5

Happily, Jackie’s troop soon left for Sabishii. Maya decided to travel out to the site of the newly discovered aquifer. She took a train counterclockwise around the basin, over Niesten Glacier and south down the great western slope, past the hill town of Montepulciano to a tiny station called Yaonisplatz. From there she drove a little car along a road that followed a mountain valley through the violent ridges of the Hellespontus.

The road was no more than a rough cut in the regolith, secured by a fixative, marked by transponders, and obstructed in shadowed places by drifts of dirty hard summer snow. It ran through strange country. From space the Hellespontus had a certain visual and areomorphological coherence, as the ejecta had been thrown back from the basin in concentric rings. But on the surface these rough rings were almost impossible to make out, and what was left was random pilings of rock, stone dropped from the sky chaotically. And the fantastic pressures engendered by the impact had resulted in all manner of bizarre metamorphoses, the most common being giant shattercones, which were conical boulders fractured on every scale by the impact, so that some had faults you could drive into, while others were simply conical rocks on the ground, with microscopic flaws that covered every centimeter of their surfaces, like old china.

Maya drove through this fractured landscape feeling somewhat spooked by the frequent kami stones: shattercones that had landed on their points and stood balanced; others that had had the softer material underneath them eroded away, until they became immense dolmens; giant rows of fangs; tall capped lingam columns, such as the one known as Big Man’s Hardon; crazily stacked strata piles, the most prominent of them called Dishes In the Sink; great walls of columnar basalt, patterned in hexagons; other walls as smooth and gleaming as immense chunks of jasper.

The outermost concentric ring of ejecta was the one that most resembled a conventional mountain range, appearing on this afternoon like something out of the Hindu Kush, bare and huge under galloping clouds. The road crossed this range by means of a high pass between two lumpy peaks. In the windy pass Maya stopped her car and looked back, and saw nothing but ragged mountains, a whole world of them— peaks and ridges all piebald with clouds’ shadows and snow, and here and there the occasional crater ring to give things a truly unearthly look.

Ahead the land dropped to the crater-pocked Noachis Planum, and down there was a camp of mining rovers, drawn up in a circle like a wagon train. Maya drove hard down the rough road to this camp, reaching it in the late afternoon. There she was welcomed by a small contingent of old Bedouin friends, plus Nadia, who was visiting to consult on the drilling rig for the newly discovered aquifer. They all were impressed with this one. “It extends past Proctor Crater, and probably out to Kaiser,” Nadia said. “And it looks like it goes way far south, so far it might be coextensive with the Australis Tholus aquifer. Did you ever establish a northern boundary for that one?”

“I think so,” Maya said, and started tapping at her wristpad to find out. They talked about water through an early dinner, only occasionally pausing to exchange other news. After dinner they sat in Zeyk and Nazik’s rover, and relaxed eating sherbet that Zeyk passed around, while staring into the coals of a little brazier fire on which Zeyk had earlier cooked shish kebab. The talk turned inevitably to the current situation, and Maya said again what she had said to Art— that they should foment trouble between the metanationals back on Earth, if they could.

“That means world war,” Nadia said sharply. “And if the pattern holds, it would be the worst one yet.” She shook her head. “There has to be a better way.”

“It will not take our meddling for it to start,” Zeyk said. “They’re on the spiral down into it now.”

“Do you think so?” Nadia said. “Well, if it happens . . . then we’ll have our chance for a coup here, I guess.”

Zeyk shook his head. “This is their escape hatch. It will take a lot of coercion to make the powerful give up a place like this.”

“There are different kinds of coercion,” Nadia said. “On a planet where the surface is still deadly, we should be able to find some kinds that don’t involve shooting people. There should be a whole new technology for waging war. I’ve talked with Sax about this, and he agrees.”

Maya snorted, and Zeyk grinned. “His new ways resemble the old ones, as far as I can tell! Bringing down that aerial lens— we loved that! As for firing Deimos out of orbit, well. But I can see his point, to an extent. When the cruise missiles come out . . .”

“We have to make sure it doesn’t come to that.” Nadia had the mulish expression she got when her ideas were set in concrete, and Maya regarded her with surprise. Nadia, revolutionary strategist— Maya wouldn’t have believed it possible. Well, she no doubt thought of it as protecting her construction projects. Or a construction project itself, in a different medium.

“You should come talk to the communes in Odessa,” Maya suggested to her. “They’re followers of Nirgal, basically.”

Nadia agreed, and leaned forward with a miniature poker to tap one of the coals back into the center of the brazier. They watched the fire burn; a rare sight on Mars, but Zeyk liked fires enough to take the trouble. Films of gray ash fluttered over the Martian orange of hot coals. Zeyk and Nazik talked in low voices, describing the Arab situation on the planet, which was complex as usual. The radicals among them were almost all out in caravans, prospecting for metals and water and areothermal sites, looking innocuous and never doing a thing to reveal that they were not part of the metanat order. But they were out there, waiting, ready to act.

Nadia got up to go to bed, and when she had gone, Maya said hesitantly, “Tell me about Chalmers.”

Zeyk stared at her, calm and impassive. “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know how he was involved with Boone’s murder.”

Zeyk squinted uncomfortably. “That was a very complicated night in Nicosia,” he complained. “The talk about it among Arabs is endless. It gets tiresome.”

“So what do they say?”

Zeyk glanced at Nazik, who said. “The problem is they all say different things. No one knows what really happened.”

“But you were there. You saw some of it. Tell me first what you saw.”

At this Zeyk eyed her closely, then nodded. “Very well.” He took a breath, composed himself. Solemnly, as if giving witness, he said, “We were gathered at the Hajr el-kra Meshab, after the speeches you gave. People were angry at Boone because of a rumor that he had stopped a plan to build a mosque on Phobos, and his speech hadn’t helped. We never liked that new Martian society he talked about. So we were there grumbling when Frank came by. I must say, it was an encouraging sight to see him at that moment. It seemed to us that he was the only one with a chance to counter Boone. So we looked to him, and he encouraged us to— he slighted Boone in subtle ways, made jokes that made us angrier at Boone while making Frank seem the only bastion against him. I was actually annoyed with Frank for stirring up the young ones even more. Selim el-Hayil and several of his friends from the Ahad wing were there, and they were in a state— not just at Boone, but also at the Fetah wing. You see the Ahad and Fetah were split over a variety of issues— pan-Arab versus nationalist, relations to West, attitude to the Sufis . . . it was a fundamental division in that younger generation of the Brotherhood.”

“Sunni-Shiite?” Maya asked.

“No. More conservative and liberal, with the liberals thought to be secular, and the conservatives religious, either Sunni or Shiite. And el-Hayil was a leader of the conservative Ahad. And he had been in the caravan Frank had traveled with that year. They had talked often, and Frank had asked him a lot of questions, really bored into him, in that way he had, until he felt that he understood you, or understood your party.”

Maya nodded, recognizing the description.

“So Frank knew him, and that night el-Hayil almost spoke at one point, and decided not to when Frank gave him a look. I saw this. Then Frank left, and el-Hayil left almost immediately after.”

Zeyk paused to sip coffee and think it over.

“That was the last I saw of either of them for the next couple of hours. It began to get ugly well before Boone was killed. Someone was cutting slogans on the windows of the medina, and the Ahad thought it was the Fetah, and some Ahad attacked a group of Fetah. After that they were fighting throughout the city, and fighting some American construction crews as well. Something happened. There were other fights going on as well. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”

Maya nodded. “I remember that much.”

“So, well, we heard that Boone had disappeared, and we were down at the Syrian Gate checking the lock codes to see if he had gone out that way, and we found someone had gone out and hadn’t come back in, so we were on our way out when we heard the news about him. We couldn’t believe it. We went down to the medina and everyone was gathered there, and they all told us it was true. I got into the hospital after about a half hour of moving through the crowd. I saw him. You were there.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, you were, but Frank had already left. So I saw him, and went back out and told the others it was true. Even the Ahad were shocked, I am sure of that— Nasir, Ageyl, Abdullah. . . .”

“Yes,” Nazik said.

“But el-Hayil and Rashid Abou, and Buland Besseisso, were not there with us. And we were back at the residence facing Hajr el-kra Meshab when there was a very hard knocking at the door, and when we opened it el-Hayil fell into the room. He was already very sick, sweating and trying to vomit, and his skin all flushed and blotchy. His throat had swollen and he could barely talk. We helped him into the bathroom and saw he was choking on vomit. We called Yussuf in, and were trying to get Selim out to the clinic in our caravan when he stopped us. ‘They have killed me,’ he said. We asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Chalmers.’ ”

“He said that?” Maya demanded.

“I said, ‘Who did this?’ and he said, ‘Chalmers.’ ”

As if from a great distance Maya heard Nazik say, “But there was more.”

Zeyk nodded. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘Chalmers has killed me. Chalmers and Boone.’ He was choking it out word by word. He said, ‘We planned to kill Boone.’ Nazik and I groaned to hear this, and Selim seized me by the arm.” Zeyk reached out with both hands and clutched an invisible arm. “ ’He was going to kick us off Mars.’ He said this in such a way— I will never forget it. He truly believed it. That Boone was somehow going to kick us off Mars!” He shook his head, still incredulous.

“What happened then?”

“He—” Zeyk opened his hands. “He had a seizure. He held his throat first, then all his muscles—” He clenched his fists again. “He seized up and stopped breathing. We tried to get him breathing, but he never did. I didn’t know— tracheotomy? Artificial respiration? Antihistamines?” He shrugged. “He died in my arms.”

There was a long silence as Maya watched Zeyk remembering. It had been half a century since that night in Nicosia, and Zeyk had been old at the time.

“I’m surprised how well you remember,” she said. “My own memory, even of nights like that . . .”

“I remember everything,” Zeyk said gloomily.

“He has the opposite problem to everyone else,” Nazik said, watching her husband. “He remembers too much. He does not sleep well.”

“Hmph.” Maya considered it. “What about the other two?”

Zeyk’s mouth pursed. “I can’t say for sure. Nazik and I spent the rest of that night dealing with Selim. There was an argument about what to do with his body. Whether to take it out to the caravan and then hide what had happened, or to get the authorities in immediately.”

Or to go to the authorities with a lone dead assassin, Maya thought, watching Zeyk’s guarded expression. Perhaps that had been argued as well. He was not telling the story in the same way. “I don’t know what really happened to them. I never found out. There were a lot of Ahad and Fetah in town that night, and Yussuf heard what Selim had said. So it could have been their enemies, their friends, themselves. They died later that night, in a room in the medina. Coagulants.”

Zeyk shrugged.

Another silence. Zeyk sighed, refilled his cup. Nazik and Maya refused.

“But you see,” Zeyk said, “that is just the start. That’s what we saw, what we could tell you for sure. After that, whew!” He made a face. “Arguments, speculation— conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated anymore. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory— not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.”

“You don’t believe in any of them?” Maya asked, feeling suddenly hopeless.

“No. I have no reason to. The Ahad and Fetah were in conflict, I know that. Frank and Selim were connected somehow. How that affected Nicosia— whether it did—” He blew out a breath. “I don’t know, and I don’t see how one could know. The past . . . Allah forgive me, the past seems a sort of demon, here to torture my nights.”

“I’m sorry.” Maya stood. The brilliant little chamber suddenly seemed cramped and florid. Catching a glimpse of the evening stars in a window, she said, “I’m going to go for a walk.”

Zeyk and Nazik nodded, and Nazik helped her get her helmet on. “Don’t be long,” she said.

The sky was matted with the usual spectacular array of stars, with a band of mauve on the western horizon. The Hellespontus reared to the east, late alpenglow turning its peaks a dark pink that sawed at the indigo above it, both colors so pure that the transition line seemed to vibrate.

Maya walked slowly toward an outcropping perhaps a kilometer away. There was something growing in the cracks underfoot, lichen or piggyback moss, its greens all black. She stepped on rocks where she could. Plants had it hard enough on Mars without being stepped on as well. All living things. The chill of the twilight seeped into her, until she could feel the X of the heating filaments in her pants against her knees as she walked. She stumbled and blinked to clear her vision. The sky was full of blurry stars. Somewhere north, in the Aureum Chaos, the body of Frank Chalmers lay in a wash of ice and sediments, his walker for a coffin. Killed while saving the rest of them from being swept away. Though he would have scorned such a description with all his heart. An accident of timing, he would insist, nothing more. The result of having more energy than anyone else, energy fueled by his anger— at her, at John, at UNOMA and all the powers of Earth. At his wife. At his father. At his mother, and himself. At everything. The angry man; the angriest man who had ever lived. And her lover. And the murderer of her other lover, the great love of her life, John Boone, who might have saved them all. Who would have been her partner forever.

And she had set them on each other.

Now the sky was starry black, with no more than a dark purple band left on the western skyline. Her tears were gone, along with her feelings; nothing left but the black world and a slash of purple bitterness, like a wound bleeding into the night.