2

The train from Sabishii out to the Burroughs-Hellas piste was only four cars long, a little locomotive and three passenger cars, none more than half full. Maya walked through them to the last seats of the final car; people glanced at her, but only briefly. No one seemed perturbed by her lack of hair. There were a lot of vulture women on Mars after all, even some on this very train, also wearing work jumpers of cobalt or rust or light green, also old and UV-weathered: a kind of cliché, the ancient Mars veterans, here from the beginning, seen it all, ready to bore you to tears with tales of dust storms and stuck lock doors.

Well, it was just as well. It would not have done to have people nudging each other and exclaiming There’s Toitovna! Still she could not help sitting down feeling ugly and forgotten. Which was stupid. She needed to be forgotten. And ugliness helped that; the world wants to forget the ugly.

She plumped into her seat and stared forward. Apparently Sabishii had been visited by a contingent of Terran Japanese tourists, all of them clustered in facing seats at the front of the car, chattering and looking around with their vid spectacles, no doubt recording every minute of their life movies, recordings that no one would ever watch.

The train slid gently forward and they were off. Sabishii was still a small tent town in the hills, but the hummocky land between the town and the main piste was studded with carved peak boulders, and small shelters cut into the cliffs. All north-facing slopes were caked with the snow of the autumn’s first storms, and the sun bounced in blinding flashes off slick mirrors of ice as they floated by frozen ponds. The low dark shrubs were all based on ancestors from Hokkaido, and the vegetation gave the land a spiky black-green texture; it was a collection of bonsai gardens, each of them an island separated by a harsh sea of broken rock.

The Japanese tourists naturally found this landscape enchanting. Although possibly they were from Burroughs, new emigrants down to visit the Japanese first landing site, as if making a trip from Tokyo to Kyoto. Or perhaps they were natives, and had never seen Japan. She would be able to tell when she saw them walk; but it didn’t matter.

The piste ran just north of Jarry-Desloges Crater, which from outside appeared to be a big round mesa. The apron was a broad fan of snowy debris, dotted with ground-hugging trees and a pie-bald array of dark greens and bright lichen and alpine flowers and heather, each species with its signature color, and the whole field starred by the scattering of erratic boulders that had fallen back from the sky when the crater was formed. The effect was of a field of redrock, being drowned from below by a rainbow tide.

Maya stared out at the vivid hillside, feeling mildly stunned. Snow, lichen, heather, pine: she knew that things had changed in the world while she had hidden under the polar cap— that before it had been different, and she had lived in a rock world and had experienced all the intense events of those years, had had her heart smashed to stishovite under their impact. But it was so hard to connect with any of that. Either to remember it, or to feel anything about what she could remember. She sat back in her seat and closed her eyes, and tried to relax, to let whatever would come to her come.

. . . It was not so much a specific memory of a specific event, but rather a kind of composite: Frank Chalmers, angrily denouncing or deriding or fulminating. Michel was right: Frank had been an angry man. And yet that was not all he had been. She more than anyone knew that, perhaps, had seen him at peace, or if not at peace— perhaps she had never seen that— at least happy. Or something like. Scared of her, solicitous of her, in love with her— she had seen all that. And shouting at her furiously for some small treachery, or for nothing at all; she had certainly seen that too. Because he had loved her.

But what had he been like, really? Or rather, why had he been that way? Was there ever any explaining why they were themselves? There was so little she knew about him before they had met: a whole life back there in America, an incarnation that she had not seen. The bulky dark man she had met in Antarctica— even that person was almost lost to her, overlaid by everything that had happened on the Ares, and on Mars. But before that nothing, or next to nothing. He had headed NASA, got the Mars program off the ground, no doubt with the same corrosive style he had exhibited in later years. He had been married briefly, or so she seemed to recall. What had that been like? Poor woman. Maya smiled. But then she heard Marina’s tiny voice again, saying, “If Frank hadn’t killed John,” and she shuddered. She stared at the lectern in her lap. The Japanese passengers at the front of the car were singing a song, a drinking song apparently, as they had a flask out and were passing it around. Jarry-Desloges was behind them now, and they were gliding along the northern rim of the Iapygia Sink, an oval depression that they could see a fair way across before the horizon cut it off. The depression was saturated with craters, and now inside each ring was a slightly separate ecology; it was like looking down into a bombed florist’s shop, the baskets scattered everywhere and mostly broken, but here a basket of yellow tapestry, there of pink palimpsest, of whitish or bluish or green Persian carpets. . . .

She tapped on her lectern, and typed out Chalmers.

It was an immense bibliography: articles, interviews, books, videos, a whole library of his communiqués to Earth, another library of commentaries, diplomatic, historical, biographical, psychological, psychobiographical— histories, comedies, and tragedies, in every medium, including, apparently, an opera. Meaning some villainous coloratura was down there on Earth, singing her thoughts.

She clicked off the lectern, appalled. After a few minutes of deep breathing she clicked it back on, and called up the file. She couldn’t bear to look at any video or still images; she went for the shortest biographical articles in print, from popular magazines, and called one up at random and began to read.

• • •

He was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1976, and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. His mother and father divorced when he was seven, and after that he lived mostly with his father, in apartments near Jacksonville Beach, an area of cheap stucco beach property built in the 1940s, behind an aging boardwalk of shrimp shacks and hamburger joints. Sometimes he lived with an aunt and uncle near the downtown, which was dominated by big skyscrapers built by insurance companies. His mother moved to Iowa when he was eight. His father joined Alcoholics Anonymous three separate times. He was his high school’s class president, and the captain of its football team, on which he played center, and of its baseball team, on which he played catcher. He led a project to clear the choking hyacinths from the St. Johns River. “His entry in his senior yearbook is so long you just know something had to be wrong!” He was accepted by Harvard and given a scholarship, then after one year transferred to MIT, where he earned degrees in engineering and astronomy. For four years he lived alone, in a room above a garage in Cambridge, and very little information about him survived; few people seemed to have known him. “He went through Boston like a ghost.”

After college he took a National Service Corps job in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and here was where he burst onto the national scene. He ran one of the most successful civilian works programs associated with the NSC, building housing for Caribbean immigrants coming through Pensacola. Here thousands of people knew him, at least in his work life. “They all agree he was an inspirational leader, dedicated to the immigrants, working nonstop to help their integration into American society.” It was in these years that he married Priscilla Jones, the beautiful daughter of a prominent Pensacola family. People spoke of a political career. “He was on top of the world!”

Then in 2004 the NSC was terminated, and in 2005 he joined the astronaut program in Huntsville, Alabama. His marriage broke up that same year. In 2007 he became an astronaut, and moved quickly into a “flying administration” post. One of his longest space flights was six weeks on the American space station, alone with fellow rising star John Boone. He became head of NASA in 2015, while Boone became captain of the space station. Chalmers and Boone together rode the “Mars Apollo” project through the American government, and after Boone made the first landing in 2020, they both joined the First Hundred, and went to Mars in 2027.

• • •

Maya stared at the clear black letters of the Roman alphabet. The pop articles with their one-liners and exclamation points had their suggestive moments, no doubt about it. A motherless boy with a father who drank; a hardworking idealistic youth, riding high and then losing a job and a marriage in the same year; that 2005 would be worth looking into in more detail. After that, he seemed pretty clearly in it for himself. That was what being an astronaut generally meant, in NASA or Glavkosmos; always trying to get more space time, doing administration to get the power to get out more often. . . . By that time in his life, the brief descriptions chimed with the Frank she had known. No, it was the youth, the childhood; it was hard to see that, hard to imagine it as Frank.

She called up the index again, and ran down the list of biographical materials. There was an article called “Broken Promises: Frank Chalmers and the National Service Corps.” Maya tapped out the calling code for it and the text appeared. She scrolled down until she saw his name.

Like many people with basic structural problems in their lives, Chalmers coped in his Pensacola years by filling the days with ceaseless activity. If he had no time to rest, then he had no time to think. This had been a successful strategy for him all the way back to high school, when in addition to all his school activities, he had worked twenty hours a week in a literacy program. And in Boston his academic load made him what one classmate called an “invisible man.” We know less about this period of his life than any other. There are reports that he lived out of his car through his first Boston winter, using the bathrooms of a gym on campus. Only when he had secured the transfer to MIT do we have an address for him—

Maya hit fast forward, click click.

The Florida panhandle was one of the poorest areas of the nation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with Caribbean immigration, the closure of the local military bases, and Hurricane Dale combining to cause great misery. “You felt like you were working in Africa,” one National Service Corps worker said. In his three years there we get our fullest view of Chalmers as a social creature, as he secured grants to expand a jobs program that made an immense impact on the entire coast, helping thousands who had moved into makeshift shelters after Dale. Training programs taught people to build their homes, meanwhile learning skills that could be put to use elsewhere. The programs were immensely popular among the recipients, but there was opposition to them from the local development industry. Chalmers was therefore controversial, and in the first years of the new century he appears often in the local media, enthusiastically defending the program and advocating it as part of a mass surge of grassroots social action. In a guest editorial for the Fort Walton Beach Journal he wrote, “The obvious solution is to turn all our energies on the problem and work on it as a systemic thing. We need to build schools to teach our children to read, and send them off to become doctors to heal us, and lawyers to work the powers that be, so we get our fair share. We need to build our own homes and our own farms, and feed ourselves.”

The results in Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach got the local NSC larger grants from Washington, and matching grants from participating corporations. At the high point, in 2004, the Pensacola Coast NSC employed 20,000 people, and was one of the main factors responsible for what was called the “Gulf Renaissance.” Chalmers’s marriage to Priscilla Jones, daughter of one of the old money families from Panama City, seemed to symbolize this new synthesis of poverty and privilege in Florida, and the two were a prominent couple in the society of the Gulf Coast for about two years.

The election of 2004 ended this period. The abrupt cancellation of the NSC was one of the new administration’s first acts. Chalmers spent two months in Washington testifying before House and Senate subcommittees, trying to aid the passage of a bill reinstating the program. The bill passed, but the two Democratic Florida senators and the congressman from the Pensacola district did not support it, and Congress was unable to override the executive veto. The NSC “threatened market forces,” the new administration said, and so it came to an end. The indictment and conviction of 19 congressmen (including Pensacola’s representative) for lobbying irregularities originating in the building industry came eight years later, and by that time the NSC was a dead issue, its veterans scattered.

For Frank Chalmers it was a watershed. He retreated into a privacy from which in many respects he never emerged. The marriage did not survive the move to Huntsville, and Priscilla soon remarried a friend of the family she had known before Chalmers’s arrival in the area. In Washington, Chalmers led an austere life in which NASA appeared to be his exclusive interest; he was famous for his 18-hour days, and the enormous impact they had on NASA’s fortunes. These successes made Chalmers nationally famous, but no one at NASA or elsewhere in Washington claimed to know him well. The obsessive overscheduling served again as a mask, behind which the idealistic social worker of the Gulf Coast disappeared for good.

A disturbance at the front of the car caused Maya to look up. The Japanese were standing, pulling down luggage, and it was clear now that they were Burroughs natives; most of them were about two meters tall, gangly kids with toothy laughs and uniformly brilliant black hair. Gravity, diet, whatever it was, people born on Mars grew tall. This group of Japanese reminded Maya of the ectogenes in Zygote, those strange kids who had grown like weeds. . . . Now scattered over the planet, that whole little world gone, like all the others before it.

Maya grimaced, and on an impulse fast-forwarded her lectern to the article’s illustrations. There she found a photo of Frank at age twenty-three, in the beginning of his work with the NSC: a dark-haired kid with a sharp confident smile, looking at the world as if he were ready to tell it something it didn’t know. So young! So young and so knowing. At first glance Maya thought it was the innocence of youth to look so knowing, but in fact the face did not look innocent. His had not been an innocent childhood. But he was a fighter, and he had found his method, and was prevailing. A power that couldn’t be beaten, or so the smile seemed to say.

But kick the world, break your foot. As they said in Kamchatka.

The train slowed and glided to a smooth stop. They were in Fournier Station, where the Sabishii branch met the main Burroughs-to-Hellas piste.

The Burroughs Japanese filed out of the car, and Maya clicked off her lectern and followed. The station was only a small tent, south of Fournier Crater; its interior was simple, a T-shaped dome. Scores of people wandered the three levels of the interior, in groups or singly, most of them in plain work jumpers, but many in business suits or metanational uniforms, or in casual clothes, which these days consisted of loose pantaloons, blouses, and moccasins.

Maya found the sight of so many people a bit alarming, and she moved awkwardly past the kiosk lines and the crowded cafés fronting the pistes. No one met the eye of such a bald withered androgyne. Feeling the artificial breeze on her scalp, she took her place at the front of the line to get on the next train south, turning over in her mind the photo from the book. Had they ever really been that young?

At one o’clock the train floated in from the north. Security guards came out of a room by the cafés, and under their bored eye she put her wrist to a portable checker, and boarded. A new procedure, and simple; but as she found a seat her heart was racing. Clearly the Sabishiians, with the help of the Swiss, had beaten the Transitional Authority’s new security system. But still she had reason to be afraid— she was Maya Toitovna, one of the most famous women in history, one of the most wanted criminals on Mars, with the passengers in their seats looking up at her as she passed down the aisle, naked under a blue cotton jumper.

Naked but invisible, by reason of unsightliness. And the truth was that at least half the occupants of the car looked as old as her, Mars vets who looked seventy and could have been twice that, wrinkled, gray-haired, balding, irradiated and bespectacled, scattered among all the tall fresh young natives like autumn leaves among evergreens. And there among them, what looked like Spencer Jackson. As she flung her bag onto the overhead rack, she looked at the seat three ahead; the man’s bald pate told her little, but she was pretty sure it was him. Bad luck. On general principle the First Hundred (the First Thirty-nine) tried never to travel together. But there was always the chance that chance itself would screw them up.

She sat in the window seat, wondering what Spencer was doing. Last she had heard, he and Sax had formed a technological team in Vishniac mohole, doing weapons research that they weren’t telling anyone else about, or so Vlad had said. So he was part of Sax’s crazy outlaw ecotage team, at least to some extent. It didn’t seem like him, and she wondered if he had been the moderating influence one recently noticed in Sax’s activities. Was Hellas his destination, or was he returning to the southern sanctuaries? Well— she wouldn’t find out until Hellas at best, as the protocol was to ignore each other until they were in private.

So she ignored Spencer, if it was him, and she ignored the passengers still filing into the car. The seat next to her remained empty. Across from her were two fiftyish men in suits, emigrants by the look of them, apparently traveling with the two just like them who were seated in front of her. As the train pulled out of the station tent they discussed some game they had all played together: “He hit it a mile! He was lucky to ever find it again!” Golf, apparently. Americans, or something like. Metanational executives, off to oversee something in Hellas, they didn’t mention what. Maya took out her lectern and headphones and put the headphones on. She called up Novy Pravda and watched the tiny images from Moscow. It was hard to concentrate on the voices, and it made her drowsy. The train flew south. The reporter was deploring the growing conflict between Armscor and Subarashii over the terms of the Siberian development plan. This was a case of crocodile tears, as the Russian government had been hoping for years to play the two giants off against each other and create an auction situation for the Siberian oil fields, rather than be met by a united metanat front dictating all terms. It was surprising in fact that the two metanats had broken ranks like this. Maya did not expect that it would last; it was in the metanats’ interest to hold together, to make sure it was always a matter of parceling out the available resources and never fighting for them. If they squabbled, the fragile balance of power might collapse on them, a possibility of which they were surely aware.

She put her head back drowsily and looked out the window at the passing land. Now they were gliding down into the lapygia Sink, and had a long view to the southwest. It looked like the Siberian taiga/tundra border, as depicted on the news program she had just been watching— a great frost-fractured jumble of a slope, all caked with snow and ice, the bare rock coated with lichen and amorphous mounds of olive and khaki mosses, the coral cacti and dwarf trees filling every low hollow. Pingoes dotting one flat low valley looked like a rash of acne, smeared with a dirty ointment. Maya dozed for a while.

The image of Frank at twenty-three jerked her awake. She thought drowsily about what she had read, trying to piece it together. The father; what had made him join Alcoholics Anonymous three times, and quit it twice (or three times)? It had a bad sound. And after that, as if in response to it, the kind of workaholic habits that were just like the Frank she had known, even if the work seemed un-Frankishly idealistic. Social justice was not something that the Frank she had known had believed in. He had been a political pessimist, engaged in a constant rearguard action to keep the worse from coming to the worst. A career of damage control— and, if some were to be believed, personal aggrandizement. No doubt true. Although Maya felt he had always craved power in order to effect more damage control. But no one could tease the strands of those two motives apart; they were tangled like the moss and the rock out there in the Sink. Power was a many-faceted thing.

If only Frank hadn’t killed John. . . . She stared at the lectern, turned it on, tapped in John’s name. The bibliography was endless. She checked: 5,146 entries. And it was a selected list. Frank had had several hundred at most. She switched to index mode, and looked up “Death of.”

Scores of entries, hundreds! Cold and yet sweating, Maya ran swiftly down the list. The Bern connection, the Moslem Brotherhood, Marsfirst, UNOMA, Frank, her, Helmut Bronski, Sax, Samantha; by title alone she could see that all theories of agency in his death would be advocated. Of course. Conspiracy theory was tremendously popular, always and forever. People wanted such catastrophes to mean something more than mere individual madness, and so the hunt was on.

Disgust at the crackpot inclusiveness of the list almost caused her to shut the file. But then again, perhaps she was just afraid? She opened one of the many biographies, and there on the screen was a photo of John. A ghost of her old pain passed through her, leaving a kind of bleached, emotionless desolation. She clicked to the final chapter.

The Nicosia riot was an early manifestation of the tensions informing Martian society which would later explode in 2061. There were already a great number of Arab technicians living in minimal housing arrangements, in close proximity to ethnic groups with whom they had historical grievances, also to administration personnel whose better housing and travel and walker privileges were obvious. A volatile mix of several groups descended on Nicosia for its dedicatory celebration, and for several days the town was extremely crowded.

click click

The violence has never been satisfactorily explained. Jensen’s theory, that the intra-Arab conflict, stimulated by the Lebanese war of liberation from Syria, sparked the Nicosia riot, is insufficient; there were also documented attacks on the Swiss, as well as a high level of random violence, all impossible to explain in terms of the Arab conflict alone.

The official depositions of the people in Nicosia that night still leave the ignition of the conflict a mystery. A number of reports suggest the presence of an agent provocateur, never identified.

click click

At midnight, when the timeslip began, Saxifrage Russell was at a café midtown, Samantha Hoyle was on a tour of the city wall, and Frank Chalmers and Maya Toitovna had met in the western park where the speeches had been given a few hours before. Fighting had already broken out in the medina. John Boone went down the central boulevard to investigate the disturbance, as did Sax Russell from another direction. At approximately ten minutes into the timeslip, Boone was set upon by a group of between three and six young men, sometimes identified as “Arab.” Boone was knocked down and whisked into the medina before any witnesses could react, and an impromptu search turned up no sign of him. It was not until 12:27 A.M. that he was located by a larger search party in the town’s farm, and taken from there to the nearest hospital, on Boulevard of the Cypresses. Russell, Chalmers, and Toitovna helped to carry him—

Again a disturbance in the car drew Maya out of the text. Her skin was clammy, and she was shivering slightly. Some memories never really went away, no matter how you suppressed them: despite herself Maya remembered perfectly the glass on the street, a figure on its back on the grass, the puzzled look on Frank’s face, the so different puzzlement on John’s.

But those were officials, there at the front of the car, standing in the aisle and moving slowly down it. Checking IDs, travel documentation; and there were another two stationed at the back of the car.

Maya tapped off her lectern. She watched the three policemen move down the car, feeling her pulse knocking hard through her body. This was new; she had never seen it before, and it seemed the others on board hadn’t either. The car was hushed; everyone watched. Anyone in the car could have had irregular ID, and that fact made for a kind of solidarity in their silence; all eyes focused on the police; no one looked around to see who might be blanching.

The three policemen were oblivious to this observation, and almost seemed oblivious to the very people they interviewed. They joked among themselves as they discussed the restaurants of Odessa, and they moved from row to row rapidly, like conductors, gesturing for people to put their wrists up to the little reader, then cursorily checking the results, comparing for only a few seconds people’s faces to the photos called up by their IDs.

They came to Spencer, and Maya’s heart rate picked up. Spencer (if it was Spencer) merely held up a steady hand to the reader, apparently looking straight at the seat back in front of him. Suddenly something about his hand was deeply familiar— there under the veins and the liver spots was Spencer Jackson, no doubt of it. She knew it by the bones. He was answering a question now, in a low voice. The policeman with the voice-and-eye reader held it to Spencer’s face briefly, and then they all waited. Finally they got a quick line on the reader, and moved on. Two away from Maya. Even the exuberant businessmen were subdued, eyeing each other with sardonic grimaces and raised eyebrows, as if it were ludicrous to have such measures imported into the cars themselves. No one liked this; it was a mistake to do it. Maya took heart from that, and looked out the window. They were ascending the southern side of the Sink, the train gliding up the gentle grade of the piste over low hills, each higher than the next, the train always moving at the same speed, as if moving by magic carpet, over the even-more-magic carpet of the millefleur landscape.

They stood over her. The one closest wore a belt over his rust uniform jumper, with several instruments hanging from the belt, including a stun gun. “ID wrist please.” He wore an ID tag, with photo and dosimeter, and a label that said “United Nations Transitional Authority.” A thin-faced young emigrant of about twenty-five, though it was easier to guess that from the photo than the face itself, which looked tired. The man turned and said to the woman officer behind him, “I like the veal parmesan they do there.”

The reader was warm on her wrist. The woman officer was observing her closely. Maya ignored the look and stared at her wrist, wishing she had a weapon. Then she was looking into the camera eye of the voice-and-eye reader. “What is your destination?” the young man asked.

“Odessa.”

A moment’s suspended silence.

Then a high beep. “Enjoy your stay.” And they were off.

Maya tried to regulate her breathing, to slow it down. The wrist readers took pulses, and if you were over 110 or so they notified the applicator; it was a basic lie detector in that sense. Apparently she had stayed under the line. But her voice, her retinas; those had never been changed. The Swiss passport identity must be powerful indeed, overriding the earlier IDs when they were consulted, at least in this security system. Had the Swiss done that, or the Sabishiians, or Coyote, or Sax, or some force she didn’t know? Had she actually been successfully identified and let go, to be tracked so that she would lead them to more of the fugitive Hundred? It seemed as likely as the idea of overmastering the big data banks— as likely or more.

But for the moment, she was left alone. The police were gone. Maya’s finger knocked on the lectern, and without thinking about it she called back what she had been reading. Michel was right; she felt tough and hard, diving back into this stuff. Theories to explain the death of John Boone. John had been killed, and now she was being checked by police while traveling over Mars in an ordinary train. It was hard not to feel that there was some sort of cause and effect there, that if John had lived, it wouldn’t be this way.

All the principal figures in Nicosia that night have been accused of being behind the assassination: Russell and Hoyle on the basis of sharp disagreements in Marsfirst policy; Toitovna on the basis of a lovers’ quarrel; and the various ethnic or national groups in town on the basis of political quarrels either real or imaginary. But certainly the most suspicion over the years has fallen on the figure of Frank Chalmers. Though he was observed to be with Toitovna at the time of the attack (which in some theories gets Toitovna called an accessory or coconspirator), his relationship with the Egyptians and Saudis in Nicosia that night, and his long-standing conflict with Boone, make it inevitable that he is often identified as the ultimate cause of Boone’s murder. Few if any deny that Selim el-Hayil was the leader of the three Arabs who eventually confessed before their suicide/murders. But this only adds to suspicion of Chalmers, as he was a known acquaintance of el-Hayil’s. Samizdat and one-read documents are reputed to tell the story that “the stowaway” was in Nicosia, and spotted Chalmers and el-Hayil in conversation that night. As “the stowaway” is a myth mechanism by which people convey the anonymous perceptions of the common Martian, it is quite possible that such a tale expresses the observations of people who did not want to be identified as witnesses.

Maya clicked to the end.

El-Hayil was in the late stages of a fatal paroxysm when he broke into the hotel occupied by the Egyptians and confessed to the murder of Boone, asserting that he had been the leader, but had been aided by Rashid Abou and Buland Besseisso of the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood. The bodies of Abou and Besseisso were found later that afternoon in a room in the medina, poisoned by coagulants that appeared to be self-administered or given to each other. The actual murderers of Boone were dead. Why they acted, and with whom they may have acted, will never be known. Not the first time such a situation has existed, and not the last; for we hide as much as we seek.

Scrolling through footnotes, Maya was struck again by what a Topic this was, debated by historians and scholars and conspiracy nuts of every persuasion. With a shudder of revulsion she tapped the lectern off, and faced the double window and shut her eyes hard, trying to restore the Frank she had known, and the Boone. For years she had scarcely ever thought of John, the pain was so great; and in a different way she hadn’t wanted to think of Frank either. Now she wanted them back. The pain had become the ghost of pain, and she needed to have them back, for her own life’s sake. She needed to know.

The “mythical” stowaway . . . She ground her teeth, feeling the weightless hallucinatory fear of that first sight of him, his brown face distorted and big-eyed through the glass . . . did he know anything? Had he really been in Nicosia? Desmond Hawkins, the stowaway, the Coyote— he was a strange man. Maya had her own particular relationship with him, but she doubted whether he would tell her much about that night.

What is it? she had asked Frank when they heard the shouting.

A hard shrug, a look away. Something done on the spur of the moment. Where had she heard that before? He had looked away as he said it, as if he could not bear her gaze. As if he had somehow said too much.

• • •

The mountain ranges ringing the Hellas Basin were widest in the western crescent called the Hellespontus Montes, the range on Mars most reminiscent of Terran mountains. To the north, where the piste from Sabishii and Burroughs crossed into the basin, the range was narrower and lower, not so much a matter of mountainous terrain as of an uneven drop to the basin floor, the land seemingly shoved to the north in low concentric waves. The piste threaded its way down this hilly slope, and often it had to switch-back down long ramps cut into the sides of the rock waves, each new one lower than the last. The train slowed greatly for the turns, and for many minutes at a time Maya could look out her window either straight at the bare basalt of the wave they were descending, or out over a big expanse of northwest Hellas, still three thousand meters below them: a wide flat plain, ochre and olive and khaki in the foreground, then, out on the horizon, a dirty jumble of white, winking like a broken mirror. That was the glacier over Low Point, still mostly frozen, but thawing more each year, with melt ponds on its surface, and deeper pods of water far below— pods which teemed with life, and occasionally broke onto the surface of the ice, or even the adjacent land— for this lobe of ice was growing fast. They were pumping water out of aquifers below the surrounding mountains onto the basin floor. The deep depression in the northwest part of the basin, where Low Point and the mohole had been, was the center of this new sea, which was over a thousand kilometers long, and at its widest, over Low Point, three hundred kilometers across. And situated in the lowest point on Mars. A situation rich with promise, as Maya had been maintaining from the very moment they had landed.

The town Odessa had been established well up the north slope of the basin, at the—1-kilometer elevation, where they planned to stabilize the final level of the sea. Thus it was a harbor town waiting for water, and with that in mind the southern edge of the town was a long boardwalk or corniche, a wide grassy esplanade that ran inside the tent, which was secured in the edge of a tall seawall that now stood above bare land. The view of the seawall as the train approached gave one the impression that it was a half-town, with a southern part that had been split off and disappeared.

Then the train was coasting into the town’s train station, and the view was cut off. The train stopped and Maya pulled down her bag and walked out, following Spencer. They did not look at each other, but once out of the station they went with a loose group of people to a tram stop, and got on the same little blue tram, which ran behind the corniche park bordering the seawall. Near the west end of town they both got off at the same stop.

There, behind and above an open-air market shaded by plane trees, was a three-story apartment complex inside a walled courtyard, with young cypresses lining the side walls. Each floor of the building stepped back from the one below, so that there were balconies for the two higher levels, sporting potted trees and flower boxes hung on their railings. As she climbed the stairs up to the gate of the courtyard, Maya found the architecture of the building somewhat reminiscent of Nadia’s buried arcades; but up here in the late afternoon sun behind the market, its walls whitewashed and its shutters blue, it had the look of the Mediterranean or the Black Sea— not all that unlike some fashionable seaside apartment blocks in Terra’s Odessa. At the gate she turned to look back over the plane trees of the market; the sun was setting over the Hellespontus Mountains to the west, and out on the distant ice, blinks of sunlight gleamed as yellow as butter.

She followed Spencer through the garden and into the building, checked in with the concierge right after he did, got her key, and went to the apartment that had been assigned to her. The whole building belonged to Praxis, and some apartments functioned as safe houses, including hers, and no doubt Spencer’s. They got in the elevator together and went to the third floor, not speaking. Maya’s apartment was four doors down from Spencer’s. She went inside. Two spacious rooms, one with a kitchen nook; a bathroom, an empty balcony. The view from the kitchen window overlooked the balcony, and the distant ice.

She put her bag on the bed and went back out, down to the market to buy dinner. She bought from vendors with carts and umbrellas, and sat on a bench placed on the grass bordering the corniche, eating souvlakia and drinking from a little bottle of retsina, watching the evening crowd make their leisurely promenade up and down the corniche. The closest edge of the ice sea looked to be about forty kilometers away, and now all but the easternmost part of the ice was in the shadow of the Hellespontus, a dusky blue shading in the east to alpenglow pink.

Spencer sat down beside her on the bench. “Nice view,” he remarked.

She nodded and continued eating. She offered him the bottle of retsina, and he said, “No thank you,” holding up a half-eaten tamale. She nodded and swallowed.

“What are you working on?” she asked when she was done.

“Parts for Sax. Bioceramics, among other things.”

“For Biotique?”

“For a sister company. She Makes Seashells.”

“What?”

“It’s the name of the company. Another Praxis division.”

“Speaking of Praxis . . .” She glanced at him.

“Yes. Sax wants these parts pretty bad.”

“For weapons?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Can you keep him on a leash for a while?”

“I can try.”

They watched the sunlight drain out of the sky, flowing westward like a liquid. Behind them lights flicked on in the trees over the market, and the air began to chill. Maya felt grateful that there was an old friend sitting beside her, in comfortable silence. Spencer’s behavior toward her made a telling contrast to Sax; in his friendliness was his apology for his recriminations in the car after Kasei Vallis, and his forgiveness for what she had done to Phyllis. She appreciated it. And in any case he was one of the primal family, and it was nice to have that during yet another move. A new start, a new city, a new life— how many was it now?

“Did you know Frank very well?” she said.

“Not really. Not like you and John knew him.”

“Do you think . . . do you think he could have been involved in John’s murder?”

Spencer continued to look out at the blue ice on the black horizon. Finally he took the retsina bottle from the bench beside her, drank. He looked at her. “Does it matter anymore?”