7

So when they traveled around Hellas and met with Free Mars groups, Maya was thankful to see the people who came, who made the effort to believe that their actions could make a difference, even in the face of the great vortex swirling below them. Maya learned from them that everywhere he went, Nirgal was apparently insisting to the other natives that the situation on Earth was critical to their own fortunes, no matter how distant it seemed. And this was having an effect; now the people who came to the meetings were full of the news of Consolidated and Amexx and Subarashii, and of the recent new incursions into the southern highlands by the UNTA police, incursions which had forced the abandonment of Overhangs, and many hidden sanctuaries. The south was being emptied, all the hidden ones flooding into Hiranyagarbha or Sabishii, or Odessa and the east Hellas canyons.

Some of the young natives Maya met seemed to think that the UNTA appropriation of the south was basically a good thing, as it began the countdown to action. She was quick to denounce such thinking. “It’s not them who should have control of the timetable,” she told them. “We have to control the timing of this, we have to wait for our moment. And then all act together. If you don’t see that—”

Then you’re fools!

But Frank had always lashed out at his audiences. These people needed something more— or, to be precise, they deserved something more. Something positive, something to draw them as well as to drive them. Frank had said this too, but he had seldom acted on it. They needed to be seduced, like the nightly dancers on the corniche. Probably these people were out on their own waterfronts on all the other nights of the week. And politics needed to co-opt some of that erotic energy, or else it was only a matter of ressentiment and damage control.

So she seduced them. She did it even when she was worried or frightened, or in a bad mood. She stood among them thinking about sex with the tall lithe young men, and then she sat down in their midst, and asked them questions. She caught their gazes one by one, all of them so tall that when she sat on tables she was eye to eye with them as they sat in chairs, and she engaged them in conversation as intimate and pleasurable as she could make it. What did they want from life, from Mars? Often she laughed out loud at their responses, caught unawares by their innocence or their wit. They had themselves already dreamed Marses more radical than any she could believe in, Marses that were truly independent, egalitarian, just and joyous. And in some ways they had already enacted these dreams: many of them now had made their little warrens into extensive communal apartments, and they worked in their alternative economy that had less and less connection with the Transitional Authority or the metanats— an economy governed by Marina’s eco-economics and Hiroko’s areophany, by the Sufis and by Nirgal, by his roving gypsy government of the young. They felt they were going to live forever; they felt they lived in a world of sensuous beauty; their confinement in tents was normality, but a stage only, a confinement in warm womb mesocosms, which would be inevitably followed by their emergence onto a free living surface— by their birth, yes! They were embryo areurges, to use Michel’s term, young gods operating their world, people who knew they were meant to be free, and were confident they would get there, and soon. Bad news would come from Earth and attendance at the meetings would rise— and in these meetings the air was not one of fear but of determination, of the look on Frank’s face in the photo over her sink. A struggle between ex-allies Armscor and Subarishii over Nigeria resulted in the use of biological weapons (both sides disclaimed responsibility) so that the people, animals, and plants of Lagos and the surrounding area were devastated by grotesque diseases; and in the meetings that month, the young Martians spoke angrily, their eyes flashing, of the lack of any rule of law on Earth— the lack of any authority that could be trusted. The metanational global order was too dangerous to be allowed to rule Mars!

Maya let them talk for an hour before she said anything but “I know.” And she did know! It almost made her weep to look at them, to see how shocked they were by injustice and cruelty. Then she went over the points of the Dorsa Brevia Declaration one by one, describing how each had been argued out, what it meant, and what its implementation in the real world would feel like in their lives. They knew more about this than she did, and these parts of the discussion got them more fired up than any complaints about Earth— less anxious, and more enthusiastic. And in trying to envision a future based on the declaration she often got them laughing: ludicrous scenarios of collective harmony, everyone at peace and happy— they knew the squabbling cramped reality of their shared apartments, and so it really was funny. The light in the eyes of laughing young Martians— even she, who never laughed, felt a small smile rearranging the unseen map of wrinkles that was her face.

And so she would end the meeting, feeling that it was work well done. What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young? This was what Frank had never understood, at least not in his latter years. And so she would abandon Spencer’s security procedures, and lead the people in the meetings out of their rooms and down to the dry waterfronts, or into parks or cafés, to have a walk or a drink or a late meal, feeling that she had found one of the keys to revolution, a key that Frank had never known existed, but only suspected when looking at John.

“Of course,” Michel said when she returned to Odessa, and tried to tell him about it. “But Frank was not a believer in revolution anyway. He was a diplomat, a cynic, a counterrevolutionary. Joy was not in his nature. It was all damage control to him.”

But Michel was often contrary with her these days. He had learned to explode rather than soothe if she showed signs she needed a fight, and she appreciated that so much that she found she didn’t need to fight nearly so often. “Come on,” she objected at this characterization of Frank, and shoved Michel onto their bed and ravished him, just for the fun of it, just to drag him into the realm of joy and make him admit it. She knew perfectly well that he felt it was his duty to pull her always back toward the midline of her mood oscillations, and she could see his point, no one more so, and appreciated the anchoring he tried to provide; but sometimes, soaring up at the top of the curve, she saw no reason not to enjoy it a little, those brief moments of no-g flight, something like a spiritual status orgasmus. . . . And so she would pull him up by the cock to that level, and make him smile for an hour or two. Then it was possible for them to walk together downstairs and out the gate, and down through the park, over to her café in a mood of relaxation and peace, there to sit with their backs to the bar, and listen to the flamenco guitarist or the old tango band, playing its piazzollas. Talking casually about the work around the basin. Or not talking at all.

• • •

One evening in the late summer of M-year 49, they walked down with Spencer to the café and sat through the long twilight, watching dark copper clouds that sat glowing over the distant ice, under the purple sky. The prevailing westerlies drove air masses up over the Hellespontus, so that dramatic fronts of cloud over the ice were part of their daily life, but some clouds were special— metallic lobed solid objects, like mineral statues which could never just waft away on a wind. Spitting lightning from their black bottoms onto the ice below.

And then as they watched these particular statues, there was a low rumble, and the ground trembled slightly underfoot, and the silverware chattered across the table. They grabbed their glasses and stood, along with everyone else in the café— and in the shocked silence Maya saw they were all automatically looking to the south, out toward the ice. People were pouring out of the park onto the corniche, and then standing against the tent wall in silence, looking outward. There in the fading indigo of sunset, under the copper clouds, it was just possible to see movement, a winking black and white at the edge of the white-and-black mass. Moving toward them across the plain. “Water,” someone at the next table said.

Everyone moved as if in a tractor beam, glasses in hand, all other thoughts gone as they came to the tent coping at the edge of the waterfront and stood together against the chest-high wall, squinting into the shadows on the plain: black on black, with a salting of white spots, tumbling this way and that. For a second Maya recalled again the Marineris flood, and she shuddered, forced the memory back down like chyme in her esophagus, choking slightly on the acidity, doing her best to kill that part of her mind. It was the Hellas Sea coming toward her— her sea, her idea, now inundating the slope of the basin. A million plants were dying, as Sax had taught her to remember. The Low Point melt pod had been getting bigger and bigger, connecting up to other pods of liquid water, melting the rotten ice between and around them, warmed by the long summer and the bacteria and the surges of steam from explosions set in the surrounding ice. One of the northern ice walls must have broken, and now the flood was blackening the plain south of Odessa. The nearest edge was no more than fifteen kilometers away. Now most of what they could see of the basin was a salt-and-pepper jumble, the predominant pepper in the foreground shifting even as they watched to more and more salt— the land lightening at the same time that the sky was darkening, which as always gave things an unnatural aspect. Frost steam swirled up from the water, glowing with what looked to be reflected light from Odessa itself.

Perhaps half an hour passed, with everyone on the corniche standing still and watching, in a general silence that only began to end when the flood was frozen, and the twilight ended. Then there was a sudden return of human voices, and electric music from a café two down. A peal of laughter. Maya went to the bar and ordered champagne for the table, feeling her high spirits sizzle. For once her mood was in tune with events, and she was ready to celebrate the bizarre sight of their own powers unleashed, lying out there on the landscape for their inspection. She offered a toast to the café at large:

“To the Hellas Sea, and all the sailors who will sail it, dodging icebergs and storms to reach the far shore!”

Everyone cheered, and people all up and down the corniche picked it up and cheered as well, a wild moment. The gypsy band struck up a tango version of a sea chantey, and Maya felt the small smile shifting the stiff skin of her cheeks for the entire rest of that evening. Even a long discussion of the possibility of another surge washing up and over Odessa’s seawall could not take that smile off her face. Down at the office they had calculated the possibilities very finely indeed, and any slopover, as they called it, was unlikely or even impossible. Odessa would be all right.

• • •

But news kept flooding in from afar, threatening to overwhelm them in its own way. On Earth the wars in Nigeria and Azania had caused bitter worldwide economic conflict between Armscor and Subarashii. Christian, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists were all making a vice of necessity and declaring the longevity treatment the work of Satan; great numbers of the untreated were joining these movements, taking over local governments and making direct, human-wave assaults on the metanational operations within their reach. Meanwhile all the big metanationals were trying to resuscitate the UN, and put it forth as an alternative to the World Court; and many of the biggest metanat clients, and now the Group of Eleven, were going along with it. Michel considered this a victory, as it again showed fear of the World Court. And any strengthening of an international body like the UN, he said, was better than none. But now there were two competing arbitration systems erected, one controlled by the metanats, which made it easier to avoid the one they didn’t like.

And on Mars things were little better. The UNTA police were roving in the south, unhindered except by occasional unexplained explosions among their robot vehicles, and Prometheus was the latest hidden sanctuary to have been discovered and shut down. Of all the big sanctuaries only Vishniac remained hidden, and they had gone dormant in an effort to stay that way. The south polar region was no longer part of the underground.

In this context it was no surprise to see how frightened the people who came to the meetings sometimes were. It took courage to join an underground that was visibly shrinking, like Minus One Island. People were driven to it by anger, Maya supposed, and indignation and hope. But they were frightened as well. There was no assurance that this move would do any good.

And it would be so easy to plant a spy among these newcomers. Maya found it hard to trust them, sometimes. Could all of them be what they claimed to be? It was impossible to be sure of that, impossible. One night at a meeting with a lot of newcomers there was a young man in the front with a look she didn’t like, and after the meeting, which was uninspired, she had gone with Spencer’s friends right back to the apartment, and told Michel about it. “Don’t worry,” he said.

“What do you mean, don’t worry.”

He shrugged. “The members keep track of each other. They try to make sure they’re all known to each other. And Spencer’s team is armed.”

“You never told me that.”

“I thought you knew.”

“Come on. Don’t treat me as if I was stupid.”

“I don’t, Maya. Anyway, it’s all we can do, unless we hide entirely.”

“I’m not proposing to do that! What do you think I am, a coward?”“Putaine!” he roared. “Pourquoi ce ça? Pourquoi?”

A sour expression crossed his face, and he said something in French. Then he took a deep breath and shouted at her in French, one of his curses. But she could see that this was a deliberate decision on his part— that he had decided the fights were good for her, and cathartic for him, so that they could be pursued, when inevitable, as a kind of therapeutic method— and this of course was intolerable. An act, a manipulation of her— without another thought she took a step into the kitchen area and picked up a copper pot and heaved it at him, and he was so surprised that he barely managed to knock it away.

“I won’t be patronized,” she told him, satisfied that he was genuinely angry now, but still blazing herself. “You damned head-shrinker, if you weren’t so bad at your job the whole First Hundred wouldn’t have gone crazy and this world wouldn’t be so fucked up. It’s all your fault.” And she slammed out the door and went down to the café to brood over the awfulness of having a shrink as a partner, also over her own ugly behavior, so quick to leap out of her control and attack him. He did not come down and join her that time, though she sat around till closing.

• • •

And then, just after she had gotten home and lain down on the couch and fallen asleep, there was a knock at the door, rapid and light in a way immediately frightening, and Michel ran to it and looked through the peephole. He saw who it was and let her in. It was Marina.

Marina sat down heavily on the couch beside Maya, and with shaking hands holding theirs, said, “They took over Sabishii. Security troops. Hiroko and her whole inner circle were there visiting, as well as all the southerners who had come up since the raids. And Coyote too. All of them were there, and Nanao, and Etsu, and all the issei . . .”

“Didn’t they resist?” Maya said.

“They tried. There were a bunch of people killed at the train station. That slowed them down, and I think some people might have gotten into the mohole mound maze. But they had surrounded the whole area, and they came in through the tent walls. It was just like Cairo in sixty-one, I swear.”

Suddenly she started to cry, and Maya and Michel sat down on each side of her, and she put her face in her hands and sobbed. This was so out of character for the usually severe Marina that the reality of her news hit home.

She sat up and wiped her eyes and nose. Michel got her a tissue. Calmly she went on: “I’m afraid a lot of them may be killed. I was out with Vlad and Ursula in one of those outlying hermitage boulders, and we stayed there for three days, and then walked to one of the hidden garages and got out in boulder cars. Vlad went to Burroughs, Ursula to Elysium. We’re trying to tell as many of the First Hundred as we can. Especially Sax and Nadia.”

Maya got up and put on her clothes, then went down the hall and knocked on Spencer’s door. She returned to the kitchen and put on water for tea, refusing to look at the photo of Frank, who watched her saying I told you so. This is the way it happens. She took teacups back into the living room, and saw that her own hands were shaking so much that hot liquid was spilling down over her fingers. Michel’s face was pale and sweaty, and he wasn’t hearing anything Marina was saying. Of course— if Hiroko’s group had been there, then his entire family was gone, either captured or killed. She handed out the teacups, and as Spencer came in and had the story told to him, she got a robe and draped it over Michel’s shoulders, excoriating herself for the miserable timing of her assault on him. She sat by him, squeezing his thigh, trying to tell him by touch that she was there, that she was his family too, and that all her games were over, to the best of her ability— no more treating him as pet or punching bag. . . . That she loved him. But his thigh was like warm ceramic, and he obviously didn’t notice her hand, was scarcely even aware she was there. And it came to her that it was precisely in the moments of greatest need when people could do the least for each other.

She got up and got Spencer some tea, avoiding looking at the photo or the pale image of her face in the dark kitchen window, the pinched bleak vulture eye that she could never meet. You can never look back.

For the moment there was nothing to do but sit there, and get through the night. Try to absorb the news, to withstand it. So they sat, they talked, they listened to Marina tell her story in greater and greater detail. They made calls out on the Praxis lines, trying to find out more. They sat, slumped and silent, caged in their own reflections, their solitary universes. The minutes passed like hours, the hours like years: it was the hellish twisted spacetime of the all-night vigil, that most ancient of human rituals, where people fought without success to wrench meaning into each random catastrophe.

• • •

Dawn when it finally came was overcast, the tent spattered with raindrops. A few painfully slow hours later, Spencer began the process of contacting all the groups in Odessa. Over the course of that day and the next they spread the news, which had been suppressed on Mangalavid and the other infonets. But it was clear to all that something had happened, because of the sudden absence of Sabishii from the ordinary discourse, even in matters of common business. Rumors flew everywhere, gaining momentum in the absence of hard news, rumors of everything from Sabishii’s independence to its razing. But in the tense meetings of the following week Maya and Spencer told everyone what Marina had said, and then they spent the subsequent hours discussing what should be done. Maya did her best to convince people that they should not be pushed into acting before they were ready, but it was hard going; they were furious, and frightened, and there were a lot of incidents in town and around Hellas that week, all over Mars in fact— demonstrations, minor sabotage, assaults on security positions and personnel, AI breakdowns, work slowdowns. “We’ve got to show them they can’t get away with this!” Jackie said over the net, seeming everywhere at once. Even Art agreed with her: “I think civil protests by as much of the general population as we can muster might slow them down. Make those bastards think twice about doing anything like this again.”

Nevertheless, the situation stabilized after a while. Sabishii returned to the net and to train schedules, and life there resumed, although it was not the same as before, as a big police force stayed in occupation, monitoring the gates and the station, and trying to discover all the cavities of the mound maze. During this time Maya had a number of long talks with Nadia, who was working in South Fossa, and with Nirgal and Art, and even with Ann, who called in from one of her refuges in the Aureum Chaos. They all agreed that no matter what had happened in Sabishii, they needed to hold back for the moment from any attempt at a general insurrection. Sax even called in to Spencer, to say he “needed time.” Which Maya found comforting, as it supported her gut feeling that the time was not right. That they were being provoked in the hopes they would try a revolt prematurely. Ann and Kasei and Jackie and the other radicals— Dao, Antar, even Zeyk— were unhappy at the wait, and pessimistic about what it meant. “You don’t understand,” Maya told them. “There’s a whole new world growing out there, and the longer we wait, the stronger it gets. Just hold on.”

Then about a month after the closing of Sabishii, they got a brief message on their wrists from Coyote— a short clip of his lopsided face, looking unusually serious, telling them that he had gotten away through the maze of secret tunnels in the mohole mound, and was now back in the south, in one of his own hideouts. “What about Hiroko?” Michel said instantly. “What about Hiroko and the rest of them?”

But Coyote was already gone.

“I don’t think they got Hiroko either,” Michel said instantly, walking around the room without noticing he was moving. “Not Hiroko or any of them! If they had been captured, I’m sure the Transitional Authority would have announced it. I’ll bet Hiroko has taken the group underground again. They haven’t been pleased with things since Dorsa Brevia, they’re just not good at compromise, that’s why they took off in the first place. Everything that has happened since has only confirmed their opinion that they can’t trust us to build the kind of world they want. So they’ve used this chance and disappeared again. Maybe the crackdown on Sabishii forced them to do it without warning us.”

“Maybe so,” Maya said, careful to sound like she believed it. It sounded like denial on Michel’s part, but if it helped him, who cared? And Hiroko was capable of anything. But Maya had to make her response plausibly Mayalike, or he would see she was only reassuring him: “But where would they go?”

“Back into the chaos, I would guess. A lot of the old shelters are still there.”

“But what about you?”

“They’ll let me know.”

He thought it over, looked at her. “Or maybe they figure that you’re my family now.”

So he had felt her hand, in that first horrible hour. But he gave her such a sad crooked smile that she winced, and caught him up and tried to crush him with a hug, really crack a rib, to show him how much she loved him and how little she liked such a wan look. “They’re right about that,” she said harshly. “But they ought to contact you anyway.”

“They will. I’m sure they will.”

Maya had no idea what to think of this theory of Michel’s. Coyote had in fact escaped through the mound maze, and he was likely to have helped as many of his friends as he could. And Hiroko would probably be first on that list. She would certainly grill Coyote about it next time she saw him; but then he had never told her anything before. In any case, Hiroko and her inner circle were gone. Dead, captured, or in hiding, no matter which it was a cruel blow to the cause, Hiroko being the moral center for so much of the resistance.

But she had been so strange. A part of Maya, mostly subconscious and unacknowledged, was not entirely unhappy to have Hiroko off the scene, however it had happened. Maya had never been able to communicate with Hiroko, to understand her, and though she had loved her, it had made her nervous to have such a great random force wandering about, complicating things. And it had been irritating also to have another great power among the women, a power that she had had absolutely no influence over. Of course it was horrible if the whole of her group had been captured, or worse, killed. But if they had decided to disappear again, that would not be a bad thing at all. It would simplify things at a time when they desperately needed simplification, giving Maya more potential control over the events to come.

So she hoped with all her heart that Michel’s theory was true, and nodded at him, and pretended to agree in a reserved realistic way with his analysis. And then went off to the next meeting, to calm down yet another commune of angry natives. Weeks passed, then months; it seemed they had survived the crisis. But things were still degenerating on Earth, and Sabishii, their university town, the jewel of the demimonde, was functioning under a kind of martial law; and Hiroko was gone, Hiroko who was their heart. Even Maya, initially pleased in some sense to be rid of her, felt more and more oppressed by her absence. The concept of Free Mars had been part of the areophany, after all— and to be reduced to mere politics, to the survival of the fittest. . . .

The spirit seemed gone from things. And as the winter passed, and the news from Earth told of escalating conflicts, Maya noticed that people seemed more and more desperate for distraction. The partying got louder and wilder; the corniche was a nightly celebration, and on special nights, like Fassnacht or New Year’s, it was jammed with everyone in town, all dancing and drinking and singing with a kind of ferocious gaiety, under the little red mottoes painted on every other wall. you can never go back. free mars. But how? How?

New Year’s that winter was especially wild; it was M-year 50, and people were celebrating the big anniversary in style. Maya walked with Michel up and down the corniche, and from behind her domino she watched curiously as the undulating dance lines passed them by, she stared at all the long young dancing bodies, the figures masked but naked to the waist for the most part, as if out of an ancient Hindu illustration, breasts and pecs bobbing gracefully to nuevo calypso steel-drum ponking. . . . Oh, it was strange! And these young aliens were ignorant, but how beautiful! How beautiful! And this town she had helped to build, standing over its dry waterfront. . . . She felt herself taking off inside, past the equinox and into the glorious rush to euphoria, and maybe it was only an accident of her biochemistry, probably so given the grim situation of the two worlds, entre chien et loup, but nevertheless it existed, and she felt it in her body. And so she pulled Michel into a dance line, and danced and danced until she was slippery with sweat. It felt great.

For a while they sat together in her café— quite a little reunion of the First Thirty-nine, as it turned out: she and Michel and Spencer, and Vlad and Ursula and Marina, and Yeli Zudov and Mary Dunkel, who had slipped out of Sabishii a month after the shutdown, and Mikhail Yangel, up from Dorsa Brevia, and Nadia, down from South Fossa. Ten of them. “A decimation,” Mikhail noted. They ordered bottle after bottle of vodka, as if they could drown the memory of the other ninety, including their poor farm crew, who at best had just disappeared on them again, and at worst had been murdered. The Russians among them, strangely in the majority that night, began to offer up all the old toasts from home. Let’s pig up! Let’s get healthier! Let’s pour behind the cellar! Let’s get glassed! Let’s get fucked! Let’s fill the eyes with it! Let’s lick it out! Let’s wet the back of the throat! Let’s buy for three! Let’s suck it, pour it, knock it, grab it, beat it, flog it, swing it— and so on and so on, until Michel and Mary and Spencer were looking amazed and appalled. It’s like Eskimos and snow, Mikhail told them.

And then they went back out to dance, the ten of them forming a line of their own, weaving dangerously through the crowds of youngsters. Fifty long Martian years, and still they survived, still they danced! It was a miracle!

But as always in the all-too-predictable fluctuation of Maya’s moods, there came that stall at the top, that sudden downturn— tonight, begun as she noticed the drugged eyes behind the other masks, saw how everyone was on their way out, doing their best to escape into their own private world, where they didn’t have to connect with anyone except that night’s lover. And they were no different. “Let’s go home,” she said to Michel, who was still bouncing along before her in time to the bands, enjoying the sight of all the lean Martian youngsters. “I can’t stand this.”

But he wanted to stay, and so did the others, and in the end she went home by herself, through the gate and the garden and up the stairs to their apartment. The noise of the celebration was loud behind her.

And there on the cabinet over the sink the young Frank smiled at her distress. Of course it goes this way, the youth’s intent look said. I know this story too— I learned it the hard way. Anniversaries, marriages, happy moments— they blow away. They’re gone. They never meant a thing. The smile tight, fierce, determined; and the eyes . . . it was like looking in the windows of an empty house. She knocked a coffee cup off the counter and it broke on the floor; the handle spun there and she cried out loud, sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees and wept.

• • •

Then in the new year came news of heightened security measures in Odessa itself. It seemed that UNTA had learned the lesson of Sabishii, and was going to clamp down on the other cities more subtly: new passports, security checks at every gate and garage, restricted access to the trains. It was rumored they were hunting the First Hundred in particular, accusing them of attempting to overthrow the Transitional Authority.

Nevertheless Maya wanted to keep going to the Free Mars meetings, and Spencer kept agreeing to take her. “As long as we can,” she said. And so one night they walked together up the long stone staircases of the upper town. Michel was with them for the first time since the assault on Sabishii, and it seemed to Maya that he was recovering fairly well from the blow of the news, from that awful night after Marina’s knock on the door.

But they were joined at this meeting by Jackie Boone and the rest of her crowd, Antar and the zygotes, who had arrived in Odessa on the circumHellas train, on the run from the UNTA troops in the south, and rabidly angry at the assault on Sabishii, more militant than ever. The disappearance of Hiroko and her inner group had sent the ectogenes over the edge; Hiroko was mother to many of them, after all, and they all seemed in agreement that it was time to come out from cover and start a full-scale rebellion. Not a minute to lose, Jackie told the meeting, if they wanted to rescue the Sabishiians and the hidden colonists.

“I don’t think they got Hiroko’s people,” Michel said. “I think they went underground with Coyote.”

“You wish,” Jackie told him, and Maya felt her upper lip curl.

Michel said, “They would have signaled us if they were truly in trouble.”

Jackie shook her head. “They wouldn’t go into hiding again, now that things are going critical.” Dao and Rachel nodded. “And besides, what about the Sabishiians, and the lockup of Sheffield? And it’s going to happen here too. No, the Transitional Authority is taking over everywhere. We have to act now!”

“The Sabishiians have sued the Transitional Authority,” Michel said, “and they’re all still in Sabishii, walking around.”

Jackie just look disgusted, as if Michel were a fool, a weak over-optimistic frightened fool. Maya’s pulse jumped, and she could feel her teeth pressing together.

“We can’t act now,” she said sharply. “We’re not ready.”

Jackie glared at her. “We’ll never be ready according to you! We’ll wait until they’ve got a lock on the whole planet, and then we won’t be able to do anything even if we wanted to. Which is just how you’d like it, I’m sure.”

Maya shot out of her chair. “There is no they anymore. There are four or five metanationals fighting over Mars, just like they’re fighting over Earth. If we stand up in the middle of it we’ll just get cut down in the crossfire. We need to pick our moment, and that has to be when they’ve hurt each other, and we have a real chance to succeed. Otherwise we get the moment imposed on us, and it’s just like sixty-one, it’s just flailing about and chaos and people getting killed!”

“Sixty-one,” Jackie cried, “it’s always sixty-one with you— the perfect excuse for doing nothing! Sabishii and Sheffield are shut down and Burroughs is close, and Hiranyag and Odessa will be next, and the elevator is bringing down police every day and they’ve got hundreds of people killed or imprisoned, like my grandmother who is the real leader of us all, and all you talk about is sixty-one! Sixty-one has made you a coward!”

Maya lunged out and slapped her hard on the side of the head, and Jackie leaped on her and Maya fell back into a table’s edge and the breath whooshed out of her. She was being punched but managed to catch one of Jackie’s wrists, and she bit into the straining forearm as hard as she could, really trying to sever things. Then they were jerked apart and held onto, the room bedlam, everyone shouting including Jackie, who shouted “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! Murderer!” and Maya heard words grating out of her own throat as well, “Stupid little slut, stupid little slut,” between gasps for air. Her ribs and teeth hurt. People were holding hands over her mouth and Jackie’s too, people were hissing “Sssh, sssh, quiet, they’ll hear us, they’ll report us, the police will come!”

Finally Michel took his hand from Maya’s mouth and she hissed “Stupid little slut” one last time, then sat back in a chair and looked at them all with a glare that caught and stilled at least half of them. Jackie was released and she started to curse in a low voice and Maya snapped, “Shut up!” so viciously that Michel stepped between them again. “Towing all your boys around by the cock and thinking you’re a leader,” Maya snarled in a whisper, “and all without a single thought in your empty head—”

“I won’t listen to this!” Jackie cried, and everyone said “Ssssh!” and she was off, out into the hall. That was a mistake, a retreat, and Maya stood back up and used the time to castigate the rest of them in a tearing whisper for their stupidity— and then, when she had controlled her temper a little, to argue the case for biding their time, the excoriating edge of her anger just under the surface of a rational plea for patience and intention and control, an argument that was essentially unanswerable. All through this peroration everyone in the room was of course staring at her as if she were some bloodied gladiator, the Black Widow indeed, and as her teeth still hurt from sinking them into Jackie’s arm she could scarcely pretend to be the perfect model of intelligent debate; she felt like her mouth must be puffed up, it throbbed so, and she fought a rising sense of humiliation and carried on, cold and passionate and overbearing. The meeting ended in a sullen and mostly unspoken agreement to delay any mass insurrection and continue lying low, and the next thing she knew she was slumped on a tram seat between Michel and Spencer, trying not to cry. They would have to put up Jackie and the rest of her group while they were in Odessa— theirs was the safe house, after all. So it was a situation she wasn’t going to be able to escape. And meanwhile there were police officers standing in front of the town’s physical plant and offices, checking wrists before they let people inside. If she didn’t go to work again they very well might try to track her down to ask why, and if she went to work and got checked, it wasn’t certain that her wrist ID and Swiss passport would pass her. There were rumors that the post-‘61 balkanization of information was beginning to collapse back into some larger integrated systems, which had recovered some prewar data; thus the requirement of new passports. And if she ran into one of those systems, that would be that. Shipped off to the asteroids or to Kasei Vallis, to be tortured and have her mind wrecked like Sax. “Maybe it is time,” she said to Michel and Spencer. “If they lock up all the cities and the pistes, what other choice do we have?”

They didn’t answer. They didn’t know what to do any more than she did. Suddenly the whole independence project again seemed a fantasy, a dream that was just as impossible now as it had been when Arkady had espoused it, Arkady who had been so cheerful and so wrong. They would never be free of Earth, never. They were helpless before it.

“I want to talk to Sax first,” Spencer said.

“And Coyote,” Michel said. “I want to ask him more about what happened in Sabishii.”

“And Nadia,” Maya said, and her throat tightened; Nadia would have been ashamed of her if she had seen her at that meeting, and that hurt. She needed Nadia, the only person on Mars whose judgment she still trusted.

“There’s something odd going on with the atmosphere,” Spencer complained to Michel as they changed trams. “I really want to hear what Sax has to say about it. Oxygen levels are rising faster than I would have expected, especially on north Tharsis. It’s like some really successful bacteria has been distributed without any suicide genes in it. Sax has basically reassembled his old Echus Overlook team, everyone still alive, and they’ve been working at Acheron and Da Vinci on projects they’re not telling us about. It’s like those damn windmill heaters. So I want to talk to him. We have to get together on this, or else—”

“Or else sixty-one!” Maya insisted.

“I know, I know. You’re right about that, Maya, I mean I agree. I hope enough of the rest of us do.”

“We’re going to have to do more than hope.”

Which meant she was going to have to get out there and do it herself. Go fully underground, move from city to city, from safe house to safe house as Nirgal had been doing for years, without a job or a home, meeting with as many of the revolutionary cells as she could, trying to hold them on board. Or at least keep them from popping off too soon. Working on the Hellas Sea project wasn’t going to be possible anymore.

So this life was over. She got off the tram and glanced briefly through the park down the corniche, then turned and walked up to their gate and through the garden, up the stairwell, down the familiar hall, feeling heavy and old and very, very tired. She stuck the right key into the lock without thinking about it, and walked into the apartment and looked at her things, at Michel’s stacks of books, the Kandinsky print over the couch, Spencer’s sketches, the battered coffee table, the battered dining table and chairs, the kitchen nook with everything in its place, including the little face on the cabinet by the sink. How many lifetimes ago had she known that face? All these pieces of furniture would go their ways. She stood in the middle of the room, drained and desolate, grieving for these years that had slipped by almost without noticing; almost a decade of productive work, of real life, now blowing away in this latest gale of history, a paroxysm that she was going to have to try to direct or at least ride out, trying her best to nudge it in ways that would allow them to survive. Damn the world, damn its intrusiveness, its mindless charge, its inexorable roll through the present, wrecking lives as it went. . . . She had liked this apartment and this town and this life, with Michel and Spencer and Diana and all her colleagues at work, all her habits and her music and her small daily pleasures.

She looked glumly at Michel, who stood behind her in the doorway, staring around as if trying to commit the place to memory. A Gallic shrug: “Nostalgia in advance,” he said, trying to smile. He felt it too— he understood— it wasn’t just her mood, this time, but reality itself.

She made an effort and smiled back, walked over and held his hand. Downstairs there was a clatter as the Zygote gang came up the stairs. They could stay in Spencer’s apartment, the bastards. “If it works out,” she said, “we’ll come back someday.”