4

“Things are changing,” she told Michel and Spencer. “I don’t think we understand things anymore.”

She settled back into her life in Odessa, happy to be back but also disturbed, inquisitive, seeing everything anew. On the wall above her desk at the office she kept a drawing by Spencer, of an alchemist flinging a big volume into a turbulent sea. At the bottom he had written, “I’ll drown my book.”

She left the apartment every morning early, and walked down the corniche to the Deep Waters offices near the dry waterfront, next to another Praxis firm called Séparation de L’Atmosphère. There she worked through the days directing the synthesis team, coordinating the field units, and concentrating now on the small mobile operations that were moving around the basin floor, doing last-minute mineral mining and rearrangement of the ice. Occasionally she worked on the design of these little roving hamlets, enjoying the return to ergonomics, her oldest skill aside from cosmonautics itself. Working one day on changing room cabinets, she looked down at her sketches and felt a wash of déjà vu, and wondered if she had done exactly this bit of work before, sometime in the lost past. She wondered also why it was that skills were so robust in the memory, while knowledge was so fragile. She could not for the life of her recall the education that had given her this ergonomic expertise, but she had it nevertheless, despite the many decades that had passed since she had last put it to use.

But the mind was strange. Some days the sense of déjà vu returned as palpably as an itch, such that every single event of that day felt like something that had happened before. It was a sensation that became more and more uncomfortable the longer it persisted, she found, until the world became an acute frightful prison, and she nothing more than a creature of fate, a clockwork mechanism unable to do anything that she had not done before in some forgotten past. Once, when it lasted almost a week, she was almost paralyzed by it; she had never had the meaning of life assaulted so viciously, never. Michel was quite concerned about it, and assured her it was probably the mental manifestation of a physical problem; this Maya believed, sort of, but as nothing he prescribed helped to ease the feeling, it was of little practical help. She could only endure, and hope for the sensation to pass.

When it did pass, she did her best to forget the experience. And then when it recurred, she would say to Michel “Oh my God, I’m feeling it again,” and he would say “Hasn’t this happened before?” and they would laugh, and she would do her best to make do. She would dive into the particulars of her current work, planning for the dowsing teams, giving them their assignments based on the areographers’ reports from the rim, and the results of other dowsing teams coming back in. It was interesting, even exciting work, a sort of gigantic treasure hunt, which necessitated a continuing education in areography, in the secret habits of submartian water. This absorption helped with the déjà vu quite a bit, and after a while it became just another of the odd sensations with which her mind afflicted her, worse than the exhilarations but better than the depressions, or the occasional moments when rather than feeling that something had happened before, she was struck by the sense that nothing like this had ever happened ever, even though she might be doing something like stepping onto a tram. Jamais vu, Michel called it, looking concerned. Quite dangerous, apparently. But nothing to be done about it. Sometimes it was less than helpful, living with someone trained in psychological problems. One could easily become nothing more than a spectacular case study. They would need several pseudonyms to describe her.

In any case, on the days she was lucky and feeling well she worked completely abstracted, and quit somewhere between four and seven, tired and satisfied. She walked home in the characteristic light of the late day in Odessa: the whole town in the shadow of the Hellespontus, the sky therefore intense with light and color, the clouds brilliantly lit as they sailed east over the ice, and everything below burnished with reflected light, in that infinite array of colors between blue and red, different every day, every hour. She strolled lazily under the leaves of the trees in the park, and through the locked gate into the Praxis building, then up to the apartment to eat supper with Michel, who usually had finished a long day of doing therapy with homesick newcomers from Earth, or old-timers with a variety of complaints like Maya’s déjà vu or Spencer’s dissociation— memory loss, anomie, phantom smells and the like— odd gerontological problems, which had seldom cropped up in shorter-lived people, giving ominous warnings that the treatments might not be penetrating the brain quite as fully as they needed them to.

Very few nisei or sansei or yonsei ever came to visit him, however, which surprised him. “No doubt it is a good sign for the long-term prospects of Martian habitation,” he said one evening as he came up from a quiet day in his office on the bottom floor.

Maya shrugged. “They could be crazy and not know it. It looked like it might be that way to me, when I went around the basin.”

Michel eyed her. “Do you mean crazy or just different?”

“I don’t know. They just seem unaware of what they’re doing.”

“Every generation is its own secret society. And these are what you might call areurges. It is their nature to operate the planet. You have to give them that.”

Usually by the time Maya got home the apartment would already be fragrant with the smells of Michel’s attempts at Provençal cooking, and there would be an open bottle of red wine on the table. Through most of the year they ate out on the balcony, and when he was in town and feeling up to it Spencer joined them, as would their frequent visitors. As they ate they talked over the day’s work, and the events around the world, and back on Earth.

And so she lived the ordinary days of an ordinary life, la vie quotidienne, and Michel would share it with his sly smile, a bald man with an elegant Gallic face, ironic and good-humored, and ever so objective. The evening light would concentrate itself into the band of sky over the black jagged peaks of the Hellespontus, brilliant pinks and silvers and violets shading up into dark indigos and bruised blacks, and their voices would soften in that last part of the twilight Michel called entre chien et loup. And then they would pick up the plates, and go back inside, and clean up the kitchen— everything habitual, everything known, deep in that déjà vu that one determines oneself, that makes one happy.

• • •

And then, on some evenings, Spencer would have arranged for her to attend a meeting, usually in one of the communes in the upper town. These were loosely affiliated with Marsfirst, but the people who came to the meetings did not seem much like the radical Marsfirsters whom Kasei had led at the Dorsa Brevia congress— they were more like Nirgal’s friends in Dao, younger, less dogmatic, more self-absorbed, happier. It disturbed Maya to meet them even though she wanted to, and she spent the day before a meeting in a state of restless anticipation. Then after dinner a small band of Spencer’s friends would join them at the Praxis building, and accompany her as they made their way through town, taking trams and then walking, usually up into the upper reaches of Odessa, where the more crowded apartments were located.

Here entire buildings were becoming alternative strongholds, in which the occupants paid their rent and held some downtown jobs, but otherwise disconnected themselves from the official economy; they farmed in greenhouses and on terraces and roofs, and did programming and construction and small instrument and agritool manufacture, for selling and trading and giving among themselves. Their meetings took place in communal living rooms, or out in the little parks and gardens of the upper town, under the trees. Sometimes groups of Reds from out of town joined them.

Maya started by asking people to introduce themselves, and she learned more then: that most of them were in their twenties or thirties or forties, born in Burroughs, or on Elysium or Tharsis, or in camps on Acidalia or the Great Escarpment. There was also a regular small percentage of old Mars vets, and some new emigrants, often from Russia, which pleased Maya. They were agronomists, ecological engineers, construction workers, technicians, technocrats, city operators, service personnel. Much of this work was being done more and more within their developing alternative economy. Their communal buildings had begun as warrens of one-room apartments, with the bathrooms down the hall. They walked or trammed to their downtown jobs, past the fortress mansions behind the corniche, occupied by the visiting metanat executives. (Everyone in Praxis lived in apartments like theirs, which they had noted with approval.) They had all gotten the treatment, and took that to be normality— they were shocked to hear the way it was being used as an instrument of control back on Earth, but then added that to their list of Terran evils. They were in excellent health, and knew very little about sickness, or crowded health clinics. It was a folk cure among them to go out in a walker and let in a single breath of the ambient air. This was said to kill any ailment you could have. They were big and strong. They had a look in their eye that one night Maya recognized: it was the look on the youthful Frank’s face, in that photo she had seen in her lectern— that idealism, that edge of anger, that knowledge that things were not right, that confidence that they could set them right. The young, she thought. Revolution’s natural constituency.

And there they were, in their small rooms, meeting to argue the issues at hand, looking tired but happy. These were parties as much as anything else, part of their social life. It was important to understand that. And Maya would go to the middle of the room and sit on a tabletop, if possible, and say, “I am Toitovna. I was here since the beginning.”

She would talk about that— about what it had been like in Underhill— working to remember until she became as urgent in her manner as History herself, trying to explain why things on Mars were the way they were. “Look,” she told them, “you can never go back.” Physiological changes had closed Earth to them forever, emigrants and native-born alike, but especially the natives. They were Martian now, no matter what. They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free— and not so that they could cast loose from Earth’s terrible situation, not at all— rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act.

The communal groups were very receptive to this message, as were the more traditional Marsfirst groups, and the urban Bogdanovists, and even some of the Reds. To all of them, in every meeting, Maya stressed the importance of coordinating their actions. “Revolution is no place for anarchy! If we tried to fill Hellas each on our own we might easily wreck each other’s work, and maybe even overfill the minus one contour, and wreck everything we’ve been working for. It’s the same with this. We need to work together. We didn’t in sixty-one, and that’s why it was such a fiasco. It was interference rather than synergy, you understand? That was stupid. This time we have to work together.”

Tell that to the Reds, the Bogdanovists would say. And Maya would impale them with a look and say, “I’m talking to you right now. You don’t want to hear how I talk to them.” Which might make them laugh, relaxing as they imagined her castigating someone else. That awareness of her as the Black Widow— the evil witch who might curse them, the Medea who might kill them— this was not an unimportant part of her hold on them, and so she let the knives show from time to time. She asked them hard questions, and although usually they were hopelessly naíve, sometimes their answers were really impressive, especially when they were talking about Mars itself. Some of them were collecting tremendous amounts of information: inventories of metanat armories, airport systems, communication center layouts, lists and location programs for satellites and spacecraft, networks, databases. Sometimes, listening to them, it seemed like the whole thing might be possible. They were young, of course, and astonishingly ignorant in many ways, so that it was easy to feel superior to them; but then there was their animal vitality, their health and energy. And they were adults, after all, so that other times watching them Maya understood that the vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring— that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.

So she would keep that in mind even as she lectured them as sternly as she had the kids in Zygote, and after her lessons she took pains to mingle among them and just talk, share some food, listen to their stories. After an hour of that, Spencer would announce that she had to leave. The implication throughout was that she was visiting from another city— although, as she had seen some of their faces on the streets of Odessa, they certainly must have seen her as well, and knew at least that she spent a lot of time in the town. But afterward Spencer and his friends would take her through an elaborate routine, to make sure they were not followed. And most of the group would fade away into the staircased alleys of the upper town before they reached the western quarter, and the Praxis apartment building. Then they would slip in through the gate, and the door would shut with a clang, reminding her that the sunny double apartment she shared with Michel was a safe house.

One night after a very sharp meeting with a group of young engineers and areologists, as she was telling Michel about it, she tapped away at her lectern, and found the photo of the young Frank in that article, and printed out a copy of it. The article had taken the photo out of a newspaper of the time, and it was black and white, and quite grainy. She taped the photo to the side of the cabinet over the kitchen sink, feeling odd and turbulent.

Michel looked up from his AI and peered at it, and nodded approvingly. “It’s amazing how much you can read from people’s faces.”

“Frank didn’t think so.”

“He was just afraid of the ability.”

“Hmm,” Maya said. She couldn’t remember. She recalled instead the looks on the faces of the people at that night’s meeting. It was true, they had revealed everything— they had been like masks expressing exactly the sentences their owners had spoken. The metanats are out of control. They’re screwing things up. They’re selfish, they only care about themselves. Metanationalism is a new kind of nationalism, but without any home feeling. It’s money patriotism, a kind of disease. People are suffering, not so much here, but on Earth. And if it doesn’t change it will happen here too. They will infect us.

All said with the look from the photo, that knowing confident righteous blaze. It could change to cynicism, no doubt about it; Frank was the proof of that. It was possible to break that fervor, or lose it, in cynicism which could be so contagious. They would have to act before that happened;not too soon, but not too late. Timing would be everything. But if they timed it right. . . .

• • •

One day at the office, news came in from the Hellespontus. They had discovered a new aquifer, very deep compared to the others, very far away from the basin, and very big. Diana speculated that earlier glacial ages had run west off the Hellespontus range, and come to rest out there, underground— some twelve million cubic meters, more than any other aquifer, raising the amount of located water from 80 percent to 120 percent of the amount needed to fill the basin to the—1-kilometer contour.

It was amazing news, and the whole headquarters group gathered in Maya’s office to discuss it and plot it onto the big maps, the areographers already charting pipeline routes over the mountains, and debating the relative merits of different kinds of pipeline. The Low Point sea, called “the pond” in the office, already supported a robust biotic community based on the Antarctic krill food chain, and there was a spreading melt zone at its bottom, heated by the mohole and the accumulating weight of the many tons of ice pressing down from above. Increased air pressure and ever-warming temperatures meant that there would be more and more surface melting as well; bergs would be slipping and crashing together and breaking up, exposing more surfaces, and warming things with friction and sunlight, until they reached a kind of pack ice, and then brash ice. At that point newly pumped-in water, properly aimed to reinforce the Coriolis forces, would start a counterclockwise current.

On and on they talked about it, getting further and further ahead of the game, until when they went out to celebrate with a big lunch, it was almost a shock to see the corniche standing over the rocky plain of the empty basin floor. But today they would not be deterred by the present. They all had a lot of vodka with lunch, so much so that they gave themselves the rest of the afternoon off.

And so when Maya went back to the apartment, she was in no shape to deal with the sight of Kasei, Jackie, Antar, Art, Dao, Rachel, Emily, Frantz, and several of their friends, all there in her living room. They were passing through on a trip to Sabishii, where they planned to meet with some Dorsa Brevia friends, and enter Burroughs and spend a few months working there. They were perfunctory in their congratulations on the discovery of the new aquifer, all but Art; they weren’t really interested. This and the sudden crowding of her apartment made Maya cross, and it did not help that she was still affected by the vodka, or that Jackie was so effervescent, with her hands all over both proud Antar (named after the unbeaten knight of the pre-Islamic epic, as he had once explained to her) and dour Dao— both of whom stretched under her touch without appearing to mind when she was on the other one, or playing with Frantz. Maya ignored it. Who knew what perversion the ectogenes were capable of, brought up like a litter of cats as they were. And now they were rovers, gypsies, radicals, revolutionaries, whatever— like Nirgal, except not, as he had a profession, and a plan, while this crowd— well, she forced herself to suspend judgment. But she had her doubts.

She talked to Kasei, who was usually much more serious than the younger ectogenes— a gray-haired mature man, who somewhat resembled John in feature but not in expression, his stone eyetooth exposed like a fang as he darkly eyed his daughter’s behavior. Unfortunately this time through he was full of plans for ridding the world of the Kasei Vallis security compound. Obviously he felt that the relocation of Korolyov to his namesake valley had been a kind of personal affront, and the damage done to the complex by their raid to rescue Sax had not been enough to assuage him— indeed, it seemed only to have given him a taste for more. A brooding man, Kasei, with a temper— perhaps that had come from John— though really he was not much like either John or Hiroko, which Maya found endearing. But his plan to destroy Kasei Vallis was a mistake. Apparently he and Coyote had worked up a decryption program that had broken all the lock codes for the Kasei Vallis compound, and now he planned to storm the sentries, shut the occupants of the city into rovers on a locked course for Sheffield, and then blow up all the structures in the valley.

It might work or it might not, but either way it was a declaration of war, a very serious break in the rough strategy that had held ever since Spencer had managed to stop Sax from knocking things out of the sky. The strategy consisted of simply disappearing from the face of Mars— no reprisals, no sabotage, nobody home in whatever sanctuaries they happened to stumble on. . . . Even Ann seemed to be paying at least some attention to this plan. Maya reminded Kasei of this while praising his idea highly, and encouraging him to use it when the proper time came.

“But we won’t necessarily be able to break the codes then,” Kasei complained. “It’s a one-time opportunity. And it’s not as if they don’t know we’re out here, after what Sax and Peter did to the aerial lens, and Deimos. They probably think we’re even bigger than we are!”

“But they don’t know. And we want to keep that sense of mystery, that invisibility. Invisible is invincible, as Hiroko says. But remember how much they increased their security presence after Sax went on his rampage? And if they lose Kasei Vallis, they might bring up a huge replacement force. And that only makes it harder to take over in the end.”

Stubbornly Kasei shook his head. Jackie interrupted from across the room and said cheerily, “Don’t worry, Maya, we know what we’re doing.”

“Something you can be proud of! The question is, do any of the rest of us? Or are you princess of Mars now?”

“Nadia is the princess of Mars,” Jackie said, and went to the kitchen nook. Maya scowled at her back, and noticed Art watching her curiously. He did not flinch when she stared at him, and she went to her room to change clothes. Michel was in there cleaning up, making room for people to sleep on the floor. It was going to be an irritating evening.

The next morning when she got up early to go to the bathroom, feeling hung over, Art was already up. Over the sleeping bodies on the floor he whispered, “Want to go out and get breakfast?”

Maya nodded. When she was dressed they walked down the stairs and out, through the park and along the corniche, which was lurid in the horizontal beams of dawn sunlight.

They stopped in a café that had just washed down its section of sidewalk. On the dawn-stained white wall of the

building, a sentence had been painted with the help of a stencil, so that it was neat and small, and brilliantly red:

YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK

“My God,” Maya exclaimed.

“What?”

She pointed at the graffito.

“Oh, yeah,” Art said. “You see that painted all over Sheffield and Burroughs these days. Pithy, eh?”

“Ka wow.”

They sat in the chill air by a small round table, and ate pastries and drank Turkish coffee. The ice on the horizon blinked like diamonds, revealing some movement under the ice. “What a fantastic sight,” Art said.

Maya looked at the bulky Terran closely, pleased at his response. He was an optimist like Michel, but more canny about it, more natural; with Michel it was policy, with Art, temperament. She had always considered him to be a spy, from the first moment they had rescued him from his too-convenient breakdown out in their path: a spy for William Fort, for Praxis, perhaps for the Transitional Authority, perhaps for others as well. But now he had been among them for so long— a close friend of Nirgal, of Jackie, of Nadia as well . . . and they were in fact working with Praxis now, depending on it for supplies, and protection, and information about Earth. So she was no longer so sure— not only whether Art was a spy, but what, in this case, a spy was.

“You’ve got to stop them from making this assault on Kasei Vallis,” she said.

“I don’t think they’re waiting on my permission.”

“You know what I mean. You can talk them out of it.”

Art looked surprised. “If I could talk people out of things that well, we’d be free already.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well,” Art said. “I suppose they’re afraid they won’t be able to break the code again. But Coyote seems pretty confident he has the protocol. And it was Sax helped him work it out.”

“Tell them that.”

“For what it’s worth. They listen to you more than me.”

“Right.”

“We could have a contest— who does Jackie listen to least?”

Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”

Art grinned. “You should slip your recommendations into Pauline. Get it to imitate Boone’s voice.”

Maya laughed again. “Good idea!”

They talked about the Hellas project, and she described the import of the new discovery west of Hellespontus. Art had been in contact with Fort, and he described the intricacies of the latest World Court decision, of which Maya had not heard. Praxis had brought a suit against Consolidated for arranging to tether their Terran space elevator in Colombia, which was so close to the site in Ecuador that Praxis had planned to use that both sites would be endangered. The court had decided in favor of Praxis, but had been ignored by Consolidated, who had gone ahead and built a base in their new client country, and were already prepared to maneuver their elevator cable down onto it. The other metanats were happy to see the World Court defied, and they were backing Consolidated in every way possible, which was creating trouble for Praxis.

Maya said, “But these metanationals are squabbling all the time yes?”

“That’s right.”

“The thing to do would be to start a big fight between some of them.”

Art’s eyebrows shot up. “A dangerous plan!”

“For who?”

“For Earth.”

“I don’t give a damn about Earth,” Maya said, tasting the words on her tongue.

“Join the crowd,” Art said ruefully, and she laughed again.