’m on Mars is the Swiss 
federal government. It stifles everything. You need a license to breathe.”
“And the cantons have no power anymore,” Priska said. “The federal government 
took it away.”
“In some of the cantons,” Jurgen added, “this was a good thing.”
Priska said, “More interesting than Berne might be the Graubunden. That means 
Gray League. They were a loose confederation of towns in southeast Switzerland, 
for hundreds of years. A very successful organization.”
“Could you call up whatever you can get on that?” Art said.
The next night he and Nadia looked over descriptions of the Graubunden that 
Priska had sent over. Well. . . there was a certain simplicity to affairs during 
the Renaissance, Art thought. Maybe that was wrong, but somehow the extremely 
loose agreements of the little Swiss mountain towns did not seem to translate 
well to the densely interpenetrated economies of the Martian settlements. The 
Graubunden hadn’t had to worry about generating unwanted changes in atmospheric 
pressure, for instance. No—the truth was, they were in a new situation. There 
was no historical analogy that would be much help to them now.
“Speaking of global versus local,” Irishka said, “what about the land outside 
the tents and covered canyons?” She was emerging as the leading Red remaining on 
Pavonis, a moderate who could speak for almost all wings of the Red movement, 
therefore becoming quite a power as the weeks passed. “That’s most of the land 
on Mars, and all we said at Dorsa Brevia is that no individual can own it, that 
we are all stewards of it together. That’s good as far as it goes, but as the 
population rises and new towns are built, it’s going to be more and more of a 
problem figuring out who controls it.”
Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome. Recently he had made 
a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to attacking what he and 
Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they were facing, and so in 
theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes they were just too hard.
As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the global-local 
problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent. Still, as it 
was probably the worst outstanding problem. . . .


 
 
 
 
 
Art went to the Reds. The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, 
one of Nirgal and Jackie’s creche mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their 
rover camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he 
was now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big empty 
vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.
The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the caldera. They 
sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments, in the glare of 
a late-afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant silhouetted 
country of the caldera.
“So what would you like to see in this constitution?” Art said.
He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each other, somewhat 
taken aback. “Ideally,” Marion said after a while, “we’d like to be living on 
the primal planet, in caves and cliff dwellings, or excavated crater rings. No 
big cities, no terraforming.”
“You’d have to stay suited all the time.”
“That’s right. We don’t mind that.”
“Well.” Art thought it over. “Okay, but let’s start from now. Given the 
situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?”
“No further terraforming.”
“The cable gone, and no more immigration.”
“In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.”
They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his consternation 
show.
He said, “Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this point?”
“It’s not clear,” Tiu said. “But if you stopped the industrial pumping, any 
further growth would certainly be very slow. It might even lose ground, as with 
this ice age that’s starting.”
“Isn’t that what some people call ecopoesis?”
“No. The ecopoets just use biological methods to create changes in the 
atmosphere and on the surface, but they’re very intensive with them. We think 
they all should stop, ecopoets or industrialists or whatever.”
“But especially the heavy industrial methods,” Marion said. “And most especially 
the inundation of the north. That’s simply criminal. We’ll blow up those 
stations no matter what happens here, if they don’t stop.”
Art gestured out at the huge stony caldera. “The higher elevations look pretty 
much the same, right?”
They weren’t willing to admit that. Irishka said, “Even the high ground shows 
ice deposition and plant life. The atmosphere lofts high here, remember. No 
place escapes when the winds are strong.”
“What if we tented the four big calderas?” Art said. “Kept them sterile 
underneath, with the original atmospheric pressure and mix? Those would be huge 
wilderness parks, preserved in the true primal state.”
“Parks are just what they would be.”
“I know. But we have to work with what we have now, right? We can’t go back to 
m-1 and rerun the whole thing. And given the current situation, it might be good 
to preserve three or four big places in the original state, or close to it.”
“It would be nice to have some canyons protected as well,” Tiu said tentatively. 
Clearly they had not considered this kind of possibility before; and it was not 
really satisfactory to them, Art could see. But the current situation could not 
be wished away, they had to start from there.
“Or Argyre Basin.”
“At the very least, keep Argyre dry.”
Art nodded encouragingly. “Combine that kind of preservation with the atmosphere 
limits set in the Dorsa Brevia document. That’s a five-kilometer breathable 
ceiling, and there’s a hell of a lot of land above five kilometers that would 
remain relatively pristine. It won’t take the northern ocean away, but nothing’s 
going to do that now. Some form of slow ecopoesis is about the best you can hope 
for at this point, right?”
Perhaps that was putting it too baldly. The Reds stared down into Pavonis 
caldera unhappily, thinking their own thoughts.
 
“Say the Reds come on board,” Art said to Nadia. “What do you think the next 
worst problem is?”
“What?” She had been nearly asleep, listening to some tinny old jazz from her 
AI. “Ah. Art.” Her voice was low and quiet, the Russian accent light but 
distinct. She sat slumped on the couch. A pile of paper balls lay around her 
feet, like pieces of some structure she was putting together. The Martian way of 
life. Her face was oval under a cap of straight white hair, the wrinkles of her 
skin somehow wearing away, as if she were a pebble in the stream of years. She 
opened her flecked eyes, luminous and arresting under their Cossack eyelids. A 
beautiful face, looking now at Art perfectly relaxed. “The next worst problem.”
“Yes.”
She smiled. Where did that calmness come from, that relaxed smile? She wasn’t 
worried about anything these days. Art found it surprising, given the political 
high-wire act they were performing. But then again it was politics, not war. And 
just as Nadia had been terribly frightened during the revolution, always tense, 
always expecting disaster, she was now always relatively calm. As if to say, 
nothing that happens here matters all that much—tinker with the details all you 
want—my friends are safe, the war is over, this that remains is a kind of game, 
or work like construction work, full of pleasures.
Art moved around to the back of the couch, massaged her shoulders. “Ah,” she 
said. “Problems. Well, there are a lot of problems that are about equally 
sticky.” “Like what?”
“Like, I wonder if the Mahjaris will be able to adapt to democracy. I wonder if 
everyone will accept Vlad and Marina’s eco-economics. I wonder if we can make a 
decent police. I wonder if Jackie will try to create a system with a strong 
president, and use the natives’ numerical superiority to become queen.” She 
looked over her shoulder, laughed at Art’s expression. “I wonder about a lot of 
things. Should I go on?”
“Maybe not.”
She laughed. “You go on. That feels good. These problems—they aren’t so hard. 
We’ll just keep going to the table and pounding away at them. Maybe you could 
talk to Zeyk.”
“Okay.”
“But now do my neck.”
 
Art went to talk to Zeyk and Nazik that very night, after Nadia had fallen 
asleep. “So what’s the Mahjari view of all this?” he asked.
Zeyk growled. “Please don’t ask stupid questions,” he said. “Sunnis are fighting 
Shiites—Lebanon is devastated— the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor 
states—the North African countries are a metanat—Syria and Iraq hate each 
other—Iraq and Egypt hate each other—we all hate the Iranians, except for the 
Shiites—and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians too—and even 
though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, 
and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouin from Jordan. And everyone 
hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is 
the Arab view, what can I say to you?” He shook his head darkly.
“I guess you say it’s a stupid question,” Art said. “Sorry. Thinking in 
constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this—what do you think of it?”
Nazik laughed. “You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran Mahjaris think. 
He knows them only too well.”
“Too well,” Zeyk repeated.
“Do you think the human-rights section will go with them?”
Zeyk frowned. “No doubt we will sign the constitution.”
“But these rights ... I thought there were no Arab democracies still?”
“What do you mean? There’s Palestine, Egypt.... Anyway it’s Mars we are 
concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the very 
beginning.”
“Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?”
“Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don’t think the new constitution will 
end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader yourself, yes?”
Art laughed uncomfortably. “I’m just a messenger.”
Zeyk shook his head. “Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you should go, if 
you want to know what the Qah-irans think. He is our king now.”
He looked as if he had bit into something sour, and Art said, “So what does he 
want, do you think?”
“He is Jackie’s creature,” Zeyk muttered, “nothingmore.”
“I should think that would be a strike against him.”
Zeyk shrugged.
“It depends who you talk to,” Nazik said. “For the older Muslim immigrants, it 
is a bad association, because although Jackie is very powerful, she has had more 
than one consort, and so Antar looks....”
“Compromised,” Art suggested, forestalling some other word from the glowering 
Zeyk.
“Yes,” Nazik said. “But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And all of the 
people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become even more 
powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are more native 
than Arab, I think. It’s Mars that matters to them more than Islam. From that 
point of view, a close association with the Zygote ectogenes is a good thing. 
The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new Mars—especially Nirgal, 
of course, but with him off to Earth, there’s a certain transfer of his 
influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to Antar.”
“I don’t like him,” Zeyk said.
Nazik smiled at her husband. “You don’t like how many of the native Muslims are 
following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It could be time for 
retirement.”
“I don’t see why,” Zeyk objected. “If we’re going to live a thousand years, then 
what difference does a hundred make?”
Art and Nazik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was, the first time 
Art had ever seen him smile.
 
In fact, age didn’t matter. People wandered around, old or young or somewhere in 
between, talking and arguing, and it -would have been an odd thing for the 
length of someone’s lifetime to become a factor in such discussions.
And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway. If you were 
born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a way that no 
Terran could even imagine—not just because of the whole complex of areorealities 
they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn’t know. Terrans 
knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that cultural and 
biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the screen images, 
but that wasn’t enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one reason Art was 
glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth; he would learn 
what they were up against.
But most of the natives wouldn’t. And the revolution had gone to their heads. 
Despite their cleverness at the table in working the constitution toward a form 
that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive; they had no idea 
how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken 
away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit—led by 
Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic as 
ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars, and her devotion to 
her grandfather’s ideals, and her essential goodwill, even innocence; the 
college girl who wanted passionately for the world to be just.
Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly seemed to want 
to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on Mars now, and 
seven million of those had been born there; and almost every single one of these 
natives could be counted on to support the native political parties, usually 
Free Mars.
“It’s dangerous,” Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly 
meeting with Nadia. “When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that 
don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call 
‘census voting/ where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes; 
and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that 
situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a 
monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some 
of the worst civil wars in history began in those circumstances.”
“So what can we do?” Nadia asked.
“Well, some of it we’re doing already, designing structures that spread the 
power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism. Decentralization is 
important, because it creates a lot of small local majorities. Another strategy 
is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and balances, so that the 
government’s a kind of cat’s cradle of competing forces. This is called 
polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can.”
“Maybe we’re a bit too polyarchic right now,” Art said.
“Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You make some big 
part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and then draft 
ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get professional 
staff help, but make the decisions themselves.”
“I’ve never heard of that one,” Nadia said.
“No. It’s been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think it’s really worth 
considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an advantage. You get a 
letter in the mail; oh no; you’re drafted to do two years in congress. It’s a 
drag, but on the other hand it’s a kind of distinction too, a chance to add 
something to the public discourse. Citizen government.”
“I like that,” Nadia said.
“Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some version of the 
Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates in ranked 
fashion, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get some points 
for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to appeal 
outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation, and in 
the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed before.”
“Interesting,” Nadia exclaimed. “Like trusses in a wall.”
“Yes.” Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran “fractured societies” that 
had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, 
Armenia ... as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit; these had been bloody, 
bloody lands.
“It seems like political structures can only do so much,” he said.
“True,” Nadia said, “but we don’t have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. 
Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been marginalized by the 
terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull 
even them into the process.”
Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were 
structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless 
resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching 
out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of 
her mouth.
“You’re happy,” Art said.
She didn’t hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the travelers, she 
said to Sax, “It was so nice to find that political science had abstracted 
something useful in all these years.”
Eight minutes later his reply came in. “I never understood why they call it 
that.”
Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia Cherneshevsky, 
laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going to pull it off.


 
 
 
 
 
So he went back to the big table, ready to tackle the next-worst problem. That 
brought him back to earth again. There were a hundred next-worst problems, all 
small until you actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In 
all the squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some 
areas, in fact, it seemed to be getting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa 
Brevia document were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more 
radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and 
Marina’s eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not 
something that should be codified in the constitution. Some complained because 
it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional 
capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last 
group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along 
with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, 
and people listened. “This new economy that’s being proposed,” he declared one 
day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, “is a radical and unprecedented 
intrusion of government into business.”
Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over.
Vlad glared at him. Stooped, massive-headed, shaggy-eyebrowed, Vlad rarely if 
ever spoke in public; he hadn’t said a thing in the congress so far. Slowly the 
greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art felt a quiver of 
anticipation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred, Vlad was perhaps 
the most brilliant—and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic. Old when they had 
left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron labs early on and 
stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in seclusion with Ursula 
Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first ones. No one knew anything 
for certain about the three of them, they were a limit-case illustration of the 
insular nature of other people’s relationships; but this of course did not stop 
gossip, on the contrary, people talked about them all the time, saying that 
Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; 
or that Ursula had done most of the work on the longevity treatment, and Marina 
most of the work on eco-economics; or that they were a perfectly balanced 
equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that emerged from Acheron; or that 
Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives as fronts for his work in the 
separate fields of biology and economics. But no one knew for sure, for none of 
the three ever said a word about it.
Watching him stand there at the table, however, one had to suspect that the 
theory about him being just a front man was wrong. He was looking around in a 
fiercely intent, slow glare, capturing them all before he turned his eye again 
on Antar.
“What you said about government and business is absurd,” he stated coldly. It 
was a tone of voice that had not been heard much at the congress so far, 
contemptuous and dismissive. “Governments always regulate the kinds of business 
they allow. Economics is a legal matter, a system of laws. So far, we have been 
saying in the Martian underground that as a matter of law, democracy and 
self-government are the innate rights of every person, and that these rights are 
not to be suspended when a person goes to work. You”—he waved a hand to indicate 
he did not know Antar’s name—”do you believe in democracy and self-rule?”
“Yes!” Antar said defensively.
“Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental values that 
government ought to encourage?”
“Yes!” Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed.
“Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should 
people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we 
fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom 
of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue— control of our 
lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all 
those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day 
we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in 
which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the 
hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to 
feed rulers who do no real work.”
“Business leaders work,” Antar said sharply. “And they take the financial 
risks—”
“The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the privileges of 
capital.”
“Management—”
“Yes yes. Don’t interrupt me. Management is a real thing, a technical matter. 
But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is 
simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to 
everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own 
the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no 
reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. 
No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. 
That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in 
which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger. In which one 
percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five percent of the 
population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth. History has shown which 
values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the injustice and 
suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means 
have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all.
“So. We must change. It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if simple 
justice is a value, then they are values everywhere, including in the workplace 
where we spend so much of our lives. That was what was said in point four of the 
Dorsa Brevia agreement. It says everyone’s work is their own, and the worth of 
it cannot be taken away. It says that the various modes of production belong to 
those who created them, and to the common good of the future generations. It 
says that the world is something we all steward together. That is what it says. 
And in our years on Mars, we have developed an economic system that can keep all 
those promises. That has been our work these last fifty years. In the system we 
have developed, all economic enterprises are to be small cooperatives, owned by 
their workers and by no one else. They hire their management, or manage 
themselves. Industry guilds and co-op associations will form the larger 
structures necessary to regulate trade and the market, share capital, and create 
credit.”
Antar said scornfully, “These are nothing but ideas. It is utopianism and 
nothing more.”
“Not at all.” Again Vlad waved him away. “The system is based on models from 
Terran history, and its various parts have all been tested on both worlds, and 
have succeeded very well. You don’t know about this partly because you are 
ignorant, and partly because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored and 
denied all alternatives to it. But most of our microeconomy has been in 
successful operation for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The 
different parts of the macroeconomy have been used in the pseudo-metanat Praxis, 
in Switzerland, in India’s state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna Italy, and in 
many other places, including the Martian underground itself. These organizations 
were the precursors to our economy, which will be democratic in a way capitalism 
never even tried to be.”
A synthesis of systems. And Vladimir Taneev was a very great synthesist; it was 
said that all the components of the longevity treatment had already been there, 
for instance, and that Vlad and Ursula had simply put them together. Now in his 
economic work with Marina he was claiming to have done the same kind of thing. 
And although he had not mentioned the longevity treatment in this discussion, 
nevertheless it lay there like the table itself, a big cobbled-together 
achievement, part of everyone’s lives. Art looked around and thought he could 
see people thinking, well, he did it once in biology and it worked; could 
economics be more difficult?
Against this unspoken thought, this unthought feeling, Antar’s objections did 
not seem like much. Metanational capitalism’s track record at this point did 
little to support it; in the last century it had precipitated a massive war, 
chewed up the Earth, and torn its societies apart. Why should they not try 
something new, given that record?
Someone from Hiranyagarba stood and made an objection from the opposite 
direction, noting that they seemed to be abandoning the gift economy by which 
the Mars underground had lived.
Vlad shook his head impatiently. “I believe in the underground economy, I assure 
you, but it has always been a mixed economy. Pure gift exchange coexisted with a 
monetary exchange, in which neoclassical market rationality, that is to say the 
profit mechanism, was bracketed and contained by society to direct it to serve 
higher values, such as justice and freedom. Economic rationality is simply not 
the highest value. It is a tool to calculate costs and benefits, only one part 
of a larger equation concerning human welfare. The larger equation is called a 
mixed economy, and that is what we are constructing here. We are proposing a 
complex system, with public and private spheres of economic activity. It may be 
that we ask people to give, throughout their lives, about a year of their work 
to the public good, as in Switzerland’s national service. That labor pool, plus 
taxes on private co-ops for use of the land and its resources, will enable us to 
guarantee the so-called social rights we have been discussing—housing, health 
care, food, education— things that should not be at the mercy of market 
rationality. Because la salute non si paga, as the Italian workers used to say. 
Health is not for sale!”
This was especially important to Vlad, Art could see. Which made sense—for in 
the metanational order, health most certainly had been for sale, not only 
medical care and food and housing, but preeminently the longevity treatment 
itself, which so far had been going only to those who could afford it. Vlad’s 
greatest invention, in other words, had become the property of the privileged, 
the ultimate class distinction—long life or early death—a physicaliza-tion of 
class that almost resembled divergent species. No wonder he was angry; no wonder 
he had turned all his efforts to devising an economic system that would 
transform the longevity treatment from a catastrophic possession to a blessing 
available to all.
“So nothing will be left to the market,” Antar said.
“No no no,” Vlad said, waving at Antar more irritably than ever. “The market 
will always exist. It is the mechanism by which things and services are 
exchanged. Competition to provide the best product at the best price, this is 
inevitable and healthy. But on Mars it will be directed by society in a more 
active way. There will be not-for-profit status to vital life-support matters, 
and then the freest part of the market will be directed away from the basics of 
existence toward nonessentials, where venture enterprises can be undertaken by 
worker-owned co-ops, who will be free to try what they like. When the basics are 
secured and when the workers own their own businesses, why not? It is the 
process of creation we are talking about.”
Jackie, looking annoyed at Vlad’s dismissals of Antar, and perhaps intending to 
divert the old man, or trip him up, said, “What about the ecological aspects of 
this economy that you used to emphasize?”
“They are fundamental,” Vlad said. “Point three of Dorsa Brevia states that the 
land, air, and water of Mars belong to no one, that we are the stewards of it 
for all the future generations. This stewardship will be everyone’s 
responsibility, but in case of conflicts we propose strong environmental courts, 
perhaps as part of the constitutional court, which will estimate the real and 
complete environmental costs of economic activities, and help to coordinate 
plans that impact the environment.”
“But this is simply a planned economy!” Antar cried.
“Economies are plans. Capitalism planned just as much as this, and 
metanationalism tried to plan everything. No, an economy is a plan.”
Antar, frustrated and angry, said, “It’s simply socialism returned.”
Vlad shrugged. “Mars is a new totality. Names from earlier totalities are 
deceptive. They become little more than theological terms. There are elements 
one could call socialist in this system, of course. How else remove injustice 
from economy? But private enterprises will be owned by their workers rather than 
being nationalized, and this is not socialism, at least not socialism as it was 
usually attempted on Earth. And all the co-ops are businesses—small democracies 
devoted to some work of other, all needing capital. There will be a market, 
there will be capital. But in our system workers will hire capital rather than 
the other way around. It’s more democratic that way, more just. Understand me— 
we have tried to evaluate each feature of this economy by how well it aids us to 
reach the goals of more justice and more freedom. And justice and freedom do not 
contradict each other as much as has been claimed, because freedom in an injust 
system is no freedom at all. They both emerge together. And so it is not so 
impossible, really. It is only a matter of enacting a better system, by 
combining elements that have been tested and shown to work. This is the moment 
for that. We have been preparing for this opportunity for seventy years. And now 
that the chance has come, I see no reason to back off just because someone is 
afraid of some old words. If you have any specific suggestions for improvements, 
we’ll be happy to hear them.”
He stared long and hard at Antar. But Antar did not speak; he had no specific 
suggestions.
The room was filled with a charged silence. It was the first and only time in 
the congress that one of the issei had stood up and trounced one of the nisei in 
public debate. Most of the issei liked to take a more subtle line. But now one 
of the ancient radicals had gotten mad and risen up to smite one of the 
neoconservative young power mongers—who now looked like they were advocating a 
new version of an old hierarchy, for purposes of their own. A thought which was 
conveyed very well indeed by Vlad’s long look across the table at Antar, full of 
disgust at his reactionary selfishness, his cowardice in the face of change. 
Vlad sat down; Antar was dismissed.


 
 
 
 
 
But still they argued. Conflict, metaconflict, details, fundamentals; everything 
was on the table, including a magnesium kitchen sink that someone had placed on 
one segment of the table of tables, some three weeks into the process.
And really the delegates in the warehouse were only the tip of the iceberg, the 
most visible part of a gigantic two-world debate. Live transmission of every 
minute of the conference was available everywhere on Mars and in most places on 
Earth, and although the actual realtime tape had a certain documentary 
tediousness to it, Mangalavid concocted a daily highlights film that was shown 
during the timeslip every night, and sent to Earth for very wide distribution. 
It became “the greatest show on Earth” as one American program rather oddly 
dubbed it. “Maybe people are tired of the same old crap on TV,” Art said to 
Nadia one night as they watched a brief, weirdly distorted account of the day’s 
negotiations on American TV.
“Or in the world.”
“Yeah true. They want something else to think about.”
“Or else they’re thinking about what they might do,” Nadia suggested. “So that 
we’re a small-scale model. Easier to understand.”
“Maybe so.”
In any case the two worlds watched, and the congress became, along with 
everything else that it was, a daily soap opera—a soap opera which however held 
an extra attraction for its viewers, somehow, as if in some strange way it held 
the very key to their lives. And perhaps as a result, thousands of spectators 
did more than watch—comments and suggestions were pouring in, and though it 
seemed unlikely to most people on Pavonis that something mailed in would contain 
a startling truth they hadn’t thought of, still all messages were read by groups 
of volunteers in Sheffield and South Fossa, who passed some proposals “up to the 
table.” Some people even advocated including all these suggestions in the final 
constitution; they objected to a “statist legal document,” they wanted it to be 
a larger thing, a collaborative philosophical or even spiritual statement, 
expressing their values, goals, dreams, reflections. “That’s not a 
constitution,” Nadia objected, “that’s a culture. We’re not the damn library 
here.” But included or not, long communiques continued to come in, from the 
tents and canyons and the drowned coastlines of Earth, signed by individuals, 
committees, entire town populations.
Discussions in the warehouse were just as wide-ranging as in the mail. A Chinese 
delegate approached Art and spoke in Mandarin to him, and when he paused for a 
while, his AI began to speak, in a lovely Scottish accent. “To tell the truth 
I’ve begun to doubt that you’ve sufficiently consulted Adam Smith’s important 
book Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
“You may be right,” Art said, and referred the man to Charlotte.
Many people in the warehouse were speaking languages other than English, and 
relying on translation AIs to communicate with the rest. At any given moment 
there were conversations in a dozen different languages, and AI translators were 
heavily used. Art still found them a little distracting. He wished it were 
possible to know all these languages, even though the latest generations of AI 
translators were really pretty good: voices well modulated, vocabularies large 
and accurate, grammar excellent, phrasing almost free of the errors that had 
made earlier translation programs such a great party game. The new ones had 
gotten so good that it seemed possible that the English-language dominance that 
had created an almost monoglot Martian culture might begin to receue. The issei 
had of course brought all languages with them, but English had been their lingua 
franca; the nisei had therefore used English to communicate among themselves, 
while their “primary” languages were used only to speak to their parents; and 
so, for a while, English had become the natives’ native tongue. But now with the 
new AIs, and a continuing stream of new immigrants speaking the full array of 
Terran languages, it looked like things might broaden back out again, as new 
nisei stayed with their primary languages and used AIs as their lingua franca 
instead of English.
This linguistic matter illustrated to Art a complexity in the native population 
that he hadn’t noticed before. Some natives were yonsei, fourth generation or 
younger, and very definitely children of Mars; but other natives the very same 
age were the nisei children of recent issei immigrants, tending to have closer 
ties with the Terran cultures they had come from, with all the conservatism that 
implied. So that there were new native “conservatives,” and old settler-family 
native “radicals,” one might say. And this split only occasionally correlated 
with ethnicity or nationality, when these still mattered to them at all. One 
night Art was talking with a couple of them, one a global government advocate, 
the other an anarchist backing all local autonomy proposals, and he asked them 
about their origins. The globalist’s father was half-Japanese, a quarter Irish, 
and a quarter Tan-zanian; her mother had a Greek mother and a father with 
parents Colombian and Australian. The anarchist had a Nigerian father and a 
mother who was from Hawaii, and thus had a mixed ancestry of Filipino, Japanese, 
Polynesian and Portuguese. Art stared at them: if one were to think in terms of 
ethnic voting blocks, how would one categorize these people? One couldn’t. They 
were Martian natives. Nisei, sansei, yonsei—whatever generation, they had been 
formed in large part by their Martian experience—areoformed, just as Hiroko had 
always foretold. Many had married within their own national or ethnic 
background, but many more had not. And no matter what their ancestry, their 
political opinions tended to reflect not that background (just what would the 
Graeco-Colombian-Australian position be? Art wondered), but their own 
experience. This itself had been quite varied: some had grown up in the 
underground, others had been born in the UN-controlled big cities, and only come 
to an awareness of the underground later in life, or even at the moment of the 
revolution itself. These differences tended to affect them much more than where 
their Terran ancestors had happened to live.
Art nodded as the natives explained these things to him, in the long kava-buzzed 
parties running deep into the night. People at these parties were in 
increasingly high spirits, as the congress was, they felt, going well. They did 
not take the debates among the issei very seriously; they were confident that 
their core beliefs would prevail. Mars would be independent, it would be run by 
Martians, what Earth wanted did not matter; beyond that, it was detail. Thus 
they went about their work in the committees without much attention paid to the 
philosophical arguments around the table of tables. “The old dogs keep 
growling,” said one message on the big message board; this seemed to express a 
general native opinion. And the work in the committees went on.
The big message board was a pretty good indicator of the mood of the congress. 
Art read it the way he read fortune cookies, and indeed one day there was one 
message that said, “You like Chinese food.” Usually the messages were more 
political than that. Often they were things said in the previous days of the 
conference: “No tent is an island.” “If you can’t afford housing then the right 
to vote is a bad joke.” “Keep your distance, don’t change speed, don’t run into 
anything.” “La salute non si paga.” Then there were things that had not been 
said: “Do unto others.” “The Reds have green roots.” “The Greatest Show on 
Earth.” “No Kings No Presidents.” “Big Man Hates Politics.” “However: We Are the 
Little Red People.”
 
So Art was no longer surprised when he was approached by people who spoke in 
Arabic or Hindi or some language he did not recognize, then looked him in the 
eye while their AI spoke in English with an accent from the BBC or Middle 
America or the New Delhi civil service, expressing some kind of unpredictable 
political sentiment. It was encouraging, really—not the translation AIs, which 
were just another kind of distancing, less extreme than teleparticipation but 
still not quite “talking face-to-face”—but the political melange, the 
impossibility of block voting, .or of even thinking in the normal 
constituencies.
It was a strange congregation, really. But it went on, and eventually everyone 
got used to it; it took on that al-ways-already quality that extended events 
often gain over their duration. But once, very late at night, after a long 
bizarre translated conversation in which the AI on the wrist of the young woman 
he was talking to spoke in rhymed couplets (and he never knew what language she 
was speaking to start with), Art wandered back through the warehouse toward his 
office suite, around the table of tables, where work was still going even though 
it was after the timeslip, and he stopped to say hi to one group; and then, 
momentum lost, slumped back against a side wall, half watching, half drowsing, 
his kavajava buzz nearly overwhelmed by exhaustion. And the strangeness came 
back, all at once. It was a kind of hypnagogic vision. There were shadows in the 
corners, innumerable flickering shadows; and eyes in the shadows. Shapes, like 
insubstantial bodies: all the dead, it suddenly seemed, and all the unborn all 
there in the warehouse with them, to witness this moment. As if history were a 
tapestry, and the congress the loom where everything was coming together, the 
present moment with its miraculous thereness, its potential right in their own 
atoms, their own voices. Looking back at the past, able to see it all, a single 
long braided tapestry of events; looking forward at the future, able to see none 
of it, though presumably it branched out in an explosion of threads of 
potentiality, and could become anything: they were two different kinds of 
unreachable immensity. And all of them traveling together, from the one into the 
other, through that great loom the present, the now. Now was their chance, for 
all of them together in this present—the ghosts could watch, from before and 
after, but this was the moment when what wisdom they could muster had to be 
woven together, to be passed on to all the future generations.


 
 
 
 
 
They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to 
bring the congress to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in 
the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming 
the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, 
this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality 
to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so 
delicious—the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good 
governments of all time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen 
synthesis—or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of 
just government. ... To go from that to the mundane problematic of the 
constitution as written was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put 
it off.
On the other hand, it would certainly be a good thing if their diplomatic team 
were to arrive on Earth with a completed document to present to the UN and the 
people of Earth. Really, there was no avoiding it; they needed to finish; not 
just to present to Earth the united front of an established government, but also 
to start living their postcrisis life, whatever it might be.
Nadia felt this strongly, and so she began to exert herself. “Time to drop the 
keystone in the arch,” she said to Art one morning. And from then on she was 
indefatigable, meeting with all the delegations and committees, insisting that 
they finish whatever they were working on, insisting they get it on the table 
for a final vote on inclusion. This inexorable insistence of hers revealed 
something that had not been clear before, which was that most of the issues had 
been resolved to the satisfaction of most of the delegations. They had concocted 
something workable, most agreed, or at least worth trying, with amendment 
procedures prominent’in the structure so that they could alter aspects of the 
system as they went along. The young natives in particular seemed happy—proud of 
their work, and pleased that they had managed to keep an emphasis on local 
semiautonomy, institutionalizing the way most of them had lived under the 
Transitional Authority.
Thus the many checks against majoritarian rule did not bother them, even though 
they themselves were the current majority. In order not to look defeated by this 
development, Jackie and her circle had to pretend they had never argued for a 
strong presidency and central government in the first place; indeed they claimed 
that an executive council, elected by the legislature in the Swiss manner, had 
been their idea all along. A lot of that kind of thing was going on, and Art was 
happy to agree with all such claims: “Yes, I remember, we were wondering what to 
do about that the night when we stayed up to see the sunrise, it was a good 
thought you had.”
Good ideas everywhere. And they began to spiral down toward closure.
The global government as they had designed it was to be a confederation, led by 
an executive council of seven members, elected by a two-housed legislature. One 
legislative branch, the duma, was composed of a large group of representatives 
drafted from the populace; the other, the senate, a smaller group elected one 
from each town or village group larger than five hundred people. The legislature 
was all in all fairly weak; it elected the executive council and helped select 
justices of the courts, and left to the towns most legislative duties. The 
judicial branch was more powerful; it included not only criminal courts, but 
also a kind of double supreme court, one half a constitutional court, and the 
other half an environmental court, with members to both appointed, elected, and 
drawn by lottery. The environmental court would rule on disputes concerning 
ter-raforming and other environmental changes, while the constitutional court 
would rule on the constitutionality of all other issues, including challenged 
town laws. One arm of the environmental court would be a land commission, 
charged with overseeing the stewardship of the land, which was to belong to all 
Martians together, in keeping with point three of the Dorsa Brevia agreement; 
there would not be private property as such, but there would be various tenure 
rights established in leasing contracts, and the land commission was to work 
these matters out. A corresponding economic commission would function under the 
constitutional court, and would be partly composed of representatives from guild 
cooperatives which would be established for the various professions and 
industries. This commission was to oversee the establishment of a version of the 
underground’s eco-economics, including both not-for-profit enterprises 
concentrating on the public sphere, and taxed for-profit enterprises which had 
legal size limits, and were by law employee-owned.
This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for a strong 
global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was also a 
response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the previous 
century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or otherwise 
collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held firm, 
issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the land, in a 
mostly ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the metanats’ 
depredations; a moral force, which.if it had had more teeth, might have done 
more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle fought, and 
now they remembered.
Thus the Martian global government. The constitution then also included a long 
list of human rights, including social rights; guidelines for the land 
commission and the economics commission; an Australian ballot election system 
for the elective offices; a system for amendments; and so on. Lastly, to the 
main text of the constitution they appended the huge collection of materials 
that had accumulated in the process, calling it Working Notes and Commentary. 
This was to be used to help the courts interpret the main document, and included 
everything the delegations had said at the table of tables, or written on the 
warehouse screens, or received in the mail.
 
So most of the sticky issues had been resolved, or at least swept under the rug; 
the biggest outstanding dispute was the Red objection. Art went into action 
here, orchestrating several late concessions to the Reds, including many early 
appointments to the environmental courts; these concessions were later termed 
the “Grand Gesture.” In return Ir-ishka, speaking for all the Reds still 
involved in the political process, agreed that the cable would stay, that UNTA 
would have a presence in Sheffield, that Terrans would still be able to 
immigrate, subject to restrictions; and lastly, that terra-forming would 
continue, in slow nondisruptive forms, until the atmospheric pressure at six 
kilometers above the datum was 350 millibars, this figure to be reviewed every 
five years. And so the Red impasse was broken, or at least finessed.
Coyote shook his head at the way things had developed. “After every revolution 
there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, 
and then the new regime comes in and screws things up. I think what you should 
do now is go out to the tents and canyons, and ask them very humbly how they 
have been running things these past two months, and then throw this fancy 
constitution away and say, continue.”
“But that’s what the constitution does say,” Art joked.
Coyote would not kid about this. “You must be Very scrupulous not to gather 
power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the 
basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.”
As for UNTA, it was harder to tell what they thought, because opinions back on 
Earth were divided, with a loud faction calling for the retaking of Mars by 
force, everyone on Pavonis to be jailed or hanged. Most Terrans were more 
accommodating, and all of them were still distracted by the ongoing crisis at 
home. And at the moment, they didn’t matter as much as the Reds; that was the 
space the revolution had given the Martians. Now they were about to fill it.
 
Every night of the final week, Art went to bed incoherent with cavils and kava, 
and though exhausted he would wake fairly often during the night, and roll under 
the force of some seemingly lucid thought that in the morning would be gone, or 
revealed as lunatic. Nadia slept just as poorly on the couch next to his, or in 
her chair. Sometimes they would fall asleep talking over some point or other, 
and wake up dressed but entangled, holding on to each other like children in a 
thunderstorm. The warmth of another body was a comfort like nothing else. And 
once in the dim predawn ultraviolet light they both woke up, and talked for 
hours in the cold silence of the building, in a little cocoon of warmth and 
companionship. Another mind to talk to. From colleagues to friends; from there 
to lovers, maybe; or something like lovers; Nadia did not seem inclined to 
romanticism of any kind. But Art was in love, no doubt about it, and there 
twinkled in Nadia’s flecked eyes a new fondness for him, he thought. So that at 
the end of the long final days of the congress, they lay on their couches and 
talked, and she would knead his shoulders, or him hers, and then they would fall 
comatose, pounded by exhaustion. There was more pressure to ushering in this 
document than either one of them wanted to admit, except in these moments, 
huddling together against the cold big world. A new love: Art, despite Nadia’s 
unsentimentality, found no other way to put it. He was happy.
And he was amused, but not surprised, when they got up one morning and she said, 
“Let’s put it to a vote.”
 
So Art talked to the Swiss and the Dorsa Brevia scholars, and the Swiss proposed 
to the congress that they vote on the version of the constitution currently on 
the table, voting point by point as they had promised in the beginning. 
Immediately there was a spasm of vote trading that made Terran stock exchanges 
look subtle and slow. Meanwhile the Swiss set up a voting sequence, and over the 
course of three days they ran through it, allowing one vote to each group on 
each numbered paragraph of the draft constitution. All eighty-nine paragraphs 
passed, and the massive collection of “explanatory material” was officially 
appended to the main text.
After that it was time to put it to the people of Mars for approval. So on Ls 
158, October llth, m-year 52 (on Earth, February 27, 2128), the general populace 
of Mars, including everyone over five m-years old, voted by wrist on the 
resulting document. Over ninety-five percent of the population voted, and the 
constitution passed seventy-eight percent to twenty-two percent, garnering just 
over nine million votes. They had a government.


 
 
PART FOUR
               ---------
---Green Earth
               ---------
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
On Earth, meanwhile, the great flood dominated everything.
The flood had been caused by a cluster of violent volcanic eruptions under the 
west Antarctic ice sheet. The land underneath the ice sheet, resembling North 
America’s basin and range country, had been depressed by the weight of the ice 
until it lay below sea level. So when the eruptions began the lava and gases had 
melted the ice over the volcanoes, causing vast slippages overhead; at the same 
time, ocean water had started to pour in under the ice, at various points around 
the swiftly eroding grounding line. Destabilized and shattering, enormous 
islands of ice had broken off all around the edges of the Ross Sea and the Ronne 
Sea. As these islands of ice floated away on the ocean currents, the breakup 
continued to move inland, and the turbulence caused the process to accelerate. 
In the months following the first big breaks, the Antarctic Sea filled with 
immense tabular icebergs, which displaced so much water that sea level all over 
the world rose. Water continued to rush into the depressed basin in west 
Antarctica that the ice had once filled, floating out the rest of it berg by 
berg, until the ice sheet was entirely gone, replaced by a shallow new sea 
roiled by the continuing underwater eruptions, which were being compared in 
their severity to the Deccan Traps eruptions of the late Cretaceous.
And so, a year after the eruptions began, Antarctica was only a bit over half as 
big as it had been—east Antarctic like a half-moon, the Antarctic peninsula like 
an iced-over New Zealand— in between them, a berg-clotted bubbling shallow sea. 
And around the rest of the world, sea level was seven meters higher than it had 
been before.
Not since the last ice age, ten thousand years before, had humanity experienced 
a natural catastrophe of such magnitude. And this time it affected not just a 
few million hunter-gatherers in nomadic tribes, but fifteen billion civilized 
citizens, living atop a precarious sociotechnological edifice which had already 
been in great danger of collapse. All the big coastal cities were inundated, 
whole countries like Bangladesh and Holland and Belize were awash. Most of the 
unfortunates who lived in such low-lying regions had time to move to higher 
ground, for the surge was more like a tide than a tidal wave; and then there 
they all were, somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the world’s 
population—refugees.
It goes without saying that human society was not equipped to handle such a 
situation. Even in the best of times it would not have been easy, and the early 
twenty-second century had not been the best of times. Populations were still 
rising, resources were more and more depleted, conflicts between rich and poor, 
governments and metanats, had been sharpening everywhere: the catastrophe had 
struck in the midst of a crisis.
To a certain extent, the catastrophe canceled the crisis. In the face of 
worldwide desperation, power struggles of all kinds were recontextualized, many 
rendered phantasmagorical;. there were whole populations in need, and legalities 
of ownership and profit paled in comparison to the problem. The United Nations 
rose like some aquatic phoenix out of the chaos, and became the clearinghouse 
for the vast number of emergency relief efforts: migrations inland across 
national borders, construction of emergency accommodations, distribution of 
emergency food and supplies. Because of the nature of this work, with its 
emphasis on rescue and relief, Switzerland and Praxis were in the forefront of 
helping the UN. UNESCO returned from the dead, along with the World Health 
Organization. India and China, as the largest of the badly devastated countries, 
were also extremely influential in the current situation, because how they chose 
to cope made a big difference everywhere. They made alliances with each other, 
and with the UN and its new allies; they refused all help from the Group of 
Eleven, and the metanationals that were now fully intertwined into the affairs 
of most of the Gl 1 governments.
In other ways-, however, the catastrophe only exacerbated the crisis. The 
metanationals themselves were cast into a very curious position by the flood. 
Before its onset they had been absorbed in what commentators had been calling 
the metanatricide, fighting among themselves for final control of the world 
economy. A few big metanational superclusters had been jockeying for ultimate 
control of the largest industrial countries, and attempting to subsume the few 
entities still out of their control: Switzerland, India, China, Praxis, the 
so-called World Court countries, and so on. Now, with much of the population of 
Earth occupied in dealing with the flood, the metanats were mostly struggling to 
regain what control they had had of affairs. In the popular mind they were often 
linked to the flood, as cause, or as punished sinners—a very convenient bit of 
magical thinking for Mars and the other antimetanational forces, all of whom 
were doing their best to seize this chance to beat the metanats to pieces while 
they were down. The Group of Eleven and the other industrial governments 
previously associated with the metanats were scrambling to keep their own 
populations alive, and so could spare little effort to help the great 
conglomerates. And people everywhere were abandoning their previous jobs to join 
the various relief efforts; Praxis-style employee-owned enterprises were gaining 
in popularity as they took on the emergency, at the same time offering all their 
members the longevity treatment. Some of the metanats held on to their workforce 
by reconfiguring along these same lines. And so the struggle for power continued 
on many levels, but everywhere rearranged by the catastrophe.
In that context, Mars to most Terrans was completely irrelevant. Oh it made for 
an interesting story, of course, and many cursed the Martians as ungrateful 
children, abandoning their parents in the parents’ hour of need; it was one 
example among many of bad responses to the flood, to be contrasted to the 
equally plentiful good responses. There were heroes and villains all over these 
days, and most regarded the Martians as villains, rats escaping a sinking ship. 
Others regarded them as potential saviors, in some ill-defined way: another bit 
of magical thinking, by and large; but there was something hopeful in the notion 
of a new society forming on the next world out.
Meanwhile, no matter what happened on Mars, the people of Earth struggled to 
cope with the flood. The damage now began to include rapid climactic changes: 
more cloud cover, reflecting more sunlight and causing temperatures to drop, 
also creating torrential rainstorms, which often wrecked much-needed crops, and 
sometimes fell where rain had seldom fallen before, in the Sahara, theMojave, 
northern Chile—bringing the great flood far inland, in effect, bringing its 
impact everywhere. And with agriculture hammered by these new severe storms, 
hunger itself became an issue; any general sense of cooperation was therefore 
threatened, as it seemed that perhaps not everyone could be fed, and the 
cowardly spoke of triage. And so every part of Terra was in turmoil, like an 
anthill stirred by a stick.
So that was Earth in the summer of 2128: an unprecedented catastrophe, an 
ongoing universal crisis. The antediluvian world already seemed like no more 
than a bad dream from which they had all been rudely awakened, cast into an even 
more dangerous reality. From the frying pan into the fire, yes; and some people 
tried to get them back into the frying pan, while others struggled to get them 
off the stove; and no one could say what would happen next.


 
 
 
 
 
An invisible vise clamped down on Nirgal, each day more crushing than the last. 
Maya moaned and groaned about it, Michel and Sax did not seem to care; Michel 
was very happy to be making this trip, and Sax was absorbed in watching reports 
from the congress on Pavonis Mons. They lived in the rotating chamber of the 
spaceship Atlantis, and over the five months of the trip the chamber would 
accelerate until the centrifugal force shifted from Mars equivalent to Earth 
equivalent, remaining there for almost half the voyage. This was a method that 
had been worked out over the years, to accommodate emigrants who decided they 
wanted to return home, diplomats traveling back and forth, and the few Martian 
natives who had made the voyage to Earth. For everyone it was hard. Quite a few 
of the natives had gotten sick on Earth; some had died. It was important to stay 
in the gravity chamber, do one’s exercises, take one’s inoculations.
Sax and Michel worked out on exercise machines; Nirgal and Maya sat in the 
blessed baths, commiserating. Of course Maya enjoyed her misery, as she seemed 
to enjoy all her emotions, including rage and melancholy; while Nirgal was truly 
miserable, spacetime bending him in an ever more tortuous torque, until every 
cell of him cried out with the pain of it. It frightened him—the effort it took 
just to breathe, the idea of a planet so massive. Hard to believe!
He tried to talk to Michel about it, but Michel was distracted by his 
anticipation, his preparation. Sax by the events on Mars. Nirgal didn’t care 
about the meeting back on Pavonis, it would not matter much in the long run, he 
judged. The natives in the outback had lived the way they wanted to under UNTA, 
and they would do the same under the new government. Jackie might succeed in 
making a presidency for herself, and that would be too bad; but no matter what 
happened, their relationship had gone strange, become a kind of telepathy which 
sometimes resembled the old passionate love affair but just as often felt like a 
vicious sibling rivalry, or even the internal arguments of a schizoid self. 
Perhaps they were twins, who knew what kind of alchemy Hiroko had performed in 
the ectogene tanks—but no—Jackie had been born of Esther. He knew that. If it 
proved anything. For to his dismay, she felt like his other self; he did not 
want that, he did not want the sudden speeding of his heart whenever he saw her. 
It was one of the reasons he had decided to join the expedition to Earth. And 
now he was getting away from her at the rate of fifty thousand kilometers an 
hour, but there she still was on the screen, happy at the ongoing work of the 
congress, and her part in it. And she would be one of the seven on the new 
executive council, no doubt about it.
“She is counting on history to take its usual course,” May a said as they sat in 
the baths watching the news. “Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps 
and then starts to draw more into itself. This local power, spread out through 
the tents—” She shrugged cynically.
“Perhaps it’s a nova,” Nirgal suggested.
She laughed. “Yes, perhaps. But then it starts clumping again. That’s the 
gravity of history—power drawn into centers, until there is an occasional nova. 
Then a new drawing in. We’ll see it on Mars too, you mark my words. And Jackie 
will be right at the middle of it—” She stopped before adding the bitch, in 
respect for Nirgal’s feelings. Regarding him with a curious hooded gaze, as if 
wondering what she might do with Nirgal that would advance her never-ending war 
with Jackie. Little novas of the heart.
The last weeks of one g passed, and never did Nirgal begin to feel comfortable. 
It was frightening to feel the clamping pressure on his breath and his thinking. 
His joints hurt. On the screens he saw images of the little blue-and-white 
marble that was the Earth, with the bone button of Luna looking peculiarly flat 
and dead beside it. But they were just more screen images, they meant nothing to 
him compared to his sore feet, his beating heart. Then the blue world suddenly 
blossomed and filled the screens entirely, its curved limb a white line, the 
blue water all patterned by white cloud swirls, the continents peaking out from 
cloud patterns like little rebuses of half-remembered myth: Asia. Africa. 
Europe. America.
For the final descent and aerobraking the gravity chamber’s rotation was 
stopped. Nirgal, floating, feeling disembodied and balloonlike, pulled to a 
window to see it all with his own eyes. Despite the window glass and the 
thousands of kilometers of distance, the detail was startling in its sharp-edged 
clarity. “The eye has such power,” he said to Sax.
“Hmm,” Sax said, and came to the window to look.
They watched the Earth, blue before them.
“Are you ever afraid?” Nirgal asked.
“Afraid?”
“You know.” Sax on this voyage had not been in one of his more coherent phases; 
many things had to be explained to him. “Fear. Apprehension. Fright.”
“Yes. I think so. I was afraid, yes. Recently. When I found I was... 
disoriented.”
“I’m afraid now.”
Sax looked at him curiously. Then he floated over and put a hand to Nirgal’s 
arm, in a gentle gesture quite unlike him. “We’re here,” he said.
 
Dropping dropping. There were ten space elevators stranding out from Earth now. 
Several of them were what they called split cables, dividing into two branching 
strands that touched down north and south of the equator, which was woefully 
short of decent socket locations. One split cable Y-ed down to Virac in the 
Philippines and Oobagooma in western Australia, another to Cairo and Durban. The 
one they were descending split some ten thousand kilometers above the Earth, the 
north line touching down near Port of Spain, Trinidad, while the southern one 
dropped into Brazil near Aripuana, a boomtown on a tributary of the Amazon 
called the Theodore Roosevelt River.
They were taking the north fork, down to Trinidad. From their elevator car they 
looked down on most of the Western Hemisphere, centered over the Amazon basin, 
where brown water veined through the green lungs of Earth. Down and down; in the 
five days of their descent the world approached until it eventually filled 
everything below them, and the crushing gravity of the previous month and a half 
once again slowly took them in its grasp and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed. What 
little tolerance Nirgal had developed for the weight seemed to have disappeared 
during the brief return to microgravity, and now he gasped. Every breath an 
effort. Standing foursquare before the windows, hands clenched to the rails, he 
looked down through clouds on the brilliant blue of the Caribbean, the intense 
greens of Venezuela. The Orinoco’s discharge into the sea was a leafy stain. The 
limb of the sky was composed of curved bands of white and turquoise, with the 
black of space above. All so glossy. The clouds were the same as on Mars but 
thicker, whiter, more stuffed with themselves. The intense gravity was perhaps 
exerting an extra pressure on his retina or optic nerve, to make the colors push 
and pulse so hard. Sounds were noisier.
In the elevator with them were UN diplomats, Praxis aides, media 
representatives, all hoping for the Martians to give them some time, to talk to 
them. Nirgal found it difficult to focus on them, to listen to them. Everyone 
seemed so strangely unaware of their position in space, there five hundred 
kilometers over the surface of the Earth, and falling fast.
A long last day. Then they were in the atmosphere, and then the cable led their 
car down onto the green square of Trinidad, into a huge socket complex next to 
an abandoned airport, its runways like gray runes. The elevator car slid down 
into the concrete mass. It decelerated; it came to a stop.
Nirgal detached his hands from the rail, and walked carefully after all the 
others, plod, plod, the weight all through him, plod, plod. They plodded down a 
jetway. He stepped onto the floor of a building on Earth. The interior of the 
socket resembled the one on Pavonis Mons, an incongruous familiarity, for the 
air was salty, thick, hot, clangorous, heavy. Nirgal hurried as much as he could 
through the halls, wanting to get outside and see things at last. A whole crowd 
trailed him, surrounded him, but the Praxis aides understood, they made a way 
for him through a growing crowd. The building was huge, apparently he had missed 
a chance to take a subway out of it. But there was a doorway glowing with light. 
Slightly dizzy with the effort, he walked out into a blinding glare. Pure 
whiteness. It reeked of salt, fish, leaves, tar, shit, spices: like a greenhouse 
gone mad.
Now his eyes were adjusting. The sky was blue, a turquoise blue like the middle 
band of the limb as seen from space, but lighter; whiter over the hills, 
magnesium around the sun. Black spots swam this way and that. The cable threaded 
up into the sky. It was too bright to look up. Green hills in the distance.
He stumbled as they led him to an open car—an antique, small and rounded, with 
rubber tires. A convertible. He stood up in the backseat between Sax and Maya, 
just to see better. In the glare of light there were hundreds of people, 
thousands, dressed in astonishing costumes, neon silks, pink purple teal gold 
aquamarine, jewels, feathers, headdresses—”Carnival,” someone in the front seat 
of the car said up to him, “we dress in costumes for Carnival, also for 
Discovery Day, when Columbus arrived on the island. That was just a week ago, so 
we’ve continued the festival for your arrival too.”
“What’s the date?” Sax asked.
“Nirgal day! August eleven.”
They drove slowly, down streets lined with cheering people. One group was 
dressed like the natives before the Europeans arrived, shouting wildly. Mouths 
pink and white in brown faces. Voices like music, everyone singing. The people 
in the car sounded like Coyote. There were people in the crowd wearing Coyote 
masks, Desmond Hawkins’s cracked face twisted into rubbery expressions beyond 
what even he could achieve. And words—Nirgal had thought that on Mars he had 
encountered every possible distortion of English, but it was hard to follow what 
the Trinidadians said: accent, diction, intonation, he couldn’t tell why. He was 
sweating freely but still felt hot.
The car, bumpy and slow, ran between the walls of people to a short bluff. 
Beyond it lay a harbor district, now immersed in shallow water. Buildings 
swamped in the water stood in patches of dirty foam, rocking on unseen waves. A 
whole neighborhood now a tide pool, the houses giant exposed mussels, some 
broken open, water sloshing in and out their windows, rowboats bobbing between 
them. Bigger boats were tied to streetlights and power-line poles out where the 
buildings stopped. Farther out sailboats tilted on the sun-beaten blue, each 
boat with two or three taut fore-and-aft sails. Green hills rising to the right, 
forming a big open bay. “Fishing boats still coming in through the streets, but 
the big ships use the bauxite docks down at Point T, see out there?”
Fifty different shades of green on the hills. Palm trees in the shallows were 
dead, their fronds drooping yellow. These marked the tidal zone; above it green 
burst out everywhere. Streets and buildings were hacked out of a vegetable 
world. Green and white, as in his childhood vision, but here the two primal 
colors were separated out, held in a blue egg of sea and sky. They were just 
above the waves and yet the horizon was so far away! Instant evidence of the 
size of this world. No wonder they had thought the Earth was flat. The white 
water sloshing through the streets below made a continuous krmr sound, as loud 
as the cheers of the crowd.
The rank stench was suddenly cut by the smell of tar on the wind. “Pitch Lake 
down by La Brea all dug out and shipped away, nothing left but a black hole in 
the ground, and a little pond we use locally. See that’s what you smell, new 
road here by the water.” Asphalt road, sweating mirages. People jammed the black 
roadside; they all had black hair. A young woman climbed the car to put a 
necklace of flowers around his neck. Their sweet scent clashed with the stinging 
salt haze. Perfume and incense, chased by the hot vegetable wind, tarred and 
spiced. Steel drums, so familiar in all the hard noise, pinging and panging, 
they played Martian music here! The rooftops in the drowned district to their 
left now supported ramshackle patios. The stench was of a greenhouse gone bad, 
things rotting, a hot wet press of air and everything blazing in a talcum of 
light. Sweat ran freely down his skin. People cheered from the flooded rooftops, 
from boats, the water coated with flowers floating up and down on the foam. 
Black hair gleaming like chitin or jewels. A floating wood dock piled with 
several bands, playing different tunes all at once. Fish scales and flower 
petals strewn underfoot, silver and red and black dots swimming.
Flung flowers flashed by on the wind, streaks of pure color, yellow pink and 
red. The driver of their car turned around to talk, ignoring the road, “Hear the 
duglas play soaka music, pan music, listen that cuttin contest, the best five 
bands in Port a Spain.”
They passed through an old neighborhood, visibly ancient, the buildings made of 
small crumbling bricks, capped by corrugated metal roofs, or even thatch—all 
ancient, tiny, the people tiny too, brown-skinned, “The countryside Hindu, the 
cities black. T ‘n T mix them, that’s dugla.” Grass covered the ground, burst 
out of every crack in the walls, out of roofs, out of potholes, out of 
everything not recently paved by tarry asphalt—an explosive surge of green, 
pouring out of every surface of the world. The thick air reeked! Then they 
emerged from the ancient district onto a broad asphalt boulevard, flanked by big 
trees and large marble buildings. “Metanat grabhighs, looked big when they first 
built, but nothing grab as high as the cable.” Sour sweat, sweet smoke, 
everything blazing green, he had to shut his eyes so that he wouldn’t be sick. 
“You okay?” Insects whirred, the air was so hot he couldn’t guess its 
temperature, it had gone off his personal scale. He sat down heavily between 
Maya and Sax.
The car stopped. He stood again, with an effort, and got out, and had trouble 
walking; he almost fell, everything was swinging around. Maya held his arm hard. 
He gripped his temples, breathed through his mouth. “Are you okay?” she asked 
sharply.
“Yes,” Nirgal said, and tried to nod. They were in a complex of raw new 
buildings. Unpainted wood, concrete, bare dirt now covered with crushed flower 
petals. People everywhere, almost all in Carnival costume. The singe of the sun 
in his eyes wouldn’t go away. He was led to a wooden dais, above a throng of 
people cheering madly.
A beautiful black-haired woman in a green sari, with a white sash belting it, 
introduced the four Martians to the crowd. The hills behind bent like green 
flames in a strong western wind; it was cooler than before, and less smelly. 
Maya stood before the microphones and cameras, and the years fell away from her; 
she spoke crisp isolated sentences that were cheered antiphonally, call and 
response, call and response. A media star with the whole world watching, 
comfortably charismatic, laying out what sounded to Nirgal like her speech in 
Burroughs at the crux point of the revolution, when she had rallied and focused 
the crowd in Princess Park. Something like that.
Michel and Sax declined to speak, they waved Nirgal up there to face the crowd 
and the green hills holding them up to the sun. For a time as he stood there he 
could not hear himself think. White noise of cheers, thick sound in the thicker 
air.
“Mars is a mirror,” he said in the microphone, “in which Terra sees its own 
essence. The move to Mars was a purifying voyage, stripping away all but the 
most important things. What arrived in the end was Terran through and through. 
And what has happened since there has been an expression of Terran thought and 
Terran genes. And so, more than any material aid in scarce metals or new genetic 
strains, we can most help the home planet by serving as a way for you to see 
yourselves. As a way to map out an unimaginable immensity. Thus in our small way 
we do our part to create the great civilization that trembles on the brink of 
becoming. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.”
Loud cheers.
“That’s what it looks like to us on Mars, anyway—a long evolution through the 
centuries, toward justice and peace. As people learn more, they understand 
better their dependence on each other and on their world. On Mars we have seen 
that the best way to express this interdependence is to live for giving, in a 
culture of compassion. Every person free and equal in the sight of all, working 
together for the good of all. It’s that work that makes us most free. No 
hierarchy is worth acknowledging but this one: the more we give, the greater we 
become. Now in the midst of a great flood, spurred by the great flood, we see 
the flowering of this culture of compassion, emerging on both the two worlds at 
once.”
 
He sat in a blaze of noise. Then the speeches were over and they had shifted 
into some kind of public press conference, responding to questions asked by the 
beautiful woman in the green sari. Nirgal responded with questions of his own, 
asking her about the new compound of buildings surrounding them, and about the 
situation on the island; and she answered over a chatter of commentary and 
laughter from the appreciative crowd, still looking on from behind the wall of 
reporters and cameras. The woman turned out to be the prime minister of Trinidad 
and Tobago. The little two-island nation had been unwillingly dominated by the 
metanat Armscor for most of the previous century, the woman explained, and only 
since the flood had they severed that association, “and every colonial bond at 
last.” How the crowd cheered! And her smile, so full of a whole society’s 
pleasure. She was dugla, he saw, and amazingly beautiful.
The compound they were in, she explained, was one of scores of relief hospitals 
that had been built on the two islands since the flood. Their construction had 
been the major project of the islanders in response to their new freedom; they 
had created relief centers that aided flood victims, giving them all at once 
housing, work, and medical care, including the longevity treatment.
“Everyone gets the treatment?” Nirgal asked.
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Good!” Nirgal said, surprised; he had heard it was a rare thing on Earth.
“You think so!” the prime minister said. “People are saying it will create all 
kinds of problems.”
“Yes. It will, in fact. But I think we should do it anyway. Give everyone the 
treatment and then figure out what to do.”
It was a minute or two before anything more could be heard over the cheering of 
the crowd. The prime minister was trying to quiet them, but a short man dressed 
in a fashionable brown suit came out of the group behind the prime minister and 
proclaimed into the mike, to an uproar of cheers at every sentence, “This 
Marsman Nirgal is a son of Trinidad! His papa, Desmond Hawkins the Stowaway, the 
Coyote of Mars, is from Port of Spain, and he still has a lot of people there! 
That Armscor bought the oil company and they tried to buy the island too, but 
they picked the wrong island to try! Your Coyote didn’t get his spirit from out 
of the air, Maestro Nirgal, he got it from T and T! He’s been wandering around 
up there teaching everyone the T and T way, and they’re all up there dugla 
anyway, they understand the dugla way, and they have taken over all Mars with 
it! Mars is one great big Trinidad Tobago!”
The crowd went into transports at this, and impulsively Nirgal walked over to 
the man and hugged him, such a smile, then found the stairs and got down and 
walked out into the crowd, which clumped around him. A miasma of fragrances. Too 
loud to think. He touched people, shook hands. People touched him. The look in 
their eyes! Everyone was shorter than he was, they laughed at that; and every 
face was an entire world. Black dots swam in his vision, things went darker very 
abruptly—he looked around, startled—a bank of clouds had massed over a dark 
strip of sea to the west, and the lead edge had cut off the sun. Now as he 
continued to mingle the cloud bank came rolling over the island. The crowd broke 
up as people moved under the shelter of trees, or verandas, or a big tin-roofed 
bus stop. Maya and Sax and Michel were lost in their own crowds. The clouds were 
dark gray at their bases, rearing up in white roils as solid as rock but 
mutable, flowing continuously. A cool wind struck hard, and then big raindrops 
starred the dirt, and the four Martians were hustled under an open pavilion 
roof, where room was made for them.
Then the rain poured down like nothing Nirgal had ever seen—rain sheeting down, 
roaring, slamming into sudden broad rivering puddles, all starred with a million 
white droplet explosions, the whole world outside the pavilion blurred by 
falling water into patches of color, green and brown all mixed in a wash. Maya 
was grinning: “It’s like the ocean is falling on us!”
“So much water!” Nirgal said.
The prime minister shrugged. “It happens every day during monsoon. It’s more 
rain than before, and we already got a lot.”
Nirgal shook his head and felt a stabbing at his temples. The pain of breathing 
in wet air. Half drowning.
The prime minister was explaining something to them, but Nirgal could barely 
follow, his head hurt so. Anyone in the independence movement could join a 
Praxis affiliate, and during their first year’s work they were building relief 
centers like this one. The longevity treatment was an automatic part of every 
person’s joining, administered in the newly built centers. Birth-control 
implants could be had at the same time, reversible but permanent if left in; 
many took them as their contribution to the cause. “Babies later, we say. There 
will be time.” People wanted to join anyway, almost everyone had. Armscor had 
been forced to match the Praxis arrangement to keep some of their people, and so 
it made little difference now what organization one was part of, on Trinidad 
they were all much the same. The newly treated went on to build more housing, or 
work in agriculture, or make more hospital equipment. Trinidad had been fairly 
prosperous before the flood, the combined result of vast oil reserves and 
metanat investment in the cable socket. There had been a progressive tradition 
which had formed the basis of the resistance, in the years after the unwelcome 
metanat arrival. Now there was a growing infrastructure dedicated to the 
longevity project. It was a promising situation. Every camp was a waiting list 
for the treatment, working on its own construction. Of course people were 
absolutely firm in the defense of such places. Even if Armscor had wanted to, it 
would be very difficult for its security forces to take over the camps. And if 
they did they would find nothing of value to them anyway; they already had the 
treatment. So they could try genocide if they wanted to, but other than that, 
they had few options for taking back control of the situation.
“The island just walked away from them,” the prime minister concluded. “No army 
can stop that. It is an end to economic caste, caste of all kind. This is 
something new, a new dugla thing in history, like you said in your speech. Like 
a little Mars. So to have you here to see us, you a grandchild of the island, 
you who have taught us so much in your beautiful new world—oh, it is a special 
thing. A festival for real.” That radiant smile.
“Who was the man who spoke?”
“Oh that was James.”
Abruptly the rain let up. The sun broke through, and the world steamed. Sweat 
poured down Nirgal in the white air. He could not catch his breath. White air, 
black spots swimming.
“I think I need to lie down.”
“Oh yes, yes, of course. You must be exhausted, overwhelmed. Come with us.”
They took him to a small outbuilding of the compound, into a bright room walled 
with bamboo strips, empty except for a mattress on the floor.
“I’m afraid the mattress is not long enough for you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He was left alone. Something about the room reminded him of the interior of 
Hiroko’s cottage, in the grove on the far side of the lake in Zygote. Not just 
the bamboo, but the room’s size and shape—and something elusive, the green light 
streaming in perhaps. The sensation of Hiroko’s presence was so strong and so 
unexpected that when the others had left the room, Nirgal threw himself down the 
mattress, his feet hanging far off the bottom edge, and cried. A complete 
confusion of feeling. His whole body hurt, but especially his head. He stopped 
crying and fell into a deep sleep.


 
 
 
 
 
He woke in a small black chamber. It smelled green. He couldn’t remember where 
he was. He rolled onto his back and it came to him: Earth. Whispers—he sat up, 
frightened. A muffled laugh. Hands caught at him and pressed him down, but they 
were friendly hands, he could feel that immediately. “Shh,” someone said, and 
then kissed him. Someone else was fumbling at his belt, his buttons. Women, two, 
three, no two, scented overpoweringly with jasmine and something else, two 
strands of perfume, both warm. Sweaty skin, so slick. The arteries in his head 
pounded. This kind of thing had happened to him once or twice when he was 
younger, when the newly tented canyons were like new worlds, with new young 
women who wanted to get pregnant or just have fun. After the celibate months of 
the voyage it felt like heaven to squeeze women’s bodies, to kiss and be kissed, 
and his initial fright melted away in a rush of hands and mouths, breasts and 
tangled legs. “Sister Earth,” he gasped. There was music coming from somewhere 
far away, piano and steel drums and tablas, almost washed out by the sound of 
the wind in the bamboo. One of the women was on top of him, pressed down on him, 
and the feel of her ribs sliding under his hands would stay with him forever. He 
came inside her, kept on kissing. But his head still pounded painfully.
 
*      *        *
 
The next time he woke he was damp and naked on the mattress. It was still dark. 
He dressed and went out of the room, down a dim hallway to an enclosed porch. It 
was dusk; he had slept through a day. Maya and Michel and Sax were sitting down 
to a meal with a large group. Nirgal assured them he was fine, ravenous in fact.
He sat among them. Out in the clearing, in the middle of the raw wet compound, a 
crowd was gathered around an outdoor kitchen. Beyond them a bonfire blazed 
yellow in the dusk; its flames limned the dark faces and reflected in the bright 
liquid whites of their eyes, their teeth. The people at the inside table all 
looked at him. Several of the young women smiled, their jet hair like caps of 
jewels, and for a second Nirgal was afraid he smelled of sex and perfume; but 
the smoke from the bonfire, and the steamy scents of the spiced dishes on the 
table, made such a thing irrelevant— in such an explosion of smells, nothing 
could be traced to its origin—and anyway one’s olfactory system was blasted by 
the food, hot with spices, curry and cayenne, chunks of fish on rice, with a 
vegetable that seared his mouth and throat, so that he spent the next half hour 
blinking and sniffing and drinking glasses of water, his head burning. Someone 
gave him a slice of candied orange, which cooled his mouth somewhat. He ate 
several slices of bittersweet candied orange.
When the meal was over they all cleared the tables together, as in Zygote or 
Hiranyagarba. Outside dancers began to circle the bonfire, dressed in their 
surreal carnival costumes, with masks of beasts and demons over their heads, as 
during Fassnacht in Nicosia, although the masks were heavier and stranger: 
demons with multiple eyes and big teeth, elephants, goddesses. The trees were 
black against the blurry black of the sky, the stars all fat and swinging 
around, the fronds and leaves up there green black black green, and then 
fire-colored as the flames leaped higher, seeming to provide the rhythm of the 
dance. A small young woman with six arms, all moving together to the dance, 
stepped behind Nirgal and Maya. “This is the dance of Ramayana,” she told them. 
“It is as old as civilization, and in it they speak of Mangala.”
She gave Nirgal a familiar squeeze on the shoulder, and suddenly he recognized 
her jasmine scent. Without smiling she went back out to the bonfire. The tabla 
drums were following the leaping flames to a crescendo, and the dancers cried 
out. Nirgal’s head throbbed at every beat, and despite the candied orange his 
eyes were still watering from the burning pepper. And his lids were heavy. “I 
know it’s strange,” he said, “but I think I have to sleep again.”
 
He woke before dawn, and went out on a veranda to watch the sky lighten in a 
quite Martian sequence, black to purple to rose to pink, before turning the 
startling cyanic blue of a tropical Terran morning. His head was still sore, as 
if stuffed, but he felt rested at last, and ready to take on the world again. 
After a breakfast of green-brown bananas, he and Sax joined some of their hosts 
for a drive around the island.
Everywhere they went there were always several hundred people in his field of 
vision. The people were all small: brown-skinned like him in the countryside, 
darker in the towns. There were big vans that moved around together, providing 
mobile shops to villages too small to have them. Nirgal was surprised to see how 
lean people werq, their limbs wiry with labor or else as thin as reeds. In this 
context the curves of the young women were like the blooms of flowers, not long 
for this world.
When people saw who he was they rushed up to greet him and shake his hand. Sax 
shook his head at the sight of Nirgal among them. “Bimodal distribution,” he 
said. “Not speciation exactly—but perhaps if enough time passed. Island 
divergence, it’s very Darwinian.”
“I’m a Martian,” Nirgal agreed.
Their buildings were placed in holes hacked into the green jungle, which then 
tried to take the space back. The older buildings were all made of mud bricks 
black with age, melting back into the earth. Rice fields were terraced so finely 
that the hills looked farther away than they really were. The light green of 
rice shoots was a color never seen on Mars. In general the greens were brilliant 
and glowing beyond anything Nirgal could recall seeing; they pressed on him, so 
various and intense, the sun plating his back: “It’s because of the sky’s 
color,” Sax said when Nirgal mentioned it. “The reds in the Martian sky mute the 
greens just a bit.”
The air was thick, wet, rancid. The shimmering sea settled on a distant horizon. 
Nirgal coughed, breathed through his mouth, struggled to ignore his throbbing 
temples and forehead.
“You have low-altitude sickness,” Sax speculated. “I’ve read claims that it 
happens to Himalayans and Andeans who come down to sea level. Acidity levels in 
the blood. We ought to have landed you someplace higher.”
“Why didn’t we?”
“They wanted you here because Desmond came from here. This is your homeland. 
Actually there seems to be a bit of conflict over who should host us next.”
“Even here?”
“More here than on Mars, I should think.”
Nirgal groaned. The weight of the world, the stifling air— “I’m going running,” 
he said, and took off.
At first it was its usual release; the habitual motions and responses poured 
through him, reminding him that he was still himself. But as he thumped along he 
did not ascend into that lung-gom-pa zone where running was like breathing, 
something he could do indefinitely; instead he began to feel the press of the 
thick air in his lungs, and the pressure of eyes from the little people he 
passed, and most of all the pressure of his own weight, hurting his joints. He 
weighed more than twice what he was used to, and it was like carrying an 
invisible person on his back, except no— the weight was inside him. As if his 
bones had turned to lead inside him. His lungs burned and drowned at the same 
time, and no cough would get them clear. There were taller people in Western 
clothes behind him now, on little three-wheeled bicycles that splashed through 
every puddle. But locals were stepping into the road behind him, crowds of them 
blocking off the tricyclers, their eyes and teeth gleaming in their dark faces 
as they talked and laughed. The men on the tricycles had blank faces, and they 
were looking at Nirgal. But they did not challenge the crowd. Nirgal headed back 
toward the camp, turning down a new road. Now the green hills were blazing to 
his right. The road jarred up through his legs with every step, until his legs 
were like tree trunks aflame. That running should hurt! And his head was like a 
giant balloon. All the wet green plants seemed to be reaching out for him, a 
hundred shades of green flame melding to one dominant color band, pouring into 
the world. Black dots swimming. “Hiroko,” he gasped, and ran on with the tears 
streaming down his face; no one would be able to tell them from sweat. Hiroko, 
it isn’t like you said it would be!
He stumbled into the ochre dirt of the compound, and scores of people followed 
him to Maya. Soaking as he was, he still threw his arms around her and put his 
head down on her shoulder, sobbing.
“We should get to Europe,” Maya said angrily to someone over his back. “This is 
stupid, to bring him right to the tropics like this.”
Nirgal shifted to look back. It was the prime minister. “This is how we always 
live,” she said, and pierced Nirgal with a resentful proud look.
But Maya was unimpressed. “We have to go to Bern,” she said.
 
They flew to Switzerland in a small space plane provided by Praxis. As they 
traveled, they looked down on the Earth from thirty thousand meters: the blue 
Atlantic, the rugged mountains of Spain, somewhat like the Hellespontus Mon-tes; 
then France; then the white wall of the Alps, unlike any mountains he had ever 
seen. The cool ventilation of the space plane felt like home to Nirgal, and he 
was chagrined to think that he could not tolerate the open air of Earth.
“You’ll do better in Europe,” Maya told him.
Nirgal thought about the reception they had gotten. “They love you here,” he 
said. Overwhelmed as he had been, he had still noticed that the welcome of the 
duglas had been as enthusiastic for the other three ambassadors as for him; and 
Maya had been particularly cherished.
“They’re happy we survived,” Maya said, dismissing it. “We came back from the 
dead as far as they’re concerned, like magic. They thought we were dead, do you 
see? From sixty-one until just last year, they thought all the First Hundred 
were dead. Sixty-seven years! And all that time part of them was dead too. To 
have us come back like we have, and in this flood, with everything changing—yes. 
It’s like a myth. The return from underground.”
“But not all of you.”
“No.” She almost smiled. “They still have to sort that out. They think Frank is 
alive, and Arkady—and John too, even though John was killed years before 
sixty-one, and everyone knew it! For a while, anyway. But people are forgetting 
things. That was a long time ago. And so much has happened since. And people 
want John Boone to be alive. And so they forget Nicosia, and say that he is part 
of the underground still.” She laughed shortly, unsettled by this.
“Like with Hiroko,” Nirgal said, feeling his throat constrict. A wave of sadness 
like the one in Trinidad washed through him, leaving him bleached and aching. He 
believed, he had always believed, that Hiroko was alive, and hiding with her 
people somewhere in the southern highlands. This was how he had coped with the 
shock of the news of her disappearance—by being quite certain that she had 
slipped out of Sabishii, and would show up again when she felt the time was 
right. He had been sure of it. Now, for some reason he could not tell, he was no 
longer sure.
In the seat on the other side of Maya, Michel sat with a pinched expression on 
his face. Suddenly Nirgal felt like he was looking in a mirror; he knew his face 
held the same expression, he could feel it in his muscles. He and Michel both 
had doubts—perhaps about Hiroko, perhaps about other things. No way of telling. 
Michel did not seem inclined to speak.
And from across the plane Sax watched them both, with his usual birdlike gaze.
 
They dropped out of the sky paralleling the great north wall of the Alps, and 
landed on a runway among green fields. They were escorted through a cool 
Marslike building, downstairs and onto a train, which slid metallically up and 
out of the building, and across green fields; and in an hour they were in Bern.
In Bern the streets were mobbed by diplomats and reporters, everyone with an ID 
badge on their chest, everyone with a mission to speak to them. The city was 
small and pristine and rock solid: the feeling of gathered power was palpable. 
Narrow stone-flagged streets were flanked by thickly arcaded stone buildings, 
everything as permanent as a mountain, with the swift river Aare S-ing through 
it, holding the main part of town in one big oxbow. The people crowding that 
quarter were mostly Europeans: meticulous-looking white people, not as short as 
most Terrans, milling around absorbed in their talk, and always a good number of 
them clustering around the Martians and their escorts, who now were 
blue-uniformed Swiss military police.
Nirgal and Sax and Michel and Maya were given rooms in the Praxis headquarters, 
in a small stone building just above the Aare River. It amazed Nirgal how close 
to water the Swiss were willing to build; a rise in the river of even two meters 
would spell disaster, but they did not care; apparently they had the river under 
control that tight, even though it came out of the steepest mountain range 
Nirgal had ever seen! Terraforming, indeed; it was no wonder the Swiss were good 
on Mars.
The Praxis building was just a few streets from the old center of the city. The 
World Court occupied a scattering of offices next to the Swiss federal 
buildings, near the middle of the peninsula. So every morning they walked down 
the cobbled main street, the Kramgasse, which was incredibly clean, bare and 
underpopulated compared with any street in Port of Spain. They passed under the 
medieval clock tower, with its ornate face and mechanical figures, like one of 
Michel’s alchemical diagrams made into a three-dimensional object; then into the 
World Court offices, where they talked to group after group about the situations 
on Mars and Earth: UN officials, national government representatives, 
metanational executives, relief organizations, media groups. Everyone wanted to 
know what was happening on Mars, what Mars planned to do next, what they thought 
of the situation on Earth, what Mars could offer Earth in the way of help. 
Nirgal found most of the people he was introduced to fairly easy to talk with; 
they seemed to understand the respective situations on the two worlds, they were 
not unrealistic about Mars’s ability to somehow “save Earth”; they did not seem 
to expect to control Mars ever again, nor did they expect the metanational world 
order of the antediluvian years to return.
It was likely, however, that the Martians were being screened from people who 
had a more hostile attitude toward them. Maya was quite certain this was the 
case. She pointed out how often the negotiators and interviewers revealed what 
she called their “terracentricity.” Nothing mattered to them, really, but things 
Earthly; Mars was interesting in some ways, but not actually important. Once 
this attitude was pointed out to Nirgal, he saw it again and again. And in fact 
he found it comforting. The corresponding attitude existed on Mars, certainly, 
as the natives were inevitably areocentric; and it made sense, it was a kind of 
realism.
Indeed it began to seem to him that it was precisely the Terrans who showed an 
intense interest in Mars who were the most troubling to contemplate: certain 
metanat executives whose corporations had invested heavily in Martian 
terraformation; also certain national representatives from heavily populated 
countries, who would no doubt be very happy to have a place to send large 
numbers of their people. So he sat in meetings with people from Armscor, 
Subarashii, China, Indonesia, Ammex, India, Japan, and the Japanese metanat 
council; and he listened most carefully, and did his best to ask questions 
rather than talk overmuch; and he saw that some of their staunchest allies up to 
that point, especially India and China, were likely in the new dispensation to 
become their most serious problem. Maya nodded emphatically when he made this 
observation to her, her face grim. “We can only hope that sheer distance will 
save us,” she said. “How lucky we are that it takes space travel to reach us. 
That should be a bottleneck for emigration no matter how advanced transport 
methods become. But we will have to keep our guard up, forever. In fact, don’t 
speak much of these things here. Don’t speak much at all.”
 
During lunch breaks Nirgal asked his escort group—a dozen or more Swiss who 
stayed with him every waking hour—to walk with him over to the cathedral, which 
someone told Nirgal was called in Swiss the monster. It had a tower at one end, 
containing a tight spiral staircase one could ascend, and almost every day 
Nirgal took several deep breaths and then pushed on up this staircase, gasping 
and sweating as he neared the top. On clear days, which were not frequent, he 
could see out the open arches of the top room to the distant abrupt wall of the 
Alps, a wall he had learned to call the Berner Oberland. This jagged white wall 
ran from horizon to horizon, like one of the great Martian escarpments, only 
covered everywhere with snow, everywhere except for on triangular north faces of 
exposed rock, rock of a light gray color, unlike anything on Mars: granite.
Granite mountains, raised by tectonic-plate collision. And the violence of these 
origins showed.
Between this majestic white range and Bern lay a number of lower ranges of green 
hills, the grassy alps similar to the greens in Trinidad, the conifer forests a 
darker green. So much green—again Nirgal was astounded by how much of Earth was 
covered with plant life, the lithosphere smothered in a thick ancient blanket of 
biosphere. “Yes,” Michel said, along one day to view the prospect with him. “The 
biosphere at this point has even formed a great deal of the upper layer of rock. 
Everywhere life teems, it teems.”
Michel was dying to get to Provence. They were near it, an hour’s flight or a 
night’s train; and everything that was going on in Berne seemed to Michel only 
the endless wrangling of politics. “Flood or revolution or the sun going nova, 
it will still go on! You and Sax can deal with it, you can do what needs doing 
better than I.”
“And Maya even more so.”
“Well, yes. But I want her to come with me. She has to see it, or she won’t 
understand.”
Maya, however, was absorbed in the negotiations with the UN, which were getting 
serious now that the Martians back home had approved the new constitution. The 
UN was turning out to still be very much a metanat mouthpiece, just as the World 
Court continued to support the new “co-op democracies”; and so the arguments in 
the various meeting rooms, and via video transmission, were vigorous, volatile, 
sometimes hostile. Important, in a word, and Maya went out to do battle every 
day; so she had no patience at all for the idea of Provence. She had visited the 
south of France in her youth, she said, and was not greatly interested in seeing 
it again, even with Michel. “She says the beaches are all gone!” Michel 
complained. “As if the beaches were what mattered to Provence!”
In any case, she wouldn’t go. Finally, after a few weeks had passed, Michel 
shrugged and gave up, unhappily, and decided to visit Provence on his own.
On the day he left, Nirgal walked him down to the train station at the end of 
the main street, and stood waving at the slowly accelerating train as it left 
the station. At the last moment Michel stuck his head out a window, waving back 
at Nirgal with a huge grin. Nirgal was shocked to see this unprecedented 
expression, so quickly replacing the discouragement at Maya’s absence; then he 
felt happy for his friend; then he felt a flash of envy. There was no place that 
would make him feel so good to be going to, not anywhere in the two worlds.
After the train disappeared, Nirgal walked back down Kramgasse in the usual 
cloud of escorts and media eyes, and hauled his two and a half bodies up the 254 
spiral stairs of the Monster, to stare south at the wall of the Berner 
Ober-land. He was spending a lot of time up there; sometimes he missed 
early-afternoon meetings, let Sax and Maya take care of it. The Swiss were 
running things in their usual businesslike fashion. The meetings had agendas, 
and started on time, and if they didn’t get through the agenda, it wasn’t 
because of the Swiss in the room. They were just like the Swiss on Mars, like 
Jurgen and Max and Priska and Sibilla, with their sense of order, of appropriate 
action well performed, with a tough unsentimental love of comfort, of 
predictable decency. It was an attitude that Coyote laughed at, or disdained as 
life-threatening; but seeing the results in the elegant stone city below him, 
overflowing with flowers and people as prosperous as flowers, Nirgal thought 
there must be something to be said for it. He had been homeless for so long. 
Michel had his Provence to go to, but for Nirgal no place endured. His hometown 
was crushed under a polar cap, his mother had disappeared without a trace, and 
every place since then had been just a place, and everything everywhere always 
changing. Mutability was his home. And looking over Switzerland, it was a hard 
thing to realize. He wanted a home place that had something like these tile 
roofs, these stone walls, here and solid these last thousand years.
He tried to focus on the meetings in the World Court, and in the Swiss 
Bundeshaus. Praxis was still leading the way in the response to the flood, it 
was good at working without plans, and it had already been a cooperative 
concentrating on the production of basic goods and services, including the 
longevity treatment. So it only had to accelerate that process to take the lead 
in showing what could be done in the emergency. The four travelers had seen the 
results in Trinidad; local movements did most of it, but Praxis was helping 
projects like that all over the world. William Fort was said to have been 
critical in leading the fluid response of the “collective transnat,” as he 
called Praxis.
And his mutant metanational was only one of hundreds of service agencies that 
had come to the fore. All over the world they were taking on the problem of 
relocating the coastal populations, and building or relocating a new coastal 
infrastructure on higher ground.
This loose network of reconstruction efforts, however, was running into some 
resistance from the metanats, who complained that a good deal of their 
infrastructure, capital and labor were being nationalized, localized, 
appropriated, salvaged, or stolen outright. Fighting was not infrequent, 
especially where fights had already been ongoing; the flood, after all, had 
arrived right in the middle of one of the world’s paroxysms of breakdown and 
reordering, and although it had altered everything, that struggle was often 
still happening, sometimes under the cover of the relief efforts.
Sax Russell was particularly aware of this context, convinced as he was that the 
global wars of 2061 had never resolved the basic inequities of the Terran 
economic system. In his own peculiar fashion he was insistent on this point in 
the meetings, and over time it seemed to Nirgal that he was managing to convince 
the skeptical listeners of the UN and the metanats that they all needed to 
pursue something like the Praxis method if they wanted themselves and 
civilization to survive. It did not matter much which of the two they really 
cared about, he said to Nirgal in private, themselves or civilization; it didn’t 
matter if they only instituted some Machiavellian simulacrum of the Praxis 
program; the effect would be much the same in the short term, and everyone 
needed that grace period of peaceful cooperation.
So in every meeting he was painfully focused, and fairly coherent and engaged, 
especially compared to his deep abstraction during the voyage to Earth. And Sax 
Russell was after all The Terraformer Of Mars, the current living avatar of The 
Great Scientist, a very powerful position in Terran culture, Nirgal 
thought—something like the Dalai Lama of science, a continuing reincarnation of 
the embodiment of the spirit of science, created for a culture that only seemed 
to be able to handle one scientist at a time. Also, to the metanats Sax was the 
principal creator of the biggest new market in history—not an inconsiderable 
part of his aura. And, as Maya had pointed out, he was one of that group that 
had returned from the dead, one of the leaders of the First Hundred.
As all these things, his odd halting style actually helped to build the Terrans’ 
image of him. Simple verbal difficulty turned him into a kind of oracle; the 
Terrans seemed to believe that he thought on such a lofty plane that he could 
only speak in riddles. This was what they wanted, perhaps. This was what science 
meant to them—after all, current physical theory spoke of ultimate reality as 
ultramicro-scopic loops of string, moving supersymmetrically in ten dimensions. 
That kind of thing had inured people to strangeness from physicists. And the 
increasing use of translation AIs was getting everyone used to odd locutions of 
all types; almost everyone Nirgal met spoke English, but they were all slightly 
different Englishes, so that Earth seemed to Nirgal an explosion of idiolects, 
no two persons employing the same tongue.
In that context, Sax was listened to with the utmost seriousness. “The flood 
marks a break point in history,” he said one morning, to a large general meeting 
in the Bun-deshaus’s National Council Chamber. “It was a natural revolution. 
Weather on Earth is changed, also the land, the sea’s currents. The distribution 
of human and animal populations. There is no reason, in this situation, to try 
to reinstate the antediluvian world. It’s not possible. And there are many 
reasons to institute an improved social order. The old one was—flawed. Resulting 
in bloodshed, hunger, servitude, and war. Suffering. Unnecessary death. There 
will always be death. But it should come for every person as late as possible. 
At the end of a good life. This is the goal of any rational social order. So we 
see the flood as an opportunity—here as it was on Mars—to—break the mold.”
The UN officials and the metanat advisers frowned at this, but they listened. 
And the whole world was watching; so that what a cadre of leaders in a European 
city thought was not as important, Nirgal judged, as the people in their 
villages, watching the man from Mars on the vid. And as Praxis and the Swiss and 
their allies worldwide had thrown all their resources into refugee aid and the 
longevity treatments, people everywhere were joining up. If you could make a 
living while saving the world—if it represented your best chance for stability 
and long life and your children’s chances—then why not? Why not? What did most 
people have to lose? The late metanational period had benefited some, but 
billions had been left out, in an ever-worsening situation.
So the metanats were losing their workers en masse. They couldn’t imprison them; 
it was getting hard to scare them; the only way they could keep them was to 
institute the same sorts of programs that Praxis had started. And this they were 
doing, or so they said. Maya was sure they were instituting superficial changes 
meant to resemble Praxis’s only in order to keep their workers and their profits 
too. But it was possible that Sax was right, and that they would be unable to 
keep control of the situation, and would usher in a new order despite 
themselves.
Which is what Nirgal decided to say, during one of his chances to speak, in a 
press conference in a big side room of the Bundeshaus. Standing at the podium, 
looking out at a room full of reporters and delegates—so unlike the improvised 
table in the Pavonis warehouse, so unlike the compound hacked out of the jungle 
in Trinidad, so unlike the stage in the sea of people during that wild night in 
Burroughs—Nirgal saw suddenly that his role was to be the young Martian, the 
voice of the new world. He could leave being reasonable to Maya and Sax, and 
provide the alien point of view.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said, looking at as many of them as he could. 
“Every moment in history contains a mix of archaic elements, things from all 
over the past, right back into prehistory itself. The present is always a 
melange of these variously archaic elements. There are still knights coming 
through on horseback and taking the crops of peasants. There are still guilds, 
and tribes. Now we see so many people leaving their jobs to work in the 
flood-relief efforts. That’s a new thing, but it’s also a pilgrimage. They want 
to be pilgrims, they want to have a spiritual purpose, they want to do real 
work—meaningful work. They won’t tolerate being stolen from anymore. Those of 
you here who represent the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will have to 
work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as anyone else. 
And it’s true—that will happen. But it’s going to be all right, even for you. 
Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are 
safest. This universal distribution of the longevity treatment that we are now 
seeing is the ultimate meaning of the democratic movement. It’s the physical 
manifestation of democracy, here at last. Health for all. And when that happens 
the explosion of positive human energy is going to transform the Earth in just a 
matter of years.”
Someone in the crowd stood and asked him about the possibility of a population 
explosion, and he nodded. “Yes of course. This is a real problem. You don’t have 
to be a demographer to see that if new ones continue being born while the 
elderly are not dying, population will quickly soar to incredible levels. 
Unsustainable levels, until there will be a crash. So. This has to be faced now. 
The birth rate simply has to be cut, at least for a while. It isn’t a situation 
that has to last forever. The longevity treatments are not immortality 
treatments. Eventually the first generations given the treatment will die. And 
therein lies the solution to the problem. Say the current population on the two 
worlds is fifteen billion. That means we’re already starting from a bad spot. 
Given the severity of the problem, as long as you get to be a parent at all, 
there is no reason to complain; it’s your own longevity causing the problem 
after all, and parenthood is parenthood, one child or ten. So say that each 
person partners, and the two parents have only a single child, so that there is 
one child for every two people in the previous generation. Say that means seven 
and a half billion children out of this present generation. And they are all 
given the longevity treatment too, of course, and cosseted until they are no 
doubt the insufferable royalty of the world. And they go on to have four billion 
children, the new royalty, and that generation has two, and so on. All of them 
are alive at once, and the population is rising all the time, but at a lower 
rate as time passes. And then at some point, maybe a hundred years from now, 
maybe a thousand years from now, that first generation will die. It may happen 
over a fairly short period of time, but fast or slow, when the process is done, 
the overall population will be almost halved. At that point people can look at 
the situation, the infrastructure, the environments of the two worlds—the 
carrying capacity of the entire solar system, whatever that might be. After the 
biggest generations are gone, people can start having two children each, 
perhaps, so that there is replacement, and a steady state. Or whatever. When 
they have that kind of choice, the population crisis will be over. It could take 
a thousand years.”
Nirgal stopped to look outside of himself, to stare around at the audience; 
people watching him rapt, silent. He gestured with a hand, to draw them all 
together. “In the meantime, we have to help each other. We have to regulate 
ourselves, we have to take care of the land. And it’s here, in this part of the 
project, that Mars can help Earth. First, we are an experiment in taking care of 
the land. Everyone learns from that, and some lessons can be applied here. Then, 
more importantly, though most of the population will always be located here on 
Earth, a goodly fraction of it can move to Mars. It will help ease the 
situation, and we’ll be happy to take them. We have an obligation to take on as 
many people as we possibly can, because we on Mars are Terrans still, and we are 
all in this together. Earth and Mars—and there are other habitable worlds in the 
solar system as well, none as big as our two, but there are a lot of them. And 
by using them all, and cooperating, we can get through the populated years. And 
walk out into a golden age.”
 
That day’s talk made quite an impression, as far as one could tell from within 
the eye of the media storm. Nirgal conversed for hours every day after that, 
with group after group, elaborating the ideas he had first expressed in that 
meeting. It was exhausting work, and after a few weeks of it without any letup, 
he looked out his bedroom window one cloudless morning, and went out and talked 
to his escort about making an expedition. And the escort agreed to tell the 
people in Bern he was touring privately; and they took a train up into the Alps.
The train ran south from Bern, past a long blue lake called the Thuner See, 
which was flanked by steep grassy alps, and ramparts and spires of gray granite. 
The lakeside towns were topped by slate roof tiles, dominated by ancient trees 
and an occasional castle, everything in perfect repair. The vast green pastures 
between the towns were dotted by big wooden farmhouses, with red carnations in 
flower boxes at every window and balcony. It was a style that had not changed in 
five hundred years, the escorts told him. Settling into the land, as if natural 
to it. The green alps had been cleared of trees and stones—in their original 
state they had been forests. So they were terraformed spaces, huge hilly lawns 
that had been created to provide forage for cattle. Such an agriculture had not 
made economic sense as capitalism denned it, but the Swiss had supported the 
high farms anyway, because they thought it was important, or beautiful, or both 
at once. It was Swiss. “There are values higher than economic values,” Vlad had 
insisted back in the congress on Mars, and Nirgal saw now how there were people 
on Earth who had always believed that, at least in part. Werteswandel, they were 
saying down in Bern, mutation of values; but it could as well be evolution of 
values, return of values; gradual change, rather than punctuated equilibrium; 
benevolent residual archaisms, which endured and endured, until slowly these 
high isolated mountain valleys had taught the world how to live, their big 
farmhouses floating by on green waves. A shaft of yellow sun split the clouds 
and struck the hill behind one such farm, and the alp gleamed in an emerald 
mass, so intensely green that Nirgal felt disoriented, then actually dizzy; it 
was hard to focus on such a radiant green!
The heraldic hill disappeared. Others appeared in the window, wave after green 
wave, luminous with their own reality. At the town of Interlaken the train 
turned and began to ascend a valley so steep that in places the tracks entered 
tunnels into the rocky sides of the valley, and spiraled a full 360 degrees 
inside the mountain before coming back out into the sun, the head of the train 
right above the tail. The train ran on tracks rather than pistes because the 
Swiss had not been convinced that the new technology was enough of an 
improvement to justify replacing what they already had. And so the train 
vibrated, and even rocked side to side, as it rumbled and squealed uphill, steel 
on steel.
They stopped in Grindelwald, and in the station Nirgal followed his escort onto 
a much smaller train, which led them up and under the immense north wall of the 
Eiger. Underneath this wall of stone it appeared only a few hundred meters tall; 
Nirgal had gotten a better sense of its great height fifty kilometers away, in 
Bern’s Monster. Now, here, he waited patiently as the little train hummed into a 
tunnel in the mountain itself, and began to make its spirals and switchbacks in 
the darkness, punctuated only by the interior lights of the train, and the brief 
light from a single side tunnel. His escort, about ten men strong, spoke among 
themselves in low guttural Swiss German.
When they emerged into the light again they were in a little station called the 
Jungfraujoch, “the highest train station in Europe” as a sign in six languages 
said—and no wonder, as it was located in an icy pass between the two great peaks 
the Monch and the Jungfrau, at 3,454 meters above sea level, with no point or 
destination but its own.
Nirgal got off the train, trailed by his escort, and went out of the station 
onto a narrow terrace outside the building. The air was thin, clean, crisp, 
about 270 K—the best air Nirgal had breathed since he left Mars, it brought 
tears to his eyes it felt so familiar! Ah, now this was a place!
Even with sunglasses on the light was extremely bright. The sky was a dark 
cobalt. Snow covered most of the mountainsides, but granite thrust through the 
snow everywhere, especially on the north sides of the great masses, where the 
cliffs were too steep to hold snow. Up here the Alps no longer resembled an 
escarpment at all; each mass of rock had its own look and presence, separated 
from the rest by deep expanses of empty air, including glacial valleys that were 
enormously deep U gaps. To the north these macro-trenches were very far below, 
and green, or even filled with lakes. To the south, however, they were high, and 
filled only with snow and ice and rock. On this day the wind was pouring up from 
this south side, bringing the chill of the ice with it.
Down the ice valley directly south of the pass, Nirgal could see a huge crumpled 
white plateau, where glaciers poured in from the surrounding high basins to meet 
in a great confluence. This was Concordiaplatz, they told him. Four big glaciers 
met, then poured south in the Grosser Al-etschgletscher, the longest glacier in 
Switzerland.
Nirgal moved down the terrace to its end, to see farther into this wilderness of 
ice. At the far end he found that there was a staircase trail, hacked into the 
hard snow of the south wall where it rose to the pass. It was a path down to the 
glacier below them, and from there to Concordiaplatz.
Nirgal asked his escorts to stay in the station and wait for him; he wanted to 
hike alone. They protested, but the glacier in summer was free of snow, the 
crevasses all obvious, and the trail well clear of them. And no one else was 
down there on this cold summer day. Nevertheless the members of the escort were 
uncertain, and two insisted on coming with him, at least part way, and at a 
distance behind—”just in case.”
Finally Nirgal nodded at the compromise, and pulled on his hood, and hiked down 
the ice stairs, thumping down painfully until he was on the flatter expanse of 
the Jung-fraufirn. The ridges that walled this snow valley ran south from the 
Jungfrau and the Monch respectively, then after a few high kilometers dropped 
abruptly to Concordiaplatz. From the trail their rock looked black, perhaps in 
contrast to the whiteness of the snow. Here and there were patches of faint 
pinkness in the white snow—algae. Life even here— but barely. It was for the 
most part a pure expanse of white and black, and the overarching dome of 
Prussian blue, with a cold wind funneling up the canyon from Concordiaplatz. He 
wanted to make it down to Concordiaplatz and have a look around, but he couldn’t 
tell whether the day would give him enough time or not; it was very difficult to 
judge how far away things were, it could easily have been farther than it 
looked. But he could go until the sun was halfway to the western horizon, and 
then turn back; and so he hiked swiftly downhill over the firn, from orange wand 
to orange wand, feeling the extra person inside him, feeling also the two 
members of the escort who were tagging along some two hundred meters behind.
For a long time he just walked. It wasn’t so hard. The crenellated ice surface 
crunched under his brown boots. The sun had softened the top layer, despite the 
cool wind. The surface was too bright to see properly, even with sunglasses; the 
ice joggled as he walked, and glowed blackly.
The ridges to left and right began their drop. He came out into Concordiaplatz. 
He could see up glaciers into other high canyons, as if up ice fingers of a hand 
held up to the sun. The wrist ran down to the south, the Grosser 
Aletsch-gletscher. He was standing in the white palm, offered to the sun, next 
to a lifeline of rubble. The ice out here was pitted and gnarly and bluish in 
tone.
A wind picked at him, and swirled through his heart; he turned around slowly, 
like a little planet, like a top about to fall, trying to take it in, to face 
it. So big, so bright, so windy and vast, so crushingly heavy—the sheer mass of 
the white world!—and yet with a kind of darkness behind it, as of space’s 
vacuum, there visible behind the sky. He took off his sunglasses to see what it 
really looked like, and the glare was so immediate and violent that he had to 
close his eyes, to cover his face in the crook of his arm; still great white 
bars pulsed in his vision, and even the afterimage hurt in its blinding 
intensity. “Wow!” he shouted, and laughed, determined to try it again as soon as 
the afterimages lessened, but before his pupils had again expanded. So he did, 
but the second attempt was as bad as the first. How dare you try to look on me 
as I really am! the world shouted silently. “My God.” With feeling. “Ka wow.”
He put his sunglasses back on his closed eyes, looked out through the bounding 
afterimages; gradually the primeval landscape of ice and rock restabilized out 
of the pulsing bars of black and white and neon green. The white and the green; 
and this was the white. The blank world of the inanimate universe. This place 
had precisely the same import as the primal Martian landscape. Just as big as it 
was on Mars, yes, and even bigger, because of the distant horizons, and the 
crushing gravity; and steeper; and whiter; and windier, ka, it pierced so chill 
through his parka, even windier, even colder—ah God, like a wind lancing through 
his heart: the sudden knowledge that Earth was so vast that in its variety it 
had regions that even out-Marsed Mars itself—that among all the ways that it was 
greater, it was greater even at being Martian.
He was brought still by this thought. He only stood and stared, tried to face 
it. The wind died for the moment. The world too was still. No movement, no 
sound.
When he noticed the silence he began paying attention to it, listening for 
something, hearing nothing, so that the silence itself somehow became more and 
more palpable. It was unlike anything he had ever heard before. He thought about 
it; on Mars he had always been in tents or in suits— always in machinery, except 
for during the rare walks on the surface he had made in recent years. But then 
there had always been the wind, or machines nearby. Or he simply hadn’t noticed. 
Now there was only the great silence, the silence of the universe itself. No 
dream could imagine it.
 
And then he began to hear sounds again. The blood in his ears. His breath in his 
nose. The quiet whir of his thinking—it seemed to have a sound. His own support 
system this time, his body, with its organic pumps and ventilators and 
generators. The mechanisms were all still there, provided inside him, making 
their noises. But now he was free of anything more, in a great silence where he 
could actually hear himself quite well, just himself on this world alone, a free 
body standing on its mother earth, free in the rock and ice where it had all 
begun. Mother Earth—he thought of Hiroko—and this time without the tearing grief 
that he had felt in Trinidad. When he returned to Mars, he could live like this. 
He could walk out in the silence a free being, live outdoors in the wind, in 
something like this pure vast lifeless whiteness, with something like this dark 
blue dome overhead, the blue a visible exhalation of life itself—oxygen, life’s 
own color. Up there doming the whiteness. A sign, somehow. The white and the 
green, except here the green was blue.
With shadows. Among the faint lingering afterimages lay long shadows, running 
from the west. He was a long way from Jungfraujoch, and considerably lower as 
well. He turned and began hiking up the Jungfraufirn. In the distance, up the 
trail, his two companions nodded and turned uphill themselves, hiking fast.
Soon enough they were in the shadow of the ridge to the west, the sun now out of 
sight for good on this day, and the wind swirling over his back, helping on. 
Cold indeed. But it was his kind of temperature, after all, and his kind of air, 
just a nice touch of extra thickness to it; and so despite the weight inside him 
he began to trudge on up the crunchy hardpack in a little jog, leaning into it, 
feeling his thigh muscles respond to the challenge, fall into their old 
lung-gom-pa rhythm, with his lungs pumping hard and his heart as well, to handle 
the extra weight. But he was strong, strong, and this was one of Earth’s little 
high regions of Marsness; and so he crunched up the firn feeling stronger by the 
minute, also appalled, exhilarated—awed—it was a most astonishing planet, that 
could have so much of the white and so much of the green as well, its orbit so 
exquisitely situated that at sea level the green burst out and at three thousand 
meters the white blanketed it utterly—the natural zone of life just that three 
thousand meters wide, more or less. And Earth rolled right in the middle of that 
filmy bubble biosphere, in the right few thousand meters out of an orbit 150 
million kilometers wide. It was too lucky to be believed.
His skin began to tingle with the effort, he was warm all over, even his toes. 
Beginning to sweat. The cold air was deliciously invigorating, he felt he was in 
a pace that he could sustain for hours; but alas, he would not need to; ahead 
and a bit above lay the snow staircase, with its rope-and-stanchion railing. His 
guides were making good time ahead of him, hurrying up the final slope. Soon he 
too would be there, in the little train station/space station. These Swiss, what 
they thought to build! To be able to visit the stupendous Concordiaplatz, on a 
day trip from the nation’s capital! No wonder they were so sympathetic to 
Mars—they were Earth’s closest thing to Martians, truly— builders, terraformers, 
inhabitants of the thin cold air.
So he was feeling very benevolent toward them when he stepped onto the terrace 
and then burst into the station, where he began immediately steaming; and when 
he walked over to his group of escorts and the other passengers who were waiting 
next to the little train, he was beaming so completely, he was so high, that the 
impatient frowns of the group (he saw that they had been kept waiting) cracked, 
and they looked at each other and laughed, shaking their heads as if to say to 
each other, What can you do? You could only grin and let it happen—they had all 
been young in the high Alps for the first time, one sunny summer day, and had 
felt that same enthusiasm—they remembered what it was like. And so they shook 
his hand, they embraced him— they led him onto the little train and got going, 
for no matter the event, it was not good to keep a train waiting—and once under 
way they remarked on his hot hands and face, and asked him where he had gone, 
and told him how many kilometers that was, and how many vertical meters. They 
passed him a little hip flask of schnapps. And then as the train went by the 
little side tunnel that ran out onto the north face of the Eiger, they told him 
the story of the failed rescue attempt of the doomed Nazi climbers, excited, 
moved that he was so impressed. And after that they settled into the lit 
compartments of the train, squealing down through its rough granite tunnel.
Nirgal stood at the end of one car, looking out at the dynamited rock as it 
flashed past, and then as they burst back into sunlight, up at the looming wall 
of the Eiger overhead. A passenger walked by him on the way to the next car, 
then stopped and stared: “Amazing to see you here, T must say.” He had a British 
accent of some kind. “I just ran into your mother last week.”
Confused, Nirgal said, “My mother?”
“Yes, Hiroko Ai. Isn’t that right? She was in England, working with people at 
the mouth of the Thames. I saw her on my way here. Quite a coincidence running 
into you too, I must say. Makes me think I’ll start seeing little red men any 
second now.”
The man laughed at the thought, began to move on into the next car.
“Hey!” Nirgal called. “Wait!”
But the man only paused—”No no,” he said over his shoulder, “didn’t want to 
intrude—all I know, anyhow. You’ll have to look her up—in Sheerness perhaps—”
And then the train was squealing into the station at Klein Scheidegg, and the 
man hopped out an opening door in the next car, and as Nirgal went to follow him 
other people got in the way, and his escorts came to explain to him that he 
needed to descend to Grindelwald immediately if he wanted to get home that 
night. Nirgal couldn’t deny them. But looking out the window as they rolled out 
of the station, he saw the British man who had spoken to him, walking briskly 
down a trail into the dusky valley below.


 
 
 
 
 
He landed at a big airport in southern England, and was driven north and east to 
a town the escorts called Faversham, beyond which the roads and bridges were 
flooded. He had arranged to come unannounced, and his escort here was a police 
team that reminded him more of UNTA security units back home than of his Swiss 
escort: eight men and two women, silent, staring, full of themselves. When they 
had heard what he wanted to do, they had wanted to hunt for Hiroko by bringing 
people in to ask about her; Nirgal was sure that would put her in hiding, and he 
insisted on going out without fanfare to look for her. Eventually he convinced 
them.
They drove in a gray dawn, down to a new seafront, right there among buildings: 
in some places there were lines of stacked sandbags between soggy walls, in 
other places just wet streets, running off under dark water that spread for as 
far as he could see. Some planks were thrown here and there over mud and 
puddles.
Then on the far side of one line of sandbags was brown water without any 
buildings beyond, and a number of row-boats tied to a grille covering a window 
half awash in dirty foam. Nirgal followed one of the escorts into one big 
row-boat, and greeted a wiry red-faced man, wearing a dirty cap pulled low over 
his forehead. A kind of water policeman, apparently. The man shook his hand 
limply and then they were off, rowing over opaque water, followed by three more 
boats containing the rest of Nirgal’s worried-looking guards. Nirgal’s oarsman 
said something, and Nirgal had to ask him to repeat it; it was as if the man 
only had half his tongue. “Is that Cockney, your dialect?”
“Cockney.” The man laughed.
Nirgal laughed too, shrugged. It was a word he remembered from a book, he didn’t 
know what it meant really. He had heard a thousand different kinds of English 
before, but this was the real thing, presumably, and he could hardly understand 
it. The man spoke more slowly, which didn’t help. He was describing the 
neighborhood they were rowing away from, pointing; the buildings were inundated 
nearly to their rooflines. “Brents,” he said several times, pointing with his 
oar tips.
They came to a floating dock, tied to what looked like a highway sign, saying 
“OARE.” Several larger boats were tied to the dock, or swinging from anchor 
ropes nearby. The water policeman rowed to one of these boats, and indicated the 
metal ladder welded to its rusty side. “Go on.”
Nirgal climbed the side of the boat. On the deck stood a man so short he had to 
reach up to shake Nirgal’s hand, which he did with a crushing grip. “So you’re a 
Martian,” he said, in a voice that lilted like the oarsman’s, but was somehow 
much easier to understand. “Welcome aboard our little research vessel. Come to 
hunt for the old Asian lady, I hear?”
“Yes,” Nirgal said, his pulse quickening. “She’s Japanese.”
“Hmm.” The man frowned. “I only saw her the once, but I would have said she was 
Asian, Bangladeshi maybe. They’re everywhere since the flood. But who can tell, 
eh?”
Four of Nirgal’s escorts climbed aboard, and the boat’s owner pushed a button 
that started an engine, then spun the wheel in the wheelhouse, and watched 
forward closely as the boat’s rear pushed down in the water, and they vibrated, 
then moved away from the drowned line of buildings. It was overcast, the clouds 
very low, sea and sky both a brownish gray.
“We’ll go out over the wharf,” the little captain said.
Nirgal nodded. “What’s your name?”
“Ely’s the name. B-L-Y.”
“I’m Nirgal.”
The man nodded once.
“So this used to be the docks?” Nirgal asked.
“This was Faversham. Out here were the marshes—Ham, Magden—it was mostly marsh, 
all the way to the Isle of Sheppey. The Swale, this was. More fen than flow, if 
you know what I mean. Now you get out here on a windy day and it’s like the 
North Sea itself. And Sheppey is no more than that hill you see out there. A 
proper island now.”
“And that’s where you saw....” He didn’t know what to call her.
“Your Asian grandma came in on the ferry from Vlis-singen to Sheerness, other 
side of that island. Sheerness and Minster have the Thames for streets these 
days, and at high tide they have it for their roofs too. We’re over Magden Marsh 
now. We’ll go out around Shell Ness, the Swale’s too clotted.”
The mud-colored water around them sloshed this way and that. It was lined by 
long curving trails of yellowing foam. On the horizon the water grayed. Bly spun 
the wheel and they slapped over short steep waves. The boat rocked, and in its 
entirety moved up and down, up and down. Nirgal had never been in one before. 
Gray clouds hung over them, there was only a wedge of air between the cloud 
bottoms and the choppy water. The boat jostled this way and that, bobbing 
corklike. A liquid world.
“It’s a lot shorter around than it used to be,” Captain Bly said from the wheel. 
“If the water were clearer you could see Sayes Court, underneath us.”
“How deep is it?” Nirgal asked.
“Depends on the tide. This whole island was about an inch above sea level before 
the flood, so however much sea level has gone up, that’s how deep it is. What 
are they saying now, twenty-five feet? More than this old girl needs, that’s 
sure. She’s got a very shallow draft.”
He spun the wheel left, and the swells hit the boat from the side, so that it 
rolled in quick uneven jerks. He pointed at one gauge: “There, five meters. 
Harry Marsh. See that potato patch, the rough water there? That’ll come up at 
midtide, looks like a drowned giant buried in the mud.”
“What’s the tide now?”
“Near full. It’ll turn in half an hour.”
“It’s hard to believe Luna can pull the ocean around that much.”
“What, you don’t believe in gravity?”
“Oh, I believe in it—it’s crushing me right now. It’s just hard to believe 
something so far away has that much pull.”
“Hmm,” the captain said, looking out into a bank of mist blocking the view 
ahead. “I’ll tell you what’s hard to believe, it’s hard to believe that a bunch 
of icebergs can displace so much water that all the oceans of the world have 
gone up this far.”
“That is hard to believe.”
“It’s amazing it is. But the proof’s right here floating us. Ah, the mist has 
arrived.”
“Do you get more bad weather than you used to?”
The captain laughed. “That’d be comparing absolutes, I’d say.”
The mist blew past them in wet long veils, and the choppy waves smoked and 
hissed. It was dim. Suddenly Nir-gal felt happy, despite the unease in his 
stomach during the deceleration at the bottom of every wave trough. He was 
boating on a water world, and the light was at a tolerable level at last. He 
could stop squinting for the first time since he had arrived on Earth.
The captain spun his big wheel again, and they ran with the waves directly 
behind them, northwest into the mouth of the Thames. Off to their left a 
brownish-green ridge emerged wetly out of greenish-brown water, buildings 
crowding its slope. “That’s Minster, or what’s left of it. It was the only high 
ground on the island. Sheerness is over there, you can see where the water is 
all shattered over it.”
Under the low ceiling of streaming mist Nirgal saw what looked like a reef of 
foaming white water, sloshing in every direction at once, black under the white 
foam. “That’s Sheerness?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they all move to Minster?”
“Or somewhere. Most of them. There’s some very stubborn people in Sheerness.”
Then the captain was absorbed in bringing the boat in through the drowned 
seafront of Minster. Where the line of rooftops emerged from the waves, a large 
building had had its roof and sea-facing wall removed, and now it functioned as 
a little marina, its three remaining walls sheltering a patch of water and the 
upper floors at the back serving as dock. Three other fishing boats were moored 
there, and as they coasted in, some men on them looked up and waved.
“Who’s this?” one of them said as Ely nosed his boat into the dock.
“One of the Martians. We’re trying to find the Asian lady who was helping in 
Sheerness the other week, have you seen her?”
“Not lately. Couple of months actually. I heard she crossed to Southend. They’ll 
know down in the sub.”
Ely nodded. “Do you want to see Minster?” he said to Nirgal.
Nirgal frowned. “I’d rather see the people who might know where she is.”
“Yeah.” Ely backed the boat out of the gap, turned it around; Nirgal looked in 
at boarded windows, stained plaster, the shelves of an office wall, some notes 
tacked to a beam. As they motored over the drowned portion of Minster, Ely 
picked up a radio microphone on a corkscrewed cord, and punched buttons. He had 
a number of short conversations very hard for Nirgal to follow—”ah jack!” and 
the like, with all the answers emerging from explosive static.
“We’ll try Sheerness then. Tide’s right.”
 
And so they motored right into the white water and foam sloshing over the 
submerged town, following streets very slowly. In the center of the foam the 
water was calmer. Chimneys and telephone poles stuck out of the gray liquid, and 
Nirgal caught occasional glimpses of the houses and buildings below, but the 
water was so foamy on top, and so murky below, that very little was visible—the 
slope of a roof, a glimpse down into a street, the blind window of a house.
On the far side of the town was a floating dock, anchored to a concrete pillar 
sticking out of the surf. “This is the old ferry dock. They cut off one section 
and floated it, and now they’ve pumped out the ferry offices down below and 
reoc-cupied them.”
“Reoccupied them?”
“You’ll see.”
Ely hopped from the rocking gunwale to the dock, and held out a hand to help 
Nirgal across; nevertheless Nirgal crashed to one knee when he hit.
“Come on, Spiderman. Down we go.”
The concrete pillar anchoring the dock stood chest-high; it turned out to be 
hollow, and a metal ladder had been bolted down its inner side. Electric bulbs 
hung from sockets on a rubber-coated wire, twisted around one post of the 
ladder. The concrete cylinder ended some three meters down, but the ladder 
continued, down into a big chamber, warm, humid, fishy, and humming with the 
noise of several generators in another room or building. The building’s walls, 
the floor, the ceilings and windows were all covered by what appeared to be a 
sheet of clear plastic. They were inside a bubble of some kind of clear 
material; outside the windows was water, murky and brown, bubbling like 
dishwater in a sink.
Nirgal’s face no doubt revealed his surprise; Ely, smiling briefly at the sight, 
said, “It was a good strong building. The what-you-might-call sheetrock is 
something like the tent fabrics you use on Mars, only it hardens. People have 
been reoccupying quite a few buildings like this, if they’re the right size and 
depth. Set a tube and poof, it’s like blowing glass. So a lot of Sheerness folk 
are moving back out here, and sailing off the dock or off their roof. Tide 
people we call them. They figure it’s better than begging for charity in 
England, eh?”
“What do they do for work?”
“Fish, like they always have. And salvage. Eh Kama! Here’s my Martian, say 
hello. He’s short where he comes from, eh? Call him Spiderman.”
“But it’s Nirgal, innit? I’ll be fucked if I call Nirgal Spiderman when I got 
him visiting in me home.” And the man, black-haired and dark-skinned, an “Asian” 
in appearance if not accent, shook Nirgal’s right hand gently.
The room was brightly lit by a pair of giant spotlights pointed at the ceiling. 
The shiny floor was crowded: tables, benches, machiner-y in all stages of 
assembly: boat engines, pumps, generators, reels, things Nirgal didn’t 
recognize. The working generators were down a hall, though they didn’t seem any 
quieter for that. Nirgal went to one wall to inspect the bubble material. It was 
only a few molecules thick, Ely’s friends told him, and yet would hold thousands 
of pounds of pressure. Nirgal thought of each pound as a blow with a fist, 
thousands all at once. “These bubbles will be here when the concrete’s worn 
away.”
Nirgal asked about Hiroko. Kama shrugged. “I never knew her name. I thought she 
was a Tamil, from the south of India. She’s gone over to Southend I hear.”
“She helped to set this up?”
“Yeah. She brought the bubbles in from Vlissingen, her and a bunch like her. 
Great what they did here, we were groveling in High Halstow before they came.”
“Why did they come?”
“Don’t know. Some kind of coastal support group, no doubt.” He laughed. “Though 
they didn’t come on like that. Just moving around the coasts, building stuff out 
of the wreckage for the fun of it, what it looked like. Intertidal civilization, 
they called it. Joking as usual.”
“Eh Karnasingh, eh Bly. Lovely day out innit?”
“Yeah.”
“Care for some scrod?”
 
The next big room was a kitchen, and a dining area jammed with tables and 
benches. Perhaps fifty people had sat down to eat, and Kama cried “Hey!” and 
loudly introduced Nirgal. Indistinct murmurs greeted him. People were busy 
eating: big bowls of fish stew, ladled out of enormous black pots that looked 
like they had been in use continuously for centuries. Nirgal sat to eat; the 
stew was good. The bread was as hard as the tabletop. The faces were rough, 
pocked, salted, reddened when not brown; Nirgal had never seen such vivid ugly 
countenances, banged and pulled by the harsh existence in Earth’s heavy drag. 
Loud chatter, waves of laughter, shouts; the generators could scarcely be heard. 
Afterward people came up to shake his hand and look at him. Several had met the 
Asian woman and her friends, and they described her enthusiastically. She hadn’t 
ever given them a name. Her English was good, slow and clear. “I thought she 
were Paki. Her eyes dint look quite Oriental if you know what I mean. Not like 
yours, you know, no little fold in there next the nose.”
“Epicanthic fold, you ignorant bugger.”
Nirgal felt his heart beating hard. It was hot in the room, hot and steamy and 
heavy. “What about the people with her?”
Some of those had been Oriental. Asians, except for one or two whites.
“Any tall ones?” Nirgal asked. “Like me?” None. Still... if Hiroko’s group had 
come back to Earth, it seemed possible the younger ones would have stayed 
behind. Even Hiroko couldn’t have talked all of them into such a move. Would 
Frantz leave Mars, would Nanedi? Nir-gal doubted it. Return to Earth in its hour 
of need . . . the older ones would go. Yes, it sounded like Hiroko; he could 
imagine her doing it, sailing the new coasts of Terra, organizing a 
reinhabitation.. ..
“They went over to Southend. They were going to work their way up the coast.”
Nirgal looked at Ely, who nodded; they could cross too.
But Nirgal’s escorts wanted to check on things first. They wanted a day to 
arrange things. Meanwhile Ely and his friends were talking about underwater 
salvage projects, and when Ely heard about the bodyguards’ proposed delay, he 
asked Nirgal if he wanted to see one such operation, taking place the next 
morning—”though it’s not a pretty business of course.” Nirgal agreed; the 
escorts didn’t object, as long as some of them came along. They agreed to do it.
So they spent the evening in the clammy noisy submarine warehouse, Ely and his 
friends rummaging for equipment Nirgal could use. And spent the night on short 
narrow beds in Ely’s boat, rocking as if in a big clumsy cradle.
The next morning they puttered through a light mist the color of Mars, pinks and 
oranges floating this way and that over slack glassy mauve water. The tide was 
near ebb, and the salvage crew and three of Nirgal’s escorts followed Ely’s 
larger craft in a trio of small open motorboats, maneuvering between chimney 
tops and traffic signs and power-line poles, conferring frequently. Ely had 
gotten out a tattered book of maps, and he called out the street names of 
Sheer-ness, navigating to specific warehouses or shops. Many of the warehouses 
in the wharf area had already been salvaged, apparently, but there were more 
warehouses and shops scattered through the blocks of flats behind the seafront, 
and one of these was their morning’s target: “Here we go; Two Carleton Lane.” It 
had been a jewelry store, next to a small market. “We’ll try for jewels and 
canned food, a good balance you might say.”
They moored to the top of a billboard and stopped their engines. Ely threw a 
small object on a cord overboard, and he and three of the other men gathered 
around a small AI screen set on Ely’s bridge dash. A thin cable paid out over 
the side, its reel creaking woefully. On the screen, the murky color image 
changed from brown to black to brown.
“How do you know what you’re seeing?” Nirgal asked.
“We don’t.”
“But look, there’s a door, see?”-
“No.”
Ely tapped at a small keypad under the screen. “In you go, thing. There. Now 
we’re inside. This should be the market.”
“Didn’t they have time to get their things out?” Nirgal asked.
“Not entirely. Everyone on the east coast of England had to move at once, 
almost, so there wasn’t enough transport to take more than what you could carry 
in your car. If that. A lot of people left their homes intact. So we pull the 
stuff worth pulling.”
“What about the owners?”
“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people when we can, and 
charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re not on the 
register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and such. Here, 
look—we’ll see what that is.”
He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah. Refrigerator. We could 
use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”
“What about the house?”
“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But not this 
morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”
They puttered away. Ely and another man continued to watch the screen, arguing 
mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even before the flood,” 
Ely explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a couple hundred years, 
ever since the empire ended.”
“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.
“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and all the 
little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time ago.”
Finally Ely killed the engine, looked at the others. In their whiskery faces 
Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy anticipation. “There 
then.”
The other men started getting out underwater gear: full wet suits, tanks, face 
masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Ely said. “He was a 
giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker, one without 
feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a complete helmet. 
“There’s booties of his too.”
“Let me try them on.”
So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the wet suits, 
sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the tight 
collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the left 
side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it was 
very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other divers, 
named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right then, for 
one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him on the 
side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”
“I will.”
Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly felt huge. 
Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an agony—a 
fatal blow—how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a minute, two? 
Rolling in agony, in the dark. . . .
He pulled himself out of an intense recreation of Eric’s end, feeling shaken. 
They got a breathing rig attached to his upper arm and face mask, and abruptly 
he was breathing cold dry air, pure oxygen they said. Ely asked again about 
going down, as Nirgal was shivering slightly. “No no,” said Nirgal. “I’m good 
with cold, this water isn’t that cold. Besides I’ve already filled the suit with 
sweat.”
The other divers nodded, sweating themselves. Getting ready was hard work. The 
actual swimming was easier; down a ladder and, ah, yes, out of the crush of the 
g, into something very like Martian g, or lighter still; such a relief! Nirgal 
breathed in the cold bottled oxygen happily, almost weeping at the sudden 
freedom of his body, floating down through a comfortable dimness. Ah yes—his 
world on Earth was underwater.
Down deeper, things were as dark and amorphous as they had been on the screen, 
except for within the cones of light emanating from the other two men’s 
headlamps, which were obviously very strong. Nirgal followed above and behind 
them, getting the best view of all. The estuary water was cool, about 285 K 
Nirgal judged, but very little of it seeped in at the wrists and around the 
hood, and the water trapped inside the suit was soon so hot with his exertions 
that his cold hands and face (and left ribs) actually served to keep him from 
overheating.
The two cones of light shot this way and that as the two divers looked around. 
They were swimming along a narrow street. Seeing the buildings and the curbs, 
the sidewalks and streets, made the murky gray water look uncannily like the 
mist up on the surface.
Then they were floating before a three-story brick building, filling a narrow 
triangular space that pointed into an angled intersection of streets. Kev 
gestured for Nirgal to stay outside, and Nirgal was happy to oblige. The other 
diver had been holding a cable so thin it was scarcely visible, and now he swam 
into a doorway, pulling it behind him. He went to work attaching a small pulley 
to the doorway, and lining the cable through it. Time passed; Nirgal swam slowly 
around the wedge-shaped building, looking in second-story windows at offices, 
empty rooms, flats. Some furniture floated against the ceilings. A movement 
inside one of these rooms caused him to jerk away; he was afraid of the cable; 
but it was on the other side of the building. Some water seeped into his 
mouthpiece, and he swallowed it to get it out of the way. It tasted of salt and 
mud and plant life, and something unpleasant. He swam on.
Back at the doorway Kev and the other man were helping a small metal safe 
through the doorway. When it was clear they kicked upright, in place, waiting, 
until the cable rose almost directly overhead. Then they swam around the 
intersection like a clumsy ballet team, and the safe floated up to the surface 
and disappeared. Kev swam back inside, and came out kicking hard, holding two 
small bags. Nirgal kicked over and took one, and with big luxurious kicks pulsed 
up toward the boat. He surfaced into the bright light of the mist. He would have 
loved to go back down, but Ely did not want them in any longer, and so Nirgal 
threw his fins in the boat and climbed the ladder over the side. He was sweating 
as he sat on one bench, and it was a relief to strip the hood off his head, 
despite the way his hair was yanked back. The clammy air felt good against his 
skin as they helped him peel the wet suit off.
“Look at his chest will you, he’s like a greyhound.”
“Breathing vapors all his life.”
The mist almost cleared, dissipating to reveal a white sky, the sun a brighter 
white swath across it. The weight had come back into him, and he breathed deeply 
a few times to get his body back into that work rhythm. His stomach was queasy, 
and his lungs hurt a little at the peak of each inhalation. Things rocked a bit 
more than the slosh of the ocean surface would account for. The sky turned to 
zinc, the sun’s quadrant a harsh blinding glare. Nirgal stayed sitting, breathed 
faster and shallower. “Did you like it?”
“Yes!” he said. “I wish it felt like that everywhere.” They laughed at the 
thought. “Here have a cup.”
 
Perhaps going underwater had been a mistake. After that the g never felt right 
again. It was hard to breathe. The air down in the warehouse was so wet that he 
felt he could clench a fist and drink water from his hand. His throat hurt, and 
his lungs. He drank cup after cup of tea, and still he was thirsty. The gleaming 
walls dripped, and nothing the people said was comprehensible, it was all ay and 
eh and lor and da, nothing like Martian English. A different language. Now they 
all spoke different languages. Shakespeare’s plays had not prepared him for it.
He slept again in the little bed on Ely’s boat. The next day the escort gave the 
okay, and they motored out of Sheer-ness, and north across the Thames estuary, 
in a pink mist even thicker than the day before.
Out in the estuary there was nothing visible but mist and the sea. Nirgal had 
been in clouds before, especially on the west slope of Tharsis, where fronts ran 
up the rise of the bulge; but never of course while on water. And every time 
before the temperatures had been well below freezing, the clouds a kind of 
flying snow, very white and dry and fine, rolling over the land and coating it 
with white dust. Nothing at all like this liquid world, where there was very 
little difference between the choppy water and the mist gusting over it, the 
liquid and the gaseous phasing back and forth endlessly. The boat rocked in a 
violent irregular rhythm. Dark objects appeared in the margins of the mist, but 
Ely paid them no attention, keeping a sharp eye ahead through a window beaded 
with water to the point of opacity, and also watching a number of screens under 
the window.
Suddenly Ely killed the engine, and the boat’s rocking changed to a vicious 
side-to-side yaw. Nirgal held the side of the cabin and peered through the 
watery window, trying to see what had caused Ely to stop. “That’s a big ship for 
Southend,” Ely remarked, motoring on very slowly. “Where?”
“Port beam.” He pointed to a screen, then off to the left. Nirgal saw nothing.
Ely brought them into a long low pier, with many boats moored to it on both 
sides. The pier ran north through the mist to the town of Southend-on-Sea, which 
ran up and disappeared in the mist covering a slope of buildings.
A number of men greeted Ely—”Lovely day eh?” “Brilliant”—and began to unload 
boxes from his hold.
Ely inquired about the Asian woman from Vlissingen, but the men shook their 
heads. “The Jap? She ain’t here, mate.” “They’re saying in Sheerness she and her 
group came to Southend.”
“Why would they say that?” “Because that’s what they think happened.” “That’s 
what you get listening to people who live underwater.”
“The Paki grandma?” they said at the diesel fuel pump on the other side of the 
pier. “She went over to Shoebury-ness, sometime back.”
Ely glanced at Nirgal. “It’s just a few miles east. If she were here, these men 
would know.” “Let’s try it then,” Nirgal said.
So after refueling they left the pier, and puttered east through the mist. From 
time to time the building-covered hillside was visible to their left. They 
rounded a point, turned north. Ely brought them in to another floating dock, 
with many fewer boats than had been moored at Southend pier.
“That Chinese gang?” a toothless old man cried. “Gone up to Pig’s Bay they have! 
Gave us a greenhouse! Some kind of church.”
“Pig’s Bay’s just the next pier,” Ely said, looking thoughtful as he wheeled 
them away from the dock.
So they motored north. The coastline here was entirely composed of drowned 
buildings. They had built so close to the sea! Clearly there had been no reason 
to fear any change in sea level. And then it had happened; and now this strange 
amphibious zone, an intertidal civilization, wet and rocking in the mist.
A cluster of buildings gleamed at their windows. They had been filled by the 
clear bubble material, pumped out and occupied, their upstairs just above the 
foamy waves, their downstairs just below. Ely brought the boat in to a set of 
linked floating docks, greeted a group of women in smocks and yellow rain 
slickers mending a big black net. He cut his engine: “Has the Asian lady been to 
see you too then?”
“Oh yeah. She’s down inside, there in the building at the end.”
Nirgal felt his pulse jarring through him. His balance had left him, he had to 
hold on to the rail. Over the side, onto the dock. Down to the last building, a 
seafront boarding-house or something like, now much broken up and glimmering in 
all the cracks; air inside; filled by a bubble. Green plants, vague and blurry 
seen through sloshing gray water. He had a hand on Ely’s shoulder. The little 
man led him in a door and down narrow stairs, into a room with one whole wall 
exposed to the sea, like a dirty aquarium.
A diminutive woman in a rust-colored jumpsuit came through the far door. 
White-haired, black-eyed, quick and precise; birdlike. Not Hiroko. She stared at 
them.
“Are you the one came over from Vlissingen?” Ely asked, after glancing up at 
Nirgal. “The one that’s been building these submariners?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “May I help you?” She had a high voice, a British accent. 
She stared at Nirgal without expression. There were other people in the room, 
more coming in. She looked like the face he had seen in the cliffside, in Medusa 
Vallis. Perhaps there was another Hiroko, a different one, wandering the two 
planets building things....
Nirgal shook his head. The air was like a greenhouse gone bad. The light, so 
dim. He could barely get back up the stairs. Ely had made their farewells. Back 
into the bright mist. Back onto the boat. Chasing wisps. A ruse, to get him out 
of Bern. Or an honest mistake. Or a simple fool’s errand.
Ely sat him down in the boat’s cabin, next to a rail. “Ah well.”
Pitching and yawing, through the mist, which closed back down. Dark dim day on 
the water, sloshing through the phase change where water and mist turned into 
each other, sandwiched between them. Nirgal got a little drowsy. No doubt she 
was back on Mars. Doing her work there in her usual secrecy, yes. It had been 
absurd to think otherwise. When he got back he would find her. Yes: it was a 
goal, a task he gave himself. He would find her and make her come back out into 
the open. Make sure she had survived. It was the only way to be sure, the only 
way to remove this horrible weight from his heart. Yes: he would find her.
Then as they motored on over the choppy water, the mist lifted. Low gray clouds 
rushed overhead, dropping swirls of rain into the waves. The tide was ebbing 
now, and as they crossed the great estuary the flow of the Thames was released 
full force. The gray-brown surface of the water was broken to mush, waves coming 
from all directions at once, a wild bouncing surface of foamy dark water, all 
carried rapidly east, out into the North Sea. And then the wind turned and 
poured over the tide, and all the waves were suddenly rushing out to sea 
together. Among the long cakes of foam were floating objects of all kinds: 
boxes, furniture, roofs, entire houses, capsized boats, pieces of wood. Flotsam 
and jetsam. Ely’s crew stood on the deck, leaning over the rails with grapnels 
and binoculars, calling back to him to avoid things or to try to approach them. 
They were absorbed in the work. “What is all of this stuff?” Nirgal asked Bly.
“It’s London,” Bly said. “It’s fucking London, washing out to sea.”
The cloud bottoms rushed east over their heads. Looking around Nirgal saw many 
other small boats on the tossing water of the great rivermouth, salvaging the 
flotsam or just fishing. Bly waved to some as they passed through, tooted at 
others. Horn blasts floated on the wind over the gray-speckled estuary, 
apparently signaling messages, as Ely’s crews commented on each.
Then Kev exclaimed, “Hey what’s that now!” pointing upstream.
Out of a fog bank covering the mouth of the Thames had emerged a ship with 
sails, many sails, sails square-rigged on three masts in the archetypal 
configuration, deeply familiar to Nirgal even though he had never seen it 
before. A chorus of horn blasts greeted this apparition—mad toots, long 
sustained blasts, all joining together and sustaining longer and longer, like a 
neighborhood of dogs roused and baying at night, warming to their task. Above 
them exploded the sharp penetrating blast of Ely’s air horn, joining the 
chorus—Nirgal had never heard such a shattering sound, it hurt his ears! Thicker 
air, denser sound—Ely was grinning, his fist shoved against the air-horn 
button—the men of the crew all standing at the rail or on it, Nirgal’s escorts 
as well, screaming soundlessly at the sudden vision.
Finally Ely let off. “What is it?” Nirgal shouted.
“It’s the Cutty Sarkl” Ely said, and threw his head back and laughed. “It was 
bolted down in Greenwich! Stuck in a park! Some mad bastards must have liberated 
it. What a brilliant idea. They must have towed it around the flood barrier. 
Look at her sail!”
The old clipper ship had four or five sails unfurled on each of the three masts, 
and a few triangular ones between the masts as well, and extending forward to 
the bowsprit. It was sailing in the midst of the ebb flow, and there was a 
strong wind behind it, so that it sliced through the foam and flotsam, splitting 
water away from its sharp bow in a quick succession of white waves. There were 
men standing in its rigging, Nirgal saw, most of them out leaning over the 
yard-arms, waving one-armed at the ragged flotilla of motorboats as they passed 
through it. Pennants extended from the mast tops, a big blue flag with red 
crosses—when it ca’me abreast of Ely’s boat, Ely hit the air-horn trigger again 
and again, and the men roared. A sailor out at the end of the Cutty Sark’s 
mainsail yard waved at them with both hands, leaning his chest forward against 
the big polished cylinder of wood. Then he lost his balance, they all saw it 
happen, as if in slow motion; and with his mouth a round little O the sailor 
fell backward, dropping into the white water that foamed away from the ship’s 
side. The men on Ely’s boat shouted all together: “NO!” Ely cursed loudly and 
gunned . his engine, which was suddenly loud in the absence of the air horn. The 
rear of the boat dug deep into the water, and then they were grumbling toward 
the man overboard, now one black dot among the rest, a raised arm waving 
frantically.
Boats everywhere were tooting, honking, blasting their horns; but the Cutty Sark 
never slowed. It sailed away at full speed, sails all taut-bellied when seen 
from behind, a beautiful sight. By the time they reached the fallen sailor, the 
stern of the clipper was low on the water to the east, its masts a cluster of 
white sail and black rigging, until it disappeared abruptly into another wall of 
mist.
“What a glorious sight,” one of the men was still repeating. “What a glorious 
sight.”
“Yeah yeah, glorious, here fish this poor bastard in.”
Ely threw the engine in reverse, then idled. They threw a ladder over the side, 
leaned over to help the wet sailor up the steps. Finally he made it over the 
rail, stood bent over in his soaking clothes, holding on to the rail, shivering. 
“Ah thanks,” he said between retches over the side. Kev and the other crew 
members got his wet clothes off him, wrapped him in thick dirty blankets.
“You’re a stupid fucking idiot,” Ely shouted down from the wheelhouse. “There 
you were about to sail the world on the Cutty Sark, and now here you are on The 
Bride ofFaver-sham. You’re a stupid fucking idiot.”
“I know,” the man said between retches.
The men threw jackets over his back, laughing. “Silly fool, waving at us like 
that!” All the way back to Sheerness they proclaimed his ineptitude, while 
getting the bereft man dried and into the wind protection of the wheelhouse, 
dressed in spare clothes much too small for him. He laughed with them, cursed 
his luck, described the fall, reenacted coming loose. Back in Sheerness they 
helped him down into the submerged warehouse, and fed him hot stew, and pint 
after pint of bitter beer, meanwhile telling the people inside, and everyone who 
came down the ladder, all about his fall from grace. “Look here, this silly 
wanker fell off the Cutty Sark this afternoon, the clumsy bastard, when it was 
running down the tide under full sail to Tahiti!”
“To Pitcairn,” Ely corrected.
The sailor himself, extremely drunk, told his tale as often as his rescuers. 
“Just took me hands off for a second, and it gave a little lurch and I was 
flying. Flying in space. Didn’t think it would matter, I didn’t. Took me hands 
off all the time up the Thames. Oh one mo here, ‘scuse me, I’ve got to go spew.”
“Ah God she was a glorious sight she was, brilliant, really. More sail than they 
needed of course, it was just to go out in style, but God bless ‘em for that. 
Such a sight.”
Nirgal felt dizzy and bleak. The whole big room had gone a glossy dark, except 
in the exact spots where there were streaks of bright glare. Everything a 
chiaroscuro of jumbled objects, Brueghel in black-and-white, and so loud. “I 
remember the spring flood of thirteen, the North Sea in me living room—” “Ah no, 
not the flood of thirteen again, will you not go on about that again!”
He went to a partitioned room at one corner of the chamber, the men’s room, 
thinking he would feel better if he relieved himself. Inside the rescued sailor 
was on the floor of one of the stalls, retching violently. Nirgal retreated, sat 
down on the nearest bench to wait. A young woman passed him by, and reached out 
to touch him on the top of the head. “You’re hot!”
Nirgal held a palm to his forehead, tried to think about it. “Three hundred ten 
K,” he ventured. “Shit.” “You’ve caught a fever,” she said. One of his 
bodyguards sat beside him. Nirgal told him about his temperature, and the man 
said, “Will you ask your wristpad?”
Nirgal nodded, asked for a readout. 309 K. “Shit.” “How do you feel?” “Hot. 
Heavy.”
“We’d better get you to see someone.” Nirgal shook his head, but a wave of 
dizziness came over him as he did. He watched the bodyguards calling to make 
arrangements. Ely came over, and they asked him questions.
“At night?” Bly said. More quiet talk. Ely shrugged; not a good idea, the shrug 
said, but possible. The bodyguards went on, and Bly tossed down the last of his 
pint and stood. His head was still at the same level as Nirgal’s, although 
Nirgal had slid down to rest his back against the table. A different species, a 
squat powerful amphibian. Had they known that, before the flood? Did they know 
it now?
People said good-bye, crushed or coddled his hand. Climbing the conning-tower 
ladder was painful work. Then they were out in the cool wet night, fog shrouding 
everything. Without a word Bly led them onto his boat, and he remained silent as 
he started the engines and unmoored the boat. Off they puttered over a low 
swell. For the first time the rocking over the waves made Nirgal really queasy. 
Nausea was worse than pain. He sat down beside Bly on a stool, and watched the 
gray cone of illuminated water and fog before their bow. When dark objects 
loomed out of the fog Bly would slow, even shove the engines into reverse. Once 
he hissed. This went on for a long time. By the time they docked in the streets 
of Faversham, Nirgal was too sick to say good-bye properly; he could only grasp 
Ely’s hand and look down briefly into the man’s blue eyes. Such faces. You could 
see people’s souls right there in their faces. Had they known that before? Then 
Bly was gone and they were in a car, humming through the night. Nirgal’s weight 
was increasing as it had during the descent in the elevator. Onto a plane, 
ascending in darkness, descending in darkness, ears popping painfully, nausea; 
they were in Berne and Sax was there by his side, a great comfort.
He was in a bed, very hot, his breathing wet and painful. Out one window, the 
Alps. The white breaking up out of the green, like death itself rearing up out 
of life, crashing through to remind him that viriditas was a green fuse that 
would someday explode back into nova whiteness, returning to the same array of 
elements it had been before the pattern dust devil had picked it up. The white 
and the green; it felt like the Jungfrau was shoving up his throat. He wanted to 
sleep, to get away from that feeling.
Sax sat at his side, holding his hand. “I think he needs to be in Martian 
gravity,” he was saying to someone who did not seem to be in the room. “It could 
be a form of altitude sickness. Or a disease vector. Or allergies. A systemic 
response. Edema, anyway. Let’s take him up immediately in a ground-to-space 
plane, and get him into a g ring at Martian g. If I’m right it will help, if not 
it won’t hurt.”
Nirgal tried to speak, but couldn’t catch his breath. This world had infected 
him—crushed him—cooked him in steam and bacteria. A blow to the ribs: he was 
allergic to Earth. He squeezed Sax’s hand, pulled in a breath like a knife to 
the heart. “Yes,” he gasped, and saw Sax squint. “Home, yes.”


 
 
 
PART FIVE
               ------------
---Home At Last
               -----------
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
An old man sitting at sickbed. Hospital rooms are all the same. Clean, white, 
cool, humming, fluorescent. On the sickbed lies a man, tall, dark-skinned, thick 
black eyebrows. Sleeping fitfully. The old man is hunched at his head. One 
finger touches the skull behind the ear. Under his breath the old man is 
muttering. “If it’s an allergic response, then your own immune system has to be 
convinced that the allergen isn’t really a problem. They haven’t identified an 
allergen. Pulmonary edema is usually high-altitude sickness, but maybe the mix 
of gases caused it, or maybe it was low-altitude sickness. You need to get water 
out of your lungs. They’ve done pretty well with that. The fever and chills 
might be amenable to biofeedback. A really high fever is dangerous, you must 
remember that. I remember the time you came into the baths after falling into 
the lake. You were blue, fackie jumped right in—no, maybe she stopped to watch. 
You held Hiroko and me by the arms, and we all saw you warm up. Nonshivering 
thermogenesis, everyone does it, but you did it voluntarily, and very powerfully 
as well. I’ve never seen anything like it. I still don’t know how you did it. 
You were a wonderful boy. People can shiver at will if they want, so maybe it’s 
like that, only inside. It doesn’t really matter, you don’t need to know how, 
you just need to do it. If you can do it in the other direction. Bring your 
temperature down. Give it a try. Give it a try. You were such a wonderful boy.”
The old man reaches out and grabs the young man by the wrist. He holds it and 
squeezes.
“You used to ask questions. You were very curious, very good-natured. You would 
say Why, Sax, why? Why, Sax, why? It was fun to try to keep answering. The world 
is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the roots. I’m sure Hiroko 
felt that way, she probably was the one who first told me that. Listen, it 
wasn’t a bad thing to go looking for Hiroko. I’ve done the same thing myself. 
And I will again. Because I saw her once, on Dae-dalia. She helped me when I got 
caught out in a storm. She held my wrist. Just like this. She’s alive, Nirgal. 
Hiroko is alive. She’s out there. You’ll find her someday. Put that internal 
thermostat to work, get that temperature down, and someday you’ll find her....”
The old man lets go of the wrist. He slumps over, half-asleep, muttering still. 
“You would say Why, Sax, why?”


 
 
 
 
 
If the mistral hadn’t been blowing he might have cried, for nothing looked the 
same, nothing. He came into a Marseilles train station that hadn’t existed when 
he left, next to a little new town that hadn’t existed when he left, and all of 
it built according to a dripping bulbous Gaudi architecture which also had a 
kind of Bogdanovist circularity to it, so that Michel was reminded of 
Christianopolis or Hiranyagarba, if they had melted. No, nothing looked familiar 
in the slightest. The land was strangely flattened, green, deprived of its rock, 
deprived of that je ne sals quoi that had made it Provence. He had been gone 102 
years.
But blowing over all this unfamiliar landscape was the mistral, pouring down off 
the Massif Centrale—cold, dry, musty and electric, flushed with negative ions or 
whatever it was that gave it its characteristic katabatic exhilaration. The 
mistral! No matter what it looked like, it had to be Provence.
Praxis locals spoke French to him, and he could barely understand them. He had 
to listen hard, hoping his native tongue would come back to him, that the 
franglaisation and frarabisation he had heard about had not changed things too 
much; it was shocking to fumble in his native tongue, shocking too that the 
French Academy had not done its job and kept the language frozen in the 
seventeenth century like it was supposed to. A young woman leading the Praxis 
aides seemed to be saying that they could take a drive around and see the 
region, go down to the new coast and so on.
“Fine,” Michel said.
Already he was understanding them better. It was possibly just a matter of 
Provenfal accents. He followed them around through the concentric circles of the 
buildings, then out into a parking lot like all other parking lots. The young 
woman aide helped him into the passenger seat of a little car, then she got in 
on the other side, behind the steering wheel. Her name was Sylvie; she was 
small, attractive, stylish, and smelled nice, so that her strange French 
continuously surprised Michel. She started the car and drove them out of the 
airport. And then they were running noisily over a black road across a flat 
landscape, green with grass and trees. No, there were some hills in the 
distance; so small! And the horizon so far away!
Sylvie drove to the nearest coast. From a hilltop turnout they could see far 
over the Mediterranean, on this day mottled brown and gray, gleaming in the sun.
After a few minutes’ silent observation, Sylvie drove on, cutting inland over 
flat land again. Then they were stopped on a levee, and looking over the 
Camargue, she said. Michel would not have recognized it. The delta of the Rhone 
River had been a broad triangular fan of many thousands of hectares, filled by 
salt marshes and grass; now it was part of the Mediterranean again. The water 
was brown, and dotted with buildings, but it was water nevertheless, the flow of 
the Rhone a bluish line out there crossing the middle of it. Aries, Sylvie said, 
up at the tip of the fan, was a functioning seaport again. Although they were 
still securing the channel. Everything in the delta south of Aries, Sylvie said 
proudly, from Martiques in the east to Aigue-Mortes in the west, was covered by 
water. Aigues-Mortes was dead indeed, its industrial buildings drowned. Its port 
facilities, Sylvie said, were being floated and moved to Aries, or Marseilles. 
They were working hard to make safe navigational routes for ships; both the 
Carmargue and the Plaine de la Crau, farther east, had been littered with 
structures of all kinds, many still sticking out of the water, but not all; and 
the water was too opaque with silt to see into. “See, there’s the rail 
station—you can see the graineries, but not the out-buildings. And there’s one 
of the levee-banked canals. The levees are like reefs now. See the line of gray 
water? The levees are still breaking, when the current from the Rhone runs over 
them.”
“Lucky the tides aren’t big,” Michel said.
“True. If they were it would be too treacherous for ships to reach Aries.”
In the Mediterranean tides were negligible, and fishermen and coastal freighters 
were discovering day by day what could be safely negotiated; attempts were being 
made to resecure the Rhone’s main channel through the new lagoon, and to 
reestablish the flanking canals as well, so that boats wouldn’t have to 
challenge the flow of the Rhone when returning upstream. Sylvie pointed out at 
features Michel couldn’t see, and told him of sudden shifts of the Rhone’s 
channel, of ships’ groundings, loose buoys, ripped hulls, rescues by night, oil 
spills, confusing new lighthouses—false lighthouses, set by moonlighters for the 
unwary—even ordinary piracy on the high seas. Life sounded exciting at the new 
mouth of the Rhone.
After a while they got back in the little car, and Sylvie drove them south and 
east, until they hit the coast, the true coast, between Marseilles and Cassis. 
This part of the Mediterranean littoral, like the Cote d’Azur farther east, 
consisted of a range of steep hills dropping abruptly into the sea. The hills 
still stood well above the water, of course, and at first glance it seemed to 
Michel that this section of the coast had changed much less than the drowned 
Camargue. But after a few minutes of silent observation, he changed his mind. 
The Camargue had always been a delta, and now it was a delta still, and so 
nothing essential had changed. Here, however: “The beaches are gone.”
“Yes.”
It was only to be expected. But the beaches had been the essence of this coast, 
the beaches with their long tawny summers all jammed with sun-worshiping naked 
human animals, with swimmers and sailboats and carnival colors, and long warm 
thrilling nights. All that had vanished. “They’ll never come back.”
Sylvie nodded. “It’s the same everywhere,” she said matter-of-factly.
Michel looked eastward; hills dropped into the brown sea all the way to a 
distant horizon; it looked like he might be seeing as far as Cap Sicie. Beyond 
that were all the big resorts, Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Antibes, Nice, his own 
little Vil-lefranche-sur-mer, and all the fashionable beach resorts in between, 
big and small,”all drowned like the stretch under them: the sea mud brown, 
lapping against a fringe of pale broken rock and dead yellow trees, with the 
beach roads dipping into dirty white surf. Dirty surf, washing up into the 
streets of deserted towns.
Green trees above the new sealine tossed over whitish rock. Michel had not 
remembered how white the rock was. The foliage was low and dusty, deforestation 
had been a problem in recent years, Sylvie said, as people had cut trees for 
firewood. But Michel barely heard her; he was staring down at the drowned 
beaches, trying to recall their sandy hot erotic beauty. Gone. And he found, as 
he stared at the dirty surf, that in his mind he couldn’t remember them very 
well—nor his days on them, the many lazy days now blurs, as of a dead friend’s 
face. He couldn’t remember.
 
Marseilles however had of course survived—the only part of the coast one could 
not care about, the ugliest part, the city. Of course. Its docks were inundated, 
and the neighborhoods immediately behind them; but the land rose quickly here, 
and the higher neighborhoods had gone on living their tough sordid existence, 
big ships still anchored in the harbor, long floating docks maneuvered out to 
them to empty their holds, while their sailors flooded the town and went mad in 
time-honored fashion. Sylvie said that Marseilles was where she had heard most 
of the hair-raising tales of adventure from the mouth of the Rhone and elsewhere 
around the Med, where the charts meant nothing anymore: houses of the dead 
between Malta and Tunisia, attacks by Barbary corsairs... “Marseilles is more 
itself than it has been for centuries,” she said, and grinned, and Michel got a 
sudden sense of her nightlife, wild and perhaps a bit dangerous. She liked 
Marseilles. The car lurched in one of the road’s many potholes and it felt like 
his pulse, he and the mistral rushing around ugly old Marseilles, stricken by 
the thought of a wild young woman.
More itself than it had been for centuries. Perhaps that was true of the entire 
coast. There were no tourists anymore; with the beaches gone, the whole concept 
of tourism had taken a knife to the heart. The big pastel hotels and apartment 
buildings now stood in the surf half-drowned, like children’s blocks left at low 
tide. As they drove out of Marseilles, Michel noted that many of these buildings 
appeared to have been reoccupied in their upper stories, by fishermen Sylvie 
said; no doubt they kept their boats in rooms downstairs, like the Lake People 
of prehistoric Europe. The old ways, returning.
So Michel kept looking out the window, trying to rethink the new Provence, doing 
his best to deal with the shock of so much change. Certainly it was all very 
interesting, even if it was not as he remembered it. New beaches would 
eventually form, he reassured himself, as the waves cut away at the foots of sea 
cliffs, and the charged rivers and streams carried soil downstream. It was 
possible they might even appear fairly quickly, although they would be dirt or 
stones, at first. That tawny sand—well, currents might bring some of the drowned 
sand up onto the new strand, who knew? But surely most of it was gone for good.
Sylvie brought the car to another windy turnout overlooking the sea. It was 
brown right to the horizon, the offshore wind causing them to be looking at the 
back sides of waves moving away from the strand, an odd effect. Michel tried to 
recall the old sun-beaten blue. There had been varieties of Mediterranean blue, 
the clear purity of the Adriatic, the Aegean with its Homeric touch of wine . . 
. now all brown. Brown sea, beachless sea cliffs, the pale hills rocky, 
desertlike, deserted. A wasteland. No, nothing was the same, nothing.
Eventually Sylvie noticed his silence. She drove him west to Aries, to a small 
hotel in the heart of the town. Michel had never lived in Aries, or had much to 
do there, but there were Praxis offices next to this hotel, and he had no other 
compelling idea concerning where to stay. They got out; the g felt heavy. Sylvie 
waited downstairs while he took his bag up; and there he was, standing 
uncertainly in a small hotel room, his bag thrown on the bed, his body tense 
with the desire to find his land, to return to his home. This wasn’t it.
He went downstairs and then next door, where Sylvie was tending to other 
business.
“I have a place I want to see,” he said to her.
“Anywhere you like.”
“It’s near Vallabrix. North of Uzes.” She said she knew where that was.
 
It was late afternoon by the time they reached the place: a clearing by the side 
of a narrow old road, next to an olive grove on a slope, with the mistral raking 
over it. Michel asked Sylvie to stay at the car, and got out in the wind and 
walked up the slope between the trees, alone with the past.
His old mas had been set at the north end of the grove, on the edge of a 
tableland overlooking a ravine. The olive trees were gnarled with age. The mas 
itself was nothing but a shell of masonry, almost buried under long tangled 
thorny blackberry vines growing against the outer walls.
Looking down into the ruin, Michel found he could just remember its interior. Or 
parts of it. There had been a kitchen and dining table near the door, and then, 
after passing under a massive roof beam, a living room with couches and a low 
coffee table, and a door back to the bedroom. He had lived there for two or 
three years, with a woman named Eve. He hadn’t thought of the place in over a 
century. He would have said it was all gone from his mind. But with the ruins 
before him, fragments of that time leaped to the eye, ruins of another kind: a 
blue lamp had stood in that corner now filled with broken plaster. A Van Gogh 
print had been tacked to that wall, where now there was only blocks of masonry, 
roof tiles, drifts of leaves. The massive roof beam was gone, its supports in 
the walls gone as well. Someone must have hauled it out; hard to believe anyone 
would make the effort, it had to have weighed hundreds of kilos. Strange what 
people would do. Then again, deforestation; there were few trees left big enough 
to provide a beam that large. The centuries people had lived on this land.
Eventually deforestation might cease to be a problem. During the drive Sylvie 
had spoken of the violent flood winter, rains, wind; this mistral had lasted a 
month. Some said it would never end. Looking into the ruined house, Michel was 
not sorry. He needed the wind to orient himself. It was strange how the memory 
worked, or didn’t. He stepped up onto the broken wall of the mas, tried to 
remember more of the place, of his life here with Eve. Deliberate recall, a hunt 
for the past.... Instead scenes came to him of the life he had shared with Maya 
in Odessa, with Spencer down the hall. Probably the two lives had shared enough 
aspects to create the confusion. Eve had been hot-tempered like Maya, and as for 
the rest, la vie quotidienne was la vie quotidienne, in all times and all 
places, especially for a specific individual no doubt, settling into his habits 
as if into furniture, taken along from one place to the next. Perhaps.
The inside walls of this house had been clean beige plaster, tacked with prints. 
Now the patches of plaster left were rough and discolored, like the exterior 
walls of an old church. Eve had worked in the kitchen like a dancer in a 
routine, her back and legs long and powerful. Looking over her shoulder at him 
to laugh, her chestnut hair tossing with every turn. Yes, he remembered that 
repeated moment. An image without context. He had been in love. Although he had 
made her angry. Eventually she had left him for someone else, ah yes, a teacher 
in Uzes. What pain! He remembered it, but it meant nothing to him now, he felt 
not a pinch of it. A previous life. These ruins could not make him feel it. They 
scarcely brought back even the images. It was frightening—as if reincarnation 
were real, and had happened to him, so that he was experiencing minute 
flashbacks of a life separated from him by several subsequent deaths. How odd it 
would be if such reincarnation were real, speaking in languages one did not 
know, like Bridey Murphy; feeling the swirl of the past through the mind, 
feeling previous existences ... well. It would feel just like this, in fact. But 
to reexperience nothing of those past feelings, to feel nothing except the 
sensation that one was not feeling. . . .
He left the ruins, and walked back among the old olive trees.
It looked like the grove was still being worked by someone. The branches 
overhead were all cut to a certain level, and the ground underfoot was smooth 
and covered by short dry pale grass, growing between thousands of old gray olive 
pits. The trees were in ranks and files but looked natural anyway, as if they 
had simply grown at that distance from each other. The wind blew its lightly 
percussive shoosh in the leaves. Standing midgrove, where he could see little 
but olive trees and sky, he noticed again how the leaves’ two colors flashed 
back and forth in the wind, green then gray, gray then green....
He reached up to pull down a twig and inspect the leaves close up. He 
remembered; up close the two sides of an olive leaf weren’t all that different 
in color; a flat medium green, a pale khaki. But a hillside full of them, 
flailing in the wind, had those two distinct colors, in moonlight shifting to 
black and silver. If one were looking toward the sun at them it became more a 
matter of texture, flat or shiny.
He walked up to a tree, put his hands on its trunk. It felt like an olive tree’s 
bark: rough broken rectangles. A gray-green color, somewhat like the undersides 
of the leaves, but darker, and often covered by yet another green, the yellow 
green of lichen, yellow green or battleship gray. There were hardly any olive 
trees on Mars; no Mediterraneans yet. No, it felt like he was on Earth. About 
ten years old. Carrying that heavy child inside himself. Some of the rectangles 
of bark were peeling down. The fissures between the rectangles were shallow. The 
true color of the bark, clean of all lichen, appeared to be a pale woody beige. 
There was so little of it that it was hard to tell. Trees coated in lichen; 
Michel had not realized that before. The branches above his head were smoother, 
the fissures flesh-colored lines only, the lichen smoother as well, like green 
dust on the branches and twigs.
The roots were big and strong. The trunks spread outward as they approached the 
ground, spreading in fingerlike protrusions with holes and gaps between, like 
knobby fists thrust into the ground. No mistral would ever uproot these trees. 
Not even a Martian wind could knock one down.
The ground was covered with old olive pits, and shriveled black olives on the 
way to becoming pits. He picked up one with its black skin still smooth, ripped 
away the skin with his thumb and fingernails. The purple juice stained his skin, 
and when he licked it, the taste was not like cured olives at all. Sour. He bit 
into the flesh, which resembled plum flesh, and the taste of it, sour and 
bitter, unolivelike except for a hint of the oily aftertaste, bolted through his 
mind—like Maya’s deja vu—he had done this before! As a child they had tried it 
often, always hoping the taste would come round to the table taste, and so give 
them food in their play field, manna in their own little wilderness. But the 
olive flesh (paler the further one cut in toward the pit) stubbornly remained as 
unpalatable as ever—the taste as embedded in his mind as any person, bitter and 
sour. Now pleasant, because of the memory evoked. Perhaps he had been cured.
The leaves flailed in the gusty north wind. Smell of dust. A haze of brown 
light, the western sky brassy. The branches rose to twice or three times his 
height; the underbranches drooped down where they could brush his face. Human 
scale. The Mediterranean tree, the tree of the Greeks, who had seen so many 
things so clearly, seen things in their proper proportion, everything in a gauge 
symmetry to the human scale—the trees, the towns, their whole physical world, 
the rocky islands in the Aegean, the rocky hills of the Peloponnese—a universe 
you could walk across in a few days. Perhaps home was the place of human scale, 
wherever it was. Usually childhood.
Each tree was like an animal holding its plumage up into the wind, its knobby 
legs thrust into the ground. A hillside of plumage flashing under the wind’s 
onslaught, under its fluctuating gusts and knocks and unexpected stillnesses, 
all perfectly revealed by the feathering leaves. This was Provence, the heart of 
Provence; his whole underbrain seemed to be humming at the edge of every moment 
of his childhood, a vastpresque vu filling him up and brimming over, a life in a 
landscape, humming with its own weight and balance. He no longer felt heavy. The 
sky’s blue itself was a voice from that previous incarnation, saying Provence, 
Provence.
But out over the ravine a flock of black crows swirled, crying Ka, ka, ka!
Ka. Who had made up that story, of the little red people and their name for 
Mars? No way of telling. No beginnings to such stories. In Mediterranean 
antiquity the Ka had been a weird or double of a pharaoh, pictured as descending 
on the pharaoh in the form of a hawk or a dove, or a crow.
Now the Ka of Mars was descending on him, here in Provence. Black crows—on Mars 
under the clear tents these same birds flew, just as carelessly powerful in the 
aerators’ blasts as in the mistral. They didn’t care that they were on Mars, it 
was home to them, their world as much as any other, and the people below what 
they always had been, dangerous ground animals who would kill you or take you on 
strange voyages. But no bird on Mars remembered the voyage there, or Earth 
either. Nothing bridged the two worlds but the human mind. The birds only flew 
and searched for food, and cawed, on Earth or Mars, as they always had and 
always would. They were at home anywhere, wheeling in the hard gusts of the 
wind, coping with the mistral and calling to each other Mars, Mars, Mars! But 
Michel Duval, ah, Michel—a mind residing in two worlds at once, or lost in the 
nowhere between them. The noos-phere was so huge. Where was he, who was he? How 
was he to live?
Olive grove. Wind. Bright sun in a brass sky. The weight of his body, the sour 
taste in his mouth: he felt himself root right into the ground. This was his 
home, this and no other. It had changed and yet it would never change—not this 
grove, not he himself. Home at last. Home at last. He could live on Mars for ten 
thousand years and still this place would be his home.


 
 
 
 
 
Back in the hotel room in Arles, he called up Maya. “Please come down, Maya. I 
want you to see this.”
“I’m working on the agreement, Michel. The UN-Mars agreement.”
“I know.”
“It’s important!” ,   “I know.”
“Well. It’s why I came here, and I’m part of it, in the middle of it. I can’t 
just go off on vacation.”
“Okay, okay. But look, that work will never end. Politics will never end. You 
can take a vacation, and then come back to it, and it will still be going. But 
this—this is my home, Maya. I want you to see it. Don’t you want to show me 
Moscow, don’t you want to go there?”
“Not if it was the last place above the flood.”
Michel sighed. “Well, it’s different for me. Please, come see what I mean.”
“Maybe in a while, when we’ve finished this stage of the negotiations. This is a 
critical time, Michel! Really it’s you who ought to be here, not me who ought to 
be there.”
“I can watch on the wrist. There’s no reason to be there in person. Please, 
Maya.”
She paused, caught finally by something in his tone of voice. “Okay, I’ll try. 
It won’t be for a while though, no matter what.” “As long as you come.”
After that he spent his days waiting for Maya, though he tried not to think of 
it like that. He occupied every waking moment traveling about in a rented car, 
sometimes with Sylvie, sometimes on his own. Despite the evocative moment in the 
olive grove, perhaps because of it too, he felt deeply dislocated. He was drawn 
to the new coastline for some reason, fascinated by the adjustment to the new 
sea level that the local people were making. He drove down to it often, 
following back roads that led to abrupt cliffs, to sudden valley marshes. Many 
of the coastal fishing people had Algerian ancestry. The fishing wasn’t going 
well, they said. The Camargue was polluted by drowned industrial sites, and in 
the Med the fish were for the most part staying outside the brown water, out in 
the blue which was a good morning’s voyage away, with many dangers en route.
Hearing and speaking French, even this strange new French, was like touching an 
electrode to parts of his brain that hadn’t been visited in over a century. 
Coelacanths exploded regularly: memories of women’s kindnesses to him, his 
cruelties to them. Perhaps that was why he had gone to Mars—to escape himself, 
an unpleasant fellow it seemed.
Well, if escaping himself had been his desire, he had succeeded. Now he was 
someone else. And a helpful man, a sympathetic man; he could look in a mirror. 
He could return home and face it, face what he had been, because of what he had 
become. Mars had done that, anyway.
It was so strange how the memory worked. The fragments were so small and sharp, 
they were like those furry minute cactus needles that hurt far out of proportion 
to their minuscule size. What he remembered best was his life on Mars. Odessa, 
Burroughs, the underground shelters in the south, the hidden outposts in the 
chaos. Even Underbill.
If he had returned to Earth during the Underbill years, he would have been 
swamped with media crowds. But he had been out of contact since disappearing 
with Hiroko, and though he had not attempted to conceal himself since the 
revolution, few in France seemed to have noticed his reappearance. The enormity 
of recent events on Earth had ineluded a partial fracturing of the media 
culture—or perhaps it was simply the passage of time; most of the population of 
France had been born after his disappearance, and the First Hundred were ancient 
history to them—not ancient enough, however, to be truly interesting. If 
Voltaire or Louis XIV or Charlemagne had appeared, there might be a bit of 
attention—perhaps—but a psychologist of the previous century who had emigrated 
to Mars, which was a sort of America when all was said and done? No, that was of 
very little interest to anyone. He got some calls, some people came by the 
Arlesian hotel to interview him down in the lobby or the courtyard, and after 
that one or two of the Paris shows came down as well; but they all were much 
more interested in what he could tell them about Nirgal than in anything about 
he himself. Nirgal was the one people were fascinated by, he was their 
charismatic.
No doubt it was better that way. Although as Michel sat in cafes eating his 
meals, feeling as alone as if he were in a solo rover in the far outback of the 
southern highlands, it was a bit disappointing to be entirely ignored—just one 
vieux among all the rest, another one of those whose unnaturally long life was 
creating more logistical problems than le fleuve blanc, if the truth were 
told....
It was better this way. He could stop in little villages around Vallabrix, like 
Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, or Saint-Victor-des-Quies, or 
Saint-Hippolyte-de-Montaigu, and chat with the shopkeepers, who looked identical 
to the ones who had been running the shops when he had left, and were probably 
their descendants, or even possibly the same people; they spoke in an older more 
stable French, careless of him, absorbed in their own conversations, their own 
lives. He was nothing to them, and so he could see them clearly. It was the same 
out in the narrow streets, where many people looked like gypsies—North African 
blood no doubt, spreading into the populace as it had after the Saracen invasion 
a thousand years before. Africans pouring in every thousand years or so; this 
too was Provence. The young women were beautiful: gracefully flowing through the 
streets in gangs, their black tresses still glossy and bright in the dust of the 
mistral. These had been his villages. Dusty plastic signs, everything tatttred 
and run-down....
Back and forth he oscillated, between familiarity and alienation, memory and 
forgetfulness. But ever more lonely.
In one cafe he ordered cassis, and at the first sip he remembered sitting in 
that very same cafe, at that very same table. Across from Eve. Proust had been 
perfectly correct to identify taste as the principal agent of involuntary 
memory, for one’s long-term memories settled or at least were organized in the 
amygdala, just over the area in the brain concerned with taste and smell—and so 
smells were intensely intertwined with memories, and also with the emotional 
network of the limbic system, twisting through both areas; thus the neurological 
sequence, smell triggering memory triggering nostalgia. Nostalgia, the intense 
ache for one’s past, desire for one’s past—not because it had been so wonderful 
but simply because it had been, and now was gone. He recalled Eve’s face, 
talking in this crowded room across from him. But not what she had said, or why 
they were there. Of course not. Simply an isolated moment, a cactus needle, an 
image seen as if by lightning bolt, then gone; and no knowing the rest of it, no 
matter how hard he tried to recollect. And they were all like that, his 
memories; that was what memories were when they got old enough, flashes in the 
dark, incoherent, almost meaningless, and yet sometimes filled with a vague 
ache.
He stumbled out of the cafe from his past to his car, and drove home, through 
Vallabrix, under the big plane trees of Grand Planas, out to the ruined mas, all 
without thinking; and he walked out to it again helplessly, as if the house 
might have sprung back into being. But it was still the same dusty ruin by the 
olive grove. And he sat on the wall, feeling blank.
That Michel Duval was gone. This one would go too. He would live into yet 
further incarnations and forget this moment, yes even this sharp painful moment, 
just as he had forgotten all the moments that had passed here the first time. 
Flashes, images—a man sitting on a broken wall, no feeling involved. Nothing 
more than that. So this Michel too would go.
The olive trees waved their arms, gray green, green gray. Good-bye, good-bye. 
They were no help this time, they gave him no euphoric connection with lost 
time; that moment too was past.
In a flickering gray green he drove back to Aries. The clerk in the hotel’s 
lobby was telling someone that the mistral would never stop. “Yes it will,” 
Michel said as he passed.
He went up to his room and called Maya again. Please, he said. Please come soon. 
It was making him angry that he was reduced to such begging. Soon, she kept 
saying. A few more days and they would have an agreement hammered out, a bona 
fide written agreement between the UN and an independent Martian government. 
History in the making. After that she would see about coming.
Michel did not care about history in the making. He walked around Aries, waiting 
for her. He went back to his room to wait. He went out to walk again.
 
The Romans had used Aries for a port as much as they had Marseilles—in fact 
Caesar had razed Marseilles for backing Pompey, and had given Aries his favor as 
the local capital. Three strategic Roman roads had been constructed to meet at 
the town, all used for hundreds of years after the Romans had gone, and so for 
those centuries it had been lively, prosperous, important. But the Rhone had 
silted its lagoons, and the Camargue had become a pestilential swamp, and the 
roads had fallen into disuse. The town dwindled. The Camargue’s windswept salt 
grasses and their famous herds of wild white horses were eventually joined by 
oil refineries, nuclear power plants, chemical works.
Now with the flood the lagoons were back, and flushing clean. Aries was again a 
seaport. Michel continued to wait for Maya there precisely because he had never 
lived there before. It did not remind him of anything but the moment; and he 
spent his days watching the people of the moment live their lives. In this new 
foreign country.
 
He received a call at the hotel, from a Francis Duval. Sylvie had contacted the 
man. He was Michel’s nephew, Michel’s dead brother’s son, still alive and living 
on Rue du 4 Sep-tembre, just north of the Roman arena, a few blocks from the 
swollen Rhone, a few blocks from Michel’s hotel. He invited Michel to come over.
After a moment’s hesitation, Michel agreed. By the time he had walked across 
town, stopping briefly to peer into the Roman theater and arena, his nephew 
appeared to have convened the entire quartier: an instant celebration, champagne 
corks popping like strings of firecrackers as Michel was pulled in the door and 
embraced by everyone there, three kisses to the cheeks, in the Proven9al manner. 
It took him a while to get to Francis, who hugged him long and hard, talking all 
the while as people’s camera fibers pointed at them. “You look just like my 
father!” Francis said.
“So do you!” said Michel, trying to remember if it were true or not, trying to 
remember his brother’s face. Francis was elderly, Michel had never seen his 
brother that old. It was hard to say.
But all the faces were familiar, somehow, and the language comprehensible, 
mostly, the phrases sparking image after image in him; the smells of cheese and 
wine sparking more; the taste of the wine yet more again. Francis it turned out 
was a connoisseur, and happily he uncorked a number of dusty bottles, 
Chateauneuf du Pape, then a century-old sauternes from Chateau d’Yquem, and his 
specialty, red premier cru from Bordeaux called Pauillac, two each from Chateaux 
Latour and Lafitte, and a 2064 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild with a label by 
Pougnadoresse. These aged wonders had metamorphosed over the years into 
something more than mere wine, tastes thick with overtones and harmonics. They 
spilled down Michel’s throat like his own youth.
It could have been a party for some popular town politi-can, say; and though 
Michel concluded that Francis did not much resemble Michel’s brother, he sounded 
exactly like him. Michel had forgotten that voice, he would have said, but it 
was absolutely clear in his mind, shockingly so. The way Francis drawled 
“normalement,” in this case meaning the way things had been before the flood, 
whereas for Michel’s brother it had meant that hypothetical state of smooth 
operation that never occurred in the real Provence—but exactly the same lilt and 
drawl, nor-male-ment....
Everyone wanted to speak with Michel, or at least to hear him, and so he stood 
with a glass in his hand and gave a quick speech in the style of a town 
politician, complimenting the women on their beauty, managing to make it clear 
how pleased he was to be in their company without getting sentimental, or 
revealing just how disoriented he was feeling: a slick competent performance, 
which was just what the sophisticates of Provence liked, their rhetoric quick 
and humorous like the local bullfighting. “And how is Mars?
What is it like? What will you do now? Are there Jacobins yet?”
“Mars is Mars,” Michel said, dismissing it. “The ground is the color of Arlesian 
roof tiles. You know.”
They partied right through the afternoon, and then called in a feast. 
Innumerable women kissed his cheeks, he was drunk on their perfume and skin and 
hair, their smiling liquid dark eyes, looking at him with friendly curiosity. 
Native Martian girls one always had to look up to, inspecting their chins and 
necks and the insides of their nostrils. Such a pleasure to look down on a 
straight part in glossy black hair.
In the late evening people dispersed. Francis walked with Michel over to the 
Roman arena, and they climbed the bowed stone steps of the medieval towers that 
had fortified the arena. From the little stone chamber at the top of the stairs 
they looked out small windows at the tile -oofs, and the treeless streets, and 
the Rhone. Out the south windows they could see a portion of the speckled sheet 
of water which was the Camargue.
“Back on the Med,” Francis said, deeply satisfied. “The flood may have been a 
disaster for most places, but for Aries it has been a veritable coup. The rice 
farmers are all coming into town ready to fish, or take any work they can get. 
And many of the boats that survived have been docked right here in town. They’ve 
been bringing fruit in from Corsica and Mallorca, trade with Barcelona and 
Sicily. We’ve taken a good bit of Marseilles’s business, although they’re 
recovering quickly, it has to be said. But what life has come back! Before, you 
know, Aix had the university, Marseilles had the sea, and we had only these 
ruins, and the tourists who came for a day to see them. And tourism is an ugly 
business, it’s not fit work for human beings. It’s hosting parasites. But now 
we’re living again!” He was a little bit drunk. “Here, you must come out on the 
boat with me and see the lagoon.”
“I’d like that.”
That night Michel called Maya again. “You must come. I’ve found my nephew, my 
family.”
Maya wasn’t impressed. “Nirgal went to England looking for Hiroko,” she said 
sharply. “Someone told him she was there, and he left just like that.”
“What’s this?” Michel exclaimed, shocked by the sudden intrusion of the idea of 
Hiroko.
“Oh Michel. You know it can’t be true. Someone said it to Nirgal, that’s all it 
was. It can’t be true, but he ran right off.”
“As would I!”
“Please, Michel, don’t be stupid. One fool is enough. If Hiroko is alive at all, 
then she’s on Mars. Someone just said this to Nirgal to get him away from the 
negotiations. I only hope it was for nothing worse. He was having too much of an 
effect on people. And he wasn’t watching his tongue. You should call him and 
tell him to come back. Maybe he would listen to you.”
“I wouldn’t if I were him.”
Michel was lost in thought, trying to crush the sudden hope that Hiroko was 
alive. And in England of all places. Alive anywhere. Hiroko and therefore Iwao, 
Gene, Rya—the whole group—his family. His real family. He shuddered, hard; and 
when he tried to tell the impatient Maya about his family in Aries, the words 
stuck in his throat. His real family had all disappeared four years before, and 
that was the truth. Finally, sick at heart, he could only say, “Please, Maya. 
Please come.”
“Soon. I’ve told Sax I’ll go as soon as we’re finished here. That will leave all 
the rest of it to him, and he can barely talk. It’s ridiculous.” She was 
exaggerating, they had a full diplomatic team there, and Sax was perfectly 
competent, in his way. “But okay, okay, I’m going to do it. So stop pestering 
me.”


 
 
 
 
 
She came the next week.
Michel drove to the new train station and met her, feeling nervous. He had lived 
with Maya, in Odessa and Burroughs, for almost thirty years; but now, driving 
her to Avignon, she seemed like a stranger sitting there beside him, an ancient 
beauty with hooded eyes and an expression hard to read, speaking English in 
harsh rapid sentences, telling him everything that had happened in Bern. They 
had a treaty with the UN, which had agreed to their independence. In return they 
were to allow some emigration, but no more than ten percent of the Martian 
population per year; some transfer of mineral resources; some consultation on 
diplomatic issues. “That’s good, really good.” Michel tried to concentrate on 
her news, but it was hard. Occasionally as she spoke she glanced at the 
buildings shooting past their car, but in the dusty windy sunlight they looked 
tawdry enough in all truth. She did not seem impressed.
With a sinking feeling Michel drove as close as he could to the pope’s palace in 
Avignon, parked, and took her for a walk along the swollen river, past the 
bridge that did not reach to the other side, then to the wide promenade leading 
south from the palace, where sidewalk cafes nestled in the shade of the ancient 
plane trees. There they ate lunch, and Michel tasted the olive oil and the 
cassis, running them luxuriously over his tongue as he watched his companion 
relax into her metal chair like a cat. “This is nice,” she said, and he smiled. 
It was nice: cool, relaxed, civilized, the food and drink very fine. But for him 
the taste of cassis was unleashing its flood of memories, emotions from previous 
incarnations blended with the emotions he felt now, heightening everything, 
colors, textures, the feel of metal chairs and wind. While for Maya cassis was 
just a tart berry drink.
It occurred to him as he watched her that fate had led him to a companion even 
more attractive than the beautiful Frenchwomen he had consorted with in that 
earlier life. A woman somehow greater. In that too he had done well on Mars. He 
had taken on a bigger life. This feeling and his nostalgia clashed in his heart, 
and all the while Maya swallowed mouthfuls of cassoulet, wine, cheeses, cassis, 
coffee, oblivious to the interference pattern of his lives, moving in and out of 
phase inside him.
They talked desultorily. Maya was relaxed, enjoying herself. Happy at her 
accomplishment in Bern. In no hurry to go anywhere. Michel felt a glow like 
omegandorph all through him. Watching her he was slowly becoming happy himself; 
simply happy. Past, future—neither was ever real. Just lunch under plane trees, 
in Avignon. No need to think of anything but that. “So civilized,” Maya said. “I 
haven’t felt so calm in years. I can see why you like it.” And then she was 
laughing at him, and he could feel an idiot grin plastering his face.
“Would you not like to see Moscow again?” he asked curiously.
“Ah no. I would not.”
She dismissed the idea as an intrusion on the moment. He wondered what she felt 
about this return to Earth. Surely one could not be completely without feelings 
about such a thing?
But to some people home was home, a complex of feeling far beyond rationality, a 
sort of grid or gravitational field in which the personality itself took its 
geometrical shape. While for others, a place was just a place, and the self free 
of all that, the same no matter where it was. One kind lived in the Einsteinian 
curved space of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute space of the free 
self. And while he was one of the former type, Maya was one of the latter. And 
there was no use struggling against that fact. Nevertheless he wanted her to 
like Provence. Or at least to see why he loved it.
And so, when they were done eating, he drove her south through Saint-Remy, to 
Les Baux.
She slept during the drive, and he was not displeased; between Avignon and Les 
Baux the landscape consisted mostly of ugly industrial buildings, scattered on a 
dusty plain. She woke up at just the right time, when he was negotiating the 
narrow twisting road that wandered up a crease in the Alpilles to the old 
hilltop village. One parked in a parking lot, then walked up into the town; it 
was clearly a tourist arrangement, but the single curving street of the little 
settlement was now very quiet indeed, as if abandoned; and very picturesque. The 
village was shuttered for the afternoon, asleep. On the last turn to the hill’s 
top, one crossed open ground like a rough tilted plaza, and beyond that were the 
limestone knobs of the hilltop, every knob hollowed out by some eremite of the 
ancient hermitage, tucked above Saracens and all the other dangers of the 
medieval world. To the south the Mediterranean gleamed like gold plate. The rock 
itself was yellowish, and as a thin veil of bronzed cloud lay in the western 
sky, the light everywhere took on a metallic amber cast, as if they walked in a 
gel of years.
They clambered from one tiny chamber to the next, marveling at how small they 
were. “It’s like a prairie-dog nest,” Maya said, peering down into one 
squared-out little cave. “It’s like our trailer park in Underbill.”
Back on the tilted plaza, littered with limestone blocks, they stopped to watch 
the Mediterranean shine. Michel pointed out the lighter sheen of the Camargue. 
“You used to see only a bit of water.” The light deepened to a dark apricot, and 
the hill seemed a fortress above the oh-so-spacious world, above time itself. 
Maya put an arm around his waist and hugged him, shivering. “It’s beautiful. But 
I couldn’t live up here like they did, it’s too exposed somehow.”
They went back to Aries. As it was a Saturday night, the town center had become 
a kind of gypsy or North African festival, the alleys crowded with food and 
drink stands, many of them tucked into the arches of the Roman arena, which was 
open to all, with a band playing inside it. Maya and Michel walked around arm in 
arm, bathed in the smells of frying food and Arabic spices. Voices around them 
spoke in two or three different languages. “It reminds me of Odessa,” Maya said 
as they made their promenade around the Roman arena, “only the people are so 
little. It’s nice not to feel dwarfed for once.”
They danced in the arena center, drank at a table under the blurry stars. One 
star was red, and Michel had his suspicions, but did not voice them. They went 
back to his hotel room and made love on the narrow bed, and at some point it 
seemed to Michel that there were several people in him, all coming at once; he 
cried out at the strange rapture of that sensation.... Maya fell asleep and he 
lay beside her awake, in a tristesse reverberating somewhere outside time, 
drinking in the familiar smell of her hair and listening to the slowly 
diminishing cacophony of the town. Home at last.
 
In the days that followed, he introduced her to his nephew and to the rest of 
his relatives, rounded up by Francis. That whole gang took her in, and through 
the use of translation AIs asked her scores of questions. They also tried to 
tell her everything about themselves. It happened so often, Michel thought; 
people wanted to seize the famous stranger whose story they knew (or thought 
they knew), and give them their story in return, to redress the balance of the 
relationship. Some kind of witnessing, or confessional. The reciprocal sharing 
of stories. And people were naturally drawn to Maya anyway. She listened to 
their stories, and laughed, and asked questions—utterly there. Time after time 
they told her how the flood had come, drowning their homes, their livings, 
throwing them out into the world, to friends and family they hadn’t seen in 
years, forcing them into new patterns and reliances, breaking the mold of their 
lives and thrusting them out into the mistral. They had been exalted by this 
process, Michel saw, they were proud of their response, of how people had pulled 
together—also very indignant at any counterexamples of gouging or callousness, 
blots on an otherwise heroic affair: “Can you believe it? And it did no good, he 
was jumped one night in the street and all that money gone.”
“It woke us up, do you see, do you see? It woke us up when we had been asleep 
forever.”
They would say these things to Michel in French, watch him nod, and then watch 
Maya for her response as the AIs told their tale in English to her. And she 
would nod as well, absorbed as she had been in the young natives around Hellas 
Basin, focusing their stories by the look on her face, by her interest. Ah, she 
and Nirgal, they were two of a kind, they were charismatics—because of the way 
they focused on others, the way they exalted people’s stories. Perhaps that was 
what charisma was, a kind of mirror quality.
Some of Michel’s relatives took them out on their boats, and Maya marveled at 
the rampaging Rhone as they ran down it, at the strangely cluttered lagoon of 
the Camargue, and the efforts people were making to rechannelize it. Then out 
onto the brown water of the Med, and farther still, onto the blue water—the 
sun-beaten blue, the little boat bouncing over the whitecaps whipped up by the 
mistral. All the way out of the sight of land, on a blue sun-beaten plate of 
water: amazing. Michel stripped and jumped over the side, into cold water, where 
he sloshed the salt down and drank some of it too, savoring the amniotic taste 
of his old beach swims.
Back on land they went out on drives. Once they went out to see the Pont du 
Card, and there it was, same as ever, the Romans’ greatest work of art—an 
aqueduct: three tiers of stone, the thick lower arches foursquare in the river, 
proud of their two thousand years’ resistance to running water; lighter taller 
arches above, then the smallest on top of them. Form following function right 
into the heart of the beautiful—using stone to take water over water. The stone 
now pitted and honey blond, very Martian in every respect—it looked like Nadia’s 
Underbill arcade, standing there in the dusty green and limestone gorge of the 
Card, in Provence; but now, to Michel, almost more Mars than France.
Maya loved its elegance. “See how human it is, Michel. This is what our Martian 
structures lack, they are too big. But this—this was built by human hands, with 
tools anyone could construct and use. Block and tackle and human math, and 
perhaps some horses. And not our teleoperated machines and their weird 
materials, doing things no one can understand or even see.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if we could build things by hand. Nadia should see this, she would 
love it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Michel was happy. They ate a picnic there. They visited the fountains of 
Aix-en-Provence. Went out to an overlook above the Grand Canyon of the Card. 
Nosed around the street docks of Marseilles. Visited the Roman sites in Orange, 
and Nimes. Drove past the drowned resorts of the Cote d’Azur. Walked out one 
evening to Michel’s ruined mas, and into the middle of the old olive grove.
And every night of these few precious days they returned to Aries, and ate in 
the hotel restaurant, or if it was warm out, under the plane trees in the 
sidewalk cafes; and then went up to their room and made love; and at dawn woke 
and made love again, or went down directly for fresh croissants and coffee. 
“It’s lovely,” Maya said, standing one blue evening in the tower of the arena, 
looking over the tile roofs of the town; she meant all of it, all of Provence. 
And Michel was happy.
But a call came on the wrist. Nirgal was sick, very sick; Sax, sounding shaken, 
had already gotten him off Earth, back into Martian g and a sterile environment, 
inside a ship in Terran orbit. “I’m afraid his immune system isn’t up to it, and 
the g doesn’t help. He’s got an infection, pulmonary edema, a very bad fever.”
“Allergic to Earth,” Maya said, her face grim. She made plans and ended the call 
with curt instructions to Sax to stay calm, then went to the room’s little 
closet and began to throw her clothes out onto the bed.
“Come on!” she cried when she saw Michel standing there. “We have to go!”
“We do?”
She waved him off, burrowed into the closet. “I’m going.” She threw handfuls of 
underwear into her suitcase, gave him a look. “It’s time to go anyway.”
“It is?”
She didn’t reply. She was tapping at her wristpad, asking the local Praxis team 
to arrange transport into space. There they would rendezvous with Sax and 
Nirgal. Her voice was cold, tense, businesslike. She had already forgotten 
Provence.
When she saw Michel still standing motionless, she exploded—”Oh come on, don’t 
be so theatrical about it! Just because we have to leave now doesn’t mean we 
won’t ever come back! We’re going to live a thousand years, you can come back 
all the time if^you want, a hundred times, my God! Besides how is this place so 
much better than Mars? It looks just like Odessa to me, and you were happy 
there, weren’t you?”
Michel ignored that. He stumbled by her suitcases to the window. Outside, an 
ordinary Arlesian street, blue in the twilight: pastel stucco waHs, 
cobblestones. Cypress trees. Tiles on the roof across the street were broken. 
Mars-colored. Voices below shouted in French, angry about something.
“Well?” Maya exclaimed. “Are you coming?”
“Yes.”


 
 
 
PART SIX
               --------------
---Ann in the Outback
               --------------
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
Look, not choosing to take the longevity treatment is suicide.
So?
Well. Suicide is usually considered to be a sign ofpsychological dysfunction.
Usually.
I think you’ll find it’s true more often than not. You’re unhappy at least.
At least.
And yet why? What now is lacking?
The world.
Every day you still walk out to see the sunset.
Habit.
You claim the destruction of the primal Mars is the source of your depression. I 
think the philosophical reasons cited by people suffering depression are masks 
protecting them from harder, more personal hurts.
It can all be real.
You mean all the reasons?
Yes. What did you accuse Sax of? Monocausotaxophilia?
Touche. But there’s usually a start to these things, among all the real 
reasons—the first one that started you down your road. Often you have to go back 
to that point in your journey in order to start off in a new way.
Time is not space. The metaphor of space lies about what is really possible in 
time. You can never go back.
No no. You can go back, metaphorically. In your mental traveling you can journey 
back into the past, retrace your steps, see where you turned and why, then 
proceed onward in a direction that is different because it includes these loops 
of understanding. Increased understanding increases meaning. When you continue 
to insist that it is the fate of Mars that concerns you most, I think it is a 
displacement so strong that it has confused you. It too is a metaphor. Perhaps a 
true one, yes. But both terms of the metaphor should be recognized.
I see what I see.
But the way it is, you are not even seeing. There is so much of red Mars that 
remains. You should go out and look! Go out and empty your mind and just see 
what is out there. Go out at low altitude and walk free in the air, a simple 
dust mask only. It would be good for you, good at the physiological level. Also 
it would be reaping a benefit of the terraforming. To experience the freedom it 
gives us, the bond with this world—that we can walk on its surface naked and 
survive. It’s amazing! It makes us part of an ecology. It deserves to be 
rethought, this process. You should go out to consider it, to study the process 
as areoformation.
That’s just a word. We took this planet and plowed it under. It’s melting under 
our feet.
Melting in native water. Not imported from Saturn or the like, it’s been there 
from the beginning, part of the original accretion, right? Outgassed from the 
first lump that was Mars. Now part of our bodies. Our very bodies are patterns 
in Martian water. Without the trace minerals we would be transparent. We are 
Martian water. And water that has been on the surface of Mars before, yes? 
Rupturing out in artesian apocalypse. Those channels are so big!
It was permafrost for two billion years.
Then we helped it back onto the surface. The majesty of the great outbreak 
floods. We were there, we saw one with our own eyes, we nearly died in it—
Yes yes—
You felt the car as that water swept it away, you were driving—
Yes! But it swept Frank away instead.
Yes.
It swept the world away. And left us on the beach.
The world is still here. You could go out and see.
I don’t want to see. I’ve seen it already!
Not you. Some previous you. Now you’re the you living now.
Yes yes.
I think you’re afraid. Afraid of attempting a transmutation—a metamorphosis into 
something new. The alembic stands out there, all around you. The fire is hot. 
You’ll be melted, you’ll be reborn, who knows if you’ll still be there 
afterward?
I don’t want to change.
You don’t want to stop loving Mars.
Yes. No.
You will never stop loving Mars. After metamorphosis the rock still exists. It’s 
usually harder than the parent rock, yes? You will always love Mars. Your task 
becomes seeing the Mars that always endures, under thick or thin, hot or cold, 
wet or dry. Those are ephemeral, but M.ars endures. These floods happened 
before, isn’t it true?
Yes.
Mars’s own water. All these volatiles are Mars’s own volatiles.
Except the nitrogen from Titan.
Yes yes. You sound like Sax.
Come on.
You two are more alike than you think. And all we volatiles are Mars’s own.
But the destruction of the surface. It’s wrecked. Everything’s changed.
That’s areology. Or the areophany.
It’s destruction. We should have tried living here as it was.
But we didn’t. And so now being red means working to keep conditions as much 
like the primal conditions as possible, within the framework of the 
areophany—the project of biosphere creation that allows humans the freedom of 
the surface, below a certain altitude. That’s all being a Red can mean now. And 
there are a lot of Reds like that. I think you worry that if you ever change in 
even the slightest degree, then that will be the end of redness everywhere. But 
redness is bigger than you. You helped start it and define it, but you were 
never the only one. If you had been no one would ever have listened to you.
They didn’t!
Some did. Many did. Redness will go on no matter what you do. You could retire, 
you could become someone entirely different, you could become lime green, and 
redness would always go on. It might even become something more red than you 
ever imagined.
I’ve imagined it as red as it can get.
All those alternatives. We’ll live one of them and then go on. The process of 
coadaptation with this planet will go on for thousands of years. But here we are 
now. At every moment you should ask, what now is lacking? and work at some 
acceptance of your current reality. This is sanity, this is life. You have to 
imagine your life from here on out.
I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t.
You should go have a look around, really. A walkabout. Look very closely. Take a 
look even at the ice seas, a close look. But not just that. That is in the 
nature of a confrontation. Confrontation is not necessarily bad, but first just 
a look, eh? A recognition. Then you should think about going up into the hills. 
Tharsis, Elysium. A rise in altitude is a voyage into the past. Your task is to 
find the Mars that endures through all. It’s wonderful, really. So many people 
don’t have such a wonderful task as that, you can’t imagine. You’re lucky to 
have it.
And you?
What?
What is your task?
My task?
Yes. Your task.
. . . I’m not sure. I told you, I envy you having that My tasks are . .. 
confused. To help Maya, and me. And the rest of us. Reconciliation .. .I would 
like to find Hiroko....
You’ve been our shrink for a long time.
Yes.
Over a hundred years.
Yes.
And never any results at all.
Well. I like to think I have helped a little.
But it doesn’t come naturally to you.
Perhaps not.
Do you think people get interested in studying psychology because they’re 
troubled in the mind?
It’s a common theory.
But no one has ever been shrink to you.
Oh I’ve had my therapists.
Helpful?
Yes! Quite helpful. Fairly helpful. I mean—they did what they could.
But you don’t know your task.
No. Or, I... I want to go home.
What home?
That’s the problem. Hard when you don’t know where home is, eh?
Yes. I thought you would stay in Provence.
No no. I mean, Provence is my home, but. . . .
But now you’re on your way back to Mars.
Yes.
You decided to come back.
... Yes.
You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?
No. But you do. You know where your home is. You have that, and it’s precious! 
You should remember that, you shouldn’t be throwing away such a gift, or 
thinking it’s a burden! You’re a fool to think that! It’s a gift, damn you, a 
precious precious gift, do you understand me?
I’ll have to think about that.


 
 
 
 
 
She left the refuge in a meteorological rover from the previous century, a high 
square thing with a luxurious window-box driver’s compartment up top. It was not 
unlike the front half of the expedition rover in which she had first traveled to 
the North Pole, with Nadia and Phyllis and Edmund and George. And because she 
had spent thousands of days since then in such machines, she at first had the 
impression that what she was doing was ordinary, contiguous with the rest of her 
life.
But she drove northeast, downcanyon, until she was in the bed of the little 
unnamed channel at sixty degrees longitude, fifty-three degrees north. This 
valley had been carved by a small aquifer outbreak during the late Amazonian, 
running in an earlier graben fault, down the lower slopes of the Great 
Escarpment. The scoring effects of the flood were still visible on the rims of 
the canyon walls, and in the lenticular islands of bedrock on the floor of the 
channel.
Which now ran north into a sea of ice.
She got out of the car wearing a fiberfilled windsuit, a CO2 mask, goggles, and 
heated boots. The air was thin and cold, though it was spring now in the 
north—Ls 10, m-53. Cold and windy, ragged lines of low puffy clouds racing east. 
It was either going to be an ice age or, if the greens’ manipulations 
forestalled it, then a year-without-summer, like 1810 on Earth, when the 
explosion of the volcano Tambori had chilled the world.
She walked the shore of the new sea. It was at the foot of the Great Escarpment, 
in Tempe Terra, a lobe of ancient highlands extending into the north. Tempe had 
probably escaped the general stripping of the northern hemisphere by being 
roughly opposite the impact point of the Big Hit, which most areologists now 
agreed had struck near Hrad Vallis, above Elysium. So; battered hills, 
overlooking an ice-covered sea. The rock looked like a red sea’s surface in a 
wild cross chop; the ice looked like a prairie in the depths of winter. Native 
water, as Michel had said—there from the beginning, on the surface before. It 
was a hard thing to grasp. Her thoughts were scattered and confused, darting 
this way and that, all at the same time—it was like madness, but not. She knew 
the difference. The hum and keen of the wind did not speak to her in the tones 
of the MIT lecturer; she suffered no choking sensations when she tried to 
breathe. It was not like that. Rather her thinking was accelerated, fractured, 
unpredictable—like that flock of birds over the ice, zigzagging across the sky 
in a hard wind from the west. Ah the feel of that same wind against her body, 
shoving at it, the new thick air like a great animal paw. ...
The birds struggled in it with reckless skill. She stood for a while and 
watched: they were skuas, out hunting over dark streaks of open water. These 
polynyas were just the surface signs of immense pods of liquid water under the 
ice; she had heard that a continuous channel of under-ice water now wrapped the 
globe, winding east over old Vastitas, tearing frequent polynyas in the surface, 
gaps which then stayed liquid for an hour or a week. Even with the air so cold, 
the underwater temperatures were warmed by the drowned Vastitas moholes, and 
rising heat from the thousands of thermonuclear explosions set off by the 
meta-nats around the turn of the century. These bombs had been placed deep 
enough in the megaregolith to trap their radioactive fallout, supposedly, but 
not their heat, which rose in a thermal pulse through the rock, a pulse that 
would continue for years and years. No; Michel could talk about it being Mars’s 
water, but there was little else that was natural about this new sea.
Ann hiked up a ridge to get a wider view. There it lay: ice, mostly flat, 
sometimes shattered. All as still as a butterfly on a twig, as if the whiteness 
might suddenly lift off and fly away. The birds’ wheeling and the clouds’ 
scudding showed how hard the wind blew, everything in the air pouring east; but 
the ice remained still. The wind’s voice was deep and huge, scraping over a 
billion cold edges. A strip of gray water was striated by windchop, the strength 
of each gust precisely registered by the flayed cat’s paws, each brush of harder 
wind feathering the larger waves with exquisite sensitivity. Water. And below 
that brushed surface, plankton, krill, fish, squid; she had heard they were 
producing in hatcheries all the creatures of the extremely short Antarctic food 
chain, and then releasing them to the sea. Teeming water.
The skuas wheeled overhead. One cloud of them whirl-pooled down onto something 
along on the shore, behind some rocks. Ann hiked toward them. Suddenly she saw 
the birds’ target, lying in a cleft at the edge of the ice: the mostly eaten 
remains of a seal. Seals! The corpse lay on tundra grass, in the lee of a patch 
of sand dunes, sheltered by another rocky ridge running down into the ice. The 
white skeleton emerged from dark red flesh, ringed by white blubber, black fur. 
All torn open to the sky. Eyes pecked out.
She hiked on past the corpse, up another little ridge. The ridge made a kind of 
cape extending into the ice, and beyond it was a bay. A round bay—a crater, 
infilled by ice. It had happened to lie at sea level, had happened to have a 
breach in its rim on its seaward side, so that water and ice had poured in and 
filled it. Now a round bay, perfect for a harbor. One day it would be a harbor. 
About three kilometers across.
Ann sat down on a boulder on the cape, and looked out at the new bay. Her breath 
heaved in and out of her in an involuntary motion, her rib cage moving 
violently, as during labor contractions. Sobs, yes. She pulled aside her face 
mask, blew her nose using her finger, wiped her eyes, all the while still 
weeping furiously. This was her body. She recalled the first time she had 
stumbled onto the flooding of Vastitas, in a solo trip ages ago. That time she 
had not cried, but Michel had said that was only shock, the numbness of shock, 
as in any injury—withdrawal from her body and her feelings. Michel would call 
this response healthier, no doubt, but why? It hurt—her body, spasming in a 
seismic trembling. But when it was over, Michel would say, she would feel 
better. Drained. A tension gone—the tectonics of the limbic system—she scorned 
such simplistic analogies as Michel offered, the woman as planet, it was absurd. 
Nevertheless there she sat, sniffling, looking out at the ice bay under scudding 
clouds, feeling drained.
 
Nothing moved except for clouds overhead, and cat’s paws on a patch of open 
water, gust after gust, shimmering gray, mauve, gray. Water moved but the land 
was still.
Finally Ann stood and walked down a rib of hard old shishovite, now forming a 
narrow divide between two long beaches. To tell the truth, above the ice there 
was not that much that had changed from the primal state. Down at the waterline 
it was a different story. Here the daily trade winds over the open water of the 
summer bay had created waves large enough to break the remaining chunks of ice 
into what they called brash ice. Lines of this flotsam were now beached above 
the current ice level, like ice sculptures depicting driftwood. But in the 
summer this ice had helped to rip up the sand of the new beaches, tearing it 
into a slurry of ice and mud and sand, now frozen in place like brown cake 
frosting.
Ann walked slowly across this mess. Beyond it there was a little inlet, crowded 
with ice boulders that had grounded in the shallows and then been frozen into 
the sea surface. Exposure to sun and wind had rendered these boulders into 
baroque fantasias of clear blue ice and opaque red ice, like aggregates of 
sapphire and bloodstone. The south sides of the blocks had melted 
preferentially, the meltwater frozen in icicles, ice beards, ice sheets, ice 
columns.
Looking back at the shore she saw again how the sand was furrowed and torn; the 
damage was terrific, the gouges sometimes two meters deep—incredible force, to 
plow such trenches! The sand drifts must have been loess, made of loose light 
aeolian deposits. Now a no-man’s-land of frozen mud and dirty ice, as if bombs 
had devastated some sad army’s trenches.
She continued outward, stepping on opaque ice. On the surface of the bay. Like a 
world covered in semen. Once the ice cracked under her boot.
When she was well out on the bay she stopped and had a look around. Tight 
horizons indeed; she climbed a flat-topped berg, which gave her a larger view 
over the expanse of ice, out to the circle of the crater rim, just under the 
running clouds. Though cracked and jumbled and lined by pressure ridges, the ice 
nevertheless clearly conveyed the flatness of the water beneath it. To the north 
the gap to the sea was obvious. Tabular bergs stuck out from the ice like 
deformed castles. A white waste.
After struggling to come to grips with the scene, and failing, she clambered off 
the berg and hiked back to the shore, then back toward her car. As she was 
crossing the little ridge cape, movement down at the edge of the ice caught her 
eye.
A white thing moved—a person in a white walker, on all fours—no. A bear. A polar 
bear. Walking along the edge of the ice.
It spotted the dust devil of skuas over the dead seal. Ann crouched behind a 
boulder, went prone on a patch of frosty sand. Cold all along the front of her 
body. She looked over the boulder.
The bear’s ivory fur yellowed on its flanks and legs. It raised a heavy head, 
sniffed like a dog, looked around curiously. It shambled to the corpse of the 
seal, ignoring the column of squealing birds. It ate from the seal like a dog 
from a bowl. It raised its head, muzzle dark red. Ann’s heart pounded. The bear 
sat on its haunches and licked a paw, rubbed its face until it was clean, 
catlike in its fastidiousness. Then without warning it dropped to all fours and 
started up the slope of rock and sand, toward Ann’s hiding place behind the 
boulder. It trotted, moving both the legs on one side of its body in the same 
motion, left, right, left.
Ann rolled down the other side of the little cape and got up and ran up the 
trough of a shallow fracture, leading her southwest. Her rover was almost 
directly west of her, she reckoned, but the bear was coming from the northwest. 
She clambered up the short steep side of the southwest-trending canyon, ran over 
a strip of high ground to another little fracture canyon, trending a bit more to 
the west than the previous one. Up again, onto the next strip of high ground 
between these shallow fossae. She looked back. Already she was panting, and her 
rover was still at least two kilometers away, to the west and a little south. It 
was still out of sight, behind ragged hillocks. The bear was north and east of 
her; if it made directly for the rover it would be almost as close to it now as 
she was. Did it hunt by sight or by smell? Could it plot the course of its prey, 
and move to cut it off?
No doubt it could. She was sweating inside her windsuit. She hustled down into 
the next canyon and ran in it for a while, west southwest. Then she saw an easy 
ramp and ran up to the next intercanyon strip, a kind of wide high road between 
the shallow canyons on both sides. Looking back she found herself staring at the 
polar bear. It stood on all fours, behind and two canyons over, looking like a 
very big dog, or a cross between a dog and a person, draped in straw-white fur. 
It amazed her to see such a creature out there, the food chain couldn’t possibly 
support such a large predator, could it? They must surely be feeding it at feed 
stations. Hopefully so, or else it would be very hungry. Now it dropped into the 
canyon two over, out of sight, and Ann started to run down the strip toward her 
rover. Despite her running around, and the tight rugged horizon, she was 
confident of her sense of the car’s location.
She kept to a pace she thought she could sustain for the whole distance. It was 
hard not to let loose and sprint at full speed, but no, no, that would lead to a 
collapse eventually. Pace yourself, she thought, gasping in short pants. Get 
down off the high ground into a graben so you’re out of sight. Keep oriented, 
are you passing south of the rover? Back up to the higher ground, for just a 
moment to look. There behind that low flat-topped hill, which was a small 
crater, with a hump on the south end of the rim—she was certain—though the rover 
was still out of sight, and the jumbled land was easy to get confused in. A 
thousand times she had gotten briefly semilost, unsure of her exact location in 
relation to some fixed point, usually her parked rover— not a big deal usually, 
as her wrist’s APS could always lead her back. As it could now too, but she was 
sure it was over there behind that bump of a crater.
The cold air burned in her lungs. She recalled the emergency face mask in her 
backpack, and stopped and yanked off the backpack and dug, pulled off the CO2 
mask and put on the air mask; it contained a short supply of compressed oxygen 
in its frame, and with it pulled over her mouth and nose and turned on, she was 
suddenly stronger, faster, could hold a better pace. She ran along a strip of 
high ground between canyons, hoping to get a sighting of the rover round the 
slope of the crater apron. Ah, there it was! Panting triumphantly she sucked 
down the cool oxygen; it tasted lovely, but was not enough to stop her gasping. 
If she went down into the trough to her right it looked like it would run 
straight to the rover.
She glanced back and saw the polar bear running too, legs now in a shambling 
kind of gallop—lumbering—but it ate up the ground with that run, and the shallow 
canyon walls seemed no impediment to it, it flowed over them like a white 
nightmare, a thing beautiful and terrifying, the liquid flow of its muscles 
loose under thick yellow-tipped white fur. All this she saw in a single moment 
of the utmost clarity, everything in her field of vision distinct and acute and 
luminous, as if lit from within. Even running as hard as she could, focusing on 
the ground to make sure she didn’t trip over anything, she still saw the bear 
flowing over the red slope, like an afterimage. Pounding, running hard, boulder 
ballet; the bear was fast and the terrain nothing to it, but she too was an 
animal, she too had spent years in the back country of Mars, many more years in 
fact than this young bear, and she could run like an ibex over the terrain, from 
bedrock to boulder to sand to rubble, pushing hard but perfectly balanced, in 
control of the dash and running for her life. And besides the rover was near. 
Just up one last canyon side, and the slope of the apron, and there it was, she 
almost ran into it, stopped, reared up and pounded the curved metal side with a 
hard triumphant wham, as if it were the bear’s snout, and then with a second 
more controlled punch to the lock door console she was inside, inside, and the 
outer-lock door closed behind her.
She hurried upstairs to the driver’s aerie to look back. Through the glass she 
saw the polar bear below, inspecting her vehicle from a respectful distance. Out 
of dart-gun range, sniffing thoughtfully. Ann was sweating hard, still gasping 
hard for air, in and out, in and out—what violent paroxysms the rib cage could 
go through! And there she was, sitting safe in the driver’s seat! She only had 
to close her eyes and she saw again that heraldic image of the bear flowing over 
the rock; but open them and there the dashboard gleamed, bright and artificial 
and familiar. Ah so strange!
 
She was still in a kind of shock a couple of days later, able to see the polar 
bear if she closed her eyes and thought about it; distracted. By night the ice 
in the bay boomed and groaned, sometimes cracked explosively, so that she 
dreamed of the assault on Sheffield, groaning herself. By day she drove so 
carelessly that she had to put the rover on automatic pilot, instructing it to 
make its way along the shore of the crater bay.
While it rolled she wandered around the driver’s compartment, her mind racing. 
Out of control. Nothing to be done but laugh and endure it. Strike the walls, 
stare out the windows. The bear was gone but it wasn’t. She looked it up: Ursus 
maritimus, ocean bear; the Inuit called it Tomassuk, “the one who gives power.” 
It was like the landslide that had almost caught her in Melas Chasma, now a part 
of her life forever. Facing the landslide she had not moved a muscle; this time 
she had run like hell. Mars could kill her, no doubt it would kill her, but no 
big zoo creature from Earth was going to kill her, not if she could help it. Not 
that she was so enamored of life, far from it; but one should be free to choose 
one’s death. As she had chosen in the past, twice at least. But Simon and then 
Sax—like little brown bears— had snatched her death away from her. She still 
didn’t know what to make of that, how to feel about it. Her mind was racing so 
fast. She held on to the back of the driver’s seat. Finally she reached forward 
and punched Sax’s old First Hundred number on the rover’s screen keyboard, XY23, 
and waited for the AI to route the call to the shuttle returning Sax and the 
others to Mars; and after a while there he was, with his new face, staring into 
a screen.
“Why did you do it?” she shouted. “It’s my death to choose as I please!”
She waited for the message to reach him. Then it did and he jumped, the image of 
him jiggled. “Because—” he said, and stopped.
Ann felt a chill. That was just what Simon had said, after he had pulled her 
back in out of the chaos. They never had a reason, only life’s idiot because.
Sax went on: “I didn’t want—it seemed like such a waste—what a surprise to hear 
from you. I’m glad.”
“To hell with that,” Ann said.
She was about to cut the connection when he started speaking again—they were in 
simultaneous transmission now, alternating messages, “It was so I could talk to 
you, Ann. I mean it was for myself—I didn’t want to be missing you. I wanted you 
to forgive me. I wanted to argue with you more and—and make you see why I’ve 
done what I’ve done.”
His chatter stopped as abruptly as it had started, and then he looked confused, 
even frightened. Perhaps he had just heard “To hell with that.” She could scare 
him, no doubt of that.
“What crap,” she said.
After a while: “Yes. Um—how are you doing? You look. . . .”
She cut the connection. I just outran a polar bear! She shouted in her mind. I 
was almost eaten by your stupid games!
No. She wouldn’t tell him. The meddler. He had needed a good referee for his 
submissions to The Metajournal of Martian History, that was what it came down 
to. Making sure his science was properly peer-reviewed—for that he would crash 
around in a person’s most inward desires, in her essential freedom to choose 
life or death, to be a free human being!
At least he hadn’t tried to lie about it.
And—well—here she was. Rage; remorse without cause; inexplicable anguish; a 
strangely painful exhilaration: all this filled her at once. The limbic system, 
vibrating madly, spiking every thought with contradictory wild emotions, 
disconnected from the thoughts’ content: Sax had saved her, she hated him, she 
felt a fierce joy, Kasei was dead, Peter wasn’t, no bear could kill her, etc.—on 
and on and on. Oh so strange!
 
She spotted a little green rover, perched on a bluff over the ice bay. 
Impulsively she took over the wheel and drove up to it. A little face peered out 
at her; she waved through the windshields at it. Black eyes—spectacles—bald. 
Like her stepfather. She parked her rover next to his. The man gestured for her 
to come over, holding up a wooden spoon. He looked vague, only half pulled out 
of his own thoughts.
Ann put on a down jacket and went through the lock doors and walked between the 
cars, feeling the shock of the frigid air like a dousing in cold water. It was 
nice to be able to walk between one rover and another without suiting up, or, to 
get to the crux of the matter, risking death. Amazing that more people hadn’t 
been killed by carelessness or lock malfunction. Some had been, of course. 
Scores, probably, if you added them all up. Now it was just a dash of cold air.
The bald man opened his inner-lock door. “Hello,” he said, and offered a hand. 
“Hello,” Ann said, and shook it. “I’m Ann.” “I’m Harry. Harry Whitebook.” “Ah. 
I’ve heard of you. You design animals.” He smiled gently. “Yes.” No shame; no 
defensiveness. “I was just chased by one of your polar bears.” “Were you!” His 
eyes opened round. “Those are fast!”
“So they are. But they’re not just polar bears, are they.”
“They’ve got some grizzly genes, for altitude. But mostly it’s just Ursus 
maritimus. They’re very tough creatures.”
“A lot of creatures are.”
“Yes, isn’t it marvelous? Oh excuse me, have you eaten? Would you like some 
soup? I was just making soup, leek soup, I guess it must be obvious.”
It was. “Sure,” Ann said.
 
Over soup and bread she asked him questions about the polar bear. “Surely there 
can’t be a whole food chain here for something that huge?”
“Oh yes. In this area there is. It’s well-known for that— the first bioregion 
robust enough for bears. The bay is liquid to the bottom, you see. The Ap mohole 
is at the center of the crater, so it’s like a bottomless lake. Iced over in 
winter of course, but the bears are used to that from the Arctic.”
“The winters are long.”
“Yes. The female bears make dens in the snow, near some caves in dike 
outcroppings to the west. They don’t truly hibernate, their body temperatures 
drop just a few degrees, and they can wake up in a minute or two, if they need 
to adjust the den for heat. So they den for as much of the winters as they can, 
then live in there and forage out till spring. Then in spring we tow some of the 
ice plates through the mouth of the bay out to sea, and things develop from 
there, bottom to top. The basic chains are Antarctic in the water, Arctic on the 
land. Plankton, krill, fish and squid, Weddell seals, and on land rabbits and 
h’ares, lemmings, marmots, mice, lynx, bobcat. And the bears. We’re trying with 
caribou and reindeer and wolves, but there isn’t the forage for ungulates yet. 
The bears have been out just a few years, the air pressure hasn’t been adequate 
until recently. But it’s a four-thousand-meter equivalent here now, and the 
bears do very well with that, we find. They adapt very quickly.”
“Humans too.”
“Well, we haven’t seen too much at the four-thousand-meter level yet.” He meant 
four thousand meters above sea level on Earth. Higher than any permanent human 
settlement, as she recalled.
He was going on: “... eventually see thoracic-cavity expansion, bound to 
happen....” A man who talked to himself. Big, bulky; white fur in a fringe 
around his bald pate. Black eyes swimming behind round spectacles.
“Did you ever meet Hiroko?” she said.
“Hiroko Ai? I did, once. Lovely woman. I hear she’s gone back to Earth, to help 
them adapt to the flood. Did you know her?”
“Yes. I’m Ann Clayborne.”
“I thought so. Peter Clayborne’s mother, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“He’s been in Boone recently.”
“Boone?”
“That’s the little station across the bay. This is Botany Bay, and the station 
is Boone Harbor. A kind of joke. Apparently there was a similar pairing in 
Australia.”
“Indeed.” She shook her head. John would be with them forever. And by no means 
the worst of the ghosts haunting them.
As for instance this man, the famous animal designer. He clattered about the 
kitchen, pawing at things shortsightedly. He put the soup before her and she 
ate, watching him furtively as she did. He knew who she was, but he did not seem 
uncomfortable. He did not try to justify himself. She was a red areologist, he 
designed new Martian animals. They worked on the same planet. But that did not 
mean they were enemies, not to him. He would eat with her without malice. There 
was something chilling in that, overbearing despite his gentle manner. 
Obliviousness was so brutal. And yet she liked him; that dispassionate power, 
vagueness—something. He bumbled around his kitchen, sat and ate with her, 
quickly and noisily, his muzzle wet with the clear soup stock. Afterward they 
broke pieces of bread from a long loaf. Ann asked questions about Boone Harbor.
“It has a good bakery,” Whitebook said, indicating the loaf. “And a good lab. 
The rest is just an ordinary outpost. But we took the tent down last year, and 
now it is very cold, especially in the winter. Only forty-six degrees latitude, 
but we feel it as a northern place. So much so that there is some talk of 
putting the tent back up, in winter at least. And there are people who say we 
should leave it on until things warm up.” “Till the ice age is over?”
“I don’t think there will be an ice age. This first year without the soletta was 
bad, of course, but various compensations ought to be possible. A cold couple of 
years, that’s all it will be.”
He waggled a paw: it could go either way. Ann almost threw her chunk of bread at 
him. But best not to startle him. She controlled herself with a shudder.
“Is Peter still in Boone?” she asked.
“I think so. He was a few days ago.”
They talked some more about the Botany Bay ecosystem. Without a fuller array of 
plant life, animal designers were sharply limited; it was still more like the 
Antarctic than the Arctic in that respect. Possibly new soil-enhancement methods 
could speed the arrival of higher plants. Right now it was a land of lichen, for 
the most part. The tundra plants would follow.
“But this displeases you,” he observed.
“I liked it the way it was before. All Vastitas Borealis was barchan dunes, made 
of black garnet sand.”
“Won’t some remain, up next to the polar cap?”
“The ice cap will go right down to the sea line in most places. As you say, kind 
of like Antarctica. No, the dunes and the laminate terrain will be underwater, 
one way or another. The whole northern hemisphere will be gone.”
“This is the northern hemisphere.”
“A highland peninsula. And it’s gone too, in a way. Botany Bay was Arcadia 
Crater Ap.”
He looked at her through the spectacles, peering. “Perhaps if you lived at high 
altitude, it might seem like the old days. The old days, with air.”
“Perhaps,” she said cautiously. He was circling the chamber, shambling about 
with heavy steps, cleaning big kitchen knifes at the sink. His fingers ended in 
short blunt claws; even clipped they made it hard for him to work with small 
objects.
She stood up carefully. “Thanks for dinner,” she said, backing toward the lock 
door. She grabbed her jacket on the way out and slammed the door on his look of 
surprise. Out into the hard cold slap of the night, into her jacket. Never run 
away from a predator. She walked back to her car and climbed in without looking 
back.


 
 
 
 
 
The ancient highland of Tempe Terra was dotted by a number of small volcanoes, 
so there were lava plains and channels everywhere; also viscous creep features 
caused by ground ice, and the occasional small outflow channel that had run down 
the side of the Great Escarpment; all this along with the usual collection of 
Noachian impact and deformational features, so that on the areological maps 
Tempe looked like an artist’s palette, colors splashed everywhere to indicate 
the different aspects of the region’s long history. Too many colors, in Ann’s 
opinion; for her the smallest divisions into different areological units were 
artificial, remnants of sky areology, attempting to distinguish between regions 
that were more cratered or more dissected or more etched than the rest, when in 
the field it was all one, with all of the signature features visible everywhere. 
It was simply rough country—the Noachian landscape, none rougher.
Even the floors of the long straight canyons called the Tempe Fossa were too 
broken to drive over, so Ann made her way indirectly, on higher land. The most 
recent lava flows (a billion years old) were harder than the disaggregated 
ejecta they had run over, and now they stood on the land as long dikes or berms. 
On the softer land between there were a lot of splosh craters, their aprons 
clearly the remnants of liquid flow, like drip castles at the beach. Occasional 
islands of worn bedrock stuck up out of all this debris, but by and large it was 
regolith, with signs everywhere of water in the land, of the permafrost 
underfoot, causing slow slumps and creeps. And now, with the increase in 
temperatures, and perhaps the heat coming up from the Vastitas underground 
explosions, all that creep had speeded up. There were new landslides all over 
the place: a well-known Red trail had been wiped out when a ramp into Tempe 12 
had been buried; the walls of Tempe 18 had collapsed on both sides, making a 
U-shaped canyon into a V-shaped one; Tempe 21 was gone, covered by the collapse 
of its high west wall. Everywhere the land was melting. She even saw some 
taliks, which were liquified zones on top of permafrost, basically icy swamps. 
And many of the oval pits of the great alases were filled with ponds, which 
melted by day and froze by night, an action that tore the land apart even 
faster.
She passed the lobate apron of Timushenko Crater, buried on its northern flank 
by the southernmost waves of lava from Coriolanus Volcano, the largest of the 
many little volcanoes in Tempe. Here the land was extensively pitted, and snow 
had fallen, melted and then refrozen in myriad catchment basins. The land was 
slumping in all the characteristic permafrost patterns: polygonal pebble ridges, 
concentric crater fill, pingos, solifluction ridges on hillsides. In every 
depression an ice-choked pond or puddle. The land was melting.
On sunny south-facing slopes, wherever there was a bit of protection from the 
wind, trees were growing, over un-derstories of moss and grass and shrub. In the 
sun-filled hollows were krummholz dwarf trees, gnarled over their matted 
needles; in the shaded hollows, dirty snow and firn. The ruination of so much 
land. Broken land, empty but not empty, rock and ice and boggy meadow all lined 
by shattered low ridges. Clouds puffed out of nothing in the afternoon heat, and 
their shadows were another set of patches on things, a crazy quilt of red and 
black, green and white. No one would ever complain of homogeneity on Tempe 
Terra. Everything perfectly still under the rapidly moving shadows of the 
clouds. And yet there, one evening in the dusk, a white bulk slipping behind a 
boulder. Her heart jumped, but there was nothing further to see. But she had 
seen something; because just before full darkness, there was a knocking at the 
door. Her heart shuddered like the rover on its shock absorbers, she ran to a 
window, looked out. Figures the color of the rock, waving hands. Human beings.
It was a little group of Red ecoteurs. They had recognized her rover, they said 
after she let them inside, from the description given by the people at the Tempe 
refuge. They had been hoping they might run into her, and so they were happy; 
laughing, chattering, moving around the cabin to touch her, young tall natives 
with stone eyeteeth and gleaming young eyes, some of them Orientals, some white, 
some black. All happy. She recognized them from Pavonis Mons, not individually, 
but as a group; the young fanatics. Again she felt a chill.
 
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To Botany Bay,” a young woman replied. “We’re going to take out the Whitebook 
labs.”
“And Boone Station,” another added.
“Ah no,” Ann said.
They went still, looked at her carefully. Like Kasei and Dao in Lastflow.
“What do you mean?” the young woman said.
Ann took a breath, tried to figure that out. They were watching her closely.
“Were you there in Sheffield?” she asked.
They nodded; they knew what she meant.
“Then you should know already,” she said slowly. “It’s pointless to achieve a 
red Mars by pouring blood over the planet. We have to find another way. We can’t 
do it by killing people. Not even by killing animals or plants, or blowing up 
machines. It won’t work. It’s destructive. It doesn’t appeal to people, do you 
understand? No one is won over. In fact they’re put off. The more we do things 
like that, the more green they become. So we defeat our purpose. If we know that 
and do it anyway, then we’re betraying the purpose. Do you understand? We aren’t 
doing it for anything but our own feelings. Because we’re angry. Or for thrills. 
We have to find another way.”
They stared at her, uncomprehending, annoyed, shocked, contemptuous. But 
riveted. This was Ann Clayborne, after all.
“I don’t know for sure what that other way is,” she went on. “I can’t tell you 
that. I think ... that’s what I think we have to start working on. It has to be 
something like a red areophany. The areophany has always been understood as a 
green thing, right from the start. I suppose because of Hi-roko, because she 
took the lead in defining it. And in bringing it into being. So the areophany 
has always been mixed up with viriditas. But there’s no reason that should be. 
We have to change that, or we’ll never accomplish anything. There has to be a 
red worship of this place that people can learn to feel. The redness of the 
primal planet has to become a counterforce to viriditas. We have to stain that 
green until it turns some other color. Some color like you see in certain 
stones, like jasper, or ferric serpentine. You see what I mean. It will mean 
taking people out onto the land, maybe, up into the highlands, so they can see 
what it is. It will mean moving there, all over the place, and establishing 
tenure and stewardship rights, so that we can speak for the land and they will 
have to listen. Wanderers’ rights as well, ar-eologists’ rights, nomads’ rights. 
That’s what areoformation might mean. Do you understand?”
She stopped. The young natives were still attentive, now looking perhaps 
concerned for her, or concerned at what she had said.
“We’ve talked about this kind of thing before,” one young man said. “And there 
are people doing it. Sometimes we do it. But we think an active resistance is a 
necessary part of the struggle. Otherwise we’ll just get steamrolled. They’ll 
green everything.”
“Not if we stain it all. Right from the inside, right from their hearts too. But 
sabotage, murder; it’s green that springs out of all that, believe me I’ve seen 
it. I’ve been fighting just as long as you and I’ve seen it. You stomp on life 
and it just comes back stronger.”
The young man wasn’t convinced. “They gave us the six-kilometer limit because 
they were scared of us, because we were the driving force behind the revolution. 
If it weren’t for us fighting, the metanats would still rule everything here.”
“That was a different opponent. When we fought the Ter-rans, then the Martian 
greens were impressed. When we fight the Martian greens they’re not impressed, 
they’re angry. And they get more green than ever.”
The group sat in silence, thoughtful, perhaps disheartened.
“But what do we do?” a gray-haired woman said.
“Go to some land that’s endangered,” Ann suggested. She gestured out the window. 
“Right here wouldn’t be bad. Or somewhere near the six-k border. Settle, 
incorporate a town, make it a primal refuge, make it a wonderful place. We’ll 
creep back down from the highlands.”
They considered this glumly.
“Or go into the cities and start a tour group, and a legal fund. Show people the 
land. Sue every change they propose.”
“Shit,” the young man said, shaking his head. “That sounds awful.”
“Yes it does,” Ann said. “There’s ugly work to be done. But we have to get them 
from the inside too. And that’s where they live.”
Long faces. They sat around and talked about it some more; the way they lived 
now, the way they wanted to live. What they might do to get from one to the 
other. The impossibility of the guerrilla life after the war was over. And so 
on. There were lots of big sighs, some tears, recriminations, encouragements.
“Come with me tomorrow and take a straight look at this ice sea,” Ann suggested.
 
The next day the guerrilla group traveled south with her along the sixtieth 
longitude, kilometer by difficult kilometer. Khala, the Arabs called it; the 
empty land. On the one hand it was beautiful, a Noachian desolation of 
rockscapes, and their hearts were full. On the other hand the ecoteurs were 
quiet, subdued, as if on a pilgrimage in some uncertain funereal mode. Together 
they came to the big canyon called Nilokeras Scopulus, and dropped into it on a 
broad rough natural ramp. To the east lay Chryse Planitia, covered by ice: 
another arm of the northern sea. They had not escaped it. Ahead to the south lay 
the Nilokeras Fossae, the terminal end of a canyon complex that began far to the 
south, in the enormous pit of Hebes Chasma. Hebes Chasma had no exit, but its 
subsidence was now understood to have been caused by the aquifer outbreak just 
to the west, at the top of Echus Chasma. A very great amount of water had gushed 
down Echus against the hard western side of Lunae Planum, carving the steep high 
cliff at Echus Overlook; then it had come to a. break in that stupendous cliff, 
and had rushed down and through, tearing the big bend of Kasei Vallis, and 
cutting a deep channel out onto the lowlands of Chryse. It had been one of the 
biggest aquifer outbreaks in Martian history.
Now the northern sea had flowed back into Chryse, and water was filling back 
into the lower end of Nilokeras and Kasei. The flat-topped hill that was 
Sharanov Crater stood like a giant castle keep on the high promontory over the 
mouth of this new fjord. Out in the middle of the fjord lay a long narrow 
island, one of the lemniscate islands of the ancient flood, now islanded again, 
stubbornly red in the sea of white ice. Eventually this fjord would make an even 
better harbor than Botany Bay: it was steep-walled, but there were benches 
tucked here and there that could become harbor towns. There would of course be 
the west wind funnel-ing down Kasei to worry about, katabatic onslaughts holding 
the sailing ships out in the Chryse Gulf. . . .
So strange. She led the group of silent Reds to a ramp that got them down onto a 
broad bench to the west of the ice fjord. By then it was evening, and she led 
them out of the rovers and down to the shore for a suhset walk.
At the moment of sunset itself, they found themselves standing in a tight 
unhappy cluster before a solitary ice block some four meters tall, its melted 
convexities as smooth as muscle. They stood so that the sun was behind the ice 
block and shining through it. To both sides of the block brilliant light gleamed 
off the glassy wet sand. An admonition of light. Undeniable, blazingly real; 
what were they to make of it? They stood and stared in silence.
When the sun blinked out over the black horizon, Ann walked away from the group 
and went alone up to her rover. She looked back down the slope; the Reds were 
still there by the beached iceberg. It looked like a white god among them, 
tinted orange like the crumpled white sheet of the ice bay. White god, bear, 
bay, a dolmen of Martian ice: the ocean would be there with them forever, as 
real as the rock.


 
 
 
 
 
The next day she drove up Kasei Vallis to the west, toward Echus Chasma. Up and 
up she drove, on broad bench after bench, making easy progress, until she came 
to where Kasei curved left and up onto the floor of Echus. The curve was one of 
the biggest, most obvious water-carved features on the planet. But now she found 
that the flat arroyo floor was covered by dwarf trees, so small they were almost 
shrubs: black-barked, thorny, the dark green leaves as glossy and razor-edged as 
holly leaves. Moss blanketed the ground underneath these black trees, but very 
little else; it was a single-species forest, covering Kasei Vallis from canyon 
wall to canyon wall, filling the great curve like some oversized smut.
By necessity Ann drove right over top of the low forest, and the rover tilted 
this way and that as the branches, tough as manzanita, stubbornly gave under its 
wheels and then whipped back into place when they were freed. It would be nearly 
impossible to walk through this canyon anymore, Ann thought, this deep-walled 
canyon so narrow and rounded, a kind of Utah of the imagination—or so it had 
been—now like the black forest of a fairy tale, inescapable, filled with flying 
black things, and a white shape seen scuttling in the dusk. . . . There was no 
sign of the UNTA security complex that had once occupied the turn of the valley.
A curse on your house to the seventh generation, a curse on the innocent land as 
well. Sax had been tortured here, and so he had sown fireseed in the ground and 
torched the place, causing a thorn forest to sprout and cover it. And they 
called scientists rational creatures! A curse on their house too, Ann thought 
with teeth clenched, to the seventh generation and seven after that.
She hissed and drove on, up Echus, toward the steep volcanic cone of Tharsis 
Tholis. There was a town there, tucked on the side of the volcano where the 
slope leveled off. The bear had told her Peter was headed there, and so she 
avoided it. Peter, the land drowned; Sax, the land burned. Once he had been 
hers. On this rock I will build. Peter Tempe Terra, the Rock of the Land of 
Time. The new man, Homo martial. Who had betrayed them. Remember.
On she drove south, up the slope of the Tharsis Bulge, until the cone of 
Ascraeus hove into view. A mountain continent, puncturing the horizon. Pavonis 
had been infested and overgrown because of its equatorial position, and the 
little advantage that that gave the elevator cable. But Ascraeus, just five 
hundred kilometers northeast of Pavonis, had been left alone. No one lived 
there; very few people had ever even ascended it. Just a few areologists now and 
then, to study its lava and occasional pyroclastic ash flows, which were both 
colored the red nearest black.
She drove onto its lower slopes, gentle and wavy. Ascraeus had been one of the 
classic albedo feature names, as it was a mountain so big it was easily visible 
from Earth. Ascraeus Lacus. This was during the canal mania, and so they had 
decided it was a lake. Pavonis in that era had been called Phoenicus Lacus, 
Phoenix Lake. Ascra, she read, was the birthplace of Hesiod, “situated on the 
right of Mount Helicon, on a high and rugged place.” So though they had thought 
it a lake, they had named it after a mountain place. Perhaps their subconscious 
minds had understood the telescope images after all. Ascraeus was in general a 
poetic name for the pastoral, Helicon being the Boetian mountain sacred to 
Apollo and the Muses. Hesiod had looked up from his plow one day and seen the 
mountain, and found he had a story to tell. Strange the birth of myths, strange 
the old names that they lived among and ignored, while they continued to tell 
the old stories over and over again with their lives.
It was the steepest of the big four volcanoes, but there was no encircling 
escarpment, as around Olympus Mons; so she could put the rover in low gear and 
grind on up, as if taking off into space, in slow motion. Lean back in her seat 
and take a nap. Head on the headrest; relax. Wake up on arrival, up at 
twenty-seven kilometers above sea level, the same height as all the other three 
big ones; that was as high as a mountain could get on Mars, basically, it was 
the isostatic limit, at which point the lithosphere began to sag under the 
weight of all that rock; all of the big four had maxed out, they could grow no 
higher. A sign of their size and their great age.
Very old, yes, but at the same time the surface lava of Ascraeus was among the 
youngest igneous rock on Mars, weathered only slightly by wind and sun. As the 
lava sheets had cooled they had stiffened in their descent, leaving low curved 
bulges to ascend or bypass. A distinct trail of rover tracks zigzagged up the 
slope, avoiding steep sections at the bottoms of these flows, taking advantage 
of a big loose network of ramps and flowbacks. In any permanent shade, spindrift 
had settled into banks of dirty hard-packed snow; shadows were now a filmy 
blackened white, as if she drove through a photographic negative, her spirits 
plummeting inexplicably as she drove ever higher. Behind her she could see more 
and more of the conical northern flank of the volcano, and north Tharsis beyond 
that, all the way to the Echus wall, a low line over a hundred kilometers away. 
Much of what she could see was patchy with snowdrifts, windslab, firn. Freckled 
white. The shady sides of volcanic cones often became heavily glaciated.
 
There on a rockface, bright emerald moss. Everything was turning green.
 
But as she continued to ascend, day after day, up and up beyond all imagining, 
the snow patches became thinner, less frequent. Eventually she was twenty 
kilometers above the datum—twenty-one above sea level—nearly seventy thousand 
feet above the ice!—more than twice as high as Everest was above Earth’s oceans; 
and still the cone of the volcano rose above her, a full seven thousand meters 
more! Right up into the darkening sky, right up into space.
Far below scrolled a smooth flat layer of cloud, obscuring Tharsis. As if the 
white sea were chasing her up the slope. Up at this level there were no clouds, 
at least on this day; sometimes thunderheads would tower up beside the mountain, 
other days cirrus clouds could be seen overhead, slashing the sky with a dozen 
thin sickles. Today the sky above was a clear purple indigo suffused with black, 
pricked with a few daytime stars at the zenith, Orion standing faint and alone. 
Out to the east of the volcano’s summit streamed a thin cloud, a peak banner, so 
faint she could see the dark sky through it. There wasn’t much moisture up here, 
nor much atmosphere either. There would always be a tenfold difference between 
the air pressure at sea level and up here on the big volcanoes; pressure up here 
must therefore be about thirty-five millibars, very little more than what had 
existed when they had arrived.
Nevertheless she spotted tiny flecks of lichen in hollows on the tops of rocks, 
in pits that caught some snow and then a lot of sun. They were almost too small 
to see. Lichen: a symbiotic team of algae and fungus, working together to 
survive, even in thirty millibars. It was hard to believe what life would 
endure. So strange.
So strange, in fact, that she suited up and went out to look at them. Up here 
one had to employ all the old careful habits: secure walker, lock doors; out 
into the bright glare of low space.
The rocks that harbored the lichen were the kind of flat sunporches on which 
marmots would have sunbathed, if they could have lived so high. Instead, only 
little pinheads of yellow green, or battleship gray. Flake lichen, the wrist-pad 
guide said. Bits of it torn away in storms, blown up here, falling on rocks, 
sticking like little vegetable limpets. The kind of thing only Hiroko could 
explain.
Living things. Michel had said that she loved stones and not men because she had 
been mistreated, her mind damaged. Hippocampus significantly smaller, strong 
startle reaction, a tendency toward dissociation. And so she had found a man as 
much like a stone as she could. Michel too had loved that quality in Simon, he 
told her—such a relief in the Underbill years to have even one such charge, a 
man you could trust, quiet and solid, that you could heft in your hand and feel 
the weight of.
But Simon wasn’t the only one in the world like that, j Michel had pointed out. 
That quality rested in the others as well, intermixed and less pure, but still 
there. Why could she not love that quality of obdurate endurance in other 
people, in every living thing? They were only trying to exist, like any rock or 
planet. There was a mineral stubbornness in all of them.
Wind keened past her helmet and over the shards of lava, humming in her air 
hose, drowning out the sound of her breath. The sky more black than indigo here, 
except low on the horizon, where it was a hazy purple violet, topped by a band 
of clear dark blue ... oh who could believe it would ever change, up here on the 
slope of Ascraeus Mons, why hadn’t they settled up here to remind themselves of 
what they had come to, of what they had been given by Mars and then so 
profligately thrown away.
Back to the rover. She continued on up.
 
She was above silver cirrus clouds, just west of the volcano’s diaphanous summit 
banner. In the lee of the jet stream. To ascend was to travel into the past, 
above all lichen and bacteria. Though she had no doubt they were still there, 
hiding inside the first layers of the rock. Chasmoen-dolithic life, like the 
mythic little red people, the microscopic gods who had spoken to John Boone, 
their own local Hesiod. So people said.
Life everywhere. The world was turning green. But if you couldn’t see the 
greenness—if it made no difference to the land—surely it was welcome to the 
task? Living creatures. Michel had said to her, you love stones because of the 
stony quality that life has! It all comes back to life. Simon, Peter; on this 
rock I will build my church. Why could she not love that stony quality in every 
thing?
The rover rolled up the last concentric terraces of lava, working less 
strenuously now as it curved over the asymptotic flattening of the broad 
circular rim. Only slightly uphill, and less so every meter; and then onto the 
rim itself. Then to the inner edge of the rim.
Overlooking the caldera. She got out of the car, her thoughts flicking about 
like skuas.
Ascraeus’s nested caldera complex consisted of eight overlapping craters, the 
newer ones collapsing down across the circumferences of the older ones. The 
largest and youngest caldera lay out near the center of the complex, and the 
older higher-floored calderas embayed its circumference like the petals of a 
flower design. Each caldera floor was at a slightly different elevation, and 
marked by a pattern of circular fractures. Walking along the rim changed 
perspective so that distances shifted, and the floors’ heights seemed to change, 
as if they were floating in a dream. Taken all in all, a beautiful thing to 
witness. And eighty kilometers across.
Like a lesson in volcano throat mechanics. Eruptions down on the outer flanks of 
the volcano had emptied the magma from the active throat of the caldera, and so 
the caldera floor had slumped; thus all the circular shapes, as the active 
throat moved around over the eons. Arcing cliffs: few places on Mars exhibited 
such vertical slopes, they were almost true verticals. Basalt ring worlds. It 
should have been a climbers’ mecca, but as far as she knew it was not. Someday 
they would come.
The complexity of Ascraeus was so unlike the single great hole of Pavonis. Why 
had Pavonis’s caldera collapsed in the same circumference every time? Could its 
last drop have erased and leveled all the other rings? Had its magma chamber 
been smaller, or vented to the sides less? Had Ascraeus’s throat wandered more? 
She picked up loose rocks on the rim’s edge, stared at them. Lava bombs, late 
meteor ejecta, ventifacts in the ceaseless winds.... These were all questions 
that could still be studied. Nothing they did would ever disturb the vulcanology 
up here, not enough to impede the study. Indeed the Journal ofAreological 
Studies published many articles on these topics, as she had seen and still 
occasionally saw. It was as Michel had said to her; the high places would look 
like this forever. Climbing the great slopes would be like travel into the 
prehuman past, into pure areology, into the areophany itself perhaps, with 
Hi-roko or not. With the lichen or not. People had talked of securing a dome or 
a tent over these calderas, to keep them completely sterile; but that would only 
make them zoos, wilderness parks, garden spaces with their walls and their 
roofs. Empty greenhouses. No. She straightened up, looked out over the vast 
round landscape, held up and offering itself to space. To the chasmoendolithic 
life that might be struggling up here, she waved a hand. Live, thing. She said 
the word and it sounded odd: “Live.”
Mars forever, stony in the sunlight. But then she glimpsed the white bear in the 
corner of her eye, slipping behind a jagged rim boulder. She jumped; nothing 
there. She returned to the rover, feeling that she needed its protection. She 
climbed inside; but then all afternoon on the screen of the rover’s AI, the 
vague spectacled eyes seemed to be looking out at her, about to call any second. 
A kind bear of a man, though he would eat her if he could catch her. If he could 
catch her—but then none of them could catch her, she could hide in these high 
rock fastnesses forever—free she was and free she would be, to be or not to be 
if she chose that, for as long as this rock held. But there again, right at the 
lock door, that white flash in the corner of her eye. Ah so hard.


 
 
 
PART SEVEN
               --------------
---Making Things Work
               --------------
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
An ice-choked sea now covered much of the north. Vastitas Borealis had lain a 
kilometer or two below the datum, in some places three; now with sea level 
stabilizing at the minus-one contour, most of it was underwater. If an ocean of 
similar shape had existed on Earth, it would have been a bigger Arctic Ocean, 
covering most of Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Scandinavia, and then 
making two deeper incursions farther south, narrow seas that extended all the 
way to the equator; on Earth these would have made for a narrow North Atlantic, 
and a North Pacific occupied in its center by a big squarish island.
This Oceanus Borealis was dotted by several large icy islands, and a long low 
peninsula that broke its circumnavigation of the globe, connecting the mainland 
north ofSyrtis with the tail of a polar island. The north pole was actually on 
the ice ofOlympia Gulf, some kilometers offshore from this polar island.
And that was it. On Mars there would be no equivalent of the South Pacific or 
the South Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean, or the Antarctic Ocean. In its south 
there was only desert, except for the Hellas Sea, a circular body of water about 
the size of the Caribbean. So while ocean covered seventy percent of the Earth, 
it covered about twenty-five percent of Mars.
In the year 2130, most of Oceanus Borealis was covered by ice. There were large 
pods of liquid water under the surface, however, and in the summer, melt lakes 
scattered on top of the surface; there were also many polynyaps, leads and 
cracks. Because most of the water had been pumped or otherwise driven out of the 
permafrost, it had deep groundwater’s purity, meaning it was nearly distilled: 
the Borealis was a freshwater ocean. It was expected to become salty fairly 
soon, however, as rivers ran through the very salty regolith and carried their 
loads into the sea, then evaporated, precipitated, and repeated the 
process—moving salts from the regolith into the water until a balance was 
reached—a process which had the oceanographers transfixed with interest, for the 
saltiness of Earth’s oceans, stable for many millions of years, was not well 
understood.
The coastlines were wild. The polar island, formally nameless, was called 
variously the polar peninsula, or the polar island, or the Seahorse, for its 
shape on maps. In actuality its coastline was still overrun in many places by 
the ice of the old polar cap, and everywhere it was blanketed by snow, blown 
into patterns of giant sastrugi. This corrugated white surface extended out over 
the sea for many kilometers, until underwater currents fractured it and one came 
on a “coastline” of leads and pressure ridges and the chaotic edges of big 
tabular bergs, as well as larger and larger stretches of open water. Several 
large volcanic or meteoric islands rose up out of the shatter of this ice coast, 
including a few pedestal craters, sticking up out of the whiteness like great 
black tabular bergs.
The southern shores of the Borealis were much more exposed and various. Where 
the ice lapped against the foot of the Great Escarpment there were several 
mensae and colles regions that had become offshore archipelagoes, and these, as 
well as the mainland coastline proper, sported many beetling sea cliffs, bluffs, 
crater bays, fossa fjords, and long stretches of low smooth strand. The water in 
the two big southern gulfs was extensively melted below the surface, and, in the 
summers, on the surface as well. Chryse Gulf had perhaps the most dramatic 
coastline of all: eight big outbreak channels dropping into Chryse had partly 
filled with ice, and as it melted they were becoming steep-sided fjords. At the 
southern end of the gulf four of these fjords braided, weaving together several 
big cliff-walled islands to make the most spectacular seascapes of all.
Over all this water great flocks of birds flew daily. Clouds bloomed in the air 
and rushed off on the wind, dappling the white and red with their shadows. 
Icebergs floated across the melted seas, and crashed against the shore. Storms 
dropped off the Great Escarpment with terrifying force, dashing hail and 
lightning onto the rock. There were now approximately forty thousand kilometers 
of coastline on Mars. And in the rapid freeze and thaw of the days and the 
seasons, under the brush of the constant wind every part of it was coming alive.


 
 
 
 
 
When the congress ended Nadia made plans to get off Pavonis Mons immediately. 
She was sick of the bickering in the warehouse, of arguments, of politics; sick 
of violence and the threat of violence; sick of revolution, sabotage, the 
constitution, the elevator, Earth, and the threat of war. Earth and death, that 
was Pavonis Mons—Peacock Mountain, with all the peacocks preening and strutting 
and crying Me Me Me. It was the last place on Mars Nadia wanted to be.
She wanted to get off the mountain and breathe the open air. She wanted to work 
on tangible things; she wanted to build, with her nine fingers and her back and 
her mind, build anything and everything, not just structures, although those 
would be wonderful of course, but also things like air or dirt, parts of a 
construction project new to her, which was simply terraforming itself. Ever 
since her first walk in the open air down at DuMartheray Crater, free of 
everything but a little CO2 filter mask, Sax’s obsession had finally made sense 
to her. She was ready to join him and the rest of them in that project, and more 
than ever now, as the removal of the orbiting mirrors had kicked off a long 
winter and threatened a full ice age. Build air, build dirt, move water, 
introduce plants and animals: all that kind of work sounded fascinating to her 
now. And of course the more conventional construction projects beckoned as well.
When the new North Sea melted and its shoreline stabilized, there would be 
harbor towns to be inlaid everywhere, scores of them no doubt, each with jetties 
and seafronts, channels, wharves and docks, and the towns behind them rising 
into the hills. At the higher altitudes there would be more tent towns to be 
erected, and covered canyons. There was even talk of covering some of the big 
calderas, and of running cable cars between the three prince volcanoes, or 
bridging the narrows south of Elysium; there was talk of inhabiting the polar 
island continent; there were new concepts in biohousing, plans to grow homes and 
buildings directly out of engineered trees, as Hiroko has used bamboo, but on a 
bigger scale. Yes, a builder ready to learn some of the latest techniques had a 
thousand years of lovely projects ahead of her. It was a dream come true.
Then a small group came to her and said they were exploring possibilities for 
the first executive council of the new global government.
Nadia stared at them. She could see their import like a big slow-moving trap, 
and she tried her best to run out of it before it snapped shut. “There are lots 
of possibilities,” she said. “About ten times more good people than council 
positions.”
Yes, they said, looking thoughtful. But we were wondering if you had ever 
thought about it.
“No,” she said.
Art was grinning, and seeing that she began to get worried. “I plan to build 
things,” she said firmly.
“You could do that too,” Art said. “The council is a part-time job.”
“The hell it is.”
“No, really.”
It was true that the concept of citizen government was written everywhere into 
the new constitution, from the global legislature to the courts to the tents. 
People would presumably do a good deal of this work part-time. Nadia was quite 
sure, however, that the executive council was not going to be in that category. 
“Don’t executive council members have to be elected out of the legislature?” she 
asked.
Elected by the legislature, they told her happily. Usually fellow legislators 
would be elected, but not necessarily.
“Well there’s a mistake in the constitution for you!” Nadia said. “Good thing 
that you caught it so soon. Restrict it to elected legislators and you’ll cut 
your pool way down—” Way down—
“And still have lots of good people,” she backpedaled.
But they were persistent. They kept coming back, in different combinations, and 
Nadia kept running toward that narrowing gap between the teeth of the trap. In 
the end they begged. A whole little delegation of them. This was the crucial 
time for the new government, they needed an executive council trusted by all, it 
would be the one to get things started, etc. etc. The senate had been elected, 
the duma had been drafted. Now the two houses were electing the seven executive 
council members. People mentioned as candidates included Mikhail, Zeyk, Peter, 
Marina, Etsu, Na-nao, Ariadne, Marion, Irishka, Antar, Rashid, Jackie, 
Charlotte, the four ambassadors to Earth, and several others Nadia had first met 
in the warehouse. “Lots of good people,” Nadia reminded them. This was the 
polycephalous revolution.
But people were uneasy at the list, they told Nadia repeatedly. They had become 
used to her providing a balanced center, both during the congress and during the 
revolution, and before that at Dorsa Brevia, and for that matter throughout the 
underground years, and right back to the beginning. People wanted her on the 
council as a moderating influence, a calm head, a neutral party, etc. etc.
“Get out,” she said, suddenly angry, though she did not know why. They were 
concerned to see her anger, upset by it. “I’ll think about it,” she said as she 
shooed them out, to keep them moving.
Eventually only Charlotte and Art were left, looking serious, looking as if they 
had not conspired to bring all this about.
“They seem to want you on the executive council,” Art said.
“Oh shut up.”
“But they do. They want someone they can trust.”
“They want someone they’re not afraid of, you mean. They want an old babushka 
who won’t try to do anything, so they can keep their opponents off the council 
and pursue their own agendas.”
Art frowned; he had not considered this, he was too naive.
“You know a constitution is kind of like a blueprint,” Charlotte said 
thoughtfully. “Getting a real working government out of it is the true act of 
construction.”
“Out,” Nadia said.
 
But in the end she agreed to stand. They were relentless, there were a 
surprisingly large number of them, and they would not give up. She didn’t want 
to seem like a shirker. And so she let the trap close down on her leg.
The legislatures met, the ballots were cast. Nadia was elected one of the seven, 
along with Zeyk, Ariadne, Marion, Peter, Mikhail, and Jackie. That same day 
Irishka was elected the first chief justice of the Global Environmental Court, a 
real coup for her personally and the Reds generally; this was part of the “grand 
gesture” Art had brokered at the congress’s end, to gain the Reds’ support. 
About half the new justices were Reds of one shade or another, making for a 
gesture just a bit too grand, in Nadia’s opinion.
Immediately after these elections another delegation came to her, led this time 
by her fellow councillors. She had gotten the highest ballot total in the two 
houses, they told her, and so the others wanted to elect her president of the 
council.
“Oh no,” she said.
They nodded gravely. The president was just another member of the council, they 
told her, one among equals. A ceremonial position only. This arm of the 
government was modeled on Switzerland’s, and the Swiss didn’t usually even know 
who their president was. And so on. Though of course they would need her 
permission (Jackie’s eyes glittered slightly at this), her acceptance of the 
post.
“Out,” she said.
After they had left Nadia sat slumped in her chair, feeling stunned.
“You’re the only one on Mars that everyone trusts,” Art said gently. He 
shrugged, as if to say he hadn’t been involved, which she knew was a lie. “What 
can you do?” he said, rolling his eyes with a child’s exaggerated theatricality. 
“Give it three years and then things’ll be on track, and you can say you did 
your part and retire. Besides, the first president of Mars! How could you 
resist?”
“Easy.”
Art waited. Nadia glared at him.
Finally he said, “But you’ll do it anyway, right?”
“You’ll help me?”
“Oh yes.” He put a hand on her clenched fist. “All you want. I mean—I’m at your 
disposal.”
“Is that an official Praxis position?”
“Why yes, I’m sure it could be. Praxis adviser to the Martian president? You 
bet.”
So possibly she could make him do it.
She heaved a big sigh. Tried to feel less tight in her stomach. She could take 
the job, and then turn most of the work over to Art, and to whatever staff they 
gave her. She wouldn’t be the first president to do that, nor the last.
“Praxis adviser to the Martian president,” Art was announcing, looking pleased.
“Oh shut up!” she said.
“Of course.”
He left her alone to get used to it, came back with a steaming pot of kava and 
two little cups. He poured; she took one from him, and sipped the bitter fluid.
He said, “Anyway I’m yours, Nadia. You know that.”
“Mm-hmm.”
She regarded him as he slurped his kava. He meant it more than politically, she 
knew. He was fond of her. All that time working together, living together, 
traveling together; sharing space. And she liked him. A bear of a man, graceful 
on his feet, full of high spirits. Fond of kava, as was obvious in his slurping, 
in his squinched face. He had carried the whole congress, she felt, on the 
strength of those high spirits, spreading like an epidemic—the feeling that 
there was nothing so fun as writing a constitution—absurd! But it had worked. 
And during the congress they had become a kind of couple. Yes, she had to admit 
it.
But she was now 159 years old. Another absurdity, but it was true. And Art was, 
she wasn’t sure, somewhere in his seventies or eighties, although he looked 
fifty, as they often did when they got the treatment early. “I’m old enough to 
be your great-grandmother,” she said.
Art shrugged, embarrassed. He knew what she was talking about. “I’m old enough 
to be that woman’s great-grandfather,” he said, pointing at a tall native girl 
passing by their office door. “And she’s old enough to have kids. So, you know. 
At some point it just doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe not to you.”
“Well, yeah. But that’s half of the opinions that count.”
Nadia said nothing.
“Look,” Art said, “we’re going to live a long time. At some point the numbers 
have to stop mattering. I mean, I wasn’t with you in the first years, but we’ve 
been together a long time now, and gone through a lot.”
“I know.” Nadia looked down at the table, remembering some of those times. There 
was the stump of her long-lost finger. All that life was gone. Now she was 
president of Mars. “Shit.”
Art slurped his kava, watched her sympathetically. He liked her, she liked him. 
They were already a kind of couple. “You help me with this damned council 
stuff!” she said, feeling bleak as all her technofantasies slipped away.
“Oh I will.”
“And then, well. We’ll see.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and smiled.
 
So there she was, stuck on Pavonis Mons. The new government was assembling up 
there, moving from the warehouses into Sheffield proper, occupying the blocky 
polished stone-faced buildings abandoned by the metanats; there was an argument 
of course over whether they were going to be compensated for these buildings and 
the rest of their infrastructure, or whether it had all been “globalized” or 
“co-opted” by independence and the new order. “Compensate them,” Nadia growled 
at Charlotte, glowering. But it did not appear that the presidency of Mars was 
the kind of presidency that caused people to jump at her word.
In any case the government was moving in, Sheffield becoming, if not the 
capital, then at least the temporary seat of the global government. With 
Burroughs drowned and Sabishii burned, there was no other obvious place to put 
it, and in truth it didn’t look to Nadia like any of the other tent towns wanted 
to have it. People spoke of building a new capital city, but that would take 
time, and meanwhile they had to meet somewhere. So around the piste to Sheffield 
they retired, inside its tent, under its dark sky. In the shadow of the elevator 
cable, rising from its eastern neighborhood straight and black, like a flaw in 
reality.
Nadia found an apartment in the westernmost tent, behind the rim park, up on the 
fourth floor where she had a fine view down into Pavonis’s awesome caldera. Art 
took an apartment in the ground floor of the same building, at the back; 
apparently the caldera gave him vertigo. But there he was, and the Praxis office 
was in a nearby office building, a cube of polished jasper as big as a city 
block, lined with chrome blue windows.
Fine. She was there. Time to take a deep breath and do the work asked of her. It 
was like a bad dream in which the constitutional congress had suddenly been 
extended for three years, three m-years.
She began with the intention of getting off the mountain occasionally and 
joining some construction project or other. Of course she would perform her 
duties on the council, but working on an increase in greenhouse gas output, for 
instance, looked good, combining as it did technical problems and the politics 
of conforming to the new environmental regulatory regime. It would get her out 
into the back country, where a lot of the feedstocks for the greenhouse gases 
were located. From there she could do her council business over the wrist.
But events conspired to keep her in Sheffield. It was one thing after 
another—nothing particularly important or interesting, compared to the congress 
itself, but the details necessary to get things rolling. It was somewhat as 
Charlotte had said; after the design phase, the endless minutiae of 
construction. Detail after detail.
She had to expect this, she had to be patient. She would work through the first 
rush and then get away. In the meantime, along with the start-up process, the 
media wanted her, the new UN Martian Office wanted her, very interested in the 
new immigration policies and procedures; the other council members wanted her. 
Where would the council meet? How often? What were its rules of operation? Nadia 
convinced the other six councillors to hire Charlotte to be council secretary 
and protocol chief, and after that Charlotte hired a big crew of assistants from 
Dorsa Brevia. So they had the start of a staff. And Mikhail also had a great 
fund of practical experience in government from Bogdanov Vishniac. So there were 
people better suited than Nadia to do this work; but still she was called in a 
million times a day to confer, discuss, decide, appoint, adjudicate, arbitrate, 
administrate. It was endless.
And then when Nadia did clear time for herself, forcibly, it turned out that 
being president made it very difficult to join any particular project. 
Everything going on was now part of a tent or a co-op; very often they were 
commercial enterprises, involved in transactions that were part nonprofit public 
works, part competitive market. So to have the president of Mars join any given 
co-op would be a sign of official patronage, and couldn’t be allowed if one 
wanted to be fair. It was a conflict of interest.
“Shit!” she said to Art, accusingly.
He shrugged, tried to pretend he hadn’t known.
But there was no way out. She was a prisoner of power. She had to study the 
situation as if it were an engineering problem, like trying to exert force in 
some difficult medium. Say she wanted to build greenhouse-gas factories. She was 
constrained from joining any factory co-op in particular. Therefore she had to 
do it some other way. Emergence at a higher level: she could perhaps coordinate 
co-ops.
There seemed to her good reasons to promote the building of greenhouse-gas 
factories. The Year Without Summer had extended to include a series of violent 
storms that had dropped off the Great Escarpment into the north, and most 
meteorologists agreed these “Hadley cross-equatorial storms” had been caused by 
the orbital mirrors’ removal, and the resulting sudden drop in insolation. A 
full ice age was deemed a distinct possibility; and pumping up greenhouse gases 
seemed to be one of the best ways to counter it. So Nadia asked Charlotte to 
initiate a conference to come back with recommendations for forestalling an ice 
age. Charlotte contacted people in Da Vinci and Sabishii and elsewhere, and soon 
she had a conference scheduled to take place in Sabishii, named, by some Da 
Vinci saxaclone no doubt, the “Insolation Loss Effects Abatement Meeting M-53.”


 
 
 
 
 
Nadia, however, never made it to this conference. She got caught up by affairs 
in Sheffield instead, mostly instituting the new economic system, which she 
thought important enough to keep her there. The legislature was passing the laws 
of eco-economics, fleshing out the bones drawn up in the constitution. They 
directed co-ops that had existed before the revolution to help the newly 
independent metanat local subsidiaries to transform themselves into similar 
cooperative organizations. This process, called horizontalization, had very wide 
support, especially from the young natives, and so it was proceeding fairly 
smoothly. Every Martian business now had to be owned by its employees only. No 
co-op could exceed one thousand people; larger enterprises had to be made of 
co-op associations, working together. For their internal structures most of the 
firms chose variants of the Bogdanovist models, which themselves were based on 
the cooperative Basque community of Mondragon, Spain. In these firms all 
employees were co-owners, and they bought into their positions by paying the 
equivalent of about a year’s wages to the firm’s equity fund, wages earned in 
apprentice programs of various kinds at the end of schooling. This buy-in fee 
became the starter of their share in the firm, which grew every year they 
stayed, until it was given back to them as pension or departure payment. 
Councils elected from the workforce hired management, usually from outside, and 
this management then had the power to make executive decisions, but was subject 
to a yearly review by the councils. Credit and capital were obtained from 
central cooperative banks, or the global government’s start-up fund, or helper 
organizations such as Praxis and the Swiss. On the next level up, co-ops in the 
same industries or services were associating for larger projects, and also 
sending representatives to industry guilds, which established professional 
practice boards, arbitration and mediation centers, and trade associations.
The economic commission was also establishing a Martian currency, for internal 
use and for exchanges with Terran currencies. The commission wanted a currency 
that was resistant to Terran speculation, but in the absence of a Martian stock 
market, the full force of Terran investment tended to fall on the currency 
itself, as the only investment game being offered. This tended to inflate the 
value of the Martian sequin in Terran money markets, and in the old days it 
would probably have blown the sequin’s value right through the roof, to Mars’s 
disadvantage in trade balances; but as the fracturing metanats continued to 
struggle against cooperativization back on Earth, Terran finance remained in 
some disarray, and did not have its old house-on-fire intensity. So the sequin 
ended up strong on Earth, but not too strong; and on Mars it was just money. 
Praxis was very helpful in this process, as they became a kind of federal bank 
for the new economy, providing interest-free loans and serving as a mediated 
exchange with Terran currencies.
 
So given all this, the executive council was meeting for long hours every day to 
discuss legislation and other government programs. It was so time-consuming that 
Nadia almost forgot there was a conference she had initiated going on at the 
same time in Sabishii. On good nights, however, she spent a last hour or two 
on-screen with friends in Sabishii, and it looked like things were going fairly 
well there too. Many of Mars’s environmental scientists were on hand, and they 
were in agreement that massively increasing greenhouse-gas emissions would ease 
the effects of the mirror loss. Of course CO2 was the easiest greenhouse gas to 
emit, but even without using it—as they were still trying to reduce it in the 
atmosphere to breathable levels—the consensus was that the more complex and 
powerful gases could be created and released in the quantities needed. And at 
first they did not think this would be a problem, politically; the constitution 
legislated an atmosphere no thicker than 350 millibars at the six-kilometer 
contour, but said nothing about what gases could be used to create this 
pressure. If the halocarbons and other greenhouse gases in the Russell cocktail 
were pumped out until they formed one hundred parts per million of the 
atmosphere, rather than the twenty-seven parts per million that were currently 
up there, then heat retention would rise by several degrees K, they calculated, 
and an ice age would be forestalled, or at least greatly shortened. So the plan 
called for production and release of tons of carbon tetrafluoride, 
hexafluoroethane, sulfur hex-afluoride, methane, nitrous oxide, and trace 
elements of other chemicals which helped to decrease the rate at which UV 
radiation destroyed these halocarbons.
Completing the melting of the North Sea ice was the other obvious abatement 
strategy most often mentioned at the conference. Until it was all liquid, the 
albedo of the ice was bouncing a lot of energy back into space, and a truly 
lively water cycle was somewhat capped off. If they could get a liquid ocean, 
or, given how far north it was, a summer-liquid ocean, then any ice age would be 
done for, and ter-raformation essentially complete: they would have robust 
currents, waves, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, melting, streams, rivers, 
deltas—the full hydrological cycle. This was a primary goal, and so there was a 
variety of methods being proposed to speed the melting of the ice: feeding 
nuclear-power-plant exhaust heat into the ocean, scattering black algae on the 
ice, deploying microwave and ultrasound transmitters as heaters, even sailing 
big icebreakers through the shallow pack to aid the breakup.
Of course the increased greenhouse gases would help here as well; the ocean’s 
surface ice would melt on its own, after all, as soon as the air stayed 
regularly above 273 K. But as the conference proceeded, more and more problems 
with the greenhouse-gas plan were being pointed out. It entailed another huge 
industrial effort, almost the equal of the meta-nat monster projects, like the 
nitrogen shipments from Titan, or the soletta itself. And it was not a onetime 
thing; the gases were constantly destroyed by UV radiation in the upper 
atmosphere, so they had to overproduce to reach the desired levels, and then 
continue producing for as long as they wanted the gases up there. Thus mining 
the raw materials, and constructing the factories to turn those materials into 
the desired gases, were enormous projects, and necessarily a largely robotic 
effort, with self-guided and replicating miners, self-building and regulating 
factories, upper-atmosphere sampler drones—an entire machine enterprise.
The technical challenge of this was not the issue; as Nadia pointed out to her 
friends at the conference, Martian technology had been highly robotic from the 
very beginning. In this case, thousands of small robotic cars would wander Mars 
on their own, looking for good deposits of carbon, sulfur, or fluorite, 
migrating from source to source like the old Arab mining caravans on the Great 
Escarpment; then when new feedstocks were found in high concentrations, the 
robots could settle down and construct little processing plants out of clay, 
iron, magnesium, and trace metals, providing the parts that could not be 
constructed on-site, and then assembling the whole. Fleets of automated diggers 
and carts would be manufactured to haul the processed material in to centralized 
factories, where the material would be gas-sified and released from tall mobile 
stacks. It wasn’t that different from the earlier mining for atmospheric gases; 
just a larger effort.
But the most obvious deposits had already been mined, as people were now 
pointing out. And surface mining couldn’t be done the way it used to be; there 
were plants growing almost everywhere now, and in many places a kind of desert 
pavement was developing on the surface, as a result of hydration, bacterial 
action, and chemical reactions in the clays. This crust helped greatly to cut 
down on dust storms, which were still a constant problem; so ripping it up to 
get to underlying deposits of feedstock materials was no longer acceptable, 
either ecologically or politically. Red members of the legislature were calling 
for a ban on just this kind of robotic surface mining, and for good reasons, 
even in terraforming terms.
It was hard, Nadia thought one night as she shut down her screen, to be faced 
with all the competing effects of their actions. The environmental issues were 
so tightly intertwined that it was hard to tease them out and decide what to do. 
And it was also hard to stay constrained by their own rules; individual 
organizations could no longer act unilat-erally, because so many of their 
actions had global ramifications. Thus the necessity for environmental 
regulation, and for the global environmental court, already faced with a 
caseload running out of control. Eventually it would have to rule on any plans 
coming out of this conference as well. The days of unconstrained terraforming 
were gone.
And as a member of the executive council, Nadia was restricted to saying that 
she thought increased greenhouse gases were a good idea. Other than that she had 
to stay out, or appear to be impinging on the environmental court’s territory, 
which Irishka was defending very vigorously. So Nadia spent time visiting 
on-screen with a group designing new robot miners that would minimally disrupt 
the surface, or talking to a group working on dust fixatives that might be 
sprayed or grown over the surface, “thin fast pavements” as they called them; 
but they were proving to be a knotty problem.
 
And that was the extent of Nadia’s participation in the Sabishii conference that 
she herself had initiated. And since all its technical problems were enmeshed in 
political considerations anyway, it might have been said that she hadn’t missed 
it at all. Not a bit of real work had been done there, by her or anyone else. 
Meanwhile, back in Sheffield, the council was facing any number of problems of 
its own: unforeseen difficulties in instituting the eco-economy; complaints that 
the GEC was overstepping its authority; complaints about the new police, and the 
criminal justice system; unruly and stupid behavior in both houses of the 
legislature; Red and other types of resistance in the outback; and so on. The 
issues were endless, and spanned the gamut from the profoundly important to the 
incredibly petty, until Nadia began to lose all sense of where on that continuum 
any individual problem lay.
For instance, she spent a good deal of her time involved in the council’s own 
internal struggles, which she considered trivial, but couldn’t avoid. Most of 
these struggles involved resisting Jackie’s efforts to put together a majority 
that would vote with Jackie every time, so that Jackie could use the council as 
a rubber stamp for the Free Mars partyline, or in other words for Jackie 
herself. This meant getting to know the rest of the councillors better, and 
figuring out how to work with them. Zeyk was an old acquaintance; Nadia liked 
him, and he was a power among the Arabs, their current representative to the 
general culture, having defeated Antar for that position; gracious, smart, kind, 
he was in agreement with Nadia on many issues, including the core ones, and this 
made it an easy relationship, even a growing friendship. Ariadne was one of the 
goddesses of the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, and acted the part to a tee: 
imperious and rigid in her principles, she was an ideologue, probably the only 
thing that kept her from being a serious challenge to Jackie’s prominence among 
the natives. Marion was the Red councillor, an ideologue also, but much changed 
from her early radical days, although still a long-winded arguer, not easily 
beaten. Peter, Ann’s little boy, had grown up to be a power in several different 
parts of Martian society, including the space crew at Da Vinci, the green 
underground, the cable crowd, and to an extent, because of Ann, the more 
moderate Reds. This versatility was part of his nature, and Nadia had a hard 
time getting a fix on him; he was private, like his parents, and seemed wary of 
Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred; he wanted a distance from them, he was 
nisei through and through. Mikhail Yangel was one of the earliest issei to 
follow the First Hundred to Mars, and had worked with Arkady from very early on. 
He had helped to start the revolt of 2061, and Nadia’s impression was that he 
had been one of the most extreme Reds at that time—which fact sometimes made her 
angry at him still, which was silly, and impeded her ability to talk to him—but 
there it was, despite the fact that he too was much changed, a Bogda-novist 
willing to compromise. His presence on the council was a surprise to Nadia—a 
gesture toward Arkady, one might say, which she found touching.
And then there was Jackie, very possibly the most popular and powerful 
politician on Mars. At least until Nirgal got back.
And so Nadia dealt with these six every day, learning their ways as they made 
their way through item after item on their daily agendas. From the important to 
the trivial, the abstract to the personal—everything seemed to Nadia part of a 
fabric, where everything connected to everything. Not only was the council not 
part-time work, it ate up the entirety of every waking day. It consumed her 
life. And yet at this point she had only gotten through two months of a 
three-m-year term.
 
Art could see that it was getting to her, and he did what he could to help. He 
came up to her apartment every morning with breakfast, like room service. Often 
he had cooked it himself, and always it was good. As he came in, platter held 
aloft, he called up jazz on her AI to serve as the soundtrack of their morning 
together—not just Nadia’s beloved Louis, though he sought out odd recordings by 
Satch to amuse her, things like “Give Peace a Chance” or “Stardust Memories”—but 
also later styles of jazz that she had never liked before, because they were so 
frenetic; but that seemed to be the tempo of these days. Whatever the reason, 
Charlie Parker now skittered and zoomed around most impressively, she thought, 
and Charles Mingus made his big band sound like Duke Ellington’s on pandorph, 
which was just what Ellington and all the rest of swing needed, in her 
opinion—very funny, lovely music. And best of all, on many mornings Art called 
up Clifford Brown, a discovery Art had made during his investigations on her 
behalf, one he was very proud of, and advocated constantly to her as the logical 
successor to Armstrong—a vibrant trumpet sound joyous and positive and melodic 
like Satch, and also brilliantly fast and clever and difficult—like Parker, only 
happy. It was the perfect soundtrack for these wild times, driving and intense 
but as positive as one could be.
So Art would bring in breakfasts, singing “All of Me” in a pretty good voice, 
and with Satchmo’s basic insight that American song lyrics could only be treated 
as silly jokes: “All of me, why not take all of me, Can’t you see, I’m no good 
without you.” And call up some music, and sit with his back to the window; and 
the mornings were fun.
But no matter how well the days began, the council was eating her life. Nadia 
got more and more sick of it—the bickering, negotiating, compromising, 
conciliating—the dealing with people, minute after minute. She was beginning to 
hate it.
Art saw this, of course, and began to look worried. And one day after work he 
brought over Ursula and Vlad. The four of them had dinner together in her 
apartment, Art cooking. Nadia enjoyed her old friends’ company; they were in 
town on business, but getting them over for dinner there had been Art’s idea, 
and a good one. He was a sweet man, Nadia thought as she watched him moving 
about the kitchen. Canny diplomat as guileless simpleton, or vice versa. Like a 
benign Frank. Or a mix of Frank’s skill and Arkady’s happiness. She laughed at 
herself, always thinking of people in terms of the First Hundred—as if everyone 
was somehow a recombination of the traits of that original family. It was a bad 
habit of hers.
Vlad and Art were talking about Ann. Sax had apparently called Vlad from the 
shuttle rocket on its return to Mars, shaken by a conversation with Ann. He was 
wondering if Vlad and Ursula would consider offering Ann the same brain 
plasticity treatment that they had given him after his stroke.
“Ann would never do it,” Ursula said.
“I’m glad she won’t,” Vlad said. “That would be too much. Her brain wasn’t 
injured. We don’t know what that treatment would do in a healthy brain. And you 
should only undertake what you can understand, unless you are desperate.”
“Maybe Ann is desperate,” Nadia said.
“No. Sax is desperate.” Vlad smiled briefly. “He wants a different Ann before he 
gets back.”
Ursula said to him, “You didn’t want Sax to try that treatment either.”
“It’s true. I wouldn’t have done it to myself. But Sax is a bold man. An 
impulsive man.” Now Vlad looked at Nadia: “We should stick to things like your 
finger, Nadia. Now that we can fix.”
Surprised, Nadia said, “What’s wrong with it?”
They laughed at her. “The one that’s missing!” Ursula said. “We could grow it 
back, if you wanted.”
“Ka,” Nadia exclaimed. She sat back, looked at her thin left hand, the stump of 
the missing little finger. “Well. I don’t need it, really.”
They laughed again. “You could have fooled us,” Ursula said. “You’re always 
complaining about it when you’re working.”
“I am?”
They all nodded.
“It’ll help your swimming,” Ursula said.
“I don’t swim much anymore.”
“Maybe you stopped because of your hand.”
Nadia stared at it again. “Ka. I don’t know what to say. Are you sure it will 
work?”
“It might grow into an entire other hand,” Art suggested. “Then into another 
Nadia. You’ll be a Siamese twin.”
Nadia pushed him sideways in his chair. Ursula was shaking her head. “No no. 
We’ve done it for some other amputees already, and a great number of 
experimental animals. Hands, arms, legs. We learned it from frogs. Quite 
wonderful, really. The cells differentiate just like the first time the finger 
grew.”
“A very literal demonstration of emergence theory,” Vlad said with a small 
smile. Nadia saw by that smile that he had been instrumental in designing the 
procedure.
“It works?” she asked him directly.
“It works. We make what is in effect a new finger bud over your stump. It’s a 
combination of embryonic stem cells with some cells from the base of your other 
little finger. The combination functions as the equivalent of the homeobox genes 
you had when you were a fetus. So you’ve got the developmental determiners there 
to make the new stem cells differentiate properly. Then you ultrasonically 
inject a weekly dose of fibroblast growth factor, plus a few cells from the 
knuckle and the nail, at the appropriate times . . . and it works.”
As he explained Nadia felt a little glow of interest spread through her. A whole 
person. Art was watching her with his friendly curiosity.
“Well, sure,” she said at last. “Why not.”
So in the following week they took some biopsies from her remaining little 
finger, and gave her some ultrasonic shots in the stump of the missing finger, 
and in her arm, and gave her some pills; and that was it. After that it was only 
a matter of weekly shots, and waiting.
 
Then she forgot about it, because Charlotte called with a problem; Cairo was 
ignoring a GEC order concerning water pumping. “You’d better come check it out 
in person. I think the Cairenes are testing the court, for a faction of Free 
Mars that wants to challenge the global government.”
“Jackie?” Nadia said.
“I think so.”


 
 
 
 
 
Cairo stood on its plateau edge, overlooking the northwestern-most U-valley of 
Noctis Labyrinthus. Nadia walked out of the train station with Art onto a plaza 
flanked by tall palm trees. She glared at the scene; some of the worst moments 
of her life had occurred in this city, during the assault on it in 2061. Sasha 
had been killed, among many others, and Nadia had blown up Phobos, she 
herself!—and all just a few days after finding Arkady’s burned remains. She had 
never returned; she hated this town.
Now she saw that it had been damaged again in the recent unrest. Parts of the 
tent had been blown, and the physical plant heavily damaged. It was being 
rebuilt, and new tent segments were being tacked onto the old town, extending 
west and east far along the plateau’s edge. It looked like a boomtown, which 
Nadia found peculiar given its altitude, ten kilometers above the datum. They 
would never be able to take down the tents, or go outside without walkers on, 
and so Nadia had assumed it would therefore go into decline. But it lay at the 
intersection of the equatorial piste and the Tharsis piste running north and 
south, the last place one could cross the equator between here and the chaoses, 
a full quarter of the planet away. So unless a Trans-marineris bridge were built 
somewhere, Cairo would always be at a strategic crossroads.
And crossroads or not, they wanted more water. The Compton Aquifer, underlying 
lower Noctis and upper Mar-ineris, had been breached in ‘61, and its water had 
poured down the entire length of the Marineris canyons. This was the flood that 
had almost killed Nadia and her companions during the flight down the canyons, 
after Cairo was taken. Most of the floodwater had either frozen in the canyons, 
creating a long irregular glacier, or had pooled and frozen in the chaoses at 
the bottom of Marineris. And some water had of course remained in the aquifer. 
In the years since, the water in the aquifer had been pumped out for use in 
cities all over east Tharsis. And the Marineris Glacier had slowly dropped 
downcanyon, receding at its upper end where there was no source to replenish it, 
leaving behind only devastated land and a string of very shallow ice lakes. 
Cairo was therefore running out of a ready supply of water. Its hydrology office 
had responded by laying a pipeline to the northern sea’s big southern arm in the 
Chryse depression, and pumping water up to Cairo. So far, no problem; every tent 
town got its water from somewhere. But the Cair-enes had lately started pouring 
water into a reservoir in the Noctis canyon under them, and letting a stream out 
from this reservoir to run down into lus Chasma, where eventually it pooled 
behind the upper end of the Marineris Glacier, or ran by it. Essentially they 
had created a new river running right down the big canyon system, far away from 
their town; and now they were establishing a number of riverside settlements and 
farming communities downstream from the city. A Red legal group had gone to the 
Global Environmental Court to challenge this action, asserting that Valles 
Marineris had legal consideration as a natural wonder, being the largest canyon 
in the solar system; if left alone the breakout glacier would eventually have 
slid down into the chaos, leaving the canyons again open-floored. This was what 
they thought should happen, and the GEC had agreed with them, and issued an 
order (Charlotte called this a “gecko”) against Cairo, requiring them to halt 
the release of water out of the town reservoir. Cairo had refused to desist, 
claiming that the global government had no jurisdiction over what they called 
“vital town life-support issues.” Meanwhile building new downstream settlements 
as fast as they could.
Clearly it was a provocation, a challenge to the new system. “This is a test,” 
Art muttered as they walked across the plaza, “this is only a test. If this were 
a true constitutional crisis, you would hear a beep all over the planet.”
A test; exactly the kind of thing for which Nadia had lost all patience. So she 
crossed the city in a foul mood. No doubt it did not help that the awful days of 
‘61 were called back so vividly to mind by the plaza, the boulevards, the city 
wall at the canyon rim, all just as they had been back then. They said one’s 
memory was weakest from one’s middle years, but she would have lost those 
memories happily if she could have; fear and rage, however, seemed to function 
as some kind of nightmare fixative. For it was all still there—Frank tapping 
madly away at his monitors, Sasha eating pizza, Maya shouting angrily at 
something or other, the fraught hours of waiting to see if they would be passed 
over by the falling pieces of Phobos. Seeing Sasha’s body, bloody at the ears. 
Clicking over the transmitter that had brought Phobos down.
 
Thus it was very hard to keep her irritation in check as she went into the first 
meeting with the Cairenes, and found Jackie there among them, supporting their 
position. Jackie was pregnant now as well, and had been for some time; she was 
flushed, glossy, beautiful. No one knew who the father was, it was something she 
was doing on her own. A Dorsa Brevia tradition, by way of Hiroko—and just one 
more irritant to Nadia.
The meeting took place in a building next to the city wall, overlooking the 
U-shaped canyon below, called Nilus Noctis. The water in dispute was actually 
visible downcanyon, a broad ice-sheeted reservoir stopped by a dam not visible 
from up here, stopped just before the Illyrian Gate and the new chaos of the 
Compton Break.
Charlotte stood with her back to the window, asking the Cairene officials just 
the questions Nadia would have asked, but without the slightest trace of Nadia’s 
annoyance. “You will always be in a tent. Opportunities for growth will be 
limited. Why flood Marineris when you won’t benefit from it?”
No one seemed to care to answer this. Finally Jackie said, “The people living 
down there will benefit, and they’re part of greater Cairo. Water in any form is 
a resource at these altitudes.”
“Water running freely down Marineris is no resource at all,” Charlotte said.
The Cairenes argued for the utility of water in Marineris. There were also 
representatives of the downstream settlers, many of them Egyptians, claiming 
that they had been in Marineris for generations, that it was their right to live 
there, that it was the best farming land on Mars, that they would fight before 
they would leave, and so on. Sometimes the Cairenes and Jackie seemed to be 
defending these neighbors, at other times their own right to use Marineris as a 
reservoir. Mostly they seemed to be defending their right to do whatever they 
wanted. Slowly Nadia got angrier and angrier.
“The court made its judgment,” she said. “We’re not here to argue it again. 
We’re here to see it enacted.” And she left the meeting before she said anything 
inexcusable.
That night she sat with Charlotte and Art, so irritated that she could not focus 
on a delicious Ethiopian meal in the train-station restaurant. “What do they 
want?” she asked Charlotte.
Charlotte shrugged, mouth full. After swallowing: “Have you been noticing that 
being president of Mars is not a particularly powerful position?”
“Hell yes. It would be hard to miss.”
“Yes. Well, the whole executive council is the same, of course. It’s looking 
like the real power in this government is in the environmental court. Irishka 
was put in charge there as part of the grand gesture, and she’s done a lot to 
legitimate moderate redness by staking out a middle ground. It allows for a lot 
of development under the six-k limit, but above that, they’re very strict. 
That’s all backed by the constitution, so they’ve been able to make everything 
stand—the legislature is laying off, they haven’t overturned any judgments yet. 
So it’s been an impressive first session for Irishka and that whole group of 
justices.”
“So Jackie is jealous,” Nadia said.
Charlotte shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“More than possible,” Nadia said grimly.
“And then there’s the matter of the council itself. Jackie may think this is 
something she can get three of the others to back her on, and then the council 
becomes that much more hers. Cairo is an arena where she might hope that Zeyk 
will vote with her because of the Arab part of town. Then only two more. And 
both Mikhail and Ariadne are strong localists.”
“But the council can’t overturn court decisions,” Nadia said, “only the 
legislature, right? By legislating new laws.”
“Right, but if Cairo continues to defy the court, then it would be up to the 
council to order the police to go down there and physically stop them. That’s 
what the executive branch is supposed to do. If the council didn’t do that, then 
the court would be undermined, and Jackie would take effective control of the 
council. Two birds with one stone.”
Nadia threw down her bit of spongy bread. “I’ll be damned if that happens,” she 
said.
They sat in silence.
“I hate this stuff,” Nadia said.
Charlotte said, “In a few years there will be a body of practices, institutions, 
laws, amendments to the constitution, all that. Things that the constitution 
never addressed, which translate it into action. Like the proper role of 
political parties. Right now we’re in the process of working all these things 
out.”
“Maybe so, but I still hate it.”
“Think of it as meta-architecture. Building the culture that allows architecture 
to exist. Then it’ll be less frustrating for you.”
Nadia snorted.
“This one should be a clear case,” Charlotte said. “The judgment has been made, 
they only have to abide by it.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Time for the police.”
“Civil war, in other words!”
“They won’t push it that far. They signed the constitution just like everyone 
else, and if everyone else is abiding by it, then they become outlaws, like the 
Red ecoteurs. I don’t think they’ll go that far. They’re just testing the 
limits.”
She did not seem annoyed by this. That was the way people were, her expression 
seemed to say. She did not blame anyone, she was not frustrated. A very calm 
woman, this Charlotte—relaxed, confident, capable. With her coordinating it, the 
executive council’s work had so far.been well organized, if not easy. If that 
competence was what growing up in a matriarchy like Dorsa Brevia did for you, 
Nadia thought, then more power to them. She couldn’t help but compare Charlotte 
to Maya, with all Maya’s mood shifts, her angst and self-dramatization. Well, it 
was probably an individual thing in any culture. But it was going to be 
interesting to have more Dorsa Brevia women around to take on these jobs.
At the next morning’s meeting Nadia stood and said, “An order against dumping 
water in Marineris has been issued already. If you persist in the dumping, the 
new police powers of the global community will be exerted. I don’t think anyone 
wants that.”
“I don’t think you can speak for the executive council,” Jackie said.
“I can,” Nadia said shortly.
“No you can’t,” Jackie said. “You’re only one of seven. And this isn’t a council 
matter anyway.”
“We’ll see about that,” Nadia said.
The meeting dragged on. The Cairenes were stonewalling. The more Nadia 
understood what they were doing the less she liked it. Their leaders were 
important in Free Mars; and even if this challenge failed, it might result in 
concessions to Free Mars in other areas; so the party would have gained more 
power. Charlotte agreed that this could be their ultimate motive. The cynicism 
of this disgusted Nadia, and she found it very hard to be civil to Jackie when 
Jackie spoke to her, with her easy cheerfulness, the pregnant queen cruising 
around among her minions like a battleship among row-boats: “Aunt Nadia, so 
sorry you felt you needed to take time for such a thing as this....”
That night Nadia said to Charlotte, “I want a ruling where Free Mars gets 
nothing at all out of this.”
Charlotte laughed briefly. “Been talking to Jackie, have you?”
“Yes. Why is she so popular? I don’t understand it, but she is!”
“She’s nice to a lot of people. She thinks she’s nice to everyone.”
“She reminds me of Phyllis,” Nadia said. The First Hundred again. . . .”Maybe 
not. Anyway, isn’t there some sort of penalty we can invoke against frivolous 
suits and challenges?”
“Court costs, in some cases.”
“See if you can lay that on her then.”
“First let’s see if we can win.”
The meetings went on for another week. Nadia left the talking to Charlotte and 
Art. She spent the meetings looking out the windows at the canyon below, and in 
rubbing the stump of her finger, which now had a noticeable new bump on it. So 
strange; despite paying close attention, she could not recall when the bump had 
first appeared. It was warm and pink, a delicate pink, like a child’s lips. 
There seemed to be a bone in the middle of it; she was afraid to squeeze it very 
hard. Surely lobsters didn’t pinch their returning limbs. All that cell 
proliferation was disturbing—like a cancer, only controlled, directed—the 
miracle of DNA’s instructional abilities made manifest. Life itself, flourishing 
in all its emergent complexity. And a little finger was nothing compared to an 
eye, or an embryo. It was a strange business. With that going on, the political 
meetings looked really dreadful. Nadia walked out of one having heard almost 
none of it, though she was sure nothing significant had happened, and she went 
for a long walk, out to an overlook bulging out of the western end of the tent 
wall. She called Sax. The four travelers were getting closer to Mars; 
transmission delays were down to a few minutes. Nirgal appeared to be healthy 
again. He was in good spirits. Michel actually looked more drained than Nirgal; 
it seemed that the visit to Earth had been hard on him. Nadia held up her finger 
to the screen to cheer him up, and it worked. “A pinky, don’t they call it 
that?” “I guess so.”
“You don’t seem to believe it’s going to work.” “No. I guess I don’t.”
 
“We’re in a transitional period, I think,” Michel said. “At our age we can’t 
really believe that we’re still alive, so we act as if it will end at any 
minute.”
“Which it could.” Thinking of Simon. Or Tatiana Durova. Or Arkady.
“Of course. But then again it might go on for decades more, or even centuries. 
After a while we’ll have to start believing in it.” He sounded like he was 
trying to convince himself as much as her. “You’ll look at your whole hand and 
then you’ll believe it. And that will be very interesting.” Nadia wiggled the 
pink nub at the end of her hand. No fingerprint yet in the fresh translucent 
skin. No doubt when it came it would be the same fingerprint as the one on the 
other little finger. Very strange.
Art came back from one meeting looking concerned. “I’ve been asking around about 
this,” he said, “trying to figure out why they’re doing it. I put some Praxis 
operatives on the case, down in the canyon and back on Earth, and inside the 
Free Mars leadership.”
Spies, Nadia thought. Now we have spies.
“—appears that they are making private arrangements with Terran governments 
concerning immigration. Building settlements and giving places to people from 
Egypt, definitely, and probably China too. It’s got to be a quid pro quo, but we 
don’t know what they’re getting in return from these countries. Money, 
possibly.”
Nadia growled.
In the next couple of days she met on-screen or in person with all the other 
members of the executive council. Marion was of course against pumping any more 
water into Mari-neris, and so Nadia needed only two more votes. But Mik-hail and 
Ariadne and Peter were unwilling to bring the police to bear if it could be 
avoided in any other way; and Nadia suspected they were not much happier than 
Jackie at the relative weakness of the council. They seemed willing to make 
concessions, to avoid an awkward enforcement of a court judgment they weren’t 
adamantly behind.
Zeyk clearly wanted to vote against Jackie, but felt constrained by the Arab 
constituency in Cairo, and the eyes of the Arab community on him; control of 
land and water were both important to them. But the Bedouin were nomadic, and 
besides, Zeyk was a strong supporter of the constitution. Nadia thought he would 
support her. That left one more to be convinced.
The relationship with Mikhail had never improved, it was as if he wanted to be 
closer to Arkady’s memory than she was. Peter she didn’t feel she understood. 
Ariadne she didn’t like, but in a way that made it easier; and Ariadne had come 
to Cairo as well. So Nadia decided to work on her first.
Ariadne was as committed to the constitution as most of the Dorsa Brevians, but 
they were localists as well, and were no doubt thinking about keeping some 
independence of their own from the global government. And they too were far from 
any water supply. So Ariadne had been wavering.
“Look,” Nadia said to her in a little room across the plaza from the city 
offices, “You’ve got to forget about Dorsa Brevia and think about Mars.” “I am, 
of course.”
She was irritated that this meeting was taking place; she would rather have 
dismissed Nadia out of hand. The merits of the case weren’t what mattered to 
her, it was just a matter of precedence, of not having to listen to any issei. 
It was power politics and hierarchy to these people now, they had forgotten the 
real issues involved. And in this damned city; suddenly Nadia lost her patience, 
and she almost shouted, “You’re not! You’re not thinking at all! This is the 
first challenge to the constitution, and you’re looking around for what you can 
get out of it! I won’t have it!” She waved a finger under Ariadne’s surprised 
face: “If you don’t vote to enforce the court ruling, then the next time 
something you really want comes up for a council vote you’ll see reprisals, from 
me. Do you understand?”
Ariadne’s eyes were like billboards: first shocked, then a moment of pure fear. 
Then anger. She said, “I never said I wasn’t going to vote for enforcement! What 
are you going ballistic for?”
Nadia returned to a more ordinary argument mode, although still hard and tense 
and unrelenting. Finally Ariadne threw up her hands: “It’s what most of the 
Dorsa Brevia council wants to do, I was going to vote for it anyway. You don’t 
have to be so frantic about it.” And she hurried out of the room, very upset.
First Nadia felt a surge of triumph. But that look of fear in the young woman’s 
eyes—it stuck with her, until she began to feel slightly sick to her stomach. 
She remembered Coyote on Pavonis, saying “Power corrupts.” That was the sick 
feeling—that first hit of power used, or misused.
Much later that night she was still sick with repulsion, and almost weeping, she 
told Art about the confrontation. “That sounds bad,” he said gravely. “That 
sounds like a mistake. You still have to deal with her. When that’s the case, 
you have to just tweak people.”
“I know I know. God I hate this,” she said. “I want to get away, I want to do 
something real.”
He nodded heavily, patted her shoulder.
Before the next meeting, Nadia went over to Jackie and told her quietly that she 
had the council votes to put police down at the dam to stop any further release 
of water. Then in the meeting itself, she reminded everyone in an offhand remark 
that Nirgal would be back among them very soon, along with Maya and Sax and 
Michel. This caused several of the Free Mars group on hand to look thoughtful, 
though Jackie of course showed no reaction. As they nattered on after that, 
Nadia rubbed her finger, distracted, still upset with herself about the meeting 
with Ariadne.
The next day the Cairenes agreed to accept the judgment of the Global 
Environmental Court. They would cease releasing water from their reservoir, and 
the settlements downcanyon would have to exist on piped water, which would 
certainly pinch their growth.
“Good,” Nadia said, still bitter. “All that just to obey the law.”
“They’re going to appeal,” Art pointed out.
“I don’t care. They’re done for. And even if they aren’t, they’ve submitted to 
the process. Hell, they can win for all I care. It’s the process that counts, so 
we win no matter what.”
Art smiled to hear this. A step in her political education, no doubt, a step Art 
and Charlotte seemed to have taken long ago. What mattered to them was not the 
result of any single disagreement, but the successful use of the process. If 
Free Mars represented the majority now—and apparently it did, as it had the 
allegiance of almost all the natives, young fools that they were—then submitting 
to the constitution meant that they could not simply push around minority groups 
by force of numbers. So when Free Mars won something, it would have to be on the 
merits of the case, judged by the full array of court justices, who came from 
all factions. That was quite satisfying, actually; like seeing a wall made of 
delicate materials bear more weight than it looked like it could, because of a 
cleverly built framework.
But she had used threats to shore up one beam, and so the whole thing left a bad 
taste in her mouth. “I want to do something real.”
“Like plumbing?”
She nodded, not even close to a smile. “Yes. Hydrology.”
“Can I come along?”
“Be a plumber’s helper?”
He laughed. “I’ve done it before.”
Nadia regarded him. He was making her feel better. It was peculiar, 
old-fashioned: to go somewhere just to be with someone. It didn’t happen much 
anymore. People went where they needed to go, and hung out with whatever friends 
they found there, or made new friends. It was the Martian way. Or maybe just the 
First Hundred’s way. Or her way.
Anyway, it was clear that doing this, traveling together, was more than just a 
friendship, more even perhaps than an affair. But that was not so bad, she 
decided. In fact not bad at all. Something to get used to, perhaps. But there 
was always something to get used to.
A new finger, for instance. Art was holding her hand, lightly massaging the new 
digit. “Does it hurt? Can you bend it?”
It did hurt, a little; and she could bend it, a little. They had injected some 
knuckle zone cells, and now it was just longer than the first joint of her other 
little finger, the skin still baby pink, unmarred by callus or scar. Every day a 
little bigger.
Art squeezed the tip of it ever so gently, feeling the bone inside. His eyes 
were round. “You can feel that?”
“Oh yes. It’s like the other fingers, only a bit more sensitive maybe.”
“Because it’s new.”
“I suppose.”
Only the old lost finger was implicated, somehow; the ghost was calling again, 
now that there were signals coming from that end of the hand. The finger in the 
brain, Art called it. And no doubt there really was a cluster of brain cells 
devoted to that finger, which had been the ghost all along. It had faded over 
the years from lack of stimulus, but now it too was growing back, or being 
restimulated or reinforced; Vlad’s explanations of the phenomenon were complex. 
But these days when she felt the finger, it sometimes felt just as large as the 
one on the other hand, even when she was looking right at it. Like feeling an 
invisible shell over the new one. Other times she felt the little thing at its 
proper size, short and skinny and weak. She could bend it at the hand knuckle, 
and just a little at the middle knuckle. The last kuckle, behind the fingernail, 
wasn’t there yet. But it was on its way. Growing. Again Nadia joked about it 
growing on and on, though it was a creepy thought. “That would be good,” Art 
said. “You’d have to get a dog.”
But now she felt confident that wouldn’t happen. The finger seemed to know what 
it was doing. It would be all right. It looked normal. Art was fascinated by it. 
But not just by it. He massaged her hand, which was a bit sore, and then her arm 
and shoulders too. He would massage all of her if she let him. And judging by 
how her finger and arm and shoulders felt, she certainly ought to. He was so 
relaxed. Life for him was still a daily adventure, full of marvels and hilarity. 
People made him laugh every day; that was a great gift. Big, round-faced, 
round-bodied, somewhat like Nadia herself in certain aspects of appearance; 
balding, unpretentious, graceful on his feet. Her friend.
Well, she loved Art, of course. She had since Dorsa Brevia at least. Something 
like her feeling for Nirgal, who was a most beloved nephew or student or 
godchild or grandchild or child; and Art, therefore, one of her child’s friends. 
Actually he was a bit older than Nirgal, but still, those two were like 
brothers. That was the problem. But all these calculations were being 
progressively thrown off by their increasing longevity. When he was only five 
percent younger than her, would it matter anymore? When they had gone through 
thirty years of intense experience together, as they already had, as equals and 
collaborators, architects of a proclamation, a constitution, and a government; 
close friends, confidants, helpers, massage partners; did it matter, the 
different number of years past their youths they were? No it did not. It was 
obvious, one only had to think about it. And then try to feel it too.
They didn’t need her in Cairo anymore, they didn’t need her in Sheffield right 
that second. Nirgal would be back soon, and he would help to keep Jackie in 
check; not a fun job, but that was his problem, no one could help him there. It 
was hard when you fixed all your love on one person. As she had with Arkady, for 
so many years, even though he had been dead for most of them. It made no sense; 
but she missed him. And she still got angry at him. He had not even lived long 
enough to realize how much he had missed. The happy fool. Art was happy too, but 
he was no fool. Or not much. To Nadia all happy people were a bit foolish by 
definition, otherwise how could they be so happy? But she liked them anyway, she 
needed them. They were like her beloved Satchmo’s music; and given the world, 
and all that it held, that happiness was a very courageous way to live—not a set 
of circumstances, but a set of attitudes. “Yes, come plumbing with me,” she said 
to Art, and hugged him hard, hard, as if you could capture happiness by 
squeezing it hard enough. She pulled back and he was bug-eyed with surprise, as 
when holding her little finger.
 
But she was still president of the executive council, and despite her resolve, 
every day they bound her to the job a little more tightly, with “developments” 
of all kinds. German immigrants wanted to build a new harbor town called Blochs 
Hoffnung on the peninsula that cut the North Sea in half, and then dig a broad 
canal through the peninsula. Red eco-teurs objected to this plan, and blew up 
the piste running down the peninsula. They blew up the piste leading to the top 
of Biblis Patera as well, to indicate they objected to that as well. Ecopoets in 
Amazonia wanted to start massive forest fires. Other ecopoets in Kasei wanted to 
remove the fire-dependent forest that Sax had planted in the great curve of the 
valley (this petition was the first to receive unanimous approval from the GEC). 
Reds living around White Rock, an eighteen-kilometer-wide pure white mesa, 
wanted it declared a “kami site” forbidden to human access. A Sabishii design 
team was recommending that they build a new capital city on the North-Sea coast 
at 0 longitude, where there was a deep bay. New Clarke was getting crowded with 
what looked suspiciously like metanat security snoopertroopers. The Da Vinci 
techs wanted to give control of Martian space over to an agency of the global 
government that didn’t exist. Senzeni Na wanted to fill their mohole. The 
Chinese were requesting permission to build an entirely new space elevator 
tethered near Schiaparelli Crater, to accommodate their own emigration, and 
contract out to others. Immigration was growing every month.
Nadia dealt with all these issues in half-hour increments scheduled by Art, and 
so the days passed in a blur. It got very difficult to stay aware that some of 
these matters were much more important than others. The Chinese, for instance, 
would flood Mars with immigrants if they got half a chance . . . and the Red 
ecoteurs were getting more outrageous; there had even been death threats made 
against Nadia herself. She now had escorts when she left her apart> ment, and 
the apartment was discreetly guarded. Nadia ignored that, and continued to work 
on the issues, and to work the council to keep a majority on her side in the 
votes that mattered to her. She established good working relations with Zeyk and 
Mikhail, and even with Marion. Things never went quite right with Ariadne again, 
however, which was a lesson learned twice; but learned well because of that.
So she did the job. But all the time she wanted off Pa-vonis. Art saw her 
patience get shorter by the day; she knew by his look that she was becoming 
crochety, crabby, dictatorial; she knew it, but could not help it. After 
meetings with frivolous or obstructionist people she often unleashed a torrent 
of vicious abuse, in a steady low cursing voice that Art obviously found 
unnerving. Delegations would come in demanding an end to the death penalty, or 
the right to build in the Olympus Mons caldera, or a free eighth spot on the 
executive council, and as soon as the door closed Nadia would say, “Well there’s 
a bunch of fucking idiots for you, stupid fools never even thought about tie 
votes, never occurred to them that taking someone else’s life abrogates your own 
right to live,” and so on. The new police captured a group of Red ecoteurs who 
had tried to blow up the Socket again, and in the process killed a security 
guard out of his position, and she was the hardest judge they had: “Execute 
them!” she exclaimed. “Look, you kill someone, you lose your right to live. 
Execute them or else exile them from Mars for life—make them pay in a way that 
really gets the rest of the Reds’ attention.”
“Well,” Art said uneasily. “Well, after all.” But on she raged. She couldn’t 
stop until she felt less angry. And Art could see that it was getting harder 
every time.
Flailing a bit himself, he recommended she start another conference, like the 
one in Sabishii she had missed; and make sure she made this one. Organizing the 
efforts of different organizations for a single cause; this was not really 
building, Nadia thought, but it looked like it would have to do.
The fight in Cairo had gotten her thinking about the hy-drological cycle, and 
what would happen when the ice began to melt. If they could set up some kind of 
plan for a water cycle, even only an approximation, then it might go far toward 
reducing conflicts over water. So she decided to see what could be done.
As often happened these days when she thought about global issues, she found 
herself wanting to talk to Sax about it. The travelers to Earth were almost back 
now, close enough that transmission delay was insignificant, it was almost like 
having a normal wrist conversation. So Nadia spent evenings talking with Sax 
about terraforming. More than once he surprised her utterly; he did not hold the 
opinions she had imagined he would hold, he seemed always to be changing. “I 
want to keep things wild,” he said one night.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
His face took on the puzzled expression it wore when he was thinking hard. It 
was considerably longer than the transmission delay before he replied: “Many 
things. It’s a complicated word. But—I mean—I want to maintain the primal 
landscape, as much as possible.”
Nadia could censor out her laughter at this; but still Sax said, “What do you 
find amusing?”
“Oh nothing. It’s just you sound like, I don’t know, like some of the Reds. Or 
the people in Christianopolis, they’re not Reds, but they said almost the same 
thing to me, last week. They want to keep the primal landscape of the far south 
preserved. I’ve helped them to set up a conference to talk about southern 
watersheds.”
“I thought you were working on greenhouse gases?”
“They won’t let me work, I have to be president. But I am going to go to this 
conference.”
“Good idea.”
 
The Japanese settlers in Messhi Hoko (which meant “self-sacrifice for the sake 
of the group”) came to the council to demand that more land and water be 
dedicated to their tent high on south Tharsis. Nadia walked out on them, and 
flew with Art down to Christianopolis, in the far south.
The little town (and it seemed very little after Sheffield and Cairo) was set in 
Phillips Rim Crater Four, at latitude sixty-seven degrees south. During the Year 
Without Summer the far south had experienced many severe storms, dropping about 
four meters of new snow, an unprecedented amount; the previous record for a year 
had been less than one. Now it was Ls 281, just after perihelion, and high 
summer in the south. And the various abatement strategies for avoiding an ice 
age seemed to be working well; most of the new snow had melted in a hot spring, 
and now there were round lakes on every crater floor. The pond in the center of 
Christianopolis was about three meters deep, and three hundred meters across; 
this was fine with the Christians, as it gave them a nice park pond. But if the 
same thing happened every winter—and the meteorologists believed that the coming 
winters would drop even more snow, and the coming summers get ever warmer—then 
their town would quickly be inundated by snowmelt, and Phillips Rim Crater Four 
become a lake full to the brim. And this was true for craters all over Mars.
The conference in Christianopolis had been convened to discuss strategies to 
deal with this situation. Nadia had done what she could to get influential 
people down to it, including meteorologists, hydrologists, and engineers, and 
the possibility of Sax, whose return was imminent. The problem of crater 
flooding was to be only the initial point of discussion for the whole question 
of watersheds, and the planetary hydrological cycle itself.
The crater problem specifically was to be solved as Nadia had predicted: 
plumbing. They would treat the craters like bathtubs, and drill drains to empty 
them. The brecciated pans under the dusty crater floors were extremely hard, but 
they could be tunneled through robotically; then install pumps and filters and 
pump the water out, keeping a central pond or lake if one wanted, or draining it 
dry.
But what were they going to do with the water they pumped out? The southern 
highlands were everywhere lumpy, shattered, pocked, cracked, hillocky, scarped, 
slumped, fissured, and fractured; when analyzed as potential watersheds, they 
were hopeless. Nothing led anywhere; there was no downhill for long. The entire 
south was a plateau three to four kilometers above the old datum, with only 
local bumps and dips. Never had Nadia seen more clearly the difference between 
this highland and any continent on Earth. On Earth, tectonic movement had pushed 
up mountains every few-score million years, and then water had run down these 
fresh slopes, following the paths of least resistance back to the sea, carving 
the fractal vein patterns of watersheds everywhere. Even the dry basin regions 
on Earth were seamed with arroyos and dotted with playas. In the Martian south, 
however, the meteoric bombardment of the Noachian had hammered the land 
ferociously, leaving craters and ejecta everywhere; and then the battered 
irregular wasteland had lain there for two billion years under the ceaseless 
scouring of the dusty winds, tearing at every flaw. If they poured water onto 
this pummeled land they would end up with a crazy quilt of short streams, 
running down local inclines to the nearest rimless crater. Hardly any streams 
would make it to the sea in the north, or even into the Hellas or Argyre basins, 
both of which were ringed by mountain ranges of their own ejecta.
There were, however, a few exceptions to this situation. The Noachian Age had 
been followed by a brief “warm wet period” in the late Hesperian, a period 
perhaps as short as a hundred million years, when a thick warm CO2 atmosphere 
had allowed liquid water to run on the surface, carving some river channels down 
the gentle tilts of the plateau, between crater aprons diverting them this way 
and that. And these watercourses had of course remained after the atmosphere had 
frozen out, empty arroyos gradually widened by the wind. These fossil riverbeds, 
like Nirgal Vallis, Warrego Valles, Protva Valles, Patana Valles, or Oltis 
Vallis, were narrow sinuous canyons, true riverine canyons rather than grabens 
or fossae. Some of them even had immature tributary systems. So efforts to 
design a macro-watershed system for the south naturally used these canyons as 
primary watercourses, with water pumped to the head of every tributary. Then 
there were also a number of old lava channels that could easily become rivers, 
as the lava, like the water, had tended to follow the path of least resistance 
downhill. And there were a number of tilted graben fractures and fissures, as at 
the foot of the Eridania Scopulus, that could likewise be turned to use.
In the conference, big globes of Mars were marked up daily to display different 
water regimes. There were also rooms full of 3-D topo maps, with groups standing 
around different watershed systems, arguing their advantages and disadvantages, 
or simply contemplating them, or fiddling with the controls to change them, 
restlessly, from one pattern to another. Nadia wandered the rooms looking at 
these hydrographies, learning much about the southern hemisphere that she had 
never known. There was a six-kilometer-high mountain near Richardson Crater, in 
the far south. The south polar cap itself was quite high. Dorsa Brevia, on the 
other hand, crossed a depression that looked like a ray cut out from the Hellas 
impact, a valley so deep that it ought to become a lake, an idea that the Dorsa 
Brev-ians naturally did not like. And certainly the area could be drained if 
they cared to do it. There were scores of variant plans, and every single system 
was strange looking to Nadia. Never had she seen so clearly how different a 
gravity-driven fractal was from impact randomness. In the inchoate meteoric 
landscape, almost anything was possible, because nothing was obvious—nothing 
except for the fact that in any possible system, some canals and tunnels would 
have to be built. Her new finger itched with the desire to get out there and run 
a bulldozer or a tunnel borer.
Gradually the most efficient, or logical, or aesthetically pleasing plans began 
to emerge from the proposals, the best for each region being patched together, 
in a kind of mosaic. In the eastern quadrant of the deep south, streams would 
tend to run toward Hellas Basin and through a couple of gorges into the Hellas 
Sea, which was fine. Dorsa Brevia accepted a plan to have their town’s lava 
tunnel ridge become a kind of dam, crossing a watershed transversely so that 
there was a lake above it and a river below it, coursing down to Hellas. Around 
the south polar cap, snowfall would remain frozen, but most of the 
meteorologists predicted that when things stabilized there wouldn’t be much 
snowfall on the pole, that it would become a cold desert like Antarctica. 
Eventually of course they would end up with a largish ice cap, and then part of 
it would pool down into the huge depression under the Promethei Rupes, another 
partially erased old impact basin. If they didn’t want too large of a southern 
ice cap, they would have to melt and pump some of the water back north, into the 
Hellas Sea perhaps. They would have to do some similar pumping in Argyre Basin, 
if they decided to keep Argyre dry. A group of moderate Red lawyers was even now 
insisting on this before the GEQ arguing that one of the two great dune-filled 
impact basins on the planet ought to be preserved. It seemed certain this claim 
would receive a favorable judgment from the court, and so all the watersheds 
around Argyre had to take this into account.
Sax had designed his own southern watershed plan, which he sent to the 
conference from their rocket as it aero-braked into orbital insertion, to be 
considered with all the rest. It minimized surface water, emptied most craters, 
used tunnels extensively, and channelized almost all drained water into the 
fossil river canyons. In his plan vast areas of the south would stay arid 
desert, making for a hemisphere of dry tableland, cut deeply by a few narrow 
river-bottomed canyons. “Water is returned north,” he explained to Nadia in a 
call, “and if you stay up on the plateaus, it will look like it always did, 
almost.”
So that Ann would like it, he was saying.
“Good idea,” Nadia said.
And indeed Sax’s plan was not that much different than the consensus being 
hammered out by the conference. Wet north, dry south; one more dualism to add to 
the great dichotomy. And to have the old river canyons running with water again 
was satisfying. A good-looking plan, given the terrain.
But the days were long gone when Sax or anyone else could choose a terraforming 
project and then go out and do it. Nadia could see that Sax hadn’t fully 
understood this. Ever since the beginning, when he had slipped algae-filled 
windmills into the field without the knowledge or approval of anyone but his 
accomplices, he had been working on his own. It was an ingrained habit of mind, 
and now he seemed to forget the review process that any watershed plan was going 
to have to go through in the environmental courts. But the process was there, 
inescapable now, and because of the grand gesture, half the fifty GEC justices 
were Reds of one shade or another. Any watershed proposal from a conference 
including Sax Russell, even as a teleparticipant, was going to get close and 
suspicious scrutiny.
But it seemed to Nadia that if the Red justices looked carefully at the 
proposal, they would have to be amazed at Sax’s approach. Indeed it represented 
a kind of road-to-Damascus conversion—inexplicable, given Sax’s history. Unless 
you knew all of it. But Nadia understood: he was trying to please Ann. Nadia 
doubted that was possible, but she liked to see Sax try. “A man full of 
surprises,” she remarked to Art.
“Brain trauma will do that.”
In any case, when the conference was done they had designed an entire 
hydrography, designating all the future major lakes and rivers and streams of 
the southern hemisphere. The plan would eventually have to be integrated with 
similar plans for the northern hemisphere, which were in considerable disarray 
by comparison, because of the uncertainty about just how big the northern sea 
was going to be. Water was no longer being actively pumped up out of permafrost 
and aquifers—indeed many of the pumping stations had been blown up in the last 
year by Red ecoteurs— but some water was still rising, under the weight put on 
the land by the water already pumped. And summer runoff was flowing into 
Vastitas, more every year, both from the northern polar cap and the Great 
Escarpment; Vastitas was the catchment basin for huge watersheds on all sides. 
So a lot of water was going to pour into it every summer. On the other hand, a 
lot of water was always being stripped off by the arid winds, eventually 
precipitating elsewhere. And water would evaporate much faster than the ice 
currently there was subliming. So calculating how much was leaving and how much 
coming back was a modeler’s field day, and estimates were still all over the 
map, literally so in that differences in prediction led to putative shorelines 
that were in some cases hundreds of kilometers apart.
That uncertainty would delay any GECO on the south, Nadia thought; in essence 
the court had to try to correlate all the current data, and evaluate the models, 
and then prescribe a sea level, and approve all watersheds accordingly. The fate 
of Argyre Basin in particular seemed impossible to decide at this point, before 
there was a northern plan; some plans called for pumping water up into Argyre 
from the northern sea if the northern sea got too full, to avoid flooding the 
Marineris canyons, South Fossa, and the new harbor towns being built. Radical 
Reds were already threatening to build “west-bank settlements” all over Argyre 
to forestall any such move.
So the GEC had yet another big issue to solve. Clearly it was becoming the most 
important political body on Mars; with the constitution and its own previous 
rulings to guide it, it was ruling on almost every aspect of their future. Nadia 
thought that was probably as it should be; or at least that there was nothing 
wrong with it. They needed decisions with global ramifications reviewed 
globally, that was what it came down to.
But come what may in the courts, a provisional plan for the southern hemisphere 
had at least been formulated. And to everyone’s surprise, the GEC gave the plan 
a positive preliminary judgment very soon after it was submitted—because, their 
ruling said, it could be activated in stages as water fell on the south, and it 
proceeded in much the same fashion through its first stages no matter what the 
eventual sea level in the north became. So there was no reason to delay 
beginning.
Art came in beaming with the news. “We can begin plumbing,” he said.
 
But of course Nadia couldn’t. There were meetings in Sheffield to go back to, 
decisions to be made, people to be convinced or coerced. Doggedly she did that 
work, stubbornly doing her duty whether she liked it or not, and as time passed 
she got better and better at it. She saw how she could subtly pressure other 
people to get her way; saw how people would do her bidding if she asked or 
suggested in certain ways. The constant stream of decisions honed some of her 
views; she found that it helped to have at least some consciously held political 
principles, rather than judging each case by instinct. It also helped to have 
reliable allies, on the council and elsewhere, rather than being a supposedly 
neutral and independent person. And so by degrees she found herself joining the 
Bogdanovists, who, to her surprise, conformed more closely to her political 
philosophy than anything else on Mars. Of course her reading of Bog-danovism was 
relatively simple: things should be just, Arkady had insisted, and everyone free 
and equal; the past didn’t matter; they needed to invent new forms whenever the 
old ones looked unfair or impractical, which was often; Mars was the only 
reality that counted, at least to them. Using these as her guiding principles, 
she found it easier to make up her mind about things, to see a course and cut 
for it directly.
Also she became more and more ruthless. From time to time she felt freshly how 
power could corrupt, felt it as a slight nausea within her. But she was getting 
habituated. She clashed often with Ariadne, and when she recalled the remorse 
she had felt after her first wrangle with the young Minoan, it seemed to her 
ridiculously overfastidious; she was far tougher than that every day now on 
people who crossed her, she showed the knives in meeting after meeting, in 
calculated microbursts of brutality that put people in line very effectively 
indeed. In fact the more she allowed herself to release little outbursts of fury 
and scorn, the more certainly she could control them and put them to some use. 
She was a power; and people knew it; and power was corrosive. Power was 
powerful, in more ways than one. And now Nadia felt very little remorse about 
that; they deserved a pop on the nose, generally; they had thought they were 
going to get a harmless old babushka to sit in the big chair while they worked 
their games on each other, but the big chair was the power seat, and she was 
damned if she was going to go through all this shit and not use some of that 
power to try to get what she wanted.
And so less and less often did she feel how ugly it was. Once when she did, 
after a particularly hard-nosed day, she thumped down in a chair and almost 
cried, sick with disgust. Only seven months of her three m-years had passed. 
What would she become by the time her stint was done? Already she was used to 
power; by then she might even like it.
Art, worried by all this, squinted at her over their breakfast table. “Well,” he 
said once, after she explained what was bothering her, “power is power.” He was 
thinking hard. “You’re the first president of Mars. So in a way you define the 
office. Maybe you should declare you’re only going to work the one month and not 
the two months, and delegate the two months to your staff. Something like that.”
She stared at him, mouth full of toast.
Later that week she abandoned Sheffield and went south again, joining a caravan 
of people working their way from crater to crater, installing drainage systems. 
Every crater had variations, but essentially it was a matter of picking the 
right angle to emerge from the crater apron, and then setting the robots to 
work. Von Karman, Du Toit, Schmidt, Agassiz, Heaviside, Bianchini, Lau, 
Chamberlin, Stoney, Dokuchaev, Trumpler, Keeler, Charlier, Suess . . . they 
plumbed all of those craters, and many more unnamed ones, although the craters 
were taking on names even faster than they drilled them: 85 South, Too Dark, 
Fool’s Hope, Shanghai, Hiroko Slept Here, Fourier, Cole, Proudhon, Bellamy, 
Hudson, Kaif, 47 Ronin, Makoto, Kino Doku, Ka Ko, Mondragon. The migration from 
one crater to the next reminded Nadia of her trips around the south polar cap 
during the underground years; except now everything was out in the open, and 
through the nearly nightless midsummer days the team luxuriated in the sun, in 
the glary light off the crater lakes. They traveled across rough frozen bogs 
brilliant with sunny meltwater and meadow grass, and always of course they 
crossed the rust-and-black rockscape breaking out into the light, ring after 
ring, ridge after ridge. They plumbed craters and laid watershed pipes, and 
attached greenhouse-gas factories to the excavators whenever the rock had any 
gas feedstocks in it.
But hardly any of that turned out to be work in the sense Nadia meant. She 
missed the old days. Of course operating a bulldozer had not been hand labor, 
but one’s touch with the blade had been a very physical skill, and the repeated 
gearshifts physically taxing; and it was all around a higher level of engagement 
than this “work,” which consisted of talking to AIs and then walking around and 
watching humming and buzzing teams of waist-high robot diggers, city-block-sized 
mobile factory units, tunnel moles with diamond teeth that grew back like 
sharks’ teeth—everything made of bioceramic/metallic alloys stronger than the 
elevator cable, all of it out there doing it all by itself. It just wasn’t what 
she had in mind.


 
 
 
 
 
Try again. She went through another cycle; return to Sheffield, engagement in 
the council work, increasing disgust, merging with despair; look around for 
anything to get her out of it; notice some likely project and seize on it. Run 
off to check it out. Like Art had said, she could call her own shots. There was 
that in power too.
The next time out it was soil that drew her. “Air, water, earth,” Art said. 
“Next it’ll be forest fires, eh?”
But she had heard that there were scientists in Bogdanov Vishniac trying to 
manufacture soil, and this interested her. So off she went, flying south to 
Vishniac, where she had not been for years. Art accompanied her. “It’ll be 
interesting to see how the old underground cities adapt, now that there’s no 
need to hide.”
“I don’t see why anyone stays down here, to tell you the truth,” Nadia said as 
they flew down into the rugged southern polar region. “They’re so far south 
their winters last forever. Six months with no sun at all. Who would stay?”
“Siberians.”
“No Siberian in his right mind would move here. They know better.”
“Laplanders, then. Inuit. People who like the poles.”
“I suppose.”
As it turned out, no one in Bogdanov Vishniac seemed to mind the winters. They 
had redistributed their mohole mound in a ring around the mohole itself, 
creating an immense circular amphitheater facing down into the hole. This 
terraced amphitheater was to be the surface Vishniac. In the summers it would be 
a green oasis, and in the dark winters a white oasis; they planned to illuminate 
it with hundreds of brilliant streetlights, giving themselves a stage set day, 
in a town contemplating itself across a round gap in things, or from the upper 
wall looking out at the frosted chaos of the polar highlands. No, they were 
going to stay, no question of it. It was their place.
Nadia was greeted at the airport as a special guest, as always when she stayed 
with Bogdanovists. Before joining them this had struck her as ridiculous, and 
even a bit offensive: girlfriend of The Founder! But now she accepted their 
offer of a guest suite located on the lip of the mohole, with a slightly 
overhanging window that gave one a view straight down for eighteen kilometers. 
The lights on the mohole’s bottom looked like stars seen through the planet.
Art was petrified, not at the sight but at the very thought of the sight, and he 
would not go near that half of the room. Nadia laughed at him, and then when she 
was done looking, closed the drapes.
The next day she went out to visit the soil scientists, who were happy at her 
interest. They wanted to be able to feed themselves, and as more and more 
settlers moved south, this was going to be impossible without more soil. But 
they were finding that manufacturing soil was one of the most difficult 
technical feats they had ever undertaken. Nadia was surprised to hear this—these 
were the Vishniac labs, after all, world leaders in technologically supported 
ecologies, having lived for decades hidden in a mohole. And top-soil was, well, 
soil. Dirt with additives, presumably, and additives one could add.
No doubt she conveyed some of this impression to the soil scientists, and the 
man named Arne leading her around told her with some exasperation that soil was 
in fact very complex. About five percent of it by weight was made of living 
things, and this critical five percent consisted of dense populations of 
nematodes, worms, mollusks, arthropods, insects, arachnids, small mammals, 
fungi, protozoa, algae, and bacteria. The bacteria alone included several 
thousand different species, and could number as high as a hundred million 
individuals per gram of soil. And the other members of the microcommunity were 
almost as plentiful, in both number and variety.
Such complex ecologies could not be manufactured in the way Nadia had been 
imagining, which was basically to grow the ingredients separately and then mix 
them in a hopper, like a cake. But they didn’t know all the ingredients, and 
they couldn’t grow some of the ingredients, and some that they could grow died 
on mixing. “Worms in particular are sensitive. Nematodes have trouble too. The 
whole system tends to crash, leaving us with minerals and dead organic material. 
That’s called humus. We’re very good at making humus. Topsoil, however, has to 
grow.”
“Which is what happens naturally?”
“Right. We can only try to grow it faster than it grows in nature. We can’t 
assemble it, or manufacture it in bulk. And many of the living components grow 
best in soil itself, so there’s a problem providing feedstock organisms at any 
faster rate than natural soil formation would provide them.”
“Hmm,” Nadia said.
Arne took her through their labs and greenhouses, which were filled with 
hundreds of pedons, tall cylindrical vats or tubes, in racks, all holding soil 
or its components. This was experimental agronomy, and from her experience with 
Hi-roko Nadia was prepared to understand very little of it. The esoterica of 
science could go right off her scale. But she did understand that they were 
doing factorial trials, altering the conditions in each pedon and tracking what 
happened. There was a simple formula Arne showed her to describe the most 
general aspects of the problem:
 
5 = f (PM,C,R,B,T),
 
meaning that any soil property 5 was a factor (f) of the semi-independent 
variables, parent material (PM), climate (C), topography or relief (R), biota 
(B), and time (T). Time, of course, was the factor they were trying to speed up; 
and the parent material in most of their trials was the ubiquitous Martian 
surface clay. Climate and topography were altered in some trials, to imitate 
various field conditions; but mostly they were altering the biotic and organic 
elements. This meant microecology of the most sophisticated kind, and the more 
Nadia learned about it the more difficult their task seemed—not so much 
construction as alchemy. Many elements had to cycle through soil to make it a 
growth medium for plants, and each element had its own particular cycle, driven 
by a different collection of agents. There were the macronutrients—carbon, 
oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, calcium, and 
magnesium— then the micronutrients, including iron, manganese, zinc, copper, 
molybdenum, boron, and chlorine. None of these nutrient cycles was closed, as 
there were losses due to leaching, erosion, harvesting, and outgassing; inputs 
were just as various, including absorption, weathering, microbial action, and 
application of fertilizers. The conditions that allowed the cycling of all these 
elements to proceed were varied enough that different soils encouraged or 
discouraged each cycle to different degrees; each kind of soil had particular pH 
levels, salinities, compaction, and so forth; thus there were hundreds of named 
soils in these labs alone, and thousands more back on Earth.
Naturally in the Vishniac labs the Martian parent material formed the basis for 
most of the experiments. Eons of dust storms had recycled this material all over 
the planet, until it had everywhere much the same content: the typical Martian 
soil unit was made up of fine particles of mostly silicon and iron. At its top 
it was often loose drift. Below that, varying degrees of interparticle 
cementation had produced crusty cloddy material, becoming blocky the lower one 
dug.
Clays, in other words; smectite clays, similar to Terra’s montmorillonite and 
nontronite, with the addition of materials like talc, quartz, hematite, 
anhydrite, dieserite, cla-cite, beidellite, rutile, gypsum, maghemite and 
magnetite. And everything had been coated by amorphous iron oxy-hydroxides, and 
other more crystallized iron oxides, which accounted for the reddish colors.
So this was their universal parent material: iron-rich smectite clay. Its 
loosely packed and porous structure meant it would support roots while still 
giving them room to grow. But there were no living things in it, and too many 
salts, and too little nitrogen. So in essence their task was to gather parent 
material, and leach out salt and aluminum, while introducing nitrogen and the 
biotic community, all as fast as possible. Simple, when put like that; but that 
phrase biotic community masked a whole world of troubles. “My God, it’s like 
trying to get this government to work,” Nadia exclaimed to Art one evening. 
“They’re in big trouble!”
Out in the countryside people were simply introducing bacteria to the clay, and 
then algae and other microorganisms, then lichen, and then halophyllic plants. 
Then they had waited for these biocommunities to transform the clay into soils, 
through many generations of living and dying in it. This worked, and was working 
even now, all over the planet; but it was very slow. A group in Sabishii had 
estimated that when averaged over the planet’s surface, about a centimeter of 
topsoil was being generated every century. And this had been achieved using 
genetically engineered populations designed to maximize speed.
In the greenhouse farms, on the other hand, the soils used had been heavily 
amended by nutrients and fertilizers and inoculants of all kinds; the result was 
something like what these scientists were trying for, but the quantity of soil 
in greenhouses was minuscule compared to what they wanted to put out on the 
surface. Mass producing soil was their goal. But they had gotten into something 
deeper than they had expected, Nadia could tell; they had the vexed absorbed air 
of a dog gnawing on a bone too big for its mouth.
The biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and ecology involved in these problems 
were far beyond Nadia’s expertise, and there was nothing she could do to make 
suggestions there. In many cases she couldn’t even understand the processes 
involved. It was not construction, nor even an analog of construction.
But they did have to incorporate some construction into whatever production 
methods they tried, and there Nadia was at least able to understand the issues. 
She began to concentrate on that aspect of things, looking at the mechanical 
design of the pedons, and also the holding tanks for the living constituents of 
the soil. She also studied the molecular structure of the parent clays, to see 
if it suggested anything to her about working with them. Martian smectites were 
aluminosilicates, she found, meaning each unit of the clay had a sheet of 
aluminum octahedrals sandwiched between two sheets of silicon tetrahedrals; the 
different kinds of smectites had different’amounts of variation in this general 
pattern, and the more variation there was, the easier it was for water to seep 
into the interlayer surfaces. The most common smectite clay on Mars, 
montmorillonite, had a lot of variety, and so was very open to water, expanding 
when wet, and shrinking when dry to the point of cracking.
Nadia found this interesting. “Look,” she said to Arne, “what about a pedon 
filled with a matrix of feeder veins, which would introduce the biota all 
through the parent material.” Take a batch of parent material, she went on, and 
get it wet, then let it dry. Insert into the crack systems the feeder vein 
matrix. Then pour in whatever important bacteria and other constitutents they 
could grow. Then if the bacteria and other creatures could eat their way out of 
their feeder veins, digesting that material as they emerged, they would all 
suddenly be there together in the clay, interacting. That would be a tricky 
time, no doubt many trials would be necessary to calibrate the initial amounts 
of the various biota needed to avoid population booms and crashes—but if they 
could get them to settle into their usual communities, then they would suddenly 
have living soil. “There are feeder-vein systems like this used for certain 
quick-setting construction materials, and now I hear that doctors feed apatite 
paste into broken bones the same way. The feeder veins are made of protein gels 
appropriate to whatever substance they’re going to contain, molded into the 
appropriate tubular structures.”
A matrix for growth. Worth looking into, Arne said. Which made Nadia smile. She 
went around that afternoon feeling happy, and that evening when she joined Art 
she said, “Hey! I did some work today.”
“Well!” Art said. “Let’s go out and celebrate.”
 
Easy to do, in Bogdanov Vishniac. It was a Bogdanovist city, all right, as 
buoyant as Arkady himself. A party every night. They had often joined the 
evening promenade, and Nadia loved walking along the railing of the highest 
terrace, feeling that Arkady was somehow there, had somehow persisted. And never 
more so than on this night, celebrating a bit of work done. She held Art’s hand, 
looked down and across at the crowded lower terraces and their crops, orchards, 
pools, sports fields, lines of trees, arcuate plazas occupied by cafes, bars, 
dance pavilions—bands battling for sonic space, the crowds chugging around them, 
some dancing but many more simply making the night’s promenade, like Nadia 
herself. All this still under a tent, with tenting that they hoped to remove 
someday; meanwhile it was warm, and the young natives wore an outlandish array 
of pantaloons, headdresses, sashes, vests, necklaces, so that Nadia was reminded 
of the video footage of Nirgal and Maya’s reception in Trinidad. Was this 
coincidence, or was there some supraplanetary culture coming into being among 
the young? And if there was, did that mean that their Coyote, the Trinidadian, 
had invisibly conquered the two worlds? Or her Arkady, posthumously? Arkady and 
Coyote, culture kings. It made her grin to think of it, and she took sips of 
Art’s cup of scalding kavajava, the drink of choice in this cold town, and 
watched all the young people moving like angels, always dancing no matter what 
they did, flowing in graceful arcs from terrace to terrace. “What a great little 
town,” Art said.
Then they came upon an old photo of Arkady himself, framed and hung on a wall 
next to a door. Nadia stopped and clutched Art’s arm: “That’s him! That’s him to 
the life!”
The photo had caught him talking with someone, standing just inside a tent wall 
and gesturing, his hair and beard lofting away from his head and blending into a 
landscape exactly the color of his wild curls. A face coming out of a hillside, 
it seemed, blue eyes squinting in the glare of all that red glee. “I’ve never 
seen a photo that looked so much like him. If he saw a camera pointed at him he 
didn’t like it, and the picture came out wrong.”
She stared at the photo, feeling flushed, and strangely happy; such a lifelike 
encounter! Like running into someone again after years of not seeing them. 
“You’re like him, in some ways, I think. But more relaxed.”
“It looks like it would be hard to get much more relaxed than that,” Art said, 
peering closely at the photo.
Nadia smiled. “It was easy for him. He was always sure he was right.”
“None of the rest of us have that problem.”
She laughed. “You’re cheerful like he was.”
“And why not.”
They walked on. Nadia kept thinking of her old companion, seeing the photo in 
her mind’s eye. There was still so much she remembered. The feelings connected 
to the memories were fading, however, the pain blunted—the fixative leached out, 
all that flesh and trauma now only a pattern of a certain kind, like a fossil. 
And very unlike the present moment, which, looking around, feeling her hand in 
Art’s, was real, vivid, brief, perpetually changing—alive. Anything could 
happen, everything was felt. “Shall we go back to our room?”
 
The four travelers to Earth returned at last, coming down the cable to 
Sheffield. Nirgal and Maya and Michel went their ways, but Sax flew down and 
joined Nadia and Art in the south, a move which pleased Nadia no end. She had 
come to have the feeling that wherever Sax went was the heart of the action.
He looked just as he had before the trip to Earth, and was if anything even more 
silent and enigmatic. He wanted to see the labs, he said. They took him through 
them.
“Interesting, yes,” he said. Then after a while: “But I’m wondering what else we 
might do.”
“To terraform?” Art asked.
“Well...”
To please Ann, Nadia thought. That was what he meant. She gave him a hug, which 
surprised him, and she kept her hand on his bony shoulder as they talked. So 
good to have him there in the flesh! When had she gotten so fond of Sax Russell, 
when had she come to rely on him so much?
Art too had figured out what he meant. He said, “You’ve done quite a bit 
already, haven’t you? I mean, at this point you’ve dismantled all the metanats’ 
monster methods, right? The hydrogen bombs under the permafrost, the so-letta 
and aerial lens, the nitrogen shuttles from Titan—”
“Those are still coming,” Sax said. “I don’t even know how we could stop them. 
Shoot them down I guess. But we can always use nitrogen. I’m not sure I’d be 
happy if they were stopped.”
“But Ann?” Nadia said. “What would Ann like?”
Sax squinted again. When uncertainty squinched his face, it reverted to 
precisely its old ratlike expression.
“What would you both like?” Art rephrased it.
“Hard to say.” And his face twisted into a grimace of uncertainty, indecision, 
split motives.
“You want wilderness,” Art suggested.
“Wilderness is a, an idea. Or an ethical position. It can’t be everywhere, it’s 
not that kind of idea. But...” Sax waggled a hand, fell back into his own 
thoughts. For the first time in the century she had known him, Nadia had the 
sense that Sax did not know what to do. He solved the problem by sitting down 
before a screen and typing instructions into it. He appeared to forget their 
presence.
Nadia squeezed Art’s arm. He enfolded her hand, and squeezed the little finger 
gently. It was almost three quarters size now, but slowing down as it got closer 
to full size. A nail had been started, and on the pad, the delicate whorled 
ridges of a fingerprint. It felt good when it was squeezed. She met Art’s eye 
briefly, then looked down. He squeezed her whole hand before letting go. After a 
while, when it was clear Sax was fully distracted, and going to be off in his 
own world for a long time, they tiptoed off to their room, to the bed.
 
They worked by day, went out at night. Sax was blinking around as in his lab-rat 
days, anxious because there was no news of Ann. Nadia and Art comforted him as 
best they could, which wasn’t much. In the evenings they went out and joined the 
promenade. There was a park where parents congregated with their kids, and 
people walked by as if passing a little open zoo enclosure, grinning at the 
sight of the little primates at play. Sax spent hours in this park talking to 
kids and parents, and then he would wander off to the dance floors, where he 
danced by himself for hours. Art and Nadia held hands. Her finger got stronger. 
It was almost full size now, and given that it was the littlest finger anyway, 
it looked full grown unless she held it against its opposite number. Art nibbled 
it gently sometimes when they were making love, and the sensation drove her 
wild. “You’d better not tell people about this effect,” he muttered, “else it 
could get grisly—people hacking off body parts to grow them back, you know, more 
sensitive.”
“Sicko.”
“You know how people are. Anything for a thrill.”
“Don’t even talk about it.”
“Okay.”
 
But then it was time to get back to a council meeting. Sax left, to find Ann or 
hide from her, they couldn’t be sure; they flew back up to Sheffield, and then 
Nadia was back into it again, every day parsed into its thirty-minute units of 
trivia. Except some of it was important. The Chinese application for another 
space elevator near Schiaparelli had come up for action, and it was only one of 
many immigration issues that were facing them. The UN-Mars agreement worked out 
in Bern stated explicitly that Mars was to take at least ten percent of its 
population in immigrants every year, with the hope expressed that they would 
take even more—as many as possible—for as long as the hypermal-thusian 
conditions obtained. Nirgal had made this a kind of promise, had spoken very 
enthusiastically (and Nadia felt unrealistically) about Mars coming to the 
rescue, saving Earth from overpopulation with the gift of empty land. But how 
many people could Mars really hold, when they couldn’t even manufacture topsoil? 
What was the carrying capacity of Mars, anyway?
No one knew, and there was no good way to calculate it scientifically. Estimates 
of Terra’s human carrying capacity had ranged from one hundred million to two 
hundred tril-. lion, and even the seriously defensible estimates ranged from two 
to thirty billion. In truth carrying capacity was a very fuzzy abstract concept, 
depending on an entire recom-binant host of complexities such as soil 
biochemistry, ecology, human culture. So it was almost impossible to say how 
many people Mars could handle. Meanwhile Earth’s population was over fifteen 
billion, while Mars, with almost as much land surface, had a population a 
thousand times as small, at right around fifteen million. The disparity was 
clear. Something would have to be done.
Mass transfer of people from Earth to Mars was certainly one possibility; but 
the speed of the transfer was limited by the size of the transport system, and 
the ability of Mars to absorb the immigrants. Now the Chinese, and indeed the UN 
generally, were arguing that as a beginning step in a process of intensified 
immigration, they could build up the transport system very substantially. A 
second space elevator on Mars would be the first step in this multistage 
project.
Reaction on Mars to this plan was mostly negative. The Reds of course opposed 
further immigration, and while conceding that some would have to happen, they 
opposed any specific development of the transfer system just to try to keep the 
process slowed down as much as possible. That position fit their overall 
philosphy, and made sense to Nadia. The Free Mars position, however, while more 
important, was not so clear. Nirgal had come out of Free Mars, and had gone to 
Earth and issued a general invitation to Terrans to shift as many people over as 
they could. And historically Free Mars had always argued for strong ties with 
Earth, to attempt the so-called tail-wagging-dog strategy. The current party 
leadership, however, no longer seemed very fond of this position. And Jackie was 
in the middle of this new group. They had been shifting toward a more 
isolationist stance even during the constitutional congress, Nadia recalled, 
arguing always for more independence from Earth. On the other hand, they had 
been apparently cutting deals in private with certain Terran countries. So the 
Free Mars position was ambiguous, perhaps hypocritical; and seemed designed 
mainly to increase its own power on the Martian scene.
Even setting aside Free Mars, though, there was a lot of isolationist sentiment 
out there besides the Reds—anarchists, some Bogdanovists, the Dorsa Brevian 
matriarchs, the MarsFirsters—all tended to side with the Reds on this issue. If 
millions and millions of Terrans began to pour up onto Mars, they all argued, 
what then of Mars—not just of the landscape itself, but of the Martian culture 
that had been forming over the m-years? Wouldn’t that be drowned in the old ways 
brought up by the new influx, which might quickly outnumber the native 
population? Birth rates were dropping everywhere, after all, and childlessness 
and one-child families were as common on Mars as on Earth—so there wouldn’t be 
any great multiplication in the native population to look forward to. They would 
soon be overwhelmed.
So Jackie argued, at least in public, and the Dorsa Brevians and many others 
agreed with her. Nirgal, just back from Earth, seemed not to be having much 
effect on that stance. And while Nadia could see the point of her opponents’ 
arguments, she also felt that given the situation on Earth, they were being 
unrealistic to think they could close Mars down. Mars could not save Earth, as 
Nirgal had sometimes seemed to say during his visit there; but an agreement with 
the UN had been made and ratified, and they were committed to letting up at 
least as many Terrans as the treaty specified. So the bridge between the worlds 
had to be expanded if they were to meet that obligation, and keep the treaty 
viable. If they didn’t stick to the treaty, Nadia thought, anything might 
happen.
So in the debate over allowing a second cable, Nadia argued for it. It increased 
the capacity of the transport system, as they had promised to do, if only 
indirectly. And it would also take some of the pressure off the towns on 
Tharsis, and that side of Mars generally; population density maps showed that 
Pavonis was like the bull’s-eye of a target, with people radiating outward from 
it and settling as near to it as was convenient. Having a cable on the other 
side of the world would help to equalize things.
But this was a dubious value to the cable’s opponents. They wanted the 
population localized, contained, slowed. The treaty didn’t matter to them. So 
when it came to a council vote, which was only an advisory to the legislature in 
any case, only Zeyk voted with Nadia. It was Jackie’s biggest victory so far, 
and put her in a temporary alliance with Irishka and the rest of the 
environmental courts, which were on principle resistant to all forms of swift 
development.
Nadia went home to her apartment that day, discouraged and worried. “We’ve 
promised Earth we’ll take lots of immigrants, then pulled up the drawbridge. 
It’s going to lead to trouble.”
Art nodded. “We’ll have to work something out.”
Nadia blew out her breath in disgust. “Work. We won’t work anything out. Work 
isn’t the word for it. We will bicker and dicker and argue and natter.” She 
sighed a big sigh. “It will go on and on. I thought Nirgal being back would 
help, but it won’t if he doesn’t join in.”
“He doesn’t have a position,” Art said.
“He could if he wanted one, though.”
“True.”
Nadia thought about it, her mind wandering as her spirits dropped. “You know 
I’ve only gotten through ten months of my term. There’s over two and a half 
m-years to go.”
“I know.”
“M-years are so damned long.”
“Yes. But the months are short.”
She made a noise at him. Stared out the window of her apartment, down into 
Pavonis caldera. “The trouble is that work isn’t work anymore. You know, we go 
out there and join these projects, and the work on them still isn’t work. I mean 
I never get to go out and do things. I remember when I was young, in Siberia, 
work was really work.”
“You might be romanticizing that a bit.”
“Yeah, sure, but even on Mars. I remember putting together Underbill. That was 
really fun. And one day on our trip to the north pole, installing a permafrost 
gallery. . . .” She sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for work like that again.”
“There’s still a lot of construction going on,” Art pointed out.
“By robots.”
“Maybe you could go back to something more human. Build something yourself. A 
house in the country, or a development. Or one of the new harbor towns, 
hand-built to try out different things, designs, methods, whatever. It would 
slow the construction process down, the GEC would go for that.”
“Maybe. After my term is over, you mean.”
“Or even before. On breaks, like these other trips. They’ve all been analogs to 
construction, they haven’t been construction itself. Building actual things. You 
have to try that, then go back and forth between the two.”
“Conflict of interest.”
“Not if it was a public-works project. What about that proposal to build a 
global capital down at sea level?”
“Hmm,” Nadia said. She got out a map, and they pored over it. At the 
zero-longitude line, the south shore of the northern sea bent out in a little 
round peninsula, with a crater bay at its center. It was about halfway between 
Tharsis and Elysium. “We’ll have to go take a look.”
“Yes. Here, come to bed. We’ll talk about it more later. Right now I have 
another idea.”


 
 
 
 
 
Some months later they were flying back from Bradbury Point to Sheffield, and 
Nadia remembered that conversation with Art. She asked the pilot to land at a 
little station north of Sklodowska Crater, on the slope of Crater Zm, called 
Zoom. As they descended on the airstrip they saw to the east a big bay, now 
covered with ice. Across the bay was the rough mountainous country of Mamers 
Vallis, and the Deuter-onilus Mensae. The bay was an incursion into the Great 
Escarpment, which was here fairly gentle. Longitude zero. Latitude forty-six 
degrees north, fairly far north; but the northern winters were mild compared to 
the south. They could see a lot of the icy sea, lying off a long shoreline. The 
rounded peninsula surrounding Zoom was high and smooth. The little station on 
the shore was home to about five hundred people, who were out there building 
with bulldozer and cranes and dredges and draglines. Nadia and Art got out and 
sent the plane on, and took a boardinghouse room and spent about a week with the 
people there, talking about the new settlement. The locals had heard of the 
proposal to build a new capital city here on the bay; some of them liked the 
idea, some didn’t. They had thought of calling their settlement Greenwich 
because of its longitude, but they had heard the British didn’t pronounce it 
“Green Witch,” and they didn’t know how they felt about spelling the town to 
sound that way and then calling it “Grenich.” Maybe just London, they said. 
We’ll think of something, they said. The bay itself, they said, had long been 
called Chalmers Bay.
“Really?” Nadia exclaimed. She laughed. “How perfect.”
She was already very attracted to the landscape: Zoom’s smooth conic apron, the 
incurve of the big bay; red rock over white ice, and presumably over blue sea, 
someday. On the days of their visit clouds flowed by constantly, riding the west 
wind and dappling both land and ice with their shadows—sometimes puffy white 
cumulus clouds, like galleons, other times scrolled herringbone patterns 
unrolling overhead, defining the dark dome of sky above them, and the curving 
rocky land under them. It could be a small handsome city, encircling a bay like 
San Francisco or Sydney, as beautiful as those two but smaller, human scale— 
Bogdanovist architecture—hand-built. Well, not exactly hand-built, of course. 
But they could design it at a human scale. And work on it as a kind of work of 
art. Walking with Art on the shores of the ice bay, Nadia talked through her CO2 
mask about these ideas, while watching the parade of clouds gallop by in the 
low-rushing air.
“Sure,” Art said. “It would work. It’s going to be a city anyway, that’s the 
important thing. It’s one of the best bays on this stretch of the coast, so it’s 
bound to be used as a harbor. So you wouldn’t get the kind of capital city that 
just sits in the middle of nowhere, like Canberra or Brasilia, or Washington, 
B.C. It’ll have a whole other life as a seaport.”
“That’s right. That would be great.” Nadia walked on, excited as she thought 
about it, feeling better than she had in months. The movement to establish a 
capital somewhere else than Sheffield was strong, supported by almost every 
party up there. This bay had already been proposed as a site by the Sabishiians, 
so it would be a matter of supporting an already-existing idea, rather than 
forcing a new one on people. The support would be there. And as a public-works 
project, building it would be something she could take full part in. Part of the 
gift economy. She might even be able to have an influence on the plan of it. The 
more she thought about it, the more pleased she got.
They had walked far down the shore of the bay; they turned around and began to 
walk back to the little settlement. Clouds tumbled over them on a stiff wind. 
The curve of red land made its greeting to the sea. Just under the cloud layer, 
a ragged V of honking geese fletched the wind, heading north.
 
Later that day, as they flew back to Sheffield, Art picked up her hand and held 
it, inspecting her new finger. He said slowly, “You know, building a family 
would also be a very hands-on kind of construction.”
“What?”
“And they’ve got reproduction pretty much figured out.”
“What?”
“I said, as long as you’re alive, you can pretty much have children, one way or 
another.”
“What?”
“That’s what they say. If you wanted to, you could do it.”
“No.”
“That’s what they say.”
“No.”
“It’s a good idea.”
“No.”
“Well, you know, even building ... it’s great, sure, but you can only go on 
plumbing for so long. Plumbing, hammering nails, bulldozing—it’s all interesting 
enough, of course, I guess, but still. We have a lot of time to fill. And the 
only work really interesting enough to pursue over the long haul would be 
raising a kid, don’t you think?”
“No I do not!”
“But did you ever have a kid?”
“No.”
“Well there you go.”
“Oh God.”
Her ghost finger was tingling. But now it was really there.


 
PART EIGHT
               --------------
---The Green 
and theWhite
               --------------
 


 
Cadres came to the town Xiazha, in Guangzhou, and said, For the good of China we 
need you to recreate this village on Moon Plateau, Mars. You’ll go there 
together, the whole village. You’ll have your family and your friends and 
neighbors with you. Ten thousand of you all together. In ten years if you decide 
you want to come back, you can, and replacements will be sent to the new Xiazha. 
We think you will like it. It’s a few kilometers north of the harbor town 
ofNilokeras, near the Maumee River delta. The land is fertile. There are other 
Chinese villages already in that region, and Chinese sections in all the big 
cities. There are many hectares of empty land. The trip can begin in a 
month—train to Hong Kong, ferry to Manila, and then up the space elevator into 
orbit. Six months crossing the space between here and Mars, down their elevator 
to Pavonis Mons, a party train to Moon Plateau. What do you say? Let’s have a 
unanimous vote and start things off on the right foot.
Later a clerk in the town called up the Praxis office in Hong Kong, and told an 
operator there what had happened. Praxis Hong Kong sent the information along to 
Praxis’s demographic study group in Costa Rica. A planner there named Amy added 
the report to a long list of similar reports, and sat thinking for a morning. 
That afternoon she made a call to Praxis chairman emeritus William Fort, who was 
surfing a new reef in El Salvador. She described the situation to him. “The blue 
world is full,” he said, “the red world is empty. There’s going to be problems. 
Let’s talk about them.”
The demographics group and part of the Praxis policy team, including many of the 
Eighteen Immortals, gathered in Fort’s hillside surf camp. The demographers laid 
out the situation. “Everyone is getting the longevity treatment now,” Amy said. 
“We are fully into the hypermalthusian age.”
It was a demographically explosive situation. Naturally emigration to Mars was 
often seen by Terran government planners as one solution to the problem. Even 
with its new ocean, Mars still had almost as much land area as Earth, and hardly 
any people. The really populous nations, Amy told the group, were already 
sending up as many people as they could. Often the emigrants were members of 
ethnic or religious minorities who were dissatified with their lack of autonomy 
in their home countries, and so were happy to leave. In India the elevator cars 
of the cable that touched down at Suvadiva Atoll, south of the Maldives, were 
constantly at capacity, full of emigrants all day every day, a stream of Sikhs 
and Kashmiris and Muslims and also Hindus, ascending into space and moving to 
Mars. There were Zulus from South Africa. Palestinians from Israel. Kurds from 
Turkey. Native Americans from the United States. “In that sense,” Amy said, 
“Mars is becoming the new America.”
“And like the old America,” a woman named Elizabeth added, “there’s a native 
population already there to be impacted. Think about the numbers for a while. If 
every day the cars of all the space elevators on Earth are full, then that’s a 
hundred people per car, therefore twenty-four hundred per day per elevator 
taking off, and a different twenty-four hundred leaving the cars at the top of 
each elevator, and transferring into shuttles. There are ten elevators, so 
that’s twenty-four thousand people a day. Therefore eight million seven hundred 
and sixty thousand people every year.”
“Call it ten million a year,” Amy said. “That’s a lot, but at that rate it will 
still take a century to transfer just one of Earth’s sixteen billions to Mars. 
Which won’t make any difference here to speak of. So it doesn’t really make 
sense! No major relocation is possible. We can never move a significant fraction 
of the Terran population to Mars. We have to keep our attention on solving 
Earth’s problems at home. Mars’s presence can only help as a kind of 
psychological vent. In essence, we’re on our own.”
William Fort said, “It doesn’t have to make sense.”
“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “Lots of Terran governments are trying it, 
whether it makes sense or not. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil—they’re all going 
for it, and if they keep emigration at the system’s capacity, Mars’s population 
will double in about two years. So nothing changes on Earth, but Mars is totally 
inundated. “
One of the Immortals noted that an emigration surge of a similar scale had 
helped to cause the first Martian revolution.
“What about the Earth-Mars treaty,” someone else asked. “I thought it 
specifically forbade such overwhelming influxes.”
“It does, “Elizabeth said. “It specifies no more than ten percent of the Martian 
population to be added every Terran year. But it also states that Mars should 
take more if they can.”
“Besides,” Amy said, “since when have treaties ever stopped governments from 
doing what they wanted to do?”
William Fort said, “We’ll have to send them somewhere else.” The others looked 
at him. “Where?” said Amy.
No one replied. Fort waved a hand vaguely. “We’d better think of somewhere,” 
Elizabeth said grimly. “The Chinese and Indians have been good allies of the 
Martians, so far, and even they aren’t paying much attention to the treaty. I 
was sent a tape recording of an Indian policy meeting about this, and they spoke 
about running their program at capacity for a couple of centuries, and then 
seeing where they stand.”


 
 
 
 
 
The elevator car descended and Mars grew huge beneath their feet. Finally they 
slowed down, low over Sheffield, and everything felt normal, Martian gravity 
again, without the Coriolis force pulling reality to the side. And then they 
were in the Socket, and back home.
Friends, reporters, delegations, Mangalavid. In Sheffield itself people hurried 
about their business. Occasionally Nir-gal was recognized, and waved at happily; 
some even stopped to shake his hand, or give him a hug, inquiring about his trip 
or his health. “We’re glad you’re back!”
Still, in most people’s eyes . . . Illness was so rare. Quite a few looked away. 
Magical thinking: Nirgal saw suddenly that for many people the longevity 
treatments equaled immortality. They did not want to think otherwise; they 
looked away.
But Nirgal had seen Simon die even though Simon’s bones had been stuffed with 
Nirgal’s young marrow. He had felt his body unravel, felt the pain in his lungs, 
in every cell of him. He knew death was real. Immortality had not come to them, 
and never would. Delayed senescence, Sax called it. Delayed senescence, that was 
all it was; Nirgal knew that. And people saw that knowledge in him, and 
recoiled. He was unclean, and they looked away. It made him angry.
 
*      *        *
 
He took the train down to Cairo, looking out at the vast tilted desert of east 
Tharsis, so dry and ferric, the Ur landscape of red Mars: his land. His eyes 
felt it. His brain and body glowed with that recognition. Home.
But the faces on the train, looking at him and then looking away. He was the man 
who had not been able to adjust to Earth. The home world had nearly killed him. 
He was an alpine flower, unable to withstand the true world, an exotic to whom 
Earth was like Venus. This is what their eyes were saying with their darting 
glances. Eternal exile.
Well, that was the Martian condition. One out of every five hundred Martian 
natives who visited Earth died; it was one of the most dangerous things a 
Martian could do, more dangerous than cliff flying, visiting the outer solar 
system, childbirth. A kind of Russian roulette, with lots of empty chambers in 
the gun to be sure, but the full one was full.
And he had dodged it. Not by much, but he had dodged it. He was alive, he was 
home! These faces in the train, what did they know? They thought he had been 
defeated by Earth; but they also thought he was Nirgal the Hero, who had never 
been defeated before—they thought he was a story, an idea only. They didn’t know 
about Simon or Jackie or Dao, or Hiroko. They didn’t know anything about him. He 
was twenty-six m-years old now, a middle-aged man who had suffered all that any 
middle-aged man might suffer—death of parents, death of love, betrayal of 
friends, betrayal by friends. These things happen to everyone. But that wasn’t 
the Nirgal that people wanted.
The train skirted the first curved head walls of the Labyrinth of Night’s sapped 
canyons, and soon it floated into Cairo’s old station. Nirgal walked out into 
the tented town, looking around curiously. It had been a metanat stronghold, and 
he had never been in it before; interesting to see the little old buildings. The 
physical plant had been damaged by the Red Army in the revolution, and was still 
marked by broken black walls. People waved at him as he walked down the broad 
central boulevard to the city offices. And there she was, in the concourse of 
the town hall, by the window walls overlooking the U of Nilus Noctis. Nirgal 
stopped, breath short. She had not yet seen him. Her face was rounder but 
otherwise she was as tall and sleek as ever, dressed in a green silk blouse and 
a darker green skirt of some coarser material, her black hair a shiny mane 
spilling down her back. He could not stop looking at her.
Then she saw him, and flinched ever so slightly. Perhaps the wrist images had 
not been enough to tell her how much the Terran illness had hurt him. Her hands 
extended on their own recognizance, and then she followed them, hands still out 
even while her eyes were calculating, her grimace at his appearance carefully 
rearranged for the cameras that were always around her. But he loved her for 
those hands. He could feel the warmth of his face, blushing as they kissed, 
cheek to cheek like friendly diplomats. Up close she still looked fifteen 
m-years old, just past the unblemished bloom of youth—at that point that is even 
more beautiful than youth. People said she had taken the treatment from the age 
of ten.
“It’s true then,” she said, “Earth almost killed you.”
“A virus, actually.”
She laughed, but her eyes kept their calculating look. She took him by the arm, 
led him back to her entourage like a blind man. Though he knew several of them 
she made introductions anyway, just to emphasize how much the inner circle of 
the party had changed since he had left. But of course he could not notice that, 
and so he was busy being cheerful when the proceedings were interrupted by a 
great wail. There was a baby among them.
“Ah,” Jackie said, checking her wrist. “She’s hungry. Come meet my daughter.” 
She walked over to a woman holding a swaddled babe. The girl was a few months 
old, fat-jowled, darker-skinned than Jackie, her whole face bright with 
squalling. Jackie took her from the woman and carried her off into an adjacent 
room.
Nirgal, left standing there, saw Tiu and Rachel and Frantz next to the window. 
He went over to them, glanced in Jackie’s direction; they rolled their eyes, 
shrugged. Jackie wasn’t saying who the father was, Rachel said in a quick 
undertone. It was not unique behavior; many women from Dorsa Brevia had done the 
same.
The woman who had been holding the girl came out and told Nirgal that Jackie 
would like to speak with him. He followed the woman into the next room.
The room had a picture window overlooking Nilus Noc-tis. Jackie was seated in a 
window seat, nursing the child and looking at the view. The child was hungry; 
eyes closed, latched on, sucking hard, squeaking. Tiny fists clenched in some 
kind of arboreal remnant behavior, clutching to branch or fur. That was all 
culture, right there in that clutch. Jackie was issuing instructions, to aides 
both in the room and on her wrist. “No matter what they say in Bern, we need to 
have the flexibility to dampen the quotas if we need to. The Indians and Chinese 
will just have to get used to it.”
Some things began to clarify for Nirgal. Jackie was on the executive council, 
but the council was not particularly powerful. She was also still one of the 
leaders of the Free Mars party; and although Free Mars might have less influence 
on the planet, as power shifted out into the tents, in Earth-Mars relations it 
had the potential to become a determining body. Even if it only coordinated 
policy, it would gain all the power that a coordinator could command, which was 
considerable—it was all the power Nirgal had ever had, after all. In many 
situations such coordination could be the equivalent of making Mars’s Terran 
policy, as all the local governments attended to their local concerns, and the 
global legislature was more and more dominated by a Free Mars-led supermajority. 
And of course there was a sense in which the Earth-Mars relationship had the 
potential to dwarf everything else. So that Jackie might be on the way to 
becoming an interplanetary power. . . .
Nirgal’s attention returned to the baby at her breast. The princess of Mars. 
“Have a seat,” Jackie said, indicating the bench beside her with her head. “You 
look tired.”
“I’m fine,” Nirgal said, but sat. Jackie looked up at one of the aides and 
jerked her head to the side, and very soon they were alone in the room with the 
infant.
“The Chinese and Indians are thinking of this as empty new land,” Jackie said. 
“You can see it in everything they say. They’re too damned friendly.”
“Maybe they like us,” Nirgal said. Jackie smiled, but he went on: “We helped 
them get the metanats off their backs. And they can’t be thinking of moving 
their excess population here. There’s just too many of them for emigration to 
make any difference.”
“Maybe so, but they can dream. And with space elevators they can send a steady 
stream. It adds up quicker than you would think.” Nirgal shook his head. “It’ll 
never be enough.”
“How do you know? You didn’t go to either place.”
“A billion is a big number, Jackie. Too big a number for us to properly imagine. 
And Earth has got seventeen billion. They can’t send a significant fraction of 
that number here, there aren’t the shuttles to do it.”
“They might try anyway. The Chinese flooded Tibet with Han Chinese, and it 
didn’t do a thing to relieve their population problems, but they kept doing it 
anyway.”
Nirgal shrugged. “Tibet is right there. We’ll keep our distance.”
“Yes,” Jackie said impatiently, “but that’s not going to be easy when there is 
no we. If they go out to Margaritifer, and cut a deal with the Arab caravans out 
there, who’s going to stop it from happening?”
“The environmental courts?”
Jackie blew air between her lips, and the baby pulled off and whimpered. Jackie 
shifted the infant to the other breast. Blue-veined olive curve. “ Antar doesn’t 
think the environmental courts will be able to function for long. We had a fight 
with them while you were gone, and we only went along with them to give the 
process a chance, but they made no sense and they had no teeth. And everything 
everyone does has an environmental impact, so supposedly they should be judging 
everything. But tents are coming down in the lower elevations and not one in a 
hundred is going to the courts to ask permission for what they do once their 
town is part of the outside. Why should they? Everyone is an ecopoet now. No. 
The court system isn’t going to work.”
“You can’t be sure,” Nirgal said. “So is Antar the father, then?”
Jackie shrugged.
Anyone could be the father—Antar, Dao, Nirgal himself, hell John Boone could be, 
if any sample of his sperm had happened to be still in storage. That would be 
like Jackie; except she would have told everyone. She shifted the infant’s head 
toward her.
“Do you really think it’s all right to raise a fatherless child?”
“That’s how you were raised, right? And I had no mother. We were all one-parent 
children.” “But was that good?” “Who knows?”
There was a look on Jackie’s face that Nirgal could not read, her mouth just 
slightly tight with resentment, defiance .. . impossible to say. She knew who 
both her parents were, but only one had stuck around, and Kasei had not been 
much around at that. And killed in Sheffield, in part because of the brutal 
response to the Red assault that Jackie herself had advocated.
She said, “You didn’t know about Coyote until you were six or seven, isn’t that 
right?”
“True, but not right.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t right.” And he looked her in the eye.
But she looked away, down at the baby. “Better than having your parents tearing 
each other up in front of you.”
“Is that what you would do with the father?”
“Who knows?”
“So it’s safer this way.”
“Maybe it is. Certainly there’s a lot of women doing it this way.”
“In Dorsa Brevia.”
“Everywhere. The biological family isn’t really a Martian institution, is it.”
“I don’t know.” Nirgal considered it. “Actually, I saw a lot of families in the 
canyons. We come from an unusual group in that respect.”
“In many respects.”
Her child pulled away, and Jackie tucked her breast in her bra and let down her 
shirt. “Marie?” she called, and her assistant entered. “I think her diaper needs 
changing.” And she handed the infant up to the woman, who left without a word.
“Servants now?” Nirgal said.
Jackie’s mouth went tight again, and she stood, calling “Mem?”
Another woman came in, and Jackie said, “Mem, we’re going to have to meet with 
those environmental court people about this Chinese request. It could be that we 
can use it as leverage to get the Cairo water allotment reconsidered.”
Mem nodded and left the room.
“You just make the decisions?” Nirgal said.
Jackie dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Nice to have you back, Nirgal, 
but try to catch up, all right?”
 
*      *        *
 
Catch up. Free Mars was now a political party, the biggest on Mars. It had not 
always been that way; it had begun as something more like a network of friends, 
or the part of the underground that lived in the demimonde. Mostly ex-students 
of the university in Sabishii, or, later, the members of a very loose 
association of communities in the tented canyons, and in clandestine clubs in 
the cities, and so forth. A kind of vague umbrella term for those sympathetic to 
the underground, but not followers of any more specific political movement or 
philosophy. Just something they said, in fact—”free Mars.”
In many ways it had been Nirgal’s creation. So many of the natives had been 
interested in autonomy, and the various issei parties, based on the thoughts of 
one early settler or another, did not appeal to them; they had wanted something 
new. And so Nirgal had traveled around the planet, and stayed with people who 
organized meetings or discussions, and this had gone on for so long that 
eventually people wanted a name. People wanted names for things.
And so, Free Mars. And in the revolution it had become a rallying point for the 
natives, rising up out of society as a kind of emergent phenomenon, with many 
more people declaring themselves members than one would have guessed possible. 
Millions. The native majority. The very definition of the revolution, in fact; 
the main reason for its success. Free Mars as a sentence, an imperative; and 
they had done it.
But then Nirgal had left for Earth, determined to make their case there. And 
while he was gone, during the constitutional congress, Free Mars had gone from a 
movement to an organization. That was fine, it was the normal course of events, 
a necessary part of institutionalizing their independence. No one could complain 
about it, or moan for the good old days, without revealing nostalgia for a 
heroic age that had not actually been heroic—or, along with heroic, had been 
also suppressed, limited, inconvenient and dangerous. No, Nirgal had no desire 
for nostalgia—the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in 
resistance but in expression. No—he did not want it to be like it had been 
before. He was happy they were in control (at least partially) of their fate. 
That wasn’t the problem. Nor was he bothered by the tremendous growth in the 
numbers of supporters Free Mars had. The party seemed on the edge of becoming a 
supermajority, with three of the seven executive councillors coming from the 
party leadership, and most other global positions filled by other members. And 
now a fair percentage of new emigrants were joining the party— and old emigrants 
as well—and natives who had supported smaller parties before the revolution—and, 
last but not least, quite a few people who had supported the UNTA regime, and 
were now looking for the new power to follow. All in all, it made for a huge 
group. And in the first years of a new socioeconomic order, this massing of 
political power, of opinion and belief, had some advantages, no doubt about it. 
They could get things done. But Nirgal wasn’t sure he wanted to be part of it.
 
One day walking the city wall, looking out through the tenting, he watched a 
group of people standing on a launch-pad at the edge of the cliff, west of town. 
There were a number of different kinds of single-flier craft: gliders and 
ultralites that were shot out of a slingshot launcher, and rose inside the 
thermals that formed in the mornings; smaller hang gliders; and then a variety 
of new one-person aircraft, which looked like small gliders connected to the 
undersides of small blimps. These fliers were only a bit longer than the people 
who climbed into the slings or seats under the glider’s wings. Clearly they were 
made of ultralight materials; sqme were transparent and nearly invisible, so 
that once in the sky it appeared that prone or seated people were floating 
around on their own. Other machines had been colored, and were visible from 
kilometers away as strokes of green or blue in the air. The stubby wings had 
small ultralight jets attached to them, so that the pilots had control of 
direction and altitude; they were like planes in that respect, but with the 
added loft of a blimp to make them safer and more versatile; their pilots landed 
them almost anywhere, and it looked impossible to dive them—to crash, in other 
words.
The hang gliders, on the other hand, looked as dangerous as ever. The people who 
used those were the rowdiest members of the flying crowd, Nirgal could see when 
he went out there—thrill seekers who ran off the edge of the cliff shouting in 
an adrenalated exhilaration that crackled over the intercoms—they were running 
off a cliff, after all, and no matter what rig they were strapped to, their 
bodies still saw what was happening. No wonder their shouts had that special 
ring!
Nirgal got on the subway and went out to the launchpad, drawn by some quality of 
the sight. All those people, free in the sky.... He was recognized, of course, 
he shook hands; and accepted an invitation from a group of fliers to go up and 
see what it was like. The hang gliders offered to teach him to fly, but he 
laughed and said he would try the little blimpgliders first. There was a 
two-person blimpglider tethered there, slightly larger than the rest, and a 
woman named Monica invited him up, fueled the thing, and sat him beside her; and 
up the launch mast they went, to be released with a jerk into the strong 
downslope afternoon winds and over the city, now revealed as a small tent filled 
with greenery, perched on the edge of the northwestern-most of the network of 
canyons etching the slope of Tharsis.
Flying over Noctis Labyrinthus! The wind keened over the blimp’s taut 
transparent material, and they bounced unpre-dictably up and down on the wind, 
while also rotating horizontally in what seemed an uncontrolled spin; but then 
Monica laughed and began manipulating the controls before her, and quickly they 
were proceeding south across the labyrinth, over canyon after canyon making 
their irregular X intersections. Then over the Compton Chaos, and the torn land 
of the Illyrian Gate, where it dropped into the upper end of the Marineris 
Glacier.
“These things’ jets are much more powerful than they need to be,” Monica told 
him through their headphones. “You can make headway into the wind until it 
reaches something like two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, although you 
wouldn’t want to try that. You also use the jets to counteract the blimp’s loft, 
to get us back down. Here, try it. That’s left jet throttle, that’s right, and 
here are the stabilizers. The jets are dead easy, it’s using the stabilizer that 
needs some practicing.”
In front of Nirgal was a complete second set of controls. He put his hands on 
the jet throttles, gave them pushes. The blimp veered right, then left. “Wow.”
“It’s fly by wire, so if you tell it to do something disastrous, it’ll just cut 
out.”
“How many hours flying time do you need to learn this?”
“You’re doing it already, right?” She laughed. “No, it takes a hundred hours or 
so. Depends on what you mean by knowing how to do it. There’s the death mesa 
between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have relaxed and 
before they’re really good, so that they get into trouble. But that’s mostly 
hang gliders anyway. With these, the simulators are just like the real thing, so 
you can put in your hours on those, and then when you’re actually up here you’ll 
have it wired even though you haven’t officially reached the flying time limit.”
“Interesting!”
And it was. The intersecting sapped canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, lying under 
them like an enormous maze; the sudden lifts and drops as the winds tossed them; 
the loud keening of the wind over their partially enclosed gondola seats... . 
“It’s like becoming a bird!”
“Exactly.”
And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. The heart is pleased by 
one thing after another.
 
After that he spent time in a flight simulator in the city, “ and several times 
a week he made a date with Monica or” one of her friends, and went out to the 
cliff’s edge for another lesson. It was not a complicated business, and soon he 
felt that he could try a flight on his own. They cautioned him to be patient. He 
kept at it. The simulators felt very much like the real thing; if you tested 
them by doing something foolish, the seat would tilt and bounce very 
convincingly. More than once he was told the story of the person who had taken 
an ultralite into such a disastrous death spiral that the simulator had torn off 
its mountings and crashed through the glass wall next to it, cutting some 
bystanders and breaking the flier’s arm.
Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He went to Free Mars 
meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew every afternoon. As 
the days , passed he discovered that he was dreading the morning meetings; he 
only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no matter what they said. 
Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not politics, not like this. 
Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly he had been living his 
life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the surface cities about how to 
live theirs and still have some freedoms, some pleasures. Okay, it had been 
political, everything was; but it seemed he was not really interested in 
politics. Or perhaps it was government.
It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her 
crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment 
back that for Jackie’s inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. 
He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group 
had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to 
Jackie’s control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were 
firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives’ leader, 
the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars—son of 
Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage—very hard to oppose. But that 
time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own 
mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote 
beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia. 
Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her 
advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was 
a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A 
threat forever to their native queen.
So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to ignore their 
little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from all over the 
planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles. Many tent 
towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it possible, and 
hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an operation in which 
the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid enough that water was 
the critical issue, and their requests for a water allotment were pouring in, 
until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn down a kilometer merely by 
pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These and a thousand more matters 
tested the constitution’s many networks for connecting local autonomy to global 
considerations; the debates would go on forever.
Nirgal, while fundamentally uninterested in most of these wrangles, found them 
yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in Cairo. He had come back 
from Earth without any official position in the new government or the old party, 
and one thing he saw going on these days was the struggle to place him—to give 
him a job with limited power, or, for his backers (or rather Jackie’s opponents) 
to put him in a position with some real power to it. Some friends advised him to 
wait and run for the senate when the next elections came, others mentioned the 
executive council, others party positions, others a post on the GEC. All these 
jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or another, and when he talked to Nadia 
on the screens, he could see that he would find them a burden; though she seemed 
to be hammering away stolidly enough, it was obvious the executive council was 
distasteful to her. But he kept a straight face and listened closely as people 
offered their advice.
Jackie herself kept her own council. In meetings where people suggested that 
Nirgal become a kind of minister-without-portfolio, she regarded him more 
blankly than usual, which led Nirgal to think that she liked that possibility 
least of all. She wanted him pinned into some position, which given her current 
post could not help but be inferior to hers. But if he stayed outside the system 
entirely. ...
There she sat, the infant in her arms. It could be his child. And Antar watched 
her with the same expression, the same thought. No doubt Dao would have as well, 
if he were still alive. Nirgal was suddenly shaken by a spasm of grief for his 
half brother, his tormentor, his friend—he and Dao had fought for as far back as 
he could remember, but they had been brothers for all that.
 
Jackie had apparently forgotten Dao already, and Kasei as well. As she would 
forget Nirgal, if he should happen to get killed. She had been among the greens 
who had ordered the crushing of the Red assault on Sheffield, she had advocated 
the strong response. Perhaps she had to forget the dead.
The infant cried. Face rounded by fat, it was impossible to see any resemblance 
to any adult. The mouth looked like Jackie’s. Other than that... it was 
frightening, this power created by anonymous parenting. Of course a man could do 
the same, obtain an egg, grow it by ectogenesis, raise it himself. No doubt it 
would begin to happen, especially if many women took Jackie’s route. A world 
without parents. Well, friends were the real family; but he shuddered 
nevertheless at what Hiroko had done, what Jackie was doing.
He went flying to clear his mind of all that. One night after a glorious flight 
in the clouds, sitting in the launchpad pub, the conversation turned and someone 
mentioned Hi-roko’s name. “I hear she’s on Elysium,” someone said, “working on a 
new commune of communes up there.”
“How did you hear?” Nirgal demanded of the woman, somewhat sharply no doubt.
Surprised, she said, “You know those fliers who dropped in last week who are 
flying around the world? They were on Elysium last month, and they said they saw 
her there.” She shrugged. “That’s all I know. Not much by way of confirmation, I 
know.”
Nirgal sat back in his seat. Always thirdhand information. Some of the stories, 
however, seemed so like Hiroko; and a few, too Hiroko-like to have been made up. 
Nirgal did not know what to think. Very few people seemed to think she was dead. 
Sightings of the rest of her group were reported as well.
“They just wish she were here,” Jackie said when Nirgal mentioned it the next 
day.
“Don’t you wish it?”
“Of course”—(though she didn’t)—”but not enough to make up stories about it.”
“You really think they’re all made up? I mean, who would do that? What would 
they be telling themselves when they did it? It doesn’t make sense.”
“People don’t make sense, Nirgal. You have to learn that. People see an elderly 
Japanese woman somewhere, they think, that looks like Hiroko. That night they 
tell their roommates, I think I saw Hiroko today. She was down in the 
marketplace buying plums. The roommate goes to his construction site, says my 
roommate saw Hiroko yesterday, buying plums!”
Nirgal nodded. It was no doubt true, at least for most of the stories. For the 
rest, though, the few that didn’t fit that pattern....
“Meanwhile, you have to make a decision about this environmental-court 
position,” Jackie said. It was a province court, one below the global court. “We 
can arrange it so that Mem gets a position in the party that will actually be 
more influential, or you could take that one if you wanted, or both, I suppose. 
But we have to know.”
“Yeah yeah.”
People came in wanting to talk about something else, and Nirgal withdrew to the 
window, near the nurse and the infant. He was not interested in what they were 
doing, not any of it—it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of 
people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s 
politics, Jackie would say. And it was clear she enjoyed it. But Nirgal did not. 
It was strange; he had worked all his life for this situation, ostensibly, and 
now that it was here, he did not like it.
Very possibly he could learn enough to do the work. He would have to overcome 
the hostility of the people who didn’t want him back in the party, he would have 
to build his own power base, meaning collecting a group of people who would help 
him in their official positions; do them favors; curry their favor; play them 
off against each other, so that each would do his bidding in order to establish 
preeminence over the others. ... He could see all these processes at work right 
there in this very room, as Jackie met with one adviser after the next, 
discussing whatever issue happened to be their bailiwick, then working them to 
establish more firmly their allegiance to her. Of course, she would say if he 
pointed out this process. That was politics; they were in control of Mars now, 
and this work had to be done if they were to create the new world they had hoped 
for. One couldn’t be overfastidious, one had to be realistic, you held your nose 
and did it. It had a certain nobility to it, really. It was the necessary work.
Nirgal didn’t know-if those justifications were true or not. Had they really 
worked all their lives to overthrow Terran domination of Mars, only in order to 
put in place their own local version of the same thing? Could politics ever be 
anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?
He did not know. He sat in the window seat, looking down at Jackie’s daughter’s 
face, sleeping. Across the room Jackie was intimidating the Free Mars delegates 
from Elysium. Now that Elysium was an island surrounded by the northern sea, 
they were more determined than ever to take control of their fate, including 
immigration limits that would keep the massif from developing much past its 
current state. “All very well,” Jackie was saying, “but it’s a very large island 
now, a continent really, surrounded by water so that it will be especially 
humid, with a coastline of thousands of kilometers, lots of fine harbor sites, 
fishing harbors no doubt. I can sympathize with your desire to keep a hand on 
development, we all feel that, but the Chinese have expressed a particular 
interest in developing some of these sites, and what am I supposed to say to 
them? That the Elysian locals don’t like Chinese? That we’ll take their help in 
a crisis, but we don’t want them moving into the neighborhood?”
“It’s not that they’re Chinese!” the delegate said.
“I understand. Really I do. Tell you what—you go back to South Fossa and explain 
the difficulties we face here, and I’ll do everything I can here to help you. I 
can’t guarantee results, but I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks,” the delegate said, and left.
Jackie turned to her assistant. “Idiot. Who’s next. Ah, naturally; the Chinese 
ambassador. Well, let him in.”
The Chinese, a woman, was quite tall. She spoke in Mandarin, and her AI 
translated into a clear British English. After an exchange of pleasantries, the 
woman asked about establishing some Chinese settlements, preferably somewhere in 
the equatorial provinces.
Nirgal stared, fascinated. This was how settlements had been started from the 
very beginning; groups of Terran nationals had come up, and built a tent town or 
a cliff dwelling, or domed a crater. . . . Now, however, Jackie looked polite 
and said, “It’s possible. Everything of course will have to be referred to the 
environmental courts for judgment. However, there is a great deal of empty land 
on the Elysium massif. Perhaps something could be arranged there, especially if 
China was willing to contribute to infrastructure and mitigation and the like.”
They discussed details. After a while the ambassador left.
Jackie turned to look at Nirgal. “Nirgal, could you get Rachel in here? And try 
to decide what you’re going to do soon, please?”
Nirgal walked out of the building, through the city to his room. He packed his 
little collection of clothes and toiletries, and took the subway out to the 
launching pad, and asked Monica for the use of one of the single-person 
blimp-gliders. He was ready for soloing, he had put in enough hours in 
simulators and with teachers. There was another flight school down in Marineris, 
on Candor Mensa. He talked to the school officials on the launchpad; they were 
willing to let him take the blimpglider down there, and have it returned by 
another flier later.
It was midday. The Tharsis downslope winds had started, and would only get 
stronger as the afternoon progressed. Nirgal suited up, got into the pilot’s 
seat. The little blimp-glider slid up the launching mast, held by the nose; and 
was let free. **
He rose over Noctis Labyrinthus, turned east. He flew east over the maze of 
interlocking canyons. A land split open by stress from below. Flight out of the 
labyrinth. An Icarus who had flown too close to the sun, gotten burned, survived 
the fall—and now flew again, this time down, down, down, ever down. Taking 
advantage of a hard tailwind. Riding a gale, shooting down over the shattered 
dirty ice field that marked Compton Chaos, where the great channel outbreak had 
begun in 2061. That immense flood had run down lus Chasma; but Nirgal angled 
north, away from the glacier’s flow, and then flew east again, down into the 
head of Ti-thonium Chasma, which paralleled lus Chasma just to the north.
Tithonium was one of the deepest and narrowest of the Marineris canyons—four 
kilometers deep, ten wide. He could fly well below the level of the plateau rims 
and still be thousands of meters over the canyon floor. Tithonium was higher 
than lus, wilder, untouched by human hands, seldom traveled in, because it was a 
dead end to the east, where it narrowed and became rough-floored as it got 
shallower, then abruptly stopped. Nirgal spotted the road that switchbacked up 
the eastern head wall, a road he had traveled a few times in his youth, when all 
the planet had been his home.
The afternoon sun dipped behind him. The shadows on the land lengthened. The 
wind continued to blow strong, thrumming over the blimpglider, whining and 
whooshing and keening. It blew him over the caprock of the rim plateau again, as 
Tithonium became a string of oval depressions, pocking the plateau one after the 
next: the Tithonia Catena, each dip a giant bowl-shaped depression in the land.
And then suddenly the world dropped away again, and he flew out over the immense 
open canyon of Candor Chasma, Shining Canyon, the ramparts of its eastern wall 
in fact shining at that very moment, amber and bronze in the sunset’s light. To 
the noilh was the deep entrance to Ophir Chasma, to the south the spectacular 
buttress-walled opening down to Melas Chasma, the central giant of the Marineris 
system. It was Mars’s version of Concordiaplatz, he saw, but much bigger than 
Earth’s, wilder, looking untouched, primal, gigantic beyond all human scale, as 
if he had flown back two centuries into the past, or two eons, to a time before 
the anthropogenesis. Red Mars!
And there out in the middle of broad Candor was a tall diamond mesa, a caprock 
island standing nearly two kilometers above the canyon floor. And in the 
sunset’s hazy gloom Nirgal could make out a nest of lights, a tent town, at the 
southernmost point of the diamond. Voices welcomed him over the common band on 
his intercom, then guided him in to the town’s landing pad. The sun was winking 
out over the cliffs to the west as he brought the blimp-glider around and 
descended slowly into the wind, putting it down right on the figure of Kokopelli 
painted as a target on the^landing pad.


 
 
 
 
 
Shining mesa had a large top. more a kite shape than a diamond proper, thirty 
kilometers long and ten wide, standing in the middle of Candor Chasma like a 
Monument Valley mesa writ large. The tent town occupied only a small rise on the 
southern point of the kite. The mesa was just what it appeared to be, a detached 
fragment of the plateau that the Marineris canyons had split. It was a 
tremendous vantage point for viewing the great walls of Candor, with views 
through the deep, steep gaps into Ophir Chasma to the north and Melas Chasma to 
the south.
Naturally such a spectacular prospect had attracted people over the years, and 
the main tent was surrounded by new smaller ones. At five kilometers above the 
datum, the town was still tented, though there was talk of removing it. The 
floor of Candor Chasma, only three kilometers above the datum, was patched with 
growing dark green forests. Many of the people who lived on Shining Mesa flew 
down into the canyons every morning to farm or botanize, floating back up to the 
mesa’s top in the late afternoons. A few of these flying foresters were old 
underground acquaintances of Nirgal’s, and they were pleased to take him along 
and show him the canyons, and what they did in them.
The Marineris canyon floors generally run down west to east. In Candor, they 
curved around the great central mesa, then fell precipitously south into Melas. 
Snow lay on the higher parts of the floor, especially under the western walls 
where shadows lay in the afternoon. Meltwater from this snow ran down in a faint 
tracery of new watersheds, made up of sandy braided streambeds that ran together 
into a few shallow muddy red rivers, which collected at a confluence just above 
the Candor Gap, and poured down in a wild foaming rapids to the floor of Melas 
Chasma, where it pooled against the remnant of the 61 glacier, running redly 
against its northern flank.
On the banks of all these opaque red streams, forest galleries were springing 
up. They consisted in most places of cold-hardened balsas and other very rapidly 
growing tropical trees, creating new canopies over older krummholz. These days 
it was warm on the canyon floor, which was like a big sun-reflecting bowl, 
protected from the wind. The balsa canopies were allowing a great number of 
plant and animal species to flourish underneath them; Nirgal’s acquaintances 
said it was the most diverse biotic community on Mars. They had to carry 
sedative dart guns now when they landed and walked around, because of bears, 
snow leopards, and other predators. Walking through some of the galleries was 
becoming difficult because of thickets of snow bamboo and aspen.
All this growth had been aided by huge deposits of sodium nitrate that had been 
lying in Candor and Ophir canyons—great white bench terraces made of extremely 
water-soluble caliche blanco. These mineral deposits were now melting over the 
canyon floors and running down the streams, providing the new soils with lots of 
nitrogen. Unfortunately some of the biggest nitrate deposits were being buried 
under landslides—the water that was dissolving the sodium nitrate was also 
hydrating the canyon walls, destabilizing them in a radical acceleration of the 
mass wasting that went on all the time. No one went near the foot of the canyon 
walls anymore, the fliers said: too dangerous. And as they soared around in 
their blimpgliders, Nirgal saw the scars of landslides everywhere. Several high 
talus plant slopes had been buried, and wall-fixing methods were one of the many 
topics of conversation in the mesa evenings, after the omegandorph got into the 
blood; in fact there was little they could do. If chunks of a 
ten-thousand-foot-high wall of rock wanted to give way, nothing was going to 
stop them. So from time to time, about once a week or so, everyone on Shining 
Mesa would feel the ground quiver, watch the tent shimmer, and hear in the pit 
of the stomach the low rumble of a collapse. Often it was possible to spot the 
slide, rolling across the canyon floor ahead of a sienna billow of dust. Fliers 
in the air nearby would come back shaken and silent, or voluble with tales of 
being slapped across the sky by earsplitting roars. One day Nirgal was about 
halfway down to the floor when he felt one himself: it was like a sonic boom 
that went on for many seconds, the air quivering like a gel. Then, just as 
suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
Mostly he explored on his own, sometimes he flew with his old acquaintances. 
Blimpgliders were perfect for the canyon, slow and steady, easy to steer. More 
loft than was needed, more power . . . the one he had rented (using money from 
Coyote) allowed him to drift down in the mornings to help botanize in the 
forests, or walk by the streams; then float back up through the afternoons, up 
and up and up and up. This was when one got a true sense of just how tall Candor 
Mesa was, and the even taller canyon walls—up up and up and up, to the tent and 
its long meals, its party nights. Day after day Nirgal followed this routine, 
exploring the various regions of the canyons below, watching the exuberant 
nightlife in the tent; but seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a 
telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I want to 
lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning to him, 
spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night in 
sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The success of 
the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had wandered Mars 
talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather than 
colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was ended, 
the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation he found 
he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how to go on 
in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an 
-individual in his own private life.
He had discovered that he did not want to continue working on the collective; it 
was good that some people wanted to do it, but he wasn’t one of them. In fact he 
could not think about Cairo without a stab of anger at Jackie, and of simple 
pain as well—pain at the loss of that public world, that whole way of life. It 
was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, 
either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was 
past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he suddenly 
understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was twenty-seven 
m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to Earth, he had 
returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.
So he flew around the immensities of Candor, looking for some image of himself. 
The fractured, layered, scarred canyon walls were so many stupendous mineral 
mirrors; and indeed he saw clearly that he was a tiny creature, smaller than a 
gnat in a cathedral. Flying around studying each great palimpsest of facets, he 
scried two very strong impulses in himself, distinct and mutually exclusive, yet 
infolded, like the green and the white. On the one hand he wanted to stay a 
wanderer, to fly and walk and sail over all the world, a nomad forever, 
wandering ceaselessly until he knew Mars better than anyone else. Ah yes; it was 
a familiar euphoria. On the other hand it was familiar, he had done that all his 
life. It would be the form of his previous life, without the content. And he 
knew already the loneliness of that life, the rootlessness that made him feel so 
detached, that gave him this wrong-end-of-the-telescope vision. Coming from 
everywhere he came from nowhere. He had no home. And so now he wanted that home, 
as much as the freedom or more. A home. He wanted to settle into a full human 
life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its 
seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a 
community of friends.
Both these desires existed, strongly and together—or, to be more exact, in a 
subtle rapid oscillation, which jangled his emotions, and left him insomniac and 
restless. He could see no way to reconcile the two. They were mutually 
exclusive. No one he talked to had any useful suggestions as to how to resolve 
the difficulty. Coyote was dubious about setting down roots—but then he was a 
nomad, and didn’t know. Art considered the wandering life impossible; but he was 
fond of his places now.
Nirgal’s nonpolitical training was in mesocosm engineering, but he found that 
little help to his thinking. At the higher elevations they were always going to 
be in tents, and mesocosm engineering would be needed; but it was becoming more 
of a science than an art, and with increasing experience solving the problems 
would be more and more routinized. Besides, did he want to pursue a tented 
profession, when so much of the lower planet was becoming land they could walk 
on?
No. He wanted to live in the open air. To learn a patch of land, its soil and 
plants and animals and weather and skies, and everything else ... he wanted 
that. Part of him. Part of the time.
He began to feel, however, that whatever he chose, Candor Chasma was not the 
place for the kind of settlement he was thinking of. Its huge vistas made it a 
hard place to see as home—it was too vast, too inhuman. The canyon floors were 
designed and designated as wilderness, and every spring the streams surging with 
snowmelt would jump their banks, tear new channels, be buried under enormous 
landslides. Fascinating, all of it. But not home. The locals were going to stay 
up on Shining Mesa, and only visit the canyon floors during the day. The mesa 
would be their true home. It was a good plan. But the mesa—it was an island in 
the sky, a great tourist destination, a place for flying vacations, for partying 
through the nights, for expensive hotels, for the young and the in-love ... all 
that was fine, wonderful. But crowded, perhaps even overrun—or else always 
battling the influx of visitors, and newly settled residents enchanted by the 
sublime views, people who would arrive like Nirgal himself, dropping in at some 
dusk in their life and never going away, while the old residents looked on 
helplessly and grumbled about the good old days when the world had been new, and 
unoccupied.
No—that was not the kind of home he had in mind. Although he loved the way dawn 
flushed the fluted west walls of Candor, flaring all across the Martian 
spectrum, the sky turning indigo or mauve, or a startling earthly cerulean . . . 
a beautiful place, so beautiful that on some days as he flew about he felt it 
would be worth it to stand on Shining Mesa and hold his ground, to try to 
preserve it, to swoop down and learn the gnarly wilderness floor, float back up 
every afternoon to dinner. Would that work, make him feel at home? And if 
wilderness was what he wanted, weren’t there other places less spectacular but 
more remote, thus more wild?
 
Back and forth he went, back and forth. One day, flying over the foaming opaque 
series of waterfalls and rapids in the Candor Gap, he remembered that John Boone 
had been through this area, in a solo rover just after the Transmari-neris 
Highway had been built. What would that master equivocator have said about this 
amazing region?
Nirgal called up Boone’s AI, Pauline, and asked for Candor, and found a voice 
diary made during a drive through the canyon in 2046. Nirgal let the tape run as 
he looked down on the land from above, listening to the hoarse voice with the 
friendly American accent, a voice unselfconscious about talking to an AI. 
Listening to the voice made Nirgal wish he could really talk to the man. Some 
people said Nirgal had filled John Boone’s empty shoes, that Nirgal had done the 
work John would have done had he lived. If that were so, what would John have 
done afterward? How would he have lived?
“This is the most unbelievable country I’ve ever seen. Really, it’s what you 
think of when you think of Valles Mari-neris. Back in Melas the canyon was so 
wide that out in the middle you couldn’t see the walls at all, they were under 
the horizon! This small-planet curvature is producing effects no one ever 
imagined. All the old simulations lied so bad, the verticals exaggerated by 
factors of five or ten, as I recall, which made it look like you were down in a 
slot. It’s not a slot. Wow, there’s a rock column just like a woman in a toga, 
Lot’s wife I guess that would be. I wonder if it is salt, it’s white, but I 
guess that doesn’t mean much. Have to ask Ann. I wonder what those Swiss road 
builders made of all this when they built this road, it’s not very alpine. Kind 
of like an anti-Alps, down instead of up, red instead of green, basalt instead 
of granite. Well, but they seemed to like it anyway. Of course they’re 
anti-Swiss Swiss, so it makes a kind of sense. Whoa, pothole country here, the 
rover is bouncing around. Might try that bench there, it looks smoother than 
here. Yep, there we go, just like a road. Oh—it is the road. I guess I got off 
it a bit, I’m driving manually for the fun of it, but it’s hard to keep an eye 
out for the transponders when there’s so much else to look at. The transponders 
are made more for automatic pilot than the human eye. Hey, there’s the break 
into Ophir Chasma, what a gap! That wall must be, I don’t know—twenty thousand 
feet tall. My Lord. Since the last one was called Candor Gap, this one should be 
called Ophir Gap, right? Ophir Gate would be nicer. Let’s check the map. Hmm, 
the promontory on the west side of the gap is called Candor Labes, that’s lips, 
isn’t it? Candor Throat. Or, hmm. I don’t think so. It’s one hell of an opening 
though. Steep cliffs on both sides, and twenty thousand feet tall. That’s about 
six or seven times as tall as the cliffs in Yosemite. Sheeee-it. They don’t look 
that much taller, to tell the truth. Foreshortening no doubt. They look about 
twice as tall, or—who knows. I can’t remember what Yosemite really looked like, 
in terms of size anyway. This is the most amazing canyon you could ever even 
imagine. Ah, there’s Candor Mensa, on my left. This is the first time I could 
see that it isn’t part of the Candor Labes wall. I’ll bet that mesa top has one 
hell of a view. Put a fly-in hotel up there, sure. I wish I could get up there 
and see it! This would be a fun place to fly around in. Dangerous though. I see 
dust devils every now and then, vicious little things, real tight and dark. 
There’s a shaft of sunlight there hitting the mesa through the dust. Like a bar 
of butter hanging in the air. Ah, God, what a beautiful world!”
Nirgal could only agree. It made him laugh to hear the man’s voice, and 
surprised him to hear John talk about flying above. It made him understand a 
little bit the way the issei talked about Boone, the hurt in them that never 
went away. How much better it would be to have John here than just these 
recordings in an AI, what a great adventure it would have been to watch John 
Boone negotiate Mars’s wild history! Saving Nirgal the burden of that role, 
among other things. As it was, however, they only had that friendly happy voice. 
And that did not solve his problem.
 
Back up on Candor Mesa, the fliers met at night in a ring of pubs and 
restaurants placed on the high southern arc of their tent wall, where on 
terraces just inside the tent they could sit and look out at the long views, 
over the forested world of their domain. Nirgal sat among these people, eating 
and drinking, listening, sometimes talking, thinking his own thoughts among 
them, comfortably; they did not care what had happened to him on Earth, they did 
not care that he was there among them. This was good, as often he was distracted 
to the point of being oblivious to his surroundings; he would fall into reveries 
and come out of them, and realize that once again he had been in the steamy 
streets of Port of Spain, or in the refugee compound in the torrential monsoon. 
How often he found himself there again; everything that had happened since was 
so pale by comparison!
But one night he came to from a reverie, having heard some voice say “Hiroko.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“Hiroko. We met her flying around Elysium, up on its north slope.”
It was a young woman speaking, her face innocent of any knowledge of who he was.
“You saw her yourself?” he said sharply.
“Yes. She’s not hiding or anything. She said she liked my flier.”
“I don’t know,” an older man said. A Mars vet, an issei immigrant from the early 
years, his face battered by wind and cosmic rays until it looked like leather. 
Voice hoarse: “I heard she was down in the chaos where the first hidden colony 
used to be, working on the new harbors in the south bay.”
Other voices cut in: Hiroko had been seen here, had been seen there, had been 
confirmed dead, had gone to Earth; Nirgal had seen her there on Earth—
“This here’s Nirgal,” one said to the last comment, pointing and grinning. “He 
should be able to confirm or deny that one!”
Nirgal, taken aback, nodded. “I didn’t see her on Earth,” he said. “There were 
rumors only.”
“Same as here, then.”
Nirgal shrugged.
The young woman, flushed now that she knew who Nirgal was, insisted she had met 
Hiroko herself. Nirgal watched her closely. This was different; no one had ever 
made such a direct claim to him (except in Switzerland). She looked worried, 
defensive, but was holding her ground. “I talked with her, I say!”
Why lie about something like that? And how would it be possible for someone to 
get fooled about it? Impersonators? But why do that?
Despite himself Nirgal’s pulse had quickened, and he was warmer. The thing was, 
it was possible Hiroko would do something like this; hide but not hide; live 
somewhere without bothering to contact the family left behind. There was no 
obvious motive for it, it would be weird, inhumane, inhuman; and perfectly 
within Hiroko’s range of possibilities. His mother was a kind of insane person, 
he had understood that for years—a charismatic who led people effortlessly, but 
was mad. Capable of almost anything.
If she was alive.
He did not want to hope again. He did not want to go chasing off after the mere 
mention of her name! But he was watching this girl’s face as if he could read 
the truth from it, as if he could catch the very image of Hiroko still there in 
her pupils! Others were asking the questions he would have asked, so he could 
stay silent and listen, he did not have to make her overselfconscious. Slowly 
she told the whole story; she and some friends had been flying clockwise around 
Elysium, and when they stopped for the night up on the new peninsula made by the 
Phlegra Montes, they had walked down to the icy edge of the North Sea where they 
had spotted a new settlement, and there in the crowd of construction workers was 
Hiroko; and several of the construction crew were her old associates, Gene, and 
Rya, and Iwao, and the rest of the First Hundred who had followed Hiroko ever 
since the days of the lost colony. The flying group had been amazed, but the 
lost colonists had been faintly perplexed at their amazement. “No one hides 
anymore,” Hiroko had told the young woman, after complimenting her flier. “We 
spend most of our time near Dorsa Brevia, but we’ve been up here for months 
now.”
And there it was. The woman seemed perfectly sincere, there was no reason to 
believe she were lying, or subject to hallucination.
Nirgal didn’t want to have to think about this. But he had been considering 
leaving Shining Mesa anyway, and having a look around at other places. So he 
could. And—well—he was going to have to at least have a look. Shigata ga nail.
 
The next day the conversation seemed much less compelling. Nirgal didn’t know 
what to think. He called Sax on the wrist, told him what he had heard. “Is it 
possible, Sax? Is it possible?”
A strange look passed over Sax’s face. “It’s possible,” he said. “Yes, of 
course. I told you—when you were sick, and unconscious—that she. . . .” He was 
picking his words, as he so often did, with a squint of concentration. “—that I 
saw her myself. In that storm I was caught out in. She led me to my car.”
Nirgal stared at the little blinking image. “I don’t remember that.”
“Ah. I’m not surprised.”
“So you ... you think she escaped from Sabishii.”
“Yes.”
“But how likely was that?”
“I don’t know the—the likelihood. That would be difficult to judge.”
“But could they have slipped away?”
“The Sabishii mohole mound is a maze.”
“So you think they escaped.”
Sax hesitated. “I saw her. She—she grabbed my wrist. I have to believe.” 
Suddenly his face twisted. “Yes, she’s out there! She’s out there! I have no 
doubt! No doubt! No doubt she’s expecting us to come to her.”
And Nirgal knew he had to look.


 
 
 
 
 
He left Candor Mesa without a goodbye to anyone. His acquaintances there would 
understand; they often flew away themselves for a time. They would all be back 
someday, to soar over the canyons and then spend their evenings together on 
Shining Mesa. And so he left. Down into the immensity of Melas Chasma, then 
downcanyon again, east into Co-prates. For many hours he floated in that world, 
over the 61 glacier, past embayment after embayment, buttress after buttress, 
until he was through the Dover Gate and out over the broadening divergence of 
Capri and Eos chasmas. Then above the ice-filled chaoses, the crackled ice 
smoother by far than the drowned land below it had been. Then across the rough 
jumble of Margaritifer Terra, and north, following the piste toward Burroughs; 
then, as the piste approached Libya Station, he banked off to the northeast, 
toward Elysium.
The Elysium massif was now a continent in the northern sea. The narrow strait 
separating it from the southern mainland was a flat stretch of black water and 
white tabular bergs, punctuated by the stack islands which had been the Aeolis 
Mensa. The North Sea hydrologists wanted this strait liquid, so that currents 
could make their way through it from Isidis Bay to Amazonis Bay. To help achieve 
this liquidity they had placed a nuclear-reactor complex at the west end of the 
strait, and pumped most of its energy into the water there, creating an 
artificial polynya where the surface stayed liquid year-round, and a temperate 
mesoclimate on the slopes on each side of the strait. The reactors’ steam plumes 
were visible to Nirgal from far up the Great Escarpment, and as he floated down 
the slope he crossed over thickening forests of fir and ginkgo. There was a 
cable across the western entrance to the strait, emplaced to snag icebergs 
floating in on the current. He flew directly over the bergjam west of the cable, 
and looked down on chunks of ice like floating driftglass. Then over the black 
open water of the strait—the biggest stretch of open water he had ever seen on 
Mars. For twenty kilometers he floated over the open water, exclaiming out loud 
at the sight. Then ahead an immense airy bridge arced over the strait. The 
black-violet plate of water below it was dotted with sailboats, ferries, long 
barges, all trailing the white Vs of their wakes. Nirgal floated over them, 
circling the bridge twice to marvel at the sight—like nothing he had ever seen 
on Mars before: water, the sea, a whole future world.
 
He continued north, rising over the plains of Cerberus, past the volcano Albor 
Tholus, a steep ash cone on the side of Elysium Mons. The much bigger Elysium 
Mons was steep as well, with a Fuji-esque profile that served as the label 
illustration for many agricultural co-ops in the region. Sprawled over the plain 
under the volcano were farms, mostly ragged at the edges, often terraced, and 
usually divided by strips or patches of forest. Young immature orchards dotted 
the higher parts of the plain, each tree in a pot; closer to the sea were great 
fields of wheat and corn, cut by windbreaks of olive and eucalyptus. Just ten 
degrees north of the equator, blessed with rainy mild winters, and then lots of 
hot sunny days: the people there called it the Mediterranean of Mars.
Farther north Nirgal followed the west coast as it rose up out of a line of 
foundered icebergs embroidering the edge of the ice sea. As he looked down at 
the expanse of land below, he had to agree with the general wisdom: Elysium was 
beautiful. This western coastal strip was the most populated region, he had 
heard. The coast was fractured by a number of fossae, and square harbors were 
being built where these canyons plunged into the ice—Tyre, Sidon, 
Pyriphlegethon, Hertzka, Morris. Often stone breakwaters stopped the ice, and 
marinas were in place behind the breakwaters, filled with fleets of small boats, 
all waiting for open passage.
At Hertzka Nirgal turned east and inland, and flew up the gentle slope of the 
Elysian massif, passing over garden belts banding the land. Here the majority of 
Elysium’s thousands lived, in intensively cultivated agricultural-residential 
zones, sloping up into the higher country between Elysium Mons and its northern 
spur cone, Hecates Tholus. Between the great volcano and its daughter peak, 
Nirgal flew through the bare rock saddle of the pass, flung like a little cloud 
by the pass wind.
Elysium’s east slope looked nothing like the west; it was bare rough torn rock, 
heavily sand-drifted, maintained in nearly its primordial condition by the rain 
shadow of the massif. Only near the eastern coast did Nirgal see greenery below 
him again, no doubt nourished by trade winds and winter fogs. The towns on the 
east side were like oases, strung on the thread of an island-circling piste.
At the far northeast end of the island, the ragged old hills of the Phlegra 
Montes ran far out into the ice, forming a spiny peninsula. Somewhere around 
here was where that young woman had seen Hiroko. As Nirgal flew up the western 
side of the Phlegras, it struck him as a likely place to find her; it was a wild 
and Martian place. The Phlegras, like many of the great mountain ranges of Mars, 
was the only remaining arc of an ancient impact basin’s rim. Every other aspect 
of that basin had long since disappeared. But the Phlegras still stood as 
witness to a minute of inconceivable violence—impact of a hundred-kilometer 
asteroid, big pieces of the lithosphere melted and shoved sideways, other pieces 
tossed into the air to fall in concentric rings around the impact point, with 
much of the rock metamorphosed instantly into minerals much harder than their 
originals. After that trauma the wind had cut away at things, leaving behind 
only these hard hills.
There were settlements out here, of course, as there were everywhere, in the 
sinkholes and dead-end valleys and on the passes overlooking the sea. Isolated 
farms, villages often or twenty or a hundred. It looked like Iceland. There were 
always people who liked such remote land. One village perched on a flat knob a 
hundred meters over the sea was called Nuannaarpoq, which was Inuit for “taking 
extravagant pleasure in being alive.” These villagers and all the others in the 
Phlegras could float to the rest of Elysium on blimps, or walk down to the 
circum-Elysian piste and catch a ride. For this coast in particular, the nearest 
town would be a shapely harbor called Firewater, on the west side of the 
Phlegras where they first became a peninsula. The town stood on a bench at the 
end of a squarish bay, and when Nirgal spotted it, he descended onto the tiny 
airstrip at the upper end of town, and then checked into a boardinghouse on the 
main square, behind the docks standing over the ice-sheeted marina.
In the days that followed, he flew out along the coast in both directions, 
visiting farm after farm. He met a lot of interesting people, but none of them 
was Hiroko, or anyone from the Zygote crowd—not even any of their associates. It 
was even a little suspicious; a fair number of issei lived in the region, but 
every one of them denied ever having met Hiroko or any of her group. Yet all of 
them were farming with great success, in rocky wilderness that did not look easy 
to farm—cultivating exquisite little oases of agricultural productivity—living 
the lives of believers in viriditas—but no, never met her. Barely remembered who 
she was. One ancient geezer of an American laughed in his face. “Whachall think, 
we got a guru? We gonna lead ya to our guru?”
After three weeks Nirgal had found no sign of her at all. He had to give up on 
the Phlegra Montes. There was no other choice.
Ceaseless wandering. It did not make sense to search for a single person over 
the vast surface of a world. It was an impossible project. But in some villages 
there were rumors, and sometimes sightings. Always one more rumor, sometimes one 
good sighting. She was everywhere and nowhere. Many descriptions but never a 
photo, many stories but never a wrist message. Sax was convinced she was out 
there, Coyote was sure she wasn’t. It didn’t matter; if she was out there, she 
was hiding. Or leading him on a wild-goose chase. It made him angry when he 
thought of it that way. He would not search for her.
Yet he could not stop moving. If he stayed in one place for more than a week, he 
began to feel nervous and fretful in a way he had never felt in his life. It was 
like an illness, with tension everywhere in his muscles, but concentrated in his 
stomach; an elevated temperature; inability to focus on his thoughts; an urge to 
fly. And so he would fly, from village to town to station to caravanserai. Some 
days he let the wind carry him where it would. He had always been a nomad, no 
reason to stop now. A change in the form of government, why should that make a 
difference in the way he lived? The winds of Mars were amazing. Strong, 
irregular, loud, ceaseless live beings, at play.
Sometimes the wind carried him out over the northern sea, and he flew all day 
and never saw anything but ice and water, as if Mars were an ocean planet. That 
was Vastitas Borealis—the Vast North, now ice. The ice was in some places flat, 
in others shattered; sometimes white, sometimes discolored; the red of dust, or 
the black of snow algae, or the jade of ice algae, or the warm blue of clear 
ice. In some places big dust storms had stalled and dropped their loads, and 
then the wind had carved the detritus so that little dune fields were created, 
looking just like old Vastitas. In some places ice carried on currents had 
crashed over crater-rim reefs, making circular pressure ridges; in other places 
ice from different currents had crashed together, creating straight pressure 
ridges, like dragon backs.
Open water was black, or the various purples of the sky. There was a lot of 
it—polynyas, leads, cracks, patches—perhaps a third of the sea’s surface now. 
Even more common were melt lakes lying on the surface of the ice, their water 
white and sky-colored both, which at times looked a brilliant light violet but 
other times separated out into the two colors; yes, it was another version of 
the green and the white, the infolded world, two in one. As always he found the 
sight of a double color disturbing, fascinating. The secret of the world.
Many of the big drilling platforms in Vastitas had been seized by Reds and blown 
up: black wreckage scattered over white ice. Other platforms were defended by 
greens, and being used now to melt the ice: large polynyas stretched to the east 
of these platforms, and the open water steamed, as if clouds were pouring up out 
of a submarine sky.
In the clouds, in the wind. The southern shore of the northern sea was a 
succession of gulfs and headlands, bays and peninsulas, fjords and capes, 
seastacks and low archipelagoes. Nirgal followed it for day after day, landing 
in the late afternoons at little new seaside settlements. He saw crater islands 
with interiors lower than the ice and water outside the rim. He saw some places 
where the ice seemed to be receding, so that bordering the ice were black 
strands, raked by parallel lines running down to ragged drift errata of jumbled 
rock and ice. Would these strands flood again, or would they grow wider still? 
No one in these seaside towns knew. No one knew where the coastline would 
stabilize. The settlements here were made to be moved. Diked polders showed that 
some people were apparently testing the newly exposed land’s fertility. Fringing 
the white ice, green crop rows.
North of Utopia he passed over a low peninsula that extended from the Great 
Escarpment all the way to the north polar island, the only break in the 
world-wrapping ocean. A big settlement on this low land, called Boone’s Neck, 
was half-tented and half in the open. The settlement’s occupants were engaged in 
cutting a canal through the peninsula.
A wind blew north and Nirgal followed it. The winds hummed, whooshed, keened. On 
some days they shrieked. Live beings, at war. In the sea on both sides of the 
long low peninsula were tabular ice shelfs. Tall mountains of jade ice broke 
through these white sheets. No one lived up here, but Nirgal was not searching 
anymore—he had given up, very near despair, and was just floating, letting the 
winds take him like a dandelion seed: over the ice sea, shattered white; over 
open purple water, lined by sun-bright waves. Then the peninsula widened to 
become the polar island, a white bumpy land in the sea ice. No sign of the 
primeval swirl pattern of melt valleys. That world was gone.
Over the other side of the world and the North Sea, over Orcas Island on the 
east flank of Elysium, down over Cim-meria again. Floating like a seed. Some 
days the world went black and white: icebergs on the sea, looking into the sun; 
tundra swans against black cliffs; black guillemots flying over the ice; snow 
geese. And nothing else in all the day.
Ceaseless wandering. He flew around the northern parts of the world two or three 
times, looking down at the land and the ice, at all the changes taking place 
everywhere, at all the little settlements huddling in their tents, or out 
braving the cold winds. But all the looking in the world couldn’t make the 
sorrow go away.
 
One day he came on a new harbor town at the entry to the long skinny fjord of 
Marwth Vallis, and found his Zy-gote creche mates Rachel and Tiu had moved 
there. Nirgal hugged them, and over a dinner and afterward he stared at their 
oh-so-familiar faces with intense pleasure. Hiroko was gone but his brothers and 
sisters remained, and that was something; proof that his childhood was real. And 
despite all the years they looked just like they had when they were children; 
there was no real difference. Rachel and he had been friends, she had had a 
crush on him in the early years, and they had kissed in the baths; he recalled 
with a little shiver a time when she had kissed him in one ear, Jackie in the 
other. And, though he had almost forgotten it, he had lost his virginity with 
Rachel, one afternoon in the baths, shortly before Jackie had taken him out into 
the dunes by the lake. Yes, one afternoon, almost accidentally, when their 
kissing had suddenly become urgent and exploratory, a matter of their bodies 
moving outside their own volition.
Now she regarded him fondly—a woman his age, her face a map of laugh lines, 
cheery and bold. She may have recalled their early encounter as little as he 
did—hard to say what his siblings remembered of their shared bizarre 
childhood—but she looked like she remembered. She had always been friendly, and 
she was again now. He told her about his flights around the world, carried by 
the ceaseless winds, diving slowly against the blimp’s buoyancy down to one 
little habitation after another, asking after Hiroko.
Rachel shook her head, smiling ironically. “If she’s out there, she’s out there. 
But you could look forever and never find her.”
Nirgal heaved a troubled sigh, and she laughed and tousled his hair.
“Don’t look for her.”
That evening he walked along the strand, just uphill from the devastated 
berg-strewn shoreline of the northern sea. He felt in his body that he needed to 
walk, to run. Flying was too easy, it was a dissociation from the world—things 
were small and distant—again, it was the wrong end of the telescope. He needed 
to walk.
Still he flew. As he flew, however, he looked more closely at the land. Heath, 
moor, streamside meadows. A creek falling directly into the sea over a short 
drop, another one crossing a beach. Salt creeks into a fresh ocean. In some 
places they had planted forests, to try to cut down on dust storms that 
originated in this area. There were still dust storms, but the trees of the 
forest were saplings still. Hiroko might be able to sort it out. Don’t look for 
her. Look at the land.
 
He flew back to Sabishii. There was still a lot of work to be done there, 
clearing away burned buildings and then building new ones. Some construction 
co-ops were still accepting new members. One was doing reconstruction but was 
also building blimps and other fliers, including some experimental birdsuits. He 
talked with them about joining.
He left his blimpglider in town with them, and took long runs out onto the high 
moors east of Sabishii. He had run these uplands during his student years. A lot 
of the ridge runs were familiar still; beyond them, new ground. A high land, 
with its moorish life. Big kami boulders stood here and there on the rumpled 
land, like sentinels.
One afternoon, running an unfamiliar ridge, he looked down into a small high 
basin like a shallow bowl, with a break opening to lower land to the west. Like 
a glacial cirque, though more likely it was an eroded crater with a break in its 
rim, making a horseshoe ridge. About a kilometer across—quite shallow. Just a 
rumple among the many rumples on the Tyrrhena massif. From the encircling ridge 
the horizons were far away, the land below lumpy and irregular.
It seemed familiar. Possibly he had visited it on an over-nighter in his student 
years. He hiked slowly down into the basin, and still felt like he was on top of 
the massif; something about the dark clean indigo of the sky, the spacious long 
view out the gap to the west. Clouds rolled overhead like great rounded 
icebergs, dropping dry granular snow, which was chased into cracks or out of the 
basin entirely by the hard wind. On the circling ridge, near the northwest point 
of the horseshoe, there was a boulder sitting like a stone hut. It stood on four 
points on the ridge, a dolmen worn to the smoothness of an old tooth. The sky 
over it lapis lazuli.
Nirgal walked back down to Sabishii and looked into the matter. The basin was 
untended, according to the maps and records of the Tyrrhena Massif Areography 
and Ecopoesis Council. They were pleased he was interested. “The high basins are 
hard,” they told him. “Very little grows. It’s a long project.”
“Good.”
“You’ll have to grow most of your food in greenhouses. Potatoes, however—once 
you get enough soil, of course—”
Nirgal nodded.
They asked him to drop by the village of Dingboche, the one nearest the basin, 
and make sure no one there had plans for it.
So he drove back up, in a little caravan with Tariki and Rachel and Tiu and some 
other friends who had gathered to help. They drove over a low ridge and found 
Dingboche, set on a little wadi that was now being farmed, mostly in 
hardscrabble potato fields. There had been a snowstorm, and all the fields were 
white rectangles, divided by low black walls of stacked stones. A number of long 
low stone houses, with plate-rock roofs and thick square chimneys, were 
scattered among the fields, with several more clustered at the village’s upper 
end. The longest building in this cluster was a two-storied teahouse, with a big 
mattress-filled room to accommodate visitors.
In Dingboche as in much of the southern highlands the gift economy still 
predominated, and Nirgal and his companions had to endure a near potlatching 
when they stayed for the night. The locals were very happy when he inquired 
about the high basin, which they called variously the little horseshoe, or the 
upper hand. “It needs looking after.” They offered to help him get started.
So they went up to the high cirque in a little caravan, and dumped a load of 
gear on the ridge near the house boulder, and stuck around long enough to clear 
a first little field of stones, walling it with what they cleared. A couple of 
them experienced in construction helped him to make the first incisions into the 
ridge boulder. During this noisy drilling some of the Dingboche locals cut away 
at the exterior of the rock, carving in Sanskrit lettering Om Mani Padme Hum, as 
seen on innumerable mani stones in the Himalayas, and now all over the southern 
highlands. The locals chipped away the rock between the fat cursive letters, so 
that the letters stood out in raised relief against a rougher, lighter 
background. As for the boulder house itself, eventually he would have four rooms 
hacked out of the boulder, with triple-paned windows, solar panels for heat and 
power, water from a snowmelt pumped up to a tank placed higher on the ridge, and 
a composting toilet and graywater facility.
Then they were off. Nirgal had the basin to himself.
He walked around on it for many days without doing anything but looking. Only 
the tiniest part of the basin would be his farm—just some small fields inside 
low stone walls, and a greenhouse for vegetables. And a cottage industry, he 
wasn’t sure what. It wouldn’t be self-sufficient, but it would be settling in. A 
project.
And then there was the basin itself. A small channel already ran down the 
opening out to the west, as if to suggest a watershed. The cupped hand of rock 
was already a microclimate, tilted to the sun, slightly sheltered from the 
winds. He would be an ecopoet.


 
 
 
 
 
First he had to learn the land, with that as his project it was amazing how busy 
every day became, there was an endless number of things to do; but no structure, 
no schedule, no rush; no one to consult; and every day, in the last hours of 
summer light, he would walk around the ridge, and inspect the basin in the 
failing light. It was already colonized by lichen and the other first settlers; 
fellfields filled the hollows, and there were small mosaics of arctic ground 
cover in the sunny exposures, mounds of green moss humped on red soil less than 
a centimeter thick. Snowmelt coursed down a number of rivulet channels, pooling 
and dropping through any number of potential meadow terraces, little diatom 
oases, falling down the basin to meet in the gravel wadi at the gate to the land 
below, a flat meadow-to-be behind the residual rim. Ribs higher in the basin 
were natural dams, and after some consideration, Nirgal carried some ventifacts 
to these low ribs, and assembled them with their facets touching so that the 
ribs were heightened by just one or two rocks’ height. Snowmelt would collect in 
meadow ponds, banked by moss. The moors just east of Sabishii resembled what he 
had in mind, and he called up ecopoets who lived on those moors, and asked about 
species compatibility, growth rates, soil amendment and the like. In his mind 
developed a vision of the basin; then in second March the autumn came, the year 
heading toward aphelion, and he began to see how much of the landscaping would 
be done by wind and winter. He would have to wait and see.
He spread seeds and spores by hand, casting them away from bags or growth media 
dishes latched to his belt, feeling like a figure from Van Gogh or the Old 
Testament; it was a peculiar sensation of mixed power and helplessness, action 
and fate. He arranged for loads of topsoil to be trucked up and dumped on some 
of the little fields, and then he spread it out by hand, thinly. He brought in 
worms from the university farm at Sabishii. Worms in a bottle, Coyote had always 
called people in cities; observing the writhing mass of moist naked tubules, 
Nirgal shuddered. He released the worms onto his new little plots. Go, little 
worm, prosper on the land. He himself, walking around on the sunny mornings 
after a shower, was no more than moist linked naked tubules. Sentient worms, 
that’s what they were, in bottles or on the land.
After the worms it would be moles and voles. Then mice. Then snow rabbits, and 
ermine, and marmots; perhaps then some of the snow cats wandering the moors 
would drop by. Foxes. The basin was high, but the pressure they were hoping for 
at this altitude was four hundred millibars, with forty percent of that oxygen; 
they were already most of the way there. Conditions were somewhat as in the 
Himalayas. Presumably all of Earth’s high-altitude flora and fauna would be 
viable here, and all the new engineered variants; and with so many ecopoets 
stewarding small patches of the upland, the problem would be mostly a matter of 
prepping the ground, introducing the basic ecosystem desired, and then 
supporting it, and watching what came in on the wind, or walked in, or flew. 
These arrivals could be problematic of course, and there was a lot of talk on 
the wrist about invasion biology, and integrated microcline management; figuring 
out one’s locality’s connections to the larger region was a big part of the 
ongoing work of ecopoesis.
Nirgal got even more interested in this matter of dispersal the next spring, in 
first November when the snows melted, and poking out of the late slush on the 
flat terraces of the northern side of the basin were sprigs of snow alumroot. He 
hadn’t planted them, he had never heard of them, indeed he wasn’t even sure of 
his identification, until his neighbor Yoshi dropped by one week and confirmed 
it: Heuchera nivalis. Blown in on the wind, Yoshi said. There was a lot of it in 
Escalante Crater to the north. Not much of it in between; but that was jump 
dispersal for you.
Jump dispersal, spread dispersal, stream dispersal: all three were common on 
Mars. Mosses and bacteria were spread dispersing; hydrophilic plants were 
stream-dispersing along the sides of glaciers, and the new coastlines; and 
lichen and any number of other plants were jump-dispersing on the strong winds. 
Human dispersion showed all three patterns, Yoshi remarked as they wandered over 
the basin discussing the concept—spreading through Europe and Asia and Africa, 
streaming down the Americas and along the Australian coasts, jumping out to the 
Pacific Islands (or to Mars). It was common to see all three methods used by 
highly adaptable species. And the Tyrrhena massif was up in the wind, catching 
the westerlies and also the summer trade winds, so that both sides of the massif 
got precipitation; nowhere more than twenty centimeters a year, which would have 
made it desert on Earth, but in the southern hemisphere of Mars, that was a 
precipitation island. In that way too a dispersion catchment, and so very 
invasible.
So. High barren rocky land, dusted with snow wherever shade predominated, so 
that the shadows tended to be white. Little sign of life except in basins, where 
the ecopoets helped along their little collections. Clouds surged in from west 
in the winter, east in the summer. The southern hemisphere had the seasons 
reinforced by the perihelion-aphelion cycle, so that they really meant 
something. On Tyrrhena the winters were hard.
Nirgal wandered the basin after storms, looking to see what had blown in. 
Usually it was only a load of icy dust, but once he found an unplanted clutch of 
pale blue Jacob’s ladders, tucked between the splits in a breadloaf rock. Check 
the botanicals to see how it might interact with what was already there. Ten 
percent of introduced species survived, then ten percent of those became pests; 
that was invasion biology’s ten-ten rule, Yoshi said, almost the first rule of 
the discipline. “Ten meaning five to twenty, of course.” Once Nirgal weeded out 
a springtime arrival of common street-grass, fearing it would take over 
everything. Same with tundra thistle. Another time a heavy dust load fell on an 
autumn wind. These dust storms were small compared to the old global 
southern-summer storms, but occasionally a hard wind would tear up the desert 
pavement somewhere and send the dust below flying. The atmosphere was thickening 
rapidly these days, fifteen millibars a year on average. Each year the winds had 
more force, and so thicker areas of pavement were at risk of being torn away. 
The dust that fell was usually a very thin layer, however, and often high in 
nitrates; so it was like a fertilizer, to be washed into the soil by the next 
rain.
Nirgal bought a position in the Sabishii construction coop he had looked into. 
He went in often to work on the town’s buildings. Up in the basin he did some 
assembly and testing of solo blimpgliders. His work cottage was a small building 
made of stone-stacked walls, with plates of sandstone for shingles. Between that 
work and the farming in the greenhouse and his potato patch, and the ecopoesis 
in the basin, his days were full.
He flew the completed blimpgliders down to Sabishii, and stayed in a little 
studio above in his old teacher Tariki’s rebuilt house in the old city, living 
there among ancient issei who looked and sounded very much like Hiroko. Art and 
Nadia lived there too, raising their daughter Nikki. Also in town were Vijjika, 
and Reull, and Annette, all old friends from his student days—and there was the 
university itself, no longer called the University of Mars, but simply Sabishii 
College—a small school that still ran in the amorphous style of the demimonde 
years, so that the more ambitious students went to Elysium or Sheffield or 
Cairo; those who came to Sabishii were those fascinated by the mystique of the 
demimonde years, or interested in the work of one of the issei professors.
All these people and activities made Nirgal feel strangely, even uncomfortably, 
at home. He put in long days as a plasterer and general laborer on various 
construction jobs his co-op had around town. He ate in rice bars and pubs. He 
slept in the loft in Tariki’s garage, and looked forward to the days he returned 
to the basin.
One night he was walking home late from a pub, asleep on his feet, when he 
passed a small man sleeping on a park bench: Coyote.
Nirgal stopped short. He walked over to the bench. He stared and stared. Some 
nights he heard coyotes howling up in the basin. This was his father. He 
remembered all those days hunting for Hiroko, without a clue where to look. But 
here his father slept on a city park bench. Nirgal could call him anytime, and 
always that bright cracked grin, Trinidad itself. Tears started to his eyes; he 
shook his head, composed himself. Old man lying on a park bench. One saw it 
fairly frequently. A lot of the issei had gotten here and gone off somehow, into 
the back country for good, so that when they came into a city they slept in the 
parks.
Nirgal went over and sat on the end of the bench, just beyond his father’s head. 
Gray tatty dreadlocks. Like a drunk. Nirgal just sat with him, looking at the 
undersides of the linden trees around the bench. It was a quiet night. Stars 
ticked through the leaves.
Coyote stirred, twisted his head and glanced up. “Who dat.”
“Hey,” Nirgal said.
“Hey!” Coyote said, and sat up. He rubbed at his eyes. “Nirgal, man. You startle 
me there.”
“Sorry. I was walking by and saw you. What are you doing?”
“Sleeping.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Well, I was. Far as I know that was all I was doing.”
“Coyote, don’t you have a home?”
“Why no.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No.” Coyote bleared a grin at him. “I’m like that awful vid program. The world 
is my home.”
Nirgal only shook his head. Coyote squinted as he saw that Nirgal was not 
amused. He stared at him for a long time from under half-mast eyelids, breathing 
deeply. “My boy,” he said at last, dreamily. The whole city was quiet. Coyote 
muttered as if falling asleep. “What does the hero do when the tale is over? 
Swim over the waterfall. Drift out on the tide.”
“What?”
Coyote opened his eyes fully, leaned toward Nirgal. “Do you remember when we 
brought Sax into Tharsis Tholus and you sat with him, and afterward they said 
you brought him back to life? That kind of thing—think about that.” He shook his 
head, leaned back on the bench. “It’s not right. It’s just a story. Why worry 
about that story when it’s not yours anyway. What you’re doing right now is 
better. You can walk away from that kind of story. Sit in a park at night like 
any ordinary person. Go anywhere you please.”
Nirgal nodded, uncertain.
“What I like to do,” Coyote said sleepily, “is go to a sidewalk cafe and toss 
down some kava and watch all the faces. Go for a walk around the streets and 
look at people’s faces. I like to look at women’s faces. So beautiful. And some 
of them so ... so something. I don’t know. I love them.” He was falling asleep 
again. “You’ll find your way to live.”
 
Guests who occasionally visited him in the basin included Sax, Coyote, Art and 
Nadia and Nikki, who got taller every year; she was taller than Nadia already, 
and seemed to regard Nadia like a nanny or a great-grandmother—much as Nirgal 
himself had regarded her, in Zygote. Nikki had inherited Art’s sense of fun, and 
Art himself encouraged this, egging her on, conspiring with her against Nadia, 
watching her with the most radiant pleasure Nirgal had ever seen on an adult 
face. Once Nirgal saw the three of them sitting on the stone wall by his potato 
patch, laughing helplessly at something Art had said, and he felt a pang even as 
he too laughed; his old friends were now married, with a kid. Living in that 
most ancient pattern. Faced with that, his life on the land did not seem so 
substantial after all. But what could he do? Only a few people in this world 
were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it 
to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act. Few could be 
expected to have all that, and then to have things go well. The rest had to make 
do.
 
So he lived in his high basin, grew some of his food, worked on co-op projects 
to pay for the rest. He flew down to Sabishii once a month in a new aircraft, 
enjoyed his stay of a week or two, and went back home. Art and Nadia and Sax 
came up frequently, and much less often he hosted Maya and Michel, or Spencer, 
all of whom lived in Odessa— or Zeyk and Nazik, who brought news of Cairo and 
Mangala that he tried not to hear. When they left he went out onto the arcing 
ridge and sat on one of his sitting boulders, and looked at the meadows 
stringing through the talus, concentrating on what he had, on this world of the 
senses, rock and lichen and moss campion.
The basin was evolving. There were moles in the meadows, marmots in the talus. 
At the end of the long winters the marmots came out of hibernation early, nearly 
starving, their internal clocks still set to Earth. Nirgal set out food for them 
in the snow, and watched from his house’s upper windows as they ate it. They 
needed help to get through the long winters to spring. They regarded his house 
as a source of food and warmth, and two marmot families lived in the rocks under 
it, whistling their warning whistle when anyone approached. Once they warned him 
of people from the Tyrrhena committee on the introduction of new species, asking 
him for a species list, and a rough census; they were beginning to formulate a 
local “native inhabitant” list, which, once formed, would allow them to make 
judgments on any subsequent introductions of fast-spreading species. Nirgal was 
happy to join this effort, and apparently so was everyone else doing ecopoesis 
on the massif; as a precipitation island, hundreds of kilometers from the 
nearest others, they were developing their own mix of high-altitude fauna and 
flora, and there was a growing sentiment to regard this mix as “natural” to 
Tyrrhena, to be altered only by consensus.
The group from the committee left, and Nirgal sat with the house marmots, 
feeling odd. “Well,” he said to them, “now we’re indigenous.”
 
He was happy in his basin, above the world and its concerns. In the spring new 
plants appreared from nowhere, and some he greeted with a trowel of compost, 
others he plucked out and turned into compost. The greens of spring were unlike 
any other greens—light electric jades and limes of bud and leaf, new blades of 
emerald grass, blue nettles, red leaves. And then later the flowers, that 
tremendous expense of a plant’s energy, the push beyond survival, the 
reproductive urge all around him ... sometimes when Na-dia and Nikki came back 
from their walks holding miniature bouquets in their big hands, it seemed to 
Nirgal that the world made sense. He would eye them, and think about children, 
and feel some wild edge in him that was not usually there.
It was a feeling generally shared, apparently. Spring lasted 143 days in the 
southern hemisphere, coming all the way back from the harsh aphelion winter. 
More plants bloomed as the spring months passed, first early ones like 
promise-of-spring and snow liverwort, then later ones such as phlox and heather, 
then saxifrage and Tibetan rhubarb, moss campion and alpine nailwort, 
cornflowers and edelweiss, on and on until every patch of green carpet in the 
rocky palm of the basin was touched with brilliant dots of cyanic blue, dark 
pink, yellow, white, each color waving in a layer at the characteristic height 
of the plant holding it, all of them glowing in the dusk like drips of light, 
welling out into the world from nowhere—a pointillist Mars, the ribbiness of the 
seamed basin etched in the air by this scree of color. He stood in a cupped rock 
hand which tilted its snowmelt down a lifeline crease in the palm, down into the 
wide world so far below, a vast shadowy world that loomed to the west under the 
sun, all hazy and low. The last light of day seemed to shine slightly upward.
One clear morning Jackie appeared on his house AI screen, and announced she was 
on the piste from Odessa to Libya, and wanted to drop by. Nirgal agreed before 
he had time to think.
He went down to the path by the outlet stream to greet her. Little high basin . 
. . there were a million craters like it in the south. Little old impact. 
Nothing the slightest bit distinguished about it. He remembered Shining Mesa, 
the stupendous yellow view at dawn.
They came up in three cars, bouncing wildly over the terrain, like kids. Jackie 
was driving the first car, Antar the second. They were laughing hard as they got 
out. Antar didn’t seem to mind losing the race. They had a whole group of young 
Arabs with them. Jackie and Antar looked young themselves, amazingly so; it had 
been a long time since Nirgal had seen them, but they had not changed at all. 
The treatments; current folk wisdom was to get it done early and often, ensuring 
perpetual youth and balking any of the rare diseases that still killed people 
from time to time. Balking death entirely, perhaps. Early, often. They still 
looked like they were fifteen m-years old. But Jackie was a year older than 
Nirgal, and he was almost thirty-three m-years old now, and feeling older. 
Looking at their laughing faces, he thought, I’ll have to get the treatment 
myself someday.
So they wandered around, stepping on the grass and ooh-ing and ahhing at the 
flowers, and the basin seemed smaller and smaller with every exclamation they 
made. Near the end of their visit Jackie took him to one side, looking serious.
She said, “We’re having trouble holding off the Terrans, Nirgal. They’re sending 
up almost a million a year, just like you said they never could. And these new 
arrivals aren’t joining Free Mars like they used to. They’re still supporting 
their home governments. Mars isn’t changing them fast enough. If this goes on, 
then the whole idea of a free Mars will be a joke. I sometimes wonder if it was 
a mistake to leave the cable up.”
She frowned and twenty years jumped onto her face all at once. Nirgal suppressed 
a little shudder.
“It would help if you weren’t hiding here,” she exclaimed with sudden anger, 
dismissing the basin with a wave of her hand. “We need everyone we can get to 
help. People still remember you now, but in a few years. . ..”
So he only had to wait a few more years, he thought. He watched her. She was 
beautiful, yes. But beauty was a matter of the spirit, of intelligence, 
vivacity, empathy. So that while Jackie grew ever more beautiful, at the same 
time she grew less beautiful. Another mysterious infolding. And Nirgal was not 
pleased by this internal loss in Jackie, not in any way; it was only one more 
note in the chord of his Jackie pain, really. He didn’t want it to be true.
“We can’t really help them by taking more immigrants,” she said. “That was 
wrong, when you said that on Earth. They know it too. They can see it better 
than we can, no doubt. But they send people anyway. And you know why? You know 
why? Just to wreck things here. Just to make sure there isn’t someplace where 
people are doing it right. That’s their only reason.”
Nirgal shrugged. He didn’t know what to say; probably there was some truth to 
what she had said, but it was just one of a million different reasons for people 
to come; there was no reason to fix on it.
“So you won’t come back,” she said at last. “You don’t care.”
Nirgal shook his head. How to say to her that she was not worried about Mars, 
but about her own power? He wasn’t the one who could tell her that. She wouldn’t 
believe him. And maybe it was only true to him anyway.
Abruptly she stopped trying to reach him. A regal glance at Antar, and Antar did 
the work of gathering their coterie into the cars. A final questioning look; a 
kiss, full on the mouth, no doubt to bother Antar, or him, or both of them; like 
an electric shock to the soul; and she was off.
 
He spent the afternoon and the next day wandering, sitting on flat rocks and 
watching the little rivulets bounce downstream. Once he remembered how fast 
water had fallen on Earth. Unnatural. No. But this was his place, known and 
loved, every dyad and every clump of campion, even the speed of water as it 
lofted off stone and plashed down in its smooth silver shapes. The way moss felt 
under the finger pads. His visitors were people for whom Mars was forever an 
idea, a nascent state, a political situation. They lived in the tents and they 
might as well have been in a city anywhere, and their devotion, while real, was 
given to some cause or idea, some Mars of the mind. Which was fine. But for 
Nirgal now it was the land that mattered, the places where water arrived just 
so, trickling over the billion-year-old rock onto pads of new moss. Leave 
politics to the young, he had done his part. He didn’t want to do anymore. Or at 
least he wanted to wait until Jackie was gone. Power was like Hiroko, after 
all—it always slipped away. Didn’t it? Meanwhile, the cirque like an open hand.
 
But then one morning when he went out for a dawn walk, there was something 
different. The sky was clear, its purest morning purple, but a juniper’s needles 
had a yellowish tinge to them, and so did the moss, and the potato leaves on 
their mounds.
He plucked the yellowest samples of needles and sprigs and leaves, and took them 
back to the workbench in his greenhouse. Two hours’ work with microscope and AI 
did not find any problem, and he went back out and pulled up some root samples, 
and bagged some more needles and leaves and blades and flowers. Much of the 
grass had a wilted look, though it wasn’t a hot day.
Heart thudding, stomach taut, he worked all day and into the night. He could 
discover nothing. No insects, no pathogens. But the potato leaves in particular 
looked yellow. That night he called Sax and explained the situation. By 
coincidence Sax was visiting the university in Sabishii, and he drove up the 
next morning in a little rover, the latest from Spencer’s co-op.
“Nice,” Sax said as he got out and looked around. He checked Nirgal’s samples in 
the greenhouse. “Hmm,” he said. “I wonder.”
He had brought some instruments in his car, and they lugged them into the 
boulder and he went to work. At the end of a long day he said, “I can’t find 
anything. We’ll have to take some samples down to Sabishii.”
“You can’t find anything?”
“No pathogen. No bacteria, no virus.” He shrugged. “Let’s take several 
potatoes.”
They went out and dug potatoes from the field. Some of them were gnarled, 
elongated, cracked. “What is it?” Nirgal exclaimed.
Sax was frowning a little. “Looks like spindle tuber disease.”
“What causes it?”
“A viroid.”
“What’s that?”
“A bare RNA fragment. Smallest known infectious agent. Strange.”
“Ka.” Nirgal felt his stomach clamping inward. “How did it get here?”
“On a parasite, probably. This kind seems to be infecting grass. We need to find 
out.”
So they gathered samples, and drove back down to Sabishii.
Nirgal sat on a futon on the floor of Tariki’s living room, feeling sick. Tariki 
and Sax talked long after dinner, discussing the situation. Other viroids had 
been appearing in a rapid dispersal from Tharsis; apparently they had made it 
across the cordon sanitaire of space, arriving on a world that had been 
previously innocent of them. They were smaller than viruses, much smaller, and 
quite a bit simpler. Nothing but strands of RNA, Tariki said, about fifty 
nanometers long. Individuals had a molecular weight of about 130,000, while the 
smallest known viruses had molecular weights of over a million. They were so 
small that they had to be centrifuged at over 100,000 g in order to be pulled 
out of suspension.
The potato-spindle-tuber viroid was well understood, Tariki told them, tapping 
around on his screen and pointing at the schematics called up. A chain of merely 
359 nucleo-tides, lined out in a closed single strand with short double-strand 
regions braiding it. Viroids like this one caused several plant diseases, 
including pale cucumber disease, chrysanthemum stunt, chlorotic mottle, 
cadang-cadang, citrus exocortis. Viroids had also been confirmed as the agent in 
some animal brain diseases, like scrapie, and kuru, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob 
disease in humans. The viroids used host enzymes to reproduce, and then were 
taken to be-regulatory molecules in the nuclei of infected cells, disturbing 
growth-hormone production in particular.
The particular viroid in Nirgal’s basin, Tariki said, had mutated from potato 
spindle tuber. They were still identifying it in the labs at the university, but 
the sick grass made him sure they were going to find something different, 
something new.
Nirgal felt sick. The names of the diseases alone were enough to do it. He 
stared at his hands, which had been plunged thick in infected plants. Through 
the skin, into the brain, some kind of spongiform encephalopathy, mushroom 
growths of brain blooming everywhere.
“Is there anything we can do to fight it?” he said.
Sax and Tariki looked at him.
“First,” Sax said, “we have to find out what it is.”
 
That turned out to be no simple matter. After a few days, Nirgal returned to his 
basin. There he could at least do something; Sax had suggested removing all the 
potatoes from the potato fields. This was a long dirty task, a kind of negative 
treasure hunt, as he turned up diseased tuber after tuber. Presumably the soil 
itself would still hold the viroid. It was possible he would have to abandon the 
field, or even the basin. At best, plant something else. No one yet understood 
how viroids reproduced; and the word from Sabishii was that this might not even 
be a viroid as previously understood.
“It’s a shorter strand than usual,” Sax said. “Either a new viroid, or something 
like a viroid but smaller still.” In the Sabishii labs they were calling it “the 
virid.”
A long week later, Sax came back up to the basin. “We can try to remove it 
physically,” he said over dinner. “Then plant different species, ones that are 
resistant to viroids. That’s the best we can do.”
“But will that work?”
“The plants susceptible to infection are fairly specific. You got hit by a new 
one, but if you change grasses, and types of potatoes—perhaps cycle out some of 
your potato-patch soil....” Sax shrugged.
Nirgal ate with more appetite than he *had had for the previous week. Even the 
suggestion of a possible solution was a great relief. He drank some wine, felt 
better and better. “These things are strange, eh?” he said over an after-dinner 
brandy. “What life will come up with!”
“If you call it life.”
“Well, of course.”
Sax didn’t reply.
“I’ve been looking at the news on the net,” Nirgal said. “There are a lot of 
infestations. I had never noticed before. Parasites, viruses....”
“Yes. Sometimes I worry about a global plague. Something we can’t stop.”
“Ka! Could that happen?”
“There’s all kinds of invasions going on. Population surges, sudden die-offs. 
All over. Things in disequilibrium. Upsetting balances we didn’t even know 
existed. Things we don’t understand.” As always this thought made Sax unhappy.
“Biomes will eventually come into equilibrium,” Nirgal suggested.
“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”
“As equilibrium?”
“Yes. It may be a matter of. . . .” He waved his hands about like gulls. 
“Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium.”
“Punctuated change?”
“Perpetual change. Braided change—sometimes surging change—”
“Like cascading recombinance?”
“Perhaps.”
“I’ve heard that’s a mathematics only a dozen people can really understand.”
Sax looked surprised. “That’s never true. Or else, true of every math. Depends 
on what you mean by understand. But I know a bit of that one. You can use it to 
model some of this stuff. But not predict. And I don’t know how to use it to 
suggest any—reactions on our part. I’m not sure it can be used that way.” He 
talked for a while about Vlad’s notion of holons, which were organic units that 
had subunits and also were subunits of greater holons, each level combining to 
create the next one up in emergent fashion, all the way up and down the great 
chain of being. Vlad had worked out mathematical descriptions of these 
emergences, which turned out to come in more than one kind, with different 
families of properties for each kind; so if they could get enough information 
about the behavior of a level of holons and the next level up, they could try to 
fit them into these mathematical formulae, and see what kind of emergence they 
had; then perhaps find ways to disrupt it. “That’s the best approach we can take 
for things this little.” “ The next day they called up greenhouses in Xanthe, to 
ask for shipments of new starts, and flats of a new strain of Himalayan-based 
grass. By the time they arrived, Nirgal had pulled out all the grass in the 
basin, and much of the moss. The work made him sick, he couldn’t help it; once, 
seeing a concerned marmot patriarch chattering at him, he sat down and burst 
into tears. Sax had retreated into his customary silence, which only made things 
worse, as it always reminded Nirgal of Simon, and of death generally. He needed 
Maya or some other courageous expressive speaker of the inner life, of anguish 
and fortitude; but here was Sax, lost in thoughts that seemed to happen in some 
kind of foreign language, in a private idiolect he was now unwilling to 
translate.
They went to work planting new starts of Himalayan grasses throughout the basin, 
concentrating on the stream banks and their veinlike tracery under the trickles 
and ice. A hard freeze actually helped, as it killed the infected plants faster 
than the ones free of infection. They incinerated the infected plants in a kiln 
down the massif. People came from the surrounding basins to help, bringing 
replacement starts for planting later.
Two months passed, and the invasion surge weakened.
The plants that remained seemed to be more resistant. Newly planted plants did 
not get infected or die. The basin looked like it was autumn, though it was 
midsummer; but the dying had stopped. The marmots looked thin, and more 
concerned than ever; they were a worrying species. And Nir-gal could see their 
point. The basin looked ravaged. But it seemed the biome would survive. The 
yiroid was subsiding, eventually they could hardiy even find it, no matter how 
hard and long they centrifuged samples. It seemed to have left the basin, as 
mysterious in departure as in arrival.
Sax shook his head. “If the viroids that infect animals ever get more 
robust....” He sighed. “I wish I could talk to Hi-roko about it.”
“I’ve heard them say she’s at the north pole,” Nirgal said sourly.
“Yes.”
“But?”
“I don’t think she’s there. And—I don’t think she wants to talk to me. But I’m 
still. . . I’m waiting.”
“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.
Sax nodded.
They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko— mother, lover—she had 
abandoned them both.
But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave, Nirgal gave him a 
bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”
“What will you do now?”
“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”
“Ah! Good luck.”
Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off, waving once before 
putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the rib and gone.
 
So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to 
give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite 
load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and mi-crobial 
fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into 
Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind 
of potato.
Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the 
Claritas region near Senzeni Na— at their latitude, but all the way around the 
world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next 
couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; 
kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the 
last minute it veered north.
They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it 
came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static 
electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread didn’t 
make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only 
residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.
But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might as well have 
been night—a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and rattling the outer 
window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked pensively. Then the howl 
lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt more and more sick the less 
the wind howled—until the air was still, and he was so nauseated he could 
scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms sometimes did this; they ended 
abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind, or a particular landform. And 
then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines. It was raining dust now, in 
fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash were settling over the 
world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even the biggest dust storms 
would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at the end of their runs. But 
with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds so much more powerful, great 
quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and if they came down all at 
once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much deeper than a few 
millimeters.
As near suspension as some fines were, in an hour all but the very finest had 
fallen out of the air and onto them. After that it was only a hazy afternoon, 
windless, the air filled with something like a thin smoke, so that they could 
see the whole of the basin; which was covered with a lumpy blanket of dust.
Nirgal went out with his mask on as always, and dug desperately with a shovel, 
then with his bare hands. Sax came out, staggering through the soft drifts, to 
put a hand to Nirgal’s shoulder. “I don’t believe there’s anything that can be 
done.” The layer of dust was about a meter deep, or deeper. In time, other winds 
would blow some of this dust away. Snow would fall on the rest of it, and when 
the snow melted, the resulting mud would run over the spillways, and a new 
leaf-vein system of channels would cut a new fractal pattern, much like the old 
one. Water would carry the dust and fines away, down the massif and into the 
world. But by the time that happened, every plant and an-irnal in the basin 
would be dead.


 
 
 
PART NINE
               ----------
---Natural History
               ----------
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
Afterward Nirgal went with Sax up to Da Vinci, and stayed with the old man in 
his apartment. One night Coyote dropped by, after the timeslip when no one else 
would have thought to visit.
Briefly Nirgal told him what had happened to the high basin.
“Yeah, so?” Coyote said.
Nirgal looked away.
Coyote went to the kitchen and started scrabbling through Sax’s refrigerator, 
shouting back into the living room through a full mouth. “What did you expect on 
a windy hillside like that? This world is not a garden, man. Some of it going to 
get buried every year, that’s just the way it is. Another wind come in a year or 
ten and blow all that dust off your hill.”
“Everything will be dead by then.”
“That’s life. Now it’s time to do something else. What were you doing before you 
set in there?”
“Looking for Hiroko.”
“Shit.” Coyote appeared in the doorway, pointing a big kitchen knife right at 
Nirgal. “Not you too.”
“Yes me too.”
“Oh come on. When you going to grow up. Hiroko is dead. You might as well get 
used to it.”
Sax came in from his office, blinking hard. “Hiroko is alive,” he said.
“Not you too!” Coyote cried. “You two are like children!”
“I saw her on the south flank ofArsia Mows, in a storm.”
“Join the fucking party, man.”
Sax blinked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Fuck.”
Coyote went back into the kitchen.
“There have been other sightings,” Nirgal said to Sax. “Reports are fairly 
common.”
“I know that—”
“Reports are daily!” Coyote shouted from the kitchen. He charged back into the 
living room. “People see her every day! There’s a spot on the wrist to report 
sightings! Last week I see she appeared in two different places on the same 
night, in Noachis and on Olympus! Opposite sides of the world!”
“I don’t see that that proves anything,” Sax said stubbornly. “They say the same 
sort of thing about you, and I see you’re still alive.”
Coyote shook his head violently. “No. I am the exception that proves the rule. 
Anyone else, when they are reported in two places at once, that means they are 
dead. A sure sign.” He made a stop thrust to forestall Sax’s next remark, 
shouted “She’s dead! Face it! She died in the attack on Sabishii! Those UNTA 
storm troopers caught her and Iwao and Gene and Rya and all the rest of them, 
and they took them to some room and sucked the air or pulled the trigger. That’s 
what happens! Do you think it never happens? Do you think that secret police 
haven’t killed dissidents and then disappeared the bodies so that no one ever 
finds out? It happens! Fuck yes it happens, even on your precious Mars it 
happens, yes and more than once! You know it’s true! It happened. That’s how 
people are. They’ll do anything, they’ll kill people and figure they’re just 
earning their keep or feeding their children or making the world safe. And 
that’s what happened. They killed Hiroko and all the rest of them too.”
Nirgal and Sax stared. Coyote was quivering, he looked like he was going to stab 
the wall.
Sax cleared his throat. “Desmond—what makes you so sure?”
“Because I looked! I looked. I looked like no one else could look. She’s not in 
any of her places. She’s not anywhere. She didn’t get out. No one has really 
seen her since Sabishii. That’s why you’ve never heard from her. She’s not so 
inhuman she would let us go all this time without ever letting us know.”
“But I saw her,” Sax insisted.
“In a storm, you said. In a bit of trouble, I suppose. Saw her for a little 
while, just long enough to get you out of trouble. Then gone for good.”
Sax blinked.
Coyote laughed harshly. “So I thought. No, that’s fine. Dream about her all you 
want. Just don’t get that confused with reality. Hiroko is dead.”
Nirgal looked back and forth between the two silent men. “I’ve looked for her 
too,” he said. And then, seeing the blasted look on Sax’s face: 
“Anything’spossible.”
Coyote shook his head. He went back into the kitchen, muttering to himself. Sax 
looked at Nirgal, stared right through him.
“Maybe I’ll try looking for her again,” Nirgal told him.
Sax nodded.
“Beats farming,” Coyote said from the kitchen.


 
 
 
 
 
Recently Harry Whitebook had found a method for increasing animal tolerance to 
CO2, by introducing into mammals a gene which coded for certain characteristics 
of crocodile hemoglobin. Crocodiles could hold their breath for a very long time 
underwater, and the CO2 that should have built up in their blood actually 
dissolved there into bicarbonate ions, bound to amino acids in the hemoglobin, 
in a complex that caused the hemoglobin to release oxygen molecules. High CO2 
tolerance was thus combined with increased oxygen-ation efficiency, a very 
elegant adaptation, and as it turned out fairly easy (once Whitebook showed the 
way) to introduce into mammals by utilizing the latest trait transcription 
technology: designed strands of the DNA repair enzyme photolyase were assembled, 
and these would patch the descriptions for the trait into the genome during the 
geron-tological treatments, changing slightly the hemoglobin properties of the 
subject.
Sax was one of the first people to have this trait administered to him. He liked 
the idea because it would obviate the need for a face mask in the outdoors, and 
he was spending a lot of his time outdoors. Carbon-dioxide levels in the 
atmosphere were still at about 40 millibars of the 500 total at sea level, the 
rest consisting of 260 millibars nitrogen, 170 millibars oxygen, and 30 of 
miscellaneous noble gases.
So there was still too much CO2 for humans to tolerate without filter masks. But 
after trait transcription he could walk free in the air, observing the wide 
array of animals with similar trait transcriptions already out there. All of 
them monsters together, settling into their ecological niches, in a very 
confusing flux of surges, die-offs, invasions and retreats—everything vainly 
seeking a balance that could not, given the changing climate, exist. No 
different than life on Earth had ever been, in other words; but here all 
happening at a much faster rate, pushed by the human-driven changes, 
modifications, introductions, transcriptions, translations— the interventions 
that worked, the interventions that backfired—the effects unintended, 
unforeseen, unnoticed—to the point where many thoughtful scientists were giving 
up any pretense of control. “Let happen what may,” as Spencer would say when he 
was in his cups. This offended Michel’s sense of meaning, but there was nothing 
to be done about that, except to alter Michel’s sense of what was meaningful. 
Contingency, the flux of life: in a word, evolution. From the Latin, meaning the 
unrolling of a book. And not directed evolution either, not by a long shot. 
Influenced evolution perhaps, accelerated evolution certainly (in some aspects, 
anyway), But not managed, nor directed. They didn’t know what they were doing. 
It took some getting used to.
 
So Sax wandered around on Da Vinci Peninsula, a rectangular chunk of land 
surrounding the round rim hill of Da Vinci Crater, and bounded by the Simud, 
Shalbatana, and Ravi fjords, all of which debouched onto the southern end of 
Chryse Gulf. Two islands, Copernicus and Galileo, lay to the west, in the mouths 
of the Ares and Tiu fjords. A very rich braiding of sea and land, perfect for 
the burgeoning of life—the Da Vinci lab techs could not have chosen a better 
site, although Sax was quite sure they had had no sense at all of their 
surroundings when they chose the crater for the underground’s hidden aerospace 
labs. The crater had had a thick rim and was located a good distance from 
Burroughs and Sabishii, and that had been that. Stumbled into paradise. More 
than a lifetime’s observations to be made, without ever leaving home.
Hydrology, invasion biology, areology, ecology, materials science, particle 
physics, cosmology: all these fields interested Sax extremely, but most of his 
daily work in these years concerned the weather. Da Vinci Peninsula got a lot of 
dramatic weather; wet storms swept south down the gulf, dry katabatic winds 
dropped off the southern highland and out the fjord canyons, initiating big 
northward waves at sea. Because they were so close to the equator, the 
perihelion-aphelion cycle affected them much more than the ordinary inclination 
seasons. Aphelion brought cold weather twenty degrees north of the equator at 
least, while perihelion cooked the equator as much as the south. In the 
Januaries and Februaries, sun-warmed southern air lofted into the stratosphere, 
turned east at the tropopause and joined the jet streams in their 
circumnavigations. The jet streams were difluent around the Tharsis Bulge; the 
southern stream carried moisture from Amazonis Bay, and dumped it on Dae-dalia 
and Icaria, sometimes even on the western wall of the Argyre Basin mountains, 
where glaciers were forming. The northern jet stream ran over the Tempe-Mareotis 
highlands, then blew over the North Sea, picking up the moisture for storm after 
storm. North of that, over the polar cap, air cooled and fell on the rotating 
planet, causing surface winds from the northeast. These cold dry winds sometimes 
shot underneath the warmer wetter air of the temperate westerlies, causing 
fronts of huge thunderheads to rise over the North Sea, thunderheads twenty 
kilometers high.
The southern hemisphere, being more uniform than the north, had winds that 
followed even more clearly the physics of air over a rotating sphere: southeast 
trades from the equator to latitude thirty; prevailing westerlies from latitude 
thirty down to latitude sixty; polar easterlies from there to the pole. There 
were vast deserts in the south, especially between latitudes fifteen and thirty, 
where the air that rose at the equator sank again, causing high air pressure and 
hot air that held a lot of water vapor without condensing; it hardly ever rained 
in this band, which included the hyperarid provinces of Solis, Noachis, and 
Hesperia. In these regions the winds picked up dust off the dry land, and the 
dust storms, while more localized than before, were also thicker, as Sax had 
witnessed himself, unfortunately, while up on Tyrrhena with Nirgal.
Those were the major patterns in Martian weather: violent around aphelion, 
gentle during the helionequinoxes; the south the hemisphere of extremes, the 
north of moderation. Or so some models suggested. Sax liked generating the 
simulations that created such models, but he was aware that their match with 
reality was approximate at best; every year on record was an exception of some 
kind, with conditions changing at each stage of the terraforming. And the future 
of their climate was impossible to predict, even if one froze the variables and 
pretended terraformation had stabilized, which it certainly had not. Over and 
over Sax watched a thousand years of weather, altering variables in the models, 
and every time a completely different millennium flitted past. Fascinating. The 
light gravity and the resulting scale height of the atmosphere, the vast 
vertical relief of the surface, the presence of the North Sea that might or 
might not ice over, the thickening air, the perihelion-aphelion cycle, which was 
an eccentricity that was slowly precessing through the inclination seasons; 
these had predictable effects, perhaps, but in combination they made Martian 
weather a very hard thing to understand, and the more he watched, the less Sax 
felt they knew. But it was fascinating, and he could watch the iterations play 
out all day long.
 
Or else just sit out on Simshal Point, watching clouds flow across hyacinth 
skies. Kasei Fjord, off to the northwest, was a wind tunnel for the strongest 
katabatic blows on the planet, winds pouring out of it onto Chryse Gulf at 
speeds that occasionally reached five hundred kilometers an hour. When these 
howlers struck Sax could see the cinnamon clouds marking them, over the horizon 
to the north. Ten or twelve hours later big swells would roll in from the north, 
and rise up and hammer the sea cliffs, fifty-meter-high wedges of water blasting 
to spray against the rock, until the air all over the peninsula was a thick 
white mist. It was dangerous to be at sea during a howler, as he had found out 
once while sailing the coastal waters of the southern gulf, in a little 
catamaran he had learned to operate.
Nicer by far to observe storms from the sea cliffs. No howler today; just a 
steady stiff wind, and the distant black broom of a squall on the water north of 
Copernicus, and the heat of sun on skin. Global average temperature changed 
every year, up and down, mostly up. With time as the horizontal axis, a rising 
mountain range. The Year Without Summer, now an old chasm; actually it had 
lasted three years, but people would not disturb such a name for a mere fact. 
Three Unusually Cold Years—no. It didn’t have what people wanted, some kind of 
compression of the truth, to create a strong trace in the memory, perhaps. 
Symbolic thinking; people needed things thrown together. Sax knew this because 
he spent a lot of time in Sabishii visiting Michel and Maya. People loved drama. 
Maya more than most, perhaps, but it served to show. Limit-case demonstration of 
the norm. He worried about her effect on Michel. Michel seemed not to be 
enjoying life. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, “a return home,” and algos, 
“pain.” Pain of the return home. A very accurate description; despite their 
blurs, words could sometimes be so exact. It was a paradox until you looked into 
how the brain worked, then it became less surprising. A model of the mind’s 
interaction with physical reality, blurred at the edges. Even science had to 
admit it. Not that this meant giving up trying to explain things!
“Come out and do some field studies with me,” he would urge Michel.
“Soon.”
“Concentrate on the moment,” Sax suggested. “Each moment is its own reality. It 
has its particular thisness. You can’t predict, but you can explain. Or try. If 
you are observant, and lucky, you can say, this is why this is happening! It’s 
very interesting!”
“Sax. When did you become such a poet?”
Sax did not know how to answer that. Michel was still stuffed with his immense 
nostalgia. Finally Sax said, “Make time to come out into the field.”
 
In the mild winters when the winds were gentle, Sax took sailing trips around 
the south end of Chryse Gulf. The golden gulf. The rest of the year he stayed on 
the peninsula, and went out from Da Vinci Crater on foot, or in a little car for 
overnighters. Mostly he did meteorology, though of course he looked at 
everything. On the water he would sit and feel the wind in the sail as he 
wandered into one little convolution of the coast after another. On the land he 
would drive in the mornings, looking at the view until he saw a good spot. Then 
he would stop the car and go outside.
Pants, shirt, windbreaker, hiking boots, his old hat; all he needed on this day 
of m-year 65. A fact that never ceased to amaze him. Usually it was in the 
280s—bracing, but he liked it. Global averages were bouncing around the 
mid-270s. A good average, he felt—above freezing—sending a thermal pulse down 
into the permafrost. On its own this pulse would melt the permafrost in about 
ten thousand years. But of course it was not on its own.
He wandered over tundra moss and samphire, kedge and grass. Life on Mars. An odd 
business. Life anywhere, really. Not at all obvious why it should appear. This 
was something Sax had been thinking about recently. Why was there increasing 
order in any part of the cosmos, when one might expect nothing but entropy 
everywhere? This puzzled him greatly. He had been intrigued when Spencer had 
offered an offhand explanation, over beer one night on the Odessa corniche—in an 
expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the 
difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy 
possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order. Sax had been 
surprised to hear such an interesting cosmological notion from Spencer, but 
Spencer was a surprising man. Although he drank too much alcohol.
Lying on the grass looking at tundra flowers, one couldn’t help thinking about 
life. In the sunlight the little flowers stood on their stems glowing with their 
anthracyins, dense with color. Ideograms of order. They did not look like a mere 
difference in entropic levels. Such a fine texture to a flower petal; drenched 
in light, it was almost as if it were visible molecule by molecule: there a 
white molecule, there lavender, there clematis blue. These pointillist dots were 
not molecules, of course, which were well below visible resolution. And even if 
molecules had been visible, the ultimate building blocks of the petal were so 
much smaller than that that they were hard to imagine—finer than one’s 
conceptual resolution, one might say. Although recently the theory group at Da 
Vinci had begun buzzing about developments in superstring theory and quantum 
gravity they were making; it had even gotten to the point of testable 
predictions, which historically had been string theory’s great weakness. 
Intrigued by this reconnection with experiment, Sax had recently started trying 
to understand what they were doing. It meant foregoing sea cliffs for seminar 
rooms, but in the rainy seasons he had done it, sitting in on the group’s 
afternoon meetings, listening to the presentations and the discussions 
afterward, studying the scrawled math on the screens and spending his mornings 
working on Riemann surfaces, Lie algebras, Euler numbers, the topologies of 
compact six-dimensional spaces, differential geometries, Grassmannian variables, 
Vlad’s emergence operators, and all the rest of the mathematics necessary to 
follow what the current generation was talking about.
Some of this math concerning superstrings he had looked into before. The theory 
had existed for almost two centuries now, but it had been proposed speculatively 
long before there was either the math or the experimental ability to properly 
investigate it. The theory described the smallest particles of spacetime not as 
geometrical points but as ul-tramicroscopic loops, vibrating in ten dimensions, 
six of which were compactified around the loops, making them somewhat exotic 
mathematical objects. The space they vibrated in had been quantized by 
twenty-first-century theorists, into loop patterns called spin networks, in 
which lines of force in the finest grain of the gravitational field acted 
somewhat like the lines of magnetic force around a magnet, allowing the strings 
to vibrate only in certain harmonics. These supersymmetrical strings, vibrating 
harmonically in ten-dimensional spin networks, accounted very elegantly and 
plausibly for the various forces and particles as perceived at the subatomic 
level, all the bosons and fer-mions, and their gravitational effects as well. 
The fully elaborated theory therefore claimed to mesh successfully quantum 
mechanics with gravity, which had been the problem in physical theory for over 
two centuries.
All very well; indeed, exciting. But the problem, for Sax and many other 
skeptics, came with the difficulty of confirming any of this beautiful math by 
experiment, a difficulty caused by the very, very, very small sizes of the loops 
and spaces being theorized. These were all in the 10~33 centimeter range, the 
so-called Planck length, and this length was so much smaller than subatomic 
particles that it was hard to imagine. A typical atomic nucleus was about 1(T13 
centimeter in diameter, or one millionth of a billionth of a centimeter. First 
Sax had tried very hard to contemplate that distance for a while; hopeless, but 
one had to try, one had to hold that hopelessly inconceivable smallness in the 
mind for a moment. And then remember that in string theory they were talking 
about a distance twenty magnitudes smaller still—about objects one thousandth of 
one billionth of one billionth the size of an atomic nucleus! Sax struggled for 
ratio; a string, then, was to the size of an atom, as an atom was to the size of 
... the solar system. A ratio which rationality itself could scarcely 
comprehend.
Worse yet, it was too small to detect experimentally. This to Sax was the crux 
of the problem. Physicists had been managing experiments in accelerators at 
energy levels on the order of one hundred GeV, or one hundred times the mass 
energy of a proton. From these experiments they had worked up, with great 
effort, over many years, the so-called revised standard model of particle 
physics. The revised standard model explained a lot, it was really an amazing 
achievement, and it made predictions that could be proved or disproved by lab 
experiment or cosmological observations, predictions that were so varied and had 
been so well fulfilled that physicists could speak with confidence about much of 
what had gone on in the history of the universe since the Big Bang, going as far 
back as the first millionth of a second of time.
String theorists, however, wanted to make a fantastic leap beyond the revised 
standard model, to the Planck distance which was the smallest realm possible, 
the minimum quantum movement, which could not be decreased without contradicting 
the Pauli exclusion principle. It made sense, in a way, to think about that 
minimum size of things; but actually seeing events at this scale would take 
experimental energy levels of at least 1019 GeV, and they could not create 
those. No accelerator would ever come close. The heart of a supernova would be 
more like it. No. A great divide, like a vast chasm or desert, separated them 
from the Planck realm. It was a level of reality fated to remain unknown to them 
in any physical sense.
Or so skeptics maintained. But those interested in the theory had never been 
dissuaded from studying it. They searched for indirect confirmation of the 
theory at the subatomic level, which from this perspective now seemed gigantic, 
and from cosmology. Anomalies in phenomena that the revised standard could not 
explain, might be explained by predictions made by string theory about the 
Planck realm. These predictions had been few, however, and the predicted 
phenomena very difficult to see. No real clinchers had been found. But as the 
decades passed, a few string enthusiasts had always continued to explore new 
mathematical structures, which might reveal more ramifications of the theory, 
might predict more detectable indirect results.
This was all they could do; and it was a very chancy road for physics to take, 
Sax felt. He believed in the experimental testing of theories with all his 
heart. If it couldn’t be tested, it remained math only, and its beauty was 
irrelevant; there were lots of bizarrely beautiful exotic fields of mathematics, 
but if they weren’t modeling the phenomenal world, Sax wasn’t interested.
Now, however, after all the decades of work, they were beginning to make 
progress in ways that Sax found interesting. At the new supercollider in 
Rutherford Crater’s rim, they had found the second Z particle that string theory 
had long predicted would be there. And a magnetic monopole detector, orbiting 
the sun out of the plane of the ecliptic, had captured a trace of what looked to 
be a fractionally charged unconfined particle with a mass as big as a 
bacterium—a very rare glimpse of a “weakly interacting massive particle,” or 
WIMP. String theory had predicted WIMPs would be out there, while the revised 
standard did not call for them. That was thought provoking, because the shapes 
of galaxies showed that they had gravitational masses ten times as large as 
their visible light revealed; if the dark matter could be explained 
satisfactorily as weakly interacting massive particles, Sax thought, then the 
theory responsible would have to be called very interesting indeed.
Interesting in a different way was the fact that one of the leading theorists in 
this new stage of development was working right there in Da Vinci, part of the 
impressive group Sax was sitting in on. Her name was Bao Shuyo. She had been 
born and raised in Dorsa Brevia, her ancestry Japanese and Polynesian. She was 
small for one of the young natives, though still half a meter taller than Sax. 
Black hair, dark skin, Pacific features, very regular and somewhat plain. She 
was  shy with  Sax,  shy with everyone;  she even sometimes stuttered, which Sax 
found extremely endearing. But when she stood up in the seminar room to give a i 
      presentation, she became quite firm in hand if not in voice, [       
writing her equations and notes on the screen very quickly, j       as if doing 
speed calligraphy. Everyone in these moments -        attended to her very 
closely, in effect mesmerized; she had been working at Da Vinci for a year now, 
and everyone ;       there smart enough to recognize such a thing knew that they 
were watching one of the pantheon at work, discovering reality right there 
before their eyes.
The other young turks would interrupt her to ask questions, of course—there were 
many good minds in that group—and if they were lucky, off they would all go 
together, mathematically modeling gravitons and graviti-nos, dark matter and 
shadow matter—all personality and indeed all persons forgotten. Very productive 
exciting sessions; and clearly Bao was the driving force in them, the one they 
relied on, the one they had to reckon with.
It was disconcerting, a bit. Sax had met women in math and physics departments 
before, but this was the only female mathematical genius he had ever even heard 
of, in all the long history of mathematical advancement, which, now that he 
thought of it, had been a weirdly male affair. Was there anything in life as 
male as mathematics had been? And why was that?
Disconcerting in a different way was the fact that areas of Bao’s work were 
based on the unpublished papers of a Thai mathematician of the previous century, 
an unstable young man named Samui, who had lived in Bangkok brothels and 
committed suicide at the age of twenty-three, leaving behind several “last 
problems” in the manner of Fermat, and insisting to the end that all of his math 
had been dictated to him by telepathic aliens. Bao had ignored all that and 
explained some of Samui’s more obscure innovations, and then used them to 
develop a group of expressions called advanced Rovelli-Smolin operators, which 
allowed her to establish a system of spin networks that meshed with 
su-perstrings very beautifully. In effect this was the complete uniting of 
quantum mechanics and gravity at last, the great problem solved—if it were true. 
And true or not, it had been powerful enough to allow Bao to make several 
specific predictions in the larger realms of the atom and the cosmos; and some 
of these had since been confirmed.
So now she was the queen of physics—the first queen of physics—and 
experimentalists in labs all over were on-line to Da Vinci, anxious to have more 
suggestions from her. The afternoon sessions in the seminar room were invested 
with a palpable sense of tension and excitement; Max Schnell would start the 
meeting, and at some point call on Bao; and she would stand and go to the screen 
at the front of the room, plain, graceful, demure, firm, pen flying over the 
screen as she gave them a way to calculate precisely the neutrino mass, or 
described very specifically the ways strings vibrated to form the different 
quarks, or quantized space so that gravitinos were divided into three families, 
and so on; and her colleagues and friends, perhaps twenty men and one other 
woman, would interrupt to ask questions, or add equations that explained side 
issues, or tell the rest of them about the latest results from Geneva or Palo 
Alto or Rutherford; and during that hour, they all knew they were at the center 
of the world.
And in labs on Earth and Mars and in the asteroid belt, following her work, 
unusual gravity waves were noted, in very difficult delicate experiments; 
particular geometric patterns were revealed in the fine fluctuations in the 
cosmic background radiation; dark-matter WIMPs and shadow-matter WISPs were 
being sought out; the various families of leptons and fermions and leptoquarks 
were explained; galactic clumping in the first inflation was provisionally 
solved; and so on. It seemed as if physics might be on the brink of the Final 
Theory at last. Or at least in the midst of the Next Big Step.
 
Given the significance of what Bao was doing, Sax felt shy about speaking to 
her. He did not want to waste her time on trivial things. But one afternoon at a 
kava party, out on one of the arc balconies overlooking Da Vinci’s crater lake, 
she approached him—even more shy and stumbling than he was—so much so that he 
was forced into the very unusual position of trying to put someone else at ease, 
finishing sentences for her and the like. He did that as best he could, and they 
stumbled along, talking about his old Russell diagrams for gravitinos, useless 
now he would have thought, though she said they still helped her to see 
gravitational action. And then when he asked a question about that day’s 
seminar, she was much more relaxed. Yes, clearly that was the way to put her at 
ease; he should have thought of it immediately. It was what he liked himself.
After that, they got in the habit of talking from time to time. He always had to 
work to draw her out, but it was interesting work. And when the dry season came, 
in the fall helionequinox, and he started going out sailing again from the 
little harbor Alpha, he asked her haltingly if she would like to join him, and 
they stuttered their way through a deeply awkward interaction, which resulted in 
her going out with him the next nice day, sailing in one of the lab’s many 
little catamarans.
When day sailing, Sax stayed in the little bay called the Florentine, southeast 
of the peninsula, where Ravi Fjord widened but before it became Hydroates Bay. 
This was where Sax had learned to sail, and where he still felt best acquainted 
with the winds and currents. On longer trips he had explored the delta of fjords 
and bays at the bottom end of the Marineris system, and three or four times he 
had sailed up the eastern side of the Chryse Gulf, all the way to Mawrth Fjord 
and along the Sinai Peninsula.
On this special day, however, he confined himself to the Florentine. The wind 
was from the south, and Sax tacked down into it, enlisting Bao’s help at every 
change of tack. Neither of them said much. Finally, to get things started, Sax 
was forced to ask about physics. They talked about the ways in which strings 
constituted the very fabric of space-time itself, rather than being replacements 
for points in some absolute abstract grid.
Thinking it over, Sax said, “Do you ever worry that work on a realm so far 
beyond the reach of experiment will turn out to be a kind of house of 
cards—knocked over by some simple discrepancy in the math, or some later 
different theory that does the job better, or is more confirmable?”
“No,” Bao said. “Something so beautiful as this has to be true.”
“Hmm,” Sax said, glancing at her. “I must admit I’d rather have something solid 
crop up. Something like Einstein’s Mercury—a known discrepancy in the previous 
theory, which the new theory resolves.”
“Some people would say that the missing shadow matter fills that bill.”
“Possibly.”
She laughed. “You need more, I can see. Perhaps some kind of thing we can do.”
“Not necessarily,” Sax said. “Although it would be nice, of course. Convincing, 
I mean. If something were better understood, so that we could manipulate it 
better. Like the plasmas in fusion reactors.” This was an ongoing problem in 
another lab at Da Vinci.
“Plasmas might very well be better understood if you modeled them as having 
patterns imposed by spin networks.”
“Really?”
“I think so.”
She closed her eyes—as if she could see it all written down, on the inside of 
her eyelids. Everything in the world. Sax felt a piercing stab of envy, of—loss. 
He had always wanted that kind of insight; and there it was, right in the boat 
beside him. Genius was a strange thing to witness.
“Do you think this theory will mean the end of physics?” he asked.
“Oh no. Although we might work out the fundamentals. You know, the basic laws. 
That might be possible, sure. But then every level of emergence above that 
creates its own problems. Taneev’s work only scratches the surface there. It’s 
like chess—we might learn all the rules, but still not be able to play very well 
because of emergent properties. Like, you know, pieces are stronger if they’re 
out in the center of the board. That’s not in the rules, it’s a result of all 
the rules put together.”
“Like weather.”
“Yes. We already understand atoms better than weather. The interactions of the 
elements are too complex to follow.”
“There’s holonomy. Study of whole systems.”
“But it’s just a bunch of speculation at this point. The start of a science, if 
it turns out to work.”
“And so plasmas, though?”
“Those are very homogeneous. There’s only a very few factors involved, so it 
might be amenable to spin-network analysis.”
“You should talk to the fusion group about that.”
“Yes?” She looked surprised.
“Yes.”
Then a hard gust hit, and they spent a few minutes watching the boat respond, 
the mast sucking in sails with a bit of humming until they were reset, and 
running across the strengthening breeze, into the sun. Light flaked off the fine 
black hair gathered at the back of Bao’s neck; beyond that, the sea cliffs of Da 
Vinci. Networks, trembling at the touch of the sun—no. He could not see it, with 
eyes open or closed.
Cautiously he said, “Do you ever wonder about being, you know. Being one of the 
first great women mathematicians?”
She looked startled, then turned her head away. She had thought about it, he 
saw. “The atoms in a plasma move in patterns that are big fractals of the 
spin-network patterns,” she said.
Sax nodded, asked more questions about that. It seemed possible to him that she 
would be able to help Da Vinci’s fusion group with the problems they were having 
engineering a lightweight fusion apparatus. “Have you ever done any engineering? 
Or physics?”
Affronted: “I am a physicist.”
“Well, a mathematical physicist. I was thinking of the engineering side.”
“Physics is physics.”
“True.”
Only once more did he push, and this time indirectly. “When did you first learn 
math?”
“My mom gave me quadratic equations at four, and all kinds of math games. She 
was a statistician, very keen about it all.”
“And the Dorsa Brevia schools... .”
She shrugged. “They were fair. Math was mostly something I did by reading, and 
correspondence with the department in Sabishii.”
“I see.”
And they went back to talking about the new results from CERN; about weather; 
about the sailboat’s ability to point to within a few degrees of the wind. And 
then the following week she went out with him again, on one of his walks on the 
peninsula’s sea cliffs. It was a great pleasure to show her a bit of the tundra. 
And over time, taking him through it step-by-step, she managed to convince him 
that they were perhaps coming close to understanding what was happening at the 
Planck level. A truly amazing thing, he thought, to intuit this level, and then 
make the speculations and deductions necessary to flesh it out and understand 
it, creating a very complex powerful physics, for a realm that was so very 
small, so very far beyond the senses. Awe-inspiring, really. The fabric of 
reality. Although both of them agreed that just as with all earlier theories, 
many fundamental questions were left unanswered. It was inevitable. So that they 
could lie side by side in the grass in the sun, staring as deeply into the 
petals of a tundra flower as ever one could, and no matter what was happening at 
the Planck level, in the here and now the petals glowed blue in the light with a 
quite mysterious power to catch the eye.
 
Actually, lying on the grass made it clear how much the permafrost was melting. 
And the melt lay on a hardpan of still-frozen ground, so that the surface became 
saturated and boggy. When Sax stood up, his ventral side chilled instantly in 
the breeze. He spread his arms to the sunlight. Photon rain, vibrating across 
the spin networks. In many regions heat exhaust from nuclear power plants was 
being directed down into capillary galleries in the permafrost, he told Bao as 
they walked back to the rover. This was causing trouble in some wet areas, which 
were tending to saturate at the surface. The land melting, so to speak. Instant 
wetlands. A very active biome, in fact. Though the Reds objected. But most of 
the land that would have been affected by permafrost melt was now under the 
North Sea anyway. What little remained above the sea was to be treasured as 
swamps and marshes.
The rest of the hydrosphere was almost equally transformative of the surface. It 
couldn’t be helped; water was a very effective carver of rock, hard though it 
was to believe when watching a gossamer waterfall drift down a sea cliff, 
turning to white mist long before it hit the ocean. Then again there was the 
sight of the massive giant howler waves, battering the cliffs so hard that the 
ground shook underfoot. A few million years of that and those cliffs would be 
significantly eroded.
“Have you seen the riverine canyons?” she asked.
“Yes, I saw Nirgal Vallis. Remarkable how satisfying it was to see water down at 
its bottom. So apt.”
“I didn’t know there was so much tundra out here.”
Tundra was the dominant ecology for much of the southern highlands, he told her. 
Tundra and desert. In the tundra, fines were fixed very effectively to the 
ground; no wind could lift mud, or quicksand, of which there was a good 
quantity, making it dangerous to travel in certain regions. But in the deserts 
the powerful winds ripped great quantities of dust into the sky, cooling 
temperatures while they darkened the day, and causing problems where they 
landed, as they had for Nirgal. Suddenly curious, he said, “Have you ever met 
Nirgal?”
The sandstorms these days were nothing like the long-forgotten Great Storm of 
course, but still a factor that had to be considered. Desert pavement formed by 
microbacteria was one very promising solution, though it tended to fix only the 
top centimeter of deposits, and if the wind tore the edge of the pavement, what 
was underneath was then free to be borne away. Not an easy problem. Dust storms 
would be with them for centuries.
Still, an active hydrosphere. Meaning life everywhere.
 
Bao’s mother died in a small plane crash, and Bao as the youngest daughter had 
to go home and take care of things, including possession of the family home. 
Ultimogeniture in action, modeled on the Hopi matriarchy, he was told. Bao 
wasn’t sure when she would be back; there was even a chance she wouldn’t be. She 
was matter-of-fact about it, it was just something that had to be done. 
Withdrawn already into an internal world. Sax could only wave good-bye to her 
and walk back to his room, shaking his head. They would understand the 
fundamental laws of the universe before they had even the slightest handle on 
society. A particularly obdurate subject of study. He called Michel on screen 
and expressed something like this, and Michel said, “It’s because culture keeps 
progressing.”
Sax thought he could see what Michel meant—there were rapid changes in attitudes 
to many things. Werteswandel, as Bela called it, mutation of values. But they 
still lived in a society struggling with archaisms of all sorts. Primates 
banding into tribes, guarding a territory, praying to a god like a cartoon 
parent. . .. “Sometimes I don’t think there’s been any progress at all,” he 
said, feeling strangely disconsolate.
“But Sax,” Michel protested, “right here on Mars we have seen both patriarchy 
and property brought to an end. It’s one of the greatest achievements in human 
history.”
“If true.”
“Don’t you think women have as much power as men now?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“Perhaps even more, when it comes to reproduction.”
“That would make sense.”
“And the land is in the shared stewardship of everyone.
We still own personal items as property, but land as property has never happened 
here. That’s a new social reality, we struggle with it every day.”
So they did. And Sax remembered how bitter the conflicts had been in the old 
days, when property and capital had been the order of the day. Yes, perhaps it 
was true: patriarchy and property were in the process of being dismantled. At 
least on Mars, at least for now. As with string theory, it might take a long 
time to work it into any proper state. After all Sax himself, who had no 
prejudices whatsoever, had been amazed to see a woman mathematician at work. Or, 
to be more precise, a woman genius. By whom he had been promptly hypnotized, so 
to speak, along with every other man in the theory group—to the point of being 
rendered quite distraught by her departure. Uneasily he said, “On Earth people 
seem to be fighting just as much as before.”
Even Michel had to admit it. “Population pressures,” he said, trying to wave 
them away. “There are too many people down there, and more all the time. You saw 
what it was like during our visit. As long as Earth is in that situation, Mars 
is under threat. And so we fight up here too.”
Sax took the point. In a way it was comforting; human behavior not as 
irreducibly evil or stupid, but as responding, semirationally, to a given 
historical situation, a danger. Seizing what one could, with the notion that 
there might not be enough for all; doing everything possible to protect one’s 
offspring; which of course endangered all offspring, by the aggregate of 
individual selfish actions. But at least it could be called an attempt at 
reason, a first approximation.
“It’s not as bad as it was, anyway,” Michel was saying. “Even on Earth people 
are having far fewer children. And they’re reorganizing into collectives pretty 
well, considering the flood and all the trouble that preceded it. A lot of new 
social movements down there, a lot of them inspired by what we’re doing here. 
And by what Nirgal does. They’re still watching him and listening to him, even 
when Tie doesn’t speak. What he said during our visit there is still having a 
big effect.”
“I believe it.”
“Well, there you are! It’s getting better, you have to admit it. And when the 
longevity treatments stop working, there will come a balance of births and 
deaths.”
“We’ll hit that time soon,” Sax predicted glumly.
“Why do you say so?”
“Signs of it cropping up. People dying from one thing or other. Senescence is 
not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have kicked in—it’s a 
wonder we’ve done as much as we have. There’s probably a purpose in senescence. 
Avoiding overpopulation, perhaps. Making room for new genetic material.”
“That bodes poorly for us.”
“We’re already over two hundred percent the old average lifetime.”
“Granted, but even so. One doesn’t want it to end just because of that.”
“No. But we have to focus on the moment. Speaking of which, why don’t you come 
out into the field with me? I’ll be as upbeat as you want out there. It’s very 
interesting.”
“I’ll try to free up some time. I’ve got a lot of clients.”
“You’ve got a lot of free time. You’ll see.”
 
In this particular moment, the sun was high. Rounded white clouds were piling up 
in the air overhead, forming great masses that would never come again, though at 
the moment they were as solid as marble, and darkening at their bottoms. 
Cumulonimbus. He was standing on Da Vinci Peninsula’s western cliff again, 
looking across Shalbatana Fjord to the cliff edging the east side of Lunae 
Planum. Behind him rose the flat-topped hill that was the rim of Da Vinci 
Crater. Home base. He had lived there a long time now. These days their co-op 
was making many of the satellites being put up into orbit, and the boosters as 
well, in collaboration with Spencer’s lab in Odessa, and a great number of other 
places. A Mondragon-style cooperative, operating the ring of labs and homes in 
the rim, and the fields and lake filling the crater floor. Some of them chafed 
at restrictions imposed by the courts on projects they had in mind, involving 
new power plants that would put out too much heat. In the last few years the GEC 
had been issuing K rations, as they were called, giving communities the right to 
add some fraction of a degree Kelvin to the global warming. Some Red communities 
were doing their best to get assigned K rations and then not use them. This 
action, along with ongoing incidences of ecotage, kept the global temperature 
from rising very fast no matter what other communities did. Or so the other 
communities argued. But the ecocourts were still parsimonious with the K 
rations. Cases were judged by a provincial ecocourt, then the judgment was 
approved by the GEC, and that was it: no appeals, unless you could get a 
petition signed by fifty other communities, and even then the appeal was only 
dropped into the morass of the global legislature, where its fate was up to the 
undisciplined crowd in the duma.
Slow progress. Just as well. With the global average temperatures above 
freezing, Sax was content. Without the constraint of the GEC, things could 
easily get too warm. No, he was in no further hurry. He had become an advocate 
of stabilization.
Now, out in the sun of a perihelion day, it was an invigorating 281 K, and he 
was walking along the sea-cliff edge of Da Vinci, looking at alpine flowers in 
the cracks of the rubble, then past them to the distant quantum sheen of the 
fjord’s sunny surface, when down the cliff edge walking his way came a tall 
woman, wearing a face mask and jumper, and big hiking boots: Ann. He recognized 
her instantly— that stride, no doubt about it—Ann Clayborne, in the flesh.
 
This surprise brought a double jolt to his memory—of Hiroko, emerging out of the 
snow to lead him to his rover— then of Ann, in Antarctica, striding over rock to 
meet him— but for what?
Confused, he tried to track the thought. Double image—a fleet single image—
Then Ann was before him and the memories were gone, forgotten like a dream.
 
He had not seen her since forcing the gerontological treatment on her in Tempe, 
and he was acutely uncomfortable; possibly this was a fright reaction. Of course 
it was unlikely she would physically assault him. Though she had before. But 
that was never the kind of assault that worried him. That time in Antarctica—he 
grasped for the elusive memory, lost it again. Memories on the edge of 
consciousness were certain to be lost if one made any deliberate effort to 
retrieve them. Why that should be was a mystery. He didn’t know what to say.
“Are you immune to carbon dioxide now?” she asked through her face mask.
He explained about the new hemoglobin treatment, struggling for each word, in 
the way he had after his stroke. Halfway through his explanation, she laughed 
out loud. “Crocodile blood now, eh?”
“Yes,” he said, guessing her thought. “Crocodile blood, rat mind.”
“A hundred rats.”
“Yes. Special rats,” he said, striving for accuracy. Myths after all had their 
own rigorous logic, as Levi-Strauss had shown. They had been genius rats, he 
wanted to say, a hundred of them and geniuses every one. Even his miserable 
graduate students had had to admit that.
“Minds altered,” she said, following his drift.
“Yes.”
“So, after your brain damage, altered twice,” she noted.
“That’s right.” Depressing when you thought of it that way. Those rats were far 
from home. “Plasticity enhancement. Did you . . . ?”
“No. I did not.”
So it was still the same old Ann. He had been hoping she would try the drugs on 
her own recognizance. See the light. But no. Although in fact the woman before 
him did not look like the same Ann, not exactly. The look in her eye; he had 
gotten used to a look from her that seemed a certain signal of hatred. Ever 
since their arguments on the Ares, and perhaps before. He had had time to get 
used to it. Or at least to learn it.
Now, with a face mask on, and a different expression around her eyes, it was 
almost like a different face. She was watching him closely, but the skin around 
the eyes was no longer so knotted. Wrinkled, she and he were both maximally 
wrinkled, but the pattern of wrinkles was that of a relaxed musculature. It 
seemed possible the mask even hid a small smile. He didn’t know what to make of 
it.
“You gave me the gerontological treatment,” she said.
“Yes.”
Should he say he was sorry if he wasn’t? Tongue-tied, lockjawed, he stared at 
her like a bird transfixed by a snake, hoping for some sign that it was all 
right, that he had done the right thing.
She gestured suddenly at their surroundings. “What are you trying to do now?”
He struggled to understand her meaning, which seemed to him as gnomic as a koan. 
“I’m out looking,” he said. He couldn’t think what to say. Language, all those 
beautiful precious words, had suddenly scattered away, like a flock of startled 
birds. All out of reach. That kind of meaning gone. Just two animals, standing 
there in the sun. Look, look, look!
She was no longer smiling, if she had been. Neither was she looking daggers at 
him. A more evaluative look, as if he were a rock. A rock; with Ann that surely 
indicated progress.
But then she turned and walked away, down the sea cliff toward the little 
seaport at Zed.


 
 
 
 
 
Sax returned to Da Vinci Crater feeling mildly stunned. Back inside they were 
having their annual Russian Roulette Party, in which they selected the year’s 
representatives to the global legislature, and also the various co-op posts. 
After the ritual of names from a hat, they thanked the people who had done these 
jobs for the previous year, consoled those to whom the lot had fallen this year, 
and, for most of them, celebrated once again having been passed over.
The random selection method for Da Vinci’s administrative jobs had been adapted 
because it was the only way to get people to do them. Ironically, after all 
their efforts to give every citizen the fullest measure of self-management, the 
Da Vinci techs had turned out to be allergic to the work involved. They only 
wanted to do their research. “We should give the administration entirely to 
AIs,” Konta Arai was saying, as he did every year, between sips from a foaming 
stein of beer. Aonia, last year’s representative to the duma, was saying to this 
year’s selection, “You go to Man-gala and sit around arguing, and the staff does 
what work there is. Most of it has been drained off to the council or the courts 
or the parties. It’s Free Mars apparatchiks who are really running this planet. 
But it’s a really pretty town, nice sailing in the bay, and iceboating in the 
winter.”
Sax wandered away. Someone was complaining about the many new harbor towns 
springing up in the south gulf, to near them for comfort. Politics in its most 
common forn complaint. No one wanted to do it but everyone was happ to complain 
about it. This kind of talk would go on fc about half an hour, and then they 
would cycle back to tall ing about work. There was one group doing that ahead; 
Sax could tell by the tone of their voices; he wandered ove and found they were 
talking about fusion. Sax stopped: appeared they were excited by recent 
developments in the lab in the quest for a pulsed fusion propulsion engine. Cor 
tinuous fusion had been achieved decades before, but took extremely massive 
tokamaks to do it, assemblages to big and heavy and expensive to be used in many 
situation This lab, however, was attempting to implode small pellei of fuel many 
times in rapid sequence, and use the fusio results to power things.
“Did Bao talk to you about this?” Sax asked.
“Why yes, before she left she was coming over to talk wit us about plasma 
patterns, it wasn’t immediately helpfu this is really macro compared to what she 
does, but she’s s damn smart, and afterward something she said set Yanand off on 
how we could seal off the implosion and still leave space for emission 
afterward.”
They needed their lasers to hit the pellets on all sides ; once, but there also 
had to be a vent for charged partich to escape. Bao had apparently been 
interested in the prol lem, and now they returned to a lively discussion of i 
which they thought they had solved at last; and whe someone dropped into the 
circle and mentioned the day lottery results, they brushed him off. “Ka, no 
politic please.”
As Sax wandered on, half listening to the conversatior he passed, he was struck 
again by the apolitical nature c most scientists and technicians. There was 
something aboi politics they were allergic to, and he felt it as well, he ha to 
admit it. Politics was irreducibly subjective and comprc mised, a process that 
went entirely against the grain of th scientific method. Was that true? These 
feelings and pre udices were subjective themselves. One could try to regar 
politics as a kind of science—a long series of experiments i communal living, 
say, with all the data consistently cor taminated. Thus people hypothesized a 
system of gove nance, lived under it, examined how they felt about it, the 
changed the system and tried again. Certain constants or principles seemed to 
have emerged over the centuries, as they ran through their experiments and 
paradigms, trying successively closer approximations of systems that promoted 
qualities like physical welfare, individual freedom, equality, stewardship of 
the land, guided markets, rule of law, compassion to all. After repeated 
experiments it had become clear—on Mars at least—that all these sometimes 
contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in 
which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory 
this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, 
created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by 
maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.
Thus political science. And fine, in theory. But it followed that if they 
believed in the theory, people then had to devote a fair amount of time to the 
exercise of their power. That was self-government, by tautology; the self 
governed. And that took time. “Those who value freedom must make the effort 
necessary to defend it,” as Tom Paine had said, a fact which Sax knew because 
Bela had gotten into the bad habit of putting up signs in the halls with such 
inspirational sentiments printed on them. “Science Is Politics by Other Means,” 
another of his signs had announced, rather cryptically.
But in Da Vinci most people did not want to spend their time that way. 
“Socialism will never succeed,” Oscar Wilde had remarked (in handwriting on yet 
another sign), “it takes up too many evenings.” So it did; and the solution was 
to make your friends take up their evenings for you. Thus the lottery method of 
election, a calculated risk, for one might get stuck with the job oneself 
someday. But usually the risk paid off. Which accounted for the gaiety of this 
-annual party; people were pouring in and out of the French doors of the 
commons, onto the open terraces overlooking the crater lake, talking with great 
animation. Even the drafted ones were beginning to cheer up again, after the 
solace of kavajava and alcohol, and perhaps the thought that power after all was 
power; it was an imposition, but the draftees could do some little things that 
no doubt were occurring to them even now—make trouble for rivals, do favors for 
people they wanted to impress, etc. So once again the system had worked; they 
had warm bodies filling the whole polyarchic array, the neighborhood boards, the 
ag board, the water board, the architectural review board, the project review 
council, the economic coordination group, the crater council to coordinate all 
these smaller bodies, the global delegates’ advisory board—all that network of 
small management bodies that progressive political theorists had been suggesting 
in one variation or another for centuries, incorporating aspects of the 
almost-forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker 
management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on. An experiment in 
synthesis. And so far it seemed to be working, in the sense that the Da Vinci 
techs seemed about as self-determined and happy as they had been during the ad 
hoc underground years, when everything had been done (apparently) by instinct, 
or, to be more precise, by the general consensus of the (much smaller) 
population in Da Vinci at that time.
They certainly seemed as happy; out on the terraces they were lining up at big 
pots of kavajava and Irish coffee, or kegs of beer, clumped in talkative groups 
so that the clatter of voices was like the sound of waves, as at any cocktail 
party: an amazing sound, those voices all together. A chorus of talk—it was a 
music that no one consciously listened to but Sax, as far as he could tell; but 
as he listened to it he suspected strongly that the sound of it, heard 
unconsciously, was one of the things that made people at parties so happy and 
gregarious. Get two hundred people together, talking loudly so that each 
conversation could be heard only by its small group: such a music they made!
So running Da Vinci was a successful experiment, despite the fact that the 
citizens showed no interest in it. If they had they might have been less happy. 
Maybe ignoring government was a good strategy. Maybe the definition of good 
government was the government you could safely ignore, “to finally get back to 
my own work!” as one happily buzzed ex-water-board chief was just now saying. 
Self-government not being considered part of one’s own work!
Although of course there were those people who did like the work, something 
about the interplay of theory and practice, the argument, the problem solving, 
the collaboration with other people, the service to others as a kind of gift, 
the endless talk; the power. And these people stayed on to serve two terms, or 
three if they were allowed, and then took on some other volunteer task that was 
going a-begging; indeed, most of these people did more than one task at once. 
Bela, for instance, had claimed not to like the chairmanship of the lab of labs, 
but now he was going directly into the volunteer advisory group, which always 
had a number of spots in danger of being unfilled. Sax wandered over to him: 
“Would you agree with Aonia that Free Mars is dominating global policy?”
“Oh undoubtedly, assuredly. They are simply so big. And they have packed the 
courts, and rigged some things their way. I think they want to control all the 
new asteroid colonies. And to conquer Earth too, for that matter. All the 
politically ambitious young natives are joining the party, like bees to the 
flower.”
“Trying to dominate other settlements. .. .”
“Yes?”
“It sounds like trouble.”
“Yes it does.”
“Have you heard about this lightweight fusion engine they’re talking about?”
“Yes, a little.”
“You might look into backing that a bit more. If we could get engines like that 
into spaceships. . . .”
“Yes? Sax?”
“Transport that fast might have the effect of cracking domination by any one 
party.”
“Do you think so?”
“Well, it would make it a hard situation to control.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Hmm, well, I must think about this further.”
“Yes. Science is politics by other means, remember.”
“Indeed it is! Indeed it is.” And Bela went off to the beer kegs, muttering to 
himself, then greeting another group as they approached him.
So spontaneously there emerged that bureaucratic class that had been the terror 
of so many political theorists: the experts who took control of the polity, and 
supposedly would never relinquish their grip. But to whom would they relinquish 
it? Who else wanted it? No one, as far as Sax could tell. Bela could stay on the 
advirsory board forever if he wanted to. Expert, from the Latin experiri, to 
try. As in experiment. So it was government by the experimenters.
Trying by the triers. In effect government by the interested. So yet another 
kind of oligarchy. But what other choice did they have? Once you had to draft 
members into the governing body, then the notion of self-government as an aspect 
of individual liberty became somewhat paradoxical.
Hector and Sylvia, from Bao’s seminar, broke into Sax’s reverie and invited him 
to come down and hear their music group do a selection of songs from Maria dos 
Buenos Aires. Sax agreed and followed them.
Outside the little amphitheater where the recital was going to take place, Sax 
stopped at a drink table and dispensed another small cup of kava. The festival 
spirit was growing all around them. Hector and Sylvia hurried down to get ready, 
glowing with anticipation. Watching them Sax remembered his recent encounter 
with Ann. If only he had been able to think! Why, he had gone completely 
incoherent! If only he had thought to become Stephen Lindholm again, perhaps 
that would have helped. Where was Ann now, what was she thinking? What had she 
been doing? Did she only wander the face of Mars now, like a ghost, moving from 
one Red station to another? What were the Reds doing now, how did they live? Had 
they been about to bomb Da Vinci, had his chance encounter stopped a raid? No 
no. There were ecoteurs still out there monkey-wrenching projects, but with the 
legal limits on terraform-ing, most Reds had rejoined society somehow; it was 
one mainstream political strand among the rest, vigilant, quick to 
litigate—indeed much more interested in taking on political work than less 
ideological citizens—but still, and by that very tendency, normalized. Where 
then would Ann fit in? With whom did she associate?
Well, he could call her and ask.
But he was afraid to call, afraid to ask. Afraid to talk to her! At least by 
wrist. And apparently in person as well. She had not said what she thought of 
him giving her the treatment against her will. No thanks, no curse; nothing. 
What did she think? What was she thinking?
He sighed, sipped his kava. Down below they were beginning, Hector rolling out a 
recitative in Spanish, his voice so musical and expressive it was almost as if 
Sax could understand him by tone of voice alone.
Ann, Ann, Ann. This obsessive interest in someone else’s thought was so 
uncomfortable. So much easier to concentrate on the planet, on rock and air, on 
biology. It was a ploy Ann herself would understand. And there was in eco-poesis 
something fundamentally intriguing. The birth of a world. Out of their control. 
Still he wondered what she made of it. Perhaps he would run into her again.
 
Meanwhile, the world. He went back out on it again. Rumpled land under the blue 
dome of the sky. The ordinary sky at the equator in spring changed color day by 
day, it took a color chart even to approximate the tone colors; some days it was 
a deep violet blue—clematis blue, or hyacinth blue, or lapis lazuli, or a 
purplish indigo. Or Prussian blue, a pigment made from ferric ferrocyanide, 
interestingly, as there was certainly a lot of ferric material up there. Iron 
blue. Slightly more purple than Himalayan skies as seen in photographs, but 
otherwise like the Terran skies seen at those high altitudes. And combined with 
the rocky indented landscape, it did seem like a high-altitude place. 
Everything: the sky color, the rumpled rock, the cold thin air so pure and 
chill. Everything so high. He walked into the wind, or across the wind, or with 
the wind at his back, and each felt different. In his nostrils the wind was like 
a mild intoxicant, flooding the brain. He stepped on lichen-crusted rocks, from 
slab to slab, as if walking on a personal sidewalk appearing magically out of 
the shatter of the land, up and down, every step just a step, wandering 
attentive to the thisness of each moment. Moment to moment to moment, each one 
discrete, like Bao’s loops of timespace, like the successive positions of a 
finch’s head, the little birds plancking from one quantum pose to the next. It 
appeared on close inspection that moments were not regular units but varied in 
duration, depending on what was happening in them. The wind dropped, no birds in 
sight: everything suddenly still, and oh so silent, except for the buzzing of 
insects; those moments could last several seconds each. Whereas when sparrows 
were dogfighting a crow, the moments were nearly instantaneous. Look very 
closely; sometimes it was a flow, sometimes the planck-planck-planck of 
individual stillnesses.
To know. There were different ways of knowing; but none of them was quite so 
satisfactory, Sax decided, as the direct knowledge of the senses. Out here in 
the brilliant spring light, and the cold wind, he came to the edge of a cliff, 
and looked down onto the ultramarine plate of Simud Fjord, silvered by myriad 
chips of light blazing off the water. Cliffs on the other side were banded by 
stratification lines, some of which had become green ledges lining the basalt. 
Gulls, puffins, terns, guillemots, ospreys, all wheeling in the gulfs of air 
below him.
 
As he learned the different fjords, he found he had his favorites. The 
Florentine, directly southeast of Da Vinci, was a pretty oval of water; a walk 
along the low bluffs overlooking it was continuously picturesque. Thick grass 
grew like a mat over these bluffs, they looked like Sax’s image of the Irish 
coast. The land’s edges were softening as soil and flora began to fill in the 
cracks, holding to mounds that defied the angle of repose, so that one walked 
over pads of ground, swelling between the sharp teeth of still-bare rocks.
Clouds poured inland from the sea to the north, and the rain fell, steady 
deluges that soaked everything. The day after a storm like that the air steamed, 
the land gurgled and dripped, and every step off bare rock was a boggy squish. 
Heath, moor, bog. Gnarly little forests in the low grabens. A quick brown fox, 
seen out of the corner of the eye as it dashed behind a sierra juniper. Away 
from him, after something? No way to know. On business of its own. Waves 
striking the sea cliffs bounced back outward, creating interference patterns 
with the incoming waves that could have come right out of a physics wave tank: 
so beautiful. And so strange, that the world should conform so well to 
mathematical formulation. The unreasonable effectiveness of math; it was at the 
heart of the great unexplainable.
Every sunset was different, as a result of the residual fines in the upper 
atmosphere. These lofted so high that they were often illuminated by the sun 
long after everything else was in twilight’s great shadow. So Sax would sit on 
the western sea cliff, rapt through the setting of the sun, then stay through 
the hour of twilight, watching the sky colors change as the sun’s shadow rose 
up, until all the sky was black; and then sometimes there would appear 
noctilucent clouds, thirty kilometers above the planet, broad streaks gleaming 
like abalone shells.
The pewter sky of a hazy day. The florid sunset in a hard blow. The warmth of 
the sun on his skin, at peace in a windless late afternoon. The patterns of 
waves on the sea below. The feel of the wind, the look of it.
But once in an indigo twilight, under the sparkling array of fat blurry stars, 
he grew uneasy. “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,” Tennyson had written just a 
few years before the discovery. Moonless Mars. It was in this hour that Phobos 
had used to shoot up over the western horizon like a flare. A moment of the 
areophany if ever there was one. Fear and Dread. And he had completed the 
desatellitization himself. They could have popped any military base built on 
Deimos, what had he been thinking? He couldn’t remember. Some kind of desire for 
symmetry; down, up; but symmetry was perhaps a quality prized more by 
mathematicians than other people. Up. Somewhere Deimos was still orbiting the 
sun. “Hmm.” He looked it up on the wrist. A lot of new colonies were starting 
out there: people were hollowing out asteroids, then spinning them to create a 
gravity effect on their insides, then moving in. New worlds.
A word caught his eye: Pseudophobos. He tracked back, read; informal name for an 
asteroid that somewhat resembled the lost moon in size and shape. “Hmmm.” Sax 
tapped around and got a photo. Well, the resemblance was superficial: a triaxial 
ellipsoid, but weren’t they all. Potato-shaped, right size, banged hard on one 
end, a Stickneyesque crater. Stickney; there had been a nice little settlement 
tucked into it. What’s in a name? Say they dropped the pseudo. A couple of mass 
drivers and AIs, some side jets . . . that peculiar moment, when Phobos had shot 
up over the western horizon. “Hmmmmm,” Sax said.
The days passed and the seasons. He did field studies and meteorology. Effects 
of atmospheric pressure on cloud formation. Meaning drives out around the 
peninsula, then a walk, then out with the balloons and kites. Weather balloons 
these days were elegant things, instrument packages less than ten grams, lofted 
by a bag eight meters tall. Capable of rising right into the exosphere.
Sax enjoyed arranging the bag over a smooth patch of sand or grass, the top 
downwind from him, then sitting and holding the delicate little payload in his 
fingers, then flicking the toggle that shot compressed hydrogen into 
thetoalloon, and watching it fill and yank up at the sky. If he held on to the 
line he was almost hauled to his feet, and without gloves on the line would cut 
his palm, as he had quickly learned. Release it then, thump back to the sand, 
watch the round red dot shimmy up through the wind, until it was a pinprick and 
then could no longer be seen. That happened at around a thousand meters, 
depending on the haze in the air; once it had happened as low as 479 meters, 
once as high as 1,352 meters, a very clear day indeed. After that, he would read 
some of the data on his wrist, sitting in the sunshine feeling like a little 
piece of him was sailing up into space. Strange what made one happy.
The kites were just as nice. They were a bit more complex than the balloons, but 
a special pleasure during the autumn, when the trade winds blew strong and 
steady every day. Go out to one of the western sea cliffs, take a short run into 
the wind, get the kite into the air; a big orange box kite, bobbing this way and 
that; then as it got up into the steadier wind it stabilized, and he reeled it 
out feeling the shifts in the wind as subtle quiverings in his arms. Or else he 
wedged a spool pole in a crack, and set the resistance, and watched the kite 
soar up and away. The line was nearly invisible. When the spool ran out the line 
hummed, and if he held it between his fingers, the wind’s fluctuations were 
communicated to him as a kind of music. The kite would stay up for weeks at a 
time, out of sight or, if he kept it low enough, just within sight, a tiny flaw 
in the sky. Transmitting data all the while. A square object was visible at a 
greater distance than a round object of the same area. The mind was a funny 
animal.
 
Michel called up to talk about nothing in particular. This was the hardest kind 
of conversation of all for Sax. The image of Michel would look down and to the 
right, and it would be very clear as he spoke that his mind was elsewhere, that 
he was unhappy, that Sax needed to somehow take the lead.
“Come visit and go for a walk with me,” Sax said again. “I really think you 
should.” How could one emphasize that? “I really think you should.” Throw things 
together. “Da Vinci is like the west coast of Ireland. The end of Europe, all 
green sea cliff over a big plate of water.”
Michel nodded uncertainly.
Then a couple of weeks later there he was, walking down a hall in Da Vinci. “I 
wouldn’t mind seeing the end of Europe.”
“Good man.”
So they went out together on a day trip. Sax drove him west to the Shalbatana 
cliffs, then they got out and walked north, toward Simshal Point. Such a 
pleasure to have his old friend with him in this beautiful place. Seeing any of 
the First Hundred was a welcome break in his routine, a rare event that he 
treasured. The weeks would pass in their comfortable round, and then suddenly 
one of the old family would appear, and it was like a homecoming without the 
home, making him think he perhaps ought to move to Sa-bishii or Odessa someday, 
so that he could experience such a wonderful feeling more often.
And no one’s company pleased him more than Michel’s. Although on this day Michel 
wandered behind, distracted, seemingly troubled. Sax observed this, and wondered 
what he could do to help. Michel had given him so much help in the long months 
of his return to speech—had taught him to think again, had taught him to see 
everything differently. It would be nice if he could do something to repay such 
a gift, even partially.
Well, it would only happen if he said something. So after they stopped, and Sax 
got out the kite and assembled it, he handed the spool to Michel.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll hold the kite ready. You run it up. That way, into the 
wind.” And he held the kite as Michel walked across the grassy mounds, until the 
line was taut and Sax let the kite go as Michel started running, and off it 
went, up up up.
Michel came back grinning. “Here, touch the line—you can feel the wind.”
“Ah,” Sax said. “So you can.” And the nearly invisible line thrummed against his 
fingers.
They sat down and opened Sax’s wicker basket, and took out the picnic lunch he 
had packed. Michel became quiet once again.
“Something is troubling you?” Sax ventured as they ate.
Michel waved a chunk of bread, swallowed. “I think I want to go back to 
Provence.”
“For good?” Sax said, shocked.
Michel frowned. “Not necessarily. But for a visit. I was only just beginning to 
enjoy my last visit there when we had to leave.”
“It’s heavy on Earth.”
“True. But I found the adjustment surprisingly easy.”
“Hmm.” Sax had not liked the return to Terran gravity. Certainly evolution had 
adapted their bodies to it, and it was true that living in .38 g caused an array 
of medical problems. But he was used to the feel of Martian g now, to the point 
he never noticed it; and if he did, it felt good.
“Without Maya?” he said.
“I suppose it would have to be. She doesn’t want to go. She says she will 
someday, but it’s always later, later. She’s working for the credit co-op bank 
in Sabishii, and thinks she’s indispensable. Well, that’s not fair. She just 
doesn’t want to miss any of it.”
“Can you not make a kind of Provence where you live? Plant an olive grove?”
“It’s not the same.”
“No, but. . . .”
Sax didn’t know what to say. He felt no nostalgia for Earth. As for living with 
Maya, he could no more imagine that than he could imagine living in a damaged 
erratic centrifuge. The effect would be much the same. Thus perhaps Michel’s 
desire for solid ground, for the touch of the Earth.
“You should go,” Sax said. “But wait just a little longer. If they get these 
pulsed fusion engines on spaceships, then you could be there fairly soon.”
“But that might cause real problems with Earth’s gravity. I think you need the 
months of the trip to get prepared for it.”
Sax nodded. “What you would need is a kind of exoskel-eton. Inside it you’d feel 
somewhat supported, and therefore as if in a lighter g, perhaps. Those new 
birdsuits I’ve heard of, they must have the capacity to stiffen to something 
like an exoskeleton, or you’d never be able to hold the wings in position.”
“An ever-shifting carapace of carbon,” Michel said with a smile. “A flowing 
shell.”
“Yes. You might be able to wear something like that to walk around in. It 
wouldn’t be so bad.”
“So first we move to Mars, you’re saying, where we have to wear walkers for a 
hundred years—then when we have changed everything, to the extent that we can 
sit out here in the sun ~only slightly freezing, then we move back to Earth, 
where we have to wear walkers again for another hundred years.”
“Or forever after,” Sax said. “That’s correct.”
Michel laughed. “Well, maybe I will go then. When it gets like that.” He shook 
his head. “Someday we’ll be able to do everything we want, eh?”
The sun beat down on them. The wind rustled over the tips of the grass. Each 
blade a green stroke of light. Michel talked about Maya for a while, first 
complaining, then making allowances, then enumerating her good qualities, the 
qualities that made her indispensable, the source of all excitement in life. Sax 
nodded dutifully at every declaration, no matter how much they contradicted the 
ones that had come before. It was like listening to an addict, he imagined; but 
this was the way people were; and he was not so far from such contradictions 
himself.
After a silence had stretched out, Sax said, “How do you think Ann sees this 
kind of landscape now?”
Michel shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for years.”
“She didn’t take the brain plasticity treatment.”
“No. She’s stubborn, eh? She wants to stay herself. But in this world, I’m 
afraid. ...”
Sax nodded. If you saw all the signs of life in the landscape as contaminations, 
as a horrible mold encrusting the pure beauty of the mineral world, then even 
the oxygen blue of the sky would be implicated. It would drive one mad. Even 
Michel thought so: “I’m afraid she will never be sane, not really.”
“I know.”
On the other hand, who were they to say? Was Michel insane because he was 
obsessively concerned with a region on another planet, or in love with a very 
difficult person? Was Sax insane because he could no longer speak well, and had 
trouble with various mental operations as the result of a stroke and an 
experimental cure? He didn’t think so, in either case. But he did believe quite 
firmly that he had been rescued from a storm by Hiroko, no matter what Desmond 
said. This some might consider a sign of, well, of purely mental events seeming 
to have an external reality. Which was often cited as a symptom of insanity, as 
Sax recalled.
“Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to 
see what Michel would say.
“Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking—it’s a very persistent form of 
thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our 
thinking is magical thinking. And so often following archetypal patterns, as in 
Hi-roko’s case, which is like the story of Persephone, or Christ. I suppose that 
when someone like that dies, the shock of the loss is nearly insupportable, and 
then it only takes one grieving friend or disciple to dream of the lost one’s 
presence, and wake up crying ‘I saw her’—and within a week everyone is convinced 
that the prophet is back, or never died at all. And thus with Hiroko, who is 
spotted regularly.”
But I really did see her, Sax wanted to say. She grabbed my wrist.
And yet he was deeply troubled. Michel’s explanation made good sense. And it 
matched up very well with Desmond’s. Both these men missed Hiroko greatly, Sax 
presumed, and yet they were facing up to the fact of her disappearance and its 
most probable explanation. And unusual mental events might very understandably 
occur in the stress of a physical crisis. Maybe he had hallucinated her. But no, 
no, that wasn’t right; he could remember it just as it had happened, every 
detail vivid!
But it was a fragment, he noticed, as when one recalled a fragment of a dream 
upon waking, everything else slipping out of reach with an almost tangible 
squirt, like something slick and elusive. He couldn’t quite remember, for 
instance, what had come right before Hiroko’s appearance, or after. Not the 
details.
He clicked his teeth together nervously. There were all kinds of madness, 
evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them 
staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or 
another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips 
with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not 
know how to construct a life.
Well—still. Here they were, sitting on the Da Vinci sea cliffs. There was no 
need to get too overwrought about these matters, not really. As Nanao would have 
said, what now is lacking? They had eaten a good lunch, were full, not thirsty, 
out in the sun and wind, watching a kite soar far above in the dark velvet blue; 
old friends sitting in the grass, talking. What now was lacking? Peace of mind? 
Nanao would have laughed. The presence of other old friends? Well, there would 
be other days for that. Now, in this moment, they were two old brothers in arms, 
sitting on a sea cliff. After all the years of struggle they could sit out there 
all afternoon if they liked, flying a kite and talking. Discussing their old 
friends and the weather. There had been trouble before, there would be trouble 
again; but here they were.
“How John would have liked this,” Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these 
things. “I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want 
her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were 
something—good. See how beautiful it is—in its own way. In itself, the way it 
all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don’t. It’s too complex. We 
just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it 
this way or that, but the total biosphere.... It’s self-organizing. There’s 
nothing unnatural about it.”
“Well. ...” Michel demurred.
“There isn’t! We can fiddle all we want, but we’re only like the sorcerer’s 
apprentice. It’s all taken on a life of its own.”
“But the life it had before,” Michel said. “This is what Ann treasures. The life 
of the rocks and the ice.”
“Life?”
“Some kind of slow mineral existence. Call it what you will. An areophany of 
rock. Besides, who is to say that these rocks don’t have their own kind of slow 
consciousness?”
“I think consciousness has to do with brains,” Sax said primly.
“Perhaps, but who can say? And if not consciousness as we define it, then at 
least existence. An intrinsic worth, simply because it exists.”
“That’s a worth it still has.” Sax picked up a rock the size of a baseball. 
Brecciated ejecta, from the looks of it: a shat-tercone. Common as dirt, 
actually much more common than dirt. He inspected it closely. Hello, rock. What 
are you thinking? “I mean—here it all is. Still here.”
“But not the same.”
“But nothing is ever the same. Moment to moment everything changes. As for 
mineral consciousness, that’s too mystical for me. Not that I’m automatically 
opposed to mysticism, but still. . ..”
Michel laughed. “You’ve changed a lot, Sax, but you are still Sax.”
“I should hope so. But I don’t think Ann is much of a mystic either.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know. Such a ... such a pure scientist that, that she 
can’t stand to have the data contaminated? That’s a silly way to put it. An awe 
at the phenomena. Do you know what I mean by that? Worship of what is. Live with 
it, and worship it, but don’t try to change it and mess it up, wreck it. I don’t 
know. But I want to know.”
“You always want to know.”
“True. But this I want to know more than most things. More than anything else I 
can think of! Truly.”
“Ah Sax. I want Provence; you want Ann.” Michel grinned. “We’re both crazy!”
They laughed. Photons rained onto their skin, most shooting right through them. 
Here they were, transparent to the world.


 
 
PART TEN
               -----------
---Werteswandel
               -----------
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
It was past midnight, the offices were quiet. The head adviser went to the 
samovar and started dispensing coffee into tiny cups. Three of his colleagues 
stood around a table covered with hand-screens.
From the samovar the head adviser said, “So spheres of deuterium and helium3 are 
struck by your laser array, one after the next. They implode and fusion takes 
places. Temperature at ignition is seven hundred million kelvins, but this is 
okay because it is a local temperature, and very short-lived.”
“A matter of nanoseconds.”
“Good. I find that comforting. Then, okay, the resulting energy is released 
entirely as charged particles, so that they can all be contained by your 
electromagnetic fields—there are no neutrons to fly forward and fry your 
passengers. The fields serve as shield and pusher plate, and also as the 
collection system for the energy used to fuel the lasers. All the charged 
particles are directed out the back, passing through your angled minor apparatus 
which is the door arc for the lasers, and the passage collimates the fusion 
products.”
“That’s right, that’s the neat part,” said the engineer.
“Very neat. How much fuel does it burn?”
“If you want Mars gravity-equivalent acceleration, that’s 
three-point-seventy-three meters per second squared, so assume a ship of a 
thousand tons, three hundred and fifty tons for the people and the ship, and 
six-fifty for the device and fuel—then you have to burn three hundred and 
seventy-three grams a second.”
“Ka, that adds up fairly fast?”
“It’s about thirty tons a day, but it’s a lot of acceleration too. The trips are 
short.”
“And these spheres are how big?”
The physicist said, “A centimeter radius, mass point-twenty-nine grams. So we 
bum twelve hundred and ninety of them per second. That ought to give passengers 
in the ship a good continuous g feel.”
“I should say so. But helium3, isn’t it quite rare?”
The engineer said, “A Galilean collective has started harvesting it out of the 
upper atmosphere of Jupiter. And they may be working out that surface collection 
method on Luna as well, though that’s not been going well. But Jupiter has all 
we’ll ever need.”
“So the ships will carry five hundred passengers.”
“That’s what we’ve been using for our calculations. It could be adjusted, of 
course.”
“You accelerate halfway to your destination, turn around and decelerate for the 
second half of the trip.”
The physicist shook his head. “Short trips yes, longer trips no. You only need 
to accelerate for a few days to be going quite fast. Longer trips you should 
coast through the middle, to save fuel.”
The head adviser nodded, handed the others full cups. They sipped.
The mathematician said, “Travel times will change so radically. Three weeks from 
Mars to Uranus. Ten days from Mars to Jupiter. From Mars to Earth, three days. 
Three days!” She looked around at the others, frowning. “It will make the solar 
system something like Europe in the nineteenth century. Train trips. Ocean 
liners.”
The others nodded. The engineer said, “Now we’re neighbors with people on 
Mercury, or Uranus, or Pluto.”
The head adviser shrugged. “Or for that matter Alpha Cen-tauri. Let’s not worry 
about that. Contact is a good thing. Only connect, the poet says. Only connect. 
Now we will connect with a vengeance.”He raised his cup. “Cheers.”


 
 
 
 
 
Nirgal got in a rhythm and kept it all day. Lung-gom-pa. The religion of 
running, running as meditation or prayer. Zazen, ka zen. Part of the areophany, 
as Martian gravity was integral to it; what the human body could achieve in two 
fifths the pull it had evolved for was a euphoria of effort. One ran as a 
pilgrim, half worshiper half god.
A religion with quite a few adherents these days, loners out running around. 
Sometimes there were organized runs, races: Thread the Labyrinth, Chaos Crawl, 
the Transmari-neris, the Round-the-Worlder. And in between those, the daily 
discipline. Purposeless activity; art for art’s sake. For Nirgal it was worship, 
or meditation, or oblivion. His mind wandered, or focused on his body, or on the 
trail; or went blank. At this moment he was running to music, Bach then Bruckner 
then Bonnie Tyndall, an Elysian neoclassicist whose music poured along like the 
day itself, tall chords shifting in steady internal modulation, somewhat like 
Bach or Bruckner in fact but slower and steadier, more inexorable and grand. 
Fine music to run by, even though for hours at a time he didn’t consciously hear 
it. He only ran.
It was coming time for the Round-the-Worlder, which began every other 
perihelion. Starting from Sheffield the contestants could run east or west 
around the world, without wristpad or any other navigational aid, shorn of 
everything but the information of their senses, and small bags of food and drink 
and gear. They were allowed to choose any route that stayed within twenty 
degrees of the equator (they were tracked by satellite, and disqualified if they 
left the equatorial zone), and all bridges were allowed, including the Ganges 
Strait Bridge, which made routes both north and south of Marineris competitive, 
and created almost as many viable routes as contestants. Nirgal had won the race 
in five of the nine previous runnings, because of his route-finding ability 
rather than his speed; the “Nirgalweg” was considered by many fell runners to be 
in the nature of a mystical achievement, full of counterintuitive extravagance, 
and in the last couple races he had had trackers following him with the plan of 
passing him at the end. But each year he took a different route, and often he 
made choices that looked so bad that some of his trackers gave up and took off 
in more promising directions. Others couldn’t keep up the pace over the two 
hundred days of the circumnavigation, crossing some 21,000 kilometers—it 
required truly long-distance endurance, one had to be able to sustain it as a 
way of life. Running every day.
Nirgal liked it. He wanted to win the next Round-the-Worlder, to have won a 
majority of the first ten. He was out researching the route, checking new 
trails. Many new paths were being built every year, there had been a craze 
recently to inlay staircase trails in the sides of the canyon cliffs and dorsa 
and escarpments that everywhere seamed the outback. The trail he was on now had 
been constructed since he had last been in this area; it dropped down the steep 
cliff wall of a sink in the Aromatum Chaos, and there was a matching trail on 
the opposite wall of the sink. Going straight through Aromatum would add a fair 
bit of verti-cality to a run, but all flatter routes had to swing far to north 
or south, and Nirgal thought that if all the trails were as good as this one, 
the cost in elevation might turn out to be worth it.
The new trail occupied angled cracks in the blocky cliff wall, the steps fitted 
like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and very regular, so that it was like 
running down a staircase in the ruined wall of some giant’s castle. Cliffside 
trailmaking was an art, a lovely form of work that Nirgal had joined from time 
to time, helping to move cut rocks with a crane, to wedge them into position on 
top of the step below—hours in a belay harness, pulling on the thin green lines 
with gloved hands, guiding big polygons of basalt into place. The first trail 
builder Nirgal had met had been a woman constructing a trail along the finback 
of the Geryon Montes, the long ridge on the floor of lus Chasma. He had helped 
her all of one summer, down most of the ridge. She was still in Marineris 
somewhere, constructing trails with her hand tools and high-powered rock saws, 
and pulley systems with superstrong line, and glue bolts stronger than the rock 
itself—painstakingly assembling a sidewalk or staircase from the surrounding 
rock, some trails like miraculously helpful natural features, others like Roman 
roads, others still with a pharaonic or Incan massiveness, huge blocks fitted 
with hairline precision across boulder slopes or large-grained chaos.
Down three hundred steps, counting, then across the sink floor in the hour 
before sunset, the strip of sky a velvet violet glowing over dark cliff walls. 
No trail here on the shadowed sand of the sink floor, and he focused on the 
rocks and plants scattered over it, running between things, his glance caught by 
light-colored flowers on top of round-barreled cacti, glowing like the sky. His 
body was also glowing, with the end of the day’s run, and the prospect of 
dinner, his hunger a gnawing from within, a faintness, getting more unpleasant 
by the minute.
He found the staircase trail on the western cliff wall, up and up, changing 
gears into the uphill push stride, smooth and regular, turning left and right 
with the switchbacks, admiring the elegant placement of the trail in the crack 
system of the cliff, a placement that usually had him running with a waist-high 
wall of rock on the air side, except during the ascent of one bare sheer patch 
of rock, where the builders had been forced to the extremity of bolting in a 
solid magnesium ladder. He hurried up it, feeling his quadriceps like giant 
rubber bands; he was tired.
On a plinth to the left of the staircase there was a flat patch with a great 
view of the long narrow canyon below. He turned off the trail and stopped 
running. He sat down on a rock like a chair. It was windy; he popped his little 
mushroom tent, and it stood before him transparent in the dusk. Bedding, lamp, 
lectern, all pulled hastily from his fanny pack in the search for food, all 
burnished by years of use, and as light as feathers—his gear kit altogether 
weighed less than three kilos. And there they were in their place at the back, 
battery-powered stove and food bag and water bottle.
The twilight passed in Himalayan majesty as he cooked a pot of powdered soup, 
sitting cross-legged on his sleeping pad, leaning back against the tent’s clear 
wall. Tired muscles feeling the luxury of sitting down. Another beautiful day.
 
He slept poorly that night, and got up in the predawn cold wind, and packed up 
quickly, shivering, and ran west again. Out of the last Aromatum jumbles he came 
to the northern shore of Ganges Bay. The dark blue plate of the bay lay to his 
left as he ran. Here the long beaches were backed by wide sand dunes, covered by 
short grass that made for easy running. Nirgal flowed on, in his rhythm, 
glancing at the sea or into the taiga forest off to the right. Millions of trees 
had been planted along this coastline in order to stabilize the ground and cut 
down on dust storms. The great forest of Ophir was one of the least populated 
regions on Mars; it had been rarely visited in the earlier years of its 
existence, and had never been host to a tent town; deep deposits of dust and 
fines had discouraged travel. Now these deposits were somewhat fixed by the 
forest, but bordering the streams were swamps and quicksand lakes, and unstable 
loess bluffs that caused breaks in the lattice roof of branches and leaves. 
Nirgal kept to the border of forest and sea, on the dunes or among stands of 
smaller trees. He crossed several small bridges spanning river mouths. He spent 
a night on the beach, lulled to sleep by the sound of breaking waves.
The next day at dawn he followed the trail under the canopy of green leaves, the 
coast having stopped at the Ganges Chasma dam. The light was dim and cool. 
Everything at this hour looked like a shadow of itself. Faint trails branched 
off uphill to the left. The forest here was conifer for the most part: redwoods 
in tall groves, surrounded by smaller pines and junipers. The forest floor was 
covered by dry needles. In wet places ferns broke through this brown mat, adding 
their archaic fractals to the sun-dappled floor. A stream braided among narrow 
grassy islands. He could rarely see more than a hundred meters ahead. Green and 
brown were the dominant colors; the only red visible was the tint of the 
redwoods’ hairy bark. Shafts of sunlight like slender living beings danced over 
the forest floor. Nirgal ran outside himself, mesmerized as he passed among 
these pencils of light. He skipped on rocks across a shallow creek, in a 
fern-floored glade. It was like crossing a room, with hallways extending to 
similar rooms upstream and down. A short waterfall gurgled to his left.
He stopped for a drink from the far side of the creek. Then as he straightened 
up he saw a marmot, waddling over moss under the waterfall. He felt a quick stab 
to the heart. The marmot drank and then washed its paws and face. It did not see 
Nirgal.
Then there was a rustle and the marmot ran, was buried in a flurry of spotted 
fur—white teeth—a big lynx, pinning the marmot’s throat in powerful jaws, 
shaking the little creature hard, then pressing it still under a big paw.
Nirgal had jumped at the moment of attack, and now as the lynx stood over its 
prey it looked in Nirgal’s direction, as if just now registering the movement. 
Its eyes glittered in the dim light, its mouth was bloody; Nirgal shuddered, and 
when the cat saw him and their gazes locked, he saw it running at him and 
jumping on him, its pointed teeth bright even in the dim light—
But no. It disappeared with its prey, leaving only a bobbing fern.
Nirgal ran on. The day was darker than the cloud shadow could explain, a malign 
dimness. He had to focus on the trail. Light flickered through the shadows, 
white piercing green. Hunter and hunted. Ice-rimmed ponds in the gloom. Moss on 
bark, fern patterns in his peripheral vision. Here a gnarly pile of bristlecone 
pines, there a pit of quicksand. The day was chill, the night would be frigid.
He ran all day. His pack bounced against his back, nearly empty of food. He was 
glad he was nearing his next cache. Sometimes on runs he took only a few 
handfuls of cereal and lived off the land as best he could, gathering pine nuts 
and fishing; but on trips of that kind half of every day had to be spent in the 
search for food, and there wasn’t much to be found. When the fish were biting a 
lake was an incredible cornucopia. Lake people. But on this run he was going 
full tilt from cache to cache, eating seven or eight thousand calories a day, 
and still ravenous every evening. So when he came to the little arroyo 
containing his next cache, and found the arroyo’s side wall collapsed in a 
landslide over it, he shouted with dismay and anger. He even dug for a while at 
the pile of loose rock; it was a small slide; but a couple of tons would have to 
be removed. No chance. He would have to run hard across Ophir to the next cache, 
and go hungry. He took off in the very moment of realization, thinking to save 
time.
Now he looked for edible things as he ran, pine nuts, meadow onions, anything. 
He ate the food left in his pack very slowly, chewing it for as long as he 
could, trying to imagine it to some higher level of nutrient value. Savoring 
every bite. Hunger kept him awake part of every night, though he slept heavily 
through the hours before dawn.
On the third day of this unexpected hunger run he emerged from the forest just 
south of Juventa Chasma, in land broken by the ancient Juventa aquifer outbreak. 
It was a lot of work to make his way through this land on a clean line, and he 
was hungrier than he could ever remember being; and his next cache still two 
days away. His body had eaten all its fat reserves, or so it felt, and was now 
feeding on the muscles themselves. This autocannibalism gave every object a 
sharp edge, tinged with glories—the whiteness shining out of things, as if 
reality itself were going translucent. Soon after this stage, as he knew from 
similar past experiences, the lung-gom-pa state would give way to 
hallucinations. Already there were lots of crawling worms in his eyes, and black 
dots, and circles of little blue mushrooms, and then green lizardlike things 
scurrying along in the sand, right before the blurs of his feet, for hours at a 
time.
It took all the thought he could muster to navigate the broken land. He watched 
the rock underfoot and the land ahead equally, head up and down and up and down, 
in a bobbing motion that had little to do with his thinking, which browsed over 
near and far in an entirely different rhythm. The Juventa Chaos, downhill to his 
right, was a shallow jumbled depression, over which he could see to a distant 
horizon; it was like looking into a big shattered bowl. Ahead the land was 
rumpled and uneven, pits and hillocks covered with boulders and sand drifts, the 
shadows too dark, the sunlit highlights too bright. Dark yet glary; it was near 
sunset again, and his pupils were pinched by the light. Up and down, up and 
down; he came on an ancient dune side, and glissaded down the sand and scree, a 
dreamy descent, left, right, left, each step carrying him down a few meters, 
feet cushioned by sand and gravel shoved off the angle of repose. All too easy 
to get used to that; once on flat ground again it was hard work to return to 
honest jogging, and the next little uphill was devastating. He would have to 
look for a campsite soon, perhaps in the next hollow, or on the next sandy flat 
next to a rock bench. He was starving, faint with lack of food, and nothing in 
his pack but some meadow onions pulled earlier; but it would help to be so 
tired, he would fall asleep no matter what. Exhaustion beat hunger every time.
He stumbled across a shallow depression, over a knob, between two house-sized 
boulders. Then in a flash of white a naked woman was standing before him, waving 
a green sash; he stopped abruptly, he reeled, stunned at the sight of her, then 
concerned that the hallucinations had gotten so out of hand. But there she 
stood, as vivid as a flame, blood streaks spattering her breasts and legs, 
waving the green scarf silently. Then other human figures ran past her and over 
the next little knob, going where she pointed, or so it seemed. She looked at 
Nirgal, gestured to the south as if directing him as well, then took off 
running, her lean white body flowing like something visible in more than three 
dimensions, strong back, long legs, round bottom, already distant, the green 
scarf flying this way and that as she used it to point.
Suddenly he saw three antelope ahead, moving over a hillock to the west, 
silhouetted by the low sun. Ah; hunters. The antelope were being herded west by 
the humans, who were scattered in an arc behind them, waving scarves at them 
from behind rocks. All in silence, as if sound had disappeared from the world: 
no wind, no cries. For a moment, as the antelope stopped on the hillock, 
everyone stopped moving, everyone alert but still; hunters and hunted all frozen 
together, in a tableau that transfixed Nirgal. He was afraid to blink for fear 
the whole scene would wink away to nothing.
The antelope buck moved, breaking the tableau. He rocked forward cautiously, 
step-by-step. The woman with the green sash walked after him, upright and in the 
open. The other hunters popped in and out of view, moving like finches from one 
frozen position to the next. They were barefoot, and wore loincloths or 
singlets. Some of their faces and backs were painted red or black or ochre.
Nirgal followed them. They swerved, and he found himself on their left wing as 
they moved west. This turned out to be lucky, as the antelope buck tried to make 
a break around his side, and Nirgal was in position to jump in its path, waving 
his hands wildly. The three antelope then turned as one, dashed west again. The 
troop of hunters followed, running faster than Nirgal at his fastest, 
maintaining their arc. Nirgal had to work hard just to keep them in sight; they 
were very fast, barefoot or not. It was hard to see them in the long shadows, 
and they stayed silent; oa the other wing of the arc someone yipped once, and 
that was their only sound, except for the squeak and clatter of sand and gravel, 
the harsh breath in their throats. In and out of sight they ran, the antelope 
keeping their distance in short bursts of flowing speed. No human would ever 
catch them. Still Nirgal ran, panting hard, following the hunt. Ahead he spotted 
their prey again. Ah—the antelope had stopped. They had come to the edge of a 
cliff. A canyon rim—he saw the gap and the opposite rim. A shallow fossa, pine 
tops sticking out of it. Had the antelope known it was there? Were they familiar 
with this region? The canyon had not been visible even a few hundred meters 
back. . . .
But perhaps they did know the place, for in the pure flow of animal grace they 
half trotted, half pronged south along the cliff edge to a little embayment. 
This turned out to be the top of a steep ravine, down which rubble siphoned onto 
the canyon floor. As the antelope disappeared down this slot all the hunters 
rushed to the rim, where they looked on as the three animals descended the 
ravine, in an astonishing display of power and balance, clacking from rock to 
rock in tremendous leaps down. One of the hunters howled, “Owwwwwwwww,” and with 
that cry all the hunters hurried over to the head of the ravine, yelping and 
grunting. Nirgal joined the others and dropped over the rim and then they were 
all in a mad descent, clacking and jumping, and though Nirgal’s legs were 
rubbery his endless days of lung-gom now served him well, for he dropped past 
most of the others as he hopped down boulders and glissaded down little 
rockslides, jumping, holding balance, using his hands, making great desperate 
leaps, like everyone else utterly locked into the moment, into the striving for 
a quick descent without a bad fall.
Only when he was successfully on the canyon floor did Nirgal look up again, to 
see that the canyon was filled by the forest he had barely seen from above. 
Trees stood high over a needle-strewn floor of old snow, big fir and pine, and 
then, upcanyon to the south, the unmistakably massive trunks of giant sequoias, 
big trees, trees so huge that the canyon suddenly seemed shallow, though the 
descent of the ravine had taken quite a while. These were the treetops that had 
stuck up over the canyon rim; engineered giant sequoias two hundred meters tall, 
towering like great silent saints, each one extending its arms in a broad circle 
over daughter trees, the fir and pine, the thin patchy snow and the brown needle 
beds.
The antelope had trotted upcanyon into this primeval forest, headed south, and 
with a few happy hoots the hunters followed them, darting past one huge trunk 
after another. The massive cylinders of riven red bark dwarfed everything 
else—they all looked like little animals, like mice, dashing over a snowy forest 
floor in the failing light. Nirgal’s skin tingled down his back and flanks, he 
was still adrenalated from the descent of the ravine, panting and light-headed. 
It was obvious that they could not catch the antelope, he didn’t understand what 
they were doing. Nevertheless he raced between the stupendous trees, following 
the lead hunters. The chase itself was all he wanted.
Then the sequoia towers became more scattered, as at the edge of a skyscraper 
district, until there were only a few left. And looking between the trunks of 
the last of the behemoths, Nirgal again hauled up short: on the other side of a 
narrow clearing, the canyon was blocked off by a wall of water. A sheer wall of 
water, filling the canyon right to the rim, hanging suspended over them in a 
smooth transparent mass.
Reservoir dam. Recently they had begun building them out of transparent sheets 
of diamond lattice, sunk in a concrete foundation; Nirgal could see this one 
running down both canyon walls and across the canyon floor, a thick white line.
The mass of water stood over them like the side of a great aquarium, turbid near 
the bottom, weeds floating in dark mud. Above them silver fish as big as the 
antelope flitted next to the clear wall, then receded into dark crystalline 
deptns.
The three antelope pronged nervously back and forth before this barrier, the doe 
and fawn following the quick turns of the buck. As the hunters closed on them, 
the buck suddenly leaped away and crashed its head against the dam with a 
powerful thrust of its whole body—antlers like bone knives, thwack—Nirgal froze 
in fear, everyone froze at this violent gesture, so ferocious as to be human; 
but the buck bounced away, staggered. He turned and charged at them. Bola balls 
spun through the air and the line wrapped around his legs just above the hocks, 
and he crashed forward and down. Some of the hunters swarmed on him, others 
brought down doe and fawn in a hail of rocks and spears. A squeal cut off 
abruptly. Nirgal saw the doe’s throat cut with an obsidian-bladed dagger, the 
blood pouring onto the sand next to the foundation of the dam. The big fish 
flashed by overhead, looking down at them.
The woman with the green scarf was nowhere to be seen. Another hunter, a man 
wearing only necklaces, tilted his head back and howled, shattering the strange 
silence of the work; he danced in a circle, then ran at the clear wall of the 
dam and threw his spear straight at it. The spear bounced away. The exultant 
hunter ran up and slammed his fist against the clear hard membrane.
A woman hunter with blood on her hands turned her head to give the man a 
contemptuous look. “Quit fooling around,” she said.
The spear thrower laughed. “You don’t have to worry. These dams are a hundred 
times stronger than they need to be.”
The woman shook her head, disgusted. “It’s stupid to tempt fate.”
“It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.”
“You’re a fool,” the woman said. “Luck is as real as anything else.”
“Luck! Fate! Ka.” The spear thrower picked up his spear and ran and threw it at 
the dam again; it rebounded and almost hit him, and he laughed wildly. “How 
lucky,” he said. “Fortune favors the bold, eh?”
“Asshole. Show some respect.”
“All honor to that buck, indeed, crashing the wall like he did.” The man laughed 
raucously.
The others were ignoring these two, busy butchering the animals. “Many thanks, 
brother. Many thanks, sister.” Nir-gal’s hands shook as he watched; he could 
smell the blood; he was salivating. Piles of intestines steamed in the chill 
air. Magnesium poles were pulled from waist bags and telescoped out, and the 
decapitated antelope bodies were tied over them by the legs. Hunters at the ends 
of the poles hefted the headless carcasses into the air.
The bloody-handed woman shouted at the spear thrower, “You’d better help carry 
if you want to eat any of these.”
“Fuck you.” But he helped carry the front end of the buck.
“Come on,” the woman said to Nirgal, and then they were hurrying west across the 
canyon floor, between the great wall of water and the last of the massive 
sequoias. Nirgal followed, stomach growling.
The west wall of the canyon was marked with petro-glyphs: animals, lingams, 
yonis, handprints, comets and spaceships, geometric designs, the humpbacked 
flute player Kokopelli, all scarcely visible in the dusk. There was a staircase 
trail inlaid in the cliff, following a nearly perfect Z of ledges. The hunters 
hiked up it and Nirgal followed. Shift into the uphill rhythm one more time, his 
stomach eating him from within, his head swimming. A black antelope splayed 
across the rock beside him.
Above, a few giant sequoias stood isolated on the canyon rim. When they reached 
the rim, returning to the sunset’s last light, he saw that these trees formed a 
circle, nine trees in a rough woodhenge, with a big firepit at their center.
The band entered the circle and got to work starting a fire, skinning the 
antelope, cutting big venison steaks out of the haunches. Nirgal stood watching, 
legs in a sewing-machine tremble, mouth salivating like a fountain; he swallowed 
again and again as he sniffed the steak juices lofting in the smoke through the 
early stars. Firelight pushed like a bubble at the dusk’s gloom, turning the 
circle of trees into a flickering roofless room. The light flickering against 
the needles was like seeing your own capillaries. Some of the trees had wooden 
staircases spiraling around their trunks, up into their branches. High above 
them lamps were being lit, voices like skylarks among the stars.
Three or four of the hunters bunched around him, offering him flatcakes of what 
tasted like barley, then a fiery liquor out of clay jars. They told him they had 
found the sequoia henge a few years before.
“What happened to the, the leader of the hunt?” Nirgal asked, looking around. 
“Oh, the diana can’t sleep with us tonight.” “Besides she fucked up, she don’t 
want to.” “Yes she does. You know Zo, she always has a reason.” They laughed and 
moved nearer to the fire. A woman poked out a charred steak, waved it on its 
stick until it cooled. “I eat all of you, little sister.” And bit into the 
steak. Nirgal ate with them, lost in the wet hot taste of the meat, chewing hard 
but still bolting the food, his body all abuzz with trembling light-headed 
hunger. Food, food!
He ate his second steak more slowly, watching the others. His stomach was 
filling quickly. He recalled the scramble down the ravine: it was amazing what 
the body could do in such a situation, it had been an out-of-body experience— or 
rather an experience so far into the body that it was like 
unconsciousness—diving deep into the cerebellum, presumably, into that ancient 
undermind that knew how to do things. A state of grace.
A resiny branch spit flames out of the blaze. His sight had not yet settled 
down, things jumped and blurred with afterimages. The spear thrower and another 
man came up to him, “Here, drink this,” and tilted a skin’s spigot against his 
lips and laughed, some bitter milky drink in his mouth. “Have some of the white 
brother, brother.” A group of them picked up some stones and began to hit them 
together in rhythm, all their different patterns meshing bass to treble. The 
rest of them began to dance around the bonfire, hooting or singing or chanting. 
“Auqakuh, Qahira, Harmakhis, Kasei. Auqakuh, Mangala, Ma’adim, Bahram.” Nirgal 
danced with them, exhaustion banished. It was a cold night and one could move in 
or away from the heat of the fire, feel its radiance against cold bare skin, 
move back out into the chill. When everyone was hot and sweaty they took off 
into the night, stumbling back toward the canyon, south along the rim. A hand 
clutched at Nirgal’s arm and it looked like the diana was there beside him 
again, light in the dark, but it was too dark to see, and then they were 
crashing into the water of the reservoir, shockingly frigid, dive under, 
waist-deep silt and sand, heart-stopping cold, stand up, wade back out all the 
senses pulsating wildly, gasps, laughter, a hand at his ankle and down he went 
again, into the shallows face first, laughing. Through the dark wet, freezing, 
toes banging “ow! ow!” and back into the henge, into the heat. Soaking they 
danced again, pressed to the heat of the fire, arms extended, hugging its 
radiance. All the bodies ruddy in the firelight, the sequoia needles flashing 
against pinwheel stars, bouncing in rhythm to the rock percussion. When they 
warmed back up and the fire died down, they led him up one of the sequoia 
staircases. On the massive upper limbs of the tree were perched small flat 
sleeping platforms, low-walled and open to the sky. The floors swayed very 
slightly underfoot, on a cold breeze that had roused the trees’ deep airy choral 
voices. Nirgal was left alone on what appeared to be the highest platform. He 
unpacked his bedding and lay down. To the chorus of wind in sequoia needles he 
fell fast asleep.


 
In the early dawn he woke suddenly. He sat against the wail of his platform, 
surprised that the whole evening had not turned out to be a dream. He looked 
over the edge; the ground was far, far below. It was like being in the crow’s 
nest of an enormous ship; it reminded him of his high bamboo room in Zygote, but 
everything here was vastly bigger, the starry dome of the sky, the horizon’s 
distant jagged black line. All the land was a rumpled dark blanket, with the 
water of the reservoir a squiggle of silver inlaid into it.
He made his way down the stairs; four hundred of them. The tree was perhaps 150 
meters tall, standing over the 150-meter drop of the canyon cliff. In the 
presunrise light he looked down on the wall over which they had tried to drive 
the antelope, saw the ravine they had crashed down, the clear dam, the mass of 
water behind it.
He went back to the henge. A few of the hunters were up, coaxing the fire back 
to life, shivering in the dawn chill. Nirgal asked them if they were moving on 
that day. They were; north through the Juventa Chaos, then on toward the 
southwest shore of the Chryse Gulf. After that they didn’t know.
Nirgal asked if he could join them for a while. They looked surprised; surveyed 
him; spoke among themselves in a language he didn’t recognize. While they 
talked, Nirgal wondered that he had asked. He wanted to see the diana again, 
yes. But it was more than that. Nothing in his lung-gom-pa had been like that 
last half hour of the hunt. Of course the running had set the stage for the 
experience— the hunger, the weariness—but then it had happened, something new. 
Snowy forest floor, the pursuit through the primeval trees—the dash down the 
ravine—the scene under the dam....
The early risers were nodding at him. He could come along.
 
All that day they hiked north, threading a complicated path through the Juventa 
Chaos. That evening they came to a small mesa, its whole cap covered by an apple 
orchard. A ramp road led the way up to this grove. The trees had been pruned to 
the shape of cocktail glasses, and now new shoots rose straight up from the 
gnarled older branches. Through the afternoon they pulled ladders around from 
tree to tree, pruning the thin shoots away and thereby harvesting some hard, 
tart, unripe little apples, which they saved.
In the center of the grove was a open-walled round-roofed structure. A disk 
house, they called it. Nirgal walked through it, admiring the design. The 
foundation was a round slab of concrete, polished to a finish like marble. The 
roof was also round, held up by a simple T of interior walls, a diameter and a 
radius. In the open semicircle were kitchen and living space; on the other side, 
bedrooms and bathroom. The circumference, now open to the air, could be closed 
off in inclement weather by clear walls of tenting material, drawn around the 
circle like drapes.
There were disk houses all over Lunae, the woman who had butchered the antelope 
told Nirgal. Other groups used the same set of houses, tending the orchards when 
they passed through. They were all part of a loose co-op, working out a nomad 
life, with some agriculture, some hunting, some gathering. Now one group was 
cooking down the little apples, making applesauce for preservation; others were 
grilling antelope steaks over a fire outside, or working in a smokehouse.
Two round baths right next to the disk house were now steaming, and some of the 
group were shedding their clothes and hopping into the smaller bath, to clean up 
before supper. They were very dirty; they had been in the back country a long 
time. Nirgal followed the woman (her hands still spotted with dried blood) and 
joined them in the bath, the hot water like another world, like the heat of the 
fire transmuted to liquid that one could touch, in which one could immerse one’s 
body.
 
They woke at dawn and lazed around a fire, brewing coffee and kava, talking, 
stitching clothes, working around the disk house. After a while they gathered 
their few traveling possessions and killed the fire and moved out. Everyone 
carried a backpack or waistpack, but most of them traveled as lightly as Nirgal 
or more so, with nothing but thin sleeping rolls and some food, and a few with 
spears or bows and arrows slung over a shoulder. They walked hard through the 
morning, then split into smaller groups to gather pine nuts, acorns, meadow 
onions, wild corn; or hunt for marmots or rabbits or frogs, or perhaps larger 
game. They were lean people; their ribs showed, their faces were thin. We like 
to stay a little hungry, the woman told him. It makes the food taste better. And 
indeed every night of this extended walk Nirgal bolted his food as during his 
runs, shaky and ravenous; and everything tasted like ambrosia. They walked a 
long distance every day, and during their big hunts they often ended up in 
terrain that would have been a disaster to run in, terrain so rough that it was 
often four or five days before they all managed to find each other again, at the 
next disk house in its orchard. Since Nirgal didn’t know where these were, he 
had to stick close to one or another of the group. Once they had him take the 
four children in the group on an easier route across Lunae Planum’s cratered 
terrain, and the children told him what direction to take every time they had to 
make a choice; and they were the first to reach the next disk house. The kids 
loved it. Often they were consulted by the larger group as to when they should 
leave a disk house. “Hey you kids, is it time to go?” They would answer yes or 
no very firmly within seconds, in concert. Once two adults got in a fight and 
afterward they had to present their cases to the four kids, who decided against 
one of them. The butcher woman explained to Nirgal: “We teach them, they judge 
us. They’re hard but fair.”
They harvested some of the yield of the orchards: peaches, pears, apricots, 
apples. If a crop was getting overripe they harvested everything and cooked it 
down and bottled it as sauces or chutneys, leaving it in big pantries under the 
disk houses for other groups, or for themselves on their next time through. Then 
they were off again, north over Lunae until it fell down the Great Escarpment, 
here very dramatically, dropping from Lunae’s high plateau five thousand meters 
down to the Chryse Gulf, in only just over a hundred horizontal kilometers.
The way was difficult across this tilted country, the land ripped and corrugated 
by a million small deformations. No trails had been constructed here, and there 
was no good way through; it was up and down and over and back and up and down 
again; and nothing much to hunt; and no disk houses nearby; and not much food to 
be found. And one of the youngsters slipped while they were crossing a line of 
coral cactus, seaming the land like a living barbed-wire fence, and he fell on 
one knee into a nest of spines. The magnesium poles served then as a stretcher 
frame, and on they went north carrying the crying boy, the best hunters out on 
the flanks of the group with bows and arrows, to see- if they could shoot 
anything flushed by their passage. Nirgal saw several misses, then one long 
flight of an arrow that hit a running jackrabbit, which tumbled and flopped 
until they killed it—a tremendous shot, it had them all leaping around 
shrieking. They burned more calories celebrating the shot than they ever got 
back from eating the tiny shreds of rabbit meat that were each person’s share, 
and the butcher woman was contemptuous. “Ritual cannibalism of our rodent 
brother,” she scoffed as she ate her shred. “Don’t ever tell me there’s no such 
thing as luck.” But the hothead spear thrower just laughed at her, and the 
others seemed cheered by their mouthful of meat.
Then later that same day they came on a young caribou bull, off on his own, 
looking disoriented. Their food problems were solved, if they could catch him. 
But he was wary despite his confused air, and he kept beyond the reach of even 
the longest bow shot, heading away from the group, down the Great Escarpment 
with all the hunters in view on the slope above.
Eventually everyone got on their hands and knees, and began to crawl laboriously 
over the hot rock of midday, trying to traverse quick enough to circle the 
caribou. But the wind blew from behind them, and the caribou moved skittishly 
downslope or traversed north, grazing as he went, and looking back at his 
pursuers more and more curiously, as if wondering why they continued with such a 
charade. Nirgal too began to wonder. And apparently he was not alone; the 
caribou’s skepticism had infected them. A variety of subtle and not-so-subtle 
whistles filled the air, in what was evidently an argument over strategy. Nirgal 
understood then that hunting was hard, that the group failed often. That they 
were perhaps not very good at it. Everyone was baking on the rock, and they had 
not eaten properly for a couple of days. Part of life for these people; but 
today too miserable to be fun.
Then as they continued, the horizon below them to the east seemed to double: 
Chryse Gulf, gleaming blue and flat, still far below. As they continued to 
follow the caribou downslope, the sea covered more and more of their view of the 
globe; the Great Escarpment pitched so steeply here that even Mars’s tight 
curvature did not bend fast enough to hide the long view, and they could see out 
over Chryse Gulf for many kilometers. The sea, the blue sea!
Perhaps they could trap the caribou against the water. But now he was trending 
north, traversing the slope of the escarpment. They crawled after him, over a 
little ridge, and suddenly had a good view down to the coastline: fringe of 
green forest flanking the water, small whitewashed buildings under the trees. A 
white lighthouse on a bluff.
As they continued north a turn in the coast hove over the horizon. Just beyond 
the point of the turn lay a seaside town, banked around a half-moon bay on the 
southern side of what they now saw was a strait, or more accurately a fjord, for 
across a narrow passage of water rose a wall even steeper than the slope they 
were on: three thousand meters of red rock rearing out of the sea, the giant 
cliff like the edge of a continent, its horizontal bands cut deep by a billion 
years of wind. Nirgal realized suddenly where they were; that massive cliff was 
the sea-facing escarpment of the Shar-anov Peninsula, and the fjord therefore 
Kasei Fjord, and the harbor town therefore Nilokeras. They had come a long way.
The whistles between the hunters got very noisy and expressive. About half the 
group sat up—a crop of heads, sticking out over a field of stones, looking at 
each other as if an idea had struck them all at once—and then they stood and 
walked down the slope toward the town, abandoning the hunt and leaving the 
caribou heedlessly munching. After a while they skipped and hopped downslope, 
hooting and laughing, leaving the stretcher bearers and the injured boy behind.
They waited lower down, however, under tall Hokkaido pines on the outskirts of 
the town. When the stretcher group caught up, they descended through the pines 
arjd orchards together, into the upper streets of the town. A loud gang, passing 
fine window-fronted houses overlooking the crowded harbor, straight to a medical 
clinic, as if they knew where they were going. They dropped off the injured 
youth and then went to some public baths; and after a quick bath they went to 
the curve of businesses backing the docks, and invaded three or four adjacent 
restaurants with tables out under umbrellas, and strings of bare incandescent 
light-bulbs. Nirgal sat at a table with the youngsters, in a seafood restaurant; 
after a while the injured boy joined them, knee and calf wrapped, and they all 
ate and drank in huge quantities—shrimp, clams, mussels, trout, fresh bread, 
cheeses, peasant salad, liters of water, wine, ouzo—all in such excess that they 
staggered away when they were done, drunk, their stomachs taut as drums.
Some went immediately to what the butcher woman called their usual hostel, to 
lie down or throw up. The rest limped on past the building to a nearby park, 
where a performance of Tyndall’s opera Phyllis Boyle was to be followed by a 
dance.
Nirgal lay sprawled on the grass with the park contingent, out at the back of 
the audience. Like the rest he was awed by the facility of the singers, the 
sheer lushness of orchestral sound as Tyndall used it. When the opera was done 
some of the group had digested their feast enough to dance, and Nirgal joined 
them, and after an hour of dancing joined the band as well, with many other 
audience sit-ins; and he drummed away until his whole body was humming like the 
magnesium of the pans.
But he had eaten too much, and when some of the group returned to the hostel, he 
decided to go back with them. On their way back, some passersby said 
something—”Look at the ferals,” or something like that—and the spear thrower 
howled, and just like that he and some of the young hunters had pushed the 
passersby against a wall, shoving them and shouting abuse: “Watch your mouth or 
we’ll beat the shit out of you,” Spear Thrower shouted happily, “you caged rats, 
you drug addicts, you sleepwalkers, you fucking earthworms, you think you can 
take drugs and get what we get, we’ll kick your ass and then you’ll feel some 
real feeling, you’ll see what we mean,” and then Nirgal was pulling him back, 
saying “Come on, come on, don’t make trouble,” and the passersby were on them 
with a roar, hard-fisted and -footed men who were not drunk and were not amused, 
the young hunters had to retreat, then let themselves be pulled away by Nirgal 
when the passersby were satisfied at having driven them off; still shouting 
abuse, staggering up the street, holding their bruises, laughing and snarling, 
completely full of themselves, “Fucking sleepwalkers, wrapped in your gift 
boxes, we’ll kick your ass! Kick your ass right out of your dollhouse into the 
drink! Stupid sheep that you are!”
Nirgal cuffed them along, giggling despite himself. The ranters were very drunk, 
and Nirgal was not much more sober himself. When they got to their hostel he 
looked into the bar across the street, saw the butcher woman was sitting in 
there, and so went in with the rest of the rough boys. He sat back watching them 
while he drank a glass of cognac, swishing it over his tongue. Ferals, the 
passersby had called them. The butcher woman was eyeing him, wondering what he 
thought. Much later he stood, with difficulty, and left the bar with the others, 
walking unsteadily across the cobbled street, humming along with the others as 
they bellowed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” On the obsidian water of Kasei Fjord 
the stars rode up and down. Mind and body full of feeling, sweet fatigue a state 
of grace.


 
 
 
 
 
The next morning they slept in and woke up late, dopey and hungover. They lay 
around for a while in their dorm room, slurping kavajava. Then they went 
downstairs, and even though they claimed to be still stuffed, ate a huge hostel 
breakfast. While they ate they decided to go flying. The winds that poured down 
Kasei Fjord were as powerful as any on the planet, and windsurfers and fliers of 
all kinds had come to Nilokeras to take advantage of them. Of course at any time 
howlers could take the situation “off scale” and shut down the fun for everyone 
except the big wind riders; but the average day’s hard blow was glorious.
The fliers’ base of operations was an offshore crater rim island, called 
Santorini. After breakfast the group went down to the docks together and got on 
a ferry, and debarked half an hour later on the little arcuate island, and 
trooped with the other passengers up to the gliderport.
Nirgal had not flown for years, and it was a great joy to strap into a 
blimpglider’s gondola and rise up the mast, and let loose and soar on the 
powerful updrafts pushing off San-torini’s steep inner rim. As Nirgal ascended 
he saw that most of the fliers wore birdsuits of one sort or another; it looked 
like he was flying in a flock of wide-winged flying creatures, which resembled 
not birds but something more like flying foxes, or some mythic hybrid like the 
griffin or Pegasus: bird-humans. The birdsuits were of several different kinds, 
imitating in some respects the configurations of different species—albatross, 
eagle, swift, lammergeier. Each suit encased its flier in what was in effect an 
ever-changing exoskeleton, which responded to interior pressure from the flier’s 
body, to take and then hold positions, or make certain movements, all reinforced 
in proportion to the pressure exerted inside them, so that a human’s muscles 
could flap the big wings, or hold them in place against the great torque of the 
wind’s onslaughts, meanwhile keeping the streamlined helmets and tail feathers 
in the proper positions. Suit AIs helped fliers who wanted help, and they could 
even function as automatic pilots; but most fliers preferred to do the thinking 
for themselves, and controlled the suit as a waldo, exaggerating many times the 
strength of their own muscles.
Sitting in his blimpglider Nirgal watched with both pleasure and trepidation as 
these bird people shot down past him in terrifying stoops toward the sea, then 
popped their wings and curved away and gyred back up again on the inner-wall 
updraft. It looked to Nirgal like the suits took a high level of skill to fly; 
they were the opposite of the blimp-gliders, a few of which soared with Nirgal 
over the island, rising and falling in much gentler swoops, taking in the view 
like agile balloonists.
Then soaring up past him in a rising spiral, Nirgal spotted the face of the 
diana, the woman who had led the ferals’ hunt. She recognized him too, raised 
her chin and bared her teeth in a quick smile, then pulled her wings in and 
tipped over, dropping away with a tearing sound. Nirgal watched her from above 
with fearful excitement, then a moment of terror as she dove right past the edge 
of Santo-rini’s cliff; from his vantage point it had looked like she was going 
to hit. Then she was back up, soaring on the updraft in tight spirals. It looked 
so graceful he wanted to learn to fly in a birdsuit, even as he felt his pulse 
still hammering at the sight of her dive. Stoop and soar, stoop and soar; no 
blimpglider could fly like that, not even close. Birds were the greatest fliers, 
and the diana flew like a bird. Now, along with everything else, people were 
birds.
With him, past him, around him, as if performing one of those darting courtships 
that members of some species put on for each other; after about an hour of this, 
she smiled at him one last time and tipped away, then drifted in lazy circles 
down to the gliderport at Phira. Nirgal followed her down, landing half an hour 
later with a swoop into the wind, running and then stopping just short of her. 
She had been waiting, wings spread around her on the ground.
She stepped in a circle around him, as if still doing a courtship dance. She 
walked toward him, pulling her hood back and offering her head, her black hair 
spilling out in the light like a crow’s wing. The diana. She stretched up on her 
toes and kissed him full on the mouth, then stood back, watching him gravely. He 
remembered her running naked ahead of the hunt, a green sash bouncing from one 
hand.
“Breakfast?” she said.
It was midafternoon, and he was famished. “Sure.”
They ate at the gliderport restaurant, looking out at the arc of the island’s 
little bay, and the immensity of the Shar-anov cliffs, and the acrobatics of the 
fliers still in the air. They talked about flying, and running the land; about 
the hunt for the three antelope, and the islands of the North Sea, and the great 
fjord of Kasei, pouring its wind over them. They flirted; and Nirgal felt the 
pleasant anticipation of where they were headed, he luxuriated in it. It had 
been a long time. This too was part of the descent into the city, into 
civilization. Flirting, seduction—how wonderful all that was when one was 
interested, when one saw that the other was interested! She was fairly young, he 
judged, but her face was sunburned, skin lined around the eyes—not a youth—she 
had been to the Jovian moons, she said, and had taught at the new university in 
Nilokeras, and was now running with the ferals for a time. Twenty m-years old, 
perhaps, or older—hard to tell these days. An adult, in any case; in those first 
twenty m-years people got most of whatever experience was ever going to give 
them, after that it was only a matter of repetition. He had met old fools and 
young sages almost as often as the reverse. They were both adults, 
contemporaries. And there they were, in the shared experience of the present.
Nirgal watched her face as she talked. Careless, smart, confident. A Minoan: 
dark-skinned, dark-eyed, aquiline nose, dramatic lower lip; Mediterranean 
ancestry, perhaps, Greek, Arabic, Indian; as with most of the yonsei, it” was 
impossible to tell. She was simply a Martian woman, with Dorsa Brevia English, 
and that look in the eye as she watched him—ah yes—how many times in his 
wandering had it happened, a conversation turning at some point, and then 
suddenly he was flying with some woman in the long glide of seduction, the 
courtship leading to some bed or hidden dip in the hills....
“Hey Zo,” the butcher woman said in passing. “Going with us to the ancestral 
neck?”
“No,” Zo said.
“The ancestral neck?” Nirgal inquired.
“Boone’s Neck,” Zo said. “The town up on the polar peninsula.”
“Ancestral?”
“She’s John Boone’s great-grandaughter,” the butcher woman explained.
“By way of?” Nirgal asked, looking at Zo.
“Jackie Boone,” she said. “My mother.”
“Ah,” Nirgal managed to say.
He sat back in his seat. The baby he had seen Jackie nursing, in Cairo. The 
similarity to her mother was obvious once he knew. His skin was goose-pimpling, 
the hairs lifting from the skin of his forearms. He hugged himself, shivered. “I 
must be getting old,” he said.
She smiled, and he saw suddenly that she had known who he was. She had been 
toying with him, laying a little trap—as an experiment, perhaps, or to displease 
her mother, or for some other reason he could not imagine. For fun.
Now she was frowning at him, trying to look serious. “It doesn’t matter,” she 
said.
“No,” he said. For there were other ferals out there.


 
 
 
PART ELEVEN
         ------
---Viriditas
         ------
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
It was a disordered time. Population pressures now drove everything. The general 
plan to get through the hypermalthusian years was obvious, and holding up fairly 
well; each generation got smaller; nevertheless, there were now eighteen billion 
people on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars; and more being bom all the time; 
and more moving from Earth to Mars all the time; and people on both worlds 
crying enough, enough!
When Terrans heard Martians crying enough, some of them became enraged. The 
concept of carrying capacity meant nothing before the sheer numbers, the images 
on the screens. Uneasily the Martian global government did what it could to deal 
with this anger. It explained that Mars with its thin new biosphere could not 
sustain as many people as the fat old Earth. It also set the Martian rocket 
industry into the shuttle business, and rapidly expanded a program to turn 
asteroids into floating cities. This program was an unexpected offshoot of what 
had been serving as part of their prison system. For many years now the 
punishment for conviction of serious crimes on Mars had been permanent exile 
from the planet, begun by some years of confinement and servitude on some new 
asteroid settlement. After they had served their sentence it was a matter of 
indifference to the Martian government where the exiles went, as long as they 
did not return to Mars. So inevitably a steady stream of people arrived on Hebe, 
shipped out and did their time, and then moved somewhere else, sometimes out to 
the still thinly populated outer satellites, sometimes back into the inner 
system; but often to one of the many hollowed-asteroid colonies that were being 
established. Da Vinci and several other co-ops made and distributed shareware 
for starting up these settlements, and many other organizations did the same, 
for in truth the program was simple. Surveying teams had found thousands of 
candidates in the asteroid belt for the treatment, and on the best of them they 
left behind the equipment to transform them. A team of self-reproducing digging 
robots went to work on one end of the asteroid, boring into the rock like dogs, 
tossing most of the rubble into space, and using the rest to make and fuel more 
diggers. When the rock was hollowed out, the open end was capped and the whole 
thing was spun, so that centrifugal force provided a gravity equivalent inside. 
Powerful lamps called sunlines or sunspots were fired up in the centers of these 
hollowed-out cylinders, and they provided light levels equivalent to the Terran 
or Martian day, with the g usually adjusted accordingly, so that there were 
little Mars-equivalent cities, and little Earth-equivalent cities, and cities 
all across the range in between, and beyond, at least to the light side; many of 
the little worlds were experimenting with quite low gs.
There were some alliances between these little new city-states, and often ties 
to founder organizations back on a home world, but there was no overall 
organization. From the independents, especially those occupied mostly by Martian 
exiles, there had been in the early days some fairly hostile behavior to 
passersby, including attempts to impose passage tolls on spaceships, tolls so 
blatant as to resemble piracy. But now shuttles passing through the belts were 
moving at very high speeds, and slightly above or below the plane of the 
ecliptic, to avoid the dust and rubble that was only getting worse with the 
hollowing of so many rocks. It was difficult to demand a toll from these ships 
without threatening their total destruction, which invited heavy retribution; 
and so the trend in tolls had proved to be short-lived.
Now, with both Earth and Mars feeling population pressures that were more and 
more intense, the Martian co-ops were doing everything they could to encourage 
the rapid development of new asteroid cities. They were also building large new 
tented settlements on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and most recently Uranus, 
with Neptune and perhaps even Pluto to follow. The big satellites of the inner 
gas giants were very large moons, really little planets, and all of them now had 
inhabitants who were beginning terraformingprojects that were more or less 
long-range, depending on the local situation. None of them could be terra-formed 
quickly, but all of them appeared to be possible, at least to an extent; and 
some offered the tantalizing opportunity of a complete new world. Titan, for 
instance, was beginning to come out of its nitrogen haze, as settlers living in 
tents on the smaller moons nearby heated and pumped the big moon’s surface 
oxygen into its atmosphere. Titan had the right volatiles for terrafor-mation, 
and though it was at great distance from the sun, receiving only one percent the 
insolation that Earth did, an extensive series of mirrors was adding light, more 
all the time, and the locals were looking into the possibility of free-hanging 
deuterium fusion lanterns, orbiting Titan and illuminating it further. This 
would be an alternative to another device that so far the Saturnians had been 
averse to using, called a gas lantern. These gas lanterns were now flying 
through the upper atmospheres of Jupiter and Uranus, collecting and burning 
helium3 and other gases in flares whose light was reflected outward by 
electromagnetic disks. But the Saturnians had refused to allow them, because 
they did not want to disturb the ringed planet’s appearance.
So in all these outer orbits the Martian co-ops were extremely busy, helping 
Martians and Terrans to emigrate to one of the new little worlds. And as the 
process continued, and a hundred and then a thousand asteroids and moonlets were 
given a local habitation and a name, the process took fire, becoming what some 
called the explosive diaspora, others simply the accelerando. People took to the 
idea, and the project gathered an energy that was felt everywhere, expressing a 
growing sense of humanity’s power to create, its vitality and variety. And the 
accelerando was also understood to be humanity’s response to the supreme crisis 
of the population surge, a crisis so severe that it made the Terran flood of 
2129 look in comparison like no more than a bad high tide. It was a crisis which 
could have triggered a terminal disaster, a descent into chaos and barbarity; 
and instead it was being met head-on by the greatest efflorescence of 
civilization in history, a new renaissance.
Many historians, sociologists, and other social observers attempted to explain 
the vibrant nature of this most self-conscious age. One school of historians, 
called the Deluge Group, looked back to the great Terran flood, and declared 
that it had been the cause of the new renaissance: a forced jump to a higher 
level. Another school of thought put forth the so-called Technical Explanation; 
humanity had passed through one of the transitions to a new level of 
technological competence, they maintained, as it had every half century or so 
right back to the first industrial revolution. The Deluge Group tended to use 
the term diaspora, the Technics the term accelerando. Then in the 2170s the 
Martian historian Charlotte Dorsa Brevia wrote and published a dense 
multivolumed analytical metahistory, as she called it, which maintained that the 
great flood had indeed served as a trigger point, and technical advances as the 
enabling mechanism, but that the specific character of the new renaissance had 
been caused by something much more fundamental, which was the shift from one 
kind of global socioeconomic system to the next. She described what she called a 
“residual/emergent complex of overlapping paradigms,” in which each great 
socioeconomic era was composed of roughly equal parts of the systems immediately 
adjacent to it in past and future. The periods immediately before and after were 
not the only ones involved, however; they formed the bulk of a system, and 
comprised its most contradictory components, but additional important features 
came from particularly persistent aspects of more archaic systems, and also 
faint hesitant intuitions of developments that would not flower until much 
later.
Feudalism, therefore, to take one example, was for Charlotte made up of a clash 
of the residual system of absolute religious monarchy, and the emergent system 
of capitalism—with important echoes of more archaic tribal caste, and faint 
foreshadow-ings of later individualist humanisms. The clashing of these forces 
shifted over time, until the Renaissance of the sixteenth century ushered in the 
age of capitalism. Capitalism then was composed of clashing elements of the 
residual feudalism, and an emergent future order that was only now being defined 
in their own time, which Charlotte called democracy. And now, Charlotte claimed, 
they were, on Mars at least, in the democratic age itself. Capitalism had 
therefore, like all other ages, been the combination of two systems in very 
sharp opposition to each other. This incompatibility of its constituent parts 
was underlined by the unfortunate experience of capitalism’s critical shadow, 
socialism, which had theorized true democracy, and called for it, but in the 
attempt to enact it had used the methods at hand in its time, the same feudal 
methods so prevalent in capitalism itself; so that both versions of the mix had 
ended up about as destructive and unjust as their common residual parent. The 
feudal hierarchies in capitalism had been mirrored in the lived socialist 
experiments; and so the whole era had remained a highly charged chaotic 
struggle, exhibiting several different versions of the dynamic struggle between 
feudalism and democracy.
But the democratic age had finally, on Mars, emerged from the capitalist age. 
And this age too, following the logic of Charlotte’s paradigm, was necessarily a 
dash of residual and emergent— between the contentious, competitive residuals of 
the capitalist system, and some emergent aspects of an order beyond 
democracy—one that could not be fully characterized yet, as it had never 
existed, but which Charlotte ventured to call Harmony, or General Goodwill. This 
speculative leap she made partly by studying closely how different cooperative 
economics was from capitalism, and partly by taking an even larger 
metahistorical perspective, and identifying a broad general movement in history 
which commentators called her Big Seesaw, a movement from the deep residuals of 
the dominance hierarchies of our primate ancestors on the savanna, toward the 
very slow, uncertain, difficult, unpredetermined, free emergence of a pure 
harmony and equality which would then characterize the very truest democracy. 
Both of these long-term clashing elements had always existed, Charlotte 
maintained, creating the big seesaw, with the balance between them slowly and 
irregularly shifting, over all human history: dominance hierarchies had 
underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic 
values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of 
self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force. 
And so as the seesaw of this meta-metahistory had shifted balance over the 
centuries, the noticeably imperfect attempts to institute democracy had slowly 
gained power. Thus a very small percentage of humans had counted as true equals 
in slave-holding societies like ancient Greece or revolutionary America, and the 
circle of true equals had only enlarged a bit more in the later “capitalist 
democracies.” But as each system passed on to the next, the circle of equal 
citizens had bloomed wider, by a slight or great margin, until now not only were 
all humans (in theory, anyway) equal, but consideration was beinggiven to other 
animals, andeven to plants, ecosystems, and the elements themselves. These last 
extensions of “citizenship” Charlotte considered to be among the foreshadowings 
of the emergent system that might come after democracy per se, Charlotte’s 
postulated period of Utopian “harmony.” These glimmerings were faint, and 
Charlotte’s distant hoped-for system a vague hypothesis; when Sax Russell read 
the later volumes of her work, poring avidly over the endless examples and 
arguments (for this account is a severe abridgment of her work, a mere abstract 
only), reading in an excited state at finding a general paradigm that might 
clarify history for him at last, he wondered if this putative age of universal 
harmony and goodwill would ever actually come about; it seemed to him possible 
or even likely that there was some sort of asymptotic curve in the human story— 
the ballast of the body, perhaps—which would keep civilization struggling there 
in the age of .democracy, struggling always upward, also away from relapse, and 
never getting much further along; but it also seemed to him that this state 
itself would be good enough to call a successful civilization. Enough was as 
good as a feast, after all.
In any case, Charlotte’s metahistory was very influential, providing for the 
explosively accelerating diaspora a kind of master narrative, by which they 
could orient themselves; and so she joined the small list of historians whose 
analyses had affected the flow of their own time, people like Plato, Plutarch, 
Bacon, Gibbon, Chamfort, Carlyle, Emerson, Marx, Spengler—and on Mars before 
Charlotte, Michel Duval. People now ordinarily understood capitalism to have 
been the clash of feudalism and democracy, and the present to be the democratic 
age, the clash of capitalism and harmony. And they also understood that their 
own era could still become anything else as well—Charlotte was insistent that 
there was no such thing as historical determinism, but only people’s repeated 
efforts to enact their hopes; then the analyst’s retroactive recognition of such 
hopes as came true created an illusion of determinism. Anything could have 
happened; they could have fallen apart into general anarchy, they could have 
become a universal police state to “control” the crisis years; but as the great 
metanationals of Terra had in reality all mutated into Praxis-like worker-owned 
cooperatives, with people in control of their own work—democracy it was, for the 
moment. They had enacted that hope.
And now their democratic civilization was accomplishing something that the 
previous system could never have accomplished, which was simply survival in the 
hypermalthusian period. Now they could begin to see that fundamental shift in 
systems, in this twenty-second century they were enacting; they had shifted the 
balance, in order to survive the new conditions. In the cooperative democratic 
economy, everyone saw the stakes were high; everyone felt responsible for their 
collective fate; and everyone benefited from the frenetic burst of coordinated 
construction that was going on everywhere in the solar system.
This flowering civilization included not only the solar system beyond Mars, but 
the inner planets as well. In the flush of energy and confidence humanity was 
working back in to areas previously considered uninhabitable, and now Venus was 
attracting a crowd of new terraformers, who were following up on the gesture 
made by Sax Russell with the relocation ofMars’s great mirrors, and had 
elaborated a grand vision for the eventual inhabitation of that planet, the 
sister to Earth in so many ways.
And even Mercury had its settlement. Although it had to be admitted that for 
most purposes, Mercury was too close to the sun. Its day lasted fifty-nine 
Terran days, its year eighty-eight Terran days, so that three of its days 
equaled two years, a pattern that was not a coincidence but a node on the way to 
being tidally locked, like Luna around the Earth. The combination of these two 
spins gave Mercury a very slow roll through its solar day, during which the 
brightside hemisphere became much too hot, while the nightside hemisphere became 
extremely cold. The lone city currently on the planet was therefore a kind of 
enormous train, running around the planet on tracks set on the northern 
forty-fifth latitude. These tracks were made of a metalloceramic alloy that was 
the first of the Mercurial physicists’ many alchemical tricks, a matrix that 
withstood the eight-hundred-K heat of midbrightside. The city itself, called 
Terminator, then ran over these tracks at a speed of about three kilometers per 
hour, which kept it within the planet’s terminator, the zone of predawn shadow 
that was in most terrain about twenty kilometers wide. A slight expansion of the 
tracks exposed to the morning sun farther to the east drove the city ever 
westward, as it rested on tightly fitting sleeves shaped to slide the city away 
from the expansion. This motion was so inexorable that resistance to it in 
another part of the sleeves generated great amounts of electrical power, as did 
the solar collectors trailing the city, and set on the very top of the high Dawn 
Wall, catching the first blasting rays of sunlight. Even in a civilization where 
energy was cheap, Mercury was amazingly blessed. And so it joined the worlds 
farther out, and became one of the brightest of all. And a hundred new floating 
worlds opened every year—cities in flight, little city-states, each with its own 
charter, settler mix, landscape, style.
And yet still, with all the blossoming of human effort and confidence of the 
accelerando, there was a sense of tension in the air, of danger. For despite all 
the building, emigration, settlement, and inhabitation, there were still 
eighteen billion on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars; and the semipermeable 
membrane between the two planets was curved taut with the osmotic pressure of 
that demographic imbalance. Relations between the two were tense, and many 
feared that a prick of the taut membrane could tear everything asunder. In this 
pressured situation, history was little comfort; so far they had dealt with it 
well, but never before had humanity responded to a crisis of need with any 
long-term consistent sensible sanity; mass madness had erupted before; and they 
were the exact same animals that in previous centuries, faced with matters of 
subsistence and survival, had slaughtered each other indiscriminately. 
Presumably it could happen again. So people built, argued, grew furious; waited, 
uneasily, for signs that the oldest superelderly were dying; stared hard at 
every child they saw. A stressed renaissance, then, living fast, on the edge, a 
manic golden age: the Accelerando. And no one could say what would happen next.


 
 
 
 
 
Zo sat at the back of a room full of diplomats, looking out the window at 
Terminator as the oval city rolled majestically over the blasted wastelands of 
Mercury. The herni-ellipsoidal space under the city’s high clear dome would have 
been a pretty airspace to fly in, but the local authorities had banned it as too 
dangerous—one of many fascist regulations that bound life here—the state as 
nanny, what Nietzsche so aptly called the slave mentality, still alive and well 
here at the end of the twenty-second century, in fact popping up everywhere, 
hierarchy reerecting its comforting structure in all these new provincial 
settlements, Mercury, the asteroids, the outer systems—everywhere except on 
noble Mars.
Here on Mercury it was particularly bad. Meetings between the Martian delegation 
and the Mercurians had been going on in Terminator for weeks, and Zo was tired 
of them, both the meetings and the Mercurial negotiators, a secretive 
self-important group of oligarchic mullahs haughty and fawning at the same time, 
who had not yet comprehended the new order of things in the solar system. She 
wanted to forget them and their little world, to go home and fly.
On the other hand, in her cover as a lowly staff assistant she had up to this 
point been an entirely minor figure in the proceedings, and now that 
negotiations were grinding to a halt, stalled on the stubborn incomprehension of 
these happy slaves, her turn had come at last. As the meeting broke up, she took 
aside an aide to the highest leader in Terminator, who was called rather 
picturesquely the Lion of Mercury, and she asked the aide for a private meeting. 
The young man, an ex-Terran, was agreeable—Zo had made sure of his interest long 
before—and they retired to a terrace outside the city offices.
Zo put a hand to the man’s arm, said kindly, “We’re very concerned that if 
Mercury and Mars don’t make a solid partnership, Terra will wedge between us and 
play us off against each other. We’re the two largest collections of heavy 
metals left in the solar system, and the more civilization spreads, the more 
valuable that becomes. And civilization is certainly spreading. This is the 
Accelerando, after all. Metals are valuable.”
And Mercury’s natural fund of metals, though hard to mine, was truly 
spectacular; the planet was only a little bigger than Luna and yet its gravity 
nearly equaled that of Mars, a very tangible sign of its heavy iron core, and 
its accompanying array of more precious metals, seamed all through the 
meteor-battered surface.
“Yes ... ?” the young man said.
“We feel that we need to establish a more explicit....”
“Cartel?”
“Partnership.”
The young Mercurian smiled. “We aren’t worried about being pitted against Mars 
by anyone.”
“Obviously. But we are.”
For a time there, at the beginning of its colonization, Mercury had seemed to be 
very flush. Not only did the colonists have metals, but being so close to the 
sun, they had the possibility of tapping a great deal of solar energy. Just the 
resistance set up between the city’s sleeves and the expanding tracks they slid 
over created enormous amounts of it, and there was even more in solar-collection 
potential; collectors in Mercurial orbit had started lazing some of that 
sunlight out to the new outer-solar-system colonies. From the first fleet of 
track-laying cars, in 2142, through the rolling construction of Terminator in 
the 2150s, and throughout the 2160s and 70s, the Mercurians had thought they 
were rich.
Now it was 2181, however, and with the successful wide deployment of various 
kinds of fusion power, energy was cheap, and light was reasonably plentiful. The 
so-called lamp satellites, and the gas lanterns burning in the uoper atmospheres 
of the gas giants, were being built and lit all over the outer system. As a 
result Mercury’s copious solar resources had been rendered insignificant. 
Mercury had become once again nothing more than a metal-rich but dreadfully 
hot-and-cold place, a hardship assignment. And unterraformable to boot.
, Quite a crash in their fortunes, as Zo reminded the young man without much 
subtlety. Which meant they needed to cooperate with their more conveniently 
located allies in the system. “Otherwise the risk of Terran return to dominance 
is very real.”
“Terra is too enmeshed in its own problems to endanger anyone else,” the young 
man said.
Zo shook her head gently. “The more trouble Terra is in, the worse danger for 
the rest of us. That’s why we’re worried. That’s why we’re thinking that, if you 
don’t want to enter into an agreement with us, we may just have to build another 
city and track system on Mercury, down in the southern hemisphere, and cruise in 
the terminator down there. Where some of the best metal deposits are.”
The young man was shocked. “You couldn’t do that without our permission.”
“Couldn’t we?”
“No city on Mercury can exist if we don’t want it to.”
“Why, what will you do?”
The young man was silent.
Zo said, “Anyone can do what they want, eh? This is true for everyone ever 
born.”
The young man thought it over. “There’s not enough water.”
“No.” Mercury’s water supply consisted in its entirety of small ice fields lying 
inside craters at the two poles, where they remained in permanent shadow. These 
crater glaciers contained enough water for Terminator’s purposes, but not much 
more. “A few comets directed at the poles would add more, however.”
“Unless their impact blasted all the water on the poles away! No, that wouldn’t 
work! The ice in those polar craters is only a tiny fraction of the water from 
billions of years of comets, hitting all over the planet. Most of the water was 
lost to space on impact, or burned off. The same thing would happen if comets 
struck up there now. You’d get a net loss.”
“The AI modelers suggest all kinds of possibilities. We could always try it and 
see.”
The young man stepped back, affronted. And rightly so; you couldn’t put a threat 
much more explicitly than that. But in slave moralities the good and the stupid 
tended to become much the same, so one had to be explicit. Zo held her 
expression steady, though the young man’s indignation had a commedia dell’arte 
quality that was quite funny. She stepped closer to him, emphasizing their 
difference in height; she had half a meter on him.
“I’ll give the Lion your message,” he said through his teeth.
“Thanks,” Zo said, and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.
These slaves had created for themselves a ruling caste of physicist-priests, who 
were a black box for those on the outside, but like all good oligarchies 
predictable and powerful in their exterior action. They would take the hint, and 
be able to act on it. An alliance would follow. So Zo left their offices, and 
walked happily down the stepped streets of the Dawn Wall. Her work was done, and 
so very likely the mission would soon return to Mars.
She entered the Martian consulate midway down the wall, sent a call to Jackie 
letting her know that the next move had been made. After that she walked out 
onto the balcony to have a smoke.
Her color vision surged under the impact of the chrom-otropics lacing her 
cigarette, and the little city below her became quite stunning, a Fauvist 
fantasia. Against the Dawn Wall the terracing rose in ever-narrower strips, 
until the highest buildings (the offices of the city rulers, naturally) were a 
mere line of windows under the Great Gates and the clear dome above it. Tile 
roofs and balconies were nestled under the green treetops below her, the 
balconies all floored and walled by mosaics. Down on the oval flat that held the 
greater part of the city, the roofs were bigger and closer together, the 
greenery bunched in crops that glowed under the light that bounced down from 
filtered mirrors in the dome; altogether it looked like a big Faberge egg, 
elaborate, colorful, pretty in the way that all cities were.
But to be trapped inside one . .. well, there was nothing for it but to pass the 
hours in as entertaining a manner as possible, until she got the word to go 
home. Part of one’s nobility was devotion to duty, after all.
So she strode down the wall’s staircase streets to Le Dome, to party with Miguel 
and Arlene and Xerxes, and the band of composers, musicians, writers and other 
artists and aesthetes who hung out at the cafe. It was a wild bunch. Mercury’s 
craters had all been named centuries before after the most famous artists in 
Terran history, and so as Terminator • rolled along it passed Diirer and Mozart, 
Phidias and Purcell, Turgenev and Van Dyke; and elsewhere on the planet were 
Beethoven, Imhotep, Mahler, Matisse, Murasaki, Milton, Mark Twain; Homer and 
Holbein touched rims; Ovid starred the rim of the much larger Pushkin, in one of 
many reversals of true importance; Goya overlapped Sophocles, Van Gogh was 
inside Cervantes; Chao Meng-fu was full of ice; and so on and so forth, in a 
most capricious manner, as if the naming committee of the International 
Astronomical Union had one night gotten hilariously drunk and started tossing 
named darts at a map; there was even a clue commemorating this party, a huge 
escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.
Zo thoroughly approved the method. But the effect on the artists currently 
living on Mercury had been catastrophic in the extreme. Constantly confronted as 
they were with Terra’s unmatchable canon, an overwhelming anxiety of influence 
had crippled them. But their partying had taken on a corresponding greatness 
that Zo quite enjoyed.
On this evening, after a considerable amount of drinking in the Dome, during 
which time the city rolled between Stravinsky and Vyasa, the group took off 
through the narrow alleyways of the city, looking for trouble. A few blocks away 
they barged in on a ceremony of Mithraists or Zo-roastrians, sun worshipers in 
any case, influential in local government and indeed perhaps the heart of it, 
and their catcalls quickly broke up the meeting and stimulated a fist-fight, and 
in short order they had to run to avoid arrest by the local constabulary, the 
spasspolizei as the Dome crowd called them.
After that they went to the Odeon, but were kicked out for being unruly; then 
they cruised the alleyways of the entertainment dfstrict, and danced outside a 
bar where loud bad industrial was being played. But there was something missing. 
Forced gaiety was so pathetic, Zo thought, looking down at their sweaty faces. 
“Let’s go outside,” she suggested. “Let’s go out on the surface and play piper 
at the gates of dawn.”
No one except Miguel showed any interest. They were worms in a bottle, they had 
forgotten the ground existed. But Miguel had promised to take her out many 
times, and now, with her time on Mercury short, he was finally just bored enough 
to agree to go.
 
Terminator’s tracks were numerous, each smooth gray cylinder held several meters 
off the ground by an endless row of thick pylons. As the city slid majestically 
westward, it passed small stationary platforms leading to underground transfer 
bunkers, baked ballardian space-plane runways, and crater-rim refuges. Leaving 
the city was a controlled activity, no surprise, but Miguel had a pass, and so 
the two of them activated the south city doors with it, and stepped into the 
lock and across into an underground station called Hammersmith. There they 
suited up, in bulky but flexible spacesuits, and went out through a lock into a 
tunnel, and up onto the blasted dust of Mercury.
Nothing could have been more clean and spare than this waste of black and gray. 
In such a context Miguel’s drunken giggling bothered Zo more than usual, and she 
turned down her helmet intercom until it was no more than a whisper.
Walking east of the city was dangerous; even standing still was dangerous; but 
to see the sun’s edge, that’s what they had to do. Zo kicked at the rocks as 
they wandered southwest, to get an angle on their view of the city. She wished 
she could fly over this black world; presumably some kind of rocket backpack 
would do the trick, but no one had bothered to work it up, as far as she knew. 
So they trudged along instead, keeping a sharp eye to the east. Very soon the 
sun would rise over that horizon; above them now, in the ultrathin neon-argon 
atmosphere, fine dust kicked up by electron bombardment turning to a faint white 
mist in the solar bombardment. Behind them the very top of the Dawn Wall was a 
blaze of pure white, impossible to look at even through the heavy differential 
filtering of their helmet face masks.
Then the rocky flat horizon ahead of them to the east, near Stravinsky Crater, 
turned into a silver nitrate image of itself. Zo stared into the explosive 
phosphorescent dancing line, rapt: Sol’s corona, like a forest fire in some 
silver forest just over the horizon. Zo’s spirit flashed likewise, she would 
have flown like Icarus into the sun if she could, she felt like a moth wanting 
the flame, a kind of spiritual sexual hunger, and indeed she was crying out in 
just the same involuntary orgasmic cries, such a fire, such a beauty. The solar 
rapture, they called this back in the city, and well named. Miguel felt it as 
well; he was leaping from boulder tops eastward, arms spread wide, like Icarus 
trying to launch himself.
Then he came down awkwardly in the dust, and Zo could hear his cry even with her 
intercom volume turned almost off. She ran to him and saw the impossible angle 
of his left knee, cried out herself and knelt at his side. Through the suit the 
ground was frigid. She helped him up, his arm over her shoulder. She turned up 
the volume on her intercom, even though he was groaning loudly. “Shut up,” she 
said. “Concentrate, pay attention.”
They got into a rhythm, hopping west after the receding Dawn Wall, still 
incandescent across the top of its tall bell curve. It was receding from them, 
there was no time to be lost. But they kept falling. The third time, sprawled in 
the dust, the landscape a blinding mix of pure white and pure black, Miguel 
screamed in pain and then panted out, “Go on, Zo, go save yourself! No reason 
both of us should die out here!”
“Oh fuck that,” Zo said, picking herself up.
“Go!”
“I won’t! Shut up now, let me try carrying you.”
He weighed about what he would on Mars, seventy kilos with the suit, she 
guessed, more a matter of balance than anything else, so while he babbled on 
hysterically, “Let me go, Zo, truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all you 
know and all you need to know,” she leaned over and put her arms under his back 
and knees, which caused him to shriek. “Shut up!” she cried. “Right now this is 
the truth, and therefore beautiful.” And she laughed as she started to run with 
him in her arms.
He blocked her view of the ground directly before them, so she had to look 
forward in the blaze-and-black, with sweat in her eyes. It was hard going, and 
twice more she fell; but while running she thumped along at a good speed back 
toward the city.
Then she felt sunlight on her back. It was like the pricking of needles, even 
through her insulated suit. Massive surge of adrenaline; blinded by the light; 
some kind of valley aligned to the dawn; then back into the patchy zone of 
light-shot shadows, a crazy chiaroscuro; then, slowly, back into the terminator 
proper, everything shadowed and dim except for the fiery city wall, blazing far 
above. She was gasping hard for air, sweating heavily, hot from exertion now 
rather than sunlight. And yet still the sight of the incandescent arc at the top 
of the city was enough to make one into a Mithraist.
Of course even when the city was directly over them, there was no immediate way 
of getting back up into it. She had to run past it, on to the next underground 
station. Complete focus on running, for minute after minute. Lactic-acid pain. 
And there it was, up ahead on the horizon, a door in a hill beside the tracks; 
pound and pound over the smoothed regolith. Violent hammering on the door got 
the two of them let into the lock and inside, where they were arrested; but Zo 
just laughed at the spasspolizei, and got her helmet off, and Miguel’s, and 
kissed the sobbing Miguel repeatedly for his clumsiness. In his pain he didn’t 
notice, he was latched onto her as a drowning man to a lifesaver. She only 
succeeded in disengaging herself from his grasp by banging him gently on his 
hurt knee. She laughed out loud at his howl, feeling a rush pour through her; 
such adrenaline, so beautiful, rarer by far than any sexual orgasm, thus more 
precious. So she kissed Miguel again and again, kisses that he did not notice, 
and then she barged through the spasspolizei, claiming diplomatic status and a 
need for haste. “Get him some drugs, you fools,” she said. “A shuttle for Mars 
is leaving tonight, I have to go.”
“Thank you, Zo!” Miguel cried. “Thank you! You saved my life!”
“I saved my trip home,” she said, and laughed at his expression. She returned to 
kiss him some more. “It’s me should be thanking you! Such an opportunity! Thank 
you, thank you.”
“No, thank you!”
“No, thank you!”
And even in his agony he laughed. “I love you, Zo.”
“And I love you.”
But if she didn’t hurry she would miss her shuttle.


 
 
 
 
 
The shuttle was a pulsed fusion rocket. and they would reach Earth the day after 
tomorrow. And in a decent gravity the whole time, except for during the 
somersault.
All manner of things were changing because of this sudden shrinkage of the solar 
system. One small result was that Venus was no longer needed as a gravity handle 
for rocket travel, and so it was coincidence only that had Zo’s shuttle, the 
Nike of Samothrace, passing fairly near to the shaded planet. Zo joined the rest 
of the passengers in the big skylight ballroom to look at it as they passed. The 
clouds of the planet’s superheated atmosphere were dark; the planet appeared as 
a gray circle against the black of space. The ter-raforming of Venus was 
proceeding apace, the whole planet in the shade of a parasol, which was Mars’s 
old soletta with its mirrors repositioned so that they did just the opposite of 
what they had done in front of Mars; rather than redirect light onto the planet, 
they reflected it all away. Venus rolled in darkness.
This was the first step of a terraforming project that many people deemed mad. 
Venus had no water, a stupendously thick superheated carbon-dioxide atmosphere, 
a day longer than its year, and surface temperatures that would melt lead and 
zinc. Not a promising set of initial conditions, it was true, but people had 
begun to try anyway, humanity’s reach continuing to exceed its grasp, even as 
its grasp became godlike; Zo thought it was wonderful. The people who had 
initiated the project were even claiming it could happen faster than the 
terraforming of Mars. This was because the complete removal of sunlight had 
profound effects; the temperature in the thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere 
(ninety-five bar at the surface!) had been dropping by five K a year for the 
last half century. Soon the “Big Rain” would begin to fall, and in just a couple 
hundred years the carbon dioxide would all be on the planet, in dry-ice glaciers 
covering the low parts of the surface. At that point the dry ice was to be 
covered by an insulating layer of diamond coating or foamed rock, and once 
sealed off, water oceans would be introduced. The water was going to come from 
somewhere else, as Venus’s natural inventory would cover it to a depth of a 
centimeter or less. The Venusian terraformers, mystics of a new kind of 
viriditas, were currently negotiating with the Saturnian League for the rights 
to the ice moon Ence-ledus, which they hoped to drive down into Venusian orbit 
and break up in successive passes through the atmosphere. This moon’s water once 
rained onto Venus would create shallow oceans over about seventy percent of the 
planet, entirely covering the wrapped carbon-dioxide glaciers. An atmosphere of 
oxygen and hydrogen would be left in place, some light would be let through the 
parasol, and at that point human settlements would become possible, on the two 
high continents Ishtar and Aphrodite. After that, they would have all the 
remaining problems of terraforming that Mars had been dealing with, and they 
would also have the very long-term, specifically Venusian projects of removing 
the CO2 ice sheets from the planet somehow, and also imparting enough spin to 
the planet to give it a reasonable diurnal cycle; for the short term, days and 
nights could be established using the parasol as a giant circular Venetian 
blind, but in the long run they did not want to rely on something so fragile. 
With a quiver she imagined it: some centuries hence, a biosphere and 
civilization established on Venus, the two continents inhabited, the beautiful 
Diana Rift a fair valley, billions of people and animals—and then one day the 
parasol knocked awry, and ssssss, a whole world roasted. Not a happy prospect. 
And so now, even before the massive flooding and scouring of the Big Rain, they 
were trying to lay metallic windings as physicalized latitude lines around the 
planet, windings that would, when a fleet of solar-powered generators were 
placed in fluctuating orbits around the planet, make the planet in effect the 
armature of a giant electric motor, the magnetic forces of which would create 
the torque that would increase the planet’s spin. The system’s designers claimed 
that, in about the same time it would take to freeze out the atmosphere and drop 
an ocean, the impetus of this “Dyson motor” could speed Venus’s rotation enough 
to give the planet a weeklong day; so there they would be, in perhaps three 
hundred years, down on the transmogrified world, planting crops. The surface 
would be massively eroded of course, and still very volcanic, with carbon 
dioxide trapped under the seas ready to burst out and poison them, and weeklong 
days cooking and freezing them; but there they would be nevertheless, everything 
stripped, raw, new.
The plan was insane. It was beautiful. Zo stared up through the ballroom ceiling 
at the gibbous gray globe, hopping from foot to foot in her excitement, in her 
horror and admiration, hoping to catch a glimpse of the little dots of the new 
asteroid moons that were home to the terraform-ing mystics, or perhaps the 
coronal arc of a reflection from the annular mirror that used to be Mars’s. No 
luck there— only the gray disk of the shaded evening star, the signet of people 
who had taken on a task that recontextualized humanity as a kind of god 
bacteria, chewing away at worlds, dying to prepare the ground for later 
life—dwarfed most grandiosely in the cosmic scheme of things, in an almost 
Calvinistic masochist-heroism—a parodic travesty of the Mars project—and yet 
just as magnificent. They were specks in this universe, specks! But what ideas 
they had. People would do anything for the sake of an idea, anything.
 
Even visit Earth. Steaming, clotted, infectious, a human anthill stuck with a 
stick; the panic pullulation ongoing in the dreadful mash of history; the 
hypermalthusian nightmare at its worst; hot, humid, and heavy; and yet still, or 
perhaps because of all that, a great place to visit. And Jackie wanted her to 
check in with a couple of people in India anyway. So Zo had taken the Nike, and 
would later catch a Mars shuttle from Earth. Before she went to India to talk to 
Jackie’s contacts, however, she made her regular pilgrimage to Crete, to see the 
ruins that here were still called Minoan, although in Dorsa Brevia she had been 
taught to call them Ariadnean. Minos had been the one to wreck the ancient 
matriarchy, after all, so it was one of the many travesties of Terran history 
that the destroyed civilization should now be named after the destroyer. But 
names could be changed.
She wore a rented exoskeleton, made for off-world visitors oppressed by the g. 
Gravity was destiny, as they said, and Earth had a lot of destiny. The suits 
were like birdsuits without wings, conformable bodysuits that moved with one’s 
muscles while providing some undersupport; body bras. They did not entirely ease 
the effect of the planet’s pull, for breathing was still an effort, and Zo’s 
limbs felt heavy within the suit, so to speak, pressed down uncomfortably 
against the fabric. She had gotten used to walking around in the suits on 
previous trips, and it was a fascinating exercise, like weight lifting, but not 
one that she liked very much. Better than the alternative, however. She had 
tried that too, but it was a terrible distraction, it kept one from really 
seeing, really being there.
So she walked around the ancient site of Gournia, in the peculiar, somewhat 
submarine flow of the suit. Gournia was her favorite of all the Ariadnean ruins, 
the only ordinary village of that civilization to have been found and excavated; 
the other sites were all palaces. This village had probably been a satellite of 
the palace at Malia: now a warren of waist-high walls made of stacked stones, 
covering a hilltop overlooking the Aegean. All the rooms were very small, often 
one meter by two, with alleys running between shared walls; little labyrinths, 
yes, and very much like the whitewashed villages that still dotted the 
countryside. People said that Crete had been hard hit by the great flood, as the 
Ar-iadneans had been by theirs following the explosion of Thera; and it was true 
that all the pretty little fishing harbors were flooded to one extent or 
another, and the Ariadnean ruins at Zakros and Malia entirely drowned. But what 
Zo saw on Crete was an everlasting vitality. There was no other place on Earth 
she had seen that had handled the population surge as well; everywhere small 
whitewashed villages clung to the land, like beehives, covering hilltops, 
filling valleys, and surrounded by crops and orchards, with the dry knobby hills 
still sticking out of the cultivated land, in sculptured ridges rising to the 
central spine of the island. The island’s population had risen to over forty 
million, she had heard, and yet the island still looked much the same; there 
were just more villages, built to match the pattern not only of the existing 
ones but of the ancient ones like Gour-nia and Itanos as well. Town planning 
with a continuity five thousand years old, continuity with that first peak of 
civilization or final peak of prehistory, so tall as to be glimpsed even by 
classical Greece a thousand years later, enduring by oral transmission alone as 
the myth of Atlantis—and then also in the shapes of all their subsequent lives, 
not only on Crete, but now on her Mars as well. Because of the names used in 
Dorsa Brevia, and that culture’s valorization of the Ariadnean matriarchy, the 
two places had developed a relationship; many Martians came to Crete to visit 
the ancient sites, and there were new hotels near all of them now, built on a 
slightly larger scale to accommodate the tall young pilgrims, visiting the holy 
places station to station—Phaistos, Gournia, Itanos, Malia and Zakros under the 
water, even the ridiculous “reconstruction” at Knossos. They came and saw how it 
had all begun, back in the morning of the world. Zo too—standing in the 
brilliant blue Aegean light, straddling a stone alleyway five thousand years 
old, she felt pouring into her the reverberations of that greatness, up through 
the spongy red stones underfoot and into her own heart. Nobility that would 
never end.
 
The rest of Earth, however, was Calcutta. Well, that wasn’t really fair. But 
Calcutta itself was definitely Calcutta. Fetid humanity at its most compacted; 
whenever she went out of her room Zo had at least five hundred people in her 
field of vision, and often a few thousand. There was a frightful exhilaration in 
the sight of all this life in the streets, a world of dwarfs and midgets and 
other assorted small people, all of whom saw her and clumped like baby birds to 
a parent who could feed them. Although Zo had to admit that the clumping was 
friendlier than that, composed more of curiosity than hunger—indeed they seemed 
more interested in her exoskeleton than her. And they seemed happy enough, thin 
but not emaciated, even when they were clearly permanently camped on the 
streets. The streets themselves were co-ops now, people had tenure, swept them, 
regulated the millions of little markets, grew crops in every plaza, and slept 
among them too. That was life on Earth in the late Holocene. After Ariadne it 
had been downhill all the way.
Zo went up to Prahapore, an enclave in the hills to the north of the city. This 
was where one of Jackie’s Terran spies lived, in the midst of a jammed dorm of 
harried civil servants, all living at their screens and sleeping under their 
desks. Jackie’s contact was a translator programmer, a woman who understood 
Mandarin, Urdu, Dravidian and Vietnamese, as well as her Hindu and English; she 
also was important in an extensive eavesdropping network, and could keep Jackie 
informed concerning some of the Indian-Chinese conversations about Mars.
“Of course they both will send more people to Mars,” the heavyset woman said to 
Zo, after they were out in the compound’s little herb garden. “That’s a given. 
But it does look like both governments feel they have their populations in a 
long-term solution. No one expects to have more than one child anymore. It’s not 
only the law, it’s the tradition.”
“The uterine law,” Zo said.
The woman shrugged. “Possibly so. A very strong tradition, in any case. People 
look around, they see the problem. They expect to get the longevity treatment, 
and they expect to have a sterility implant at that time. And in India, anyway, 
they feel lucky if they get the permits to remove the implants. And after having 
one child, people expect to be sterilized for good. Even the Hindu 
fundamentalists have changed on this, the social pressure on them was so great. 
And the Chinese have been doing this for centuries. The longevity treatment only 
reinforced what they had already been doing.”
“So Mars has le^ss to fear from them than Jackie thinks.”
“Well, they still want to send up emigrants, that’s part of the overall 
strategy. And resistance to the one-child rule has been stronger in some 
Catholic and Muslim countries, and several of those nations would like to 
colonize Mars as if it were empty. The threat shifts now, from India and China 
to the Philippines, Brazil, Pakistan.”
“Hmm,” Zo said. Talk of immigration always made her feel oppressed. Threatened 
by lemmings. “What about the exmetas?”
“The old Group of Eleven is rebanding in support of the strongest of the old 
metanats. They will be looking for places to develop. They’re much weaker than 
before the flood, but they still have a lot of influence in America, Russia, 
Europe, South America. Tell Jackie to watch what Japan does in the next few 
months, she’ll see what I mean.” They connected up wristpads so that the woman 
could make a secure transfer of detailed information for Jackie.
“Okay,” Zo said. Suddenly she was tired, as if a heavy man had crawled into the 
exoskeleton with her and were dragging her down. Earth, what a drag. Some people 
said they liked the weight, as if they needed that pressure to be convinced of 
their own reality. Zo wasn’t like that. Earth was the very definition of 
exoticism, which was fine, but suddenly she longed to be home. She unplugged her 
wristpad from the translator’s, imagining all the while that perfect middle way, 
that perfect test of will and flesh: the exquisite gravity of Mars.


 
 
 
 
 
Then it was down the space elevator from Clarke, a trip that took longer than 
the flight from Earth; and she was back in the world, the only real world, Mars 
the magnificent. “There’s no place like home,” Zo said to the train-station 
crowd in Sheffield, and then she sat happily in the trains as they flowed over 
the pistes down Tharsis, then north to Echus Overlook.
The little town had grown since its early days as the ter-raforming 
headquarters, but not much; it was out of the way, and built into the steep east 
wall of Echus Chasma, so that there wasn’t much of it to be seen—a bit on the 
plateau at the top of the cliff, a bit at the bottom, but with three vertical 
kilometers between the two, so that they were not visible one from the 
other—more like two separate villages, connected by a vertical subway. Indeed if 
it weren’t for the fliers, Echus Overlook might have subsided into sleepy 
historic-monument status, like Underbill or Senzeni Na, or the icy hideouts in 
the south. But the eastern wall of Echus Chasma stood right in the path of the 
prevailing westerlies that came pouring down the Tharsis Bulge, causing them to 
shoot up in the most astonishingly powerful updrafts. Which made it a birding 
paradise.
Zo was supposed to check in with Jackie and the Free Mars apparatchiks working 
for her, but before getting embroiled in all that she wanted to fly. So she 
checked her old San-torini hawksuit out of storage at the gliderport, and went 
to the changing room and slipped into it, feeling the smooth muscly texture of 
the suit’s flexible exoskeleton. Then it was out the smooth path, trailing her 
tail feathers, and onto the Diving Board, a natural overhang that had been 
artificially extended with a concrete slab. She walked to the edge of this slab 
and looked down, down, down, three thousand meters down, to the umber floor of 
Echus Chasma. With the usual burst of adrenaline she tipped forward and fell off 
the cliff. Headfirst down, down, down, the wind picking up in a swift whoosh 
over her helmet as she reached terminal velocity, which she recognized by the 
pitch of the whooshing; and then she spread her arms, and felt the suit stiffen 
and help her muscles to hold the beautiful wings wide, and with a loud crumping 
smoosh of wind she curved up into the sun, turned her head, arched her back, 
pointed her toes and set the tail feathers, left right left; and the wind was 
pulling her up, up, up. Shift her feet and arms together, turn then in a tight 
gyre, see the cliff then the chasm floor, around and around: flying. Zo the 
hawk, wild and free. She was laughing happily, and tears streamed this way and 
that in her goggles, dashed away by the force of the g.
The air above Echus was nearly empty this morning. After riding the updraft most 
fliers were peeling off to the north, soaring, or shooting down one of the 
clefts in the cliff wall, where the updraft was diminished and it was possible 
to tip and dive in stoops of great velocity. Zo too, when she had gotten about 
five thousand meters above Overlook, and was breathing the pure oxygen of her 
helmet’s enclosed air system, turned her head right and dipped her right wing, 
and curved through the exhilaration of a run across the wind, feeling it keen 
over her body in a rapid continuous fingering. No sound but the hard whoosh of 
wind in her wings. The somatic pressure of the wind all over her body was a 
subtly sensuous massage, and she felt it through the tightened suit as if the 
suit were not there, as if she were naked and feeling the wind directly on her 
skin, as she wished she could be. A good suit reinforced this impression, of 
course, and she had used this one for three m-years before leaving for Mercury; 
it fit like a glove, it was great to be back in it.
She pulled up into a kite, then stunted forward in the maneuver called Jesus 
Falling. A thousand meters down and she pulled her wings in and began to 
dolphin-kick to speed her stoop, until the wind was keening loudly over her, and 
she passed the edge of the great wall going well over terminal velocity. Passing 
the rim was the sign to start pulling out, because as tall as the cliff was, at 
full stoop the chasm floor came rushing up like a final slap in the face, and it 
took a while to pull out of it, even given her strength and skill and nerve, and 
the reinforcement of the suit. So she arched her back and popped her wings, and 
felt the strain in her pecs and biceps, a tremendous pressure even though the 
suit aided her with a logarithmically increasing precen-tage of the load. Tail 
feathers down; pike; four hard flaps; and then she was jinking across the 
chasm’s sandy floor, she could have picked a mouse off it.
She turned and got back in the updraft, gyred back up into developing high 
clouds. The wind was erratic today, and it was an all-absorbing pleasure to 
tumble and play in it. This was the meaning of life, the purpose of the 
universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a 
mirror of the wind. Exuberance; she flew like an angel, as they said. Sometimes 
one flew like a drone, sometimes one flew like a bird; and then on rare 
occasions one flew like an angel. It had been a long time.
She came to herself, and lofted back down the wall toward Overlook, feeling 
tired in her arms. Then she spotted a hawk. Like a lot of fliers, if there was a 
bird in sight she tracked it, watching it more closely than birders had ever 
before watched a bird, imitating its every twitch and flutter to try to learn 
the genius of its flight. Sometimes hawks over this cliff would be innocently 
wheeling in a search for food and a whole squadron of fliers would be above it 
following its moves, or trying to. It was fun.
Now she shadowed the hawk, turning when it did, imitating the placement of the 
wings and tail. Its mastery of the air was like a talent that she craved but 
could never have. But she could try: bright sun in the racing clouds, indigo 
sky, the wind against her body, the little weightless gut orgasms when she 
peeled over into a stoop ... eternal moments of no-mind. The best, cleanest use 
of human time.
But the sun fell westward and she got thirsty, and so she left the hawk to its 
day and turned and coursed down in giant lazy S’s to Overlook, to nail her 
landing with a flap and a step, right on the green Kokopelli, just as if she had 
never left.
 
The neighborhood behind the launching complex was called Topside, and it was a 
mass of cheap dorms and restaurants inhabited almost entirely by fliers, and 
tourists come to watch the flying, all eating and drinking and roving and 
talking and dancing and looking for someone with whom to tandem the night. And 
there, no surprise, were her flier friends, Rose and Imhotep and Ella and 
Estavan, all in a group at the Adler Hofbrauhaus, high already and delighted to 
see Zo back again among them. They had a drink at the Adler to celebrate the 
reunion, and then went to Overlook Overlook, and sat on the rail catching up on 
gossip, passing around a big spliff laced with pandorph, making ribald 
commentary on the passing parade below the railing, shouting at friends spotted 
in the crowd.
Eventually they left Overlook Overlook and went down into the crowds of Topside, 
and slowly made their way through the bars to one of the bathhouses. They piled 
into the changing room and took off their clothes, and wandered naked through 
the dark warm watery rooms, the water waist-deep, ankle-deep, chest-deep—hot, 
cold, lukewarm—splitting up, finding each other later, having sex with scarcely 
visible strangers, Zo working slowly through several partners to her own orgasm, 
purring happily as her body clamped down on itself and her mind went away. Sex, 
sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the 
rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm. Joy at 
the sight of the stars in the skylight overhead, at the feel of warm water and 
of some boy who came in her and stayed in her, nearly hard, and three minutes 
later stiffened and started humping again, laughing at the approach of another 
bright orgasm. After that she sloshed into the comparative brightness of the bar 
and found the others there, Estavan declaring that the night’s third orgasm was 
usually the best, with an exquisitely long approach to climax and yet still a 
good bit of semen left to ejaculate. “After that it’s still fine, but more of an 
effort, you have to be wild to get off, and then it isn’t like the third 
anyway.” Zo and Rose and the rest of the women agreed that in this as in so many 
other ways, being female was superior; in a night at the baths they routinely 
had several wonderful orgasms, and even these were as nothing compared to the 
status orgasmus, a kind of running continuous orgasm that could last half an 
hour if one were lucky and one’s partners skillful. There was a craft to this 
that they studied assiduously, but it was still more art than science, as they 
all agreed: one had to be high but not too high, with a group but not a crowd 
... lately they had gotten pretty reliably good at it, they told Zo, and happily 
Zo demanded proof. “Come on, I want to be tabled.” Estavan hooted and led her 
and the rest down to a room with a big table sticking out of the water. Imhotep 
lay on his back on the table, Zo’s mattress man for the session; she was lifted 
up by the others, lying on her back as well, and slid down onto him, and then 
the whole group was on her, hands and mouths and genitals, a tongue in each ear, 
in her mouth, contact everywhere; after a while it was all an un-differentiated 
mass of erotic sensation, total sexsurround, Zo purring loudly. Then when she 
started to come, arching up off Imhotep with the violence of the cramping, they 
all kept going, more subtly now, teasing her, not letting her land, and then she 
was off and flying, the touch of a little finger would keep her going, until she 
cried out “No, I can’t,” and they laughed and said “You can,” and kept her going 
until her stomach muscles truly cramped, and she rolled violently off Imhotep 
and was caught by Rose and Estavan. She couldn’t even stand. Someone said they 
had had her off for twenty minutes; it had felt like two, or eternity. All her 
abdominal muscles ached, as did her thighs and butt. “Cold bath,” she said, and 
crawled off to the cool water in a nearby room.
But after being tabled there was little else at the baths that could appeal. Any 
more orgasms would hurt. She helped to table Estavan and Xerxes, and then a thin 
woman she didn’t know, all fun, but then she got bored. Flesh flesh flesh. 
Sometimes after being tabled one got further and further into it; other times it 
became just skin and hair and flesh, insides and outsides, who cared.
She went to the changing room and dressed, went outside. It was morning, the sun 
bright over the bare plains of Lunae. She flowed through the empty streets to 
her hostel, feeling relaxed and clean and sleepy. A big breakfast, fall into 
bed, delicious sleep.
But there in the hostel restaurant was Jackie. “If it isn’t our Zoya.” She had 
always hated the name, which Zo had chosen for herself.
Zo, surprised, said, “Did you follow me here?”
Jackie looked disgusted. “It’s my co-op too, you might recall. Why didn’t you 
check in when you got back?”
“I wanted to fly.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I didn’t mean it as one.”
Zo went to the buffet table, piled a plate with scrambled eggs and muffins. She 
returned to Jackie’s table, kissed her mother on the top of the head. “You’re 
looking good.”
Actually she looked younger than Zo, who was often sunburned and therefore 
wrinkled—younger but somehow preserved, as if she were a twin sister of Zo’s who 
had been bottled for a time and only recently decanted. She wouldn’t tell Zo how 
often she had had the gerontological treatments, but Rachel had said that she 
was always trying new variants, which were coming out at the rate of two or 
three a year, and that she got the basic package every three years at the most. 
So although she was somewhere in her fifth m-decade, she looked almost like Zo’s 
contemporary, except for that preserved quality, which was not so much body as 
spirit—a look in the eye, a certain hardening, a tightness, a wariness or 
weariness. It was hard work being the alpha female year after year, a heroic 
struggle, it had worn visible tracks in her no matter how baby smooth her skin, 
no matter how much a beauty she remained—and she was still quite a beauty, no 
doubt about it. But she was getting old. Soon her young men would unwrap 
themselves from around her little fingers and drop away.
Meanwhile she still had a great deal of presence, and at the moment she appeared 
considerably put out. People averted their eyes as if her look might strike them 
dead, which made Zo laugh. Not the politest way to greet one’s beloved mother, 
but what else could one do? Zo was too relaxed to be irritated.
Probably a mistake to laugh at her, however. She stared coldly until Zo 
straightened up.
“Tell me what happened on Mercury.”
Zo shrugged. “I told you. They still think they have the sun to give to the 
outer solar system, and it’s gone to their heads.”
“I suppose their sunlight would still be useful out there.”
“Energy’s always useful, but the outer satellites should be able to generate 
what they need, now.”
“So the Mercurians are left with metals.”
“That’s right.”
“But what do they want for them?”
“Everyone wants to be free. None of these new little worlds are big enough to be 
self-sufficient, so they have to have something to trade if they want to stay 
free. Mercury has sunlight and metals, the asteroids have metals, the outer 
satellites have volatiles, if anything. So they package and trade what they 
have, and try to make alliances to avoid domination by Earth or Mars.”
“It isn’t domination.”
“Of course not.” Zo kept a straight face. “But the big worlds, you know—”
“Are big.” Jackie nodded. “But add all these little ones together, and they’re 
big too.”
“Who’s going to add them?” Zo asked.
Jackie ignored the question. The answer was obvious anyway: Jackie would. Jackie 
was locked into a long-term battle with various forces on Earth, for what came 
down to the control of Mars; she was trying to keep them from being inundated by 
the immense home world; and as human civilization continued to spread throughout 
the solar system, Jackie considered the new little settlements pawns in this 
great struggle. And indeed if there were enough of them, they might make a 
difference.
“There’s not much reason to worry about Mercury,” Zo reassured her. “It’s a dead 
end, a provincial little town, run by a cult. No one can settle very many people 
there, no one. So even if we do manage to bring them on board, they won’t matter 
much.”
Jackie’s face took on its world-weary look, as if Zo’s analysis of the situation 
were the work of a child—as if there were hidden sources of political power on 
Mercury, of all places. It was irritating, but Zo restrained herself and did not 
show her irritation.
Antar came in, looking for them; he saw them and smiled, came over and gave 
Jackie a quick kiss, Zo a longer one. He and Jackie conferred for a while about 
something or other, in whispers, and then Jackie told him to leave.
There was a great deal of the will to power in Jackie, Zo saw once again. 
Ordering Antar around gratuitously; it was a flaunting of power that one saw in 
many nisei women, women who had grown up in patriarchies and therefore reacted 
virulently against them. They did not fully understand that patriarchy no longer 
mattered, and perhaps never had—that it had always been caught in the Kegel grip 
of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological power that 
could not be controlled by any mere politics. The female hold on male sexual 
pleasure, on life itself—these were realities for patriarchs as much as anyone, 
despite all their repression, their fear of the female which had been expressed 
in so many ways, purdah, clitoridec-tomy, foot binding and so on—ugly stuff 
indeed, a desperate ruthless last-ditch defense, successful for a time, 
certainly—but now blown away without a trace. Now the poor fellows had to fend 
for themselves, and it was hard. Women like Jackie had them whipped. And women 
like Jackie liked to whip them.
“I want you to go out to the Uranian system,” Jackie was saying. “They’re just 
settling out there, and I want to get them early. You can pass along a word to 
the Galileans as well, they’re getting out of line.”
“I should do a co-op stint,” Zo said, “or it will become too obvious that it’s a 
front.”
After many years of running with a feral co-op based in Lunae, Zo had joined one 
of the co-ops that functioned in part as a front for Free Mars, allowing Zo and 
other operatives to do party work without it becoming obvious that that was 
their principal activity. The co-op Zo had joined built and installed crater 
screens, but she hadn’t worked for them in any real job for over a year.
Jackie nodded. “Put in some time, then take another leave. In a month or so.”
“Okay.”
Zo was interested in seeing the outer satellites, so it was easy to agree. But 
Jackie only nodded, showing no sign of awareness that Zo might not have agreed. 
Her mother was not a very imaginative person, when all was said and done. No 
doubt Zo’s father was the source of that quality in Zo, ka bless him. Zo did not 
want to know his identity, which at this point would only have been an 
imposition on her freedom, but she felt a surge of gratitude to him for his 
genes, her salvation from pure Jackieness.
Zo stood, too tired to take her mother any longer. “You look tired, and I’m 
beat,” she said. She kissed Jackie on the cheek as she went off to her room. “I 
love you. Maybe you should think about getting the treatment again.”
 
Her co-op was based in Moreux Crater, in the Protonilus Mensae, between Mangala 
and Bradbury Point. It was a big crater, puncturing the long slope of the Great 
Escarpment as it fell down toward the Boone’s Neck peninsula. The coop was 
always developing new varieties of molecular netting to replace earlier nets, 
and the old tent fabrics; the mesh they had installed over Moreux was the latest 
thing, the polyhydroxybutyrate plastic of its fibers harvested from soybean 
plants, engineered to produce the PHB in the plants’ chlbroplasts. The mesh held 
in the equivalent of a daily inversion layer, which made the air inside the 
crater about thirty percent thicker and considerably warmer than the outside 
air. Nets like this one made it easier to get bi-omes through the tough 
transition from tent to open air, and when permanently installed, they created 
nice meso-climates at higher altitudes or latitudes. Moreux extended up to 
forty-three degrees north, and winters outside the crater were always going to 
be fairly severe. With the mesh in place they were able to sustain a warm 
high-altitude forest, srjorting an exotic array of plants engineered from the 
East African volcanoes, New Guinea, and the Himalayas. Down on the crater floor 
in the summer the days were seriously hot, and the weird blooming spiky trees as 
fragrant as perfume.
The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the northern arc 
of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window walls, 
overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath them. 
The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under vine-covered 
trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305 K, and people 
muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air to escape, or 
even working up a system where they could simply roll off the mesh during the 
summer.
Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out 
as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the 
outer satellites.
The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining 
tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact 
brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and greenhouse-gas 
minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was 
therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some 
feedstocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining 
methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was 
still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course 
robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would 
be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian 
world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of 
rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the 
powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut 
galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot 
excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and 
then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of 
late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the 
purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of 
the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a 
lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable 
car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead 
to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and 
zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy 
spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, 
watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a 
meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.
One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was 
escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of 
old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the 
longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small 
bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises 
clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of 
the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure 
out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes 
might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, 
perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.
Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly stunned through the 
whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric inquiries to his associates, 
and spent his time staring down at the forest below the town. When someone at 
dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I 
taught your mother once.”
“Yes,” Zo said.
“Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.
“I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.
“I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.
 
The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.
 
They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade under the 
eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a high canopy 
through which lemurs howled and leaped. The old man walked slowly along, peering 
at the heedless creatures of the forest, and he spoke seldom, mostly to ask if 
Zo knew the names of the various ferns and trees. All she could identify for him 
were the birds. “The names of plants go in one ear and out the other, I’m 
afraid,” she admitted cheerfully.
His forehead wrinkled at this.
“I think that helps me to see them better,” she added.
“Really.” He looked around again, as if trying it. “Does that mean you don’t see 
the birds as well as the plants?”
“They’re different. They’re my brothers and sisters, they have to have names. 
It’s part of them. But this stuff”—she gestured at the green fronds around them, 
giant ferns under spiky flowering trees—”this stuff is nameless, really. We make 
up names, but they don’t really have them.”
He thought about this.
“Where do you fly?” he said a kilometer down the overgrown trail.
“Everywhere.”
“Do you have favorite places?”
“I like Echus Overlook.”
“Good updrafts?”
“Very good. I was there until Jackie descended on me and put me to work.”
“It’s not your work?”
“Oh yes, yes. But my co-op is good at flex time.”
“Ah. So you will stay here awhile?”
“Only until the Galilean shuttle leaves.”
“Then you will emigrate?”
“No no. A tour, for Jackie. Diplomatic mission.”
“Ah. Will you visit Uranus?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to see Miranda.”
“Me too. That’s one reason I’m going.”
“Ah.”
They crossed a shallow creek, stepping on exposed flat stones. Birds called, 
insects whirred. Sunlight filled the entire crater bowl now, but under the 
forest canopy it was still cool, the air shot with parallel columns and wires of 
slanting yellow light. Russell crouched to stare into the creek they had 
crossed.
“What was my mother like as a child?” Zo asked.
“Jackie?”
He thought about it. A long time passed. Just as Zo was concluding with 
exasperation that he had forgotten the question, he said, “She was a fast 
runner. She asked a lot of questions. Why why why. I liked that. She was the 
oldest of that generation of ectogenes, I think. The leader anyway.”
“Was she in love with Nirgal?”
“I don’t know. Why, have you met Nirgal?”
“I think so, yes. With the ferals once. What about with Peter Clayborne, was she 
in love with him?”
“In love? Later, maybe. When they were older. In Zygote, I don’t know.”
“You aren’t much help.”
“No.”
“Forgotten it all?”
“Not all. But what I remember is—hard tc characterize. I remember Jackie asking 
about John Boone one day, just in the way you’re asking about her. More than 
once. She was pleased to be his granddaughter. Proud of him.”
“She still is. And I’m proud of her.”
“And—I remember her crying, once.”
“Why? And don’t say I don’t know!”
This balked him. Finally he looked up at her, with a smile almost human. “She 
was sad.”
“Oh very good!”
“Because her mother had left. Esther?”
“That’s right.”
“Kasei and Esther broke up, and Esther left for—I don’t know. But Kasei and 
Jackie stayed in Zygote. And one day she got to school early, on a day I was 
teaching. She asked why a lot. And this time too, but about Kasei and Esther. 
And then she cried.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I don’t. . . . Nothing, I suppose. I didn’t know what to say. Hmm.... I thought 
she perhaps should have gone with Esther. The mother bond is crucial.”
“Come on.”
“You don’t agree? I thought all you young natives were sociobiologists.”
“What’s that?”
“Urn—someone who believes that most cultural traits have a biological 
explanation.”
 
“Oh no. Of course not. We’re much freer than that. Mothering can be any kind of 
thing. Sometimes mothers are nothing but incubators.”
“I suppose so—”
“Take my word for it.”
“... But Jackie cried.”
On they hiked, in silence. Like a lot of the big craters, Moreux turned out to 
have several pie-wedge watersheds, converging on a central marsh and lake. In 
this case the lake was small and kidney-shaped, curving around the rough low 
knobs of a central peak complex. Zo and Russell came out from under the forest 
canopy on an indistinct trail that faded into elephant grass, and they would 
have gotten quickly lost except for the stream, which was oxbowing through the 
grass toward a meadow and then the marshy lake. Even the meadow was dominated by 
elephant grass, great circular clumps of it that stood well overhead, so that 
they often had a view of nothing but giant grasses and sky.
The long blades of grass gleamed under the lilac midday zenith. Russell stumbled 
along well behind Zo, his round sunglasses like mirrors in his face, reflecting 
the grass bundles as he looked this way and that. He appeared utterly foxed, 
amazed at the surroundings, and he muttered into an old wristpad that hung on 
his wrist like a manacle.
A final oxbow into the lake had created a fine sand-and-pebble beach, and after 
testing with a stick for quicksand at the waterline, and finding the sand firm, 
Zo stripped off her sweaty singlet and walked out into the water, which got nice 
and cold a few meters offshore. She dove under, swam around, hit her head on the 
bottom. There was a beached boulder standing over some deep water, and she 
climbed it and dove in three or four times, doing a forward flip in the water 
right after entry; this forward somersault, difficult and graceless in the air, 
caused a quick little tug of weightless pleasure in the pit of her stomach, a 
feeling as close to orgasm as any nonorgasm she had ever felt. So she dove 
several times, until the sensation wore off and she was cooled. Then she walked 
out of the lake and lay on the sand, feeling its heat and the solar radiation 
cook both sides of her. A real orgasm would have been perfect, but despite the 
fact that she was laid out before him like a map of sex, Russell sat 
cross-legged in the shallows, absorbed apparently by the mud, naked himself 
except for sunglasses and wristpad. A farmer-tanned little bald wizened primate, 
like her image of Gandhi or Homo habilis. It was even a bit sexy how different 
he was, so ancient and small, like the male of some turtle-without-a-shell 
species. She pulled her knee to the side and shifted up her bottom in an 
unmistakable present posture, the sunlight hot on her exposed vulva.
“What amazing mud,” he said, staring at the glop in his hand. “I’ve never seen 
anything like this biome.”
“No.”
“Do you like it?”
“This biome? I suppose so. It’s a bit hot and overgrown, but interesting. It 
makes a change.”
“So you don’t object. You’re not a Red.”
“A Red?” She laughed. “No, I’m a whig.”
He thought that one over. “Do you mean to say that greens and Reds are no longer 
a contemporary political division?”
She gestured at the elephant grass and saal trees backing the meadow. “How could 
they be?”
“Very interesting.” He cleared his throat. “When you go to Uranus, will you 
invite a friend of mine?”
“Maybe,” Zo said, and shifted her hips back a bit.
He took the hint, and after a moment leaned forward and began to massage the 
thigh nearest him. It felt like a monkey’s little hands on her skin, clever and 
knowing. He could lose his whole hand in her pubic hair, a phenomenon he 
appeared to like, as he repeated it several times and got an erection, which she 
held hard as she came. It was not like being tabled, of course, but any orgasm 
was a good thing, especially out in the sun’s hot rain. And although his 
handling of her was basic, he did not exhibit any of that hankering for 
simultaneous affection which so many of the old ones had, a sentimentality which 
interfered with the much more acute pleasures that could be achieved one person 
at a time. So when her shuddering had stilled she rolled on her side, and took 
his erection in her mouth—like a little finger she could wrap her tongue 
entirely around—while giving him a good view of her body. She stopped once to 
look herself, big rich taut curves, and saw that the span of her hips stood 
nearly as high as his shoulders. Then back to it, vagina dentata, so absurd 
those frightened patriarchal myths, teeth were entirely superfluous, did a 
python need teeth, did a rock stamp need teeth? Just grab the poor creatures by 
the cock and squeeze till they whimpered, and what were they going to do? They 
could try to stay out of the grip, but at the same time it was the place they 
most wanted to be, so that they wandered in the pathetic confusion and denial of 
that double bind—and put themselves at the risk of teeth anyway, any chance they 
got; she nipped at him, to remind him of his situation; then let him come. Men 
were so lucky they weren’t telepathic.
Afterward they took another dip in the lake, and back on the sand he pulled a 
loaf of bread from his day pack. They broke the loaf in half and ate.
“Were you purring, then?” he said between swallows.
“Mm-hmm.”
“You had the trait inserted?”
She nodded, swallowed. “Last time I took the treatment.”
“The genes are from cats?”
“From tigers.”
“Ah.”
“It turns out to be a minor change in the larynx and vocal cords. You should try 
it, it feels really good.”
He was blinking and did not answer.
“Now who’s this friend you want me to take to Uranus?”
“Ann Clayborne.”
“Ah! Your old nemesis.”
“Something like that.”
“What makes you think she would go?”
“She might not. But she might. Michel says she’s trying some new things. And I 
think Miranda would be interesting to her. A moon knocked apart in an impact, 
and then reassembled, moon and impactor together. It’s an image I’d ... like her 
to see. All that rock, you know. She’s fond of rock.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Russell and Clayborne, the green and the Red, two of the most famous antagonists 
in all the melodramatic saga of the first years of settlement. Those first 
years: a situation so claustrophobic Zo shuddered to think of it. Clearly the 
experience had brecciated the minds of all those who had suffered through it. 
And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage inflicted later on, as she 
recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s stories tended to blur 
together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony, Maya’s betrayals—all the 
arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so on—such sordid stuff, with 
scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far as she could tell. As if the 
old ones had been anaerobic bacteria, living in poison, slowly excreting the 
necessary conditions for the emergence of a fully oxygenated life.
Except perhaps for Ann Clayborne, who seemed, from the stories, to have 
understood that to feel joy in a rock world, you had to love rock. Zo liked that 
attitude, and so she said, “Sure, I’ll ask her. Or you should, shouldn’t you? 
You ask, and tell her I’m agreeable. We can make room in the diplomatic group.”
“It’s a Free Mars group?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
He asked her questions about Jackie’s political ambitions, and she answered when 
she could, looking down her body and its curves, the hard muscles smoothed by 
the fat under the skin—hipbones flanking the belly, navel, wiry black pubic hair 
(she brushed bread crumbs out of it), long powerful thighs. Women’s bodies were 
much more handsomely proportioned than men’s, Michelangelo had been wrong about 
that, although his David made a best case for his argument, a flier’s body if 
ever there was one.
“I wish we could fly back up to the rim,” she said.
“I don’t know how to fly the birdsuits.”
“I could have carried you on my back.”
“Really?”
She glanced at him. Another thirty or thirty-five kilos. . . .”Sure. It would 
depend on the suit.”
“It’s amazing what those suits can do.”
“It’s not just the suits.”
“No. But we weren’t meant to fly. Heavy bones and all. You know.”
“I do. Certainly the suits are necessary. Just not sufficient.”
“Yes.” He was looking at her body. “It’s interesting how big people are 
getting.”
“Especially genitals.”
“Do you think so?”
She laughed. “Just teasing.”
“Ah.”
“Although you would think the parts would grow that had increased use, eh?”
“Yes. Depth of chests have grown greater, I read.”
She laughed again. “The thin air, right?”
“Presumably. It’s true in the Andes, anyway. The distances from spine to sternum 
in Andean natives are nearly twice as large as they are in people who live at 
sea level.”
“Really! Like the chest cavities of birds, eh?”
“I suppose.”
“Then add big pecs, and big breasts....”
He didn’t reply.
“So we’re evolving into something like birds.”
He shook his head. “It’s phenotypic. If you raised your kids on Earth, their 
chests would shrink right back down.”
“I doubt I’ll have kids.”
“Ah. Because of the population problem?”
“Yes. We need you issei to start dying. Even all these new little worlds aren’t 
helping that much. Earth and Mars are both turning into anthills. You’ve taken 
our world from us, really. You’re kleptoparasites.”
“That sounds redundant.”
“No, it’s a real term, for animals that steal food from their young during 
exceptionally hard winters.”
“Very apt.”
“We should probably kill you all when you turn a hundred.”
“Or as soon as we have children.”
She grinned. He was so imperturbable! “Whichever comes first.”          :
He nodded as if this were a sensible suggestion. She laughed, although it was 
vexing too: “Of course it will never happen.”
“No. But it won’t be necessary.”
“No? You’re going to act like lemmings and run off cliffs?”
“No. Treatment-resistant diseases are appearing. Older people are dying. It’s 
bound to happen.”
“Is it?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t think they’ll figure out ways to cure these new diseases, keep 
stringing things along?”
“In some cases. But senescence is complex, and sooner or later....” He shrugged.
“That’s a bad thought,” Zo said.
She stood, pulled the dried fabric of her singlet up her legs. He stood and 
dressed too.
“Have you ever met Bao Shuyo?” he asked.
“No, who’s she?”
“A mathematician, living in Da Vinci.”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
They hiked uphill through the forest, from time to time stopping to look after 
the quick blur of an animal. A big jungle chicken, what looked like a lone 
hyena, standing looking down a wash at them. . . . Zo found she was enjoying 
herself. This issei was unteasable, unshockable; and his opinions were 
unpredictable, which was an unusual trait in the old, indeed in anyone. Most of 
the ancient ones Zo had met seemed especially bound in the tightly warped 
space-time of their values; and as the way people lived their values was in 
inverse proportion to how tightly they were bound in them, the old had ended up 
Tartuffes to a man, or so she had thought, hypocrites for whom she had no 
patience at all. She despised the old and their precious values. But this one 
didn’t seem to have any. It made her want to talk more with him.
When they got back to the village she patted him on the head. “That was fun. 
I’ll talk to your friend.”
“Thanks.”
A few days later she gave Ann Clayborne a call. The face that appeared on the 
screen was as forbidding as a skull.
“Hi, I’m Zoya Boone.”
“Yes?”
“It’s my name,” Zo said. “That’s how I introduce myself to strangers.”
“Boone?”
“Jackie’s daughter.”
“Ah.”
Clearly she didn’t like Jackie. A common reaction; Jackie was so wonderful that 
a lot of people hated her.
“I’m also a friend of Sax Russell’s.”
“Ah.”
Impossible to read what she meant by that one.
“I was telling him that I’m on my way out to the Uranian system, and he said you 
might be interested in joining me.”
“He did?”
“He did. So I called. I’m going to Jupiter and then Uranus, with two weeks on 
Miranda.”
“Miranda!” she said. “Who are you again?”
“I’m Zo Boone! What are you, senile?”
“Miranda, you said?”
“Yes. Two weeks, maybe more if I like it.”
“If you like it?”
“Yes. I don’t stay places I don’t like.”
Clayborne nodded as if that were only sensible, and so Zo added mock solemnly, 
as if to a child, “There’s a lot of rock there.”
“Yes yes.”
A long pause. Zo studied the face on the screen. Gaunt and wrinkled, like 
Russell, only in her case almost all the wrinkles were vertical. A face hacked 
out of wood. Finally she said, “I’ll think about it.”
“You’re supposed to be trying new things,” Zo reminded her.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Sax told you that?”
“No—I asked Jackie about you.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said again, and cut the connection.
So much for that, Zo thought. Still she had tried, and therefore felt virtuous, 
a disagreeable sensation. These issei had a way of pulling one into their 
realities; and they were all mad.
And unpredictable as well; the next day Clayborne called back, and said she 
would go.


 
 
 
 
 
In person Ann Claybome proved to be indeed as withered and sun-dried as Russell, 
but even more silent and strange— waspish, laconic, prone to brief ill-tempered 
outbursts. She showed up at the last minute with a single backpack and a slim 
black wristpad, one of the latest models. Her skin was a nut brown, and marked 
by wens and warts and scars where skin disorders had been removed. A long life 
spent outdoors, and in the early days too, when UV bombardment had been intense; 
in short, she was fried. A bakehead, as they said in Echus. Her eyes were gray, 
her mouth a lizard slash, the lines from the corners of her mouth to her 
nostrils like deep hatchet chops. Nothing could be more severe than that face.
During the week of the voyage to Jupiter she spent her time in the little ship 
park, walking through the trees. Zo preferred the dining hall, or the big 
viewing bubble where a small group gathered in the evening watch, to eat tabs of 
pandorph and play go, or smoke opium and look at the stars. So she seldom saw 
Ann on the trip out.
They shot over the asteroid belt, slightly out of the plane of the ecliptic, 
passing over several of the hollowed-out little worlds, no doubt, though it was 
hard to tell; inside the rock potatoes shown on the ship’s screens there might 
be rough shells like finished mines, or towns landscaped into beautiful estates; 
societies anarchic and dangerous, or settled by religious groups or Utopian 
collectives, and painfully peaceable. The existence of such a wide variety of 
systems, coexisting in a semianarchic state, made Zo doubt that Jackie’s plans 
for organizing the outer satellites under a Martian umbrella would ever succeed; 
it seemed to her that the asteroid belt might serve as a model for what the 
entire solar system’s political organization would become. But Jackie did not 
agree; the asteroid belt was as it was, she said, because of its particular 
nature, scattered through a broad band all around the sun. The outer satellites 
on the other hand were clumped in groups around their gas giants, and were 
certain to become leagues because of that; and were such large worlds, compared 
to the asteroids, that eventually it would make a difference with whom they 
allied themselves in the inner system.
Zo was not convinced. But their deceleration brought them into the Jovian 
system, where she would have a chance to put Jackie’s theories to the test. The 
ship ran a cat’s cradle through the Galileans to slow down further, giving them 
close-ups of the four big moons. All four of them had ambitious terraforming 
plans, and had started to put them into action. The outer three, Callisto, 
Ganymede, and Europa, had similar initial conditions to deal with; they were all 
covered by water ice layers, Callisto and Ganymede to a depth of a thousand 
kilometers, Europa to a depth of a hundred kilometers. Water was not uncommon in 
the outer solar system, but it was by no means ubiquitous either, and so these 
water worlds had something to trade. All three moons had large amounts of rock 
scattered over their icy surfaces, the remnants of meteoric impact for the most 
part, carbonaeous chondrite rubble, a very useful building material. The 
settlers of the three moons had, on their arrival some thirty m-years before, 
rendered the chondrites and built tent frameworks of carbon nanotube similar to 
that used in Mars’s space elevator, tenting spaces twenty or fifty kilometers 
across with multilayered tent materials. Under their tents they had spread 
crushed rock to create a thin layer of ground—the ultimate permafrost—in some 
places surrounding lakes they had melted into the ice.
On Callisto the tent town built to this plan was called Lake Geneva; this was 
where the Martian delegation went to meet with the various leaders and policy 
groups of the Jovian League. As usual Zo accompanied the delegation as a minor 
functionary and observer, looking for opportunities to convey Jackie’s messages 
to people who could discreetly do something about it.
This particular meeting was part of a biannual series the Jovians held to 
discuss the terraforming of the Galileans, and so a good context for Jackie’s 
interests to be expressed. Zo sat at the back of the room next to Ann, who had 
decided to sit in on the meeting. The technical problems of terra-forming these 
moons were big in scale, but simple in concept. Callisto, Ganymede and Europa 
were being dealt with in the same way, at least at the beginning: mobile fusion 
reactors were out roaming their surfaces, heating the ice and pumping gases into 
early hydrogen/oxygen atmospheres. Eventually they hoped to create equatorial 
belts where gathered rock had been crushed to create ground over the ice; 
atmospheric temperatures would then be kept near freezing, so that tundra 
ecologies could be established around a string of equatorial lakes, in a 
breathable oxygen/hydrogen atmosphere.
lo, the innermost of the Galileans, was more difficult, but intriguing; rail-gun 
launchers were firing large missiles of ice and chaldates down to it from the 
other three big moons; being so close to Jupiter it had very little water, its 
surface made up of intermixed layers of basalt and sulfur— the sulfur spewing 
out onto the surface in spectacular volcanic plumes, driven by the tidal action 
from Jupiter and the other Galileans. The plan for lo’s terraformation was more 
long-term than most, and was to be driven in part by an infusion of 
sulfur-eating bacteria into hot sulfur springs around the volcanoes.
All four of these projects were slowed by the lack of light, and space mirrors 
of tremendous size were being built at Jupiter’s Lagrange points, where the 
complications of the Jovian system’s gravitational fields were reduced; sunlight 
would be directed from these mirrors to the equators of the four Galileans. All 
four moons were tidally locked around Jupiter, so their solar days depended on 
the length of their orbits around Jupiter, ranging from forty-two hours for lo 
to fifteen days for Callisto; and whatever the length of their days, they all 
received during them only four percent as much sunlight as the Earth. But the 
truth was that the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth was stupendously 
excessive, so that four percent was actually a lot of light, when it came to 
visibility—seventeen thousand times as much as the full moon on Earth—but not 
much heat, if one wanted to terraform. They therefore were cadging light any way 
they could; Lake Geneva and all the settlements on the other moons were located 
facing Jupiter, to take advantage of the sunlight reflected from that giant 
globe in the sky; and flying “gas lanterns” had been dropped into the upper 
atmosphere of Jupiter, clusters of them igniting some of the planet’s helium3 in 
points of light that were too brilliant to look directly at for more than a 
second; the fusion burns were suspended before electromagnetic reflecting dishes 
that put all the light out into the planet’s plane of the ecliptic. Thus the 
banded monster ball was now made an even more spectacular sight by the achingly 
bright diamond dots of some twenty gas lanterns wandering its face.
The space mirrors and the gas lanterns together would still leave the 
settlements with less than half the sunlight Mars got, but it was the best they 
could do. That was life in the outer solar system, a somewhat dim business all 
around, Zo judged. Even gathering that much light would require the manufacture 
of a massive infrastructure; and this was where the Martian delegation came in. 
Jackie had arranged to offer a lot of help, including more fusion behemoths, 
more gas lanterns, and also Martian experience in space mirrors and terraforming 
techniques generally, through an association of aerospace co-ops interested in 
obtaining more projects now that the situation in Martian space was largely 
stabilized. They would contribute capital and expertise, in return for 
preferential trade agreements, supplies of heliunij culled from Jupiter’s upper 
atmosphere, and the opportunity to explore, mine, and possibly join terraforming 
efforts on Jupiter’s clutch of smaller moons, all eighteen of them.
Invested capital, expertise, trade; this was the carrot, and a big one. Clearly 
if the Galileans accepted it, the tendrils of association with Mars would be 
there, and Jackie could then follow that up with political alliances of various 
sorts; and pull the Jovian moons into her web. This eventuality was as clear to 
the Jovians as it was to anyone, however, and they were doing what they could to 
get what they wanted without giving too much in return. No doubt they would soon 
be playing the Martians off against similar offers from the Terfan exmetas and 
other organizations.
This was where Zo came in; she was the stick. Public carrot, private stick; this 
was Jackie’s method, in all phases of life.
Zo revealed Jackie’s threats in tiny indirect glimpses, to make them seem even 
more threatening. Brief meeting with officials from lo: the ecopoetic plan, Zo 
said to them, casually, seemed far too slow. It would be thousands of years 
before their bacteria chewed the sulfur into useful gases, and meanwhile 
Jupiter’s intense radio field, which enveloped lo and added to its problems, 
would mutate the bacteria beyond recognition. They needed an ionosphere, they 
needed water, it was possible they even needed to think about pulling the moon 
out into a higher orbit around their great gas god. Mars, home of terraforming 
expertise and the healthiest wealthiest civilization in the solar system, could 
help them with all that, give them special help. Or even discuss with the other 
Galileans the notion of taking over the project, in order to bring it up to 
speed.
After that, casual conversations with various authorities from the ice 
Galileans: in cocktail parties after workshops, in bars after the parties, 
walking in groups along Lake Geneva’s signature lakefront promenade, under the 
sonolu-minescent streetlights suspended from the tent framework. The delegates 
from lo, she told these people, are looking into cutting a separate deal on 
their own. They had the situation with the most potential, when all was said and 
done; hard ground to stand on, heat, heavy metals; great tourist potential. Zo 
ventured that they seemed to be willing to use these advantages to strike out on 
their own, and fractionate the Jovian League.
Ann followed Zo and the others on some of these walks, and Zo let her listen in 
on a couple of the conversations, curious to see what she would make of them. 
She followed them down the waterfront promenade, which was set on the low meteor 
crater rim they had used to contain the lake. The slosh craters here beat any 
slosh crater on Mars by a long shot; the icy rim of this one was only a few 
meters higher than the general surface of the moon, forming a round levee from 
which one could look over the water of the lake, or back onto the grassy streets 
of the town, or beyond the streets to the rubbly ice plain outside the tent, 
visibly curving to the nearby horizon. The extreme flatness of the landscape 
outside the tent gave an indication of its nature—a glacier covering a whole 
world, ice a thousand kilometers deep, ice which ate every meteor impact and 
tidal cracking, and quickly flowed back to flatness again.
On the surface of the lake small black waves formed interference patterns on the 
flat sheet of water, which was white like the lake’s ice bottom, tinted yellow 
by the great ball of Jupiter looming gibbous overhead, all its bands of creamy 
yellow and orange visibly swirled at their edges and around the pinprick 
lanterns.
They passed a line of wooden buildings; the wood came from forested islands, 
floating around like rafts on the far side of the lake. Streetgrass gleamed 
greenly, and gardens grew in oversized planter boxes behind the buildings, under 
long bright lamps. Zo showed a bit of the stick to their companions on the walk, 
confused functionaries from Ganymede; she reminded them of Mars’s military 
might, mentioned again that lo was considering defection from their league.
The Ganymedans went off to get dinner, looking dismayed. “So subtle,” Ann 
remarked when they were out of earshot.
“Now we’re being sarcastic,” Zo said.
“You’re a thug. Put it that way.”
“I will have to enroll in the Red school of diplomatic subtlety. Perhaps arrange 
for assistants to come along with me and blow up some of their property.”
Ann made a noise between her teeth. She continued down the promenade, and Zo 
kept up with her.
“Strange that the Great Red Spot is gone,” Zo remarked as they crossed a bridge 
over a white-bottomed canal. “Like some kind of sign. I keep expecting it to 
come around into view.”
The air was chill and damp. The people they passed were mostly of Terran origin, 
part of the diaspora. Some fliers cut la/y spirals up near the tent frame. Zo 
watched them cross the face of the great planet. Ann stopped frequently to 
inspect cut surfaces of rock, ignoring the town on ice and its crowds, with 
their tiptoe grace and their rainbow clothing, a gang of young natives 
greyhounding past—”You really are more interested in rocks than people,” Zo 
said, half-admiring, half-irritated.
Ann looked at her; such a basilisk glare! But Zo shrugged and took her by the 
arm, pulled her along. “The young natives out here are less than fifteen m-years 
old, they’ve lived in point-one g all their lives, they don’t care about Earth 
or Mars. They believe in the Jovian moons, in water, in swimming and flying. 
Most of them have altered their eyes for the low light. Some of them are growing 
gills. They have a plan to terraform these moons that will take them five 
thousand years. They’re the next step in evolution, for ka’s sake, and here you 
are staring at rocks that are just the same as rocks everywhere else in this 
galaxy. You’re just as crazy as they said.”
This bounced off Ann like a thrown pebble. She said, “You sound like me, when I 
tried to get Nadia away from Underbill.”
Zo shrugged. “Come on,” she said, “I have another meeting.”
“Mafia work never stops, does it.” But she followed, peering around like a 
wizened court jester, dwarfish and oddly dressed in her old-fashioned jumper.
Some Lake Geneva council members greeted them, somewhat nervously, by the docks. 
They got on a small ferry, which threaded its way out through a fleet of small 
sailing boats. Out on the lake it was windy. They puttered to one of the forest 
islands. Vast specimens of balsa and teak stood over the swampy mat of the 
floating island’s heated ground, and on the island’s shore loggers were working 
outside a little sawmill. The mill was soundproofed, nevertheless a muffled 
whine of saw cuts accompanied the conversation. Floating on a lake on a moon of 
Jupiter, all the colors suffused with the gray of solar distance: Zo felt little 
bursts of flier’s exhilaration, and she said to the locals, “This is so 
beautiful. I can see why there are people on Eu-ropa who talk about making their 
whole world a water world, sail around and around. They could even ship away 
water to Venus and get down to some solid land for islands. I don’t know if 
they’ve mentioned it to you. Maybe it’s just all talk, like the idea I heard for 
creating a small black hole and dropping it into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. 
Stellariz-ing Jupiter! You’d have all the light you needed then.”
“Wouldn’t Jupiter be consumed?” one of the locals asked.
“Oh but it would take ever so long, they said; millions of years.”
“And then a nova,” Ann pointed out.
“Yes yes. Everything but Pluto destroyed. But by that time we’ll be long gone, 
one way or another. Or if not, they’ll figure something out.”
Ann laughed harshly. The locals, thinking hard, did not appear to notice.
Back on the lakeshore Ann and Zo walked the promenade. “You’re so blatant,” Ann 
said.
“On the contrary. It’s very subtle. They don’t know if I’m speaking for me, or 
for Jackie, or for Mars. It could be just talk. But it reminds them of the 
larger context. It’s too easy for them to get wrapped up in the Jovian situation 
and forget all the rest. The solar system entire, as a single political body; 
people need help thinking about that, they can’t conceptualize it.”
“You need help yourself. It’s not Renaissance Italy, you know.”
“Machiavelli will always remain true, if that’s what you mean. And they need to 
be reminded of that here.”
“You remind me of Frank.”
“Frank?”
“Frank Chalmers.”
“Now there’s an issei I admire,” Zo said. “What I’ve read about him, anyway. He 
was the only one of you who wasn’t a hypocrite. And he was the one that got the 
most done.”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Ann said.
Zo shrugged. “The past is the same for all of us. I know as much about it as you 
do.”
A group of the Jovians walked by, pale and big-eyed, utterly absorbed by their 
own talk. Zo gestured: “Look at them! They’re so focused. I admire them too, 
really—throwing themselves so energetically into a project that won’t be 
completed until long after their death—it’s an absurd gesture, a gesture of 
defiance and freedom, a divine madness, as if they were sperm wiggling madly 
toward an unknown goal.”
“That’s all of us,” Ann said. “That’s evolution. When do we go to Miranda?”


 
 
 
 
 
Around Uranus, four times as far from the sun as Jupiter, objects were struck by 
one quarter of a percent the light that would have struck them on Earth. This 
was a problem for powering major terraforming projects, although as Zo found 
when they entered the Uranian system, it still provided quite enough 
illumination for visibility; the sunlight was 1,300 times as bright as the full 
moon on Earth, the sun still a blinding little chip in the black array of stars, 
and though things in the region were a bit dim and drained of their color, one 
could see them perfectly well. Thus the great power of the human eye and spirit, 
functioning well so far from home.
But there were no big moons around Uranus to attract a major terraforming 
effort; Uranus’s family consisted of fifteen very small moons, none larger than 
Titania and Oberon at six hundred kilometers in diameter, and most considerably 
smaller—a collection of little asteroids, really, named after Shakespeare’s 
women for the most part, all circling the blandest of the gas giants, blue-green 
Uranus, rolling around with its poles in the plane of the ecliptic, its eleven 
narrow graphite rings scarcely visible fairy loops. All in all, not a promising 
system for inhabitation.
Nevertheless people had come, people had settled. This was no surprise to Zo; 
there were people exploring and starting to build on Triton, on Pluto, on 
Charon, and if a tenth planet were discovered and an expedition sent out to it, 
they would no doubt find a tent town already there, its citizens already 
squabbling with each other, already bristling at any suggestion of outside 
interference in their affairs. This was life in the diaspora.
 
The major tent town in the Uranian system was on Oberon, the biggest and 
farthest out of the fifteen moons. Zo and Ann and the rest of the travelers from 
Mars parked in a planetary orbit just outside Oberon, and took a ferry down to 
the moon to make a brief visit to the main settlement.
This town, Hippolyta, spanned one of the big groove valleys that were common to 
all the larger Uranian moons. Because the gravity was even more meager than the 
light was dim, the town had been designed as a fully three-dimensional space, 
with railings and glide ropes and flying dumbbell waiters, cliffside balconies 
and elevators, chutes and ladders, diving boards and trampolines, hanging 
restaurants and plinth pavilions, all illuminated by bright white floating lamp 
globes. Zo saw immediately that so much paraphernalia in the air made flying 
inside the tent impossible; but in this gravity daily life was a kind of flight, 
and as she bounded in the air with a flex of her foot, she decided to join those 
residents who treated daily life that way; she danced. And in fact very few 
people tried to walk in the Terran way; here human movement was naturally 
airborne, sinuous, full of vaulting leaps and spinning dives and long Tarzan 
loops. The lowest level of the city was netted.
The people who lived out here came from everywhere else in the system, although 
of course they were mostly Martian or Terran. At this point there were no native 
Uranians, except for a single creche of young children who had been born to 
mothers building the settlement. Six moons were now occupied, and recently they 
had dropped a number of gas lanterns into the upper atmosphere of Uranus, to 
swim in rings around its equator; these now burned in the planet’s blue-green 
like pinpricks of sunlight, forming a kind of diamond necklace around the middle 
of the giant. These lanterns had increased the system’s light enough so that 
everyone they met in Oberon remarked on how much more color there was in things, 
but Zo was not impressed. “I’d hate to have seen it before,” she said to one of 
the local enthusiasts, “it’s Monochromomundos.” Actually all the buildings in 
the town were brightly painted in broad swaths of color, but which color a swath 
happened to be was sometimes beyond Zo’s telling. She needed a pupil dilator.
But the locals seemed to like it. Of course some of them spoke of moving on 
after the Uranian towns were finished, out to Triton, “the next great problem,” 
or Pluto or Charon; they were builders. But others were settling in here for 
good, giving themselves drugs and genetic transcriptions to adapt to the low g, 
to increase the sensitivity of their eyes, etc. They spoke of guiding in comets 
from the Oort cloud to provide water, and perhaps forcing two or three of the 
smaller uninhabited moons to collide, to create larger and warmer bodies to work 
with, “artificial Mirandas” as one person called them.
Ann walked out of that meeting, or rather pulled herself along a railing, unable 
to cope with the mini-g. After a while Zo followed her, onto streets covered 
with luxuriant green grass. She looked up: aquamarine giant, slender dim rings; 
a cold fey sight, unappealing by any previous human standard, and perhaps 
untenable in the long run because of the moonlet gravity. But back in the 
meeting there had been Uranians praising the planet’s subtle beauties, inventing 
an aesthetics to appreciate it, even as they planned to modify everything they 
could. They emphasized the subtle shades of the colors, the cool warmth of the 
tented air, the movement so like flight, like dance in a dream.... Some of them 
had even become patriots to the point of arguing against radical transformation; 
they were as preservationist as this inhospitable place could logically sustain.
And now some of these preservationists found Ann. They came up to Ann in a 
group, standing in a circle around her to shake her hand, hug her, kiss the top 
of her head; one got down on his knees to kiss her feet. Zo saw the look on 
Ann’s face and laughed. “Come on,” she said to the group, who apparently had 
been assigned a kind of guardian status for the moon Miranda. The local version 
of Reds, sprung into existence out here where it made no sense at all, and long 
after redness had ceased to be much of an issue even on Mars. But they flowed or 
pulled themselves into position around a table set out in the middle of the tent 
on a tall slender column, and ate a meal as the discussion rangecTall over the 
system. The table was an oasis in the dim air of the tent, with the diamond 
necklace in its round jade setting shining down on them; it seemed the center of 
town, but Zo saw suspended in the air other such oases, and no doubt they seemed 
like the center as well. Hippolyta was a real town, but Oberon could hold scores 
of towns like it, and so would Titania, Ariel, Miranda; small as they were, 
these satellites all had surfaces covering hundreds of square kilometers. This 
was the attraction of these sun-forsaken moons: free land, open space—a new 
world, a frontier, with its ever-receding chance to start new, to found a 
society from scratch. For the Uranians this freedom was worth more than light or 
gravity. And so they had gathered the programs and the starter robots, and taken 
off for the high frontier with plans for a tent and a constitution, to be their 
own first hundred.
But these were precisely the kind of people least interested in hearing about 
Jackie’s plans for a systemwide alliance. And already there had been local 
disagreements strong enough to have caused trouble; among the people sitting 
around the table were some serious enemies, Zo could tell. She watched their 
faces closely as the head of their delegation, Marie, laid out the Martian 
proposal in the most general terms: an alliance designed to deal with the 
massive’ historical-economic-numerical gravity well of Earth, which was huge, 
teeming, flooded, mired in its past like a pig in a sty, and still the dominant 
force in the diaspora. It was in the best interests of all the other settlements 
to band with Mars and present a united front, in control of their own 
immigration, trade, growth—in control of their destinies.
Except none of the Uranians, despite their arguments with each other, looked at 
all convinced. An elderly woman who was the mayor of Hippolyta spoke, and even 
the Mir-andan “Reds” nodded: they would deal with Earth on their own. Earth or 
Mars was equally dangerous to freedom. Out here they planned on dealing with all 
potential alliances or confrontations as free agents, in temporary collusion or 
opposition with equals, depending on circumstances. There was simply no need for 
any more formal arrangements to be made. “All that alliance stuff smacks of 
control from above,” the woman concluded. “You don’t do it on Mars, why try it 
out here?”
“We do do it on Mars,” Marie said. “That level of control is emergent from the 
complex of smaller systems below it, and it’s useful for dealing with problems 
at the holistic level. And now at the interplanetary level. You’re confusing 
totalization with totalitarianism, a very serious error.”
They did not look convinced. Reason had to be backed with leverage; that was why 
Zo was along. And the application of leverage would go easier with the reasoning 
laid out like this beforehand.
Throughout the dinner Ann remained silent, until the general discussion ended 
and the Miranda group began to ask her questions. Then she came alive, as if 
switched on, and asked them in return about current local planetology: the 
classification of different regions of Miranda as parts of the two colliding 
planetessimals, the recent theory that identified the tiny moons Ophelia, 
Desdemona, Bianca, and Puck as ejected pieces of the Mirandan collision, and so 
on. Her questions were detailed and knowledgeable; the guardians were thrilled, 
in transports, their eyes as big as lemurs’ eyes. The rest of the Uranians were 
likewise pleased to see Ann’s interest. She was The Red; now Zo saw what that 
really meant; she was one of the most famous people in history. And it seemed 
possible that all the Uranians had a little Red in them; unlike the settlers of 
the Jovian and Saturnian systems, they had no plans for large-scale 
terraforming, they planned to live in tents and go out on the primal rock for 
the rest of their lives. And they felt—at least its guardian group felt—that 
Miranda was so unusual that it had to be left entirely alone. That was a red 
idea, of course. Nothing humans did there, one of the Uranian Reds said, would 
do anything but reduce what was most valuable about it. It had an intrinsic 
worth that transcended even its value as a pla-netological specimen. It had its 
dignity. Ann watched them carefully as they said this, and Zo saw in her eyes 
that she did not agree, or even quite understand. For her it was a matter of 
science—for these people, a matter of spirit. Zo actually sympathized more with 
the locals’ view than Ann’s, with its cramped insistence on the object. But the 
result was the same, they both had the Red ethic in its pure form: no 
terraforming on Miranda, of course, also no domes, no tents, no mirrors; only a 
single visitor’s station and a few rocket pads (though this too appeared to be 
controversial within the guardian group); a ban on anything except no-impact 
foot travel, and rocket hops high enough over the surface to avoid disturbing 
the dust. The guardian group conceived of Miranda as wilderness, to be walked 
through but never lived on, never changed. A climber’s world, or even better, a 
flier’s world. Looked at and nothing more. A natural work of art.
Ann nodded at all this.: And there—there it was, something more in her than the 
crimping fear: a passion for rock, in a world of rock. Fetishes could fix on 
anything. And all these people shared the fetish. Zo found it peculiar to be 
among them, peculiar and intriguing. Certainly her leverage point was coming 
clear. The guardian group had arranged a special ferry to Miranda, to show it to 
Ann. No one else would be there. A private tour of the strangest moon of all, 
for the strangest Red. Zo laughed. “I’d like to come along,” she said earnestly.
 
And the Great No said yes. That was Ann on Miranda.
It was the smallest of Uranus’s five big moons, only 470 kilometers in diameter. 
In its early years, some 3.5 billion years before the present, its smaller 
precursor had run into another moon of about the same size; the two had 
shattered, then clumped, then, in the heat of the collision, coalesced into a 
single ball. But the new moon had cooled before the coalescing was quite 
finished.
The result was a landscape out of a dream, violently divergent and disarranged. 
Some regions were as smooth as skin, others were ripped raw; some were 
metamorphosed surfaces of two proto-moons, others were exposed interior 
material. And then there were the deeply grooved rift zones, where the fragments 
met, imperfectly. In these zones extensive parallel groove systems bent at acute 
angles, in dramatic chevron formations, a clear sign of the tremendous torques 
involved in the collision. The big rifts were so large that they were visible 
from space as hack marks, incised scores of kilometers deep into the side of the 
gray sphere.
 
They came down on a plateau next to the biggest of these hacked chasms, called 
Prospero’s Rift. They suited up, then left the spacecraft, and walked out to the 
rift’s edge. A dim abyss, so deep that the bottom looked to be on a different 
world. Combined with the airy micro-g, the sight gave Zo the distinct feeling of 
flying, flying however as she sometimes did in dreams, all Martian conditions 
suspended in favor of some sky of the spirit. Overhead Uranus floated full and 
green, giving all of Miranda a jade tinge. Zo danced along the rim, pushing off 
on her toes and floating, floating, coming down in little plies, her heart full 
of beauty. So strange, the diamond sparks of the gas lanterns, surfing on 
Uranus’s stratosphere; the eldritch jade. Lights hung across a round green paper 
lantern. The depths of the abyss only suggested. Everything glowing with its own 
internal greenness, viriditas bursting out of every thing—and yet everything 
still and motionless forever, except for them, the intruders, the observers. Zo 
danced.
Ann hiked along much more comfortably than she had in Hippolyta, with the 
unconscious grace of someone who has spent a lot of time walking on rock. 
Boulder ballet; she carried a long angular hammer in her thick glove, and her 
thigh pockets bulged with specimens. She didn’t respond to the exclamations of 
Zo or the guardian group, she was oblivious to them. Like an actor playing the 
part of Ann Clayborne. Zo laughed: that one could become such a cliche!
“If they domed this dark backward and abysm of time, it would make a beautiful 
place to live,” she said. “Lots of land for the amount of tent needed, eh? And 
such a view. It would be a wonder.”
No response to such a blunt provocation, of course. But it would set them 
thinking. Zo followed the guardian group like an albatross. They had started 
descending a broken staircase of rock that lined the edge of a slim buttress, 
extending far out from the chasm wall, like a fold of drapery in a marble 
statue. This feature ended in a flat swirl several kilometers out from the wall, 
and a kilometer or more lower than the rim. After the flat spot the buttress 
fell away abruptly, in a sheer drop to the chasm floor, some twenty kilometers 
straight down. Twenty kilometers! Twenty thousand meters, some seventy thousand 
feet. . . . Even great Mars itself could boast no such wall.
There were a number of buttresses and other deformations on the wall similar to 
the one they were hiking out on: flutings and draperies, as in a limestone 
cavern, but formed all at once; the wall had been melted, molten rock had 
dripped into the abyss until the chill of space had frozen it forever. 
Everything was visible from every point of their descent. A railing had been 
bolted to the buttress’s edge, and they were all clipped to this railing by 
lines, connected to harnesses in their spacesuits; a good thing, as the edge of 
the buttress was narrow, and the slightest slip sideways could launch one out 
into the space of the chasm. The spidery little spacecraft that had dropped them 
off was going to fly down and take them off at the bottom of the staircase, from 
the flat spot at the end of the buttress promontory. So they could descend 
without a worry for the return; and descend they did, for minute after minute, 
in a silence that was not at all companionable. Zo had to grin; you could almost 
hear them thinking black thoughts at her, the grinding was palpable. Except for 
Ann, who was stopping every few meters to inspect the cracks between their rough 
stairs.
“This obsession with rock is so pathetic,” Zo said to her on a private band. “To 
be so old and still so small. To limit yourself to the world of inert matter, a 
world that will never surprise you, never do a single thing. So that you won’t 
be hurt. Areology as a kind of cowardice. Sad, really.”
A noise on the intercom: air shot between front teeth. Disgust.
Zo laughed.
“You’re an impertinent girl,” Ann said.
“Yes I am.”
“And stupid as well.”
“That I am not!” Zo was surprised at her own vehemence. And then she saw Ann’s 
face was twisted with anger behind her faceplate, and her voice hissed in the 
intercom over sharp heavy breaths. ‘
“Don’t ruin the walk,” Ann snapped.
“I was tired of being ignored.”
“So who’s afraid now?”
“Afraid of the boredom.”
Another disgusted hiss. “You’ve been very poorly brought up.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Oh yours. Yours. But we have to suffer the results.”
“Suffer on. I’m the one that got you here, remember.”
“Sax is the one who got me here, bless his little heart.”
“Everyone’s little to you.”
“Compared to this....” The movement of her helmet showed she had glanced down 
into the rift.
“This speechless immobility that you’re so safe in.”
“This is the wreckage of a collision very similar to other planetessimal 
collisions in the early solar system. Mars had some, Earth too. That’s the 
matrix life emerged out of. This is a window into that time, understand?”
“I understand, but I don’t care.”
“You don’t think it matters.”
“Nothing matters, in the sense you mean. There is no meaning to all this. It’s 
just an accident of the Big Bang.”
“Oh please,” Ann said. “Nihilism is so ridiculous.”
“Look who’s talking! You’re a nihilist yourself! No meaning or value to life or 
to your senses—it’s weak nihilism, nihilism for cowards, if you can imagine such 
a thing.”
“My brave little nihilist.”
“Yes—I face it. And then enjoy what can be enjoyed.”
“Which is?”
“Pleasure. The senses and their input. I’m a sensualist, really. It takes some 
courage, I think. To face pain, to risk death to get the senses really 
roaring....”
“You think you’ve faced pain?”
Zo remembered a stalled landing at Overlook, the pain-beyond-pain of broken legs 
and ribs. “Yes. I have.”
Radio silence. The static of the Uranian magnetic field. Perhaps Ann was 
allowing her the experience of pain, which given its omnipresence was no great 
generosity. In fact it made Zo furious. “Do you really think it takes centuries 
to become human, that no one was human until you geriatrics came along? Keats 
died at twenty-five, have you read Hyperion? Do you think this hole in a rock is 
as sublime as even a phrase ofHyperionl Really, you issei are so horrible. And 
you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven’t changed from the moment 
you touched Mars. ...”
“Quite an accomplishment, eh?”
“An accomplishment in playing dead. Ann Clayborne, the greatest dead person who 
ever lived.”
“And an impertinent girl. But look at the grain of this rock, twisted like a 
pretzel.”
“Fuck the rocks.”
“I’ll leave that to the sensualist. No, look. This rock hasn’t changed in 
three-point-five billion years. And when it did change, my Lord what a change.”
Zo looked at the jade rock under their boots. Somewhat glasslike, but otherwise 
utterly nondescript. “You’re obsessed,” she said.
“Yes. But I like my obsessions.”
 
After that they hiked down the spine of the buttress in silence. Over the course 
of the day they descended to Bottom’s Landing. Now they were a kilometer below 
the rims of the chasm, and the sky was a starry band overhead, Uranus fat in the 
middle of it, the sun a blazing jewel just to one side. Under this gorgeous 
array the depth of the rift was sublime, astonishing; again Zo felt herself to 
be flying. “You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place,” she said to all 
of them, over the common band. “It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a 
twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical 
droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits 
stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing 
created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and 
mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.”
“That’s just saying there is no intrinsic worth,” one of the guardians replied. 
“It collapses back to utilitarianism. But there’s no need to include human 
participation. These places exist without us and before us, and that is their 
intrinsic worth. When we arrive we should honor that precedence, if we want to 
be in a right attitude to the universe, if we want to actually see it.”
“But I see it,” Zo said happily. “Or almost see it. You people will have to 
sensitize your eyes with some addition to your genetic treatments. Meanwhile 
it’s glorious, it truly is. But that glory is in our minds.”
They did not answer. After a while Zo went on:
“All these issues have been raised before, on Mars. The whole matter of 
environmental ethics was raised to a new level by the experience on Mars, raised 
right into the heart of our actions. Now you want to protect this place as 
wilderness, and I can see why. But I’m a Martian, and so I understand. A lot of 
you are Martian, or your parents were. You start from that ethical position, and 
in the end wilderness is an ethical position. Terrans won’t understand you as 
well as I do. They’ll come out here and build a big casino right on this 
promontory. They’ll cover this rift from rim to rim, and try terraforming it 
like they have everywhere else. The Chinese are still jammed into their country 
like sardines, and they don’t give a damn about the intrinsic worth of China 
itself, much less a barren moonlet on the edge of the solar system. They need 
room and they see it’s out here, and they’ll come and build and look at you 
funny when you object, and what are you going to do? You can try sabotage like 
the Reds did on Mars, but they can blow you off the moons here just as easy as 
you can them, and they’ve got a million replacements for every colonist they 
lose. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about Earth. We’re like the 
Lilliputians with Gulliver. We’ve got to work together, and tie him down with as 
many little lines as we can devise.”
No response from the others.
Zo sighed. “Well,” she said, “maybe it’s for the best. Spread people around out 
here, they won’t be pressuring Mars so hard. It might be possible to work out 
deals whereby the Chinese are free to settle out here all they want, and we on 
Mars are free to cut down immigration to nearly nothing. It might work rather 
well.”
Again no response from the others.
Finally Ann said, “Shut up. Let us concentrate on the land here.”
“Oh of course.”
Then, as they were approaching the very end of the buttress, the promontory 
standing out in a gap of air beyond all telling, under the bejeweled jade disk 
and the brilliant diamond chip beyond it, the whole solar system suddenly 
triangulated by these celestial objects, the true size of things revealed—they 
saw moving stars overhead. The rocket jets of their spacecraft.
“See?” Zo said. “It’s the Chinese, coming to have a look.”
Suddenly one of the guardians was on her in a fury, striking her directly on the 
faceplate. Zo laughed. But she had forgotten Miranda’s ultralight gravity, and 
was surprised when a ridiculous uppercut lifted her right off her feet. Then she 
hit the railing with the back of her knees, spun head over heels, twisting to 
catch herself, bang—a hard blow to the head, but the helmet protected her, she 
was still conscious, tumbling down the incline at the edge of the 
promontory—beyond it the void—fear shot through her like an electric shock, she 
fought for balance but was tumbling, out of control—she felt a jolt—ah yes, the 
end of her harness! Then the sickening sensation of a farther slide down—the 
harness clip must have given way. Second surge of adrenal fear—she turned inward 
and grabbed at the passing rock. Human power in .005 g; the same gravity that 
had sent her flying now allowed her to catch herself by a single fingertip, and 
bring the whole weight of her falling body to a halt, as in a miracle.
She was on the edge of a long drop. Sparking lights in her eyes, nausea, 
darkness beyond; she couldn’t see the floor of the chasm, it was like a 
bottomless pit, a dream image, black falling. . . . “Don’t move,” said Ann’s 
voice in her ear. “Hold on. Don’t move.” Above her, a foot, then legs. Very 
slowly Zo turned her head up to look. A hand clutched her right wrist, hard. 
“Okay. There’s a hold for your left hand, above it by half a meter. Higher. 
There. Okay, climb. You above, pull us up.”
They were hauled up like fish on a line.
Zo sat on the ground. The little space ferry was landing soundlessly, over on a 
pad on the far side of the flat spot. Brief flare of light from its rockets. The 
concerned looks of the guardians, standing over her.
“Not such a funny joke,” Ann suggested.
“No,” Zo said, thinking hard about how she could use the incident. “Thanks for 
helping me.” It was impressive how quickly Ann had jumped to her help—not 
impressive that she had decided to, for this was the code of nobility, one had 
obligations to one’s peers, and enemies were just as important as friends; 
enemies were equals, they were necessary, they were what made it possible to be 
a good friend. But just as a physical maneuver it had been impressive. “Very 
quick of you.”
On the flight back to Oberon they were all silent, until one of the ferry’s crew 
turned to Ann and mentioned that Hiroko and some of her followers had been seen 
here in the Uranian system recently, on Puck.
“Oh what crap,” Ann said.
“How do you know?” Zo asked. “Maybe she decided to get as far away from Earth 
and Mars as possible. I wouldn’t blame her.”
“This isn’t her kind of place.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know that. Maybe she hasn’t heard this is your private rock 
garden.”
But Ann simply waved her away.


 
 
 
 
 
Back to Mars, the red planet, the most beautiful world in the solar system. The 
only real world.
Their shuttle accelerated, made its turn, floated a few days, decelerated; and 
in two weeks they were in the lineup for Clarke, and then on the elevator, going 
down, down, down. So slow, this final descent! Zo looked out at Echus, there to 
the northeast, between red Tharsis and the blue North Sea. So good to see it; Zo 
ate several tabs of pandorph as the elevator car made its approach into 
Sheffield, and when she walked out into the Socket, and then through the streets 
between the glossy stone buildings to the giant train station on the rim, she 
was in the rapture of the areophany, loving every face she saw, loving all her 
tall brothers and sisters with their striking beauty and their phenomenal grace, 
loving even the Terrans running around underfoot. The train to Echus didn’t 
leave for a couple of hours, and so she walked the rim park restlessly for a 
time, looking down into the great Pavonis Mons caldera, as spectacular as 
anything on Miranda, even if it wasn’t as deep as Prospero’s Rift: infinity of 
horizontal banding, all the shades of red, tan, crimson, rust, umber, maroon, 
copper, brick, sienna, paprika, oxblood, cinnabar, vermilion, all under the dark 
star-studded afternoon sky. Her world. Though Sheffield was under its tent, and 
would ever be; and she wanted back in the wind again.
So she went back to the station and got on the train for Echus, and felt the 
train fly down the piste, off the great cone of Pavonis, down the pure xeriscape 
of east Tharsis, to Cairo and a Swiss-precision exchange onto the train north to 
Echus Overlook. The train came in near midnight, and she checked in at the 
co-op’s hostel and walked over to the Adler, feeling the last of the pandorph 
buzz through her like the feather in the cap of her happiness, and the whole 
gang was there as if no time had passed, and they cheered to see her, they all 
hugged her, singly and severally, they all kissed her, they gave her drinks and 
asked questions about her trip, and told her about the recent wind conditions, 
and caressed her in her chair, until quickly it was the hour before dawn and 
they all trooped down to the ledge and suited up and took off, out into the 
darkness of the sky and the exhilarating lift of the wind, all of it coming back 
instantly like breathing or sex, the black mass of the Echus escarpment bulking 
to the east like the edge of a continent, the dim floor of Echus Chasma so far 
below—the landscape of her heart, with its dim lowland and high plateau, and the 
vertiginous cliff between them, and over it all the intense purples of the sky, 
lavender and mauve in the east, black indigo out to the west, the whole arch 
lightening and taking on color each second, the stars popping out of 
existence—high clouds to the west flaring pink—and as several stoops had taken 
her well below the level of Overlook, she was able to close on the cliff and 
catch a hard westerly updraft and sail on it, inches over Underlook and then up 
in a tight gyre, motionless herself and yet cast violently up by the wind, until 
she burst out of the shadow of the cliff into the raw yellows of the new day, an 
incredibly joyful combination of the kinetic and the visual, of sense and world, 
and as she soared up into the clouds she thought, To hell with you, Ann 
Clayborne—you and the rest of your kind can go on forever about your moral 
imperatives, your issei ethics, values, goals, strictures, responsibilities, 
virtues, grand purposes of life, you can pour out those words to the end of time 
in all their hypocrisy and fear, and still you will never have a feeling like 
this one, when the grace of mind and body and world are all in perfect 
consort—you can rant your Calvinist rant until you are blue in the face, what 
humans should do with their brief lives, as if there were any way to tell for 
sure, as if you didn’t turn out to be a bunch of cruel bastards in the end—but 
until you get out here and fly, surf, climb, jump, exert yourself somehow in the 
risk of space, in the pure grace of the body, you just don’t know, you have no 
right to speak, you are slaves to your ideas and your hierarchies and so can’t 
see that there is no higher goal than this, the ultimate purpose of existence, 
of the cosmos itself: the free play of flight.
 
In the northern spring the trade winds blew, pushing against the westerlies and 
damping the Echus updrafts. Jackie was on the Grand Canal, distracted from her 
interplanetary maneuverings by the tedium of local politics; indeed she seemed 
irritated and tense at having to deal with it, and clearly she did not want Zo 
around. So Zo went to work in the mines at Moreux for a while, and then joined a 
group of flying friends on the coast of the North Sea, south of Boone’s Neck, 
near Blochs Hoffnung, where the sea cliffs reared a kilometer out of the 
crashing surf. Late-afternoon onshore breezes hit these cliffs and sent up a 
small flock of fliers, wheeling through seastacks that poked out of tapestries 
of foam surging up and down, up and down, pure white on the wine-dark sea.
This flying group was led by a young woman Zo hadn’t met before, a girl of only 
nine m-years, named Melka. She was the best flier Zo had ever seen. When she was 
in the air leading them it was as if an angel had come into their midst, darting 
through them like a raptor through doves, at other times leading them through 
the tight maneuvers that made flocking such fun. And so Zo worked through the 
days at her co-op’s local partner, and flew every day after her work stint was 
over. And her heart was always soaring, pleased by one thing after another. Once 
she even called Ann Clay-borne, to try to tell her about flying, about what it 
really meant; but the old one had nearly forgotten who she was, and did not 
appear interested even when Zo managed to make it clear when and how they had 
met.
That afternoon she flew with an ache inside. The past was a dead letter, sure; 
but that people could become such ghosts…’
Nothing for such a feeling but sun and salt air, the everchanging spill of sea 
foam, rising and falling against the cliffs. There was Melka, diving; Zo chased 
her, feeling a sudden rush of affection for such a beautiful spirit. But then 
Melka saw her and tipped away, and clipped the highest rock of a seastack with 
the end of one wing, and tumbled down like a shot bird. Shocked at the sight of 
the accident, Zo pulled her wings in and began dolphin-kicking downward next to 
the seastack, until she was plummeting in a powerful stoop; she caught up the 
tumbling girl in her arms, she flapped one wing just over the blue waves, while 
Melka struggled under her; then she saw that they were going to have to swim.


 
 
 
PART TWELVE
               -----------
---It Goes So Fast
               -----------
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
They walked down to the the low bluffs overlooking the Florentine. It was night, 
the air still and cool, the stars bunched overhead in their thousands. They 
strode side by side on the bluff trail, looking down at the beaches below. The 
black water was smooth, pricked everywhere by reflected starlight, and the long 
smeared line reflecting Pseudophobos setting in the east, leading the eye to the 
dim black mass of land across the bay.
I’m worried, yes, very worried. In fact I’m scared.
Why?
It’s Maya. Her mind. Her mental problems. Her emotional problems. They’re 
getting worse.
What are the symptoms?
The same, only worse. She can’t sleep at night. She hates the way she looks, 
sometimes. She’s still in her manic-depressive cycle, but it’s changing somehow, 
I don’t know how to characterize it. As if she can’t always remember where in 
the cycle she is. Bouncing around in it. She forgets things, a lot of things.
We all do.
I know. But Maya is forgetting things that I would have said were essentially 
May an. She doesn’t seem to care. That’s the worst part; she doesn’t seem to 
care.
I find that hard to imagine.
Me too. Maybe it’s just the depressive part of her mood cycle, now 
predominating. But there are days when she loses all affect.
What you call jamais vu?
No, not exactly. She has those incidents too, mind you. Like a certain kind 
ofprestroke symptom. I know, I know—I told you, I’m scared. But I don’t know 
what this is, not really. She has jamais vus that are like a prestroke symptom. 
She has presque vus, where she feels almost on the edge of a revelation that 
never comes. That often happens to people in pre-epileptic auras.
I have feelings like that myself.
Yes, I suppose we all do. Sometimes it seems like things will come clear, and 
then the feeling goes away. Yes. But for Maya these are very intense, as in 
everything.
Better than the loss of affect.
Oh yes. I agree. Presque vu is not so bad. It’s deja vu that is the worst, and 
she has periods of continuous deja vu that can last up to a week. Those are 
devastating to her. They rob the world of something she can’t live without.
Contingency. Free will.
Perhaps. But the net effect of all these symptoms is to drive her into a state 
of apathy. Almost catatonia. Tried to avoid any of the abnormal states by not 
feeling too much. Not feeling at all.
They say one of the common issei ailments is falling into a funk.
Yes, I’ve been reading about that. Loss ofaffectual function, anomie, apathy. 
They’ve been treating it as they would catatonia, or schizophrenia—giving them a 
serotonin dopamine complex, limbic stimulants . . . a big cocktail, as you can 
imagine. Brain chemistry . . . I’ve been dosing her with everything I can think 
of, I must admit, keeping journals, running tests, sometimes with her 
cooperation, sometimes without her knowing much about it. I’ve been doing what I 
can, I swear I have.
I’m sure you have.
But it isn’t working. She’s losing it. Oh Sax—
He stopped, held on to his friend’s shoulder.
I can’t bear it if she goes. She was always such an airy spirit. We are earth 
and water, fire and air. And Maya was always in flight. Such an airy spirit, 
flying on her own gales up above us. I can’t stand to see her falling like this!
Ah well.
They walked on.
It’s nice to have Phobos back again.
Yes. That was a good idea of yours.
It was your idea, actually. You suggested it to me.
Did I? I don’t remember that.
You did.
Below them the sea crunched faintly on rocks.
These four elements. Earth, water, fire, and air. One of your semantic 
rectangles?
It’s from the Greeks.
Like the four temperaments?
Yes. Thales made the hypothesis. The first scientist.
But there were always scientists, you told me. All the way back to the savanna.
Yes, that’s true.
And the Greeks—all honor to them, they were obviously great minds—but they were 
only part of a continuum of scientists, you know. There has been some work done 
since.
Yes I know.
Yes. And some of that subsequent work might be of use to you, in these 
conceptual schemata of yours. In mapping the world for us. So that you might be 
given new ways of seeing things that might help you, even with problems like 
Maya’s. Because there are more than four elements. A hundred and twenty, more or 
less. Maybe there are more than four temperaments as well. Maybe a hundred and 
twenty of them, eh? And the nature of these elements—well—things have gotten 
strange since the Greeks. You know subatomic particles have an attribute called 
spin, that comes only in multiples of one half? And you know how an object in 
our visible world, it spins three hundred and sixty degrees, and is back to its 
original position? Well, a particle with a spin designated one half, like a 
proton or a neutron—it has to rotate through seven hundred and twenty degrees to 
get back to its original configuration.
What’s that?
It has to go through a double rotation relative to ordinary objects, to come 
back to its starting state.
You’re kidding.
No no. This has been known for centuries. The geometry of space is simply 
different for spin one half particles. They live in a different world.
And so. ...
Well, I don’t know. But it seems suggestive to me. I mean, if you are going to 
use physical models as analogues for our mental states, and throw them together 
in the patterns that you do, then perhaps you ought to be considering these 
somewhat newer physical models. To think of Maya as a proton, perhaps, a spin 
one half pariicle, living in a world twice as big as ours.
Ah.
And it gets stranger than that. There are ten dimensions to this world, Michel. 
Ten. The three of macrospace that we can perceive, the one of time, and then six 
more microdimensions, com-pactifted around the fundamental particles in ways we 
can describe mathematically but cannot visualize. Convolutions and topologies. 
Differential geometries, invisible but real, down at the ultimate level 
ofspacetime. Think about it. It could lead to whole new systems of thought for 
you. A vast new enlargement of your mind.
I don’t care about my mind. I only care about Maya.
Yes. I know.
They stood looking over the starry water. Over them arched the dome of stars, 
and in the silence the air breathed over them, the sea mumbled below. The world 
seemed a big place, wild and free, dark and mysterious.
After a time they turned, and began walking back along the trail.
One time I was taking the train from Da Vinci to Sheffield, and there was some 
problem with the piste, and we stopped for a while in Underbill. I got off and 
took a walk through the old trailer park. And I started remembering things, fust 
looking around. I wasn’t really trying. But things came to me.
A common phenomenon.
Yes, so I understand. But I wonder if it might not help Maya to do something 
like that. Not Underhill in particular, but all the places where she was happy. 
Where the two of you were happy. You’re living in Sabishii now, but why not move 
back to some place like Odessa?
She didn’t want to.
She might have been wrong. Why don’t you try living in Odessa, and visiting 
Underhill from time to time, or Sheffield. Cairo. Maybe even Nicosia. The 
south-pole cities, Dorsa Brevia. A dive into Burroughs. A train tour of the 
Hellas Basin. All that kind of return might help her to stitch her selves 
together, to see again where our story began. Where we were formed for good or 
ill, in the morning of the world. She might need that whether she knows it or 
not.
Hmm.
Arm in arm they walked back to the crater, following a dim track through dark 
bracken.
Bless you, Sax. Bless you.


 
The water of Isidis Bay was the color of a bruise or a clematis petal, sparkling 
with sunlight that glanced off waves just on the verge of whitecapping. The 
swell was from the north, and the cabin cruiser pitched and yawed as they 
motored northwest from DuMartheray Harbor. A bright day in spring, Ls 51, m-year 
79, A.D. 2181.
Maya sat on the upper deck of the boat, drinking in the sea air and the flood of 
blue sunlight. It was a joy to be out on the water like this, away from all the 
haze and junk on shore. Wonderful the way the sea could not be tamed or changed 
in any way, wonderful how when one got out of the sight of land one rocked on 
blue wilderness again, always the same no matter what happened back there. She 
could have sailed on, all day every day, and each slide down the waves a little 
roller-coaster ride of the soul.
But that wasn’t what they were about. There ahead white-caps broke over a broad 
patch, and beside her the boat’s pilot brought the wheel over a spoke or two, 
and knocked the throttle down a few rpm. That white water was the top of Double 
Decker Butte, now a reef marked by a black buoy, clanging a deep bongBong, 
bongBong, bongBong.
Mooring buoys were scattered around this big nautical church bell. Their pilot 
steered to the nearest one. There were no other boats anchored here, or visible 
anywhere; it was as if they were alone in the world. Michel came up from below 
and stood by her, hand on her shoulder as the pilot cut the throttle, and a 
sailor in the bow below them reached out with a boat hook and snagged the buoy, 
clipped their mooring rope onto it. The pilot killed the engine and they drifted 
back on the swells till the mooring line tugged them short into one swell, with 
a loud slap and a fan of white spray. They were at anchor over Burroughs.
Down in the cabin Maya got out of her clothes and pulled on a flexible orange 
dry suit: suit and hood, booties, tank and helmet, lastly gloves. She had only 
learned to dive for this descent, and every part of it was still new, except for 
the sensation of being underwater, which was like the weightlessness of space. 
So once she got over the side of the boat and into the water, it was a familiar 
feeling: sinking down, pulled by the weight belt, aware that the water around 
her was cold, but not feeling it in any real way. Breathing underwater; that was 
odd, but it worked. Down into the dark. She let go and swam down, away from the 
little pin of sunlight.
 
Down and down. Past the upper edge of Double Decker Butte, past its silvered or 
coppery windows, standing in rows like mineral extrusions or the one-way mirrors 
of observers from another dimension. Quickly gone in the murk, however, and she 
dream-parachuted down again, down and down. Michel and a couple others were 
following her, but it was so dark that she couldn’t see them. Then a robot trawl 
shaped like a thick bed frame sank past them all, its powerful headlights 
shooting forward long cones of crystalline fluidity, cones so long that they 
became one blurry diffuse cylinder, flowing this way and that as the trawl 
dipped and bobbed, striking now a distant mesa’s metallic windows, now the black 
muck down on the rooftops of the old Nied-erdorf. Somewhere down there, the 
Niederdorf Canal had run—there, a gleam of white teeth—the Bareiss columns, 
impervious white under their diamond coating, about half-buried in black sand 
and muck. She pulled up and kicked her fins back and forth a few times to stop 
descending, then pushed a button that shot some compressed air into one part of 
her weight belt, to stabilize herself. She floated then over the canal like a 
ghost. Yes; it was like Scrooge’s dream, the trawl a kind of robot Christmas 
Past, illuminating the drowned world of lost time, the city she had loved so 
much. Sudden darts of pain lanced through her ribs; mostly she was numb to any” 
feeling. It was too strange, too hard to understand or believe that this was 
Burroughs, her Burroughs, now Atlantis at the bottom of a Martian sea.
Bothered by her lack of feeling, she kicked hard and swam down the canal park, 
over the salt columns and farther west.
There on the left loomed Hunt Mesa, where she and Michel had lived in hiding 
over a dance studio; then the broad black upslope of Great Escarpment Boulevard. 
Ahead lay Princess Park, where in the second revolution she had stood on a stage 
and given a speech to a huge throng; the crowd had stood just below where she 
was floating now. Over there—that was where she and Nirgal had spoken. Now the 
black bottom of a bay. All of that, so long ago—her life— They had cut open the 
tent and walked away from the city, they had flooded it and never looked back. 
Yes, no doubt Michel was right, this dive was a perfect image of the murky 
processes of memory; and maybe it would help to see it; and yet... Maya felt her 
numbness, and doubted it. The city was drowned, sure. But it was still here. 
Anytime they wanted to someone could rebuild the dike and pump out this arm of 
the bay, and there the city would be again, drenched and steaming in the 
sunlight, safely enclosed in a polder as if it were some town in the 
Netherlands; wash down the muddy streets, plant streetgrass and trees, clean out 
the mesa interiors, and the houses and the shops down in the Niederdorf, and up 
the broad boulevards—polish the windows—and there you would have it all 
again—Burroughs, Mars, on the surface and gleaming. It could be done; it even 
made sense, almost, given how much excavation there had been in the nine mesas, 
given that Isidis Bay had no other good harbor. Well, no one would ever do it. 
But it could be done. And so it was not really like the past at all.
Numb, and feeling more and more chill, Maya shot more air into the weight belt, 
turned and swam back up the length of Canal Park, back toward the light trawl. 
Again she spotted the row of salt columns, and something about them drew her. 
She kicked down to them, then swam just over the black sand, disturbing the 
rippled surface with the downdraft from her fins. The rows of Bareiss columns 
had bracketed the old canal. They looked more tumbledown than ever now that 
their symmetricality was ruined by half burial. She remembered taking afternoon 
walks in the park, west into the sun, then back, with the light pouring past 
them. It had been a beautiful place. Down among the great mesas it had been like 
being in a giant city of many cathedrals.
There beyond the columns was a row of buildings. The buildings were the 
anchoring point for a line of kelp; long trunks rose from their roofs into the 
murk, their broad leaves undulating gently in a slow current. There had been a 
cafe in the front of that end building, a sidewalk cafe, partly shaded by a 
trellis covered with wisteria. The last salt column served as a marker, and Maya 
was sure of her identification.
She swam laboriously into a standing position, and a time came back to her. 
Frank had shouted at her and run off, no rhyme or reason as usual with him. She 
had dressed and followed him, and found him here hunched over a coffee. Yes. She 
had confronted him and they had argued right there, she had berated him for not 
hurrying up to Sheffield ... she had knocked a coffee cup off the table, and the 
handle had broken off and spun on the ground. Frank got up and they walked away 
arguing, and went back to Sheffield. But no, no. That wasn’t how it had been. 
They had quarreled, yes, but then made up. Frank had reached across the table 
and held her hand, and a great black weight had lifted off her heart, giving her 
a brief moment of grace, of being in love and being loved.
One or the other. But which had it been?
She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t be sure. So many fights with Frank, so many 
reconciliations; both could have happened. It was impossible to keep track, to 
remember what had happened when. It was all blurring together in her mind, into 
vague impressions, disconnected moments. The past, disappearing entirely. Small 
noises, like an animal in pain—ah—that was her throat. Mewling, sobbing. Numb 
and yet sobbing, it was absurd. Whatever had happened then, she just wanted it 
back. “Fuh.” She couldn’t say his name. It hurt, as if someone had stuck a pin 
in her heart. Ah—that was feeling, it was! It couldn’t be denied; she was 
gasping with it, it hurt so. One couldn’t deny it.
She pumped the fins slowly, floated off the sand, up away from the rooftops 
anchoring their kelp. Sitting miserably at that cafe table, what would they have 
thought if they had known that a hundred and twenty years later she would be 
swimming overhead, and Frank dead all that time?
End of a dream. Disorientation, of a shift from one reality to another. Floating 
in the dark water brought back some of the numbness. Ah but there it was, that 
pinprick pain, there inside, encysted—insisted—hold on to it forever, hold on to 
any feeling you can, any feeling you can dredge up out of all that muck, 
anything! Anything but the numbness; sobbing in pain was rapture compared to 
that.
And so Michel was proved right again, the old alchemist. She looked around for 
him; he had swum off on voyages of his own. Quite some time had passed, the 
others were making their rendezvous in the cone of light before the trawl, like 
tropical fish in a dark cold tank, drawn to the light in hopes of warmth. Dreamy 
slow weightlessness. She thought of John, floating naked against black space and 
crystal stars. Ah—too much to feel. One could only stand a single shard of the 
past at a time; this drowned city; but she had made love to John here too, in a 
dorm somewhere in the first years—to John, to Frank, to that engineer whose name 
she could seldom recall, no doubt to others besides, all forgotten, or almost; 
she would have to work on that. Encyst them all, precious stabs of feeling held 
in her forever, till death did they part. Up, up, up, among the colorful 
tropical fish with their arms and their legs, back into the light of day, blue 
sunlight, ah God yes, ears popping, a giddiness perhaps of nitrogen narcosis, 
rapture of the deep. Or the rapture of human depth, the way they lived and 
lived, giants plunged through the years, yes, and what they held on to. Michel 
was swimming up from below, following her; she kicked then waited, waited, 
clasped him and squeezed hard, ah, how she loved the other’s solidity in her 
arms, that proof of reality, she squeezed thinking thank you Michel you sorcerer 
of my soul, thank you Mars for what endures in us, drowned or encysted though it 
may be. Up into the glorious sun, into the wind, strip off the suit with cold 
clumsy fingers, pull it off and step out of it chrysalislike, careless of the 
power of the female nude over the male eye, then suddenly aware of it, give them 
that startling vision of flesh in the sunlight, sex in the afternoon, breathe 
deep in the wind, goose-pimpling all over with the shock of being alive. “I’m 
still Maya,” she insisted to Michel, teeth chattering; she hugged her breasts 
and toweled off, luxury of terry cloth on wet skin. She pulled on clothes, 
whooped at the chill of the wind. Michel’s face was the image of happiness, the 
deification, that mask of joy, old Dionysius, laughing aloud at the success of 
his plan, at the rapture of his friend and companion. “What did you see?” “The 
cafe—the park—the canal—and you?” “Hunt Mesa—the dance studio—Thoth 
Boulevard—Table Mountain.” In the cabin he had a bucket of champagne on ice, and 
he popped the cork and it shot off into the wind and landed lightly on the 
water, then floated off on the blue waves.
 
But she refused to say any more about it. She would not tell the story of her 
dive. The others did and then it was her turn, somehow, and the people on the 
boat were looking at her like vultures, eager to gulp down her experiences. She 
drank her champagne and sat silently on the upper deck, watching the 
broad-sloped waves. Waves looked odd on Mars, big and sloppy, impressive. She 
gave Michel a look to let him know she was all right, that he had done well to 
send her under. Beyond that, silence. Let them have their own experiences to 
feed on, the vultures.
The boat returned to DuMartheray Harbor, which consisted of a little crescent of 
marina-platted water, curving under part of the apron .of DuMartheray Crater. 
The slope of the apron was covered with buildings and greenery, right up to the 
rim.
They disembarked and walked up through the town, had dinner in a rim restaurant, 
watching sunset flare over the water of Isidis Bay. The evening wind fell down 
the escarpment and whistled offshore, holding the waves up and tearing spray off 
their tops, in white plumes crossed by brief rainbow arcs. Maya sat next to 
Michel, and kept a hand on his thigh or shoulder. “Amazing,” someone said, “to 
see the row of salt columns still gleaming down there.”
“And the rows of windows in the mesas! Did you see that broken one? I wanted to 
go in and look, but I was afraid.”
Maya grimaced, concentrated on the moment. People across the table were talking 
to Michel about a new institute concerning the First Hundred and other early 
colonists— some kind of museum, a repository of oral histories, committees to 
protect the earliest buildings from destruction, etc., also a program to provide 
help for superelderly early settlers. Naturally these earnest young men (and 
young men could be so earnest) were particularly interested in Michel’s help, 
and in finding and somehow enlisting all of the First Hundred left alive; 
twenty-three now, they said. Michel was of course perfectly courteous, and 
indeed seemed truly interested in the project.
Maya couldn’t have hated the idea more. A dive into the wreckage of the past, as 
a kind of smelling salts, repellent but invigorating—fine. That was acceptable, 
even healthy. But to fix on the past, to focus on it; disgusting. She would have 
happily tossed the earnest young men over the rail. Meanwhile Michel was 
agreeing to interview all the remaining First Hundred, to help the project get 
started. Maya stood up and went to the rail, leaned against it. Below on the 
darkening water luminous plumes of spray were still blowing off the top of every 
wave.
 
A young woman came up beside her and leaned on the railing. “My name is 
Vendana,” she said to Maya, while looking down at the waves. “I’m the Green 
party’s local political agent for the year.” She had a beautiful profile, clean 
and sharp in a classic Indian look: olive-skinned, black-eyebrowed, long nose, 
small mouth. Intelligent subtle brown eyes. It was odd how much one could tell 
by faces alone; Maya was beginning to feel she knew everything essential about a 
person at first glance. Which was a useful ability, given that so much of what 
the young natives said these days baffled her. She needed that first insight.
Greenness, however, she understood, or thought she did; actually an archaic 
political term, she would have thought, given that Mars was fully green now, and 
blue as well. “What do you want?”
Vendana said, “Jackie Boone, and the Free Mars slate of candidates for offices 
from this area, are traveling around campaigning for the upcoming elections. If 
Jackie stays party chair again, and gets back on the executive council, then 
she’ll continue working on the Free Mars plan to ban all new immigration from 
Earth. It’s her idea, and she’s been pushing it hard. Her contention is that 
Terran immigration can all be redirected elsewhere in the solar system. That 
isn’t true, but it’s a stance that goes over very well in certain quarters. The 
Terrans, of course, don’t like it. If Free Mars wins big on an isolationist 
program, we think Earth will react very badly. They’ve already got problems they 
can barely handle, they need to have what little out we provide. And they’ll 
call it a breaking of the treaty you negotiated. They might even go to war over 
it.”
Maya nodded; for years she had felt a heightening tension between Earth and 
Mars, no matter Michel’s assurances. She had known this was coming, she had seen 
it.
“Jackie has a lot of groups lined up behind her, and Free Mars has had a 
supermajority in the global government for years now. They’ve been packing the 
environmental courts all the while. The courts will back her in any immigration 
ban she cares to propose. We want to maintain the policies as set by the treaty 
you negotiated, or even widen immigration quotas a bit, to give Earth as much 
help as we can. But Jackie’s going to be hard to stop. To tell you the truth, I 
don’t think we know quite how. So I thought I’d ask you.”
Maya was surprised: “How to stop her?”
“Yes. Or more generally, to ask you to help us. I think it will take unpisting 
her personally. I thought you might be interested.”
And she turned her head to look at Maya with a knowing smile.
There was something vaguely familiar in the ironic smile lifting that classic 
little full-lipped mouth, something which though offensive was much preferable 
to the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young historians pestering Michel. And as 
Maya considered it, the invitation began to look better and better; it was 
contemporary politics, an engagement with the present. The triviality of the 
current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the 
moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of 
respectable statecraft, of immutable History. And this issue could prove to be 
important, as the young woman had said. And it would put her back in the midst 
of things. And of course (she did not think this consciously) anything that 
balked Jackie would have its own satisfactions. “Tell me more about it,” Maya 
said, moving down the balcony out of earshot of the others. And the tall ironic 
young woman followed her.


 
Michel had always wanted to take a trip on the Grand Canal, and recently he had 
talked Maya into trying a move from Sabishii back to Odessa, as a way to combat 
Maya’s various mental afflictions; they might even take an apartment in the same 
Praxis complex that they had lived in before the second revolution. That was the 
only place Maya thought of as home, aside from Underbill, which she refused even 
to visit. And Michel felt that coming back to some kind of home might help her. 
So, Odessa. Maya was agreeable; it did not matter to her. And Michel’s desire to 
travel there by way of the Grand Canal seemed fine as well. Maya had not cared. 
She wasn’t sure of anything these days, she had few opinions, few preferences; 
that was the trouble.
Now Vendana was saying that Jackie’s campaign was to proceed along the Grand 
Canal, north to south, in a big canal cruiser that doubled as campaign 
headquarters. They were there now, at the canal’s north end, getting ready in 
the Narrows.
So Maya returned to Michel on the terrace, and when the historians left them she 
said, “So let’s go to Odessa by the Grand Canal, like you said.”
Michel was delighted. Indeed it seemed to lift from him a certain somberness 
that had followed the dive into drowned Burroughs; he had been pleased at its 
effect on Maya, but for himself it had perhaps not been so good. He had been 
uncharacteristically reticent about his experience, somehow oppressed, as if 
overwhelmed by all that the great sunken capital represented in his own life. 
Hard to tell. So that now, to see Maya responding so well to the experience, and 
also to suddenly be given the prospect of seeing the Grand Canal—a kind of giant 
joke, in Maya’s opinion—it made him laugh. And that she liked to see. Michel 
thought that Maya needed a lot of help these days, but she knew full well that 
it was Michel who was struggling.
 
So a few days later they walked up a gangway onto the deck of a long narrow 
sailing ship, whose single mast and sail were one curved unit.of dull white 
material, shaped like a bird’s wing. This ship was a kind of passenger ferry, 
sailing eastward around the North Sea in perpetual circumnavigations. When 
everyone was aboard, they motored out of DuMartheray’s little harbor, and turned 
east, keeping within sight of land. The ship’s mast sail proved to be flexible 
and mobile in many different directions; it shifted in its curves like a bird’s 
wing, every moment different as its AI responded minutely to catch the fitful 
winds.
On the second afternoon of their voyage into the Narrows, the Elysium massif 
came over the horizon ahead of them, bulking alpenglow pink against the hyacinth 
sky. The coast of the mainland rose to the south as well, as if to stretch up 
and see the great massif across the bay: bluffs alternated with marshes, and 
then a long tawny reach was succeeded by an ever-higher sea cliff. The 
horizontal red strata of this cliff were all broken by bands of black and ivory, 
and the ledges were lined with mats of samphire and grasses, and streaked with 
white guano. The waves slammed into the sheer rock at the bottom of these cliffs 
and rebounded, the arcs of the backwash intersecting the oncoming swells in 
quick points of upshot water. In short, beautiful sailing: long glides down the 
swells, the wind an offshore powerhouse, especially in the afternoons—the spray, 
the salt tang in the air—for the North Sea was becoming salty—the wind in her 
hair, the white V tapestry of the ship’s wake, luminous over the indigo sea: 
beautiful days. It made Maya want to stay on board, to sail around the world and 
then around again, to never land and never change .. . there were people doing 
that now, she had heard, giant greenhouse ships utterly self-sufficient, sailing 
the great ocean in their own thalassacracy. . . .
But there ahead of them were the Narrows, narrowing. The trip from DuMartheray 
was already almost over. Why were the good days always so short? Moment to 
moment, day by day—each so full, and oh so lovely—and then gone forever, gone 
before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them. Sailing 
through life looking back at the wake, high seas, flying wind. . . . Now the sun 
was low, the light slanting across the sea cliffs, accenting all their wild 
irregularities, their overhangs, caves, sheer clean faces dropping directly into 
the sea, red rock into blue wa-.ter, all untouched by human hands (though the 
sea itself was their work). Sudden shards of splendor, splintering inside her. 
But the sun was disappearing, and the break in the sea cliffs ahead marked the 
first big harbor of the Narrows, Rhodos, where they would dock and the evening 
would come. They would eat in a harbor cafe next to the water in the long 
twilight, and that day’s glorious sail would never come again. This strange 
nostalgia, for the moment just gone, for the evening yet to come: “Ah, I’m alive 
again,” she said to herself, and marveled that it could have happened. Michel 
and his tricks—one would think that by now she would have become impervious to 
all that psychiatric-alchemical mumbo jumbo. It was too much for the heart to 
bear. But—well—better this than the numbness, that was certain. And it had a 
certain painful splendor, this acute sensation—and she could endure it—she could 
even enjoy it, somehow, in snatches—a sublime intensity to these late-afternoon 
colors, everything suffused with them. And under such a flood of nostalgic 
light, the harbor of Rhodos looked gorgeous—the big lighthouse on the western 
cape, the pair of clanging buoys red and green, port and starboard. Then in to 
the calm dark water of an anchorage, and down into rowboats, in the failing 
light, across black water through a crowd of exotic ships at anchor, no two the 
same as ship design was going through a period of rapid innovation, new 
materials making almost anything possible, and all the old designs being 
reinvented, drastically altered, then returned to again; there a clipper ship, 
there a schooner, there something that looked to be entirely outrig- ger ... 
finally to bang into a busy wooden dock, in the dusk.
Harbor towns at dusk were all alike. A corniche, a curving narrow park, lines of 
trees, an arc of ramshackle hotels and restaurants backing the wharves ... they 
checked into one of these hotels, and then strolled the dock, ate under an 
awning just as Maya had supposed they would. She relaxed in the grounded 
stability of her chair, watching liquid light oxbow over the viscous black water 
of the harbor, listening to Michel talk to the people sitting at the next table, 
tasting the olive oil and bread, the cheeses and ouzo. It was strange how much 
beauty hurt, sometimes, and even happiness. And yet she wished the lazy 
postprandial sprawl in their hard chairs could go on forever.
Of course it didn’t. They went up to bed, hand in hand, and she held on to 
Michel as hard as ever she could. And the next day they hauled their bags across 
town to the inner harbor, just north of the first canal lock, and up into a big 
canal boat, long and luxurious, like a barge become cruise ship. They were two 
of about a hundred passengers coming on board; and among the others was Vendana 
and some of her friends. And further on, on a private canal boat a few locks 
ahead, were Jackie and her consort of followers, about to travel south as well. 
On some nights they would be docked in the same canalside towns. “Interesting,” 
Maya drawled, and at the word Michel looked both pleased and worried.
 
The Grand Canal’s bed had been cut by an aerial lens, concentrating sunlight 
beamed down from the soletta. The lens had flown very high in the atmosphere, 
surfing on the thermal cloud of gases thrown up by the melted and vaporized 
rock; it had flown in straight lines, and burned its way across the land without 
the slightest regard for details of topography. Maya vaguely remembered seeing 
vids of the process at the time, but the photos had necessarily been taken from 
a distance, and they had not prepared her at all for the sheer size of the 
canal. Their long low canal boat motored into the first lock; was lifted up a 
short distance on infilling water; motored out of an opening gate—and there they 
were, in a wind-rippled lake two kilometers wide, extending in a straight line 
directly southwest toward the Hellas Sea, two thousand kilometers away. A great 
number of boats large and small were proceeding in both directions, keeping to 
the right with the slower ones closer to the banks, in the standard rules of the 
road. Almost all the craft were motorized, although many also sported lines of 
masts in schooner rig, and some of the smallest boats had big triangular sails 
and no engines—”dhows,” Michel said, pointing. An Arab design, apparently.
Somewhere up ahead was Jackie’s campaign ship. Maya ignored that and 
concentrated on the canal, gazing from bank to bank. The absent rock had not 
been excavated but vaporized, and looking at the banks one could tell; 
temperatures under the concentrated light of the aerial lens had reached five 
thousand K, and the rock had simply dissociated into its constituent atoms and 
shot into the air. After cooling, some material had fallen back on the banks, 
and some back into the trench, pooling there as lava; so the canal had been left 
with a flat floor, and banks some hundred meters high, and each over a kilometer 
wide: rounded black slag levees, on which very little could grow, so that they 
were nearly as bare and black now as when they had cooled forty m-years before, 
with only the occasional sand-filled crack bursting with greenery. The canal 
water appeared black under the banks, shading to sky color out in the middle of 
the canal, or rather to a shade just darker than sky color, the effect of the 
dark bottom no doubt; with streaks of green zigzagging across all.
The obsidian rise of the two banks, the straight gash of dark water between; 
boats of all sizes, but many of them long and narrow to maximize space in the 
locks; then every few hours a canalside town, hacked into the bankside and then 
spreading on top of the levee. Most of the towns had been named after one of the 
many canals on the classic Lowell and Antoniadi maps, and these names had been 
taken by the canal-besotted astronomers from the canals and rivers of classical 
antiquity. The first towns they passed were quite near the equator, and they 
were bracketed by groves of palm trees, then wooden docks, backed by busy little 
waterside districts; pleasant terrace neighborhoods above; then the bulk of the 
towns up on the flats of the levees. Of course the lens, in cutting a straight 
line, had carved a canal bed that rose directly up the Great Escarpment onto the 
high plain of Hesperia, a four-kilometer rise in elevation; so every few 
kilometers the canal was blocked by a lock dam. These, like dams everywhere 
these days, were transparent walls, and looked as thin as cellophane, yet were 
still many magnitudes stronger than necessary to hold the water they held, or so 
people said. Maya found their windowpane clarity offensive, a bit of whimsical 
hubris that would surely be struck down one day, when one of the thin walls 
would pop like a balloon and wreak havoc, and people would go back to good old 
concrete and carbon filament.
For now, however, the approach to a lock involved sailing toward a wall of water 
like the Red Sea parted for the passage of the Israelites, fish darting hither 
and thither overhead like primitive birds, a surreal sight, like something out 
of an Escher print. Then into a lock like a water-walled grave, surrounded by 
these bird-fish; and then up, and up, and out onto a new level of the great 
straight-sided river, cutting through the black land. “Bizarre,” Maya said after 
the first lock, and the second and the third; and Michel could only grin and 
nod.
The fourth night of the trip they docked at a small canalside town called 
Naarsares. Across the canal was an even smaller town called Naarmalcha. 
Mesopotamian names, apparently. A terrace restaurant on top of the levee gave a 
view far up and down the canal, and behind the canal to the arid highlands 
flanking it. Ahead they could see where the canal cut through the wall of Gale 
Crater, floored with water: Gale was now a bulb in the canal, a holding area for 
ships and goods.
After dinner Maya stood on the terrace looking through the gap into Gale. Out of 
the inky talc of twilight Vendana and some companions approached her: “How do 
you like the canal?” they asked.
“Very interesting,” Maya said curtly. She didn’t like being asked questions, or 
being at the center of a group; it was too much like being an exhibit in a 
museum. They weren’t going to get anything out of her. She stared at them. One 
of the young men among them gave up, began to talk to the woman next to him. He 
had an extraordinarily beautiful face, features neatly chiseled under a shock of 
black hair; a sweet smile, an unselfconscious laugh; altogether captivating. 
Young, but not so young as to seem unformed. He looked Indian perhaps—such dark 
skin, such white regular teeth—strong, lean as a whippet, a good bit taller than 
Maya, but not one of these new giants—human scale still, unprepossessing but 
solid, graceful. Sexy.
She moved toward him slowly, as the group shifted into a more relaxed 
cocktail-party format, people wandering around to talk and look down at the 
canal and the docks. Finally she got a chance to speak with him, and he did not 
react as if approached by Helen of Troy or Lucy the habiline fossil. It would be 
lovely to kiss such a mouth. Out of the question, of course, and she didn’t even 
really want to. But she liked to think about it; and the thought gave her ideas. 
Faces were so powerful.
His name was Athos. He was from Licus Vallis, to the west of Rhodes. Sansei, 
from a seafaring family, grandparents Greek and Indian. He had helped to found 
this new Green party, convinced that helping Earth through its surge was the 
only way to stay out of the maelstrom: the controversial tail-wagging-the-dog 
approach, as he admitted with an easy beautiful smile. Now he was running for 
representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and helping to coordinate the Green 
campaigns more generally.
“We’ll catch up with the Free Mars campaign in a few days?” Maya asked Vendana 
later.
“Yes. We plan to debate them at a meeting in Gale.”
 
Then as they were walking up the gangplank onto their boat, the young ones 
turned away from her, heading together up to the foredeck to continue partying; 
Maya was forgotten, she wasn’t part of that. She stared after them, then joined 
Michel in their little cabin near the stern. Seething. She couldn’t help it, 
even though she was shocked when it occurred: sometimes she hated the young. “I 
hate them,” she said to Michel. And simply because they were young. She might 
disguise it as hatred of their thoughtlessness, stupidity, callowness, utter 
provincialism; that was all true; but beyond that, she also hated their 
youth—not just their physical perfection, but simply their age—sheer 
chronology—the fact that they had it all in front of them. It was all best in 
anticipation, everything. Sometimes she woke from floating dreams in which she 
had been looking down on Mars from the Ares, after they had aerobraked, and were 
stabilizing their orbit in preparation for the descent; and shocked at the 
abrupt fall back into the present, she realized that for her that had been the 
best moment of all, that rush of anticipation as it all lay there below them, 
anything possible. That was youth.
“Think of them as fellow travelers,” Michel advised now, as he had several times 
before when Maya had confessed to this feeling. “They’re only going to be young 
for as long as we were—a snap of the fingers, right? And then they’re old, and 
then gone. We all go through it. Even a century’s difference doesn’t matter a 
damn. And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will exist, these people 
are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being alive at the same 
time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your contemporaries are the only 
ones who are ever going to really understand you.”
“Yes yes,” Maya said. It was true. “But I still hate them.”
 
The aerial lens’s burn had been about equally deep everywhere, so when it had 
blazed across Gale Crater it had cut a wide swath through the rim on the 
northeast and southwest sides; but these cuts were higher than the canal bed 
elsewhere, so that narrower cuts had been excavated through them, and locks 
installed, and the inner crater made into a high lake, a bulb in the canal’s 
endless thermometer. The Lowellian system of ancient nomenclature was in 
abeyance here for some reason, and the northeastern locks were bracketed by a 
little divided town called Birch’s Trenches, while the southwestern locks’ 
larger town was called Banks. The town Banks covered the meltzone of the burn, 
and then rose in broad bending terraces onto the un-melted rim of Gale, 
overlooking the interior lake. It was a wild town, crews and passengers of 
passing ships pounding down their gangplanks to join a more or less continuous 
festival. On this night the party was focused on the arrival of the Free Mars 
campaign. A big grassy plaza, perched on a wide bench over the lake lock, was 
jammed with people, some attending to the speeches given from a flat rooftop 
stage overlooking the plaza, others ignoring the commotion and shopping, or 
promenading, or drinking, or sitting over the lock eating food purchased from 
small smoky stands, or dancing, or wandering off to explore the upper reaches of 
the town.
Throughout the campaign speeches Maya stood on a terrace above the stage, which 
gave her a view of the backstage area, where Jackie and the rest of the Free 
Mars leadership were milling about, talking or listening as they waited for 
their turn in the spotlights. Antar was there, Ariadne, some others Maya 
half-recognized from recent news vids. Observation from a distance could be so 
revealing; down there she saw all the primate dominance dynamics that Frank used 
to go on about. Two or three of the men were fixed on Jackie, and, in a 
different way, a couple of the women. One of the men, named Mikka, was on the 
global executive council these days, a leader of the MarsFirst party. MarsFirst 
was one of the oldest political parties on Mars, formed to contest terms of the 
renewal of the first Mars treaty; Maya had been part of that, she seemed to 
recall. Now Martian politics had fallen into a pattern somewhat resembling 
European parliamentary countries, with a broad spectrum of small parties 
bracketing a few centrist coalitions, in this case Free Mars, the Reds, and the 
Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, with the others latching on, or filling gaps, or 
running off to the sides, all of them shifting this way and that in temporary 
alliances, to advance their little causes. In this array MarsFirst had become 
something like the political wing of the Red ecoteurs still in the outback, a 
nasty expedient unscrupulous organization, folded into the Free Mars 
super-majority for no good ideological reason; there had to be some kind of deal 
going on. Or something more personal; the way that Mikka followed Jackie, the 
way he regarded her; a lover, or very recent ex-lover, Maya would have bet on 
it. Besides which she had heard rumors to that effect.
Their speeches were all about beautiful wonderful Mars and how it was going to 
be ruined by overpopulation, unless they closed it to further Terran 
immigration. There was a strong case to be made for that point of view, 
actually, as could be told by the cheers and applause from the crowd. Their 
attitude was deeply hypocritical, as most of those applauding made their living 
from Terran tourists, and all of them were immigrants or the children of 
immigrants; but they cheered anyway. It was a good election issue. Especially if 
you ignored the risk of war; if you ignored the sheer immensity of Earth, and 
its primacy in human civilization. Defying it in this way.... Well, it didn’t 
matter; these people didn’t give a damn about Earth, and they didn’t understand 
it either. So defiance only made Jackie look more brave and beautiful, standing 
up for a free Mars. The ovation for her was loud and sustained; she had learned 
a lot since her maladroit speeches during the second revolution, she had gotten 
quite good. Very good.
When the Green speakers got up to take their turn, and argue for an open Mars, 
they tried to talk about the danger of a closed-Mars policy, but the response 
was of course much less enthusiastic than it had been for Jackie—their position 
sounded like cowardice, to tell the truth, and the desirability of an open Mars, 
naive. Before arriving in Banks Vendana had offered Maya a chance to speak, but 
she had declined, and now she was confirmed in her judgment; she did not envy 
these speakers their unpopular stance before a dwindling crowd.
Afterward the Greens held a small party/postmortem, and Maya critiqued their 
performance with some severity. “I’ve never seen such incompetence. You’re 
trying to scare them, but you only sound fearful. The stick is necessary, but 
you need a carrot as well. The possibility of war is the stick, but you have to 
tell them why it would be good to keep Terrans coming up, without sounding like 
idiots. You have to remind them that we all have Terran origins, we are always 
immigrants here. For you can never leave Earth.”
They nodded at this, Athos among them looking thoughtful. After that Maya got 
Vendana to one side, and grilled her about Jackie’s recent liaisons. Mikka was 
indeed a recent partner, and probably still was. MarsFirst was if anything more 
anti-immigration than the larger party. Maya nodded; she had begun to see the 
outlines of a plan.
When the postmortem was over, Maya wandered downtown with Vendana and Athos and 
the rest, until they passed a large band playing what they called Sheffield 
sound. This music was only noise to Maya: twenty different drum rhythms at once, 
on instruments not intended for percussion or even for musical use. But it 
suited her purposes, as under the clatter and pounding she was able to guide the 
young Greens unobtrusively toward Antar, whom she had spotted across the dance 
floor. When they were nearer to him she could say, “Oh, there’s Antar—hello, 
Antar! These are the people I’m sailing with. We’re right behind you, 
apparently, headed to Hell’s Gate and then Odessa. How’s the campaign going?”
And Antar was his usual gracious princely self, a man hard to object to even 
when you knew how reactionary he was, how much he had been in the pocket of 
Earth’s Arab nations. Now he must be turning on those old allies, another 
dangerous part of this anti-immigrant strategy. It was curious the way the Free 
Mars leadership had decided to defy the Terran powers, and at the same time to 
try to dominate all the new settlements in the outer solar system. Hubris. Or 
perhaps they just felt threatened; Free Mars had always been the young natives’ 
party, and if unrestricted immigration brought in millions of new issei, then 
Free Mars’s status would be endangered, not only its superma-jority but its 
simple majority as well. These new hordes with all their old fanaticisms 
intact—churches and mosques, flags, hidden firearms, open feuds—there was 
definitely a case for the Free Mars position to be made, for during the 
intensive immigration of the past decade, the new arrivals had clearly begun to 
construct another Earth, just as stupid as the first one. John would have gone 
crazy, Frank would have laughed. Arkady would have said I told you so, and 
suggested yet another revolution.
But Earth had to be dealt with more realistically than that, it could not be 
banished or wished away. And here in the moment, Antar was being gracious, extra 
gracious, as if he thought Maya might be useful for something. And as he always 
followed Jackie around, Maya was not surprised at all when suddenly Jackie and 
some others were at his side, and everyone saying hello. Maya nodded to Jackie, 
who smiled back flawlessly. Maya gestured to her new companions, carefully 
introduced them one by one. When she came to Athos she saw Jackie watching him, 
and Athos, as he was introduced, gave a friendly glance to her. Swiftly but very 
casually Maya started asking Antar about Zeyk and Na-zik, who were living on the 
coast of Acheron Bay, apparently. The two groups were moving slowly toward the 
music, and soon, if they kept going, they would be thoroughly mingled, and it 
would be too loud to hear any conversation but one’s own. “I like this Sheffield 
sound,” Maya said to Antar. “Help me get through to the dance floor?”
An obvious ploy, as she needed no help getting through crowds. But Antar took 
her arm, and did not notice Jackie talking to Athos—or pretended not to. It was 
an old story to him anyway. But that Mikka, looking very tall and powerful up 
close; Scandinavian ancestry perhaps, looking a bit of a hothead; he was now 
trailing the group with a sour expression. Maya pursed her lips, satisfied that 
the gambit had started well. If MarsFirst was even more isolationist than Free 
Mars, then trouble between them might be all the more useful.
So she danced with more enthusiasm than she had felt in years. Indeed if you 
concentrated on the bass drums only, and held to their rhythms, then it was 
somewhat like the knocking of an excited heart; and over that fundamental ground 
bass the chattering of the various woodblocks and kitchen implements and round 
stones was no more than the ephemera of stomach rumbling or rapid thought. It 
made a kind of sense; not musical sense as she understood it, but rhythmic 
sense, in some way. Dance, sweat, watch Antar shuffle gracefully about. He must 
be a fool but it didn’t show. Jackie and Athos had disappeared. And so had 
Mikka. Perhaps he would go nova and murder them all. Maya grinned and spun in 
the dance.
Michel came over and Maya gave him a big smile, a sweaty hug. He liked sweaty 
hugs, and looked pleased but curious: “I thought you didn’t like this kind of 
music?”
“Sometimes I do.”
 
Southwest of Gale the canal rose through lock after lock, up onto the highlands 
of Hesperia. As it crossed the highlands, to the east of the Tyrrhena massif, it 
remained at about the four-kilometer elevation, now more often called five 
kilometers above sea level, and so there was little need for locks. For days at 
a time they motored along the canal, or sailed under the power of the ship’s 
line of little mast sails, stopping in some bankside towns, passing others. 
Oxus, Jaxartes, Scamander, Simois, Xanthus, Steropes, Polyphemus—they stopped in 
each, keeping a steady pace with the Free Mars campaign, and indeed with most of 
the other Hellas-bound barges and yachts. Everything stretched out without 
change to both horizons, although occasionally in this region the lens had 
burned through something other than the usual basaltic regolith, so that in the 
vaporizing and falling out there had occurred some variation in the levees, 
stretches of obsidian or sideromelane, swirls of brilliant glossy color, of 
marbled porphyry greens, violent sul-furic yellows, lumpy conglomerates, even 
one long section of clear glass banks, clear on both sides of the canal, 
distorting the highlands behind them and for long stretches reflecting the sky. 
This stretch, called Glass Banks, was of course intensively developed. Between 
the canalside towns ran mosaic paths, shaded by palm trees in giant ceramic 
pots, and backed by villas complete with grass lawns and hedges. The Glass Banks 
towns were whitewashed, bright with pastel shutters and window boxes and doors, 
and blue-glazed tile roofs, and long colored neon signs over blue awnings in the 
waterfront restaurants. It was a kind of dream Mars, a canal cliche from the 
ancient dreamscape, but none the less beautiful for that, the obviousness of it 
indeed part of its pleasure. The days of their passage through this region were 
warm and windless, the canal surface as smooth as the banks, and as clear: a 
glass world. Maya sat on the forward deck under a green awning, watching the 
freight barges and the tourist paddle wheelers heading in the other direction, 
everyone out on deck to enjoy the sight of the glass banks and the colorful 
towns decorating them. This was the heart of the Martian tourist industry, the 
favorite destination for off-world visitors; ridiculous, but true; and one had 
to admit it was pretty. Gazing at the passing scene it occurred to Maya that 
whichever party won the next general election, and whichever way the immigration 
battle fell out, this world would probably go on, gleaming like a toy in the 
sun. Still, she hoped her gambit would work.
 
As they barged farther south the southern autumn put a chill in the air. 
Hardwood trees began to appear on the once-again-basalt banks, their leaves 
flaring red and yellow; and one morning there was a skim of ice sheeting the 
smooth water against the shores. When they stood on the top of the western bank, 
the volcanoes Tyrrhena Patera and Hadriaca Patera loomed on the horizon like 
flattened Fujis, Hadriaca displaying the banded maypole of white glaciers on 
black rock which Maya had first seen from the other side, coming up out of Dao 
Vallis when she had made her tour of the flooding Hellas Basin, so long ago. 
With that young girl, what was her name? A relative of someone she knew.
The canal cut through the dragonback mounds of the Hesperia Dorsa. The canalside 
towns grew less equatorial, more austere, more highland. Volga river towns, New 
England fishing villages, but with names like Astapus, Aeria, Uchronia, Apis, 
Eunostos, Agathadaemon, Kaiko ... on and on the broad band of water led them, 
south by west, as straight as a compass bearing for day after day, until it was 
hard to remember that this was the only one, that such canals were not webbed 
everywhere, as on the maps of the ancient dream. Oh there was one other big 
canal, at Boone’s Neck, but it was short and very wide, and getting wider every 
year, as draglines and the eastward current tore at it; no longer a canal, 
really, but rather an artificial strait. No, the dream of the canals had been 
enacted only here, in all the world; and while here, cruising tranquilly over 
the water, one’s view of everything else cut off by the high banks, there was a 
sense of romance in the air, a sense that their political and personal squabbles 
had a kind of Barsoomian grandeur.
Or so it felt, strolling in the nip of an evening under the pastel neons of a 
canalside town. In one, called Anteus, Maya was strolling the canalside 
promenade, looking down into boats large and small, onto beautiful big young 
people drinking and chatting lazily, sometimes cooking meat on braziers clamped 
to the railings and hung out over the water. On a wide dock extending into the 
canal, there was an open-air cafe, from which came the plaintive singing of a 
gypsy violin; she turned into the cafe instinctively, and only at the last 
minute saw Jackie and Athos, sitting at a canalside table alone, leaning over 
until their foreheads almost touched. Maya certainly did not want to interrupt 
such a promising scene, but the very abruptness of her halt caught Jackie’s eye, 
so that she looked up, then started. Maya turned to leave, but saw Jackie was 
getting up to come over.
Another scene, Maya thought, only partly unhappy at the prospect. But Jackie was 
smiling, and Athos was coming with her, at her side, watching it all with 
wide-eyed innocence; either he had no idea of their history, or else he had a 
good control of his expressions. Maya guessed the latter, simply because of the 
look in his eye, just that bit too innocent to be real. An actor.
“It’s beautiful this canal, don’t you think?” Jackie was saying.
“A tourist trap,” Maya said. “But a pretty one. And it keeps the tourists nicely 
bunched.”
“Oh come now,” Jackie said, laughing. She took Athos’s arm. “Where’s your sense 
of romance?”
“What sense of romance,” Maya said, pleased at this public display of affection. 
The old Jackie would not have done it. Indeed it was a shock to see that she was 
no longer young; stupid of Maya not to have thought of that, but her sense of 
time was such a mishmash that her own face in the mirror was a perpetual shock 
to her—every morning she woke up in the wrong century, so seeing Jackie looking 
matronly with Athos on her arm was only more of the same—an impossibility—this 
was the fresh dangerous girl of Zygote, the young goddess of Dorsa Brevia!
“Everyone has a sense of romance,” Jackie said. The years were not making her 
any wiser. Another chronological discontinuity. Perhaps taking the longevity 
treatment so often had clogged her brain. Curious that after such assiduous use 
of the treatments there should be any signs of aging left at all; in the absence 
of cell-division error, where exactly was it coming from? There were no wrinkles 
on Jackie’s face, in some ways she could be mistaken for twenty-five; and the 
look of happy Boonean confidence was as entrenched as ever, the only way really 
she resembled John—glowing like the neon scrim of the cafe overhead. But despite 
all that she looked her years, somehow—in her eyes, or in some gestalt at work 
despite all the medical manipulation.
And then one of Jackie’s many assistants was there among them, panting, gasping, 
pulling Jackie’s arm away from Athos, crying “Jackie, I’m so sorry, so sorry, 
she’s killed, she’s killed—”—shivering—
“Who?” Jackie said sharply, like a slap.
The young woman (but she was aging) said miserably, “Zo.”
“Zo?”
“A flying accident. She fell into the sea.”
This ought to slow her down, Maya thought.
“Of course,” Jackie said.
“But the birdsuits,” Athos protested. He was aging too. “Didn’t they. . . .”
“I don’t know about that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jackie said, shutting them up. Later Maya heard an 
eyewitness account of the accident, and the image stayed etched in her mind 
forever—the two fliers struggling in the waves like wet dragonflies, staying 
afloat so that they would have been okay, until one of the North Sea’s big 
swells picked them up and slammed them into the base of a seastack. After which 
they had drifted in the foam.
Now Jackie was withdrawn, remote, thinking things over. She and Zo had not been 
close, Maya had heard; some said they hated each other. But one’s child. You 
were not supposed to survive your children, that was something even childless 
Maya felt instinctively. But they had abrogated all the laws, biology meant 
nothing to them anymore; and here they were. If Ann had lost Peter on the 
falling cable; if Nadia and Art ever lost Nikki... even Jackie, as foolish as 
she was, had to feel it.
And she did. She was thinking hard, trying to find the way out. But she wasn’t 
going to; and then she would be a different person. Aging—it had nothing to do 
with time, nothing. “Oh Jackie,” Maya said, and put a hand forward. Jackie 
flinched, and Maya pulled the hand back. “I’m sorry.”
But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme. 
Maya had learned that on the night of Hiroko’s disappearance, when she had tried 
to comfort Michel. Nothing could be done.
Maya almost cuffed the sniffling young aide, restrained herself: “Why don’t you 
escort Ms. Boone back to your ship. And then keep people away for a while.”
Jackie was still lost in her thoughts. Her flinch away from Maya had been 
instinct only, she was stunned—disbelieving—and the disbelief absorbed all her 
effort. All just as one would expect, from any human being. Maybe it was even 
worse if you hadn’t gotten along with the child—worse than if you loved them, 
ah, God—”Go,” Maya said to the aide, and with a look commanded Athos to help. He 
would certainly make an impression on her, one way or the other. They led her 
off. She still had the most beautiful back in the world, and held herself like a 
queen. That would change when the news sank in.
Later Maya found herself down at the southern edge of town, where the lights 
left off and the starry sheen of the canal was banked by black berms of slag. It 
looked like the scroll of a life, someone’s world line: bright neon squiggles, 
moving across a landscape to the black horizon. Stars overhead and underfoot. A 
black piste over which they glided soundlessly.
She walked back to their boat. Stumped down the gangplank. It was distressing to 
feel this way for an enemy, to lose an enemy to this kind of disaster. “Who am I 
going to hate now?” she cried to Michel.
“Well,” Michel said, shocked. Then, in a comforting tone: “I’m sure you’ll think 
of someone.”
Maya laughed shortly, and Michel cracked a brief smile. Then he shrugged, 
looking grave. He less than any of them had been lulled by the treatment. 
Immortal stories in mortal flesh, he had always insisted. He was downright 
morbid about it. And here another illustration of his point.
“So the all-too-human got hers at last,” he said.
“She was an idiot with all those risks, she was asking for it.”
“She didn’t believe in it.”
Maya nodded. No doubt true. Few believed in death anymore, especially the young, 
who never had, even before the days of the treatment. And now less than ever. 
But believe in it or not, it was touching down more and more, mostly of course 
among the superelderly. New diseases, or old diseases returned, or else a rapid 
holistic collapse with no apparent cause—this last had killed Helmut Bronski and 
Derek Hastings in recent years, people Maya had met, if not known well. Now an 
accident had struck someone so much younger than they were that it made no 
sense, fit no pattern but youthful recklessness. An accident. Random chance.
“Do you still want to get Peter to come?” Michel asked, from out of a whole 
different realm of thought. What was this, realpolitik from Michel? Ah—he was 
trying to distract her. She almost laughed again.
“Let’s still get in touch with him,” she said. “See if he might come.” But this 
was only to reassure Michel; her heart was not in it.
That was the beginning of the string of deaths.


 
 
 
 
 
But she didn’t know that then. Then, it was only the end of their canal journey.
The burn of the aerial lens had stopped just short of the eastern edge of the 
Hellas Basin watershed, between Dao and Harmakhis valleys. The final segment of 
the canal had been dug by conventional means, and it dropped so precipitously 
down the steep eastern slope of the basin that frequent locks were necessary, 
here functioning as dams, so that the canal no longer had the classic look it 
had had in the highlands, but was rather a series of reservoir lakes connected 
by short broad reddish rivers, extending out from under each clear dam. So they 
boated across lake after lake, down and down in a slow parade of barges and 
sailboats and cabin cruisers and steamers, and as they dropped in the locks they 
could see through their clear walls down the string of lakes like a giant 
staircase of blue stepping-stones, down to the distant bronze plate of the 
Hellas Sea. Somewhere in the badlands to right and left, the Dao and Harmakhis 
canyons cut deeply into the redrock plateau, following their more natural 
courses down the great slope; but with their tents removed the two canyons were 
not visible until you were right on their rims, and nothing could be seen of 
them from the canal.
On board their ship, life went on. Apparently it was much the same on the Free 
Mars barge, where Jackie was said to be doing well. Still seeing Athos when the 
two boats were docked in the same town. Accepting sympathy graciously, and then 
turning the topic elsewhere, usually to the campaign business at hand. And their 
campaign continued to go well. Under Maya’s coaching the Green campaign was 
being run better than before, but anti-immigrant sentiment was strong. 
Everywhere they went the other Free Mars councillors and candidates spoke at the 
rallies, and Jackie only made occasional short, dignified appearances. She was a 
lot more powerful and intelligent a speaker than she used to be. But by watching 
the others speak Maya got a good sense of who was at the top level of the 
organization, and several of these people looked very happy to have gained the 
limelight. One young man, another one of Jackie’s young men, named Nanedi, stood 
out in particular. And Jackie did not seem very pleased to see it; she became 
cool to him, she turned more and more to Athos, and Mikka, and even An-tar. Some 
nights she appeared a veritable queen among the consorts. But Maya could see 
under that, to the truth she had witnessed in Anteus. From a hundred meters away 
she could see the darkness at the heart of things.
Nevertheless, when Peter returned her call, Maya asked him to meet her for a 
talk about the current elections; and when Peter arrived, Maya rested, 
watchfully. Something would happen.
Peter looked relaxed, calm. He lived in the Charitum Montes these days, working 
on the Argyre wilderness project, and also with a co-op making Mars-to-space 
planes for people who wanted to bypass the elevator. Relaxed, calm, even a bit 
withdrawn. Simon-like.
Antar was already angry at Jackie, for embarrassing him more than usual by her 
lack of discretion with Athos. Mikka was even angrier than Antar. Now, with 
Peter on hand, Jackie was baffling and then angering Athos as well, as she 
devoted all her attention to Peter. She was as reliable as a magnet. But she was 
attracted to Peter, who was as inert to her as always, iron to her magnet. It 
was depressing how predictable they were. But useful: the Free Mars campaign was 
subtly losing momentum. Antar was no longer so bold as to suggest to the Qahiran 
Mahjaris that they forget about Arabia during its time of troubles. Mikka was 
intensifying the MarsFirst critique of various Free Mars positions unrelated to 
immigration, and pulling some of the other members of the executive council into 
his sphere. Yes—Peter was acting as intensifier to Jackie’s impolitic side, 
making her erratic and ineffective. So it all was working as Maya had planned; 
one only had to roll men toward Jackie like bowling balls, and over she would 
go. And yet Maya felt no sense of triumph.
 
And then they were pushing out of the final lock into Malachite Bay, a 
funnel-shaped indentation of the Hellas Sea, its shallow water covered by a 
sun-beaten windchop. Farther out they pitched gently onto the darker sea, where 
many of the barges and smaller craft turned north and made toward Hell’s Gate, 
the largest deepwater harbor on the east coast of Hellas. Their barge followed 
this parade, and soon the great bridge crossing Dao Vallis appeared over the 
horizon, then the building-covered walls at the entrance to the canyon; then the 
masts, the long jetty, the harbor slips.
Maya and Michel went ashore, and made their way up the cobbled and staired 
streets, to the old Praxis dorms under the bridge. There was an autumn harvest 
festival the next week that Michel wanted to attend, and then they would be off 
to Minus One Island, and Odessa. After they checked in and dropped their bags, 
Maya took off for a walk through the streets of Hell’s Gate, happy to be out of 
the canal boat’s confinement, able to get off by herself. It was near sunset, 
near the end of a day that had begun in the Grand Canal. That trip was over.
Maya had last visited Hell’s Gate back in 2121, during her first piste tour of 
the basin, working for Deep Waters, and traveling with—with Diana! that was her 
name! Esther’s granddaughter, and a niece of Jackie’s. That big cheerful girl 
had been Maya’s introduction to the young natives, really— not only by way of 
her contacts in the new settlements around the basin, but in herself, in her 
attitudes and ideas— the way Earth was just a word to her, the way her own 
generation absorbed all her interest, all her efforts. That had been the first 
time Maya had begun to feel herself slipping out of the present, into the 
history books. Only the most intense effort had allowed her to continue to 
engage the moment, to have an influence on those times. But she had made that 
effort, had been an influence. It had been one of the great periods of her life, 
perhaps the last great period of her life. The years since then had been like a 
stream in the southern highlands, wandering through cracks and grabens and then 
sinking into some unexpected pothole.
But once, sixty years before, she had stood right here, under the great bridge 
that carried the piste from cliff to cliff over the mouth of Dao canyon—the 
famous Hell’s Gate bridge, with the city falling down the steep sun-washed 
slopes on both sides of the river, facing the sea. At that time there had been 
only sand out there, except for a band of ice visible on the horizon. The town 
had been smaller and ruder, the stone steps of the staircase streets rough and 
dusty. Now they had been polished on their tops by feet toiling up them. The 
dust had been washed away by the years; everything was clean and had a dark 
patina; now it was a beautiful Mediterranean hillside harbor, perched in the 
shadow of a bridge that rendered the whole town a miniature, like something in a 
paperweight or a postcard from Portugal. Quite beautiful in an autumn’s early 
sunset, all shadowed and florid to the west, everything sepia, the moment 
trapped in amber. But once she had passed through this way with a vibrant young 
Amazon, when a whole new world was opening up, the native Mars she had helped to 
bring into being—all of it revealed to her, while she was still a part of it.
The sun set on these memories. Maya returned to the Praxis building, still 
located up under the bridge, the final staircase to it as steeply pitched as a 
ladder. Ascending it with pushes on her thighs to help, Maya suddenly felt an 
overwhelming sense of deja vu. She had done this before— not only climbed these 
steps, but climbed them with the sense that she had climbed them before—with 
precisely the same feeling that in a yet earlier visit, she had been an 
effective part of the world.
Of course—she had been one of the first explorers of Hellas Basin, in the years 
right after Underhill. That had slipped her mind. She had helped to found 
Lowpoint, and then had driven around, exploring the basin before anyone else 
had, even Ann. So that later, when working for Deep Waters, and seeing the new 
native settlements, she had felt similarly removed from the contemporary scene. 
“My God,” she exclaimed, appalled. Layer on layer, life after life—they had 
lived so long! It was like reincarnation in a way, or eternal recurrence.
There was some little kernel of hope at the middle of that feeling. Back then, 
in that first feeling of slipping away, she had started a new life. Yes she 
had—she had moved to Odessa, and made her mark on the revolution, helping it to 
succeed by hard work, and a lot of thought about why people support change, 
about how to change without engendering a bitter backlash, which though perhaps 
decades removed yet always seemed to smash back into any revolutionary success, 
wrecking what was good in it. And it looked as though they had indeed avoided 
that bitterness.
At least until now. Perhaps that was the best way of looking at what was 
happening in this election; an inevitable backlash of some kind. Perhaps she had 
not succeeded as much as she had thought—perhaps she had only failed less 
drastically than Arkady, or John, or Frank. Who could be sure; so hard to say 
anymore what was really going on in history, it was too vast, too inchoate. So 
much was happening everywhere that anything might be happening anywhere. Co-ops, 
republics, feudal monarchies ... no doubt there were Oriental satrapies out 
there in the back country, in some caravan gone wrong ... so that any 
characterization one made of history would have some validity somewhere. This 
thing she was involved in now, the young native settlements demanding water, 
going off the net and outside UNTA’s control—no—it wasn’t that—something 
else....
But standing there at the Praxis flat door, she couldn’t remember what it was. 
She and Diana would take a piste train south the next morning, around the 
southeast bend of Hellas to see the Zea Dorsa, and the lava-tube tunnel they had 
converted to use as an aqueduct. No. She was here because…
She couldn’t bring it back. On the tip of the tongue . .. Deep Waters. 
Diana—they had just finished driving up and down Dao Vallis, where on the canyon 
floor natives and immigrants were starting up an agrarian valley life, creating 
a complex biosphere under their enormous tent. Some of them spoke Russian, it 
had brought tears to her eyes to hear it! There—her mother’s voice, sharp and 
sarcastic as she ironed clothes in their little apartment kitchen nook-sharp 
smell of cabbage—
No. It wasn’t that. Look to the west, to the sea shimmering in the dusk air. 
Water had flooded the sand dunes of east Hellas. It was a century later at 
least, it had to be. She was here for some other reason... scores of boats, 
little dots down in a postage-stamp harbor, behind a breakwater. It wouldn’t 
come back to her. It wouldn’t come. A horrible sense of tip-of-the-tongueism 
made her dizzy, then sick, as if she would get it out by vomiting. She sat down 
on the step. On the tip of the tongue, her whole life! Her whole life! She 
groaned aloud, and some kids throwing pebbles at gulls stared at her. Diana. She 
had met Nirgal by accident, they had had a dinner.... But Nirgal had gotten 
sick. Sick on Earth!
And it all came back with a physical snap, like a blow to her solar plexus, a 
wave rolling over her. The canal voyage, of course, of course, the dive down 
into drowned Burroughs, Jackie, poor Zo the crazy fool. Of course of course of 
course. She hadn’t really forgotten, of course. So obvious now that it was back. 
It hadn’t really been gone; just a momentary lapse in her thinking, while her 
attention had wandered elsewhere. To another life. A strong memory had its own 
integrity, its own dangers, just as much as a weak memory did. It was only the 
result of thinking that the past was more interesting than the present. Which in 
many ways was true. But still. ...
Still, she found she preferred to sit a while longer. The little nausea 
persisted. And there was a bit of residual pressure in her head, as if that 
tongue’s hard tipping had left things sore; yes, it had been a bad moment. Hard 
to deny when you could still feel the throbbing from that tongue’s desperate 
thrusts.
She watched the end of dusk turn the town a deep dark orange, then a glowing 
color like light shining through a brown bottle. Hell’s Gate indeed. She 
shivered, got up, stepped unsteadily down the stairs into the harborside 
district, where the restaurants ringing the quays were bright moth-flittering 
globes of tavern light. The bridge loomed overhead like a negative Milky Way. 
Maya walked behind the docks, toward the marina.
There was Jackie, walking toward her. There were some aides following some way 
back, but in front it was just Jackie, coming toward her unseeing; then seeing. 
At the sight of Maya a corner of her mouth tightened, no more, but it was enough 
to allow Maya to see that Jackie was, what, ninety years old? A hundred? She was 
beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Events would soon be 
washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved 
through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when 
people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the 
time they died; and how much more so now. No sailboard would keep you up with 
that wave, not even a birdsuit allowing you to air-surf the wave in pelican 
style, like Zo. Ah, that was it; it was Zo’s death she saw on Jackie’s face. 
Jackie had tried her best to ignore it, to let it run off her like water off a 
duck’s back. But it hadn’t worked, and now she stood in Hell’s Gate over 
star-smeared water, an old woman.
Maya, shocked by the intensity of this vision, stopped. Jackie stopped. In the 
distance the clack of dishes, the loud burble of restaurant conversations. The 
two women looked at each other. This was not something Maya could remember doing 
with Jackie—this fundamental act of acknowledgment, meeting the other’s eye. 
Yes, you are real; I am real. Here we are, the both of us. Big sheets of glass, 
cracking inside. Something freer, Maya turned and walked away.


 
 
 
 
 
Michel found them a passenger schooner, going to Odessa byway of Minus One 
Island. The boat’s crew told them that Nirgal was expected to be on the island 
for a race, news which made Maya happy. It was always good to see Nirgal, and 
this time she needed his help as well. And she wanted to see Minus One; the last 
time she had been there it had not been an island at all, just a weather station 
and airstrip crn a bump in the basin floor.
Their ship was a long low schooner, with five bird’s-wing mast sails. Once 
beyond the end of the jetty the mast sails extruded their taut triangular 
expanses, and then, as the wind was from behind, the crew set a big blue kite 
spinnaker out front. After that the ship leaped into the clear blue swells, 
knocking up sheets of spray with every slam into an oncoming wave. After the 
confinement of the Grand Canal’s black banks it felt wonderful to be out on the 
sea, with the wind in her face and the waves coursing by—it blew all the 
confusion of Hell’s Gate out of her head—Jackie forgotten—the previous month now 
understood to be a kind of malignant carnival that she would never have to 
revisit—she would never return there—the open sea for her, and a life in the 
wind! “Oh Michel, this is the life for me.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
And at the end of the voyage they were to settle in Odessa, now a seaside town 
like Hell’s Gate. Living there they could sail out any day they wanted when the 
weather was nice, and it would be just like this, windy and sunny. Bright 
moments in time, the living present which was the only reality they ever had; 
the future a vision, the past a nightmare— or vice versa—anyway only here in the 
moment could one feel the wind, and marvel at the waves, so big and sloppy! Maya 
pointed at one blue hillside rolling by in a long irregular fluctuating line, 
and Michel laughed out loud; they watched more closely, laughed harder; not in 
years had Maya felt so strongly the sense of being on a different world, these 
waves just didn’t act right, they flew around and fell over and bulged and 
wriggled all over their surfaces much more than the admittedly stiff breeze 
could justify, it looked odd; it was alien. Ah Mars, Mars, Mars!
The seas were always high, the crew told them, on the Hellas Sea. The absence of 
tides made no difference—what mattered most when it came to waves was gravity, 
and the strength of the wind. Hearing that as she looked out at the heaving blue 
plain, Maya’s spirits bounced up in the same wild way. Her g was light, and the 
winds were strong in her. She was a Martian, one of the first Martians, and she 
had surveyed this basin in the beginning, helped to fill it with water, helped 
to build the harbors and put free sailors at sea on it; now she sailed over it 
herself, and if she never did anything again but sail over it, that would be 
enough.
And so they sailed, and Maya stood in the bow near the bowsprit, hand on the 
rail to steady her, feeling the wind and the spray. Michel came and stood with 
her.
“So nice to be off the canal,” she said.
“It’s true.”
They talked about the campaign, and Michel shook his head. “This 
anti-immigration campaign is so popular.”
 
“Are the yonsei racist, do you think?”
“That would be hard, given their own racial mix. I think they are just generally 
xenophobic. Contemptuous of Earth’s problems—afraid of being overrun. So Jackie 
is articulating a real fear that everyone already has. It doesn’t have to be 
racist.”
“But you’re a good man.”
Michel blew out air. “Well, most people are.”
“Come on,” Maya said. Sometimes Michel’s optimism was too much. “Whether it’s 
racist or not, it still stinks.
Earth is down there looking at all our open land, and if we close the door on 
them now they’re likely to come hammer it open. People think it could never 
happen, but if the Ter-rans are desperate enough then they’ll just bring people 
up and land them, and if we try to stop them they’ll defend themselves here, and 
presto we’ll have a war. And right here on Mars, not back on Earth or in space, 
but on Mars. It could happen—you can hear the threat of it in the way people in 
the UN are trying to warn us. But Jackie isn’t listening. She doesn’t care. 
She’s fanning xenophobia for her own purposes.”
Michel was staring at her. Oh yes; she was supposed to have stopped hating 
Jackie. It was a hard habit to break. She waved all that she had said away, all 
the malevolent hallucinatory politicking of the Grand Canal. “Maybe her motives 
are good,” she said, trying to believe it. “Maybe she only wants what’s best for 
Mars. But she’s still wrong, and she still has to be stopped.”
“It isn’t just her.”
“I know, I know. We’ll have to think about what we might do. But look, let’s not 
talk about them anymore. Let’s see if we can spot the island before the crew.”
 
Two days later they did just that. And as they approached Minus One,. Maya was 
pleased to see that the island was not at all in the style of the Grand Canal. 
Oh there were whitewashed little fishing villages on the water, but these had a 
handmade look, an unelectrified look. And above them on the bluffs stood groves 
of tree houses, little villages in the air. Ferals and fisherfolk occupied the 
island, the sailors told them. The land was bare on the headlands, green with 
crops in the sea valleys. Umber sandstone hills broke into the sea, alternating 
with little bay beaches, all empty except for dune grass flowing in the wind.
“It looks so empty,” Maya remarked as they sailed around the north point and 
down the western shore. “They see the vids of this back on Earth. That’s why 
they won’t let us shut the door.”
“Yes,” Michel said. “But look how the people here bunch their population. The 
Dorsa Brevians brought the pattern up from Crete. Everyone lives in the 
villages, and goes out into the country to work it during the days. What looks 
empty is being used already, to support those little villages.”
There was no proper harbor. They sailed into a shallow bay overlooked by a tiny 
whitewashed fishing village, and dropped an anchor, which remained clearly 
visible on the sandy bottom, ten meters below. They ferried ashore using the 
schooner’s dinghy, passing some big sloops and several fishing boats anchored 
closer to the beach.
Beyond the village, which was nearly deserted, a twisting arroyo led them up 
into the hills. When the arroyo ended in a box canyon, a switchbacked trail gave 
them access to the plateau above. On this rugged moor, with the sea in view all 
around, groves of big oak trees had been planted long ago. Now some of the trees 
were festooned with walkways and staircases, and little wooden rooms high in 
their branches. These tree houses reminded Maya of Zygote, and she was not at 
all surprised to learn that among the prominent citizens of the island were 
several of the Zygote ec-togenes—Rachel, Tiu, Simud, Emily—they had all come to 
roost here, and helped to build a way of life that Hiroko presumably would have 
been proud to see. Indeed there were some who said that the islanders hid Hiroko 
and the lost colonists in one of the more remote of these oak groves, giving 
them an area to roam in without fear of discovery. Looking around, Maya thought 
it was quite possible; it made as much sense as any other Hiroko rumor, and more 
than most. But there was no way of knowing. And it didn’t matter anyway; if 
Hiroko was determined to hide, as she must have been if she was alive, then 
where she hid was not worth worrying about. Why anyone bothered with it was 
beyond Maya. Which was nothing new; everything to do with Hiroko had always 
baffled her.
The northern end of Minus One Island was less hilly than the rest, and as they 
came down onto this plain they spotted most of the island’s conventional 
buildings, clustered together. These were devoted to the island’s olympiads, and 
they had a consciously Greek look to them: stadium, amphitheater, a sacred grove 
of towering sequoia, and out on a point over the sea, a small pillared temple, 
made of some white stone that was not marble but looked like it—alabaster, or 
diamond-coated salt. Temporary yurt camps had been erected on the hills above. 
Several thousand people milled about this scene; much of the island’s 
population, apparently, and a good number of visitors from around Hellas 
Basin—the games were still mostly a Hellas affair. So they were surprised to 
find Sax in the stadium, helping to do the measurements for the throwing events. 
He gave them a hug, nodding in his diffuse way. “Annarita is throwing the discus 
today,” he said. “It should be good.”
And so on that fine afternoon Maya and Michel joined Sax out on the track, and 
forgot about everything but the day at hand. They stood on the inner field, 
getting as close to events as they wanted. The pole vault was Maya’s favorite, 
it amazed her—more than any other event it illustrated to her the possibilities 
of Martian g. Although it clearly required a lot of technique to take advantage 
of it: the bounding yet controlled sprint, the precise planting of the extremely 
long pole as it jounced forward, the leap, the pull, the vault itself, feet 
pointing at the sky; then the catapulted flight into space, body upside down as 
the jumper shot above the flexing pole, and up, and up; then the neat twist over 
the bar (or not), and the long fall onto an airgel pad. The Martian record was 
fourteen meters and change, and the young man vaulting now, already winner for 
the day, was trying for fifteen, but failing. When he came down off the airgel 
pad Maya could see how very tall he was, with powerful shoulders and arms, but 
otherwise lean to the point of gauntness. The women vaulters waiting their turn 
looked much the same.
It was that way in all the events, everyone big and lean and hard-muscled—the 
new species, Maya thought, feeling small and weak and old. Homo martial. Luckily 
she had good bones and still carried herself well, or else she would have been 
ashamed to walk among such creatures. As it was she stood unconscious of her own 
defiant grace, and watched as the woman discus thrower Sax had pointed out to 
them spun in an accelerating burst that flung the discus as if shot from a 
skeet-casting device. This Annarita was very tall, with a long torso and wide 
rangy shoulders, and lats like wings under her arms; neat breasts, squashed by a 
singlet; narrow hips, but a full strong bottom, over powerful long thighs— yes, 
a real beauty among the beauties. And so strong; though it was clear that it was 
the swiftness of her spin that propelled her discus so far. “One hundred eighty 
meters!” Michel exclaimed, smiling. “What joy for her.”
And the woman was pleased. They all applied themselves intensely in the moment 
of effort, then stood around relaxing, or trying to relax—stretching muscles, 
joking with each other. There were no officials, no scoreboard, only some 
helpers like Sax. People took turns running events other than their own. Races 
started with a loud bang. Times were clocked by hand, and called out and logged 
onto a screen. Shot puts still looked heavy, their throwing awkward. Javelins 
flew forever. High jumpers were only able to clear four meters, to Maya and 
Michel’s surprise. Long jumpers, twenty meters; which was a most amazing sight, 
the jumpers flailing their limbs through a leap that lasted four or five 
seconds, and crossed a big part of the field.
In the late afternoon they held the sprints. As with the rest of the events, men 
and women competed together, all wearing singlets. “I wonder if sexual 
dimorphism itself is lessened in these people,” Michel said as he watched a 
group warm up. “Everything is so much less genderized for them—they do the same 
work, the women only get pregnant once in their lives, or never—they do the same 
sports, they build up the same muscles....”
Maya fully believed in the reality of the new species, but at this notion she 
scoffed: “Why do you always watch the women then?”
Michel grinned. “Oh / can tell the difference, but I come from the old species. 
I just wonder if they can.”
Maya laughed out loud. “Come on. I mean look there, and there,” pointing. 
“Proportions, faces…”
“Yeah yeah. But still, it’s not like, you know, Bardot and Atlas, if you know 
what I mean.”
“I do. These people are prettier.”
Michel nodded. It was as he had said from the start, Maya thought; on Mars it 
would finally become clear that they were all little gods and goddesses, and 
should live life in a sacred joyfulness. . . . Gender, however, remained clear 
at first glance. Although she too came from the old species; maybe it was just 
her. But that runner over there ... ah. A woman, but with short powerful legs, 
narrow hips, flat chest. And that one next to her? Again female—no, male! A high 
jumper, as graceful as a dancer, though all the high jumpers were having 
trouble: Sax muttered something about plants. Well, still; even if some of them 
were a bit androgynous, for most it was the usual matter of instant recognition.
“You see what I mean,” Michel said, observing her silence.
“Sort of. I wonder if these youngsters really think about it differently, 
though. If they have ended patriarchy, then there must necessarily be a new 
social balance of the sexes.. . .”
“That’s certainly what the Dorsa Brevians would claim.”
“Then I wonder if that’s not the problem with Terran immigration. Not the 
numbers themselves, but the fact that so many people arriving from Earth are 
coming from older cultures. It’s like they’re arriving out of a time machine 
from the Middle Ages, and suddenly here are all these huge Mi-noans, women and 
men much the same—”
“And a new collective unconscious.”
“Yes, I suppose. And so the newcomers can’t cope. They cluster in immigrant 
ghettos, or new towns entire, and keep their traditions and their ties to home, 
and hate everything here, and all the xenophobia and misogyny in those old 
cultures breaks out again, against both their own women and the native girls.” 
She had heard of problems in the cities, in fact, in Sheffield and all over east 
Tharsis. Sometimes young native women beat the shit out of surprised immigrant 
assailants; sometimes the opposite occurred. “And the young natives don’t like 
it. They feel like they’re letting monsters into their midst.”
Michel grimaced. “Terran cultures were all neurotic at their core, and when the 
neurotic is confronted with the sane, it usually gets more neurotic than ever. 
And the sane don’t know what to do.”
“So they press to stop immigration. And put us at risk of another war.”
But Michel was distracted by the beginning of another race. The races were fast, 
but not anywhere near two and a half times as fast as Terra’s, despite the 
gravity difference. It was the same problem as the high jumpers’ plants, but 
continuous through the race: the runners took off with such acceleration that 
they had to stay very low to keep from bounding too high away from the track. In 
the sprints they stayed canted forward throughout, as if desperately trying to 
avoid falling on their faces, their legs pumping furiously. In the longer dashes 
they finally straightened up near the end, and began to scull at the air as if 
swimming forward from an upright position, their strides longer and longer until 
they seemed to be leaping foward like one-leg-at-a-time kangaroos. The sight 
reminded Maya of Peter and Jackie, the two speedsters of Zygote, running the 
beach under the polar dome; on their own they had developed a similar style.
Using these techniques, the winner of the fifty-meter dash ran the race in 4.4 
seconds; the winner of the hundred in 8.3; the two hundred in 17.1; and the four 
hundred in 37.9; but in each case the balance problems engendered by their 
speeds seemed to keep them from a full sprint the way Maya remembered seeing it 
in her youth.
In the longer races, the running style was a graceful bounding pace, similar to 
what they had called the Martian lope back at Underhill, where they had tried it 
without much success in their tight walkers. Now it was like flight. A young 
woman led most of the ten-thousand-meter race, and she had enough in reserve to 
kick hard at the end, accelerating throughout the entire last lap, faster and 
faster until she gazelled around the track only touching down every few meters, 
lapping some of the other racers who seemed to toil as she flew past; it was 
lovely; Maya shouted herself hoarse. She held to Michel’s arm, she felt dizzy, 
tears sprang to her eyes even as she laughed; it was so strange and so marvelous 
to see these new creatures, and yet none of them knew, none of them!
She liked to see women beating men, though they themselves did not seem to 
remark it. Women won slightly more often in long distances and hurdles, men in 
the sprints. Sax said that testosterone helped with strength but caused cramping 
eventually, hampering long-distance efforts. Clearly most of the events were a 
matter of technique in any case. And so one saw what one wanted, she thought. 
Back on Earth—but these people would have laughed if she had started a sentence 
with that phrase. Back on Earth, so what? There had been all sorts of bizarre 
and ugly behavior back in the nest world, but why worry about that when a hurdle 
was approaching and another runner advancing in your peripheral vision? Fly, 
fly! She shouted herself hoarse.
At the end of the day the field athletes, finished with their events, cleared a 
passageway into the stadium and around the track; and a single runner jogged in, 
to sustained applause and wild cheers. And it was Nirgal! Starting hoarse 
already, Maya’s shouting was ragged, almost painful.
The cross-country racers had started at the southern end of Minus One that 
morning, barefoot and naked. They had run over a hundred kilometers, over the 
heavy corrugations of Minus One’s central moors, a devilish network of ravines, 
grabens, pingo holes, alases, escarpments and rockfalls— nothing too deep, 
apparently, so that many different routes were possible, making it as much an 
orienteering event as a run; but difficult all the way; and to come jogging in 
at four P.M. was apparently a phenomenal accomplishment. The next racer wouldn’t 
be coming in until after sunset, people said. So Nirgal took a victory lap, 
looking dusty and exhausted, like a refugee from a disaster; then he put on 
pants, and ducked his head for his laurel wreath, and accepted a hundred hugs.
Maya was the last of these, and Nirgal laughed happily to see her. His skin was 
white with dried sweat, his lips caked and cracking, hair dust-colored, eyes 
bloodshot. Ribby and wiry, almost emaciated. He gulped water from a bottle, 
drained it, refused another. “Thanks, I’m not that dehydrated, I hit a reservoir 
there around Jiri Ki.”
“So which way did you take?” someone called.
“Don’t ask!” he said with a laugh, as if it had been too ugly to own up to. 
Later Maya learned that people’s routes were left unobserved and undescribed, a 
kind of secret. These cross-country races were popular in a certain group, and 
Nirgal was a champion, Maya knew, particularly at the longer distances; people 
spoke of his routes as if they involved teleportation. This was apparently a 
short race for him to win, so he was especially pleased.
Now he walked over to a bench and sat down. “Let me get myself together a bit,” 
he said, and sat watching the last sprints, looking distracted and happy. Maya 
sat next to him and stared; she couldn’t get enough of him. He had been living 
on the land for the longest time, part of a feral farmer-and-gatherer co-op ... 
it was a life Maya could scarcely imagine, and so she tended to think of Nirgal 
as in limbo, banished to an outback netherworld, where he survived like a rat or 
a plant. But here he was, exhausted but exclaiming at a four-hundred-meter 
race’s photo finish, exactly the vital Nirgal she remembered from that Hell’s 
Gate tour so long ago—glory years for him as well as her. But looking at him, it 
seemed unlikely that he thought of the past in the same way she did. She felt in 
thrall to her past, to history; but something other than history was his 
fulfillment now— his destiny survived and put aside like an old book, and now 
here he was, in the moment, laughing in the sun, having beat a whole pack of 
wild young animals at their own game, by his wits alone and his feel for Mars, 
and his lung-gom-pa technique and his hard legs. He had always been a runner, 
she could see in her mind Jackie and him dashing over the beach after Peter as 
if it were yesterday—the other two had been faster, but he had gone on all day 
sometimes, round and round the little lake, for no reason anyone could tell. “Oh 
Nirgal.” She leaned over and kissed his dusty hair, felt him hugging her. She 
laughed, and looked around at all the beautiful giants around the field, the 
athletes ruddy in the sunset, and she felt life slipping into her again. Nirgal 
could do that.
 
Late that night, however, she took Nirgal aside, after an outdoor feast in the 
cool evening air, and she told him all her fears about the latest conflict 
between Earth and Mars. Michel was off talking to people; Sax sat on the bench 
across from them, listening silently.
“Jackie and the Free Mars leadership are talking a hard line, but it won’t work. 
The Terrans won’t be stopped. It could lead to war, I tell you, war.”
Nirgal stared at her. He still took her seriously, God bless his beautiful soul, 
and Maya put her arm around him like she would have her own son, and squeezed 
him hard, hard.
“What do you think we should do?” he asked.
“We have to keep Mars open. We have to fight for that, and you have to be part 
of it. We need you more than anyone else. You were the one that had the greatest 
impact during our visit to Earth; in essence you’re the most important Martian 
in Terran history, because of that visit. They still write books and articles 
about what you do, did you know that? There’s a feral movement getting very 
strong in North America and Australia, and growing everywhere. The Turtle Island 
people have almost entirely reorganized the American west, it’s scores of feral 
co-ops now. They’re listening to you. And it’s the same here. I’ve been doing 
what I can, we just fought them in the election campaign for the whole length of 
the Grand Canal. And I tried to counter Jackie a bit. That worked a little, I 
think, but it’s bigger than Jackie. She’s gone to Irishka, and of course it 
makes sense for the Reds to oppose immigration, they think that will help 
protect their precious rocks. So Free Mars and the Reds may be in the same camp 
for the first time, because of this issue. They’ll be very hard to beat. But if 
they aren’t... .”
Nirgal nodded. He took her point. She could have kissed him. She squeezed him 
across the shoulders, leaned over and kissed his cheek, nuzzled his neck. “I 
love you, Nirgal.”
“And I love you,” he said with an easy laugh, looking a bit surprised. “But 
look, I don’t want to get involved in a political campaign. No, listen—I agree 
that it’s important, and I agree we should keep Mars open, and help Earth out 
through the population surge. That’s what I’ve always said, that’s what I told 
them when we were there. But I won’t get into the political institutions. I 
can’t. I’ll make my contribution the way I did before, do you understand? I 
cover a lot of ground, I see a lot of people. I’ll talk to them. I’ll start 
giving talks to meetings again. I’ll do what I can at that level.”
Maya nodded. “That would be great, Nirgal. That’s the level we need to reach 
anyway.”
Sax cleared his throat. “Nirgal, have you ever met the mathematician Bao?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Ah.”
Sax slumped back into his reverie. Maya talked for a while about the problems 
she and Michel had discussed that day—how immigration worked as a time machine, 
bringing up little islands of the past into the present. “That was John’s worry 
too, and now it’s happening.”
Nirgal nodded. “We have to have faith in the areophany. And in the constitution. 
They have to live by it once they’re here, the government should insist on 
that.”
“Yes. But the people, the natives I mean. . . .”
“Some kind of assimilationist ethic. We need to draw everyone in.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Maya. I’ll see what I can do.” He smiled at her; then suddenly he was 
falling asleep, right before their eyes. “Maybe we can pull it off one more 
time, eh?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve got to get flat. Good night. I love you.”
 
*      *        *
 
They sailed northwest from Minus One, and the island slipped under the horizon 
like a dream of ancient Greece, and they were on the open sea again, with its 
high broad sloppy groundswell. Hard trade winds poured out of the northeast for 
every hour of their passage, tearing off white-caps that made the dark purple 
water look even darker. Wind and water made a continuous roar; it was hard to 
hear, everything had to be shouted. The crew gave up speech entirely, and worked 
on setting the maximum amount of sail possible, forcing the ship’s AI to deal 
with their enthusiasm; the mast sails stretched or tightened with each gust like 
bird’s wings, so that the wind had a visual component to match the invisible 
kinetics of Maya’s buffeted skin, and she stood in the bow looking up and back, 
taking it all in.
On the third day the wind blew even harder, and the boat got up to its 
hydroplaning speed, the hull lifting up onto a flat section at the stern and 
then skipping over the waves, knocking up far more spray than was comfortable 
for anyone on deck; Maya retreated to the first cabin, where she could look out 
the bow windows and witness the spectacle. Such speed! Occasionally crew members 
would come in sopping, to catch their breath and suck down some Java. One of 
them told Maya that they were adjusting their course to take account of the 
Hellas current; “this sea’s the biggest example ever of the Coriolis force on a 
bathtub drain, it being round, and in the latitudes where trade winds push it 
the same way as the Coriolis force, so it’s swirling clockwise around Minus One 
Island like a great big whirlpool. We have to adjust for it big time or we’ll 
make landfall halfway to Hell’s Gate.”
The strong winds held, and flying along like they were, hydroplaning for most of 
the day, it took them only four days to sail across their radius of the Hellas 
Sea. On the fourth afternoon the mast sails feathered in, and the hull fell back 
into the water, rolling in the whitecaps. To the north land appeared over all 
the horizon at once; the rim of the great basin, like a mountain range without 
any peaks: a giant berm of a slope, looking like the inner wall of a crater, 
which of course it was, but so much bigger than any normal crater that one could 
only barely see the arcing of the circle—exactly that big—which struck Maya as 
beautiful, somehow. And as they closed on the land, and then coasted westward 
toward Odessa (their landfall had still been east of the town, despite their 
adjustment for the clockwise current) she could, by climbing up the shrouds into 
the wind, see the beach that the sea had created: a wide strand, backed by 
grass-covered dunes, with creek mouths cutting through here and there. A 
handsome coast, and near the outskirts of Odessa; part of Odessa’s handsomeness 
then, part of her town.
Off to the west, the rugged peaks of the Hellespontus Montes began to poke over 
the waves, distant and small, very different in character from the smooth 
northern rise. So they had to be close. Maya climbed up farther in the shrouds. 
And there it was, on the rise of the northern slope—the topmost rows of parks 
and buildings, all green and white, turquoise and terra-cotta. And then the big 
bowed middle of town, like an enormous amphitheater looking down on the stage of 
the harbor, which came over the horizon white lighthouse first, then the statue 
of Arkady, then the breakwater, then the thousand masts of the marina, and the 
jumble of roofs and trees behind the stained concrete of the corniche seawall. 
Odessa.
She scampered down the shroud like a crew member, almost, and hugged a few of 
them and Michel, feeling herself grin, feeling the wind pour over them. They 
came into the harbor and the sails furled into their masts like touched snails. 
They puttered into a slip, and walked down a gangplank, and along the dock, up 
through the marina and into the corniche park. And there they were. The blue 
trolley still clang-clanged on the street behind the park.
Maya and Michel walked down the corniche hand in hand, looking at all the food 
vendors and the small outdoor cafes across the street. All the names seemed new, 
not a single one the same, but that was restauranteering for you; they all 
looked much as they had before, and the city rising up terrace by terrace behind 
the seafront was just as they remembered it: “There’s the Odeon, there’s the 
Sinter—”
“That’s where I worked for Deep Waters, I wonder what they all do now?”
“I think maintaining sea level keeps a good number of them busy. There’s always 
some kind of water work.”
“True.”
And then they came to the old Praxis apartment building, its walls now mostly 
ivy-covered, the white stucco discolored, the blue shutters faded. In need of a 
bit of work, as Michel said, but Maya loved it that way: old. There on the third 
floor she spotted their old kitchen window and balcony, and Spencer’s there 
beside it. Spencer himself was supposed to be inside.
And they went in the gate, and said hello to the new concierge, and indeed 
Spencer was inside, sort of: he had died that afternoon.


 
 
 
 
 
It shouldn’t have mattered so much. Maya hadn’t seen Spencer Jackson in years, 
she had never seen that much of him, even when he lived next door; never known 
him at all well. No one had. Spencer was one of the least comprehensible of the 
First Hundred, which was saying a lot. His own man, his own life. And he had 
lived as part of the surface world under an assumed identity, a spy, working for 
the security gestapo in Kasei Vallis for almost twenty years, until the night 
they had blown the town away and rescued Sax, and Spencer as well. Twenty years 
as someone else, with a false past, and no one to talk to; what would that do to 
one? But then Spencer had always been withdrawn, private, self-contained. So 
maybe it hadn’t mattered as much to him. He had seemed all right in their years 
in Odessa, always in therapy with Michel of course, and a very heavy drinker at 
times; but easy to have as a neighbor, a good friend, quiet, solid, reliable in 
his ways. And he certainly had continued to work, his production with the 
Bogdanovist designers had never flagged, neither during his double life or 
after. A great designer. And his pen sketches were beautiful. But what would 
twenty years of duplicity do to you? Maybe all his identities had become 
assumed. Maya had never thought about it; she couldn’t imagine it; and now, 
packing Spencer’s things in his empty apartment, she wondered that she had never 
even tried before—that somehow Spencer had managed to live in such a way that 
one did not even wonder about him. It was a very strange accomplishment. Crying, 
she said to Michel, “You have to wonder about everybody!”
He only nodded. Spencer had been one of his best friends.
And then in the next few days an amazing number of people came to Odessa for the 
funeral. Sax, Nadia, Mikhail, Zeyk and Nazik, Roald, Coyote, Mary, Ursula, 
Marina and Vlad, Jurgen and Sibilla, Steve and Marion, George and Ed-vard, 
Samantha, really it was like a convocation of the remaining Hundred and 
associated issei. And Maya stared around at all their old familiar faces, and 
realized with a sinking heart that they would be meeting like this for a long 
time to come. Gathering from around the world each time one fewer, in a final 
game of musical chairs, until one day one of them would get a call and realize 
they were the last one left. A horrible fate. But not one that Maya expected to 
have to endure; she would die before that, surely. The quick decline would get 
her, or something else; she would step in front of a trolley if she had to. 
Anything to avoid such a fate. Well—not anything. To step in front of a trolley 
would be both too cowardly and too brave, at one and the same time. She trusted 
she would die before it came to that. Ah, never fear; death could be trusted to 
show up. No doubt well before she wanted it. Maybe the final survivor of the 
First Hundred wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway. New friends, a new 
life—wasn’t that what she was searching for now? So that these sad old faces 
were just a hindrance to her?
She stood grimly through the short memorial service and the quick eulogies. 
Those who spoke looked somewhat perplexed as to what they could say. A big crowd 
of engineers had come from Da Vinci, Spencer’s colleagues from his design years. 
Clearly a lot of people had been fond of him, it was surprising, even though 
Maya had been fond of him herself. Curious that such a hidden man could evoke 
such a response. Perhaps they had all projected onto his blank-ness, made their 
own Spencer and loved him as part of themselves. They all did that anyway; that 
was life.
But now he was gone. They went down to the harbor and the engineers let loose a 
helium balloon, and when it reached a hundred meters Spencer’s ashes began to 
spill out, in a slow trickle. Part of the haze, the blue of the sky, the brass 
of sunset.
In the days that followed the crowd dispersed, and Maya wandered Odessa nosing 
through used-furniture shops and sitting on benches on the corniche, watching 
the sun bounce over the water. It was lovely to be in Odessa again, but she felt 
the funereal chill of Spencer’s death much more than she would have expected. It 
cast a pall over even the beauty of this most beautiful town; it reminded her 
that in coming back here and moving into the old building, they were attempting 
the impossible—trying to go back, trying to deny time’s passing. 
Hopeless—everything was passing— everything they did was the last time they 
would ever do it. Habits were such lies, such lies, lulling them into the 
feeling that there was something that was lasting, when really nothing lasted. 
This was the last time she would ever sit on this bench. If she came down to the 
corniche tomorrow and sat on this same bench, it would again be the last time, 
and there would again be nothing lasting about it. Last time after last time, so 
it would go, on and on, always one final moment after the next, finality 
following finality in seamless endless succession. She could not grasp it, 
really. Words couldn’t say it, ideas couldn’t articulate it. But she could feel 
it, like the edge of a wave front pushing ever outward, or a constant wind in 
her mind, rushing things along so fast it was hard to think, hard to really feel 
them. At night in bed she would think, this is the last time for this night, and 
she would hug Michel hard, hard, as if she could stop it happening if she 
squeezed hard enough. Even Michel, even the little dual world they had built—”Oh 
Michel,” she said, frightened. “It goes so fast.”
He nodded, mouth pursed. He no longer tried to give her therapy, he no longer 
tried always and ever to put the brightest face on things; he treated her as an 
equal now, and her moods as some kind of truth, which was only her due. But 
sometimes she missed being comforted.
Michel offered no rebuttal, however, no hopeful comment. Spencer had been his 
friend. Before, in the Odessa years, when he and Maya had fought, he had 
sometimes gone to Spencer’s to sleep, and no doubt to talk late into the night 
over glasses of whiskey. If anyone could draw out Spencer it would have been 
Michel. Now he sat on the bed looking out the window, a tired old man. They 
never fought anymore. Maya felt it would probably do her some good if they did; 
clear out the cobwebs, get charged again. But Michel would not respond to any 
provocation. He himself didn’t care to fight, and as he was no longer giving her 
therapy, he wouldn’t do it for her sake either. No. They sat side by side on the 
bed. If someone walked in, Maya thought, they would observe a couple so old and 
worn that they did not even bother to speak anymore. Just sat together, alone in 
their own thoughts.
“Well,” Michel said after the longest time, “but here we are.”
Maya smiled. The hopeful remark, made at last, at great effort. He was a brave 
man. And quoting the first words spoken on Mars. John had had a knack, in a 
funny way, for saying things. “Here we are.” It was stupid, really. And yet 
might he have meant something more than the John-obvious assertion, had it been 
more than the thoughtless exclamation that anyone might make? “Here we are,” she 
repeated, testing the phrase on her tongue. On Mars. First an idea, then a 
place. And now they were in a nearly empty apartment bedroom, not the one they 
had lived in before but a corner apartment, with views out big windows to south 
and west. The great curve of sea and mountains said Odessa, nowhere else. The 
old plaster walls were stained, the wood floors dark and gleaming; it had taken 
many years of life to achieve that patination. Living room through one door, 
hall to the kitchen through the other. They had a mattress on a frame, a couch, 
some chairs, some unopened boxes—their things from before, pulled out of 
storage. Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her 
feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until 
it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak the naked reality of the 
world. And thank God for that.
 
Soon after that the global elections were held, and Free Mars and its cluster of 
small allies were returned as a super-majority in the global legislature. Its 
victory was not as large as had been expected, however, and some of its allies 
were grumbling and looking around for better deals. Mangala was a hotbed of 
rumors, one could have spent days at the screen reading columnists and analysts 
and provocateurs hashing over the possibilities; with the immigration issue on 
the table the stakes were higher than they had been in years, and the 
kicked-anthill behavior of Mangala proved it. The outcome of the election for 
the next executive council remained very much in doubt, and there were rumors 
that Jackie was fending off challenges from within the party.
Maya shut off her screen, thinking hard. She gave a call to Athos, who looked 
surprised to see her, then quickly polite. He had been elected representative 
from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and was in Mangala working hard for the Greens, 
who had made a fairly strong showing and had a solid group of representatives, 
and many interesting new alliances. “You should run for the executive council,” 
Maya told him.
Now he was really surprised. “Me?”
“You.” Maya wanted to tell him to go look in a mirror and think it over, but bit 
her tongue. “You made the best impression in the campaign, and a lot of people 
want to support a pro-Earth policy, and don’t know who to back. You’re their 
best bet. You might even go talk to MarsFirst and see if you can pull them out 
of the Free Mars alliance. Promise them a moderate stance and a voice with a 
councillor, and long-range Reddish sympathies.”
Now he was looking worried. If he was still involved with Jackie and he ran for 
the council, then he would be in big trouble on that front. Especially if he 
went after MarsFirst as well. But after Peter’s visit he might not be as 
concerned about that as he would have been during the bright nights on the 
canal. Maya let him go stew about it. There was only so much you could do with 
these people.
 
Although she did not want to reconstruct her previous life in Odessa, she did 
want to work, and at this point hydrology had overtaken ergonomics (and 
politics, obviously) as her primary area of expertise. And she was interested in 
the water cycle in the Hellas Basin, curious to see how the work was changing 
now that the basin was full. Michel had his practice, and was going to get 
involved with the first settlers’ project that had been mentioned to him in 
Rhodes; she would have to do something; and so after they had unpacked and 
furnished the new apartment, she went looking for Deep Waters.
The old offices were now a seafront apartment, very smart. And the name was no 
longer in the directories. But Diana was, living in one of the big group houses 
in the upper town; and happy to see Maya show up at her door, happy to go out to 
lunch with her and tell her all about the current situation in the local water 
world, which was still her work.
“Most of the Deep Waters people moved straight into the Hellas Sea Institute.” 
This was an interdisciplinary group, composed of representatives from all the 
agricultural co-ops and water stations around the basin, as well as fisheries, 
the University of Odessa, and all the towns on the coast, and all the 
settlements higher in the the basin’s extensive rim-land watersheds. The seaside 
towns in particular were intensely interested in stabilizing the sea’s level at 
just above the old minus-one-kilometer contour, just a few-score meters higher 
than the North Sea’s current level. “They don’t want sea level to change by even 
a meter,” Diana said, “if it can be helped. And the Grand Canal is useless as a 
runoff canal to the North Sea, because the locks need water flowing in both 
directions. So it’s a matter of balancing the inflow from aquifers and rainfall, 
with evaporation loss. That’s been fine so far. Evaporation loss is slightly 
higher than the precipitation into the watershed, so every year they draw down 
the aquifers a few meters. Eventually that’ll be a problem, but not for a long 
time, because there’s a good aquifer reserve left, and they’re refilling a bit 
now, and may more in the future. We’re hoping precipitation levels will also 
rise over time, and they have been so far, so they probably will continue to, 
for a while longer anyway. I don’t know. That’s the main worry, anyway; that the 
atmosphere will suck off more than the aquifers can resupply.”
“Won’t the atmosphere finally hydrate fully?”
“Maybe. No one is really sure how humid it will get. Climate studies are a joke, 
if you ask me. The global models are just too complex, there are too many 
unknown variables. What we do know is that the air is still pretty arid, and it 
seems likely it will get more humid. So, everybody believes what they want, and 
goes out there and tries to please themselves, and the environmental courts keep 
track of it all as best they can.”
“They don’t forbid anything?”
“Oh yeah, but only big heat pumpers. The small stuff they don’t mess with. Or at 
least they didn’t used to. Lately the courts have been getting tougher, and 
tackling smaller projects.”
“It’s exactly the smaller projects that would be most calculable, I should 
think.”
“Sort of. They tend to cancel each other out. There are a lot of Red projects, 
you know, to protect the higher altitudes, and any place they can in the south. 
They’ve got that constitutional height limit to back them, and so they’re always 
taking their complaints right up to the global court. They win there, and do 
their thing, and then all the little development projects are somewhat 
counterbalanced. It’s a nightmare legally.”
“But they’re managing to hold things steady.”
“Well, I think the high altitudes are getting a bit more air and water than 
they’re supposed to. You have to go really high to get away from it.”
“I thought you said they were winning in court?”
“In the courts, yes. In the atmosphere, no. There’s too much going on.”
“You’d think they’d sue the greenhouse-gas factories.”
“They have. But they’ve lost. Those gases have everyone else’s support. Without 
them we’d have gone into an ice age and stayed there.”
“But a reduction in emission levels....”
“Yeah, I know. It’s still being fought over. It’ll go on forever.”
“True.”
Meanwhile the Hellas Sea’s sea level had been agreed on; it was a legislative 
fact, and efforts all around the basin were coordinated to make sure the sea 
obeyed the law. The whole matter was fantastically complicated, although simple 
in principle: they measured the hydrological cycle, with all its storms and 
variations in rain and snow, melting and seeping into the ground, running over 
the surface in creeks and rivers, down into lakes and then into the Hellas Sea, 
there to freeze in the winter, then evaporate in the summer and begin the whole 
round again . . . and to this immense cycle they did what was necessary to 
stabilize the level of the sea, which was about the size of the Caribbean. If 
there was too much water and they wanted to draw down the sea level, there was 
the possibility of piping some of it back up into the emptied aquifers in the 
Amphitrites Mountains to the south. They were fairly limited in this, however, 
because the aquifers were composed of porous rock which tended to crush down 
when the water was first removed, making them difficult or impossible to refill. 
In fact spill-off possibilities were one of the main problems still facing the 
project. Keeping the balance. . ..
And this kind of effort was going on all over Mars. It was crazy. But they 
wanted to do it, and that was that. Diana was talking now about the efforts to 
keep the Argyre Basin dry, an effort in its way as large as the one to fill 
Hellas: they had built giant pipelines to evacuate water from Argyre to Hellas 
if Hellas needed water, or to river systems that led to the North Sea if it 
didn’t.
“What about the North Sea itself?” Maya asked.
Diana shook her head, mouth full. Apparently the consensus was that the North 
Sea was beyond regulation, but basically stable. They would just have to watch 
and see what happened, and the seaside towns up there take their chances. Many 
believed that the North Sea’s level would eventually fall a bit, as water 
returned to the permafrost or was trapped in one of the thousands of crater 
lakes in the southern highlands. Then again precipitation and runoff into the 
North Sea was substantial. The southern highlands were where the issue would be 
decided, Diana said; she called up a map onto her wristpad screen to show Maya. 
Watershed construction co-ops were still wandering around installing drainage, 
running water into highland creeks, reinforcing riverbeds, excavating quicksand, 
which in some cases revealed the ghost creekbeds of ancient watersheds below the 
fines; but mostly their new streams had to be based on lava features or fracture 
canyons, or the occasional short canal. The result was very unlike the venous 
clarity of Terran watersheds: a confusion of little round lakes, frozen swamps, 
canyon arroyos, and long straight rivers with abrupt right-angle turns, or 
sudden disappearances into sinkholes or pipelines. Only the refilled ancient 
riverbeds looked “right”; everywhere else the terrain looked like a bomb range 
after a rainstorm.
Many of the Deep Waters veterans who had not directly joined the Hellas Sea 
Institute had started an associated coop of their own, which was mapping the 
groundwater basins around Hellas, measuring the return of water to the aquifers 
and the underground rivers, figuring out what water could be stored and 
recovered, and so on. Diana was a member of this co-op, as were many of the 
people in Maya’s old office. After their lunch Diana went to the rest of the 
group, and told them about Maya’s return to town; when they heard that Maya was 
interested in joining them, they offered her a position in the co-op with a 
reduced joining fee. Pleased at the compliment, she decided to take them up on 
it.
 
So she worked for Aegean Water Table, as the co-op was called. She got up in the 
mornings and made coffee and ate some toast or a biscuit, or croissant, or 
muffin, or crumpet. In fine weather she ate out on their balcony; more often she 
ate in the bay window at the round dining table, reading the Odessa Messenger on 
the screen, noting every little incident that combined to reveal to her the 
darkening situation vis a vis Earth. The legislature in Mangala elected the new 
executive council, and Jackie was not one of the seven; she had been replaced by 
Nanedi. Maya whooped, and then read all the accounts she could find, and watched 
the interviews; Jackie claimed to have declined to run, she said she was tired 
after so many m-years, and would take a break like she had several times before, 
and be back (a sharp glint to her eye with that last remark). Nanedi kept a 
discreet silence on that topic, but he had the pleased, slightly amazed look of 
the man who had killed the dragon; and though Jackie declared that she would 
continue her work for the Free Mars party apparatus, clearly her influence there 
had waned, or else she would still be on the council.
So; she had bowled Jackie off the global playing field; but the anti-immigrant 
forces were still in power. Free Mars still held its supermajority alliance in 
uneasy check. Nothing important had changed; life went on; the reports from 
pullulating Earth were still ominous. Those people were going to come up after 
them someday, Maya was sure of it. They were getting along among themselves, 
they could rest, take a look around, make some plans, coordinate their efforts. 
Better really to eat breakfast without turning the screen on, if she wanted to 
keep her appetite.
So she took to going downtown and having a larger breakfast on the corniche, 
with Diana, or later Nadia and Art, or with visitors to town. After breakfast 
she would walk down to the AWT offices, near the eastern end of the seafront—a 
good walk, in air that each year was just the slightest bit saltier. At AWT she 
had an office with a window, and did what she had done for Deep Waters, serving 
as liaison with the Hellas Sea Institute, and coordinating a fluctuating team of 
areologists and hydrologists and engineers, directing their research efforts 
mostly in the Hellespontus and Am-phitrites mountains, where most of the 
aquifers were. She took trips around the curve of the coast to inspect some of 
their sites and facilities, going up into the hills, staying often in the little 
harbor town of Montepulciano, on the southwest shore of the sea. Back in Odessa 
she worked through the days, and quit early, and wandered around the town, 
shopping in used-furniture stores, or for clothes; she was getting interested in 
the new styles and their changes through the seasons; it was a stylish town, 
people dressed well, and the latest styles suited her, she looked rather like a 
smallish elderly native, with erect regal carriage.. . . Often she arranged to 
be out on the corniche in the late afternoon, walking home to their apartment, 
or else sitting below it in the park, or having an early meal in the summers in 
some seaside restaurant. In the fall a flotilla of ships docked at the wharf and 
threw out gangplanks between the ships and charged entry for a wine festival, 
with fireworks over the lake after dark. In the winter the dusk fell on the sea 
early, and the inshore water was sometimes sheeted with ice, and glowing with a 
pastel of whatever clear color might be filling the sky that evening, dotted by 
ice-skaters and swift low iceboats.
One twilight hour as she was eating by herself, a theater company put on a 
production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in an adjoining alley, and between the 
dusk and the spots on the planks of the temporary stage, the quality of light 
was such that Maya was drawn like a moth to watch. She barely followed the play, 
but some moments struck her with great force, especially the blackouts when the 
action was supposed to stop, the actors all frozen on stage in the late light. 
That moment only needed some blue, she thought, to be perfect.
Afterward the theater company came over to the restaurant to eat, and Maya 
talked with the director, a middle-aged native woman named Latrobe, who was 
interested to meet her, to talk about the play, and about Brecht’s theory of 
political theater. Latrobe proved to be pro-Terran, pro-immigrationist; she 
wanted to stage plays that made the case for an open Mars, and for assimilating 
the new immigrants into the areophany. It was frightening, she said, how few 
plays of the classical repertory reinforced such feelings. They needed new 
plays. Maya told her about Diana’s political evenings in the UNTA years, how 
they had sometimes met in the parks. About her notion concerning the blues in 
the lighting of that night’s production. Latrobe invited Maya to come by and 
talk to the troupe about politics, and also to help with the lighting if she 
wanted, which was a weak point in the company, having had its origin in the very 
same parks Diana’s group had used to meet in. Perhaps they could get out there 
again, and do some more Brechtian theater.
And so Maya dropped by and talked with the troupe, and over time, without ever 
really deciding to, she became one of its lighting crew, helping also with 
costumes, which was fashion in a different way. She also talked to them long 
into the nights about the concept of a political theater, and helped them to 
find new plays; in effect she was a kind of political-aesthetic consultant. But 
she steadfastly resisted all efforts to get her on stage, not only from the 
company, but from Michel and Nadia as well. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do 
that. If I did they would immediately want me to be playing Maya Toitovna, in 
that play about John.”
“That’s an opera,” Michel said. “You’d have to be a soprano.”
“Nevertheless.”
She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world 
of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their 
values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, 
and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; 
movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images 
had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like 
was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would 
never return, never be the same. Theater was the most powerful art in town, 
really, and the same was true in many other Martian cities as well.
So as the m-years passed, the Odessa troupe mounted any number of political 
plays, including a complete run-through of the work of the South African Athol 
Fugard, searing passionate plays anatomizing institutionalized prejudice, the 
xenophobia of the soul; the best English-language plays since Shakespeare, Maya 
thought. And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering and making famous 
what was later called the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young native playwrights as 
ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play explored the wrenching 
problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful assimilation into the 
areophany—a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million little blood knots cut 
or tied. It was Maya’s best window into the contemporary world, and more and 
more her way of speaking back to it, doing her best to shape it—very satisfying 
indeed, as many of the plays caused talk, sometimes even a furor, as new works 
by the Group attacked the anti-immigrant government that was still in power in 
Mangala. It was politics in a new mode, the most intriguing she had yet 
encountered; she longed to tell Frank about it, to show him how it worked.
In those same years, as the months passed two by two, Latrobe mounted quite a 
few productions of old classics, and as Maya watched them, she got more and more 
snared by the power of tragedy. She liked doing the political plays, which angry 
or hopeful tended to contain an innate uto-pianism, a drive for progress; but 
the plays that struck her as most true, and moved her most deeply, were the old 
Ter-ran tragedies. And the more tragic the better. Catharsis as described by 
Aristotle seemed to work very well for her; she emerged from good performances 
of the great tragedies shattered, cleansed—somehow happier. They were the 
replacement for her fights with Michel, she realized one night—a sublimation, he 
would have said, and a good one at that—easier on him, of course, and more 
dignified all around, nobler. And there was that connection to the ancient 
Greeks as well, a connection being made in any number of ways all around Hellas 
Basin, in the towns and among the ferals, a neoclassicism that Maya felt was 
good for them all, as they confronted and tried to measure up to the Greeks’ 
great honesty, their unflinching look at reality. The Oresteia, Antigone, 
Electra, Medea, Agamemnon which should have been called Clytemnestra—those 
amazing women, reacting in bitter power to whatever strange fates their men 
inflicted on them, striking back, as when Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and 
Cassandra, then told the audience how she had done it, at the end staring out 
into the audience, right at Maya:
 
“Enough of misery! Start no more. Our hands are red. 
Go home and yield to fate in time, 
In time before you suffer. We have acted as we had to act.”
 
We have acted as we had to act. So true, so true. She loved the truth of these 
things. Sad plays, sad music—threnodies, gypsy tangos, Prometheus Bound, even 
the Jacobean revenge plays—the darker the better, really. The truer. She did the 
lighting for Titus Andronicus and people were disgusted, appalled, they said it 
was just a bloodbath, and by God she certainly used a lot of red spots—but that 
moment when the handless and tongueless Lavinia tried to indicate who had done 
it to her, or knelt to carry away Titus’s severed hand in her teeth, like a 
dog—the audience had been as if frozen; one could not say that Shakespeare had 
not had his sense of stagecraft right from the start, bloodbath or no. And then 
with every play he had gotten more powerful, more electifyingly dark and true, 
even as an old man; she had come out of a long harrowing inspired performance of 
King Lear in an elation, flushed and laughing, grabbing a young member of the 
lighting crew by the shoulder, shaking him, shouting “Was that not wonderful, 
magnificent?”
“Ka, Maya, I don’t know, I might have preferred the Restoration version myself, 
the one where Cordelia is saved and marries Edgar, do you know that one?”
“Bah! Stupid child! We have told the truth tonight, that is what is important! 
You can go back to your lies in the morning!” Laughing harshly at him and 
throwing him back to his friends, “Foolish youth!”
He explained to the friends: “It’s Maya.”
“Toitovna? The one in the opera?”
“Yes, but for real.”
“Real,” Maya scoffed, waving them away. “You don’t even know what real is.” And 
she felt that she did.
And friends came to town, visiting for a week or two; and then, as the summers 
got warmer and warmer, they took to spending one of the Decembers out in a beach 
village west of the town, in a shack behind the dunes, swimming and sailing and 
windsurfing and lying on the sand under an umbrella, reading and sleeping 
through the perihelion. Then back into Odessa, to the familiar comforts of their 
apartment and the town, in the burnished light of the southern autumn which was 
the longest season of the Martian year, also the approach to aphelion, day after 
day dimmer and dimmer, until aphelion came, on Ls 70, and between then and the 
winter solstice at Ls 90 was the Ice Festival, and they ice-skated on the white 
sea ice right under the corniche, looking up at the town’s seafront all drifted 
with snow, white under black clouds; or iceboating so far out on the ice that 
the town was just a break in the white curve of the big rim. Or eating by 
herself in steamy loud restaurants, waiting for the music to start, wet snow 
pelting down on the street outside. Walking into a musty little theater and its 
anticipatory laughter. Eating out on the balcony for the first time in the 
spring, sweater on against the chill, looking at the new buds on the tips of the 
tree twigs, a green unlike any other, like little viriditas teardrops. And so 
around, deep in the folds of habit and its rhythms, happy in the deja vu that 
one made for oneself.
Then she turned on her screen one morning and checked the news and found out 
that a large settlement of Chinese had been discovered already esconced in Huo 
Hsing Vallis (as if the name justified the intrusion); a surprised global police 
had ordered them to leave, but now they were calmly defying the order. And the 
Chinese government was warning Mars that any interference with the settlement 
would be regarded as an attack on Chinese citizens, with an appropriate 
response. “What!” Maya shouted. “No!”
She called up everyone in Mangala she knew; these days there weren’t that many 
of them in positions of any importance. She asked what they knew, and demanded 
to be told why the settlers weren’t being escorted back to the elevator and sent 
home, and so on; “This is simply not acceptable, you have to stop it now!”
But incursions only a bit less blatant had been happening for some time now, as 
she had seen herself in occasional news reports. Immigrants were being landed in 
cheap landing vehicles, bypassing the elevator and the authorities in Sheffield. 
Rocket-and-parachute landings, as in the old days; and there was little that 
could be done about it, without provoking an interplanetary incident. People 
were working hard on the problem behind the scenes. The UN was backing China, so 
it was hard. Progress was being made, slowly but surely. She was not to worry.
She shut down the screen. Once upon a time she had suffered under the illusion 
that if only she exerted herself hard enough, the whole world would change. Now 
she knew better.
Although it was a hard thing to admit. “It’s enough to turn you red,” she said 
to Michel as she left for work. “It’s enough to get us up to Mangala,” she 
warned him.
But in a week the crisis passed. An accommodation was reached; the settlement 
was allowed to remain, and the Chinese promised to send up a correspondingly 
smaller number of legal immigrants the following year. Very unsatisfactory, but 
there it was. Life went on under this new shadow.
Except she was walking home, one late-spring afternoon after work, and a line of 
rosebushes at the back of the cor-niche caught her attention, and she walked 
over to have a closer look. Behind the bushes people were walking on Har-makhis 
Avenue by the cafes, most of them in a hurry. The bushes had a lot of new 
leaves, their brown a mixture of green and red. The new roses were a pure dark 
red, their lustrous velvet petals glowing in the afternoon light. Lincoln, the 
tag on the trunk said. A kind of rose. Also the greatest American, a man who had 
been a kind of combination of John and Frank, as Maya understood him. One of the 
Group had written a great play about him, dark and troubling, the hero murdered 
senselessly, a real heart-breaker. They needed a Lincoln these days. The red of 
the roses was glowing brightly. Suddenly she couldn’t see; for a moment 
everything dazzled, as if she had glanced into the sun.
Then she was looking at an array of things.
Shapes, colors—she was aware of that much, but what they were—who she 
was—wordlessly she struggled to recognize…
Then it all crashed back at once. Rose, Odessa, all of it just as if it had 
never been gone. But she staggered, she had to catch her balance. “Ah no,” she 
said. “My God.” She swallowed; throat dry, very dry. A physiological event. It 
had lasted quite some time. She hissed, choked back a cry. Stood rigid on the 
gravel path, the hedge brown green before her, spotted by livid red. She would 
have to remember that color effect for the next Jacobean play they did.
She had always known it was going to happen. She had always known. Habit, such a 
liar; she knew that. Inside her ticked a bomb. In the old days it had had three 
billion ticks, more or less. Now they had rigged it to have ten billion— or 
more—or less. The ticks kept ticking nevertheless. She had heard of a clock one 
could buy, which ran downward through a certain finite number of hours, 
presumably those you had left if you were to live to five hundred years, or 
whatever length of life you chose. Choose a million and relax. Choose one, and 
pay a little bit closer attention to the moment. Or dive into your habits and 
never think about it, like everyone else she knew.
She would have been perfectly happy to do that. She had done it before and would 
do it again. But now in this moment something had happened, and she was back in 
the interregnum, the stripped time between sets of habits, waiting for the next 
exfoliation. No, no! Why? She didn’t want such a time, they were too hard—she 
could scarcely stand the raw sense of time passing that came to her during these 
periods. The sense that everything was for the last time. She hated that 
feeling, hated it. And this time she hadn’t changed her habits at all! Nothing 
was different; it had struck out of the blue. Maybe it had been too long since 
the last time, habits nonwithstanding. Maybe it would start happening now 
whenever it chose to, randomly, perhaps frequently.
She went home (thinking, I know where my home is) and tried to tell Michel what 
had happened, describing and sobbing and describing and then giving up. “We only 
do things once! Do you understand?”
He was very concerned, though he tried not to show it. Blank-outs or not, she 
had no trouble recognizing the moods of Monsieur Duval. He said that her little 
jamais vu was perhaps a small epileptic fit or a tiny stroke, but he could not 
be sure, and even tests might not tell them. Jamais vu was poorly understood; a 
variation on deja vu, essentially its reverse: “It seems to be a kind of 
temporary interference in the brain’s wave patterns. They go from alpha waves to 
delta waves, in a little dip. If you’ll wear a monitor we could find out next 
time it happens, if it does. It’s somewhat like a waking sleep, in which a lot 
of cognition shuts down.”
“Do people ever get stuck there?”
“No. I don’t know of any cases like that. It’s rare, and always temporary.”
“So far.”
He tried to act as if that were a baseless fear.
Maya knew better, and went into the kitchen to start a meal. Bang the pots, open 
the refrigerator, pull out vegetables, chop them and throw them in the pan. Chop 
chop chop chop. Stop to cry, stop to stop crying; even this had happened ten 
thousand times before. The disasters one couldn’t avoid, the habit of hunger. In 
the kitchen, trying to ignore everything and make a meal; how many times. Well, 
here we are.
After that she avoided the row of rosebushes, fearful of another incident. But 
of course they were visible from anywhere on that stretch of the corniche, right 
out to the seawall. And they were in bloom almost all the time, roses were 
amazing that way. And once, in that same afternoon light, pouring over the 
Hellespontus and making everything to the west somewhat washed out, darkened to 
pastel opacities, her eye caught the pinprick reds of the roses in the hedge, 
even though she was walking the seawall—and seeing the tapestry of foam on the 
black water to one side of her, and the roses and Odessa rising up to the other 
side, she stopped, stilled by something in the double vision, by a 
realization—or almost—the edge of an epiphany—she felt some vast truth pushing 
at her, just outside her—or inside her body, even, inside her skull but outside 
her thoughts, pushing at the dura that encased the brain—everything explained, 
everything come clear at last, for once…
But the epiphany never made it through the barrier. A feeling only, cloudy and 
huge—then the pressure on her mind passed, and the afternoon took on its 
ordinary pewter luminance. She walked home feeling full, oceans of clouds in her 
chest, full to bursting with something like frustration, or a kind of anguished 
joy. Again she told Michel what had happened, and he nodded; he had a name for 
this too:
“Presque vu.” Almost seen. “I get that one a lot,” he said. With a 
characteristic look of secret sorrow.
But all of his symptomatic categories suddenly seemed to Maya only to mask what 
was really happening to her.
Sometimes she got very confused; sometimes she thought she understood things 
that did not exist; sometimes she forgot things, forever; and sometimes she got 
very, very scared. And these were the things Michel was trying to contain with 
his names and his combinatoires.
 
Almost seen. Almost understood. And then back into the world of light and time. 
And there was nothing for it but to go on. And so on she went. Enough days 
passed and she could forget what it had felt like, forget just how frightened 
she had been, or how close to joy. It was a strange enough thing that it was 
easy to forget. Just live in la vie quotidienne, pay attention to daily life 
with its work, friends, visitors.
Among other visitors were Charlotte and Ariadne, who came down from Mangala to 
consult with Maya about the worsening situation with Earth. They went out to 
breakfast on the corniche, and talked about Dorsa Brevia’s concerns. 
Essentially, despite the fact that the Minoans had left the Free Mars coalition 
because they disliked its attempt to dominate the outer satellite settlements, 
among other things, the Dorsa Brevians had come to think Jackie had been right 
about immigration, at least to an extent.
“It’s not that Mars is approaching its human carrying capacity,” Charlotte said, 
“they’re wrong about that. We could tighten our belts, density the towns. And 
these new floating towns on the North Sea could accommodate a lot of people, 
they’re a sign of how many more could live here. They have practically no 
impact, except on harbor towns, in some senses. But there’s room for more harbor 
towns, on the North Sea anyway.”
“Many more,” Maya said. Despite the Terran incursions, she did not like to hear 
anti-immigrant talk in any form. But Charlotte was back on the executive 
council, and for years she had supported a close relation to Earth, so this was 
hard for her to say:
“It isn’t the numbers. It’s who they are, what they believe. The assimilation 
troubles are getting really severe.”
Maya nodded. “I’ve read about them on the screen.”
“Yes. We’ve tried to integrate newcomers every way we know, but they clump, 
naturally, and you can’t just break them up.”
“No.”
“But so many problems are rising—cases of sharia, family abuse, ethnic gangs 
getting in fights, immigrants attacking natives—usually men attacking women, but 
not always. And young native gangs are retaliating, harassing the new 
settlements and so on. It’s big trouble. And this with immigration already much 
reduced, at least legally. But the UN is angry with us about that, they want to 
send up even more. And if they do we’ll become a kind of human disposal site, 
and all our work will have gone to waste.”
“Hmm.” Maya shook her head. She knew the problem, of course. But it was 
depressing to think that allies like these might leave and join the other side, 
just because the problem was getting hard. “Still, whatever you do has to take 
the UN into account. If you ban immigration and they immigrate anyway, and back 
it up, then our work goes to waste even quicker. That’s what’s been happening 
with these incursions, right? Better to allow immigration, to keep it at the 
lowest level that will be satisfactory to the UN, and deal with the immigrants 
as they come.”
The two women nodded unhappily. They ate for a while, looking out at the fresh 
blue of the morning sea. Ariadne said, “The exmetas are a problem as well. They 
want to come here even more than the UN.”
“Of course.” It was no surprise to Maya that the old meta-nationals were still 
such powers on Earth. Of course they had all aped the Praxis model to survive, 
and so with that fundamental change in their nature, they were no longer like 
totalitarian fiefdoms out to conquer the world; but they were still big and 
strong, with a lot of people in them and a lot of capital accumulated; and they 
still wanted to do business, to make their members’ livings. Strategies for 
doing that were sometimes admirable, sometimes not: one could make things that 
people really needed, in a new and better way; or one could play the angles, try 
to press advantages, try to inflate false needs. Most exmetas pursued a mix of 
strategies, of course, trying to stabilize by diversification as in their old 
investment days. But that made fighting the bad strategies even harder in a way, 
because everyone was pursuing them to some extent. And now a lot of exmetas were 
pursuing very active Martian programs, working for the Terran governments and 
shipping people up from Earth, building cities and starting farms, mining, 
production, trade. Sometimes it seemed that emigration from Earth to Mars would 
not cease until there was an exact balance in their fullnesses; which given the 
hypermalthusian situation on Earth, would be a disaster for Mars.
“Yes yes,” Maya said impatiently. “Nevertheless, we have to try to help, and we 
have to keep ourselves within the realm of the acceptable, vis a vis Earth. Or 
else it will be war.”
So Charlotte and Ariadne went away, both looking as worried as Maya felt. And it 
suddenly occurred to Maya, very grimly, that if they were coming to her for 
help, then they were in deep trouble indeed.
So her direct political work picked up again, although she tried to keep a limit 
on it. She seldom traveled away from Odessa, except for AWT business. She did 
not stop working with her theater group, which in any case was now the true 
heart of her political work. But she started going to meetings again, and 
rallies, and sometimes she took the stage and spoke. Werteswandel took many 
forms. One night she even got carried away and agreed to run for Odessa’s seat 
in the global senate, as a member of the Terran Society of Friends, if they 
couldn’t find a more viable candidate. Later, when she had a chance to think it 
over, she begged them to look for someone else first, and in the end they 
decided to go with one of the young playwrights from the Group, who worked in 
the Odessa town administration; a good choice. So she escaped that, and went on 
doing what she could to help the Earth Quakers less actively—feeling more and 
more odd about it, for one could not overshoot a planet’s carrying capacity 
without disaster following—that was what Earth’s history since the nineteenth 
century existed to prove. So they had to be careful, and not let too many people 
up—it was a tightrope act—but coping with a limited period of overpopulation was 
better than dealing with an outright invasion, and this was a point she made in 
meeting after meeting.
And all this time Nirgal was out there in the outback, wandering in his nomadic 
life and talking to the ferals and the farmers, and, she hoped, having his usual 
effect on the Martian worldview, on what Michel called its collective 
unconscious. She pinned a lot of her hopes on Nirgal. And did her best to deal 
with this other strand in her life, to face up to history, in some ways the 
darkest strand of all, as it stitched its course through her life and bunched it 
up, in a big twisting loop, back into the foreboding that had prevailed during 
her previous life in Odessa.
So that was already a kind of malign deja vu. And then the real deja vus came 
back, sucking the life out of things as they aways did. Oh a single flash of the 
sensation was just a jolt, of course, a fearful reminder, here then gone. But a 
day of it was torture; and a week, hell itself. The stereo-temporal state, 
Michel said the current medical journals were calling it. Others called it the 
“always-already sensation.” Apparently a problem for a certain percentage of the 
ancient ones. And nothing could be worse, in terms of her emotions. She would 
wake on these days and every moment of the day would be an exact repetition of 
some earlier identical day—this was how it felt—as if Nietzsche’s notion of 
eternal recurrence, the endless repetition of all possible spa-cetime 
continuums, had become somehow transparent for her, a lived experience. 
Horrible, horrible! And yet there was nothing to do but stagger through the 
always-already of the foreseen days, zombielike, until the curse lifted, 
sometimes in a slow fog, sometimes in a quick snap back to the 
non-stereotemporal state—like double vision coming back into focus, giving 
things back their depth. Back to the real, with its blessed sense of newness, 
contingency, blind becoming, where she was free to experience each moment with 
surprise, and feel the ordinary rise and fall of her emotional sine wave, a 
roller coaster which though uncomfortable was at least movement.
“Ah good,” Michel said as she came out of one of these spells, obviously 
wondering which of the drugs he had been giving her had done the trick.
“Maybe if I could just get to the other side of a presque vu,” Maya said weakly. 
“Not deja or presque or jamais, but just the vu.”
“A kind of enlightenment,” Michel guessed. “Satori. Or epiphany. A mystical 
oneness with the universe. It’s usually a short-lived phenomenon, I am told. A 
peak experience.”
“But with a residue?”
“Yes. Afterward you feel better about things. But, well, it’s said to usually 
come only if one achieves a certain. . . .”
“Serenity?”
“No, well. . . yes. Stillness of mind, you might say.”
“Not my kind of thing, you mean.”
Which cracked a grin. “But it could be cultivated. Prepared for, I mean. That’s 
what they do in Zen Buddhism, if I understand it correctly.”
So she read some Zen texts. But they all made it clear; Zen was not information, 
but behavior. If your behavior was right, then the mystic clarity might descend; 
or might not. And even if it did, it was usually a brief thing, a vision.
She was too stuck in her habits for that kind of change in her mental behavior. 
She was not in the kind of control of her thoughts that could prepare for a peak 
experience. She lived her life, and these mental breakdowns intruded on her. 
Thinking about the past helped to trigger them, it seemed; so she focused on the 
present as much as she could. That was Zen, after all, and she got fairly good 
at it; it had been an instinctive survival strategy for years. But a peak 
experience . . . sometimes she yearned for it, for the almost seen to be seen at 
last. A presque vu would descend on her, the world take on that aura of vague 
powerful meaning just outside her thoughts, and she would stand and push, or 
relax, or just try to follow it, to bring it on home; curious, fearful, hoping; 
and then it would fade, and pass. Still, someday ... if only it would come 
clear! It might help, in the time after. And sometimes she was so curious; what 
would the insight be? What was that understanding which hovered just outside her 
mind, those times? It felt too real to be just an illusion…
So, though it didn’t occur to her at first that this was what she was seeking, 
she accepted an invitation from Nirgal to go with him to the Olympus Mons 
festival. Michel thought it was a great idea. Once every m-year, in the northern 
spring, people met on the summit of Olympus Mons near Crater Zp, to hold a 
festival inside a cascade of cresent-shaped tents, over stone and tile mosaics, 
as during that first meeting there, the celebration of the end of the Great 
Storm, when the ice asteroid had blazed across the sky and John had spoken to 
them of the coming Martian society.
Which society, Maya thought as they ascended the great volcano in a train car, 
might be said to have arrived, at least in certain times and places. Now, here: 
here we are. On Olympus, on Ls 90 every year, to remember John’s promise and 
celebrate its achievement. By far the greater number of celebrants were young 
natives, but there were a lot of new immigrants as well, come up to see what the 
famous festival was like, intent on partying all week long, mostly by 
continuously playing music or dancing to it, or both. Maya preferred dance, as 
she still played no other instrument than the tambourine. And she lost Michel 
and all their other friends there, Nadia and Art and Sax and Marina and Ursula 
and Mary and Nirgal and Diana and all the rest, so that she could dance with 
strangers, and forget. Do nothing but focus on the passing faces luminous before 
her, each one like a pulsar of consciousness crying I’m alive I’m alive I’m 
alive.
Great dancing, all night long; a sign that assimilation might be happening, the 
areophany working its invisible spell on everyone who came to the planet, so 
that their toxic Terran pasts would be diluted and forgotten, and the true 
Martian culture achieved at last in a collective creation. Yes, and fine. But no 
peak experience. This was not the place for it, not for her. It was too much the 
dead hand of the past, perhaps; things were much the same on the peak of Olympus 
Mons, the sky still black and starry with a purple band around the horizon. . . 
. There were hostels built around the immense rim, Marina said, for pilgrims to 
stay in as they made circumnavigations of the summit; and other shelters down in 
the caldera, for the red climbers who spent their existence down in that world 
of overlapping convex cliffs. Strange what people would do, Maya thought, 
strange what destinies were being enacted on Mars nowadays.
But not by her. Olympus Mons was too high, therefore too stuck in the past. It 
was not where she was going to have the kind of experience she was seeking.
She did, however, get a chance to have a long talk with Nirgal, on the train 
ride back to Odessa. She told him about Charlotte and Ariadne and their 
concerns, and he nodded and told her about some of his adventures in the 
outback, many illustrating progress in assimilation. “We’ll win in the end,” he 
predicted. “Mars right now is the battleground of past and future, and the past 
has its power, but the future is where we’re all going. There’s a kind of 
inexorable power in it, like a vacuum pull forward. These days I can almost feel 
it.” And he looked happy.
Then he pulled their bags off the overhead racks, he kissed her cheek. He was 
thin and hard, slipping away from her. “We’ll keep working on it, yes? I’ll come 
visit you and Michel in Odessa. I love you.”
 
*      *        *
 
Which made her feel better, of course. No peak experience; but a train trip with 
Nirgal, a chance to talk with that most elusive native, that most beloved son.
After her return from the mountain, however, she continued to be subject to her 
array of “mental events,” as Michel called them. He got more worried every time 
one of them happened. They were beginning to scare him, Maya saw, even though he 
tried to hide it. And no wonder. These “events,” and others like them, were 
happening to a lot of his aged clients. The gerontological treatments could not 
seem to help people’s memories hold on to their ever-lengthening pasts. And as 
their pasts slipped away, year by year, and their memories weakened, the 
incidence of “events” grew ever higher, until some people even had to be 
institutionalized.
Or, alternatively, they died. The First Settlers’ Institute that Michel 
continued to work with had a smaller group of subjects every year. Even Vlad 
died, one year. After that Marina and Ursula moved from Acheron to Odessa. Nadia 
and Art had already moved to west Odessa, after their daughter Nikki had grown 
up and moved there. Even Sax Russell took an apartment in town, though he spent 
most of the year in Da Vinci still.
For Maya these moves were both good and bad. Good because she loved all these 
people, and it felt like they were clustering around her, which pleased her 
vanity. And it was a great pleasure to see their faces. So she helped Marina, 
for instance, to help Ursula to deal with Vlad’s loss. It seemed that Ursula and 
Vlad had been the true couple, in some sense—though Marina and Ursula . . . 
well, there were no terms for the three points of a menage a trois, no matter 
how it was constituted. Anyway Marina and Ursula were now the remainder, a 
couple very close in their grieving, otherwise much like the young native 
same-sex couples one saw in Odessa, men arm in arm on the street (a comforting 
sight), women hand in hand.
So she was happy to see the two of them, or Nadia, or any of the rest of the old 
gang. But she couldn’t always remember the incidents they discussed as if 
unforgettable, and this was irritating. Another kind of jamais vu; her own life. 
No, it was better to focus on the moment, to go down and work on water, or the 
lighting for the current play, or sit chatting in the bars with new friends from 
work, or with complete strangers. Waiting for that enlightenment to someday 
come....
Samantha died. Then Boris. Oh there were two or three years between their 
deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, 
this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as 
best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker, as on the corniche 
when a black squall approached from over the Hellespontus—Terran nations still 
sending up unauthorized people and landing them, the UN still threatening, China 
and Indonesia suddenly at each other’s throats, Red ecoteurs blowing things up 
more and more indiscriminately, recklessly, killing people. And then Michel came 
up the stairs, heavy with grief; “Yeli died.”
“What? No—oh no.”
“Some kind of heart arrhythmia.”
“Oh my God.”
Maya hadn’t seen Yeli for decades, but to lose another one of the remaining 
First Hundred—lose the possibility of ever seeing again Yeli’s shy smile ... no. 
She didn’t hear the rest of what Michel said, not so much from grief as from 
distraction. Or grief for herself.
“This is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it?” she said at last, when 
she noticed Michel staring at her.
He sighed. “Maybe.”
Again most of the surviving members of the First Hundred came to Odessa for the 
memorial service, organized by Michel. Maya learned a lot about Yeli in those 
calls, mostly from Nadia. He had left Underhill and moved to Lasswitz early on, 
he had helped to build the domed town, and had become an expert in aquifer 
hydrology. In ‘61 he had wandered with Nadia, trying to repair structures and 
stay out of trouble, but in Cairo, where Maya had seen him briefly, he had 
gotten separated from the others, and missed the escape down Marineris. At the 
time they had assumed he had been killed like Sasha, but in fact he had 
survived, as most of the people in Cairo had, and after the revolt he had moved 
down to Sabishii and worked again in aquifers, linking up with the underground 
and helping to make Sabishii into the capital of the demimonde. He had lived for 
a while with Mary Dunkel, and when Sabishii was closed down by UNTA, he and Mary 
had come through Odessa; they had been there for the m-50 celebration, which was 
the last time Maya remembered seeing him, all the Russians in the group offering 
up the old drinking toasts. Then he and Mary broke up, Mary said, and he moved 
to Senzeni Na and became one of the leaders there in the second revolution. When 
Senzeni Na joined Nicosia and Sheffield and Cairo in the east Tharsis alliance, 
he had gone up to help in the Sheffield situation; after that he had returned to 
Senzeni Na, served on its first independent town council, and slowly become one 
of the grandfathers of the community there, just like so many others of the 
First Hundred had elsewhere. He had married a Nigerian nisei, they had had a 
boy; he had been back to Moscow twice, and was a popular commentator on Russian 
vids. Right before his death he had been working on the Argyre Basin project 
with Peter, siphoning off some big aquifers under the Charitum Monies without 
disturbing the surface. A great-grandaughter living out on Callisto was 
pregnant. But then one day during a picnic on the Senzeni Na mohole mound he had 
collapsed, and they hadn’t been able to revive him.
So they were down to the First Eighteen. Although Sax, of all people, made a 
provisional inclusion of seven more, for the possibility that Hiroko’s band was 
still alive somewhere. Maya regarded this as a fantasy, obvious wishful 
thinking, but on the other hand Sax was not prone to wishful thinking, so maybe 
there was something to it. Only eighteen for certain, however, and the youngest 
of them, Mary (unless Hiroko were alive) was now 212 years old. The oldest, Ann, 
was 226. Maya herself was 221, an obvious absurdity, but there it was, year 2206 
in the Terran news reports. . . .
“But there are people in their two-fifties,” Michel noted, “and the treatments 
may very well continue to work for a long long time. This may just be a bad 
coincidence.”
“Maybe.”
Each death seemed to cut a piece from him. He was getting darker and darker, 
which irritated Maya. No doubt he still thought he should have stayed in 
Provence—that was his wish-fulfillment fantasy, this imaginary home that 
persisted in the face of the obvious fact that Mars was his home and had been 
from the moment they had landed—or from the moment he had joined Hiroko—or 
perhaps from the moment he had first seen it in the sky as a boy! No one could 
say when it had happened, but Mars was his home, and it was obvious to everyone 
but him. And yet he pined for Provence; and considered Maya both his exiler and 
his country in exile, her body his replacement Provence, her breasts his hills, 
her belly his valley, her sex his beach and ocean. Of course it was an 
impossible project being someone’s home as well as their partner; but as it was 
all nostalgia anyway, and as Michel believed in impossible projects as good 
things, it generally turned out all right. Part of their relationship. Though 
sometimes an awful burden for her. And never more than when a death of one of 
the First Hundred drove him to her, and thus to thoughts of home.
Sax was always vexed at a funeral or a memorial service. Clearly he felt that 
death was some kind of rude imposition, a flagrant bit of the great 
unexplainable waving its red flag in his face; he could not abide it, it was a 
scientific problem waiting to be solved. But even he was baffled by the various 
manifestations of the quick decline, which were always different except for the 
speed of their effect, and the lack of an obvious single cause. A wave collapse 
like her jamais vu, a kind of jamais vivre—theories were endless, it was a vital 
concern for all the old ones, and all the younger ones who expected to become 
old—for everyone, in other words. And so it was being intensely studied. But so 
far no one knew for sure what the quick decline was, or even if it was any one 
thing; and the deaths kept happening.
For Yeli’s service they cast some portion of his ashes off in another swiftly 
rising balloon, launching it from the same point of the breakwater they had 
launched Spencer, standing out where they could look back and see all Odessa. 
Afterward they retreated to Maya and Michel’s apartment. Praxis indeed, the way 
they held each other then. They went through Michel’s scrapbooks, talking about 
Olympus Mons, ‘61, Underbill. The past. Maya ignored all that and served them 
tea and cakes, until only Michel and Sax and Nadia remained in the apartment. 
The wake was over; she could relax. She stopped at the kitchen table, put her 
hand on Michel’s shoulder, and looked over it at a grainy black-and-white photo, 
stained by what looked like spots of spaghetti sauce and coffee. A faded picture 
of a young man grinning right at the camera, grinning with a confident knowing 
smile.
“What an interesting face,” she said.
Under her hand Michel stiffened. Nadia had a stricken look. Maya knew she had 
said something wrong, even Sax looked somehow pinched, almost distraught. Maya 
stared at the young man in the photo, stared and stared. Nothing came to her.
She left the apartment. She walked up the steep streets of Odessa, past all the 
whitewash and the turquoise doors and shutters, the cats and the terra-cotta 
flower boxes, until she was high in the town, and could look out over the indigo 
plate of the Hellas Sea for many kilometers. As she walked she cried, but 
without knowing why, a curious desolation. And yet this too had happened before.
Sometime later she found herself in the west part of the upper town. There was 
the Paradeplatz Park, where they had staged The Blood Knot, or had it been The 
Winter’s Tale. Yes, The Winter’s Tale. But there would be no coming back to life 
for them.
Ah well. Here she was. She made her way slowly down the long staircase 
alleyways, down and down toward their building, thinking about plays, her 
spirits a bit lighter as she descended. But there was an ambulance there at the 
apartment gate, and feeling cold, as if ice water had been dashed over her, she 
veered away and continued past the building, down to the corniche.
She walked up and down the corniche, until she was too tired to walk. Then she 
sat on a bench. Across from her in a sidewalk cafe a man was playing a wheezy 
bandoneon, a bald man with a white mustache, bags under his eyes, round cheeks, 
red nose. His sad music was right there in his face. The sun was setting and the 
sea was nearly still, each broad facet glistening with the viscous glassy luster 
that liquid surfaces sometimes display, all of it as orange as the sun winking 
out over the mountains to the west. She sat back, relaxing, and felt the sea 
breeze on her skin. Gulls planed overhead. Suddenly the sea’s color looked 
familiar to her, and she remembered looking down from the Ares at the mottled 
orange ball that Mars had been, the untouched planet rolling below them after 
their arrival in orbit, symbol of every potential happiness. She had never been 
happier than that, in all the time since.
And then the feeling came on her again, the pre-epileptic aura of the presque 
vu, the sea glittering, a vast significance suffusing everything, immanent 
everywhere but just beyond reach, pressing in on things—and with a little pop 
she got it—that that very aspect of the phenomenon was itself the meaning—that 
the significance of everything always lay just out of reach, in the future, 
tugging them forward—that in special moments one felt this tidal tug of becoming 
as a sensation of sharp happy anticipation, as she had when looking down on Mars 
from the Ares, the unconscious mind filled not with the detritus of a dead past 
but with the unforeseeable possibilities of the live future, ah, yes—anything 
could happen, anything, anything. And so as the presque vu washed slowly away 
from her, unseen again and yet somehow this time comprehended, she sat back on 
the bench, full and glowing; here she was, after all, and the potential for 
happiness would always be in her.


 
 
 
PART THIRTEEN
               -----------
---Experimental 
Procedures
               -----------
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
At the last minute Nirgal went up to Sheffield. From the train station he took 
the subway out to the Socket, not seeing a thing. Inside the vast halls of the 
Socket he walked to the departure lounge. And there she was.
When she saw him she was pleased that he had come, but irritated that he had 
come so late. It was almost time for her to go. Up the cable, onto a shuttle, 
out to one of the new hollowed-out asteroids, this one particularly large and 
luxuriant; and then off, accelerating for a matter of months, until it could 
coast at several percent of the speed of light. For this asteroid was a 
star-ship; and they were off to a star near Aldebaran, where a Mars-like planet 
rolled in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like sun. A new world, a new life. 
And fackie was going.
Nirgal still couldn’t quite believe it. He had gotten the message only two days 
before, had not slept as he tried to decide whether this mattered, whether it 
was part of his life, whether he ought to see her off, whether he ought to try 
to talk her out of it.
Seeing her now, he knew he could not talk her out of it. She was going. I want 
to try something new, she had said in her message, a voice record without a 
visual image. There coming from his wrist, her voice: There’s nothing for me 
here now anymore. I’ve done my part. I want to try something new.
The group in the starship asteroid were mostly from Dorsa Brevia. Nirgal had 
called Charlotte to try to find out why. It’s complicated, Charlotte said. 
There’s a lot of reasons. This planet they’re going to is relatively nearby, and 
it’s perfect for terraform-ing. Humanity going there is a big step. The first 
step to the stars.
I know, Nirgal had said. Quite a few starships had already left, off to other 
likely planets. The step had been taken.
But this planet is the best one yet. And in Dorsa Brevia, people are beginning 
to wonder if we don’t have to get that distance from Earth to get a fresh start. 
The hardest part is leaving Earth behind. And now it’s looking bad again. These 
unauthorized landings; it could be the start of an invasion. And if you think of 
Mars as being the new democratic society, and Earth the old feudalism, then the 
influx can look like the old trying to crush the new, before it gets too big. 
And they’ve got us outnumbered twenty billion to two. And part of that old 
feudalism is patriarchy itself. So the people in Dorsa Brevia wonder if they can 
get a little bit more distance. It’s only twenty years to Aldebaran, and they’re 
going to live a long time. So a group of them are doing it. Families, family 
groups, childless couples, childless single people. It’s like the First Hundred 
going to Mars, like the days ofBoone and Chalmers.
And so fackie sat on the carpeted floor of the departure lounge, and Nirgal sat 
next to her. She looked down. She was smoothing the carpet with the palm of her 
hand, and then drawing patterns in the nap, letters. Nirgal, she wrote.
He sat down beside her. The departure lounge was crowded but subdued. People 
looked grave, wan, upset, thoughtful, radiant. Some were going, some were seeing 
people off. Through a broad window they looked into the interior of the socket, 
where elevator cars levitated in silence against the walls, and the foot of the 
37,000-kilometer-long cable stood hovering ten meters over the concrete floor.
So you’re going, Nirgal said.
Yes, fackie said. I want a new start.
Nirgal said nothing.
It will be an adventure, she said.
True. He didn’t know what else to say.
In the carpet she wrote Jackie Boone Went to the Moon.
It’s an awesome idea when you think of it, she said. Humanity, spreading through 
the galaxy. Star by star, ever outward. It’s our destiny. It’s what we ought to 
be doing. In fact I’ve heard people say that that’s where Hiroko is—that she and 
her people joined one of the first starships, the one to Barnard’s star. To 
start a new world. Spread viriditas.
It’s as likely as any other story, Nirgal said. And it was true; he could 
imagine Hiroko doing it, taking off again, joining the new diaspora, of humanity 
across the stars, settling the nearby planets and then on from there. A step out 
of the cradle. The end of prehistory.
He stared at her profile as she drew patterns on the carpet. This was the last 
time he would ever see her. For each of them it was as if the other were dying. 
That was true for a lot of the couples huddled silently together in this room. 
That people should leave everyone they knew.
And that was the First Hundred. That was why they had all been so strange—they 
had been willing to leave the people they knew, and go off with ninety-nine 
strangers. Some of them had been famous scientists, all of them had had parents, 
presumably. But none of them had had children. And none of them had had spouses, 
except for the six married couples who had been part of the hundred. Single 
childless people, middle-aged, ready for a fresh start. That was who they were. 
And now that was Jackie too: childless, single.
Nirgal looked away, looked back; there she was, flush in the light. Fine-grained 
gloss of black hair. She glanced up at him, looked back down. Wherever you go, 
she wrote, there you are.
She looked up at him. What do you think happened to us? she asked.
I don’t know.
They sat looking at the carpet. Through the window, in the cable chamber, an 
elevator levitated across the floor, hovering upright as it moved over a piste 
to the cable. It latched on, and a jetway snaked out and enveloped its outer 
side.
Don’t go, he wanted to say. Don’t go. Don’t leave this world forever. Don’t 
leave me. Remember the time the Sufis married us? Remember the time we made love 
by the heat of a volcano? Remember Zygote?
He said nothing. She remembered.
I don’t know.
He reached down and rubbed the nap of the carpet so that he erased the second 
you. With his forefinger he wrote we.
She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?
The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for departure. People 
stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself standing, facing 
fackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was her body in his 
arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed in, held his 
breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to the jetway 
she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.
Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever you go, there we 
are. It wasn’t true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do. 
Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the planet. Now I am flying 
to Al-debaran.


 
 
 
 
The northern polar island had suffered perhaps more deformation than any other 
landscape on Mars; so Sax had heard, and now walking on a bluff edging the 
Chasma Borealis River, he could see what they meant. The polar cap had melted by 
about half, and the massive ice walls of Chasma Borealis were mostly gone. Their 
departure had been a thaw unlike any seen on Mars since the middle Hesperian, 
and all that water had rushed every spring and summer down the stratified sand 
and loess, cutting through them with great force. Declivities in the landscape 
had turned into deep sand-walled canyons, cutting downstream to the North Sea in 
very unstable watersheds, channelizing subsequent spring melts and shifting 
rapidly as slopes collapsed and landslides created short-lived lakes, before the 
dams were cut through and carried off in their turn, leaving only beach terraces 
and slide gates.
Sax stood looking down on one of these slide gates now, calculating how much 
water must have accumulated in the lake before the dam had broken. One couldn’t 
stand too close to the edge of the overlook, the new canyon rims were by no 
means stable. There were few plants to be seen, only here and there a strip of 
pale lichen color, providing some relief from the mineral tones. The Borealis 
River was a wide shallow wash of tumbling glacial milk, some hundred and eighty 
meters below him. Tributaries cut hanging valleys much less deep, and dumped 
their loads in opaque waterfalls like spills of thin paint.
Up above the canyons, on what had been the floor of Chasma Borealis, the plateau 
was cut with tributary streams like the pattern of veins in a leaf. This had 
been laminated terrain to begin with, looking as if elevation contours had been 
artfully incised into the landscape, and the stream cuts revealed that the 
French curve laminae went down many meters, as if the map had marked the 
territory to a great depth.
It was near midsummer, and the sun rode the sky all day long. Clouds poured off 
the ice to the north. When the sun was at its lowest, the equivalent of 
midafternoon, these clouds drifted south toward the sea in thick mists, colored 
bronze or purple or lilac or some other vibrant subtle shade. A thin scattering 
of fellfield flowers graced the laminate plateau, reminding Sax of Arena 
Glacier, the landscape that had first caught his attention, back before his 
incident. That first encounter was very difficult for Sax to remember, but 
apparently it had imprinted on him in the way ducklings imprinted on the first 
creatures they saw as their mothers. There were great forests covering the 
temperate regions, where stands of giant sequoia shaded pine understories; there 
were spectacular sea cliffs, home to great clouds of mewling birds; there were 
crater jungle terraria of all kinds, and in the winters there were the endless 
plains of sastrugi snow; there were escarpments like vertical worlds, vast 
deserts of red shifting sands, volcano slopes of black rubble, there was every 
manner of biome, great and small; but for Sax this spare rock bioscape was the 
best.
He walked along over the rocks. His little car followed as best it could, 
crossing the tributaries of the Borealis upstream at the first car ford. The 
summertime flowering, though hard to pick out if one were more than ten meters 
away, was nevertheless intensely colorful, as spectacular in its way as any rain 
forest. The soil created by these plants in their generations was extremely 
thin, and would thicken only slowly. And augmenting it was difficult; all soil 
dropped in the canyons would wind up in the North Sea, and on the laminate 
terrain the winters were so harsh that soil availed little, it only became part 
of the permafrost. So they let the fellfields grow in their own slow course to 
tundra, and saved the soil for more promising regions in the south. Which was 
fine by Sax. It left for everyone to experience, for many centuries to come, the 
first areobiome, so spare and un-Terran.
Trudging over the rubble, alert for any plant life underfoot, Sax veered toward 
his car, which was now out of sight to his right. The sun was at much the same 
height it had been all day, and away from the deep narrow new Chasma Borealis 
running down the broad old one, it was very hard to keep oriented; north could 
have been anywhere across about one hundred and eighty degrees: basically, 
“behind him.” And it would not do to walk casually into the vicinity of the 
North Sea, somewhere ahead of him, because polar bears did very well on that 
littoral, killing seals and raiding rookeries.
So Sax paused for a moment, and checked his wristpad maps to get a precise fix 
on his position and his car’s. He had a very good map program in his wristpad 
these days. He found he was at 31.63844 degrees longitude, 84.89926 degrees 
north latitude, give or take a few centimeters; his car was at 31.64114, 
84.86857; if he climbed to the top of this little breadloaf knoll to the west 
northwest, up an exquisite natural staircase, he should see it. Yes. There it 
rolled, at a lazy walking pace. And there, in the cracks of this breadloaf (so 
apt, this anthropomorphic analogizing) was some small purple saxifrage, 
stubbornly hunkering down in the protection of broken rock.
Something in the sight was so satisfying: the laminate terrain, the saxifrage in 
the light—the little car moving to its dinner rendezvous with him—the delicious 
weariness in his feet—and then something indefinable, he had to admit 
it—unexplainable—in that the individual elements of the experience were 
insufficient to explain the pleasure of it. A kind of euphoria. He supposed this 
was love. Spirit of place, love of place—the areophany, not only as Hiroko had 
described it, but perhaps as she had experienced it as well. Ah, Hiroko—could 
she really have felt this good, all the time? Blessed creature! No wonder she 
had projected such an aura, collected such a following. To be near that bliss, 
to learn to feel it oneself . . . love of planet. Love of a planet’s life. 
Certainly the biological component of the scene was a critical part of one’s 
regard for it. Even Ann would surely have to admit that, if she were standing 
there beside him. An interesting hypothesis to test. Look, Ann, at this purple 
saxifrage. See how it catches the eye, somehow. One’s regard focused, in the 
center of the curvilinear landscape. And so love, spontaneously generated.
Indeed this sublime land seemed to him a kind of image of the universe itself, 
at least in its relation of life to nonlife. He had been following the 
biogenetic theories of Deleuze, an attempt to mathematicize on a cosmological 
scale something rather like Hiroko’s viriditas. As far as Sax could tell, 
Deleuze was maintaining that viriditas had been a threadlike force in the Big 
Bang, a complex border phenomenon functioning between forces and particles, and 
radiating outward from the Big Bang as a mere potentiality until 
second-generation planetary systems had collected the full array of heavier 
elements, at which point life had sprung forth, bursting in “little bangs” at 
the end of each thread of viriditas. There had been none too many threads, and 
they had been uniformly distributed through the universe, following the galactic 
clumping and partly shaping it; so that each little bang at the end of a thread 
was as far removed from the others as it was possible to be. Thus all the life 
islands were widely separated in timespace, making contact between any two 
islands very unlikely simply because they were all late phenomena, and at a 
great distance from the rest; there hadn’t been time for contact. This 
hypothesis, if true, seemed to Sax a more than adequate explanation for the 
failure of SETI, that silence from the stars that had been ongoing for nearly 
four centuries now. A blink of the eye compared to the billion light-years that 
Deleuze estimated separated all life islands each a tertiary emergent 
phenomenon.
So viriditas existed in the universe like this saxifrage on the great sand 
curves of the polar island: small, isolate, magnificent. Sax saw a curving 
universe before him; but Deleuze maintained that they lived in a flat universe, 
on the cusp between permanent expansion and the expand-contract model, in a 
delicate balance. And he also maintained that the turning point, when the 
universe would either start to shrink or else expand past all possibility of 
shrinking, appeared to be very close to the present time! This made Sax very 
suspicious, as did the implication in Deleuze that they could influence the 
matter one way or the other: stomp on the ground and send the universe flying 
outward to dissolution and heat death, or catch one’s breath, and pull it all 
inward to the unimaginable omega point of the eschaton: no. The first law of 
thermodynamics, among many other considerations, made this a kind of 
cosmological hallucination, a small god’s existentialism. Psychological result 
of humanity’s suddenly vastly increased physical powers, perhaps. Or Deleuze’s 
own tendencies to megalomania; he thought he could explain everything.
In fact Sax was suspicious of all the current cosmology, placing humanity as it 
did right at the center of things, time after time. It suggested to Sax that all 
these formulations were artifacts of human perception only, the strong 
an-thropic principle seeping into everything they saw, like color. Although he 
had to admit some of the observations seemed very solid, and hard to accept as 
human perceptual intrusion, or coincidence. Of course it was hard to believe 
that the sun and Luna looked exactly the same size when seen from Earth’s 
surface, but they did. Coincidences happened. Most of these anthropocentric 
features, however, seemed to Sax likely to be the mark of the limits of their 
understanding; very possibly there were things larger than the universe, and 
others smaller than strings—some even larger plenum, made of even smaller 
components—all beyond human perception, even mathematically. If that were true 
it might explain some of the inconsistencies in Bao’s equations—if one allowed 
that the four macrodimensions of timespace were in relation to some larger 
dimensions, like the six microdimensions were to their ordinary four, then the 
equations might work quite beautifully—he had a vision of one possible 
formulation, right there—
He stumbled, caught his balance. Another small bench of sand, about three times 
the size of the normal one. Okay— on and up to the car. Now what had he been 
thinking about?
He couldn’t remember. He had been thinking something interesting, he knew that. 
Figuring something out, it seemed like. But try as he might, he couldn’t recall 
what it was. It bulked at the back of his mind like a rock in his shoe, a 
tip-of-the-tongueism that never came through. Most uncomfortable; even 
maddening. It had happened to him before, he seemed to recall—and more 
frequently recently, wasn’t that true? He wasn’t sure, but that felt right. He 
had been losing his train of thought, and then been unable to retrieve it, no 
matter how hard he tried.
He reached his car without seeing his walk there. Love of place, yes—but one had 
to be able to remember things to love them! One had to be able to remember one’s 
thoughts! Confused, affronted, he clattered about the car getting a dinner 
together, then ate it without noticing.
This memory trouble would not do.
 
Actually, now that he thought of it, losing his train of thought had been 
happening a lot. Or so he seemed to remember. It was an odd problem that way. 
But certainly he had been aware of losing trains of thought, which seemed, in 
their blank aftermath, to have been good thoughts. He had even tried to talk 
into his wristpad when such an accelerated burst of thinking began, when he felt 
that sense of several different strands braiding together to make something new. 
But the act of talking stopped the mentation. He was not a verbal thinker, it 
seemed; it was a matter of images, sometimes in the languages of math, sometimes 
in some kind of inchoate flow that he could not characterize. So talking stopped 
it. Or else the lost thoughts were much less impressive than they had felt; for 
the wrist recordings had only a few phrases, hesitant, disconnected, and most of 
all slow—they were nothing like the thoughts he had hoped to record, which, 
especially in this particular state, were just the reverse—fast, coherent, 
effortless—the free play of the mind. That process could not be captured; and it 
struck Sax forcibly how little of anyone’s thinking was ever recorded or 
remembered or conveyed in any way to others—the stream of one’s consciousness 
never shared except in thimblefuls, even by the most prolific mathematician, the 
most diligent diarist.
So, well; these incidents were just one of the many conditions they had to adapt 
to in their unnaturally prolonged old age. It was very inconvenient, even 
irritating. No doubt the matter ought to be investigated, although memory was a 
notorious quagmire for brain science. And it was somewhat like the leaky-roof 
problem; immediately after such a lost train of thought, with the absent shape 
of it still in his mind, and the emotional excitation, it almost drove him mad; 
but as the content of the thought was forgotten, half an hour later it did not 
seem much more significant than the slipping away of dreams in the minutes after 
waking. He had other things to worry about.
 
Such as the death of his friends. Yeli Zudov this time, a member of the First 
Hundred he had never known well; nevertheless he went down to Odessa, and after 
a memorial service, a lugubrious affair during which Sax was frequently 
distracted by thoughts of Vlad, of Spencer, of Phyllis, and then of Ann—they 
returned to the Praxis building, and sat in Michel and Maya’s apartment. It was 
not the same apartment they had lived in before the second revolution, but 
Michel had taken pains to make it look much the same, as far as Sax could 
recall—something about Maya’s therapy, as she was having more and more mental 
trouble—Sax wasn’t sure what the latest was. He had never been able to deal with 
the more melodramatic aspects of Maya, and he hadn’t paid overmuch attention to 
Michel’s talk about her when the two of them last got together—it was always 
different, always the same.
Now, however, he took a cup of tea from Maya, and watched her go back into the 
kitchen, past the table on which Michel’s scrapbooks were spre’ad. Face up was a 
photo of Frank that Maya had treasured long ago; she had had it taped to the 
kitchen cabinet by the sink, in the apartment down the hall—Sax remembered that 
most clearly, it was a kind of heraldic feature of those tense years: all of 
them struggling while the young Frank laughed at them.
Maya stopped and looked down at the photo, stared at it closely. Remembering 
their earlier dead, no doubt. Those who had gone before, so very long ago.
But she said, “What an interesting face.”
Sax felt a chill in the pit of his stomach. So distinct, the physiological 
manifestations of distress. To lose the substance of a speculative train of 
thought, a venture into the metaphysical—that was one thing. But this—her own 
past, their past—it was insupportable. Not to be abided. He would not abide it.
Maya saw they were shocked, though she did not know why. Nadia had tears in her 
eyes, not a common sight. Michel looked stricken. Maya, sensing something 
seriously wrong, fled the apartment. No one stopped her.
The others picked up the place. Nadia went to Michel.
“More and more like that,” Michel muttered, looking haunted. “More and more. I 
feel it myself. But for Maya. . . .” He shook his head, looking deeply 
discouraged. Even Michel could make nothing good of this, Michel who had worked 
his alchemy of optimism on all their previous reversals, making them part of his 
great story, the myth of Mars that he had somehow wrenched out of the daily 
morass. But this was the death of story. Thus hard to mythol-ogize. No—living on 
after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful. Something was going 
to have to be done.
 
Sax was still thinking about this, sitting in a corner absorbed in his wristpad, 
reading a collection of abstracts from recent experimental work on the memory, 
when there came a thump from the kitchen and a cry from Nadia. Sax rushed in to 
find Nadia and Art crouched over Michel, who lay white-faced on the floor. Sax 
called the concierge, and faster than he would have imagined possible an 
emergency crew had barged in with their equipment and shouldered Art aside, big 
young natives who brusquely encased Michel into their compact web of machinery, 
leaving the old ones as spectators only of their friend’s—struggle.
Sax sat down among the medics, in their way, and put a hand to Michel’s neck and 
shoulder. Michel’s breathing had stopped, his pulse as well. White-faced. The 
resuscitation attempts were violent, the electrical shocks tried at a variety of 
strengths, the subsequent shift to heart-lung machine accomplished with a 
minimum of fuss; and the young medics worked in near silence, talking among 
themselves only when necessary, seemingly unaware of the old ones sitting 
against the wall. They did all they could; but Michel remained stubbornly, 
mysteriously dead.
Of course he had been upset by Maya’s memory failure. But this did not seem an 
adequate explanation. He had already been aware of Maya’s problem, none more so, 
and he had-been worried; so any single display of her problem shouldn’t have 
mattered. A coincidence. A bad one. And of course eventually—quite late that 
evening, actually, after the doctors had finally given up, and taken Michel 
downstairs, and were clearing out their equipment—Maya returned, and they had to 
tell her what had happened.
She was distraught, naturally. Her shock and anguish were too much for one of 
the young medics, who tried to comfort her (that won’t work, Sax wanted to say, 
I’ve tried that myself) and got himself struck in the face for his pains, which 
made him angry; he went out in the hall, sat down heavily.
Sax went out and sat beside him. He was weeping.
“I can’t do this anymore,” the man said after a while. He shook his head, 
seemingly apologetic. “It’s pointless. We come and do all we can and it makes no 
difference. Nothing stops the quick decline.”
“Which is?” Sax said.
The young man shrugged his massive shoulders, sniffed. “That’s the problem. No 
one knows.”
“Surely there must be theories? Autopsies?”
“Heart arrhythmia,” said one of the other medics curtly as he passed by with 
some equipment.
“That’s just the symptom,” the sitting man snarled, and sniffed again. “Why does 
it go arrhythmic? And why doesn’t CPR restart it?”
No one answered.
Another mystery to be solved. Through the door Sax could see Maya crying on the 
couch, Nadia beside her like a statue of Nadia. Suddenly Sax realized that even 
if he found an explanation, Michel would still be dead.
Art was dealing with the medics, making arrangements. Sax tapped at his wrist 
and looked at a list of titles for articles on quick decline; 8,361 titles in 
this index. There were literature reviews, and tables assembled by AIs, but 
nothing that looked like a definitive paradigm statement. Still at the stage of 
observation and initial hypothesis . .. flailing. In many ways it resembled the 
work on memory Sax had been reading. Death and the mind; how long they had 
studied these problems, how long the problems had resisted! Michel himself had 
commented on that, implying some deeper narrative that explained their 
unexplainables—Michel who had brought Sax back from aphasia, who had taught him 
to understand parts of himself he hadn’t even known existed. Michel was gone. He 
wouldn’t be back. They had carried the last version .of his body out of the 
apartment. He had been around Sax’s age, about 220 years old. It was an advanced 
age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax’s chest, this hot blur 
of tears? It didn’t make sense.
But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of the mind, he 
would have said. But Sax wasn’t so sure; his memory problems seemed less 
important now, Maya’s as well. She remembered enough to be devastated, after 
all. Him too. He remembered what was important.
Strange to recall: he had been in her company immediately in the wake of the 
death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each time it got 
worse for her. And the same for him.
 
Michel’s ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a pinch for 
return to Provence.


 
 
 
 
 
The literature on longevity, and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax 
found it difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. 
Recent work on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but 
understanding articles on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and 
coming to some fuller understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This 
was an area Sax had never understood more than superficially, shying away from 
it instinctively because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous 
nature. A subject very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had 
left it happily to Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along 
with Ursula and Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many 
major modifications since then.
Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time to dive into 
viriditas, into the realm of the complex.
There was orderly behavior, there was chaotic behavior; and on their border, in 
their interplay, so to speak, lay a very large and convoluted zone, the realm of 
the complex. This was the zone in which viriditas made its appearance, the place 
where life could exist. Keeping life in the middle of the zone of complexity 
was, in the most general philosophical sense, what the longevity treatments had 
been about—keeping various incursions of chaos (like arrhythmia) or of order 
(like malignant cell growth) from fatally disrupting the organism.
But now something was causing the gerontologically treated individual to go from 
negligible senescence to extremely rapid senescence—or, even more disturbingly, 
straight from health to death, without senescence at all. Some heretofore unseen 
irruption of chaos or order, into the border zone of the complex. This was how 
it seemed to him, in any case, at the end of one very long session of reading 
the most general descriptions of the phenomenon he could find. And it suggested 
certain avenues of investigation as well, in the mathematical descriptions of 
the complexity-chaotic border, likewise the order-complexity border. But he lost 
this holistic vision of the problem in one of his blankouts, the train of 
thought concerning the substance of the math gone forever. And it had probably 
(he tried to console himself afterward) been too philosophical a vision to do 
him any good anyway. The explanation after all was not going to be obvious, or 
else the massive concerted effort of medical science would have searched it out 
by now. On the contrary; it was likely to be something very subtle in the 
biochemistry of the brain, an arena that had resisted five hundred years of 
effort to investigate it scientifically, resisted like the hydra, every new 
discovery only suggesting another headful of mysteries.. ..
Nevertheless he persevered. And over the course of a few weeks’ absorbed 
reading, he certainly gave himself a better orientation in the field than he had 
ever had before. Previously his impression had been that the longevity treatment 
consisted of a fairly straightforward injection of the subject’s own DNA, the 
artificially produced strands reinforcing the ones already in the cells, so that 
the breaks and errors that crept in over time were repaired, and the strands 
generally strengthened. This much was true; but the longevity treatment was more 
than this, just as senescence itself was more than cell-division error. It was, 
as one might have predicted, much more complicated than just breaking 
chromosomes; it was an entire complex of processes. And while some were well 
understood, others were not. Senes-cencial action (aging) took place on every 
level: molecule, cell, organ, organism. Some senescence resulted from hormonal 
effects that were positive for the young organism in its reproductive phase, and 
only later negative for the post-reproductive animal, when in evolutionary terms 
it no longer mattered. Some cell lines were virtually immortal; bone-marrow 
cells and the mucus in the gut went on replicating for as long as their 
surroundings were alive, with no sign at all of time-related changes. Other 
cells, such as the nonreplaced proteins in the lens of the eye, underwent change 
that was driven by exposure to heat or light, regular enough to function as a 
kind of biological chronometer. Each kind of cell line aged at a different 
speed, or did not age at all; thus it was not just “a matter of time” in the 
sense of a kind of Newtonian absolute time, working entropically on an organism; 
there was no such time. Rather it was a great many trains of specific physical 
and chemical events, moving at different speeds, and with varying effects. There 
was a fantastically large number of cell-repair mechanisms inherent in any large 
organism, and an immune system of great and various power; the longevity 
treatments often supplemented these processes, or worked on them directly, or 
replaced them. The treatment now included supplements of the enzyme photolyase, 
to correct DNA damage, and supplements of the pineal hormone melatonin, and 
dehydroepiandrosterone, a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands. .. 
.There were about two hundred components like these in the longevity treatment 
now.
So vast, so complex—sometimes Sax finished his day’s reading and walked down to 
Odessa’s seafront, to sit on the corniche with Maya, and he would pause in 
eating a burrito and stare at it—contemplate everything that went into its 
digestion, everything that kept them alive—feel his breath which he had never 
noted at all, before—and suddenly he would feel breathless—lose his 
appetite—lose his belief that any such complex system could exist for more than 
a moment before collapsing into primordial chaos and the simplicities of 
astrophysics. Like a house of cards a hundred stories tall, in a wind. Tap it 
anywhere.... It was lucky Maya did not require much in the way of active 
companionship, because often he was rendered speechless for many minutes at a 
time, rapt in the contemplation of his own evident impossibility.
But he persevered. This was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma. And 
there were others helping in the search, working ahead of him on the frontiers, 
and beside him in related fields, from the small—virology, where the inquiries 
into tiny forms such as prions and viroids were revealing even smaller forms, 
almost too partial to be called life: virids, viris, virs, vis, vs, all of which 
might have relevance to the larger problem.... All the way up to the large 
organismic issues, such as brain-wave rhythms and their relationship to the 
heart and other organs, or the pineal gland’s ever-decreasing secretions of 
melatonin, a hormone that seemed to regulate many aspects of aging. Sax followed 
them all, trying to glean a new view by his later and hopefully larger 
perspective. He had to follow his intuition to what seemed important, and study 
that.
Of course it did not help that some of his best thoughts on the subject blanked 
out on him at the moment of completion. He had to be able to get these thought 
flurries recorded before they disappeared! He began to talk aloud to himself, 
frequently, even in public situations, hoping that this would help to forestall 
the blanks; but again, it didn’t work. It simply was not a verbal process.
In all this work the meetings with Maya were a pleasure. Every evening, if he 
noticed it was evening, he would stop reading and walk down the staircase 
streets of the town to the corniche, and there, on one of four different 
benches, he would often see Maya, sitting and looking out over the harbor to the 
sea. He would go to one of the food stands back in the park, buy a burrito or a 
gyro or a salad or a corn dog, and walk over and sit down next to her. She would 
nod and they would eat without saying much. Afterward they sat and watched the 
sea. “How was your day?” “Okay. And yours?” He did not attempt to talk much 
about his reading, and she didn’t say much about her hydrology, or the theater 
productions that she would go off to after dusk had fallen. Really they didn’t 
have much to say to each other. But it was companionable anyway. And one evening 
the sunset flared to an unusual lavender brilliance, and Maya said, “I wonder 
what color that is?” and Sax had ventured, “Lavender?”
“But lavender is usually more pastel, isn’t it?”
Sax called up a large color chart he had found long before to help him see the 
colors of the sky. Maya snorted at this, but he held his wrist up anyway, and 
compared various sample squares to the sky. “We need a bigger screen.” And then 
they found one that they thought matched: light violet. Or somewhere between 
light violet and pale violet.
And after that they had a little hobby. Really it was remarkable how varied the 
colors of the Odessa sunsets were, affecting sky, sea, the whitewashed walls of 
the town; endless variation. Much more variation than there were names. The 
poverty of language in this area was a constant surprise to Sax. Even the 
poverty of the color chart. The eye could perceive perhaps ten million different 
shades, he read; the color handbook he was referring to had 1,266 samples in it; 
and only a very small fraction of these had names. So most evenings they held up 
their forearms, and tried different colors against the sky, and found a patch 
that matched fairly well, and it was a nondescript; no name. They made up names: 
2 October the llth Orange, Aphelion Purple, Lemon Leaf, Almost Green, Arkady’s 
Beard; Maya could go on forever, she was really good at it. Then sometimes they 
would find a named patch matching the sky (for a moment, anyway) and they would 
learn the real meaning of a new word, which Sax found satisfying. But in that 
stretch between red and blue, English had surprisingly little to offer; the 
language just was not equipped for Mars. One evening in the dusk, after a 
mauvish sunset, they went through the chart methodically, just to see: purple, 
magenta, lilac, amaranth, aubergine, mauve, amethyst, plum, violaceous, violet, 
heliotrope, clematis, lavender, indigo, hyacinth, ultramarine—and then they were 
into the many words for the blues. There were many, many blues. But for the 
red-blue span that was it, except for the many modulations of the list, royal 
violet, lavender gray, and so on.
One evening the sky was clear, and after the sun had gone down behind the 
Hellespontus Mountains, but was still illuminating the air over the sea, it 
turned a very familiar rusty brown orange; Maya seized his arm in her clawlike 
grip, “That’s Martian orange, look, that’s the color of the planet from space, 
what we saw from the Aresl Look! Quick, what color is that, what color is that?”
They looked through the charts, arms held up before them. “Paprika red.” “Tomato 
red.” “Oxide red, now that should be right; it’s oxygen’s affinity for iron 
makes that color after all.”
“But it’s way too dark, look.”
“True.”
“Brownish red.”
“Reddish brown.”
Cinnamon, raw sienna, Persian orange, sunburn, camel, rust brown, Sahara, chrome 
orange . .. they began to laugh. Nothing was quite right. “We’ll call it Martian 
orange,” Maya decided.
“Fine. But look how many more names there are for these colors than there are 
for the purples, why is that?”
Maya shrugged. Sax went reading in the material accompanying the chart, to see 
if they said anything about it. “Ah. It appears that the cones in the retina 
contain cells sensitive to blue, green or red, and so colors around those three 
have lots of distinction, while those in between are composites.” Then in the 
empurpling dusk he came on a sentence that surprised him so much he read it 
aloud:
“Redness and greenness form another pair which cannot be perceived 
simultaneously as components of the same color.”
“That’s not true,” Maya said immediately. “That’s just because they’re using a 
color wheel, and those two are on opposite sides.”
“What do you mean? That there’s more colors than these?”
“Of course. Artists’ colors, theater colors; you put a green spot and a red spot 
on someone and you get a color all right, and it’s not red or green.”
“But what is it? Does it have a name?”
“I don’t know. Look in an artist’s color wheel.”
And so he did, and so did she. She found it first: “Here. Burnt umber, Indian 
red, madder alizarin . . . those are all green-red mixes.”
“Interesting! Red-green mixes! Don’t you find that suggestive?”
She gave him a look. “We’re talking about colors here, Sax, not politics.”
“I know, I know. But still. ...”
“No. Don’t be silly.”
“But don’t you think we need a red-green mix?”
“Politically? There’s a red-green mix already, Sax. That’s the trouble. Free 
Mars got the Reds on board to stop immigration, that’s why they’re having such 
success. They’re teaming up and closing down Mars to Earth, and soon after that 
we’ll be at war with them again. I tell you, I can see it coming. We’re 
spiraling down into it again.”
“Hmm,” Sax said, sobered. He was not paying attention to solar systemic politics 
these days, but he knew that Maya, who had a very sharp eye for these things, 
was getting more and more worried about it—with her usual mordant Mayan dash of 
satisfaction at the approach of crisis. So that it was perhaps not as bad as she 
thought. Probably he would have to look into it again soon, pay attention. But 
meanwhile—
“Look, it’s gone indigo, right over the mountains.” Intense saw edge of black 
below, purple blue above....
“That’s not indigo, it’s royal blue.”
“But they shouldn’t call it blue if it’s got some red in it.”
“Shouldn’t. Look, marine blue, Prussian blue, king’s blue, they all have red in 
them.”
“But that color on the horizon isn’t any of those.”
“No, you’re right. Nondescript.”
They marked it on their charts. Ls 24, m-year 91, September 2206; a new color. 
And so another evening passed.
Then one winter evening they were sitting on the westernmost bench, in the hour 
before sunset, everything still, the Hellas Sea like a plate of glass, the sky 
cloudless and clean, pure, transparent; and as the sun dropped everything 
drifted over the spectrum into the blue, until Maya looked up from her salade 
nicoise and clutched Sax by the arm, “Oh my God, look,” and she put her paper 
plate aside and they both stood instinctively, like ancient veterans hearing the 
national anthem from an approaching parade; Sax swallowed hamburger in a lump, 
“Ah,” he said, and stared. Everything was blue, sky blue, Terran sky blue, 
drenching everything for most of an hour, flooding their retinas and the nerve 
pathways in their brains, no doubt long starved for precisely that color, the 
home they had left forever.
 
Those were pleasant evenings. By day, however, things got more and more 
complicated. Sax gave up studying whole-body problems, sharpened his focus to 
the brain alone. This was like halving infinity, but still, it cut down on the 
papers he had to look at, and it did seem like the brain was the heart of the 
problem, so to speak. There were changes in the hyperaged brain, changes visible 
both on autopsy and during the various scans of blood flow, electrical activity, 
protein use, sugar use, heat, and all the rest of the indirect tests they had 
managed to concoct through the centuries, studying the living brain during 
mental activity of every kind. Observed changes in the hyperaged brain included 
calcification of the pineal gland, which reduced the amount of melatonin it 
produced; synthetic melatonin supplements were part of the longevity treatment, 
but of course it would be better to stop the calcification from occurring in the 
first place, for it probably had other effects. Then there was a clear growth in 
the number of neurofibrillary tangles, which were protein filament aggregates 
that grew between neurons, exerting physical pressure on them, perhaps the 
analogue of the pressure Maya reported feeling during her presque vus, who could 
say. Then again beta-amyloid protein accumulated in the cerebral blood vessels 
and in the extracellular space around nerve terminals, again impeding function. 
And pyramidal neurons in the frontal cortex and hippocampus accumulated calpain, 
which meant they were vulnerable to calcium influxes, which damaged them. And 
these were nondividing cells, the same age as the organism itself; damage to 
them was permanent, as during Sax’s stroke. He had lost a lot of his brain in 
that incident, he didn’t like to think of it. And the ability of the molecules 
in these nondividing cells to replace themselves could also be damaged, a 
smaller but over time equally significant loss. Autopsies of people over two 
hundred who had died of the quick decline regularly showed serious calcification 
of the pineal gland, coupled with increases in calpain levels in the 
hippocampus. And the hippocampus and calpain levels generally were both 
implicated in some of the leading current models of how the memory worked. It 
was an interesting connection.
But all inconclusive. And no one was going to solve the mystery by literature 
review alone. But the experiments that might clear things up were not practical, 
given the inaccessibility of the living brain. You could kill chicks and mice 
and rats and dogs and pigs and lemurs and chimps, you could kill individuals of 
every species in creation, dissect the brains of their fetuses and embryos as 
well, and still never find what you were looking for; for it was autopsy itself 
that was insufficient to the task. And the various live scans were likewise 
insufficient to the task, as the processes involved were either more 
fine-grained than the scans could perceive, or more holistic, or more 
combinatorial, or, probably, all three at once.
Still, some of the experiments and the resultant modeling were suggestive; 
calpain buildup seemed to alter brain-wave function, for instance; and this fact 
and others gave him ideas for further investigation. He began to read 
intensively in the literature on the effects of calcium-binding protein levels, 
on corticosteroids, on the calcium currents in the hippocampal pyramidal 
neurons, and on the calcification of the pineal gland. It appeared there were 
synergistic effects that might impact both memory and general brainwave 
function, indeed all bodily rhythms, including heart rhythms. “Was Michel 
experiencing any memory troubles?” Sax asked Maya. “Perhaps feeling that he had 
lost entire trains of thought—even very useful trains of thought?”
Maya shrugged. By now Michel was almost a year gone. “I can’t remember.”
It made Sax nervous. Maya seemed in retreat, her memory worse every day. Even 
Nadia could do nothing for her. Sax met her down on the corniche more and more 
frequently, it was a habit they both clearly must have enjoyed, though they 
never spoke of that; they simply sat, ate a kiosk meal, watched the sunset and 
pulled up their color charts to see if they would catch another new one. But if 
it weren’t for the notations they made on the charts, neither of them would have 
been sure whether the colors they saw were new or not. Sax himself felt that he 
was experiencing his blank-outs more frequently, perhaps some four to eight a 
day, although he couldn’t be sure. He took to keeping his AI running a sound 
recorder permanently, activated by voice; and rather than try to describe his 
complete train of thought, he just spoke a few words that he hoped would later 
key a fuller recollection of what he had been thinking. Thus at the end of the 
day he would sit down apprehensively or hopefully, and listen to what the AI had 
captured during the day: and mostly it was thought that he remembered thinking, 
but occasionally he would hear himself say, “Synthetic melatonins may be a 
better antioxidant than natural ones, so that there aren’t enough free 
radicals,” or “Viriditas is a fundamental mystery, there will never be a grand 
unified theory,” without having any memory of saying such things, or, often, 
what they might mean. But sometimes the statements were suggestive, their 
meanings excavatable.
And so he struggled on. As he did he saw it anew, as fresh as in his 
undergraduate days: the structure of science was so beautiful. It was surely one 
of the greatest achievements of the human spirit, a kind of stupendous parthenon 
of the mind, constantly a work in progress, like a symphonic epic poem of 
thousands of stanzas, being composed by them all in a giant ongoing 
collaboration. The language of the poem was mathematics, because this appeared 
to be the language of nature itself; there was no other way to explain the 
startling adherence of natural phenomena to mathematical expressions of great 
difficulty and subtlety. And so in this marvelous family of languages their 
songs explored the various manifestations of reality, in the different fields of 
science, and each science worked up its standard model to explain things, all 
constellating at some distance around the basics of particle physics, depending 
on what level or scale was being investigated, so that all the standard models 
hopefully interlocked in a coherent larger structure. These standard models were 
somewhat like Kuhnian paradigms but in reality (paradigms being a model of 
modeling) more supple and various, a dialogic process in which thousands of 
minds had participated over the previous hundreds of years; so that figures like 
Newton or Einstein or Vlad were not the isolate giants of public perception, but 
the tallest peaks of a great mountain range, as Newton himself had tried to make 
clear with his comment about standing on the shoulders of giants. In truth the 
work of science was a communal thing, extending back even beyond the birth of 
modern science, back all the way into prehistory, as Michel had insisted; a 
constant struggle to understand. Now of course it was highly structured, 
articulated beyond the ability of any single individual to fully grasp. But this 
was only because of the sheer quantity of it; the spectacular efflorescence of 
structure was not in any particular incomprehensible, one could still walk 
around anywhere inside the parthenon, so to speak, and thus comprehend at least 
the shape of the whole, and make choices as to where to study, where to learn 
the current surface, where to contribute. One could first learn the dialect of 
the language relevant to the study; which in itself could be a formidable task, 
as in su-perstring theory or cascading recombinant chaos; then one could survey 
the background literature, and hopefully find some syncretic work by someone who 
had worked long on the cutting edge, and was able to give a coherent account of 
the status of the field for outsiders; this work, disparaged by most working 
scientists, called the “gray literature” and considered a vacation or a lowering 
of oneself on the part of the synthesist, was nevertheless often of great value 
for someone coming in from the outside. With a general overview (though it was 
better to think of it as an underview, with the actual workers up there lost in 
the dim rafters and entablatures of the edifice), one could then move up into 
the journals, the peer-reviewed “white literature,” where the current work was 
being recorded; and one could read the abstracts, and get a sense of who was 
attacking what part of the problem. So public, so explicit. . . . And for any 
given problem in science, the people who were actually out there on the edge 
making progress constituted a special group, of a few hundred at most—often with 
a core group of synthesists and innovators that was no more than a dozen people 
in all the worlds—inventing a new jargon of their dialect to convey their new 
insights, arguing over results, suggesting new avenues of investigation, giving 
each other jobs in labs, meeting at conferences specially devoted to the 
topic—talking to each other, in all the media there were. And there in the labs 
and the conference bars the work went forward, as a dialogue of people who 
understood the issues, and did the sheer hard work of experimentation, and of 
thinking about experiments.
And all this vast articulated structure of a culture stood out in the open sun 
of day, accessible to anyone who wanted to join, who was willing and able to do 
the work; there were no secrets, there were no closed shops, and if every lab 
and every specialization had its politics, that was just politics; and in the 
end politics could not materially affect the structure itself, the mathematical 
edifice of their understanding of the phenomenal world. So Sax had always 
believed, and no analysis by social scientists, nor even the troubling 
experience of the Martian terraforming process, had ever caused him to waver in 
that belief. Science was a social construct, but it was also and most 
importantly its own space, conforming to reality only; that was its beauty. 
Truth is beauty, as the poet had said, speaking of science. And it was; the poet 
had been right (they weren’t always).
And so Sax moved about in the great structure, comfortable, capable, and on some 
levels content.
 
But he began to understand that as beautiful and powerful as science was, the 
problem of biological senescence was perhaps too difficult. Not too difficult to 
be solved ever, nothing was that, but simply too difficult to be solved in his 
lifetime. Actually it was still an open question how hard a problem it was. 
Their understanding of matter, space and time was incomplete, and it might be 
that it would always necessarily shade off into metaphysics, like the 
speculations about the cosmos before the Big Bang, or things smaller than 
strings. On the other hand the world might be amenable to progressive 
explanations, until it all (at least from string to cosmos) would be brought 
someday within the realm of the great parthenon. Either result was possible, the 
court was still out, the next thousand years or so should tell the tale.
But in the meantime, he was experiencing several blank-outs a day. And sometimes 
he was short of breath. Sometimes his heart seemed to beat so hard. Seldom did 
he sleep at night. And Michel was dead, so that Sax’s sense of the meaning of 
things was becoming uncertain, and in great need of help. When he managed to 
think at all on the level of meaning, he found that he felt he was in a race. 
Him and everyone else, but especially the life scientists actually at work on 
the problem: they were in a race with death. To win it, they had to explain one 
of the greatest of the great unexplainables.
And one day, sitting down on a bench with Maya after a day in front of his 
screen, thinking of the vastness of that growing wing of the parthenon, he 
realized that it was a race he couldn’t win. The human species might win it, 
someday, but it looked to be a long way off still. It was no great surprise, 
really; he knew this; that is to say, he had always known it. Labeling the 
current largest manifestation of the problem had not disguised to him its 
profundity, “the quick decline” was just a name, inaccurate, over-simple—not 
science, in fact, but rather an attempt (like “the Big Bang”) to diminish and 
contain the reality, as yet not understood. In this case the problem was simply 
death. A quick decline indeed. And given the nature of life and of time, this 
was a problem that no living organism would ever truly solve. Postponements, 
yes; solutions, no. “Reality itself is mortal,” he said.
“Of course,” Maya said, absorbed in the sight of the sunset.
He needed a simpler problem. As a postponement, as a step toward the harder 
problems; or just as something he could solve. Memory, perhaps. Fighting the 
blank-outs; it was certainly a problem that stood at hand, ready for study. His 
memory was in need of help. Working on it might even cast light on the quick 
decline. And even if it didn’t, he had to try it, no matter how hard it was. 
Because they were all going to die; but they could at least die with their 
memories intact.
So he switched his emphasis to the memory problem, abandoning the quick decline 
and all the rest of the senescence issues. He was only mortal after all.


 
 
 
 
 
Recent memory work was fairly suggestive of avenues of approach. This particular 
scientific front was related in some of its aspects to the work on learning that 
had enabled Sax to (partially) recover from his stroke. This was not surprising, 
as memory was the retention of learning. All brain science tended to move 
together in its understanding of consciousness. But in that progression, 
retention and recall remained recalcitrant crux issues, still imperfectly 
understood.
But there were indications, and more all the time. Clinical clues; a lot of the 
ancient ones were experiencing memory problems of varying kinds, and behind the 
ancient ones came a giant generation of nisei, who could see the problems 
manifesting in their elders, and hoped to avoid them. So memory was a hot topic. 
Hundreds, indeed thousands of labs were working on it in one way or another, and 
as a result many aspects of it were coming clear. Sax immersed himself in the 
literature in his usual style, reading intensively for several months on end; 
and at the end of that time he thought he could say, in general terms, how 
memory worked; although in the end he, like all the rest of the scientists 
working on the problem, ran into their insufficient understanding of the 
underlying basics—of consciousness, matter, time. And at this point, as detailed 
as their understanding was, Sax could not see how memory might be improved or 
reinforced. They needed something more.
The original Hebb hypothesis, first proposed by Donald Hebb in 1949, was still 
held to be true, because it was such a general principle; learning changed some 
physical feature in the brain, and after that the changed feature somehow 
encoded the event learned. In Hebb’s time the physical feature (the engram) was 
conceived of as occurring somewhere on the synaptic level, and as there could be 
hundreds of thousands of synapses for each of the ten billion neurons in the 
brain, this gave researchers the impression that the brain might be capable of 
holding some 1014 data bits; at the time this seemed more than adequate to 
explain human consciousness. And as it was also within the realm of the possible 
for computers, it led to a brief vogue in the notion of strong artificial 
intelligence, as well as that era’s version of the “machine fallacy,” a variant 
of the pathetic fallacy, in which the brain was thought of as being something 
like the most powerful machine of the time. The work of the twenty-first and 
twenty-second century, however, had made it clear that there were no specific 
“engram” sites as such. Any number of experiments failed to locate these sites, 
including one in which various parts of rat’s brains were removed after they 
learned a task, with no part of the brain proving essential; the frustrated 
experimenters concluded that memory was “everywhere and nowhere,” leading to the 
analogy of brain to hologram, even sillier than all the other machine analogies; 
but they were stumped, they were flailing. Later experiments clarified things; 
it became obvious that all the actions of consciousness were taking place on a 
level far smaller even than that of neurons; this was associated in Sax’s mind 
with the general miniaturization of scientific attention through the 
twenty-second century. In that finer-grained appraisal they had begun 
investigating the cytoskeletons of neuron cells, which were internal arrays of 
microtubules, with protein bridges between the microtubules. The microtubules’ 
structure consisted of hollow tubes made of thirteen columns of tubulin dimers, 
peanut-shaped globular protein pairs, each about eight-by-four-by-four 
nanometers, existing in two different configurations, depending on their 
electrical polarization. So the dimers represented a possible on-off switch of 
the hoped-for engrain; but they were so small that the electrical state of each 
dimer was influenced by the dimers around it, because of van der Waals 
interactions between them. So messages of all kinds could be propagated along 
each mi-crotubule column, and along the protein bridges connecting them. Then 
most recently had come yet another step in miniaturization: each dimer contained 
about 450 amino acids, which could retain information by changes in the 
sequences of amino acids. And contained inside the dimer columns were tiny 
threads of water in an ordered state, a state called vicinal water, and this 
vicinal water was capable of conveying quantum-coherent oscillations for the 
length of the tubule. A great number of experiments on living monkey brains, 
with miniaturized instrumentation of many different kinds, had established that 
while consciousness was thinking, amino-acid sequences were shifting, tub-ulin 
dimers in many different places in the brain were changing configuration, in 
pulsed phases; microtubules were moving, sometimes growing; and on a much larger 
scale, dendrite spines then grew and made new connections, sometimes changing 
synapses permanently, sometimes not.
So now the best current model had it that memories were encoded (somehow) as 
standing patterns of quantum-coherent oscillations, set up by changes in the 
microtubules and their constituent parts, all working in patterns inside the 
neurons. Although there were now researchers who speculated that there could be 
significant action at even finer ultramicroscopic levels, permanently beyond 
their ability to investigate (familiar refrain); some saw traces of signs that 
the oscillations were structured in the kind of spin-network patterns that Bao’s 
work described, in knotted nodes and networks that Sax found eerily reminiscent 
of the palace-of-memory plan, utilizing rooms and hallways, as if the ancient 
Greeks by introspection alone had intuited the very geometry of timespace.
In any case, it was sure that these ultramicroscopic actions were implicated in 
the brain’s plasticity; they were part of how the brain learned and then 
remembered. So memory was happening at a far smaller level than had been 
previously imagined, which gave the brain a much higher computational 
possibility than before, up to perhaps 1024 operations per second—or even 1043 
in some calculations, leading one researcher to note that every human mind was 
in a certain sense more complicated that all the rest of the universe (minus its 
other consciousnesses, of course). Sax found this suspiciously like the strong 
anthropic phantoms seen elsewhere in cosmological theory, but it was an 
interesting idea to contemplate.
So, not only was there simply more going on, it was also happening at such fine 
levels that quantum effects were certainly involved. Experimentation had made it 
clear that large-scale collective quantum phenomena were happening in every 
brain; there existed in the brain both global quantum coherence, and quantum 
entanglement between the various electrical states of the microtubules; and this 
meant that all the counterintuitive phenomena and sheer paradox of quantum 
reality were an integral part of consciousness. Indeed it was only very 
recently, by including the quantum effects in the cytoskeletons, that a team of 
French researchers had finally managed to put forth a plausible theory as to why 
general anesthetics worked, after all the centuries of blithely using them.
So they were confronted with yet another bizarre quantum world, in which there 
was action at a distance, in which decisions not made could affect events that 
really happened, in which certain events seemed to be triggered tel-eologically, 
that is to say by events that appeared to come after them in time. . . . Sax was 
not greatly surprised by this development. It supported a feeling he had had all 
his life, that the human mind was deeply mysterious, a black box that science 
could scarcely investigate. And now that science was investigating it, it was 
coming up hard against the great unexplainables of reality itself.
Still, one could hold to what science had learned; and admit that reality at the 
quantum level behaved in ways that were simply outrageous at the level of human 
senses and ordinary experience. They had had three hundred years to get used to 
that, and eventually they had somehow to incorporate this knowledge into their 
worldviews, and forge on. Sax would have indeed said that he was comfortable 
with the familiar quantum paradoxes; things at the micros-cale were bizarre but 
explicable, quantifiable or at least de-scribable, using complex numbers, 
Riemannian geometry, and all the rest of the armatures of the appropriate 
branches of mathematics. Finding such stuff in the very workings of the brain 
should have been no surprise at all. Indeed, compared to things like human 
history or psychology or culture, it was even somehow comforting. It was only 
quantum mechanics after all. Something that could be modeled by mathematics. And 
that was saying something.
So. At an extremely fine level of structure in the brain, much of one’s past was 
contained, encoded in a unique complex network of synapses, microtubules, dimers 
and vicinal water and amino-acid chains, all small enough and near enough 
together to have quantum effects on each other. Patterns of quantum fluctuation, 
diverging and collapsing; this was consciousness. And the patterns were clearly 
held or generated in specific parts of the brain; they were the result of a 
physical structure articulated on many levels. The hippocampus, for instance, 
was critically important, especially the dentate gyrus region and the perforant 
pathway nerves that led to it. And the hippocampus was extremely sensitive to 
action in the limbic system, directly underneath it in the brain; and the limbic 
system was in many ways the seat of the emotions, what the ancients would have 
called the heart. Thus the emotional charge of an event had much to do with how 
fully it was laid out in the memory. Things happened, and the consciousness 
witnessed or experienced them, and inevitably a great deal of this experience 
changed the brain, and became part of it forever; particularly the events 
heightened by emotion. This description seemed right to Sax; what he had felt 
most he remembered best—or forgot most assiduously, as certain experiments 
suggested, with an unconscious constant effort that was not true forgetting at 
all, but repression.
After that initial change in the brain, however, the slow process of degradation 
began. For one thing, the power of recollection was different in different 
people, but always less powerful than memory storage, it appeared, and very hard 
to direct. So much was patterned into the brain but never retrieved. And then if 
one never remembered a pattern, never recollected and rehearsed it, then they 
never got the reinforcement of another run-through; and after about 150 years of 
storage, experiments suggested, the pattern began to degrade more and more 
rapidly, due apparently to the accumulated quantum effects of free radicals 
collecting randomly in the brain. This was apparently what was happening to the 
ancient ones; a breakdown process which began immediately after an event was 
patterned into the brain, eventually hit a cumulative level where the effects 
were catastrophic for the oscillatory patterns involved, and thus for the 
memories. It was probably about as clocklike, Sax thought glumly, as the 
thermodynamic clouding of the lens of the eye.
However—if one could rehearse all one’s memories, ec-phorize them as some called 
it in the literature on the subject—from the Greek, meaning something like “echo 
transmission”—then it would reinforce the patterns, giving them a fresh start 
and setting the clock of degradation back to zero. A sort of longevity treatment 
for dimer patterns, in effect, sometimes referred to in the literature as 
anamnesis, or loss of forgetting. And after such treatment it would be easier to 
recall any given event, or at least as easy as it had been soon after the event 
happened. This was the general direction that work in memory reinforcement was 
taking. Some called the drugs and electrical devices involved in this process 
nootropics, a word which Sax read as “acting upon mind.” There were a lot of 
terms for the process being bandied about in the current literature, people 
scrambling through their Greek and Latin lexicons in the hope of becoming the 
namer of the phenomenon: Sax had seen mnemonics and mnemonistics, and 
mnemosynics, after the goddess of memory; also mimenskesthains, from the Greek 
verb “to remember.” Sax preferred memory reinforcer, although he also liked 
anamnesis, which seemed the most accurate term for what they were trying to do. 
He wanted to concoct an anamnestic.
But the practical difficulties of ecphorization—of remembering all one’s past, 
or even some particular part of it— were great. Not just finding the anamnestics 
that might stimulate such a process, but finding as well the time it would take! 
When one had lived two centuries, it seemed possible that it might take years to 
ecphorize all the significant events of one’s life.
Clearly a sequential chronological run-through was impractical, in more ways 
than one. What would be preferable was some kind of simultaneous flushing of the 
system, strengthening the entire network without consciously remembering every 
component of it. Whether such a flushing was electrochemically possible was 
unclear; and what such a flushing might feel like was impossible to imagine. But 
if one were to electrically stimulate the perforant pathway to the hippocampus, 
and get a great deal of adenosine tri-phosphate past the blood-brain barrier, 
for instance, thus stimulating the long-term potentiation that aided learning in 
the first place; and then impose a brain-wave pattern stimulating and supporting 
the quantum oscillations of the microtubules; and then direct one’s 
consciousness to review the memories that felt most important to one, while the 
rest were being reinforced as well, unconsciously....
He ran through another accelerando of thought on this issue, then crashed blank 
on it. There he was, sitting in his apartment living room, blanked, cursing 
himself for not at least trying to mutter something into his AI. It seemed that 
he had been onto something—something about ATP, or was it LTP? Well. If it was a 
genuinely useful thought, it would come back. He had to believe that. It seemed 
probable.
As it did, more and more as he studied the issues, that the shock of Maya’s 
amnesiac moment had somehow propelled Michel into the quick decline. Not that 
such an explanation could ever be proved, or that it even really mattered. But 
Michel would not have wanted to survive either his memory or hers; he had loved 
her as his life project, his definition of himself. The shock of Maya blanking 
on something so basic, so important (like the key to memory restoration). ... 
And the mind-body connection was so strong—so strong that the distinction itself 
was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious 
views of the soul. Mind was one’s body’s life. Memory was mind. And so, by a 
simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life 
was gone. So Michel must have felt, in that final traumatic half hour, as his 
self tumbled into a fatal arrhythmia, under the anguish of grieving for his 
love’s death-of-mind.
They had to remember to be truly alive. And so ecphori-zation, if he could 
figure out the appropriate anamnestic methodology, was going to have to be 
tried.
 
Of course it might be dangerous. If he did manage to work up a memory 
reinforcer, it would flush the system all at once, perhaps, and no one could 
predict what that would feel like subjectively. One would just have to try it. 
It would be an experiment. Self-experimentation. Well, it wouldn’t be the first 
time. Vlad had given himself the first geronto-logical treatment, though it 
could have killed him; Jennings had inoculated himself with live smallpox 
vaccine; Arkady’s ancestor Alexander Bogdanov had exchanged his blood for that 
of a young man suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, and had died while the 
young man had lived for thirty more years. And of course there was the story of 
the young physicists at Los Alamos, who had set off the first nuclear explosion 
wondering among themselves whether it might not burn up the entire atmosphere of 
the Earth, a somewhat disturbing case of self-experimentation, one had to admit. 
Compared to that ingesting a few amino acids seemed no very great thing, 
something more like Dr. Hoffman trying LSD on himself. Presumably ecphorizing 
would be less disorienting than an LSD experience, for if all one’s memories 
were being reinforced at once, consciousness would surely not be capable of 
being aware of it. The so-called stream of consciousness was fairly unilinear, 
it seemed to Sax on introspection. So that at most one might experience a quick 
associative train of recollections, or a random jumble—not unlike Sax’s everyday 
mentation, to tell the truth. He could handle that. And he was willing to risk 
something more traumatic, if that was what it happened to take. He flew to 
Acheron.


 
 
 
 
 
Up at Acheron a new crowd was in place in the old labs, now vastly expanded, so 
that the entire high long fin of rock was excavated and occupied—it was a city 
now of some 200,000 people. At the same time it was still, of course, a 
spectacular fin of rock some fifteen kilometers long and six hundred meters 
high, while never more than a kilometer wide at any point; and it was still a 
lab, or a complex of labs, in a way that Echus Overlook had long since ceased to 
be— something more like Da Vinci, with a similar organization. After Praxis had 
renovated the infrastructure, Vlad and Ursula and Marina had led the formation 
of a new biological research station; now Vlad was dead, but Acheron had a life 
of its own, and did not seem to miss him. Ursula and Marina directed their own 
little labs, and lived still in the quarters they had shared with Vlad, just 
under the crest of the fin—a partially walled arboreal slot, very windy. They 
were as private as ever, withdrawn into their own world even more than they had 
been with Vlad; and they were certainly taken for granted in Acheron, treated by 
the younger scientists as local grandmothers or great-aunts, or simply as 
colleagues in the labs.
Sax, however, the younger scientists stared at, looking just as nonplussed as if 
they were being introduced to Archimedes. It was as disconcerting to be treated 
in such a way as it was to meet such an anachronism, and Sax struggled through 
several conversations of surpassing awkwardness as he tried to convince everyone 
that he did not know the magic secret of life, that he used words to stand for 
the same things as they did, that his mind was not yet altogether shattered by 
age, etc.
But this estrangement could also be an advantage. Young scientists as a class 
tended to be naive empiricists, also idealistic energetic enthusiasts. So coming 
in from outside, both new and old at once, Sax was able to impress them in the 
seminars Ursula convened to discuss the current state of memory work. Sax laid 
out his hypotheses concerning the creation of a possible anamnestic, with 
suggestions for various lines of experimental work on these possibilities, and 
he could see that his suggestions had for the young scientists a kind of 
prophetic power, even (or perhaps especially) when they were quite general 
comments. If these vague suggestions happened to chime with some avenue these 
people were already exploring, then the response could be enthusiastic in the 
extreme. In fact it was a case of the more gnomic the better; which was not very 
scientific, but there it was.
As he watched them Sax realized for the first time that the versatile, 
responsive, highly focused nature of science that he was getting used to in Da 
Vinci was not confined to Da Vinci alone, but was a feature of all the labs 
arranged as cooperative ventures; it was the nature of Martian science more 
generally. With the scientists in control of their own work, to a degree never 
seen in his youth on Earth, the work itself had an unprecedented rapidity and 
power. In his day the resources necessary to do the work would have belonged to 
other people, to institutions with their own interests and bureaucracies, 
creating a ponderous and often foolish clumsy scattering of effort; and even the 
coherent efforts were often devoted to trivial things, to the monetary profits 
of the institution in control of the lab. Here, on the other hand, Acheron was a 
semiautonomous self-contained community, answerable to the environmental courts 
and to the constitution of course, but to no one else. They chose among 
themselves what to work on, and when they were asked for help, if they were 
interested, they could respond immediately.
So he was not going to have to do all the work of developing a memory reinforcer 
himself, not by any means; the Acheron labs were highly interested, and Marina 
remained active in the city’s lab of labs, and the city still had a close 
relationship with Praxis, with all its resources. And many labs there were 
already investigating memory. It was a big part of the longevity project now, 
for obvious reasons. Marina said that some twenty percent of all human effort 
was now being devoted, in one form or another, to the longevity project. And 
longevity itself was pointless without memory lasting as long as the rest of the 
system. So it made sense for a complex like Acheron to focus on it.
 
Soon after his arrival Sax joined Marina and Ursula alone, for breakfast in the 
dining area of their quarters. Just the three of them, surrounded by portable 
walls covered by batiks from Dorsa Brevia, and trees in pots. No remembrance of 
Vlad. Nor did they mention him. Sax, conscious of how unusual it was to be 
invited into their home, had trouble focusing on the matter at hand. He had 
known both these women from the beginning, and greatly respected both of them, 
Ursula especially for her great empathic qualities; but he didn’t feel he knew 
them at all well. So he sat there in the wind, eating and looking at them, and 
out the open window walls. There to the north lay a narrow strip of blue, 
Acheron Bay, a deep indentation in the North Sea—to the south, far beyond the 
first nearby horizon, the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons. In between, a devil’s 
golf course of a land—hard gnarled eroded old lava flows, riven and pocked—and 
in each hollow a little green oasis, dotting the blackish waste of the plateau.
Marina said, “We’ve been thinking about why experimental psychologists in every 
generation have reported a few isolated cases of truly exceptional memories, but 
there is never any attempt to explain them by the memory models of the period.”
“In fact they forget them as soon as they can,-” Ursula said.
“Yes. And then when the reports are exhumed, no one quite believes them to be 
true. It’s put down to the credulity of earlier times. Typically no one alive 
can be found who can reproduce the feats described, and so the tendency is to 
conclude that the earlier investigators were mistaken or fooled. But a lot of 
the reports were perfectly well substantiated.”
“Such as?” Sax said. It had not occurred to him to look at organism-level 
real-world functional accounts, anecdotal as they invariably were. But of course 
it made sense to do so.
Marina said, “The conductor Toscanini knew by heart every note of every 
instrument for about two hundred and fifty symphonic works, and the words and 
music of about a hundred operas, plus a lot more shorter works.”
“They tested this?”
“Spot checks, so to speak. A bassoonist broke a key of his bassoon and told 
Toscanini, who thought it over and told him not to worry, he wouldn’t have to 
play that note that night. Things like that. And he conducted without scores, 
and wrote down missing parts for players, and so on.”
“Uh-huh. . . .”
“The musicologist Tovey had a similar power,” Ursula added. “It isn’t uncommon 
in musicians. It’s as if music is a language where incredible memory feats are 
sometimes possible.”
“Hmm.”
Marina went on. “A Professor Athens, of Cambridge University, early twenty-first 
century, had a vast knowledge of specifics of all sorts—again music, but also 
verse, facts, math, his own past on a daily basis. ‘Interest is the thing,’ he 
was reported to have said. ‘Interest focuses the attention.’“
“True,” Sax said.
“He mostly used his memory for what he found interesting. An interest in 
meaning, he called it. But in 2060 he remembered all of a list of twenty-three 
words he had learned for a casual test in 2032. And so on.”
“I’d like to learn more about him.”
“Yes,” Ursula said. “He was less of a freak than some of the others. The 
so-called calendar calculators, or the ones who can recall visual images 
presented to them in great detail—they’re often impaired in other parts of their 
lives.”
Marina nodded. “Like the Latvians Shereskevskii and the man known as V.P., who 
remembered truly huge quantities of random fact, in tests and in general. But 
both of them experienced synesthesia.”
“Hmm. Hippocampal hyperactivity, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
They mentioned several more. A man named Finkelstein, who could calculate the 
election returns for the entire United States faster than any calculators of the 
1930s. Tal-mudic scholars who had not only memorized the Talmud, but also the 
location of every word on every page. Oral storytellers who knew Homeric amounts 
of verse by heart. Even people who were said to have used the Renaissance 
palace-of-memory method to great effect; Sax had tried that himself after his 
stroke, with fair results. And so on.
“These extraordinary abilities don’t seem to be the same as ordinary memory,” 
Sax observed.
“Eidetic memory,” Marina said. “Based on images that return in great detail. 
It’s said to be the way that most children remember. Then at puberty, the way we 
remember changes, at least for most of us. It’s as if these people don’t ever 
metamorphose away from the children’s way.”
“Hmm,” Sax said. “Still, I wonder if they are the upper extremes of continuous 
distributions of ability, or whether they are examples of a rare bimodal 
distribution.”
Marina shrugged. “We don’t know. But we have one here to study.”
“You do!”
“Yes. It’s Zeyk. He and Nazik have moved here so that we can study him. He’s 
being very cooperative; she’s encouraging him. There might as well be some good 
that comes of it, she says. He doesn’t like his ability, you see. In him it 
doesn’t have much to do with computational tricks, although he’s better at that 
than most of us. But he can remember his past in extraordinary detail.”
“I think I remember hearing about this,” Sax said. The two women laughed, and 
startled, he joined in. “I’d like to see what you’re doing with him.”
“Sure. He’s down in Smadar’s lab. It’s interesting. They view vids from events 
that he witnessed, and ask him questions about the events, and he talks about 
what he remembers while they’ve got all the latest scans running on his brain.”
“Sounds very interesting.”
 
Ursula led him down to a long dimmed lab, in which some operating beds were 
occupied by subjects undergoing scans of one sort or another, colored images 
flickering on screens or holographically in the air; while other beds were 
empty, and somehow ominous.
After all the young native subjects, when they came to Zeyk he looked to Sax 
like a specimen of Homo habilis, whisked out of prehistory to be tested for 
mental capacity. He was wearing a helmet studded with contact points on its 
inner surface, and his white beard was damp, his eyes sunken and weary in 
bruise-colored, withered skin. Nazik sat on the other side of his bed, holding 
his hand in hers. Hovering in the air over a holograph next to her was a 
detailed three-dimensional transparent image of some part of Zeyk’s brain; 
through it colored light was flickering continuously, like heat lightning, 
creating patterns of green and red and blue and pale gold. On the screen by the 
bed jiggled images of a small tent settlement, after dark. A young woman, 
presumably the researcher Smadar, was asking questions.
“So the Ahad attacked the Fetah?”
“Yes. Or they were righting, and my impression was that the Ahad started it. But 
someone was setting them on each other, I thought. Cutting slogans in the 
windows.”
“Did the Muslim Brotherhood often have internal conflicts this severe?”
“At that time they did. But why on that night, I don’t know. Someone set them on 
each other. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”
Sax felt his stomach tighten. Then he felt chilled, as if the ventilation system 
had let in the air of the cold morning outside. The little tent town in the vids 
was Nicosia. They were talking about the night John Boone had been killed. 
Smadar was watching the vids, asking questions. Zeyk was being recorded. Now he 
looked at Sax, nodded a greeting. “Russell was there also.”
“Were you,” Smadar said, looking at Sax speculatively.
“Yes.”
It was something Sax had not thought about in years; decades; a century, 
perhaps. He realized that he had never been back to Nicosia again, not even once 
since that night. As if he had been avoiding it. Repression, no doubt. He had 
been very fond of John, who had worked for him for several years before the 
assassination. They had been friends. “I saw him attacked,” he said, surprising 
them all.
“Did you!” Smadar exclaimed. Now Zeyk and Nazik and Ursula were staring at him 
as well, and Marina had joined them.
“What did you see?” Smadar asked him, glancing briefly up at Zeyk’s brain image, 
flickering away in its silent storm. This was the past, just such a silent 
flickering electric storm. This was the work they were embarked on.
“There was fighting,” Sax said slowly, uneasily, looking into the hologram image 
as if into a crystal ball. “In a little plaza, where a side street met the 
central boulevard. Near the medina.”
“Were they Arab?” the young woman asked.
“Possibly,” Sax said. He closed his eyes, and though he could not see it he 
could somehow imagine it, a kind of blind sight. “Yes, I think so.”
He opened his eyes again, saw Zeyk staring at him. “Did you know them?” Zeyk 
croaked. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”
Sax shook his head, but this seemed to shake loose an image, black and yet 
there. The vid showed the dark streets of Nicosia, flickering with light like 
the thought in Zeyk’s brain. “A tall man with a thin face, a black mustache. 
They all had black mustaches, but his was longer, and he was shouting at the 
other men attacking Boone, rather than at Boone himself.”
Zeyk and Nazik were looking at each other. “Yussuf,” Zeyk said. “Yussuf and 
Nejm. They led the Fetah then, and they were worse about Boone than any of the 
Ahad. And when Selim appeared at our place later that night, dying, he said 
Boone killed me, Boone and Chalmers. He didn’t say I killed Boone; he said Boone 
killed me.” He stared again at Sax: “But what happened then? What did you do?”
Sax shuddered. This was why he had never returned to Nicosia, never thought 
about it: on that night, at the critical moment, he had hesitated. He had been 
afraid. “I saw them from across the plaza. I was a distance away, and I didn’t 
know what to do. They struck John down. They pulled him away. I—I watched. 
Then—then I was in a group running after them, I don’t know who the rest were. 
They carried me along. But the attackers were dragging him down those side 
streets, and in the dark, our group . . . our group lost them.”
“There were probably friends of the assailants in your group,” Zeyk said. “There 
by plan, to lead you the wrong way in the pursuit.”
“Ah,” Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group. “Possibly.”
He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on the screen 
flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk’s cortex was alive with microscopic 
colored lightning.
“So it was not Selim,” Zeyk said to Nazik. “Not Selim, and so not Frank 
Chalmers.”
“We should tell Maya,” Nazik said. “We must tell her.”
Zeyk shrugged. “She won’t care. If Frank did set Selim on John, and yet someone 
else actually did the deed, does that matter?”
“But you think it was someone else?” Smadar said.
“Yes. Yussuf and Nejm. The Fetah. Or whoever it was setting people on each 
other. Nejm, perhaps…”
“Who is dead.”
“And Yussuf as well,” Zeyk said grimly. “And whoever started the rioting that 
night....” He shook his head, and the image overhead quivered slightly.
“Tell me what happened next,” Smadar said, looking down at her screen.
“Unsi al-Khan came running into the hajr to tell us Boone had been attacked. 
Unsi... well, anyway, I went with some others to the Syrian Gate, to see if it 
had been used. The Arab method of execution at that time was to throw you out 
onto the surface. And we found that the gate had been used once and no one had 
come back in by it.”
“Do you remember the lock code?” Smadar asked.
Zeyk frowned, his lips moved, his eyes clamped shut. “They were part of the 
Fibonacci sequence, I remember noticing that. Five-eight-one-three-two-one.”
Sax gaped. Smadar nodded. “Go on.”
“Then a woman I didn’t know ran by and told us Boone had been found in the farm. 
We followed her to the medical clinic in the medina. It was new, everything was 
clean and shiny, no pictures on the walls yet. Sax, you were there, and the rest 
of the First Hundred in the town: Chalmers and Toitovna, and Samantha Hoyle.”
Sax found he had no memory of the clinic at all. Wait.. . an image of Frank, his 
face flushed, and Maya, wearing a white domino, her mouth a bloodless line. But 
that had been outside, on the glass-scattered boulevard. He had told them of the 
attack on Boone, and Maya had cried instantly Didn’t you stop them? Didn’t you 
stop them? and he had realized all of a sudden that he hadn’t stopped them—that 
he had failed to help his friend—that he had stood there frozen in shock, and 
watched while his friend had been assaulted and dragged off. We tried, he had 
said to Maya. I tried. Though he hadn’t.
But at the clinic, later; nothing. Nothing came to him of the whole rest of that 
night, in fact. He closed his eyes like Zeyk, clamped the lids shut as if that 
might squeeze out another image. But nothing came. The memory was odd that way; 
he remembered the critical moments of trauma, when these realizations had 
stabbed into him; the rest had disappeared. Surely the limbic system and the 
emotional charge of every incident must be crucially involved in the entrainment 
or encoding or embedding of a memory.
And yet there was Zeyk, slowly naming every person he had known in the clinic 
waiting room, which must have been crowded; then describing the face of the 
doctor who had come out to give them the news of Boone’s death. “She said, ‘He’s 
dead. Too long out there.’ And Maya put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, and he 
jumped.”
“We have to tell Maya,” Nazik whispered.
“He said to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ which I thought was odd. She said something to him 
about how he had never liked John anyway, which was true. And Frank even agreed, 
but then he left. He was angry at Maya as well. He said, he said ‘What do you 
know about what I like or don’t like.’ So bitter. He didn’t like her 
presumption. The idea that she knew him.” Zeyk shook his head.
“Was I there during this?” Sax said.
“. . . Yes. You were sitting right on the other side of Maya. But you were 
distracted. You were crying.”
Nothing came back to Sax of that, nothing. It occurred to him with a lurch that 
just as there were many things that he had done that no one else would ever know 
about, there were also things he had done that others remembered, that he 
himself could not recall. So little they knew! So little!
And still Zeyk went on: the rest of that night, the next morning. The appearance 
of Selim, his death; then the day after that, when Zeyk and Nazik had left 
Nicosia. And the day after that as well. Later Ursula said that he could go on 
in that amount of detail for every week of his life.
But now Nazik stopped the session. “This one is too hard,” she said to Smadar. 
“Let’s start again tomorrow.”
Smadar agreed, and began tapping at the console of the machine beside her. Zeyk 
stared at the dark ceiling like a haunted man; and Sax saw that among the many 
dysfunctions of the memory, one would have to include memories that worked too 
well. But how? What was the mechanism? That image of Zeyk’s brain, replicating 
in another medium the patterns of quantum activity—lightning flickering around 
in his cortex ... a mind that held the past far better than the rest of the 
ancient ones, impervious to the affliction of breaking memory, which Sax had 
believed to be an inexorable clocklike breakdown ... well, they were giving that 
brain every test they could think of. But it was quite possible the secret would 
remain unsolved; there was simply too much happening of which they were 
completely unaware. As on that night in Nicosia.
 
Shaken, Sax changed into a warm jumper and went outdoors. The land around 
Acheron had already been providing welcome breaks from his lab time, and now he 
was very happy to have a place to get away.
He headed north, toward the sea. Some of his best thinking about memory had come 
when he was walking down to this seashore, over routes so circuitous that he 
could never find the same way twice, partly because the old lava plateau was so 
fractured by grabens and scarps, partly because he was never paying attention to 
the larger topography—he was either lost in his thoughts or lost in the 
immediate landscape, only intermittently looking around to see where he was. In 
fact it was a region in which one could not get lost; ascend any small ridge, 
and there the Acheron fin stood, like the spine of an immense dragon; and in the 
other direction, visible from more places as one approached it, the wide blue 
expanse of Acheron Bay. In between lay a million micro-environments, the rocky 
plateau pocked with hidden oases, and every crack filled with plants. It was 
very unlike the melting landscape on the polar shore across the sea; this rocky 
plateau and its little hidden habitats seemed immemorial, despite the gardening 
that was certainly being done by the Acheron ecopoets. Many of these oases were 
experiments, and Sax treated them as such, staying out of them, peering down 
into one steep-walled alas after another, wondering what the ecopoet responsible 
was trying to discover with his or her work. Here soil could be spread with no 
fear of it being washed into the sea, although the startling green of the 
estuaries extending back into the valleys showed that some fertile soil was 
making its way down the streams. These estuarine marshes would fill with eroded 
soils, while at the same time they were getting saltier, along with the North 
Sea itself. . . .
This time out, however, his observations were broken repeatedly by thoughts of 
John. John Boone had worked for him for the last several years of John’s life, 
and they had had many a conference as they discussed the rapidly developing 
Martian situation; vital years; and through them John had been always happy, 
cheerful, confident—trustworthy loyal helpful friendly courteous kind obedient 
cheerful thrifty brave clean and reverent—no, no, not exactly—he had also been 
abrupt, impatient, arrogant, lazy, slipshod, drug dependent, proud. But how Sax 
had come to rely on him, how he had loved him—loved him like a big brother who 
had protected him out in the world at large. And then they had killed him. Those 
are the ones the killers always go after. They can’t stand that courage. And so 
they had killed him and Sax had stood on watching and hadn’t done a thing. 
Frozen in shock and personal fear. You didn’t stop them? Maya had cried; he 
remembered it now, her sharp voice. No, I was afraid. No, I did nothing. Of 
course it was unlikely that there was anything he could have done at that point. 
Before, when the attacks on John had first started, Sax might have been able to 
talk him into another assignment, gotten him some bodyguards, or, since John 
would never have accepted that, hired some bodyguards to follow him in secret, 
to protect him while his friends froze and stared in shocked witness. But he 
hadn’t hired anyone. And so his brother had been killed, his brother who had 
laughed at him but who had loved him as well, loved him before anyone else 
thought of him at all.
Sax wandered over the fractured plain, distraught—distraught at the loss of a 
friend 153 years before. Sometimes it seemed there was no such thing as time.
 
*      *        *
 
Then he stopped short, brought back to the present by the sight of life. Small 
white rodents, sni’ffing around on the green of a sunken meadow. They were no 
doubt snow pika or something like, but in their whiteness they looked enough 
like lab rats to give Sax a start. White lab rats, yes, but tailless—mutant lab 
rats, yes—free at last, out of their cages and into the world, wandering over 
the intense green meadow grass like surreal hallucinatory objects, all ablink 
and sniff-whiskered as they checked out the ground between grass clumps for 
tasties. Munching away on seeds and nuts and flowers. John had been greatly 
amused at the myth of Sax as the hundred lab rats. Sax’s mind, now free and 
scattered. This is our body.
He crouched and watched the little rodents until he got cold. There were greater 
creatures out on that plain, and they always stopped him short: deer, elk, 
moose, bighorn sheep, reindeer, caribou, black bear, grizzly bear—even packs of 
wolves, like swift gray shadows—and all to Sax like citizens out of a dream, so 
that every time he spotted even a single creature he felt startled, 
disconnected, even stunned; it did not seem possible; it was certainly not 
natural. Yet here they were. And now these little snow pika, happy in their 
oasis. Not nature, not culture: just Mars.
He thought of Ann. He wanted her to see them.
He often thought of her these days. So many of his friends were dead now, but 
Ann was alive, he could still talk to her, it was at least possible. He had 
looked into the matter, and found that she now lived in the caldera of Olympus 
Mons, as part of the small community of red climbers that occupied it. 
Apparently they took turns in the caldera, to keep the population low despite 
the big holes’ steep walls and primeval conditions, both so attractive to them. 
But Ann stayed as long as she liked, Sax had heard, and only left infrequently. 
This was what Peter had told him, although Peter had only heard it secondhand. 
Sad how those two were estranged; pointless; but family estrangements seemed to 
be the most intransigent of all.
Anyway, she was on Olympus Mons. Therefore almost in sight, just over the 
horizon to the south. And he wanted to talk to her. All his reflections on what 
happened to Mars, he thought, were framed as an internal conversation with Ann. 
Not so much as an argument, or so he hoped, but as an endless persuasion. If he 
could be so changed by the reality of blue Mars, could not Ann as well? Was it 
not almost inevitable, even necessary? Might it have already happened? Sax felt 
he had come over the years to love what Ann loved in Mars; and now he wanted her 
to reciprocate, if possible. She had become for him, in a most uncomfortable 
way, his measure of the worth of what they had done. The worth, or the 
acceptability. It was a strange feeling to have settled in him, but there it 
was.
Another uncomfortable lump in his mind, like the suddenly rediscovered guilt 
about John’s death, which he would try again to forget. If he could blank out on 
the interesting thoughts he ought to be able to blank out on the awful ones, 
oughtn’t he? John had died, and nothing Sax could have done would have prevented 
it. Very probably. There was no way to say. And no way to go back. John had been 
killed and Sax had failed to help him; and here they were, Sax alive and John 
dead, nothing now but a powerful node-and-network system in the minds of all the 
people who had known him. And nothing to be done.
But Ann was alive, up there climbing the caldera walls of Olympus. He could talk 
to her if he wanted. Although she would not come out. He would have to hunt her 
down. But he could do it, that was the thing. The real sting of John’s death lay 
in the death of that chance; he could no longer talk to him. But he could still 
talk to Ann, the chance existed.
 
Work on the anamnestic package continued. Acheron was a joy that way: days in 
the labs, talking with the lab directors about their experiments and seeing if 
he could help. Weekly seminars, where they got together in front of the screens 
and shared their.results, and talked about what they meant and what they might 
try next. People interrupted their work to help with the farm, or do other 
business or go on trips; but others were there to fill in, and when people came 
back they often had new ideas, and always had a new charge of energy. Sax sat in 
the seminar rooms after the weekly roundups, looking at the coffee cups and the 
rings of brown coffee and black kava stains on the battered wooden tabletops, 
the white shiny blackboard screens covered with schemata and chemical diagrams 
and big looping arrows pointing to acronyms and alchemical symbols that Michel 
would have loved, and something inside him would glow till it hurt, some 
parasympathetic reaction spilling out of his limbic system—now this was science, 
by God, this was Martian science, in the hands of the scientists themselves, 
working together for some collective goal that made sense, that was for the 
common good; pushing at the edge of what they knew, theory and experiment 
bouncing back and forth like a blur of Ping-Pong balls, week after week finding 
out more, going after more, extending the great invisible parthenon right out 
into the uncharted territory of the human mind, into life itself. It made him so 
happy that he almost didn’t care if they ever figured things out; the search was 
all.
But his short-term memory was damaged. He was experiencing blank-outs and 
tip-of-the-tongueism every day; sometimes in the seminars he had to stop 
midsentence, almost, and sit down and wave at the others, asking them to go on; 
and they would nod and the person at the blackboard would continue. No, he 
needed the solution to this one. There would be other puzzles to pursue 
afterward, without any doubt; the quick decline itself, for instance, or any of 
the rest of the senescence problem. No, there was no lack of the unexplainable 
to work on, and never would be. Meanwhile, the problem of the anamnestic was 
hard enough.
The outlines of it were coming clear, however. One part of it would be a drug 
cocktail, a mixture of protein-synthesis enhancers, including even amphetamines 
and chemical relatives of strychnine, and then transmitters like serotonin, 
glutamate receptor sensitizers, cholinesterase, cyclic AMP, and so on. All of 
these would be there to help in different ways to reinforce the memory 
structures when they were rehearsed. Others would be included from the general 
brain plasticity treatment that Sax had received in the period following his 
stroke, at much smaller doses. Then it seemed from the experiments in electrical 
stimulation that a stimulus shock, followed by a continuous oscillation at very 
rapid frequencies phased with the subject’s natural brain waves, would serve to 
initiate the neurochemical processes augmented by the drug package. After that 
subjects would have to direct the work of remembering as best they could, 
perhaps moving from node to node if possible, with the idea that as each node 
was recalled, the network surrounding the node would then be flushed by the 
oscillations and reinforced accordingly. Moving from room to room in the theater 
of memory, in essence. Experiments with all these various aspects of the process 
were being run on volunteer subjects, often the young native experimenters 
themselves; they were remembering a great many things, they said with a kind of 
stunned awe, and the overall prospect was looking more and more promising. Week 
by week they honed their techniques, and homed in on a process.
For the work of recollection to best succeed, it was becoming clear from the 
experiments that context was an important component. Lists memorized underwater 
in diving suits could be recalled much better when the subjects returned to the 
seafloor than when they tried to remember them on land. Subjects hypnotically 
induced to feel happy or sad during memorization of a list were better at 
remembering the list when again hypnotized to feel happy or sad. Congruence of 
items in the lists helped, as did returning to rooms of the same size or color 
when remembering them. These were of course all very crude experiments, but the 
link between context and power of recollection was demonstrated by them strongly 
enough to cause Sax to think hard about where he might want to try the treatment 
when they finalized it; where, and with whom.
For the final work on the treatment Sax called up Bao Shuyo and asked her to 
come join them in Acheron for some consulations. Again, her work was much more 
theoretical, and very much more fine-grained, but after her work with the fusion 
group in Da Vinci, he had a healthy respect for her ability to help in any 
problem that involved quantum gravity and the ultramicrostructure of matter. 
Just to have her run through what they had done and comment on it would be 
valuable, he was sure.
Unfortunately, Bao’s obligations in Da Vinci were heavy, as they had been ever 
since her much-heralded return from Dorsa Brevia. Sax was put in the unusual 
position of manipulating his home labs in order to extricate- one of their best 
theorists, but he did it without compunction, getting Bela’s help to put the arm 
on the current administration, to twist their arms as hard as ever he could. 
“Ka, Sax,” Bela exclaimed during one call, “I never would have guessed that you 
would turn out to be such a fierce headhunter.” “It’s my own head I’m hunting,” 
Sax replied.


 
 
 
 
 
Usually tracking someone down was as simple as contacting their wristpad, and 
looking to see where the person was. Ann’s wristpad, however, had been left on 
the rim of the Olympus Mons caldera, at the descent station near the festival 
grounds at Crater Zp. This struck Sax as peculiar, since they had worn wristpads 
of some kind or another since the very beginning in Underbill, Ann as much as 
anyone, as he recalled. Hadn’t she? He called Peter to ask, but Peter did not 
know, of course, having been born well after the Underbill years. In any case, 
to go without a wristpad now was to borrow a behavior from the neoprimitive 
nomads wandering the canyonlands and the North Sea coast—not a lifestyle he 
would have expected Ann to take any interest in. One couldn’t live in anything 
like the Paleolithic style up on Olympus Mons, indeed it required the kind of 
continuous technological support that was no longer necessary in most places, 
with wristpads an integral part of it. Perhaps she only wanted to get away. 
Peter didn’t know.
But he did know how to contact her: “You have to go in and find her.”
At Sax’s expression he laughed. “It isn’t so bad. There’s only a couple hundred 
people in the caldera, and when they’re not staying in one of their huts, 
they’re on the cliff walls.”
“She’s become a climber?”
“Yes.”
“She climbs for—for recreation?”
“She climbs. Don’t ask me why.”
“So I just go look at all the cliffs?”
“That’s how I had to do it when Marion died.”
The summit of Olympus Mons had for the most part been left alone. Oh there were 
a few low boulder hermitages on rim overlooks, and a piste had been built on the 
northeast lava flow that broke the escarpment ring surrounding the volcano, for 
easy access to the festival complex at Crater Zp; but other than that, there was 
nothing to show what had happened to the rest of Mars, which from the rim of the 
caldera was entirely invisible, under the horizon of the encircling escarpment. 
From its rim Olympus Mons appeared to be the world entire. The local Reds had 
decided against putting a protective molecular dome over the caldera, something 
they had done over Arsia Mons; so no doubt there were bacteria, and perhaps some 
lichens that had blown over on winds and floated down into the caldera and 
survived; but at pressures little higher than the original ten millibars, they 
were not going to flourish. Probably the survivors were mostly endochasmoliths, 
so there would be no sign of them. It was a lucky thing for the Red project that 
Mars’s stupendous vertical scale kept air pressures so low on the big volcanoes; 
a free and effective sterilization technique.
Sax took the train up to Zp, and then a car on up to the rim, a taxi van driven 
by the Reds who controlled access into the caldera. The car came to the edge of 
the rim, and Sax looked down.
The caldera was multiringed, and big: ninety kilometers by sixty, about the same 
size as Luxembourg, Sax recalled hearing. The main central circle, by far the 
largest, was marred by overlapping smaller circles to the northeast, center, and 
south. The southernmost circle cut in half a slightly older, higher circle to 
the southeast; the meeting of these three arcuate walls was considered one of 
the finest climbing areas on the planet, Sax was told, with the greatest height 
anywhere in the caldera, a drop from 26 kilometers above the datum (they used 
the old term rather than sea level) down to 22.5 kilometers on the southernmost 
crater floor. A ten-thousand-foot cliff, the young Coloradoan in Sax mused.
 
The floor of the main caldera was marked by a great number of curving fault 
patterns, concentric with the caldera walls: arcing ridges and canyons, across 
which ran some straighter escarpments. These features were all explicable, they 
had been caused by recurrent caldera collapses following the sideslope drainage 
of magma from the main chamber under the volcano; but as he looked down from 
their perch on the rim, it seemed to Sax a mysterious mountain— a world of its 
own—nothing visible but the vast embayed rim, and the five thousand square 
kilometers of the caldera. Ring on ring of high curved walls and flat round 
floors, under a black starry sky. Nowhere were the encircling cliffs less than a 
thousand meters tall. As a rule they were not completely vertical; their average 
slope appeared to be just steeper than forty-five degrees. But there were 
steeper sections all over the place. No doubt the climbers flocked to the very 
steepest sections, given the nature of their interest. There looked to be some 
very vertical faces out there, even an overhang or two, as right under them, 
over the confluence of the three walls.
“I’m looking for Ann Clayborne,” Sax said to the drivers, who were rapt with the 
view. “Do you know where I could find her?”
“You don’t know where she is?” one asked.
“I’ve heard she’s climbing in the Olympus caldera.”
“Does she know you’re looking for her?”
“No. She’s not answering her calls.”
“Does she know you?”
“Oh yes. We’re old—friends.”
“And who are you?”
“Sax Russell.”
They stared at him. One said, “Old friends, eh?”
Her companion elbowed her.
They called the spot they were at Three Walls, sensibly enough. Directly under 
their car, on a little slump terrace, there was an elevator station. Sax peered 
at it through binoculars: outer-lock doors, reinforced roofing—it could have 
been a structure from the early years. The elevator was the only way down into 
this part of the caldera, if you did not care to rappel.
“Ann resupplies at Marion Station,” the elbower finally said, shocking her 
codriver. “See it, there? That square dot, where the lava channels from the main 
floor cut down into South Circle.”
This was on the opposite rim of the southernmost circle, which Sax’s map named 
“6.” Sax had trouble making out any square dot, even with the binocular’s 
magnification. But then he saw it—a tiny block just a bit too regular to be 
natural, although it had been painted the rusty gray of the local basalt. “I see 
it. How do I get there?”
“Take the elevator down, then walk on over.”
 
So he showed the elevator attendants the pass the el-bower had given him, and 
took the long elevator ride down the wall of South Circle. The elevator ran on a 
track affixed to the cliffside, and it had windows; it was like dropping in a 
helicopter, or coming down the last bit of the space elevator over Sheffield. By 
the time he got down to the caldera floor it was late afternoon; he checked into 
the spartan lodge at the bottom and ate a big leisurely dinner, thinking from 
time to time what he might say to Ann. It came to him, slowly: a coherent and it 
seemed convincing self-explication, or confession, or cri de coeur, piece by 
piece. Then to his great chagrin he blanked the whole thing. And there he was on 
the floor of a volcanic caldera, the blinkered circle of sky dark and starry 
above. On Olympus. Searching for Ann Clayborne, with nothing to say to her. Very 
chagrined.
The next morning after breakfast, he pushed his way into a walker. Although the 
materials were improved, the elastic fabric necessarily clasped the limbs and 
torso just as tightly as their old suits had. Strange how the kinetics of it 
evoked trains of thought, flashes of memory: the look of Underbill as they were 
building the foursquare dome; even a kind of somatic epiphany, which seemed to 
be a recollection of his very first walk out of the landing craft, with the 
surprise of the close horizons and the textured pink of the sky. Context and 
memory, again.
He walked out across the floor of South Circle. This morning the sky was a dark 
indigo very near black—marine blue, the chart said, an odd choice of name 
considering how dark it was. Many stars were visible. The horizon was a round 
cliff, rising on all sides: the southern semicircle three kilometers tall, the 
northeast quadrant two kilometers, the northwest quadrant one kilometer only, 
and shattered. Astonishing sight, actually—the roundness of it. Thermodynamics 
of cooling rock in magma chambers, magma throats. Out in the middle the 
encircling walls were a dizzying sight. The walls looked much the same height in 
all directions, a textbook example of foreshortening’s ability to telescope the 
perception of vertical distances.
He tromped on at a steady pace. The caldera floor was fairly smooth, pocked by 
occasional lava bombs and late meteor hits, and curving shallow grabens. Some of 
these had to be circumvented, a beautifully apt word in this case, as they were 
circumvents, he was circumventing. But for the most part he could tramp directly 
toward the broken spill of cliff in the northwest quadrant of the caldera. ‘
It took six hours of steady walking to cross the floor of South Circle, which 
was less than ten percent of the caldera complex’s total area—all the rest of 
which was invisible to him for the entire hike. No sign of life, nor of any 
disturbance to the caldera floor or walls; the atmosphere was visibly thin, 
everything equally sharp to the eye, right around the primal ten millibars, he 
judged. The untouched nature of things made him feel uncertain about even his 
boot-prints, and he tried to step on hard rock, and avoid dust patches. It was 
strangely satisfying to see the primal landscape—quite reddish—though the color 
was mostly an overlay on dark basalt. His color chart was not good at odd mixes.
Sax had never descended into one of the big calderas before. And even many years 
spent inside impact craters did not prepare one, he found—for the depth of the 
chambers, the steepness of the walls, the flatness of the floor. The sheer size 
of things.
Midafternoon he approached the foot of the northwest arc of the wall. The 
meeting of wall and floor came up over his horizon, and to his slight relief, 
the block shelter appeared directly before him; his APS setting had been quite 
accurate. Not a complicated bit of navigation, but in such an exposed place it 
was pleasant to be precisely on line. Ever since his experience in the storm so 
long ago, he had been a bit wary about getting lost. Although there would be no 
storms up here.
As he approached the hut’s lock doors, a group of people appeared from out of 
the bottom of a stupendously huge steep gully in the vast broken cliff face, 
debouching onto the crater floor about a kilometer to the west of the refuge. 
Four figures, carrying big packs on their backs. Sax stopped, the sound of his 
breath loud in his helmet: he recognized the last figure immediately. Ann was 
coming in to resupply. Now he was going to have to think of something to say. 
And then remember it too.
 
Inside the hut Sax undipped his helmet and took it off, feeling a familiar but 
most unwelcome tension in his stomach as he did. Every meeting with Ann it got 
worse. He turned around and waited. Finally Ann came in, and took off her 
helmet, and saw him. She started as if she were seeing a ghost. “Sax?” she 
cried.
He nodded. He remembered when they had last met; long ago, on Da Vinci Island; 
it felt like a previous life. He had lost his tongue.
Ann shook her head, smiled to herself. She crossed the room with an expression 
he couldn’t read, and held his arms in her two hands, and leaned forward and 
kissed his cheek gently. When she pulled back, one of her hands continued to 
clutch his left arm, sliding down to the wrist. She was staring right into him, 
and her grip was like metal. Sax was speechless again, although he very much 
wanted to speak. But there was nothing to say, or too much, he couldn’t even 
tell which it was; his tongue was again paralyzed. That hand on his wrist; it 
was more incapacitating than any glare or cutting remark had ever been.
A wave seemed to pass through her, and she became somewhat more the Ann he knew, 
looking at him suspiciously, then with alarm. “Everyone’s okay?”
“Yes yes,” Sax said. “I mean—you heard about Michel?”
“Yes.” Her mouth tightened, for a second she became the black Ann of his dreams. 
Then another wave passed through her, and she was this new stranger, still 
clutching his wrist as if trying to snip his hand off. “But now you’re just here 
to see me.”
“Yes. I wanted to”—he searched wildly for a finish to the sentence—”... to talk! 
Yes—to, to, to, to, to ask you some questions. I’m having some trouble with my 
memory. I wondered if I, if we could travel up here, and talk. Hike”— he 
gulped—”or climb. You could show me some of the caldera?”
She was smiling. Again it was some other Ann. “You can climb with me if you 
want.”
“I’m not a climber.”
“We’ll go up an easy route. Up Wang’s Gully, and over the great circle to north 
circle, I’ve wanted to get up there while it’s still summer anyway.”
“It’s Ls 200, actually. But I mean, it sounds good.” His heart was beating at 
about 150 beats a minute.
 
*      *        *
 
Ann had all the equipment they needed, it turned out. The next morning, as they 
were suiting up, she said to him, “Here, take that off.” Pointing at his 
wristpad.
“Oh dear,” Sax said. “I—isn’t it really part of the suit’s system?”
It was, but she shook her head. “The suit is autonomous.”
“Semiautonomous, I hope.”
She smiled. “Yes. But no wristpad is necessary. Look— that thing connects you to 
the whole world. It’s your manacle to spacetime. Today let’s just be in Wang’s 
Gully. It will be enough.”
It was enough. Wang’s Gully was a broad weathered chute, cutting up through 
steeper cliff ridges like a giant shattered culvert. Most of the day Sax 
followed Ann up smaller gullies within the body of this larger one, scrambling 
up waist-high steps, using his hands most of the time, but seldom with the 
feeling that a fall would kill him, or do much more than sprain an ankle. “This 
isn’t as dangerous as I thought it would be,” he said. “Is this the kind of 
climbing you always do?”
“This isn’t climbing at all.”
“Ah.”
So she went up slopes steeper than this. Taking risks that were, strictly 
speaking, unjustifiable.
And indeed, in the afternoon they came to a short wall, cut by horizontal 
fissures; Ann began to climb it, without ropes or pitons, and gritting his 
teeth, Sax followed. Near the top of a geckolike ascent, with his boot tips and 
gloved fingers all jammed into small cracks, he looked back down Wang’s Gully, 
which suddenly seemed very much steeper in its entirety than it had in any given 
section, and all his muscles began to quiver with some kind of fatigued 
excitation. Nothing for it but to finish the pitch; but he had to risk his 
position time after time as he hurried higher, the holds getting slimmer just as 
he was becoming of necessity hastier. The basalt was very slightly pitted, its 
dark gray tinged rust or sienna; he found himself hyperfocused on one crack over 
a meter above his eye level; he was going to have to use that crack; was it deep 
enough for his fingertips to gain any purchase? He had to try to find out. So he 
took a deep breath and reached up and tried, and as it turned out it was not 
really deep enough at all; but with a quick pull, groaning involuntarily at the 
effort, he was up and past it, using holds he never even consciously saw; and 
then he was on his hands and knees next to Ann, breathing very heavily. She sat 
serenely on a narrow ledge.
“Try to use your legs more,” she suggested.
“Ah.”
“Got your attention, did it?”
“Yes.”
“No memory problems, I trust?”
“No.”
“That’s what I like about climbing.”
Later that day, when the gully had lain back a bit, and opened up, Sax said, “So 
have you been having memory problems?”
“Let’s talk about that later,” Ann said. “Pay attention to this crack here.”
“Indeed.”
 
That night they lay in sleeping bags, in a clear mushroom tent big enough to 
hold ten. At this altitude, with its su-perthin atmosphere, it was impressive to 
consider the strength of the tent fabric, holding in 450 millibars of air with 
no sign of untoward bulging at any point; the clear material was nice and taut, 
but not rock hard; no doubt it was holding many bars of air less than would test 
its holding capacity. When Sax recalled the meters of rock and sandbags they had 
had to pile on their earliest habitats to keep them from exploding, he couldn’t 
help but be impressed by the subsequent advancements in materials science.
Ann nodded when he spoke of this. “We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand 
our technology.”
“Well. It’s understandable, I think. Just hard to believe.”
“I suppose I see the distinction,” she said easily.
Feeling more comfortable, he brought up memory again. “I’ve been having what I 
call blank-outs, where I can’t remember my thoughts of the previous several 
minutes, or up to say an hour. Short-term-memory failures, having to do with 
brain-wave fluctuations, apparently. And the long-term past is getting very 
uncertain as well, I’m afraid.”
For a long time she didn’t reply, except to grunt that she’d heard him. Then:
“I’ve forgotten my whole self. I think there’s someone else in me now. In 
partway. A kind of opposite. My shadow, or the shadow of my shadow. Seeded, and 
growing inside me.”
“How do you mean?” Sax said apprehensively.
“An opposite. She thinks just what I wouldn’t have thought.” She turned her head 
away, as if shy. “I call her Counter-Ann.”
“And how would you—characterize her?”
“She is ... I don’t know. Emotional. Sentimental. Stupid. Cries at the sight of 
a flower. Feels that everyone is doing their best. Crap like that.”
“You weren’t like that before, at all?”
“No no no. It’s all crap. But I feel it as though it’s real. So . . . now 
there’s Ann and Counter-Ann. And .. . maybe a third.”
“A third?”
“I think so. Something that isn’t either of the other two.”
“And what do you—I mean, do you call that one anything?”
“No. She doesn’t have a name. She’s elusive. Younger. Fewer ideas about things, 
and those ideas are—strange. Not Ann or Counter-Ann. Somewhat like that Zo, did 
you know her?”
“Yes,” Sax said, surprised. “I liked her.”
“Did you? I thought she was awful. And yet... there’s something like that in me 
as well. Three people.”
“It’s an odd way to think of it.”
She laughed. “Aren’t you the one who had a mental lab that contained all your 
memories, filed by room and cabinet number or something?”
“That was a very effective system.”
She laughed again, harder. It made him grin to hear it. Though he was frightened 
too. Three Anns? Even one had been more than he could understand.
“But I’m losing some of those labs,” he said. “Whole units of my past. Some 
people model memory as a node-and-network system, so it’s possible the 
palace-of-memory method intuitively echoes the physical system involved. But if 
you somehow lose the node, the whole network around it goes too. So, I’ll run 
across a reference in the literature to something I did, for instance, and try 
to recall doing it, what methodological problems we had or whatever, and the 
whole, the whole era will just refuse to come to me. As if it never happened.”
“A problem with the palace.”
“Yes. I didn’t anticipate it. Even after my—my incident— I was sure nothing 
would ever happen to my ability to—to think.”
“You still seem to think okay.”
Sax shook his head, recalling the blank-cuts, the gaps in memory, thepresque vus 
as Michel had called them, the confusions. Thinking was not just analytical or 
cognitive ability, but something more general.... He tried to describe what had 
been happening to him recently, and Ann seemed to be listening closely. “So you 
see, I’ve been looking at the recent work being done on memory. It’s gotten 
interesting— pressing, really. And Ursula and Marina and the Acheron labs have 
been helping me. And I think they’ve worked out something that might help us.”
“A memory drug, you mean?”
“Yes.” He explained the action of the new anamnestic complex. “So. My notion is 
to try it. But I’ve become convinced that it will work best if a number of the 
First Hundred gathered at Underbill, and take it together. Context is very 
important to recollection, and the sight of each other might help. Not everyone 
is interested, but a surprising number of the remaining First Hundred are, 
actually.”
“Not so surprising. Who?”
He named everyone he had contacted. It was, sad to admit, most of them left; a 
dozen or so. “And all of us would like it if you were there too. I know I would 
like it more than anything.”
“It sounds interesting,” Ann said. “But first we have to cross this caldera.”
 
Walking over the rock, Sax was amazed anew by the stony reality of their world. 
The fundamentals: rock, sand, dust, fines. Dark chocolate sky, on this day, and 
no stars. The long distances with no blurring to define them. The stretch of ten 
minutes. The length of an hour when one was only walking. The feeling in one’s 
legs.
And there were the rings of the calderas around them, jutting far into the sky 
even when the two walkers were out in the center of the central circle, out 
where the later, deeper calderas appeared as big embayments in a single wall’s 
roundness. Out here the planet’s sharp curvature had no effect on one’s 
perspective, the curve was for once invisible, the cliffs free and clear even 
thirty kilometers away. The net effect, it seemed to Sax, was of a kind of 
enclosure. A park, a stone garden, a maze with only one wall separating it from 
the world beyond, the world which, though invisible, conditioned everything 
here. The caldera was big but not big enough. You couldn’t hide here. The world 
poured in and overflowed the mind, no matter its hundred-trillion-bit capacity. 
No matter how big the neural array there was still just a single thread of awed 
mentation, consciousness itself, a living wire of thought saying rock, cliff, 
sky, star.
 
The rock became heavily cracked by fissures, each one an arc of a circle with 
its center point back in the middle of the central circle: old cracks relative 
to the big new holes of the north and south circles, old cracks filled with 
rubble and dust. These rock crevasses made their walk into a wandering ramble—in 
a real maze now, a maze with crevasses rather than walls, yet just as difficult 
of passage as a walled one.
But they threaded it, and finally reached the rim of north circle, number 2 on 
Sax’s map. Looking down into it gave them a new perspective—a proper shape to 
the caldera and its circular embayments, a sudden drop to a heretofore hidden 
floor, a thousand meters below.
Apparently there was a climbing route down onto the floor of north circle; but 
when Ann saw the look on his face as she pointed it out—achievable only by 
rappelling—she laughed. They would only have to climb up out of it again, she 
said easily, and the main caldera wall was already tall enough. They could hike 
around north circle to another route instead.
Surprised by this flexibility, and thankful for it, Sax followed her around the 
north circle on its west circumference. Under the great wall of the main caldera 
they stopped for the night, popped the tent, ate in silence.
After sunset Phobos shot up over the western wall of the caldera like a little 
gray flare. Fear and dread, what names.
“I heard that putting the moons back in orbit was your idea?” Ann said from her 
sleeping bag.
“Yes, it was.”
“Now that’s what I call landscape restoration,” she said, sounding pleased.
Sax felt a little glow. “I wanted to please you.”
After a silence: “I like seeing them.”
“And how did you like Miranda?”
“Oh, it was very interesting.” She talked about some of the geological features 
of the odd moon. Two planetesimals, impacted, joined together imperfectly. . . .
“There’s a color between red and green,” Sax said when it appeared she was done 
talking about Miranda. “A mixture of the two. Madder alizarin, it’s sometimes 
called. You see it in plants sometimes.”
“Uh-huhn.”
“It makes me think of the political situation. If there couldn’t be some kind of 
red-green synthesis.”
“Browns.”
“Yes. Or alizarins.”
“I thought that’s what this Free Mars-Red coalition was, Irishka and the people 
who tossed out Jackie.”
“An anti-immigration coalition,” Sax said. “The wrong kind of red-green 
combination. In that they’re embroiling us in a conflict with Earth that isn’t 
necessary.”
“No?”
“No. The population problem is soon going to be eased. The issei—we’re hitting 
the limit, I think. And the nisei aren’t far behind.”
“Quick decline, you mean.”
“Exactly. When it gets our generation, and the one after, the human population 
of the solar system will be less than half what it is now.”
“Then they’ll figure out a different way to screw it up.”
“No doubt. But it won’t be the Hypermalthusian Age anymore. It’ll be their 
problem. So, worrying so much about immigration, to the point of causing 
conflict, threatening interplanetary war... it just isn’t necessary. It’s 
shortsighted. If there was a red movement on Mars pointing that out, offering to 
help Earth through the last of the surge years, it might keep people from 
killing each other, needlessly. It would be a new way of thinking about Mars.”
“A new areophany.”
“Yes. That’s what Maya called it.”
She laughed. “But Maya is crazy.”
“Why no,” Sax said sharply. “She certainly is not.”
Ann said no more, and Sax did not press the issue. Phobos moved visibly across 
the sky, backward through the zodiac.
They slept well. The next day they made an arduous climb up a steep gully in the 
wall, which apparently Ann and the other red climbers considered the walker’s 
route out. Sax had never had such a hard day’s work in his life; and even so 
they didn’t make it all the way out, but had to pitch the tent in haste at 
sunset, on a narrow ledge, and finish their emergence the following day, around 
noon.
 
On the great rim of Olympus Mons, all was as before. A giant cored circle of 
flat land; the violet sky in a band around the horizon so far below, a black 
zenith above; little hermitages scattered in boulder ejecta that had been 
hollowed out. A separate world. Part of blue Mars, but not.
The hut they stopped at first was inhabited by very old red mendicants of some 
sort, apparently living there while waiting for the quick decline to strike 
them, after which their bodies would be cremated, and the ashes cast into the 
thin jet stream.
This struck Sax as overfatalistic. Ann apparently was likewise unimpressed: “All 
right,” she said, watching them eat their meager meal. “Let’s go try this memory 
treatment then.”


 
 
 
 
 
Many of the First Hundred argued for sites other than Underhill, arguing in a 
way that they didn’t even recognize as part of their group nature; but Sax was 
adamant, shrugging off requests for Olympus Mons, low orbit, Pseudophobos, 
Sheffield, Odessa, Hell’s Gate, Sabishii, Senzeni Na, Acheron, the south polar 
cap, Mangala, and on the high seas. He insisted that the setting for such a 
procedure was a critical factor, as experiments on context had proved. Coyote 
brayed most inappropriately at his description of the experiment with students 
in scuba gear learning word lists on the floor of the North Sea, but data were 
data, and given the data, why not do their experiment in the place where they 
would get the best results? The stakes were high enough to justify doing 
everything they could to get it right. After all, Sax pointed out, if their 
memories were returned to them intact, anything might be 
possible—anything—breakthroughs on other fronts, a defeat of the quick decline, 
health that lasted centuries more, an ever-expanding community of garden worlds, 
from thence perhaps up again in some emergent phase change to a higher level of 
progress, into some realm of wisdom that could not even be imagined at this 
point— they teetered on the edge of some such golden age, Sax told them. But it 
all depended on wholeness of mind. Nothing could continue without wholeness of 
mind. And so he insisted on Underhill.
“You’re too sure,” Marina complained; she had been arguing for Acheron. “You 
have to keep more of an open mind about things.”
“Yes yes.” Keep an open mind. This was easy for Sax, his mind was a lab that had 
burned down. Now he stood in the open air. And no one could refute the logic of 
Underhill, not Marina nor any of the rest of them. Those who objected were 
afraid, he thought—afraid of the power of the past. They did not want to 
acknowledge that power over them, they did not want to give themselves fully 
over to it. But that was what they needed to do. Certainly Michel would have 
supported the choice of Underhill, had he been still among them. Place was 
crucial, all their lives had served to show that. And even the people dubious, 
or skeptical, or afraid—i.e. all of them—had to admit that Underhill was the 
appropriate place, given what they were trying to do.
So in the end they agreed to meet there.
 
At this point Underhill was a kind of museum, kept in the state it had been in 
in 2138, the last year it had been a functioning piste stop. This meant that it 
did not look exactly as it had in the years of their occupancy, but the older 
parts were all still there, so the changes since wouldn’t affect their project 
much, Sax judged. After his arrival with several others he took a walk around to 
see, and there the old buildings all were: the original four habitats, dropped 
whole from space; their junk heaps; Nadia’s square of barrel vault chambers, 
with their domed center; Hiroko’s greenhouse framework, its enclosing bubble 
gone; Nadia’s trench arcade off to the northwest; Chernobyl; the salt pyramids; 
and finally the Alchemist’s Quarter, where Sax ended his walk, wandering around 
in the warren of buildings and pipes, trying to ready himself for the next day’s 
experience. Trying for an open mind.
Already his memory was seething, as if trying to prove that it needed no help to 
do its work. Here among these buildings he had first witnessed the 
transformative power of technology over the blank materiality of nature; they 
had started with just rocks and gases, really, and from that they had extracted 
and purified and transformed and recombined and shaped, in so many different 
ways that no one person could keep good track of them all, nor even imagine 
their effect. So he had seen but he had not understood: and they had acted 
perpetually in ignorance of their true powers, and with (perhaps as a result) 
very little sense of what they were trying for. But there in the Alchemist’s 
Quarter, he hadn’t been able to see that. He had been so sure that the world 
made green would be a fine place.
Now here he stood in the open, head free under a blue sky, in the heat of second 
August, looking around and trying to think, to remember. It was hard to direct 
the memory; things simply occurred to him. The objects in the old part of town 
felt distinctly familiar, as in the word’s root meaning “of the family.” Even 
the individual red stones and boulders around the settlement, and all the bumps 
and hollows in view, were perfectly familiar, all still in their proper places 
on the compass flower. Prospects for the experiment seemed very good to Sax; 
they were in their place, in their context, situated, oriented. At home.
He returned to the square of barrel vaults, where they were going to stay. Some 
cars had driven in during his walk, and some little excursion trains were parked 
on the sidings next to the piste. People were arriving. There were Maya and 
Nadia, hugging Tasha and Andrea, who had arrived together; their voices rang in 
the air like a Russian opera, like recitative on the edge of bursting into song. 
Of the hundred and one they had begun with, there were only fourteen of them 
going to show up: Sax, Ann, Maya, Nadia, Desmond, Ursula, Marina, Vasili, 
George, Edvard, Roger, Mary, Dmitri, Andrea. Not so many, but it was every one 
of them still alive and in contact with the world; all the rest were dead, or 
missing. If Hiroko and the other seven of the First Hundred who had disappeared 
with her were still alive, they had sent no word. Perhaps they would show up 
unannounced, as they had at John’s first festival on Olympus. Perhaps not.
So they were fourteen. Thus reduced, Underbill seemed underoccupied; though all 
of it was theirs to spread out in, they yet crowded together into the south wing 
of the barrel vaults. Nevertheless the emptiness of the rest of it was palpable. 
It was as if the place itself was an image of their failing memories, with their 
lost labs and lost lands and lost companions. Every single one of them was 
suffering from memory losses and disorders of one sort or another—between them 
they had experienced almost all the problems in mentation mentioned in the 
literature, as far as Sax could tell, and a good bit of their conversation was 
taken up in comparative symptomatology, in the recounting of various terrifying 
and/or sublime experiences that had afflicted them in the last decade. It made 
them jocular and somber by turns, as they milled around that evening in the 
little barrel-vault kitchen in the southwest corner, with its high window 
looking out onto the floor of the central greenhouse, still under its thick 
glass dome, in its muted light. They ate a picnic dinner brought in coolers, 
talking, catching up, then spreading along the south wing, preparing the 
upstairs bedrooms for an uneasy night. They stayed up as late as they could, 
talking and talking; but eventually they gave up, in ones and twos, and tried to 
sleep. Several times that night Sax woke from dreams, and heard people stumbling 
down to the bathrooms, or whispering conversations in the kitchen, or muttering 
to themselves in the troubled sleep of the aged. Each time he managed to slip 
back under again, into a light dream-filled sleep of his own.
Finally morning came. They were up at dawn; in the horizontal light they ate a 
quick breakfast, fruit and croissants and bread and coffee. Long shadows cast 
west from every rock and hillock. So familiar.
Then they were ready. There was nothing else to do. There was a kind of 
collective deep breath—uneasy laughter—an inability to meet the others’ eyes.
Maya, however, was still refusing to take the treatment. She was unswayed by 
every argument they tried. “I won’t,” she had said over and over the night 
before. “You’ll need a keeper in any case, in case you go crazy. I’ll do that.”
Sax had thought she would change her mind, that she was just being Maya. Now he 
stood before her, baffled. “I thought you were haying the worst memory troubles 
of all.”
“Perhaps.”
“So it would make sense to try this treatment. Michel gave you lots of different 
drugs for mental trouble.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, looking him in the eye.
He sighed. “I don’t understand you, Maya.”
“I know.”
And she went into the old med clinic in the corner, and took on her role as 
their keeper for the day. Everything in there was ready, and she called them in 
one by one, and took up little ultrasound injectors and put them to their necks, 
and with a little click-hiss administered one part of the drug package, and gave 
them the pills that contained the rest of it, and then helped them insert the 
earplugs that were custom-designed for each of them, to broadcast the silent 
electromagnetic waves. In the kitchen they waited for everyone to finish their 
preparations, in a nervous silence. When they were all done Maya ushered them to 
the door and guided them outside. And they were off.
 
Sax saw and felt an image: bright lights, a feeling of his skull being crushed, 
choking, gasping, spitting. Chill air and his mother’s voice, like an animal’s 
yelp, “Oh? Oh? Oh! Oh!” Then lying wet on her chest, cold.
 
“Oh my.”
The hippocampus was one of several specific brain regions that had been very 
strongly stimulated by the treatment. This meant that his limbic system, spread 
under the hippocampus like a net under a walnut, was likewise stimulated, as if 
the nut were bouncing up and down on a trampoline of nerves, causing the 
trampoline to resonate or even to jangle. Thus Sax felt the start of what would 
no doubt be a flood of emotions—registering not any single emotion, he noted, 
but many at once and at nearly the same intensity, and free of any cause—joy, 
grief, love, hate, exhilaration, melancholy, hope, fear, generosity, 
jealousy—many of which of course did not match with their opposite or with most 
of the others present in him. The result of this overcrowded mix, for Sax at any 
rate, sitting on a bench outside the barrel vault, breathing hard, was a kind of 
adrenalized breath-stopping growth in his sensation of significance. A suffusion 
of meaning through everything—it was heartbreaking, or heart filling—as if 
oceans of clouds were stuffed in his chest, so that he could scarcely breathe—a 
kind of nostalgia to the nth power, a fullness, even bliss—pure sublimity—just 
sitting there, just the fact that they were alive! But all of it with a sharp 
edge of loss, with regret for lost time, with fear of death, fear of everything, 
grief for Michel, for John, for all of them really. This was so unlike Sax’s 
usual calm, steady, one might even say phlegmatic state, that he was almost 
incapacitated; he could not move well, and for several minutes he bitterly 
regretted ever initiating any such experiment as this. It was very 
foolish—idiotically foolhardy—no doubt everyone would hate him forever.
Stunned, nearly overwhelmed, he decided to try to walk, to see if that would 
clear his head. He found he could walk; push off the bench, stand, balance, 
walk, avoiding others who were wandering by in their own worlds, as oblivious to 
him as he was to them, everyone getting past each other like objects to be 
avoided. And then he was out in the open space of the Underbill environs, out in 
the chilly morning breeze, walking toward the salt pyramids, under a strangely 
blue sky.
He stopped and looked around—considered—grunted in surprise, came to a 
halt—could not walk. For all of a sudden he could remember everything.
 
Not everything everything. He could not recall what he had had for breakfast on 
2 August 13 in 2029, for instance; that was in accord with experiments which 
suggested that daily habitual activities were not differentiated enough on 
entrainment to allow for individual recall. But as a class . . . in the late 
2020s he had started his days back in the barrel vault, at the southeast corner, 
where he had shared an upstairs bedroom with Hiroko, Evgenia, Rya, and Iwao. 
Experiments, incidents, conversations flickered in his mind as he saw that 
bedroom in his mind’s eye. A node in timespace, vibrating a whole network of 
days. Rya’s pretty back across the room as she washed under her arms. Things 
people said that hurt in their carelessness. Vlad talking about clipping genes. 
He and Vlad had stood out here together on this very spot, in their very first 
minute on Mars, looking around at everything without a word for each other, just 
absorbing the gravity and the pink of the sky and the close horizons, looking 
just as they looked now, so many years later: areo-logical time, as slow and 
long as the great systolis itself. In the walkers one had felt hollow. Chernobyl 
had required more concrete than could be cured in the thin dry cold air. Nadia 
had fixed it somehow, how? Heating it, that’s right. Nadia had fixed a lot of 
things in those years—the barrel vaults, the manufactories, the arcade—who would 
have suspected a person so quiet on the Ares would prove so competent and 
energetic? He hadn’t remembered that Ares impression of her for ages. She had 
been so pained when Tatiana Durova was killed by a falling crane, it was a shock 
to them all, all except Michel, who had been revealed as amazingly dissociated 
by the disaster, their first death. Would Nadia remember that now? Yes, she 
would if she thought about it. Nothing unique about Sax, or to be more accurate, 
if the treatment was working on him, it would work on all of them. There was 
Vasili, who had fought for UNOMA in both revolutions; what was he remembering? 
He looked stricken, but it could have been rapture—anything or everything—very 
likely it was the everything emotion, the fullness, apparently one of the first 
effects of the treatment. Perhaps he was remembering Tatiana’s death as well. 
Once Sax and Tatiana had gone out on a hike in Antarctica during their year 
there, and Tatiana had slipped on a loose boulder and sprained an ankle, and 
they had had to wait on Nussbaum Riegel for a helicopter from McMurdo to lift 
them back to camp. He had forgotten that for years, and then Phyllis had 
reminded him of it the night she had had him arrested, and he had promptly 
forgotten it again until this very moment. Two rehearsals in two hundred years; 
but now it was back, the low sun, the cold, the beauty of the Dry Valleys, 
Phyllis’s jealousy of Tatiana’s great dark beauty. That their beauty should die 
first—it was like a sign, a primal curse, Mars as Pluto, planet of fear and 
dread. And now that day in Antarctica, the two women long dead—he was the only 
carrier of that day so precious, without him it would be gone. Ah yes—what one 
could remember was precisely the part of the past that one had felt the most, 
the events spiked by emotion above a certain threshold—the great joys, the great 
crises, the great disasters. And the small ones as well. He had been cut from 
the seventh-grade basketball team, had cried alone after reading the list, at a 
drinking fountain at the far edge of the school, thinking You will remember this 
forever. And by God he had. Great beauty. The first times one did things had 
that special charge, first love—who had that been, though? A blank, back there 
in Boulder, a face—some friend of a friend—but that wasn’t love; and he couldn’t 
recall her name. No—now he was thinking of Ann Clayborne, standing before him, 
looking at him closely, sometime long ago. What had he been trying to recall? 
The rush of thought was so dense and rapid he would not be able to remember some 
of this remembering, he was pretty sure. A paradox, but only one of many caused 
by the single thread of consciousness in the huge field of the mind. Ten to the 
forty-third power, the matrix in which all big bangs flowered. Inside the skull 
was a universe as vast as the one outside. Ann—he had taken a walk with her in 
Antarctica as well. She was strong. Curious, during the walk across Olympus Mons 
caldera he had never once remembered this walk across Wright Valley in 
Antarctica, despite the similarities, a walk during which they had argued so 
earnestly over the fate of Mars, and he had wanted so much to take her hand, or 
for her to take his, why he had had a kind of crush on her! And him in his 
lab-rat mode, having never before risen to such feelings, now stifled for no 
better reason than shyness. She had looked at him curiously but had not 
understood his import, only wondered that he should stammer so. He had stammered 
a fair bit when a boy, it was a biochemical problem apparently solved by 
puberty, but it occasionally came back when he was nervous. Ann—Ann—he saw her 
face as he argued with her on the Ares, in Underbill, in Dorsa Brevia, in the 
warehouse on Pavonis. Why always this assault on a woman he had been attracted 
to, why? She was so strong. And yet he had seen her so depressed that she lay 
helplessly on the floor, in that boulder car, for many days as her red Mars 
died. Just lay there. But then she had pried herself off the floor and gone on. 
She had stopped Maya from yelling at him. She had helped bury her partner Simon. 
She had done all these things, and never, never, never had Sax been anything but 
a burden to her. Part of her pain. That was what he was for her. Angry with her 
in Zygote or Gamete—Gamete—both, really—her face so drawn—and then he hadn’t 
seen her for twenty years. And then later, after he had forced the longevity 
treatment on her, he hadn’t seen her for thirty years. All that time, wasted. If 
they lived for a thousand years it wouldn’t be long enough to justify such 
waste.
Wandering in the Alchemist’s Quarter. He came on Vasili again, sitting in the 
dust with the tears running down his face. The two of them had botched the 
Underbill algae experiment together, right there inside this very building, but 
Sax doubted very much that this was what Vasili was crying about. Something from 
the many years he had worked for UNOMA, perhaps, or something else—no way to 
know— well, he could ask—but wandering around Underhill seeing faces, and then 
remembering in a rush everything about them that one knew, was not a situation 
conducive to follow-up inquiries. No—walk on, leave Vasili to his own past. Sax 
did not want to know what Vasili regretted. Besides, halfway to the horizon to 
the north a figure was striding away alone—Ann. Odd to see her head free of a 
helmet, white hair coursing back in the wind. It was enough to stop the flow of 
memories—but then he had seen her that way before, in Wright Valley, yes, her 
hair light then too, dishwater blond they called that color, not very 
generously. So dangerous to develop any bond under the watchful eyes of the 
psychologists. They were there on business, under pressure, there was no room 
for personal relations which were dangerous indeed, as Natasha and Sergei had 
proved. But still it happened. Vlad and Ursula became a couple, solid, stable; 
and same with Hiroko and Iwao, Nadia and Arkady. But the danger, the risk. Ann 
had looked at him across the lab table, eating lunch, and there was something in 
her eye, some regard—he didn’t know, he couldn’t read people. They were all such 
mysteries. The day he got his letter of acceptance, selection to the First 
Hundred, he had felt so sad; why was that? No way of knowing. But now he saw 
that letter in the fax box, the maple tree outside the window; he had called Ann 
to see if she had been included— she had, a bit of a surprise, her such a loner, 
but he had been a bit happier, but still—sad. The maple had been red-leafed; 
autumn in Princeton, traditionally a melancholy time, but that hadn’t been it, 
not at all. Just sad. As if accomplishment were nothing but a certain number of 
the body’s three billion heartbeats passed. And now it was ten billion, and 
counting. No, there was no explanation. People were mysteries. So when Ann had 
said, “Do you want to hike out to Lookout Point?” in that dry valley lab, he had 
agreed instantly, without a stammer. And without really arranging to, they had 
walked out separately; she had left the camp and hiked out to Lookout Point, and 
he had followed, and out there—oh yes—looking down at the cluster of huts and 
the greenhouse dome, a kind of proto-Underhill, he had taken her gloved hand in 
his, as they sat side by side arguing over terraforming in a perfectly friendly 
way, no stakes involved. And she had pulled her hand away as if shocked, and 
shuddered (it was very cold, for Terra anyway) and he had stammered just as 
badly as he had after his stroke. A limbic hemorrhage, killing on the spot 
certain elements, certain hopes, yearnings. Love dead. And he had harried her 
ever since. Not that these events functioned as proper causal explanations, no 
matter what Michel would have said! But the Antarctic cold of that walk back to 
the base. Even in the eidetic clarity of his current power of recollection he 
could not see much of that walk. Distracted. Why, why had he repelled her so? 
Little man. White lab coat. There was no reason. But it had happened. And left 
its mark forever. And even Michel had never known.
Repression. Thinking of Michel made him think of Maya. Ann was on the horizon 
now, he would never catch her; he wasn’t sure he wanted to at that moment, still 
stunned by this so-surprising, so-painful memory. He went looking for Maya. Past 
where Arkady had laughed at their tawdriness when he came down from Phobos, past 
Hiroko’s greenhouse where she had seduced him with her impersonal friendliness, 
like primates on the savanna, the alpha female grabbing one male among the 
others, an alpha, a beta, or that class of could-be-alpha-but-not-interested 
which struck him as the only decent way to behave; past the trailer park where 
they had all slept on the floor together, a family. With Desmond in a closet 
somewhere. Desmond had promised to show them how he had lived then, all his 
hiding places. Jumble of Desmond images, the flight over the burning canal, then 
the flight over burning Kasei, the fear in Kasei as the security people strapped 
him into their insane device; that had been the end of Saxifrage Russell. Now he 
was something else, and Ann was Counter-Ann, also the third woman that was 
neither Ann nor Counter-Ann. He could perhaps speak to her on that basis: as two 
strangers, meeting. Rather than the two who had met in the Antarctic.
Maya was sitting in the barrel-vault kitchen, waiting for a big teapot to boil. 
She was making tea for them.
“Maya,” Sax said, feeling the words like pebbles in his mouth, “You should try 
it. It’s not so bad.”
She shook her head. “I remember everything that I want to. Even now, without 
your drugs, even now when I hardly remember anything, I still remember more than 
you ever will. I don’t want any more than that.”
It was possible that minute quantities of the drugs had gotten into the air and 
thus onto her skin, giving her a small fraction of the hyperemotional 
experience. Or perhaps this was just her ordinary state.
“Why shouldn’t now be enough?” she was saying. “I don’t want my past back, I 
don’t want it. I can’t bear it.”
“Maybe later,” Sax said.
What could one say to her? She had been like this in Underbill as 
well—unpredictable, moody. It was amazing what eccentrics had been selected to 
the First Hundred. But what choice had the selection committee had? People were 
all like that, unless they were stupid. And they hadn’t sent stupid people to 
Mars, or not at first, or not too many. And even the dull-witted had their 
complexities.
“Maybe,” she said now, and patted his head, and took the teapot off the burner. 
“Maybe not. I remember too much as it is.”
“Frank?” Sax said.
“Of course. Frank, John—they’re all there.” She stabbed her chest with a thumb. 
“It hurts enough. I don’t need more.”
“Ah.”
He walked back outside, feeling stuffed, uncertain of anything, off balance. 
Limbic system vibrating madly under the impact of his whole life, under the 
impact of Maya, so beautiful and damned. How he wished her happy, but what could 
one do? Maya lived her unhappiness to the full, it made her happy one might say. 
Or complete. Perhaps she felt this acutely uncomfortable emotional overfullness 
all the time! Wow. So much easier to be phlegmatic. And yet she was so alive. 
The way she had flailed them onward out of the chaos, south to the refuge in 
Zygote . .. such strength. All these strong women. Actually to face up to life’s 
awfulness, awefullness, to face it and feel it without denial, without defenses, 
just admit it and carry on. John, Frank, Arkady, even Michel, they had all had 
their great optimism, pessimism, idealism, their mythologies to mask the pain of 
existence, all their various sciences, and still they were dead—killed off one 
way or another—leaving Nadia and Maya and Ann to carry on and carry on. No doubt 
he was a lucky man to have such tough sisters. Even Phyllis— yes, somehow—with 
the toughness of the stupid, making her way, pretty well at least, fairly well, 
well at least making it, for a while. Never giving up. Never admitting anything.
She had protested his torture, Spencer had told him so, Spencer and all their 
hours of aerodynamics together, telling him over too many whiskeys how she had 
gone to the security chief in Kasei and demanded his release, his decent 
treatment, even after he had knocked her cold, almost killed her with nitrous 
oxide, lied to her in her own bed. She had forgiven him apparently, and Spencer 
had never forgiven Maya for killing her, though he pretended he had; and Sax had 
forgiven her, even though for years he had acted as if he hadn’t, to get some 
kind of hold on her. Ah the strange recombinant tangle they had made of their 
lives, result of the overextension, or perhaps it was that way in every village 
always. But so much sadness and betrayal! Perhaps memory was triggered by loss, 
as everything was inevitably lost. But what about joy? He tried to remember: 
could one cast back by emotional category, interesting idea, was that possible? 
Walking through the halls of the terraforming conference, for instance, and 
seeing the poster board that estimated the heat contribution of the Russell 
Cocktail at twelve kelvins. Waking up in Echus Overlook and seeing that the 
Great Storm was gone, the pink sky radiant with sunlight. Seeing the faces on 
the train as they slid out of Libya Station. Being kissed in the ear by Hiroko, 
in the baths one winter day in Zygote, when it was evening all afternoon. 
Hiroko! Ah—ah—He had been huddling in the cold, quite vexed to think he would be 
killed by a storm just when things were getting interesting, trying to work out 
how he might call his car to him, as it seemed he would not be able to get to 
it, and then there she had appeared out of the snow, a short figure in a 
rust-red spacesuit, bright in the white storm of wind and horizontal snow, the 
wind so loud that even the intercom mike in his helmet was no more than a 
whisper: “Hiroko?” he cried as he saw her face through the slush-smeared 
faceplate; and she said “yes.” And pulled him up by the wrist—helped him up. 
That hand on his wrist! He felt it. And up he came, like viriditas itself, the 
green force pouring through him, through the white noise, the white static 
sleeting by, her grip warm and hard, as full as the plenum itself. Yes. Hiroko 
had been there. She had led him back to the car, had saved his life, had then 
disappeared again, and no matter how certairj Desmond was of her death in 
Sabishii, no matter how convincing his arguments were, no matter how often 
second climbers had been hallucinated by solo climbers in distress, Sax knew 
better, because of that hand on his wrist, that visitation in the snow—Hiroko 
herself in the hard compact flesh, as real as rock. Alive! So that he could rest 
in that knowledge, he could know something—in the inexplicable seeping of the 
unexplainable into everything, he could rest in that known fact. Hiroko lived. 
Start with that and go on, build on it, the axiom of a lifetime of joy. Perhaps 
even convince Desmond of it, give him that peace.
He was back outside, looking for the Coyote. Not an easy task, ever. What did 
Desmond recall of Underhill—hiding, whispers, the lost farm crew, then the lost 
colony, slipping away with them—out there driving around Mars in disguised 
boulder cars, being loved by Hiroko, flying over the night surface in a 
stealthed plane, playing the demimonde, knitting the underground together—Sax 
could almost remember it himself, it was so vivid to him. Telepathic transfer of 
all their stories to all of them; one hundred squared, in the square of barrel 
vaults. No. That would be too much. Just the imagination of someone else’s 
reality was stunning enough, was all the telepathy one required or could handle.
But where had Desmond gone? Hopeless. One could never find Coyote; one only 
waited for him to find you. He would show up when he chose. For now, out 
northwest of the pyramids and the Alchemist’s Quarter, there was a very ancient 
lander skeleton, probably from the original pre-landing-equipment drop, its 
metal stripped of paint and encrusted with salt. The beginning of their hopes, 
now a skeleton of old metal, nothing really. Hiroko had helped him unload this 
one.
Back into the Alchemist’s Quarter, all the machines in the old buildings shut 
down, hopelessly outdated, even the very clever Sabatier processor. He had 
enjoyed watching that thing work. Nadia had fixed it one day when everyone else 
was baffled; little round woman humming some tune in a world of her own, 
communing with machinery, back when machines could be understood. Thank God for 
Nadia, the anchor holding them all to reality, the one they could always count 
on. He wanted to give her a hug, this most beloved sister of his, who it 
appeared was over there in the vehicle yard trying to get a museum-exhibit 
bulldozer to run.
But there on the horizon was a figure walking westward over a knoll: Ann. Had 
she been circling the horizon, walking and walking? He ran out toward her, 
stumbling just as he would have in the first week. He caught up with her, 
slowly, gasping.
“Ann? Ann?”
She turned and he saw the instinctive fear on her face, as on the face of a 
hunted animal. He was a creature to run from; this was what he had been to her. 
“I made mistakes,” he said as he stopped before her. They could speak in the 
open air, in the air he had made over her objection. Though it was still thin 
enough to make one gasp. “I didn’t see the— the beauty until it was too late. 
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Oh he had tried to say it before, 
in Michel’s car when the deluge poured, in Zygote, in Tempe Terra; never had it 
worked. Ann and Mars, all intertwined— and yet he had no apology to make to 
Mars, every sunset was beautiful, the sky’s color a different washed tint every 
minute of every day, blue sign of their power and their responsibility, their 
place in the cosmos and their power within it, so small and yet so important; 
they had brought life to Mars and it was good, he was sure of that.
But to Ann he needed to apologize. For the years of missionary fervor, the 
pressure applied to make her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, 
to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry—his face wet with tears, and she 
stared at him so—just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in 
that first refusal—which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past.
“Do you remember?” he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new train of 
thought. “We walked out to Lookout Point together—I mean one after the next—but 
to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean—you know how it was 
then—that Russian couple had fought and been sent home—we all hid everything we 
could from the selection people!” He laughed, choking somewhat, at the image of 
their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything since played out so 
in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars and replayed 
everything just as it had always been played before, it was nothing but trait 
recurrence, pattern repetition. “We sat there and I thought we were getting on 
and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn’t like it. I felt, I felt 
bad. We went back separately and didn’t talk again like that, in that way, not 
ever.
And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it was because 
of the, the ...” He waved at the blue sky.
“I remember,” she said.
She was looking cross-eyed at him. He felt the shock of it; one didn’t get to do 
this, one never got to say to the lost love of one’s youth I remember, it still 
hurts. And yet there she stood, looking at his face amazed.
“Yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what happened,” she said, frowning. “It was 
me. I mean, I put my hand on your shoulder, I liked you, it seemed like we might 
become . . . but you jumped! Ha, you jumped like I had shocked you with a cattle 
prod! Static electricity was bad down there, but still”—sharp laugh—”no. It was 
you. You didn’t—it wasn’t your kind of thing, I figured. And it wasn’t mine 
either! In a way it should have worked, just because of that. But it didn’t. And 
then I forgot about it.”
“No,” Sax said.
He shook his head, in a primitive attempt to recast his thought, to re-remember. 
He could still see in his mental theater that awkward instant at Lookout Point, 
the whole thing clear almost word for word, move for move, it’s a net gain in 
order, he had said, trying to explain the purpose of science; and she had said, 
for that you would destroy the entire face of a planet. He remembered it.
But there was that look on Ann’s face as she recalled the incident, that look of 
someone in full possession of a moment of her past, alive with the 
upwelling—clearly she remembered it too—and yet remembered something different 
than he had. One of them had to be wrong, didn’t they? Didn’t they?
“Could we really,” he said, and had to stop and try again. “Could we really have 
been two such maladroit people as to both go out—intending to—to reveal 
ourselves—”
Ann laughed. “And both go away feeling rebuffed by the other?” She laughed 
again. “Why sure.”
He laughed as well. They turned their faces to the sky and laughed.
But then Sax shook his head, rueful to the point of agony. Whatever had 
happened—well. No way of knowing, now. Even with his memory upwelling like an 
artesian fountain, like one of the cataclysmic outbreak floods themselves, there 
was still no way to be sure what had really happened.
Which gave him a sudden chill. If he could not trust these upwelling memories to 
be true—if one so crucial as this one was now cast in doubt—what then of the 
others, what about Hiroko there in the storm, leading him to his car, hand on 
his wrist—could that too be. . . . No. That hand on his wrist. But Ann’s hand 
had jerked away from him, a somatic memory just as solidly real, just as 
physical, a kinetic event remembered in his body, in the pattern of cells for as 
long as he should live. That one had to be true; they both had to be true.
And so?
So that was the past. There and not there. His whole life. If nothing was real 
but this moment, Planck instant after Planck instant, an unimaginably thin 
membrane of becoming between past and future—his life—what then was it, so thin, 
so without any tangible past or future: a blaze of color. A thread of thought 
lost in the act of thinking. Reality so tenuous, so barely there; was there 
nothing they could hold to?
He tried to say some of this, stammered, failed, gave up.
“Well,” Ann said, apparently understanding him. “At least we remember that much. 
I mean, we agree that we went out there. We had ideas, they didn’t work out. 
Something happened that we probably neither understood at the time, so it’s no 
surprise we can’t remember it properly now, or that we recall it differently. We 
have to understand something to remember it.”
“Is that true?”
“I think so. It’s why two-year-olds can’t remember. They feel things like crazy, 
but they don’t remember them because they don’t really understand them.”
“Perhaps.”
He wasn’t sure that was how memory worked. Early childhood memories Were eidetic 
images, like exposed photographic plates. But if it was true, then he was 
perhaps all right; for he had definitely understood Hiroko’s appearance in the 
storm, her hand on his wrist. These things of the heart, in the violence of the 
storm... .
Ann stepped forward and gave him a hug. He turned his face to the side, his ear 
pressed against her collarbone. She was tall. He felt her body against his, and 
he hugged her back, hard. You will remember this forever, he thought. She held 
him away from her, held him by the arms. “That’s the past,” she said. “It 
doesn’t explain what happened between us on Mars, I don’t think. It’s a 
different matter.”
“Perhaps.”
“We haven’t agreed, but we had the same—the same terms. The same things were 
important to us. I remember when you tried to make me feel better, in that 
boulder car in Marineris, during the outbreak flood.”
“And you me. When Maya was yelling at me, after Frank died.”
“Yes,” she said, thinking back. Such power of recall they had in these amazing 
hours! That car had been a crucible, they had all metamorphosed in it, in their 
own ways. “I suppose I did. It wasn’t fair, you were just trying to help her. 
And that look on your face....”
They stood there, looking back at the scattering of low structures that was 
Underbill.
“And here we are,” Sax said finally.
“Yes. Here we are.”
Awkward instant. Another awkward instant. This was life with the other: one 
awkward instant after the next. He would have to get used to it, somehow. He 
stepped back. He reached out and held her hand, squeezed it hard. Then let go. 
She wanted to walk out past Nadia’s arcade, she said, into the untouched 
wilderness west of Underbill. She was experiencing a rush of memory too strong 
to concentrate on the present. She needed to walk.
He understood. Off she went, with a wave. With a wave! And there was Coyote, 
over there near the salt pyramids so brilliant in the afternoon light. Feeling 
Mars’s gravity for the first time in decades, Sax hopped over to the little man. 
The only one of the First Hundred’s men who had been shorter than Sax. His 
brother in arms.
 
Stumbling here and there through his life, step-by-step shocked elsewhere, it 
was actually quite difficult to focus on Coyote’s asymmetrical face, faceted 
like Deimos—but there it was, most vibrantly there, pulsing it seemed with all 
its past shapes as well. At least Desmond had more or less resembled himself 
throughout. God knew what Sax looked like to the others, or what he would see if 
he looked in a mirror—the idea was dizzying, it might even be interesting to 
test it, look in a mirror while remembering something from his youth, the view 
might distort. Desmond, a Toba-gonian of Indian descent, now saying something 
difficult to comprehend, something about rapture of the deeps, unclear if he was 
referring to the memory drug or to some nautical incident from his youth. Sax 
wanted so much to tell him that Hiroko was alive, but just as the words were on 
the tip of his tongue, he stopped himself. Desmond looked so happy at this 
moment; and he would not believe Sax. So it would only upset him. Knowledge by 
experience is not always translatable into discursive knowledge, which was a 
shame, but there it was. Desmond would not believe him because he had not felt 
that hand on his wrist. And why should he, after all?
They walked out toward Chernobyl, talking about Arkady and Spencer. “We’re 
getting old,” Sax said.
Desmond hooted. He still had a most alarming laugh— infectious, however, and Sax 
laughed too. “Getting old? Getting old?”
The sight of their little Rickover put them into paroxysms. Though it was 
pathetic as well, and brave, and stupid, and clever. Their limbic systems were 
overloaded still, Sax noted, jangling with all the emotions at once. All his 
past was coming clearer and clearer, in a kind of simultaneous overlay of 
sequences, each event with its unique emotional charge, now firing all at once: 
so full, so full. Perhaps fuller than the, the what—the mind? the soul?—fuller 
than it was capable of being. Overflowing, yes, that was the way it felt. 
“Desmond, I’m overflowing.”
Desmond only laughed harder.
His life had exceeded his capacity to feel it all at once. Except what was this, 
then, this feeling? A limbic hum, the roaring hum of the wind in conifers high 
in the mountains, lying in a sleeping bag at night in the Rockies, with the wind 
thrumming through the pine needles. . . . Very interesting. Possibly an effect 
of the drug, which would pass, although he was hoping that there were effects of 
the drug that would last, and who could say if this aspect might not as well, as 
an integral part of the whole? Thus: if you can remember your past, and it is 
very long, then you will necessarily feel very full, full of experiences and 
emotions, perhaps to the point where it might not be easy to feel much more. 
Wasn’t that possible? Or perhaps everything would feel more intensely than was 
appropriate; perhaps he had inadvertently turned them all into horribly 
sentimental people, stricken with grief if they stepped on an ant, weeping with 
joy at the sight of sunrise, etc. That would be unfortunate. Enough was enough, 
or more than enough. In fact Sax had always believed that the amplitude of 
emotional response exhibited in the people around him could be turned down a 
fair bit with no very .great loss to humanity. Of course it wouldn’t work to try 
consciously to damp one’s emotions, that was repression, sublimation, with a 
resulting overpressure elsewhere. Curious how useful Freud’s steam-engine model 
of the mind remained, compression, venting, the entire apparatus, as if the 
brain had been designed by James Watt. But reductive models were useful, they 
were at the heart of science. And he had needed to blow off steam for a long 
time.
So he and Desmond walked around Chernobyl, throwing rocks at it, laughing, 
talking in a halting rush and flow, not so much a conversation as a simultaneous 
transmission, as they were both absorbed by their own thoughts. Thus very 
dislocated talk, but companionable nevertheless, and reassuring to hear someone 
else sounding so confused. And altogether a great pleasure to feel so close to 
this man, so different from him in so many ways, and yet now babbling together 
with him about school, the snowscapes of the southern polar region, the parks in 
the Ares; and they were so similar anyway.
“We all go through the same things.”
“It’s true! It’s true!”
Curious that this fact didn’t affect people’s behavior more.
Eventually they wandered back to the trailer park, slowing down as they passed 
through it, held by ever-thickening cobwebs of past association. It was near 
sunset. In the barrel vaults people were milling around, working on dinner. Most 
had been too distracted to eat during the day, and the drug appeared to be a 
mild appetite suppressant; but now people were famished. Maya had been cooking a 
big pot of stew, chopping and peeling potatoes and throwing them in. Borscht? 
Bouillabaisse? She had had the forethought to start a breadmaker in the morning, 
and now the yeasty smell filled the warm air of the barrel vaults.
They congregated in the large double vault at the southwest corner, the room 
where Sax and Ann had had their famous debate at the beginning of the formal 
terraforming effort. Hopefully this would not occur to Ann when she came in. 
Except that a videotape of the debate was playing on a small screen in the 
corner. Oh well. She would arrive soon after dark, in her old way; this 
constancy was a pleasure to all of them. It made it possible in some sense to 
say Here we are—the others are away tonight—otherwise everything is the same. An 
ordinary night in Underbill. Talk about work, the various sites—food—the old 
familiar faces. As if Arkady or John or Tatiana might walk in any second, just 
as Ann was now, right on time, stomping her feet to warm them, ignoring the 
others—just as always.
But she came and sat beside him. Ate her meal (a Provencal stew that Michel used 
to make) beside him. In her customary silence. Still, people stared. Nadia 
watched them with tears in her eyes. Permanent sentimentality: it could be a 
problem.
Later, under the clatter of dishes and voices, everyone seemingly talking at 
once—and sometimes it seemed possible also to understand everyone all at once, 
even while speaking—under that noise, Ann leaned into him and said:
“Where are you going after this?”
“Well,” he said, suddenly nervous again, “some Da Vinci colleagues invited me 
to, to, to—to sail. To try out a new boat they’ve designed for me, for my, my 
sailing trips. A sailboat. On Chryse—on Chryse Gulf.”
“Ah.”
Terrible silence, despite all the noise.
“Can I come with you?”
Burning sensation in the skin of the face; capillary engorgement; very odd. But 
he must remember to speak! “Oh yes.”
 
And then everyone sitting around, thinking, talking, remembering. Sipping Maya’s 
tea. Maya looked content, taking care of them. Much later, well into the middle 
of the night, with almost everyone still slumped in a chair, or hunched over the 
heater, Sax decided he would go over to the trailer park, where they had spent 
their first few months. Just to see.
Nadia was already out there, lying down on one of the mattresses. Sax pulled 
down another one from the wall; his old mattress, yes. And then Maya was there, 
and then all the rest of them, pulling along the reluctant and one had to say 
fearful Desmond, sitting him on a mattress in the middle, gathering around him, 
some in their old spots, others who had slept in other trailers filling the 
empty mattresses, the ones that had been occupied by people now gone. A single 
trailer now housed them all quite easily. And sometime in the depth of the night 
they all lay down, and slid down the slow uneven glide into sleep. All around 
the room, people falling to sleep in their beds—and that too was a memory, 
drowsy and warm, this was how it had always felt, to drift off in a bath of 
one’s friends, weary with the day’s work, the oh-so-interesting work of building 
a town and a world. Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, 
and dream.


 
 
 
 
 
They sailed out of the Florentine on a windy cloudless day, Ann at the rudder 
and Sax up in the starboard bow of the sleek new catamaran, making sure the 
anchor cat had secured the anchor; which reeked of anaerobic bottom mud, so much 
so that Sax got distracted and spent some time hanging over the rail looking at 
samples of the mud through his wristpad magnifying lens: a great quantity of 
dead algae and other bottom organisms. An interesting question whether or not 
this was typical of the North Sea’s bottom, or was restricted for some reason to 
the Chryse Gulf environs, or to the Florentine, or shallows more generally—
“Sax, get back here,” Ann called. “You’re the one who knows how to sail.”
“So I am.”
Though in truth the boat’s AI would do everything at the most general command; 
he could say for instance “Go to Rhodes,” and there would be nothing more to be 
done for the rest of the week. But he had grown fond of the feeling of a tiller 
under his hand. So he abandoned the anchor’s muck to another time, and made his 
way to the wide shallow cockpit suspended between the two narrow hulls.
“Da Vinci is about to go under the horizon, look.”
“So it is.”
The outer points of the crater rim were the only parts of Da Vinci Island still 
visible over the water, though they weren’t more than twenty kilometers away. 
There was an intimacy to a small globe. And the boat was very fast; it 
hydroplaned in any wind over fifty kilometers an hour, and the hulls had 
underwater outriggerkeels that extended and set in various dolphinlike shapes, 
which along with sliding counterbalance weights in the cross struts kept the 
windward hull in contact with the water, and the leeward hull from driving too 
far under. So in even moderate winds, like the one striking their unfurled mast 
sail now, the boat shoved up onto the water and skated over it like an iceboat 
over ice, moving at a speed just a few percent slower than the wind itself. 
Looking over the stern Sax could see that a very small percentage of the hulls 
were actually in contact with the water; it looked like the rudder and the 
outrigger-keels were the only things that kept them from taking flight. He saw 
the last bits of Da Vinci Island disappear, under a bouncing serrated horizon no 
more than four kilometers away from them. He glanced at Ann; she was clutching 
the rail, looking back at the brilliant white V-tapestries of their wake. Sax 
said, “Have you been at sea before?” meaning, entirely out of the sight of land.
“No.”
“Ah.”
They sailed on north, out into Chryse Gulf. Copernicus Island appeared over the 
water to their right, then Galileo Island behind it. Then both receded under the 
blue horizon again. The swells on the horizon were individually distinct, so 
that the horizon was not a straight blue line against the sky, but rather a 
shifting array of swell tops, one after another in swift succession. The 
groundswell was coming out of the north, almost directly ahead of them, so that 
looking to port or starboard the horizon line was particularly jagged, a wavy 
line of blue water against the blue sky, in a too-small circle surrounding the 
ship—as if the proper Terran distance to the horizon were stubbornly embedded in 
the brain’s optics, so that when they saw things clearly here, they would always 
appear to stand on a planet too small for them. Certainly there was a look of 
the most extreme discomfort on Ann’s face; she glared at the waves, groundswell 
after groundswell lifting the bow and then the stern. There was a cross chop 
nearly at right angles to the groundswell, pushed by the west wind and ruffling 
the bigger broader swells. Wavetank physics; one could see it all laid out; it 
reminded Sax of the physics lab on the second story of the northeasternmost 
building in his high school, where hours had passed like minutes, the flat 
little wavetank full of marvels. Here the groundswell originated in the North 
Sea’s perpetual eastward motion around the globe; the swell was greater or 
smaller depending on whether local winds reinforced it or interfered with it. 
The light gravity made for big broad waves, quickly generated by strong winds; 
if today’s wind got very much stronger, for instance, then the wind-chop from 
the west would quickly grow bigger than the groundswell from the north, and 
obscure it completely. Waves on the North Sea were notorious for their size and 
mutability, their recombinant surprises, though it was also true that they moved 
fairly slowly through the water; big slow hills, like the giant dunes of 
Vastitas far underneath them, migrating around the planet. Sometimes they could 
get very big indeed; in the aftermath of the typhoons that blew over the North 
Sea, waves seventy meters high had been reported.
This lively cross chop seemed enough for Ann, who was looking a bit distressed. 
Sax could not think what to say to her. He doubted that his thoughts on wave 
mechanics would be appropriate, though it was very interesting of course, and 
would be to anyone interested in the physical sciences. As Ann was. But perhaps 
not now. Now the sheer sensory array of water, wind, sky—it looked like it was 
enough for her. Perhaps silence was in order.
Whitecaps began to roll down the faces of some of the cross-chop waves, and Sax 
immediately checked into the ship’s weather system to see what the wind speed 
was. The ship had it at thirty-two kilometers per hour. So this was about the 
speed at which the crests of waves were first knocked over. A simple matter of 
surface tension against wind speed, calculable, in fact... yes, the appropriate 
equation in fluid dynamics suggested they should start to collapse at a wind 
speed cr thirty-five kilometers per hour, and here they were: whitecaps, 
startlingly white against the water, which was a dark blue, Prussian blue Sax 
thought it might be. The sky today was almost sky blue, slightly empurpled at 
the zenith, and somewhat whitened around the sun, with a metallic sheen between 
sun and the horizon under it.
“What are you doing?” Ann said, sounding annoyed.
Sax explained, and she listened in stony silence. He didn’t know what she might 
be thinking. That the world was somewhat explicable—he always found that a 
comfort. But Ann .. . well, it could be as simple as seasickness. Or something 
from her past, distracting her; Sax had found in the weeks since the experiment 
at Underhill that he was often distracted by some past incident, rising unbidden 
from a great bulk of them in his mind. Involuntary memory. And for Ann, that 
might include negative incidents of one kind or another; Michel had said she had 
been mistreated as a child. It still seemed to Sax too shocking to believe. On 
Earth men had abused women; on Mars, never. Was that true? Sax did not know for 
sure, but he felt it was true. This was what it meant to live in a just and 
rational society, this was one of the main reasons it was a good thing, a value. 
Possibly Ann would know more about the reality of the situation these days. But 
he did not feel comfortable asking her. It was clearly contraindicated.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she said.
“Enjoying the view,” he said quickly. Perhaps he had better talk about wave 
mechanics after all. He explained the groundswell, the cross chop, the negative 
and positive interference patterns that could result. But then he said, “Did you 
remember much about Earth, during the Underhill experiment?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
This was probably some kind of repression, and exactly the opposite of the 
psychotherapeutic method that Michel would probably have recommended. But they 
were not steam engines. And some things were no doubt better forgotten. He would 
have to work on once again forgetting John’s death, for instance; also on 
remembering better those parts of his life when he had been most social, as 
during the years of work for Biotique in Burroughs. So that across the cockpit 
from him sat Counter-Ann, or that third woman she had mentioned—while he was, at 
least in part, Stephen Lindholm. Strangers, despite that startling encounter at 
Underhill. Or because of it. Hello; nice to meet you.
 
*      *        *
 
Once they got out from among the fjords and islands at the bottom of Chryse 
Gulf, Sax turned the tiller and the boat swooped northeast, rushing across the 
wind and the whitecaps. Then the wind was behind them, and with a • following 
wind the mast sail bloomed into its own splayed-wing version of a spinnaker, and 
the hulls surfed on the mushy crests of the waves before losing to their 
superior speed. The eastern shore of the Chryse Gulf appeared before them; it 
was less spectacular than the western shore, but in many ways prettier. 
Buildings, towers, bridges: it was a well-populated coast, as were most of them 
these days. Coming off Olympus all the towns must be a bit of a shock.
After they passed the broad mouth of the Ares Fjord, Soo-chow Point emerged over 
the horizon, and then beyond it the Oxia Islands, one by one. Before the water’s 
arrival these had been the Oxia Colles, an array of round hills that stood at 
just the height to become an archipelago. Sax sailed into the narrow waterways 
between these islands, each a low round brown hump, standing forty or fifty 
meters out of the sea. By far the larger percentage of them were uninhabited, 
except perhaps by goats, but on the largest ones, especially kidney-shaped ones 
with bays, the stones covering the hills had been gathered up into walls, which 
split the slopes into fields and pastures; these islands were irrigated, green 
with orchards laden with fruit, or pastures dotted with white sheep or miniature 
cows. The ship’s maritime chart named these islands—Kipini, Wahoo, Wabash, 
Nau-kan, Libertad—and reading the map Ann snorted. “These are the names of the 
craters out in the middle of the gulf, underwater.”
“Ah.”
Still, they were pretty islands. The fishing villages on the bays were 
whitewashed, with blue shutters and doors: the Aegean model again. Indeed, on 
one high point bluff there stood a little Doric temple, square and proud. The 
boats down below in the bays were small sloops, or simply row-boats and dories. 
As they sailed past Sax pointed out a hilltop windmill here, a pasture of llamas 
there. “It seems a nice life.”
They talked about the natives then, easily and without hidden tension. About Zo; 
about the ferals and their strange hunter-gatherer city-shopper lifestyle; about 
the ag nomads, moving from crop to crop like migrant laborers who owned the 
farms; about the cross-fertilization of all these styles; about the new Terran 
settlements elbowing into the landscape; about the increasing number of harbor 
towns. Off in the middle of the bay, they spotted one of the new big townships, 
a floating island of a seacraft, with a population in the thousands; it was too 
big to enter the Oxia archipelago, and looked to be headed across the gulf to 
Ni-lokeras, or down to the southern fjords. As the land all over Mars was 
becoming more crowded, and the possibility of settling on it more and more 
restricted by the courts, more and more people were moving onto the North Sea, 
making townships like these their permanent home.
“Let’s go visit it,” Ann said. “Can we?”
“I don’t see why not,” Sax said, surprised at the request. “We can certainly 
catch it.”
He brought the catamaran about and tacked south and west toward the township, 
pushing the cat as much as he could, to impress the seafarers. In less than an 
hour they had reached its broad side, a rounded scarp about two kilometers long 
and fifty meters tall. A dock just above the waterline had a section against the 
township that would rise, as an open elevator, and when they had stepped across 
from the cat to the dock and tied their boat on, they got into this railed-off 
section and were lifted up to the deck of the township.
The deck was almost as broad as it was long, its central area a farm with many 
small trees scattered on it, so it was hard to see the other side. But it was 
clear from what they could see that the circumference of the deck was a kind of 
rectangular street or arcade, with buildings on both sides that were two to four 
stories high, the outer buildings topped by masts and windmills, the inner ones 
opening into broad breaks where parks and plazas led inward to the crops and 
groves of the farm, and a big freshwater pond. A floating town, somewhat like a 
walled city in Renaissance Tuscany in appearance, except that everything was 
extraordinarily neat and orderly, shipshape as one might say. A small group of 
the ship’s citizens greeted them on the plaza overlooking the dock, and when 
they found out who their visitors were they were thrilled—they insisted the 
travelers stay for a meal, and a few of them guided them on a walk around the 
perimeter of the ship, “or for as far as you care to go, it’s a good fair walk.”
This was a small township, they were told. Population, five thousand. Since its 
launch it had been almost entirely self-sufficient. “We grow most of our food, 
and fish for the rest. There are arguments now with other townships about 
overfishing certain species. We’re doing perennial polycul-ture, growing new 
strains of corn, sunflower, soybean, sand plum and so on, all intermixed and 
harvested by robot, because harvesting is backbreaking work. We’ve finally got 
the technology to go home to gathering, that’s what it comes down to. There are 
a lot of onboard cottage industries. We’ve got wineries, see the vineyards out 
there, and there are vintners and brandy distillers. That we do by hand. Also 
special-function semiconductors, and a famous bike shop.”
“Most of the time we sail around the North Sea. There are some really violent 
storms sometimes, but we’re so big that we ride them out pretty easily. Most of 
us have lived here for all ten years the ship has existed. It’s a great life. 
The ship is all you need. Although it’s great fun to make landfall from time to 
time. We come down to Nilokeras every Ls zero for the spring festival. We sell 
what we’ve made and resupply, and party all night long. Then back out to sea.”
“We don’t use anything but wind and sunlight, and some fish. The environmental 
courts like us, they agree we’re minimum impact. The population of the North 
Sea’s area might be even higher now than if it had stayed land. There are 
hundreds of townships now.”
“Thousands. And the harbor towns with the shipyards, and the seaports we visit 
to do business, they’re doing very well indeed.”
Ann said, “And you think this is one way we can take on some of Earth’s surplus 
population.”
“Yes, we do. One of the best ways. It’s a big ocean, it could take a lot more 
ships like this.”
“As long as they didn’t rely too much on fishing.”
As they walked on, Sax said to Ann, “That’s another reason that it just isn’t 
worth it to force a crisis over the immigration issue.”
Ann didn’t reply. She was staring down at the sun-burnished water, then up at 
one of the couple dozen masts, each with its single schooner sail. The town 
looked like a tabular iceberg with its surface entirely claimed by earth. A 
floating island.
“So many different kinds of nomads,” Sax commented.
“It seems that very few of the natives feel impelled to settle in a single 
place.”
“Unlike us.”
“Point taken. But I wonder if this tendency means they are inclined to a certain 
redness. If you know what I mean.”
“I do not.”
Sax tried to explain. “It seems to me that nomads in general tend to make use of 
the land as they find it. They move around with the seasons, and live off what 
they find growing at that time. And seafaring nomads of course even more so, 
given that the sea is impervious to most human attempts to change it.”
“Except for the people trying to regulate sea level, or salt content. Have you 
heard about them?”
“Yes. But they’re not going to have much luck with that, I would guess. The 
mechanics of saltification are still very poorly understood.”
“If they succeed it will kill a lot of freshwater species.”
“True. But the saltwater species will be happy.”
They walked across the middle of the township toward the plaza over the dock, 
passing between long rows of grapevines pruned to the shape of waist-high T’s, 
the intermingled horizontal vines heavy with grape clusters of dusty indigo, and 
bracken, and clear viridine. Beyond the vineyards the ground was covered with a 
mix of plants, like a kind of prairie, with narrow foot trails cutting through 
it.
 
At a restaurant fronting the plaza they were treated to a meal of pasta and 
shrimp. The conversation ranged everywhere. But then someone came rushing out of 
the kitchen, pointing at his wrist: news had just come in of trouble on the 
space elevator. The UN troops who had been sharing the customs duties on New 
Clarke had taken over the whole station, and sent all the Martian police down, 
charging them with corruption and declaring that the UN would administer the 
upper end of the elevator by itself from now on. The UN’s Security Council was 
now saying that their local officers had overstepped their instructions, but 
this backpedaling did not include an invitation to the Martians to come back up 
the cable again, so it looked like a smoke screen to Sax. “Oh my,” he said. 
“Maya will be very angry, I fear.”
Ann rolled her eyes. “That isn’t really the most important ramification, if you 
ask me.” She looked shocked, and for the first time since Sax had found her in 
Olympus caldera, fully engaged in the current situation. Drawn out of her 
distance. It was fairly shocking, now that he thought of it. Even these 
seafarers were visibly shaken, though before they like Ann had seem distanced 
from whatever circumstances obtained on land. He could see the news tearing 
through the restaurant’s conversations, and throwing them all into the same 
space: upheaval, crisis, the threat of war. Voices were incredulous, faces were 
angry.
The people at their table were also watching Sax and Ann, curious as to their 
reaction. “You’ll have to do something about this,” one of their guides noted.
“Why us?” Ann replied tartly. “It’s you who will have to do something about it, 
if you ask me. You’re the ones responsible now. We’re just a couple of old 
issei.”
Their dinner companions looked startled, uncertain how to take her. One laughed. 
The host who had spoken shook his head. “That’s not true. But you’re right, we 
will be watching, and talking with the other townships about how to respond. 
We’ll do our part. I was just saying that people will be looking to you, to both 
of you, to see what you do. That isn’t so true for us.”
Ann was silenced by this. Sax returned to his meal, thinking furiously. He found 
he wanter! to talk to Maya.
The evening continued, the sun fell; the dinner limped on, as they all tried to 
return to some sense of normality. Sax repressed a little smile; there might be 
an interplanetary crisis and there might not, but meanwhile dinner had to be 
gotten through in style. And these seafarers were not the kind of people who 
looked inclined to worry about the solar system at large. So the mood rallied, 
and they partied over their dessert, still very pleased to have Clayborne and 
Russell visiting them. And then in the last light the two of them made their 
excuses, and were escorted down to sea level and their boat. The waves on Chryse 
Gulf were a lot larger than they had seemed from up above.
 
Sax and Ann sailed off in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sax looked 
back up at the township, thinking about what they had seen that day. It looked 
like a good life. But something about... he chased the thought, and then at the 
end of the rapid steeplechase he caught it, and still held it all: no blank-cuts 
these days. Which was a great satisfaction, although the content of this 
particular train of thought was quite melancholy. Should he even try to share it 
with Ann? Was it possible to say it?
He said, “Sometimes I regret—when I see those seafarers, and the lives they 
lead—it seems ironic that we—that we stand on the brink of a—of a kind of golden 
age—” There, he had said it; and felt foolish; “—which will only come to pass 
when our generation has died. We’ve worked for it all our lives, and then we 
have to die before it will come.”
“Like Moses outside Israel.”
“Yes? Did he not get to go in?” Sax shook his head. “These old stories—” Such a 
throwing together, like science at its heart, like the flashes of insight one 
got into an experiment when everything about it clarified, and one understood 
something. “Well, I can imagine how he felt. It’s— it’s frustrating. I would 
rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious. About the history 
we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you 
know what I mean?”
Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, “Everything dies someday. 
Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out 
thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d 
left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be 
depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.”
“True.”
And this was Ann Clayborne talking. Sax felt that his face was glowing. That 
capillary action could be quite a pleasant sensation.
 
They returned to the Oxia archipelago and sailed through the islands, talking 
about them. It was possible to talk. They ate in the cockpit, and slept each in 
their own hull cabin, port and starboard. One fresh morning, with the wind 
wafting offshore cool and fragrant, Sax said, “I still wonder about the 
possibility of some kind of browns.” Ann glanced at him. “And where’s the red in 
it?” “Well, in the desire to hold things steady. To keep a lot of the land 
untouched. The areophany.”
“That’s always been green. It sounds like green with just a little touch of red, 
if you ask me. The khakis.”
“Yes, I suppose. That would be Irishka and the Free Mars coalition, right? But 
also burnt umbers, siennas, madder alizarins, Indian reds.”
“I don’t think there are any Indian reds.” And she laughed darkly.
Indeed she laughed frequently, though the humor expressed seemed often quite 
mordant. One evening he was in his cabin, and she up near the bow of her hull 
(she took the port, he the starboard) and he heard her laugh out loud, and 
coming up and looking around, he thought it must have been caused by the sight 
of Pseudophobos (most people just called it Phobos), rising again swiftly out of 
the west, in its old manner. The moons of Mars, sailing through the night again, 
little gray potatoes of no great distinction, but there they were. As was that 
dark laugh at the sight of them.
 
“Do you think this takeover of Clarke is serious?” Ann asked one night as they 
were retiring to their hulls.
“It’s hard to say. Sometimes I think it must be a threatening gesture only, 
because if it’s serious it would be so— unintelligent. They must know that 
Clarke is very vulnerable to—removal from the scene.”
“Kasei and Dao didn’t find it that easy to remove.”
“No, but—” Sax did not want to say that their attempt had been botched, but he 
was afraid that she would read the comment out of his silence. “We in Da Vinci 
set up an X-ray laser complex in Arsia Mons caldera, buried behind a rock 
curtain in the north wall, and if we set it off the cable will be melted right 
at about the areosynchronous point. There isn’t a defensive system that could 
stop it.”
Ann stared at him; he shrugged. He wasn’t personally responsible for Da Vinci 
actions, no matter what people thought.
“But bringing down the cable,” she said, and shook her head. “It would kill a 
lot of people.”
Sax remembered how Peter had survived the fall of the first cable, by jumping 
out into space. Rescued by chance. Perhaps Ann was less likely to write off the 
lives that would inevitably be lost. “It’s true,” he said. “It isn’t a good 
solution. But it could be done, and I would think the Terrans know that.”
“So it may just be a threat.”
“Yes. Unless they’re prepared to go further.”
 
North of the Oxia archipelago they passed McLaughlin Bay, the eastern side of a 
drowned crater. North again was Mawrth Point, and behind it the inlet to Mawrth 
Fjord, one of the narrowest and longest fjords of all. It was a matter of 
constant tacking to sail up it, pushed this way and that by tricky winds, 
swirling between steep convolute walls; but Sax did it anyway, because it was a 
pretty fjord, at the bottom of a very deep and narrow outbreak channel, widening 
as one sailed farther into it; and beyond and above the end of the water, the 
rock-floored canyon continued inland for as far as one could see, and many 
kilometers beyond that. He hoped to show Ann that the existence of the fjords 
did not necessarily mean the drowning of all the outbreak channels; Ares and 
Kasei also retained very long canyons above sea level, and Al-Qahira and Ma’adim 
as well. But he said nothing of this, and Ann made no comment.
After the maneuvering in Mawrth, he sailed them almost directly west. To get out 
of the Chryse Gulf into the Acidalia region of the North Sea, it was necessary 
to work around a long arm of land called the Sinai Peninsula, sticking out into 
the ocean from the west side of Arabia Terra. The strait beyond it connecting 
Chryse Gulf with the North Sea was 500 kilometers wide; but it would have been 
1,500 kilometers wide if it were not for the Sinai Peninsula.
So they sailed west into the wind, day after day, talking or not talking. Many 
times they came back to what it might mean to be brown. “Perhaps the combination 
should be called blue,” Ann said one evening, looking over the side at the 
water. “Brown isn’t very attractive, and it reeks of compromise. Maybe we should 
be thinking of something entirely new.”
“Maybe we should.”
At night after dinner, and some time looking at the stars swimming over the 
sloppy sea surface, they said good night, and Sax retired to the starboard hull 
cabin, Ann to the port; and the AI sailed them slowly through the night, dodging 
the occasional icebergs that began to appear at this latitude, pushed into the 
gulf from the North Sea. It was quite pleasant.
One morning Sax woke early, stirred by a strong swell under the hull, which 
pitched his narrow bed up and down in a way that his dreaming mind had 
interpreted as a giant pendulum, swinging them this way and that. He dressed 
with some difficulty and went abovedeck, and Ann, standing at the shrouds, 
called out, “It seems the groundswell and the windchop are in a positive 
interference pattern.”
“Are they!” He tried to join her, and was slammed down into a cockpit seat by a 
sudden rise of the boat. “Ah!”
She laughed. He grabbed the cockpit handrail, pulled himself up to her side. He 
saw immediately what she meant; the wind was strong, perhaps sixty-five 
kilometers per hour, and the whine in the boat’s minimal rigging was loud and 
sustained. There were whitecaps everywhere on the blue sea, and the sound of the 
wind coursing through all that broken water was very unlike what it would be 
pouring over rock—there it would be a high keening shriek—here, among the 
trillions of bursting bubbles, it was a deep solid roar. Every wave was 
whitecapped, and the great hills of the ground swells were obscured by foam 
flying off the crests and rolling in the troughs. The sky was a dirty opaque raw 
umber, very ominous looking, the sun a dim old coin, everything else dark, as if 
in shadow, though there were no clouds. Fines in the air: a dust storm. And now 
the waves were picking up, so that they spent many long seconds shooting up the 
side of one, then almost as many schussing down into the trough of the next one. 
Up and down in a long rhythm. The positive interference Ann had spoken of made 
some waves doubly big. The water not foaming was turning the color of the sky, 
brownish and dull, dark, though there was still not a cloud to be seen—only this 
ominous color of the sky; not the old pink, but more like the dust-choked air of 
the Great Storm. The whitecaps ceased in their area and the sound of water 
against the boat grew louder, a slushy rumble; the sea here was coated with 
frazil ice, or the thicker elastic layer of ice crystals called nilas. Then the 
whitecaps returned, twice as thick as before.
Sax climbed down into the cockpit and checked the weather report on the AI. A 
katabatic wind was pouring down Kasei Vallis and onto Chryse Gulf. A howler, as 
the Kasei fliers would say. The AI should have warned them.
732 Blue Mars
But like many katabatic storms it had come up in an hour, and was still a fairly 
local phenomenon. Yet strong for all that; the boat was on a roller-coaster 
ride, shimmying under hammer blows of air as it shot up and down on the huge 
groundswell. To the side the waves looked like they were being knocked over by 
the wind, but the boat’s skittering flights up and down showed that they 
underlay the flying foam as big as ever. Overhead the mast sail had contracted 
almost to a pole, in the shape of an aerodynamic foil. Sax leaned over to check 
the AI more closely; the volume knob on the beeper was turned all the way down. 
So perhaps it had tried to warn them after all.
A squall at sea; they came up fast. Horizons only four kilometers away didn’t 
help matters; and the winds on Mars had never slowed down much, in all the years 
of thickening. Underfoot the boat shuddered as it smashed through some invisible 
fragments of ice. Brash ice now, it appeared, or the broken pancake ice of a sea 
surface that had been about to freeze over in the night; difficult to spot in 
all the flying foam. Occasionally he felt the impact of a larger chunk, bergy 
bergs as sailors called them. These had come through the Chryse Strait on a 
current from the north; now they were being pushed against the lee shore of the 
southern side of the Sinai Peninsula. As the boat was too, for that matter.
They were forced to cover the cockpit with its clear shell, rolling up out of 
the decking and over to the other side. Under its waterproof cover they were 
immediately warmer, which was a comfort. It was going to be a true howler, Kasei 
Vallis serving as a conduit for an extremely powerful blast of air; the AI 
listed wind speeds at Santorini Island fluctuating between 180 and 220 
kilometers an hour, winds which would not diminish much in speed as they crossed 
the gulf. Certainly it was still a very strong wind, 160 kilometers an hour at 
the masthead; the surface of the water was disintegrating now, crests flattened 
by gusts, torn apart. The ship was shutting down in response to all that, mast 
retracting, cockpit covered, hatches battening; then the sea anchor went out, a 
tube of material like a wind sock, dragging underwater upwind of them, slowing 
their drift to leeward, and mitigating the jarring impacts against small 
icebergs that were becoming more frequent as they all clustered against the lee 
shore. Now with the sea anchor in place, it was the brash ice and bergy bergs 
that were floating downwind faster than they were, and knocking against the 
windward hull, even as the leeward hull still slammed against a thickening ice 
mass. Both hulls were mostly underwater; in effect the boat was becoming a kind 
of submarine, lying at the surface and just under it. The strength of the 
materials of the boat could sustain any shock that even a howler and a lee shore 
of icebergs could deliver; indeed they could sustain forces several magnitudes 
stronger. But the weak point, as Sax reflected as he was thrown hard against his 
seat belt and shoulder harness, holding grimly to the tiller and his seatback, 
was their bodies. The catamaran lifted on a swell, dropped with a sickening 
swoop, crashed to a halt against a big berg; and he slammed breathlessly into 
the restraints. It seemed they might be in danger of being shaken to death, an 
unpleasant way to go, as he was beginning to understand. Internal organs damaged 
by seat belts; but if they freed themselves they would be flung around the 
cockpit, into each other or into something sharp, until something broke or 
burst. No. It was not a tenable situation. Possibly the restraints he had seen 
on his bed’s frame would be gentler, but the decelerations when the boat struck 
the ice mass were so abrupt that he doubted being horizontal would help much.
“I’m going to see if the AI can get us into Arigato Bay,” he shouted in Ann’s 
ear. She nodded that she had heard. He shouted the instruction right into the 
AI’s pickup, and the computer heard and understood, which was good, as it would 
have been hard to type accurately with the boat soaring and plunging and 
shuddering as it slammed into the ice. In all that jarring it was not possible 
to feel the boat’s engine, which had been running all along, but a slight change 
in their angle to the groundswell convinced him that it was pushing harder as 
the AI tried to get them farther west.
Down near the point of the Sinai Peninsula, on the southern side, a large 
inundated crater called Arigato made a round bay. The entrance of the bay was 
about sixty degrees of the circle of the crater, facing southwest. The wind and 
waves were both also from the southwest; so the mouth of the bay, quite shallow, 
as-it was a low part of the old crater rim, was bound to be broken water, a 
difficult crossing no doubt. But once inside the bay the groundswell would be 
cut off by that same rim, and both waves and wind much reduced, especially when 
they got behind the western cape of the bay. There they would wait out the 
howler, and be on their way again when it was done. In theory it was an 
excellent plan, although Sax worried about conditions in the mouth of the bay; 
the chart showed it was only ten meters deep, which was certain to cause the 
groundswells to break. On the other hand, in a boat that became a kind of 
submarine (and yet drawing less than two meters of water for all that) 
negotiating broken surf might not be much of a problem; just go with it. The AI 
appeared to consider his instructions within the realm of the possible. And 
indeed the boat had pulled in the sea anchor, and with its powerful little 
engines was making its way across the wind and waves toward the bay, which was 
not visible; nothing of the lee shore could be seen through the dirty air.
So they held to the cockpit railings and waited out the reach, speechless; there 
was little to say, and the booming howl of the howler made it difficult to 
communicate. Sax’s hands and arms got very tired from holding on, but there was 
no help for that except to abandon the cockpit and go below and strap himself 
into his bed, which he did not want to do. Despite the discomfort, and the 
nagging worry about the bay entrance, it was an extraordinary experience to 
watch the wind pulverize the surface of the water the way it was.
A short while later (though the AI indicated it had been seventy-two minutes), 
he caught sight of land, a dark ridge over the whitecaps to the lee side of 
them. Seeing it meant they were probably too close to it, but there ahead it 
disappeared, and reappeared farther west: the entrance to Ari-gato Bay. The 
tiller shifted against his knee, and he noted a change in the boat’s direction. 
For the first time he could hear the hum of the little engines at the sterns of 
the two hulls. The jarring against the ice got rougher, and they had to hold on 
tight. Now the groundswells were getting taller, their crests torn off, but the 
bulk of every wave remaining, its face surging up as it encountered the sea 
bottom. And now he could see in the foam rolling over the water ice chunks, and 
larger bergy bits—clear, blue, jade, aquamarine—pitted, rough, glassy. A great 
deal of ice must have been driven against the lee shore ahead of them. If the 
bay mouth was choked with ice, and waves were breaking over the bar 
nevertheless, it would be a nasty passage indeed. And yet that looked like what 
the situation would be. He shouted a question or two at the AI, but its replies 
were unsatisfactory. It seemed to be saying that the boat could sustain any 
shocks the situation could inflict, but that the engines could not dnve it 
through pack ice. And in fact the ice was thickening rapidly; they seemed in the 
process of being enveloped by a loose mass of bergy bits, driven onshore by the 
wind from all over the gulf. Their grinding and knocking was now a big component 
of the overwhelming noise of the storm. Indeed it looked like it would now be 
difficult to motor out of the situation, straight offshore into the wind and 
waves and out to sea. Not that he really wanted to be out there, tossed up and 
down on waves that were growing ever larger and more unruly; capsizing would be 
a very real possibility; but because of the unexpected density of ice inshore, 
it was beginning to look like getting offshore had been their better option. Now 
closed to them. They were in for a hard pummeling.
Ann was looking uncomfortable in her restraints, holding to the cockpit rail for 
dear life, a sight that gave part of Sax’s mind satisfaction: she showed no 
inclination to let go, none at all. In fact she leaned over so that she could 
shout in his ear, and he turned his head to listen.
“We can’t stay here!” she shouted. “When we tire—the impacts are going to tear 
us up—ah!—like dolls!”
“We can strap ourselves to our beds,” Sax shouted.
She frowned doubtfully. And it was true that those restraints might not be any 
better. He had never tried them out; and there was the problem of getting 
secured in them by oneself to consider. Amazing how loud the wind was— shrieking 
wind, roaring water, thunking ice. The waves were growing larger and larger; 
when the boat rose on their faces, it took them ten or twelve heart-stopping 
seconds to shoot to the crests, and now when they got up there they saw chunks 
of ice being thrown clear of the waves, thrown off with the flying foam to crash 
down into their fellows below, and sometimes into the boat’s hulls and decking, 
and even the clear thin cockpit shell, with a force they could feel all through 
their bodies.
Sax leaned over to shout again in Ann’s ear. “I believe this is one of those 
situations in which we are meant to use the lifeboat function!”
“... lifeboat?” Ann said.
Sax nodded. “The boat is its own lifeboat!” he shouted. “It flies!”
“What do you mean?”
“It flies!”
“You’re kidding!”
“No! It becomes a—a blimp!” He leaned over and put his mouth right to her ear. 
“The hulls and the keels and the bottom of the cockpit empty their ballast. They 
fill with helium from tanks in the bow. And balloons deploy. They told me about 
it back in Da Vinci, but I’ve never seen it! I didn’t think we’d be using it!” 
The boat could also become a submarine, they had said in Da Vinci, quite pleased 
with themselves at the new craft’s versatility. But the ice packing against the 
lee shore made that option unavailable to them, something that Sax did not 
regret; for no particular reason, the idea of going down in the boat didn’t 
appeal to him.
Ann pulled back to look at him, amazed at this news. “Do you know how to fly 
it!” she shouted.
“No!”
Presumably the AI would take care of that. If they could get it into the air. 
Just a matter of finding the emergency release, of flicking the right toggles. 
He pointed at the control panel to mime this thought, then leaned forward to 
shout in her ear; her head swung in and banged his nose and mouth hard, and then 
he was blinking with bright pain, the blood running out of his nose like water 
from a faucet. Impact, just like the two planetesimals, he grinned and split his 
lip even wider, a painful mistake. He licked and licked, tasting his blood. “I 
love you!” he shouted. She didn’t hear him.
“How do we launch it?” Ann cried.
He indicated the control panel again, there beside the AI, the emergency board 
under a protective bar.
If they chose to try an escape by air, however, it would bring about a dangerous 
moment. Once they were moving at the wind’s speed, of course, there would be 
very little force brought to bear on the boat, they would simply blimp along. 
But at the moment of liftoff, while they were still nearly stationary, the 
howler would tear hard at them. They would tumble, probably, and this might 
disable the balloons enough to cast the boat back into the ice-choked breakers, 
or onto the lee shore. He could see Ann thinking this through herself. 
Still—whatever happened, it was likely to be preferable to the bone-jarring 
impacts that continued to rack them. It would be a temporary thing, one way or 
the other.
Ann looked at him, scowled at the sight of him; presumably he was a bloody mess. 
“Worth a try!” she shouted.
So Sax detached the protection bar from the emergency panel, and with a final 
look at Ann—their eyes meeting, a gaze with some content he could not 
articulate, but which warmed him—he put his fingers on the switches. Hopefully 
the altitude control would be obvious when the time came. He wished he had spent 
more time flying.
As the boat rose up the foamy face of each wave, there came a nearly weightless 
moment at the top, just before the falldown into the next icy trough. In one of 
these moments Sax flicked the switches on the panel. The boat fell down the 
waveback anyway, hit the growlers with its usual jar— then bounced right up and 
away, lifted, and tilted right over on its lee hull, so that they were hanging 
in their restraints. Balloons entangled no doubt, the next wave would capsize 
them and that would be that; but then the boat was dragging away over ice and 
water and foam, almost free of contact, rolling them head over heels in their 
restraints. A wild tumbling interval, and then the boat righted itself, and 
began to swing back and forth like a big pendulum, side to side, front to 
back—oops then all the way over again, topsyturvy—then righted, and swinging 
again. Up up up, thrown this way and that, hold on—his shoulder harness came 
free and his shoulder slammed against Ann’s, even though he had been pressed 
against her. The tiller was bashing his knee. He held on to it. Another crash 
together and he held on to Ann, twisted in his seat and clutched her, and after 
that they were like Siamese twins, arms around each other’s shoulders, in danger 
at every slam of breaking each other’s bones. They looked at each other for a 
second, faces centimeters apart, blood on both of them from some cut or other, 
or no it was probably just from his nose. She looked impassive. Up they shot 
into the sky.
His collarbone hurt, where Ann’s forehead or elbow had struck it. But they were 
flying, up and up in an awkward embrace. And as the boat was accelerated to 
something nearer the wind’s speed, the turbulence lessened greatly. The balloons 
seemed to be connected by rigging to the top of the mast. Then just when Sax was 
beginning to hope for some kind of zeppelinlike stability, even to expect it, 
the boat shot straight up and began its horrible tumbling again. Updraft no 
doubt. They were probably over land by now, and it was all too possible they 
were being sucked up into a thunderhead, like a hail ball. On Mars there were 
thun-derheads ten kilometers tall, often powered by howlers from far to the 
south, and balls of hail flew up and down in these thunderheads for a long time. 
Sometimes hail the size of cannonballs had come crashing down, devastating crops 
and even killing people. And if they were pulled up too high they might die of 
altitude, like those early balloonists in France, was it the Montgolfiers 
themselves it had happened to? Sax couldn’t remember. Up and up, tearing through 
wind and red haze, no chance to see very far—
BOOM! He jumped and hurt himself against his seat belt, came down hard. Thunder. 
Thunder banging around them, at what had to be well over 130 decibels. Ann 
seemed limp against him, and he shifted sideways, reached up awkwardly and 
twisted her ear, trying to turn her head so he could see her face. “Hey!” she 
cried, though it sounded to him like a whisper in the roar of the wind. “Sorry,” 
he said, though he was sure she couldn’t hear him. It was too loud to talk. They 
were spinning again, but without much centrifugal force. The boat was shrieking 
as the wind pushed it up; then they dove, and his eardrums hurt to bursting, he 
wiggled his jaw back and forth, back and forth. Then up again and they popped, 
painfully. He wondered how high they would go; very possible they would die of 
thin air. Though maybe the Da Vinci techs had thought to pressurize the cockpit, 
who knew. It behooved him to try to understand the boat as blimp, or at least 
master the altitude adjustment system. Not that there was much to be done 
against the force of such updrafts and downdrafts. Sudden rattle of hail against 
the cockpit shell. There were small toggles on the emergency panel; in a moment 
of less violent tumbling he was able to put his face down near the bar and read 
the display terminal embedded in it. Altitude ... not obvious. He tried to 
calculate how high the boat would go before its weight caused it to level off. 
Hard when he wasn’t actually sure of the boat’s weight, or the amount of helium 
deployed.
Then some kind of turbulence in the storm tossed them again. Up, down, up; then 
down, for many seconds in a row. Sax’s stomach was in his throat, or so it felt. 
His collarbone was an agony. Nose running or bleeding continuously. Then up. 
Gasping for air, too. He wondered again how high they were, and whether they 
were still ascending; but there was nothing to be seen outside the shell of the 
cockpit, nothing but dust and cloud. He seemed in no danger of fainting. Ann was 
motionless beside him, and he wanted to tug her ear again to see if she was 
conscious, but couldn’t move his arm. He elbowed her side. She elbowed back; if 
he had elbowed her as hard as that, he would have to remember to go lighter next 
time. He tried a very gentle elbowing, and felt a less violent prod in return. 
Perhaps they could resort to Morse code, he had learned it as a boy for no 
reason at all, and now in his reborn memory he could hear it all, every dit and 
dot. But perhaps Ann had not learned it, and this was no time for lessons.
The violent ride went on for so long he couldn’t estimate it: an hour? Once the 
noise lessened to the point where they could shout to each other, which they did 
just because it could be done; there actually wasn’t much to say.
“We’re in a thunderhead!”
“Yes!”
Then she pointed down with one finger. Pink blurs below. And they were 
descending rapidly, his eardrums aching again. Being spit out the bottom of the 
cloud, as hail. Pink, brown, rust, amber, umber. Ah yes—the surface of the 
planet, looking not very different than it ever had from the air. Descent. He 
and Ann had come down in the same landing vehicle, he recalled, the very first 
time.
Now the boat was scudding along under the cloud’s bottom, in falling hail and 
rain; but the helium might pull them back up into the cloud. He pushed down a 
likely toggle on the panel, and the boat began to descend. A pair of small 
toggles; manipulating them seemed to dip them forward or raise them up. Altitude 
adjusters. He pushed them both gently down.
They seemed to be descending. After a while it was clearer below. In fact they 
appeared to be over jagged ridges and mesas; that would be the Cydonia Mensa, on 
the mainland of Arabia Terra. Not a good place to land.
But the storm continued to carry them along, and soon they were east of Cydonia, 
out over the flat plains of Arabia.
Now they needed to descend soon, before they were flung out over the North Sea, 
which might very well be as wild and ice-filled as Chryse had been. Below lay a 
patchwork of fields, orchards—irrigation canals and curving streams, lined by 
trees. It had been raining a lot, it looked like, and there was water all over 
the surface of the land, in ponds, in canals, in little craters, and covering 
the lower parts of fields. Farmhouses clustered in little villages, only 
outbuildings in the fields—barns, equipment sheds. Lovely wet countryside, quite 
flat. Water everywhere. They were descending, but slowly. Ann’s hands were a 
bluish white in the dim afternoon; and so were his.
He pulled himself together, feeling very weary. The landing would be important. 
He pushed down the adjusters hard.
Now they were descending more swiftly. They were being blown over a line of 
trees, then down, rapidly over a broad field. At the far end it was inundated, 
brown rainwater filling the furrows. Beyond the field stood an orchard, and a 
water landing would be perfect anyway; but they were moving horizontally quite 
fast, and still perhaps ten or fifteen meters over the field. He shoved the 
adjusters full forward and saw the underhulls tilt down like diving dolphins, 
and the boat tilted as well, and then the land came right up at them, brown 
water, big splash, white waves winging away to both sides, and they were being 
dragged through muddy water until the boat skated right into a line of young 
trees, and stopped hard. Down the line of trees a group of kids and a man were 
running toward them, their mouths all perfect round O’s in their faces.
Sax and Ann struggled to a sitting position. Sax opened the cockpit shell. Brown 
water spilled in over the gunwale. A windy hazy day in the Arabian countryside. 
The water pouring in felt distinctly warm. Ann’s face was wet and her hair stood 
out in stiff tufts, as if she had been electrocuted. She smiled a crooked smile. 
“Nicely done,” she said.


 
PART FOURTEEN
               -----------
---Phoenix Lake
               -----------
 
 


 
 
 
 
 
A gun shot, a bell rung, a choir singing counterpoint.
The third Martian revolution-was so complex and nonviolent that it was hard to 
see it as a revolution at all, at the time; more like a shift in a ongoing 
argument, a change in the tide, a punctuation of equilibrium.
The takeover of the elevator was the seed of the crisis, but then a few weeks 
later the Terran military came down the cable and the crisis flowered everywhere 
at once. On the shore of the North Sea, on a small indentation of the coast of 
Tempe Terra, a cluster oflanders dropped out of the sky, swaying under 
parachutes or shimmering down on plumes of pale fire: a whole new colony, an 
unauthorized incursion of immigrants. This particular group was from Kampuchea; 
elsewhere on the planet other landers were descending, with settlers from the 
Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, Japan, Venezuela, New York. The Martians did 
not know how to respond. They were a demilitarized society, with no idea that 
something like this could ever happen, with no way to defend themselves. Or so 
they thought.
Once again it was May a who pulled them into action, playing the wrist like 
Frank used to, calling everyone in the open Mars coalition and many others 
besides, orchestrating the general response. Come on, she said to Nadia. One 
more time. And so through the cities and villages the word spread, and people 
went down into the streets, or got on trains to Mangala.
On the coast of Tempe, the new Kampuchean settlers got out of their landers and 
went to the little shelters that had been dropped with them, just as the First 
Hundreds had two centuries before. And out of the hills came people wearing 
furs, and carrying bows and arrows. They had red stone eyeteeth, and their hair 
was tied in topknots. Here, they said to the settlers, who had bunched before 
one of their shelters. Let us help you. Put those guns down. We’ll show you 
where you are. You don’t need that kind of shelter, it’s an old design. That 
hill you see to the west is Perepelkin Crater. There’s already apple and cherry 
orchards on the apron, you can take what you need. Look,”here are the plans for 
a disk house, that’s the best design for this coast. Then you’ll need a marina, 
and some fishing boats. If you let us use your harbor we’ll show you where the 
truffles grow. Yes, a disk house, see, a Sattelmeier disk house. It’s lovely to 
live out in the open air. You’ll see.
All branches of the Martian government had met in the assembly hall in Mangala, 
to deal with the crisis. The Free Mars majority in the senate, and the executive 
council, and the Global Environmental Court, all agreed that the illegal 
incursion ofTer-rans was an act of aggression the equivalent of war, which had 
to be responded to in kind. There were suggestions from the floor of the senate 
that asteroids could be directed at Terra, as bombs that would be diverted only 
if the immigrants returned home and the elevator went back to a system of dual 
supervision. It would only take one strike to have a KT event, and so on. UN 
diplomats on the scene pointed out that this was a sword that could cut boths 
ways.
In these tense days there came a knock on the door of the assembly hall in 
Mangala, and in walked Maya Toitovna. She said, “We want to speak.” Then she 
ushered in a crowd waiting outside, pushing them up onto the stage like an 
impatient sheepdog: first Sax and Ann, walking side by side; then Nadia and Art, 
Tariki and Nanao, Zeyk and Nazik, Mikhail, Vasili, Ursula and Marina, even 
Coyote. The ancient issei, come back to haunt the present moment, come back to 
take the stage and say what they thought. Maya pointed to the room’s screens, 
which showed images of the outside of the building; the group on the stage now 
extended in an unbroken line through the halls of the building out onto the big 
central plaza facing the sea, where some half-million people were assembled. The 
city streets were also stuffed with people, watching screens to see what was 
happening in the assembly hall. And out in Chalmers Bay there sailed a fleet of 
townships like a startling new archipelago, with flags and banners waving from 
their masts. And in every Martian city the crowds were out, the screens were on. 
Everyone could see everyone else.
Ann went to the podium and said quietly that the government of Mars in recent 
years had broken both the law and the spirit of human compassion, by forbidding 
immigration from Earth to Mars. The people of Mars did not want that. They 
needed a new government. This was a vote of no confidence. The new incursions of 
Tenon settlers were also illegal, and unacceptable, but understandable; the 
government of Mars had broken the law first. And the number of new settlers in 
these incursions was no greater than the number of legitimate settlers who had 
been illegally barred from coming by the current government. Mars, Ann said, had 
to be open to Tenon immigration as much as could be, given the physical 
constraints, for as long as the population-surge years might last. The surge 
years would not last much longer. Their duty now to their descendants was to get 
through the last of these packed years in peace. “Nothing on the table now is 
worth war. We have seen it, and we know.”
Then she looked over her shoulder at Sax, who stepped up next to her to the 
microphones. He said, “Mars has to be protected.” The biosphere was new, its 
carrying capacity limited. It did not have the physical resources of Earth, and 
much of its empty land would of physical necessity have to stay empty. Tenons 
had to understand that, and not overwhelm local systems; if they did, Mars would 
be no use to anyone at all. Clearly there was a severe population problem on 
Earth, but Mars alone was not the solution. “The Earth-Mars relationship has to 
be renegotiated.”
They began that renegotiation. They asked a UN representative to come up and 
explain the incursions. They argued and debated and expostulated; and shouted in 
each other’s faces. Out in the outback, locals confronted settlers, and some of 
them on both sides threatened violence; and others stepped in and started 
talking, cajoling, scolding, wrangling, negotiating; and shouting in each 
other’s faces. At any point in the process, in a thousand different places, 
things could have turned violent; many people were furious; but cooler heads 
prevailed. It remained, in most places, at the level of argument. Many feared 
this could not continue, many did not believe it possible; but it was happening, 
and the people in the streets saw it happening. They kept it happening. At some 
point, after all, the mutation of values has to express itself; and why not 
here, why not now? There were very few weapons on the planet, and it was hard to 
strike someone in the face, or stick them with a pitchfork, when they were 
standing there arguing with you. This was the moment of mutation, history in the 
making, and they could see it right before them, in the streets and on the human 
hillsides and on the Screens, history labile right there in their hands—and so 
they seized the moment, and wrenched it in a new direction. They talked 
themselves into it. A new government. A new treaty with Earth. A polycephalous 
peace. The negotiations would go on for years. Like a choir in counterpoint, 
singing a great fugue.
Eventually that cable was going to come back to haunt us, that’s what I said all 
along. You did not, you loved the cable. The only complaint you had was that it 
was too slow. You can get to Earth faster than you can get to Clarke, you said. 
That’s true, you can, it’s ridiculous. But not the same as saying the cable was 
going to come back and haunt us, you have to admit. Waiter, hey waiter! We’ll 
have tequilas all around, and some lime wedges. We were working the Socket when 
they came down, the inner chamber didn’t have a chance but the Socket is a big 
building, I don’t know if they had a plan and it didn’t work or if they didn’t 
have a plan at all, but by the time their third car came down the Socket was 
sealed off and they were the proud masters of a 37,000-kilometer dead end. It 
was stupid. It was a nightmare, these foxes kept coming in and at night only, so 
that they looked like wolves only a lot faster. And they went right for the 
throat. A plague of rabid foxes, man, it was a nightmare. Like 2128 all over 
again, I don’t know if that’s true or not but there they were, Terran police in 
Sheffield, and when people heard they all came out into the streets, the streets 
were packed, really packed, I’m short and sometimes my face was squished right 
into people’s backs or women’s breasts. I heard about it from a neighbor in the 
next apartment only about five minutes after it happened, she had heard from a 
friend living out near the Socket. The response of the people to the takeover of 
the cable’s lower facility was rapid and tumultuous. Those UN storm troopers 
didn’t know what to make of us, a detachment tried to take over Hartz Plaza and 
we just flowed around them, moving out from in front of them but shoving in at 
the sides so that it was like a kind of vacuum pull. This snarling foam-toothed 
rabid demon at my throat, it was a fucking nightmare. Took them right out to rim 
park and these goddamned starship troopers couldn ‘t have moved a centimeter at 
that point, not without slaughtering thousands of people. People in the streets, 
that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free 
elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha! And there were 
hookups to all the other cities and giant street parties in every one of them. 
We were in Lasswitz and everyone went down to the river park and stood with 
candles in their hand, so that cameras could shoot down from the overlook and 
see this sea of candles, it was great. And Sax and Ann standing there together, 
it was amazing. Amazing. Unbelievable. They probably scared the UN to death 
saying each other’s lines like that, the UN probably thought we had 
brain-transfer devices all ready to zap them. • What I liked was later when 
Peter called for a new election for the Red party leadership, and challenged 
Irishka to hold it right then and there on the wrist. Those party things are 
basically heavyweight challenges, mano a mano, if Irishka had refused to call a 
vote then she would have been finished anyway, so she had to call it no matter 
what, you should have seen the look on her face. We were in Sabishii when we 
heard the call for a Red vote and when Peter won we went wild, Sabishii was an 
instant festival. And Senzeni Na. And Nilokeras. And Hell’s Gate. And Argyre 
Station, you should have seen it. Well wait a second, it was only about a 
sixty-forty vote, in Argyre Station it went crazy because there were so many 
Irishka backers spoiling for a fight. It’s Irishka who saved Argyre Basin and 
every dry low spot on this planet if you ask me, Peter Claybome is just an old 
nisei, he never did anything., Waiter, waiter! Beers all around, weiss beers, 
bitte. Bringing food out to these little Terrans, didn’t have any idea. Nirgal 
shaking hands with every one of them. So the doctor says, how do you know you’ve 
got the quick decline? It was a fucking nightmare. It was a surprise Ann working 
with Sax, that looked like a sellout. Not if you had paid attention, they been 
traveling together and everything, you must have been on Venus or something. Or 
something. The browns, the blues, it’s stupid. We shoulda done something like 
this a long time ago. Well, why worry so much, they’re goners, there won’t be a 
single one left in ten years. Don’tbe too sure about that. Don’tbe too happy 
about that, you’re only a few years younger than them, you idiot. Oh it was a 
most interesting week we have been sleeping in the parks, and everyone was most 
kind. Werteswandel, the Germans call it. They’ve got a word for everything. 
Bound to happen, that’s evolution. We’re all mutants at this point. Speak for 
yourself jack. Speak to the waiter. Six years! That’s great news, I’m surprised 
you’re sober. Oh I’m not, ah-ha-ha, I’m not! Little red people charging around 
on red ants, think they’re helping out, whoops, right over the edge of the rim, 
better hope they’re flying ants. No wonder I’ve been getting so many ants. So 
the man says, Well, doc—Yes, and? That’s the end of the joke, he only just gets 
to say Well doc and then he dies, quick decline get it? Very funny. That’s right 
it is funny! All right, all right, ha-ha, it’s not worth getting hot over it. 
Anytime you have to threaten people to get them to laugh at your joke you have 
to consider it less than successful, okay? Fuck you. Oh clever. So anyway there 
we were when the troops kind of make like they want to go back to the Socket. 
They go at it very gently, single file behind a little electric hotel cart they 
got their hands on, and everyone moves a little and lets them go, and they were 
passing through us looking nervous, and then people were shaking their hands 
like they were all Nirgal at the gates, and asking them to stay, leaving them 
alone if they couldn’t handle it, kissing them on the cheeks, leis piled up till 
they couldn’t see over them. Right hack into the Socket. And why not since they 
made their point and threatened us enough for the goddamned traitor government 
to fold without a fight? This joker doesn’t seem to understand the principles of 
jujitsu. Of what? What? Hey just who the hell are you? I’m a stranger in town. 
What? What? Excuse me miz, could you bring us another round ofkava? Well, yes, 
we’re still trying to get it into the parts-per-billion range, but no luck yet. 
Don’t give me Fassnacht, / hate Fassnacht, the worst day of the year to me, they 
killed Boone on Fassnacht. They firebombed Dresden on Fassnacht. No end of evil 
to atone for. They were sailing in Chryse when a howler picked up their boat and 
threw it all the way over the Cydonia Mountains. That’ll be the kind of 
experience that brings you closer together. Oh please, who is this guy. It’s no 
big deal there’s blimps every week get blown around a bit, it’s no big deal. We 
got caught out in that same howler, but we were just outside Santorini, I mean 
to tell you the water’s surface was torn to smithereens to a depth of about ten 
meters, I’m not kidding. The boat we were in the Algot scared and took us under 
right down into another boat that was already down there, so we banged into this 
boat and it was like the end of the world, boom, everything dark, the AI went 
insane, scared it to death I swear. It probably just broke. Well I broke my 
collarbone. That’ll be ten sequins please. Thanks. Those howlers are dangerous. 
I was in one in Echus and we all had to sit down on our butts and even then we 
were kind of scraping along. I had to hold on to my glasses or else they would 
have been torn right off my ears. Cars flipping like tiddlywinks. The whole 
marina cleared of every single boat, it was like some kid took his toy harbor 
and knocked it across the room. I too experienced this storm at its utmost fury. 
I was visiting the township Ascension, in the North Sea near Korolev Island. Hey 
that’s where Will Fort surfs. Yes, here as I understand it the waves on Mars 
reach their greatest heights, and in this storm they towered a hundred meters 
from trough to crest, no, I do not jest. Waves much taller than the sides of the 
township, which on these dire rolling black hills appeared no larger than a 
lifeboat to those of us on it. We were a veritable cork. The animals were 
unhappy. And to compound our difficulties, we were being cast onto the south 
point of Korolev. The waves were breaking completely over the final cape into 
the sea beyond. So every time we rose up the gigantic face of each wave, the 
pilot of the Ascension turned the township south, and it slid across the face of 
the wave for some distance before losing the crest and falling back into the 
next trough. On each wave we moved a little faster and farther, for as we 
approached the point of the island the wave faces grew steeper and bigger. The 
very tip of the point curves off to the east, so that the waves were breaking 
left to right as we looked ahead, crashing onto the rocks and then onto the reef 
offshore. On our final wave the Ascension was pitched down the steep face of the 
wave. At the bottom of the face the pilot turned the township right, and the 
great raft made the cut at the bottom and drifted back up onto the face, moving 
across it at a speed we could not calculate. It was like flying. Yes—we were 
surfing a hundred-meter-high wave, on a raft as big as a village, just over the 
rocks of the reef below. For a second we flew in the tube of the breaking wave. 
Then we were out, onto the shoulder of the wave, which was back in deep water, 
and no longer breaking. And so we passed the island. So the doctor says, how do 
you know? How? So pretty. Yes, it was a moment to remember. I’m going to take my 
fund and retire, it just ain’t the same anymore. These people are thugs. Heard 
she went out on one of those star-ships, that’s what I heard. You really saw 
her? You got to get you a better translator, I did not say Never mind doctor I 
am feeling better. What the hell kind of machine. Waiter! Villages just like the 
ones back home, except no caste. If they want caste they have to carry it in 
their heads. Some issei try but the nisei go feral. The way I heard it is that 
the little red people finally got sick of all our nonsense, and they were hot to 
do something having recently domesticated the red ant, and they started this 
whole campaign so that they could come charging to the rescue when the Terrans 
invaded. You might think they were being overconfident, but you have to remember 
that the biomass of red ants on this planet is closing in on a meter thick if 
averaged, so much biomass they’re going to throw us out of orbit they should try 
ants on Mercury, and every ant has a whole tribe of the little people riding 
around on it in howdah cities or whatever, and so they weren’t so overconfident 
after all. There’s strength in numbers. So they deliberately made the government 
act stupid to spark this confrontation. I wondered what excuse those fools had, 
they need an excuse, why it is that people go to Mangala and immediately turn 
into rapacious corrupt morons, it’s a mystery to me. Went down for us. Why is it 
always the little red people, whatever happened to Big Man, I hate these little 
red people and their twee little folktales, if you’re going to be so stupid as 
to tell folktales at all, the truth being much more interesting, then at least 
they could be big tall tales, Titans and Gorgons duking it out with spiral 
galaxies like razor-edged boomerangs, zip, zip, zip! Hey watch it there, slow 
down, guy, slow down. Waiter, get this mo-tormouth some kava, will you? He needs 
to mellow. Be calm, agitated sir. Be calm. Throwing nova bombs back and forth! 
Boom! Kapow! KA BOOM! Hey! Hey! Calm oneself oh agitated one. I’m sick of these 
little people. Get your hands off me. It’s a sorry excuse for a government 
anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power. 
I told them to stick with tents, no global government, so there wouldn’t be so 
much power to suck, but did they listen to me? They did not. You told them. Yeah 
I told them, I was there. Nirgal, sure. Nirgal and I go way back. What do you 
mean, honored old one, are you not the Stowaway? Why yes, I am. So you are 
Nirgal’s father, you should go way back as you say. Yeah well in Zygote it 
didn’t always work that way. I tell you that bitch pulled the wool over your 
eyes your whole life if you let her. Have you living in a closet for years on 
end. Ah come on, you’re not Coyote. Well what can I say. Not many people 
recognize me. And why should they? I bet he is. You can’t be. If you’re Nirgal’s 
dad then why is he so tall and you’re so short? I’m not short. Why are you 
laughing? I’m five feet five inches tall. Feet? Feet? Holy ka, here’s a man 
measures his height in feet! In feet! Oh my God you must be kidding, five feet? 
Feet? Hey you look like it would take more feet than that, just how long were 
these feet? A foot was about a third of a meter, a little less. This is how they 
measured? A little less than a third of a meter? No wonder Earth is so messed 
up. Hey what makes you think your precious meter is so great, it’s just some 
fraction of the distance from Earth’s North Pole to its equator, Napoleon chose 
the fraction on a whim! It’s a bar of metal in Paris France and its length was 
determined by the whim of a madman! Don’t you be imagining you’re more rational 
than the old ways. Oh stop, please, I’ll die laughing, please. You people have 
very little respect for your elders, I like that. Hey give the old Coyote 
another drin\, what’re you having? Tequila, thanks. And some kava. Oh oh! This 
guy knows how to live. That’s right I do know how to live. These ferals got it 
figured out, as long as you don’t take it too far. They’re copying me but 
they’ve gone too far. Don’t walk, drive. Don’t hunt, buy. Sleep every night on a 
gel bed, and try to have two naked young native women as your blankets. Oh, oh, 
oh! Whoo! You old lecher! Oh honored sir. Indecent. Well, it works for me. I 
don’t sleep that well but I’m happy. Thanks, don’t mind if I do, thanks. I 
appreciate it. Cheers. Here’s to Mars.


 
 
 
 
 
She woke in a silence so still she could hear her heart. She couldn’t remember 
where she was. Then it came back. They were at Nadia and Art’s house, on the 
coast of the Hellas Sea, just west of Odes’sa. Tap tap tap. Dawn; the first nail 
of the day. Nadia was building outside. She and Art lived at the edge of their 
beach village, in their co-op’s complex of intertwined houses, pavilions, 
gardens, paths. A community of about a hundred people, linked to a hundred more 
like it. Apparently Nadia was always working on the infrastructure. Tap tap tap 
tap tap! Currently building a deck to surround a Zygote bamboo tower.
In the next room someone was breathing. There was an open door between the 
rooms. She sat up. Drapes on the wall; she pulled them open a crack. Predawn. 
Grey on gray. A spare room. Sax was on a big bed in the next room, through the 
door. Under thick coverlets.
She was cold. She got up and padded through the door into his room. His face 
slack on a broad pillow. An old man. She crawled under the coverlets into bed 
with him. He was warm. He was shorter than she was, short and round. She knew 
that, she knew him: from the sauna and pool in Un-derhill, the baths in Zygote. 
Another part of their communal body. Tap tap tap tap tap. He stirred and she 
wrapped herself around him. He snuggled back into her, still deeply asleep.
 
During the memory experiment she had focused on Mars. Michel had once said it: 
Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. And seeing the same 
hillocks and hollows around Underbill had reminded her intensely of the early 
years, when over each horizon had been a new thing. The land. In her mind it 
endured. On Earth they would never know what it was like, never. The lightness, 
the tight intimacy of the horizon, everything almost within touch; then the 
sudden immense vistas, when one of Big Man’s neighborhoods hove into view: the 
vast cliffs, the canyons so deep, the continent volcanoes, the wild chaos. The 
giant calligraphy of areological time. The world-wrapping dunes. They would 
never know; it could not be imagined.
But she had known. And during the memory experiment she had kept her mind 
focused on it, throughout the entirety of a day that had seemed to last ten 
years. Never once thought of Earth. It was a trick, a tremendous effort; don’t 
think of the word elephant] But she hadn’t. It was a trick she had gotten good 
at, the single-mindedness of the great refuser, a kind of strength. Perhaps. And 
then Sax had come flying over the horizon, crying Remember Earth? Remember 
Earth? It was almost funny.
But that had been Antarctica. Immediately her mind, so tricky, so focused, had 
said That’s just Antarctica, a bit of Mars on Earth, a continent transposed. The 
year they had lived there, a snatched glimpse of their future. In the Dry 
Valleys they had been on Mars without knowing it. So that she could remember it 
and it did not lead back to Earth, it was only an ur-Underhill, an Underbill 
with ice, and a different camp, but the same people, the same situation. And 
thinking about it, all of it had indeed come back to her, in the magic of the 
anamnestic enchantment: those talks with Sax; how she had liked someone as 
solitary in science as she was, how she had been attracted to him. No one else 
had understood how far you could walk out into it. And out there in that pure 
distance they had argued. Night after night. About Mars. Aspects technical, 
aspects philosophical. They had not agreed. But they were out there together.
But not quite. He had been shocked by her touch. Poor flesh. So she had thought. 
Apparently she had been wrong. Which was too bad, because if she had understood; 
if he had understood; if they had understood; perhaps all history would have 
changed. Perhaps not. But they had not understood. And here they were.
And in all the rush into that past, she had never once thought of the Earth 
farther north, the Earth before. She had stayed inside the Antarctic 
convergence. Indeed for the most part she had stayed on Mars, the Mars in her 
mind, red Mars. Now the theory was that the anamnestic treatment stimulated the 
memory and caused the consciousness to rehearse the associational complexes of 
node and network, bounding through the years. This rehearsal reinforced the 
memories in their physical tracery, such as it was, an evanescent field of 
patterns formed by quantum oscillation. Everything recalled was reinforced; and 
what was not recalled was perhaps not reinforced; and what was not reinforced 
would continue to fall prey to breakage, error, quantum collapse, decay. And be 
forgotten.
So she was a new Ann now. Not the Counter-Ann, nor even that shadowy third 
person who had haunted her for so long. A new Ann. A fully Martian Ann at last. 
On a brown Mars of some new kind, red, green, blue, all swirled together. And if 
there was a Terran Ann still in there, cowering in a lost quantum closet of her 
own, that was life. No scar was ever fully lost until death and the final 
dissolution, and that was perhaps the way it should be; one wouldn’t want to 
lose too much, or it would be trouble of a different kind. A balance had to be 
kept. Here, now, she was the Martian Ann, not issei any longer, but an elderly 
new native, a Ter-ran-born yonsei. Martian Ann Clayborne, in the moment and the 
only moment. It felt good to lie there.
 
Sax stirred in her arms. She looked at his face. A different face, but still 
Sax. She had an arm draped over him, and she ran a cold hand down his chest. He 
woke up, saw who it was, smiled a sleepy little smile. He stretched, turned, 
pressed his face into her shoulder. Kissed her neck with a little bite. They 
held on to each other, as they had in the flying boat during the storm. A wild 
ride. It would be fun to make love in the sky. Not practical in a wind like 
that. Some other time. She wondered if mattresses were made the same way they 
used to be. This one was hard. Sax was not as soft as he looked. They hugged and 
hugged. Sexual congress. He was inside her, moving. She seized him and hugged 
him, hard, hard.
Now he was kissing her all over, nibbling at her, completely under the covers. 
Submarining around down there. She could feel it all over her. His teeth, 
occasionally, but mostly it was the licking of a tonguetip over her skin, like a 
cat. Lick lick lick. It felt good. He was humming, or mumbling. His chest 
vibrated with it, it was like purring. “Rrrr, rrrr, rrrrrrrrrr.” A peaceful 
luxurious sound. It too felt good on her skin. Vibration, cat tongue, little 
licks all over her. She tented the coverlet so she could look down at him.
“Now which feels better?” he murmured. “A?” Kissing her. “Or B.” Kissing a 
different place.
She had to laugh. “Sax, just shut up and do it.”
“Ah. Okay.”
 
They had breakfast with Nadia and Art, and the members of their family that were 
around. Their daughter Nikki was off on a feral trip into the Hellespontus 
Mountains, with her husband and three other couples from their co-op. They had 
left the previous evening in a clatter of excited anticipation, like kids 
themselves, leaving behind their daughter Francesca, and the friends’ kids as 
well: Nanao, Boone, and Tati. Francesca and Boone were both five, Nanao three, 
Tati two; all of them thrilled to be together, and with Francesca’s 
grandparents. Today they were going to go to the beach. A big adventure. Over 
breakfast they worked on logistics. Sax was going to stay home with Art, and 
help him plant some new trees in an olive grove that Art was establishing on the 
hill behind the house. Sax would also be waiting to meet two visitors he had 
invited: Nirgal, and a mathematician from Da Vinci, a woman named Bab. Sax was 
excited to be introducing them, Ann saw. “It’s an experiment,” he confided to 
her. He was as flushed as the kids.
Nadia was going to keep working on her deck. She and Art would perhaps get down 
to the beach later, with Sax and his guests. For the morning the kids were to be 
in the care of Aunt Maya. They were so excited by this prospect they couldn’t 
sit still; they squirmed, they bolted around the table like young dogs.
So Ann, it seemed, was needed to go to the beach with Maya and the kids. Maya 
could use the help. All of them eyed Ann warily. Are you up to it, Aunt Ann? She 
nodded. They would take the tram.
 
So she was off to the beach with Maya and the kids. She and Francesca and Nanao 
and Tati were crowded in the first seat behind the driver, with Tati on Ann’s 
lap. Boone and Maya were sitting together in the seat behind. Maya came in this 
way every day; she lived on the far side of Nadia and Art’s village, in a 
detached cottage of her own, on bluffs over the beach. She went in most days to 
work for her co-op, and stayed in many evenings to work with her theater group. 
She was also a habitue of the cafe scene, and, apparently, these kids’ most 
regular baby-sitter.
Now she was engaged in a ferocious tickle fight with Boone, the two of them 
groping each other hard and giggling unabashedly. Something else to add to the 
day’s store of erotic knowledge: that there could be such a sensuous encounter 
between a five-year-old boy and a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old woman, the 
play of two humans both very experienced in the pleasures of the body. Ann and 
the other kids fell silent, slightly embarrassed to witness such a scene.
“What’s the matter,” Maya demanded of them in a breathless break, “cat got your 
tongue?”
Nanao stared up at Ann, appalled. “A cat got your tongue?”
“No,” Ann said.
Maya and Boone shrieked with laughter. People on the tram looked up at them, 
some grinning, some glowering. Francesca had Nadia’s curious flecked eyes, Ann 
saw. It was all of Nadia to be seen in her, she looked more like Art, but not 
much like either. A beauty.
 
They came to the beach stop: a little tram station, a rain shelter and kiosk, a 
restaurant, a parking lot for bikes, some country roads leading inland, and a 
broad path cutting through grassy dunes, down to the beach. They got off the 
tram, Maya and Ann laden with bags full of towels and toys.
It was a cloudy windy day. The beach proved to be nearly deserted. Swift low 
waves came in at an angle to the strand, breaking in the shallows just offshore, 
in abrupt white lines. The sea was dark, the clouds pearl gray, in a herringbone 
pattern under a dull lavender sky. Maya dropped her bags. She and Boone ran to 
the water’s edge. Down the beach to the east Odessa rose on its hillside, under 
a hole in the clouds so that all the tiny white walls glowed yellow in the sun. 
Gulls wheeled by looking for things to eat, feathering in the onshore wind. A 
pelican air-surfed over the waves, and above the pelican flew a man in a big 
birdsuit. The sight reminded Ann of Zo. People had died so young: in their 
forties, thirties, twenties; some in their teens, when they could just guess 
what they were going to miss; some at the age of these kids. Cut short like 
frogs in a frost. And it could still happen. At any moment the air itself could 
pick you up and kill you. Although that would be an accident. Things were 
different now, it had to be admitted; for barring accident, these kids would 
probably live a full span. A very full span. There was that to be said for the 
way things were now.
Nikki’s friends had said it would be best to keep their daughter Tati out of the 
sand, as she was prone to eating it. So Ann tried to keep her back on the narrow 
lawn between dunes and beach, but she broke away, howling, and trundled over and 
plopped back on her diaper on the sand, near the others, looking satisfied. 
“Okay,” Ann said, giving up and joining her, “but don’t eat any of it.”
Maya was helping Nanao and Boone and Francesca dig a hole. “When we reach water 
sand we’ll start the drip castle,” Boone declared. Maya nodded, absorbed in the 
digging.
“Look,” Francesca shrieked at them, “I’m running circles around you.”
Boone glanced up. “No,” he said, “you’re running ovals around us.”
He returned to discoursing with Maya about the life cycle of sand crabs. Ann had 
met him before; a year ago he had scarcely been talking, just simple phrases 
like Tati and Na-nao’s, Fishie! Mine! and now he was a pedant. The way language 
came to children was incredible. They were all geniuses at that age, it took 
adults years and years to twist them down into the bonsai creatures they 
eventually became. Who would dare to do that, who would dare deform this natural 
child? No one; and yet it got done. No one did it and everyone did it. Although 
Nikki and her friends, packing happily for their mountain trip, had still seemed 
a lot like kids to Ann. And they were nearly eighty years old. So perhaps it 
didn’t happen as much anymore. There was that too to be said for things as they 
were.
Francesca stopped her circling or ovaling, and plucked a plastic shovel out of 
Nanao’s hands. Nanao wailed in protest. Francesca turned away and stood on her 
tiptoes, as if to demonstrate how light her conscience was.
“It’s my shovel,” she said over her shoulder.
“Is not!”
Maya barely glanced up. “Give it back.”
Francesca danced off with it.
“Ignore her,” Maya instructed Nanao. Nanao wailed more furiously, his face 
magenta. Maya gave Francesca the eye. “Do you want an ice cream or not.”
Francesca returned, dropped the shovel on Nanao’s head. Boone and Maya, already 
reabsorbed in their digging, paid no attention.
“Ann, could you go get some ice creams from the kiosk?”
“Sure.”
“Take Tati with you, will you?”
“No!” Tati said.
“Ice cream,” Maya said.
Tati thought it over, worked laboriously to her feet.
She and Ann walked back to the tram-stop kiosk, hand in hand. They bought six 
ice creams, and Ann carried five of them in a bag; Tati insisted on eating hers 
while they walked. She was not yet good at performing two such operations at 
once, and they made slow progress. Melted ice cream ran down the stick, and Tati 
sucked ice cream and fist indiscriminately. “Pretty,” she said. “Taste pretty.”
A tram came into the station and stopped, then moved on. A few minutes later, 
three people biked down the path: Sax, leading Nirgal and a native woman. Nirgal 
braked his bike next to Ann, gave her a hug. She hadn’t seen him in many years. 
He was old. She hugged him hard. She smiled at Sax; she wanted to hug him too.
They went down and joined Maya and the kids. Maya stood to hug Nirgal, then 
shake hands with Bao. Sax biked back and forth on the lawn behind the sand, at 
one point riding with no hands and waving at the group; Boone, who was still 
using training wheels on his bike, saw him and shouted, flabbergasted: “How do 
you do that!”
Sax grabbed the handlebars. He stopped the bike and stared frowning at Boone. 
Boone walked awkwardly over to him, arms extended, and staggered right into his 
bike. “Something wrong?” Sax inquired.
“I’m trying to walk without using my cerebellum!”
“Good idea,” Sax said.
“I’ll go get more ice cream,” Ann offered, and left Tati this time, and trundled 
back up the sand to the grass path. It felt good to walk into the wind.
 
As she was returning with a second bag of ice-cream bars, the air suddenly 
turned cold. Then she felt a kind of lurch inside her, and a faintness. The sea 
surface had a glittery hard purple sheen, well above the actual surface of the 
water. And she was very cold. Oh shit, she thought. Here it comes. Quick 
decline: she had read about the various symptoms, reported by people who had 
been somehow resuscitated. Her heart pounded madly in her chest, like a child 
trying to get out of a black closet. Body insubstantial, as if something had 
leached her of substance and left her porous; she would collapse into dust at 
the tap of a finger. Tap! She grunted with surprise and pain, held on to 
herself. Pain in her chest. She took a step toward a bench beside the path, then 
stopped and hunched over at a new pain. Tap tap tap! “No!” she exclaimed, and 
clutched the bag of ice creams. Heart arrhythmic, yes it was bounding about, 
bang bang, bang bang bang bang, bang, No, she said without speaking. Not yet. 
The new Ann no doubt, but there was no time for that, Ann herself squeaked “No,” 
and then she was thoroughly absorbed in the effort to hold herself together. 
Heart you must beat! She held it so tightly she staggered. No. Not yet. The wind 
was a subzero frigidity, blowing right through her, her body ghostly; she held 
it together by will alone. Sun so bright, the harsh rays slanting right through 
her rib cage—the transparency of the world. Then everything was beating like a 
heart, the wind breathing right through her. She held herself together with 
every cramping muscle. Time stopped, everything stopped.
She took a short breath. The fit passed. The wind slowly warmed back up. The 
sea’s aura went away, leaving plain blue water. Her heart thumped with its old 
bump bump bump. Substance returned, pain subsided. The air was salty and damp, 
not cold at all. One could sweat in it.
She walked on. How forcibly the body reminded one of things. Still, she had 
held. She was going to live. For a while longer, at least. If it be not now ... 
but not now. So here she was. Tentatively she walked on, one step after another. 
Everything seemed to work. She had gotten away. Brushed only.
From the sand castle Tati saw Ann and came trundling toward her, intent on the 
bag of ice creams. But she went too fast and fell right on her face. When she 
pulled herself up her face was coated with sand, and Ann expected her to howl. 
But she licked her upper lip like a connoisseur.
Ann walked over to help her. Lifted her to her feet, tried to wipe the sand off 
her upper lip; but she whipped her head back and forth to avoid the help. Ah 
well. Let her eat some sand, what harm could it do. “There. Not too much. No, 
those are for Sax and Nirgal and Bao. No! Hey, look—look at the gulls! Look at 
the gulls!”
Tati looked up, saw seagulls overhead, tried to track them, fell on her butt. 
“Ooh!” she said. “Pretty! Pretty! Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”
Ann hauled her back to her feet. They walked hand in hand toward the group by 
its widening hole, its mound of sand topped with drip castles. Nirgal and Bao 
were down by the waterline, talking. Gulls planed overhead. Down the beach an 
old Asian woman was surf-fishing. The sea was dark blue, the sky clearing, pale 
mauve, the remaining clouds scrolling off to the east. The air all rushing by. 
Some pelicans glided in a line over the rising face of a wave, and Tati dragged 
Ann to a halt, pointing at them. “Innit pretty?”
Ann tried to walk on, but Tati refused to budge, tugged insistently at her hand: 
“Innit pretty? Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”
“Yes.”
Tati let go of her and trundled over the sand, just managing to stay on her 
feet, her diaper waddling like a duck’s behind, the backs of her fat knees 
dimpling.
But still it moves, Ann thought. She followed the child, smiling at her little 
joke. Galileo could have refused to recant, gone to the stake for the sake of 
the truth, but that would have been silly. Better to say what one had to, and go 
on from there. A brush reminded one what was important. Oh yes, very pretty! She 
admitted it and was allowed to live. Beat on, heart. And why not admit it. 
Nowhere on this world were people killing each other, nowhere were they 
desperate for shelter or food, nowhere were they scared for their kids. There 
was that to be said. The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more 
closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a 
variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brec-ciated fragments of the 
Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black 
under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift 
lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the 
wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.


 
 
Acknowledgments
 
Thanks this time to Lou Aronica, Stuart Atkinson, Terry Baier, Kenneth Bailey, 
Paul Birch, Michael Carr, Bob Eckert, Peter Fitting, Karen Fowler, Patrick 
Michel Franfois, Jennifer Hershey, Patsy Inouye, Calvin Johnson, Jane Johnson, 
Gwyneth Jones, David Kane and Ridge, Christopher McKay, Beth Meacham, Pamela 
Mellon, Lisa Nowell, Lowry Pel, Bill Purdy, Joel Russell, Paul Sattelmeier, Marc 
Tatar, Ralph Vi-cinanza, Bronwen Wang, and Vie Webb.
A special thanks to Martyn Fogg, and, again, to Charles Sheffield.


 
 
About the author
 
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is the author of the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Mars 
trilogy—Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars—as well as Antarctica; The Wild 
Shore; The Gold Coast; Pacific Edge; A Short, Sharp Shock; and other novels. He 
lives in Davis, California.