3

Then it was down the space elevator from Clarke, a trip that took longer than the flight from Earth; and she was back in the world, the only real world, Mars the magnificent. “There’s no place like home,” Zo said to the train-station crowd in Sheffield, and then she sat happily in the trains as they flowed over the pistes down Tharsis, then north to Echus Overlook.

The little town had grown since its early days as the terraforming headquarters, but not much; it was out of the way, and built into the steep east wall of Echus Chasma, so that there wasn’t much of it to be seen— a bit on the plateau at the top of the cliff, a bit at the bottom, but with three vertical kilometers between the two, so that they were not visible one from the other— more like two separate villages, connected by a vertical subway. Indeed if it weren’t for the fliers, Echus Overlook might have subsided into sleepy historic-monument status, like Underhill or Senzeni Na, or the icy hideouts in the south. But the eastern wall of Echus Chasma stood right in the path of the prevailing westerlies that came pouring down the Tharsis Bulge, causing them to shoot up in the most astonishingly powerful updrafts. Which made it a birding paradise.

Zo was supposed to check in with Jackie and the Free Mars apparatchiks working for her, but before getting embroiled in all that she wanted to fly. So she checked her old Santorini hawksuit out of storage at the gliderport, and went to the changing room and slipped into it, feeling the smooth muscly texture of the suit’s flexible exoskeleton. Then it was out the smooth path, trailing her tail feathers, and onto the Diving Board, a natural overhang that had been artificially extended with a concrete slab. She walked to the edge of this slab and looked down, down, down, three thousand meters down, to the umber floor of Echus Chasma. With the usual burst of adrenaline she tipped forward and fell off the cliff. Headfirst down, down, down, the wind picking up in a swift whoosh over her helmet as she reached terminal velocity, which she recognized by the pitch of the whooshing; and then she spread her arms, and felt the suit stiffen and help her muscles to hold the beautiful wings wide, and with a loud crumping smoosh of wind she curved up into the sun, turned her head, arched her back, pointed her toes and set the tail feathers, left right left; and the wind was pulling her up, up, up. Shift her feet and arms together, turn then in a tight gyre, see the cliff then the chasm floor, around and around: flying. Zo the hawk, wild and free. She was laughing happily, and tears streamed this way and that in her goggles, dashed away by the force of the g.

The air above Echus was nearly empty this morning. After riding the updraft most fliers were peeling off to the north, soaring, or shooting down one of the clefts in the cliff wall, where the updraft was diminished and it was possible to tip and dive in stoops of great velocity. Zo too, when she had gotten about five thousand meters above Overlook, and was breathing the pure oxygen of her helmet’s enclosed air system, turned her head right and dipped her right wing, and curved through the exhilaration of a run across the wind, feeling it keen over her body in a rapid continuous fingering. No sound but the hard whoosh of wind in her wings. The somatic pressure of the wind all over her body was a subtly sensuous massage, and she felt it through the tightened suit as if the suit were not there, as if she were naked and feeling the wind directly on her skin, as she wished she could be. A good suit reinforced this impression, of course, and she had used this one for three m-years before leaving for Mercury; it fit like a glove, it was great to be back in it.

She pulled up into a kite, then stunted forward in the maneuver called Jesus Falling. A thousand meters down and she pulled her wings in and began to dolphin-kick to speed her stoop, until the wind was keening loudly over her, and she passed the edge of the great wall going well over terminal velocity. Passing the rim was the sign to start pulling out, because as tall as the cliff was, at full stoop the chasm floor came rushing up like a final slap in the face, and it took a while to pull out of it, even given her strength and skill and nerve, and the reinforcement of the suit. So she arched her back and popped her wings, and felt the strain in her pecs and biceps, a tremendous pressure even though the suit aided her with a logarithmically increasing percentage of the load. Tail feathers down; pike; four hard flaps; and then she was jinking across the chasm’s sandy floor, she could have picked a mouse off it.

She turned and got back in the updraft, gyred back up into developing high clouds. The wind was erratic today, and it was an all-absorbing pleasure to tumble and play in it. This was the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a mirror of the wind. Exuberance; she flew like an angel, as they said. Sometimes one flew like a drone, sometimes one flew like a bird; and then on rare occasions one flew like an angel. It had been a long time.

She came to herself, and lofted back down the wall toward Overlook, feeling tired in her arms. Then she spotted a hawk. Like a lot of fliers, if there was a bird in sight she tracked it, watching it more closely than birders had ever before watched a bird, imitating its every twitch and flutter to try to learn the genius of its flight. Sometimes hawks over this cliff would be innocently wheeling in a search for food and a whole squadron of fliers would be above it following its moves, or trying to. It was fun.

Now she shadowed the hawk, turning when it did, imitating the placement of the wings and tail. Its mastery of the air was like a talent that she craved but could never have. But she could try: bright sun in the racing clouds, indigo sky, the wind against her body, the little weightless gut orgasms when she peeled over into a stoop . . . eternal moments of no-mind. The best, cleanest use of human time.

But the sun fell westward and she got thirsty, and so she left the hawk to its day and turned and coursed down in giant lazy S’s to Overlook, to nail her landing with a flap and a step, right on the green Kokopelli, just as if she had never left.

• • •

The neighborhood behind the launching complex was called Topside, and it was a mass of cheap dorms and restaurants inhabited almost entirely by fliers, and tourists come to watch the flying, all eating and drinking and roving and talking and dancing and looking for someone with whom to tandem the night. And there, no surprise, were her flier friends, Rose and Imhotep and Ella and Estavan, all in a group at the Adler Hofbrauhaus, high already and delighted to see Zo back again among them. They had a drink at the Adler to celebrate the reunion, and then went to Overlook Overlook, and sat on the rail catching up on gossip, passing around a big spliff laced with pandorph, making ribald commentary on the passing parade below the railing, shouting at friends spotted in the crowd.

Eventually they left Overlook Overlook and went down into the crowds of Topside, and slowly made their way through the bars to one of the bathhouses. They piled into the changing room and took off their clothes, and wandered naked through the dark warm watery rooms, the water waist-deep, ankle-deep, chest-deep— hot, cold, lukewarm— splitting up, finding each other later, having sex with scarcely visible strangers, Zo working slowly through several partners to her own orgasm, purring happily as her body clamped down on itself and her mind went away. Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm. Joy at the sight of the stars in the skylight overhead, at the feel of warm water and of some boy who came in her and stayed in her, nearly hard, and three minutes later stiffened and started humping again, laughing at the approach of another bright orgasm. After that she sloshed into the comparative brightness of the bar and found the others there, Estavan declaring that the night’s third orgasm was usually the best, with an exquisitely long approach to climax and yet still a good bit of semen left to ejaculate. “After that it’s still fine, but more of an effort, you have to be wild to get off, and then it isn’t like the third anyway.” Zo and Rose and the rest of the women agreed that in this as in so many other ways, being female was superior; in a night at the baths they routinely had several wonderful orgasms, and even these were as nothing compared to the status orgasmus, a kind of running continuous orgasm that could last half an hour if one were lucky and one’s partners skillful. There was a craft to this that they studied assiduously, but it was still more art than science, as they all agreed: one had to be high but not too high, with a group but not a crowd . . . lately they had gotten pretty reliably good at it, they told Zo, and happily Zo demanded proof. “Come on, I want to be tabled.” Estavan hooted and led her and the rest down to a room with a big table sticking out of the water. Imhotep lay on his back on the table, Zo’s mattress man for the session; she was lifted up by the others, lying on her back as well, and slid down onto him, and then the whole group was on her, hands and mouths and genitals, a tongue in each ear, in her mouth, contact everywhere; after a while it was all an undifferentiated mass of erotic sensation, total sexsurround, Zo purring loudly. Then when she started to come, arching up off Imhotep with the violence of the cramping, they all kept going; more subtly now, teasing her, not letting her land, and then she was off and flying, the touch of a little finger would keep her going, until she cried out “No, I can’t,” and they laughed and said “You can,” and kept her going until her stomach muscles truly cramped, and she rolled violently off Imhotep and was caught by Rose and Estavan. She couldn’t even stand. Someone said they had had her off for twenty minutes; it had felt like two, or eternity. All her abdominal muscles ached, as did her thighs and butt. “Cold bath,” she said, and crawled off to the cool water in a nearby room.

But after being tabled there was little else at the baths that could appeal. Any more orgasms would hurt. She helped to table Estavan and Xerxes, and then a thin woman she didn’t know, all fun, but then she got bored. Flesh flesh flesh. Sometimes after being tabled one got further and further into it; other times it became just skin and hair and flesh, insides and outsides, who cared.

She went to the changing room and dressed, went outside. It was morning, the sun bright over the bare plains of Lunae. She flowed through the empty streets to her hostel, feeling relaxed and clean and sleepy. A big breakfast, fall into bed, delicious sleep.

But there in the hostel restaurant was Jackie. “If it isn’t our Zoya.” She had always hated the name, which Zo had chosen for herself.

Zo, surprised, said, “Did you follow me here?”

Jackie looked disgusted. “It’s my co-op too, you might recall. Why didn’t you check in when you got back?”

“I wanted to fly.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I didn’t mean it as one.”

Zo went to the buffet table, piled a plate with scrambled eggs and muffins. She returned to Jackie’s table, kissed her mother on the top of the head. “You’re looking good.”

Actually she looked younger than Zo, who was often sun-burned and therefore wrinkled— younger but somehow pre-served, as if she were a twin sister of Zo’s who had been bottled for a time and only recently decanted. She wouldn’t tell Zo how often she had had the gerontological treatments, but Rachel had said that she was always trying new variants, which were coming out at the rate of two or three a year, and that she got the basic package every three years at the most. So although she was somewhere in her fifth m-decade, she looked almost like Zo’s contemporary, except for that preserved quality, which was not so much body as spirit— a look in the eye, a certain hardening, a tightness, a wariness or weariness. It was hard work being the alpha female year after year, a heroic struggle, it had worn visible tracks in her no matter how baby smooth her skin, no matter how much a beauty she remained— and she was still quite a beauty, no doubt about it. But she was getting old. Soon her young men would unwrap themselves from around her little fingers and drop away.

Meanwhile she still had a great deal of presence, and at the moment she appeared considerably put out. People averted their eyes as if her look might strike them dead, which made Zo laugh. Not the politest way to greet one’s beloved mother, but what else could one do? Zo was too relaxed to be irritated.

Probably a mistake to laugh at her, however. She stared coldly until Zo straightened up.

“Tell me what happened on Mercury.”

Zo shrugged. “I told you. They still think they have the sun to give to the outer solar system, and it’s gone to their heads.”

“I suppose their sunlight would still be useful out there.”

“Energy’s always useful, but the outer satellites should be able to generate what they need, now.”

“So the Mercurians are left with metals.”

“That’s right.”

“But what do they want for them?”

“Everyone wants to be free. None of these new little worlds are big enough to be self-sufficient, so they have to have something to trade if they want to stay free. Mercury has sunlight and metals, the asteroids have metals, the outer satellites have volatiles, if anything. So they package and trade what they have, and try to make alliances to avoid domination by Earth or Mars.”

“It isn’t domination.”

“Of course not.” Zo kept a straight face. “But the big worlds, you know—”

“Are big.” Jackie nodded. “But add all these little ones together, and they’re big too.”

“Who’s going to add them?” Zo asked.

Jackie ignored the question. The answer was obvious anyway: Jackie would. Jackie was locked into a long-term battle with various forces on Earth, for what came down to the control of Mars; she was trying to keep them from being inundated by the immense home world; and as human civilization continued to spread throughout the solar system, Jackie considered the new little settlements pawns in this great struggle. And indeed if there were enough of them, they might make a difference.

“There’s not much reason to worry about Mercury,” Zo reassured her. “It’s a dead end, a provincial little town, run by a cult. No one can settle very many people there, no one. So even if we do manage to bring them on board, they won’t matter much.”

Jackie’s face took on its world-weary look, as if Zo’s analysis of the situation were the work of a child— as if there were hidden sources of political power on Mercury, of all places. It was irritating, but Zo restrained herself and did not show her irritation.

Antar came in, looking for them; he saw them and smiled, came over and gave Jackie a quick kiss, Zo a longer one. He and Jackie conferred for a while about something or other, in whispers, and then Jackie told him to leave.

There was a great deal of the will to power in Jackie, Zo saw once again. Ordering Antar around gratuitously; it was a flaunting of power that one saw in many nisei women, women who had grown up in patriarchies and therefore reacted virulently against them. They did not fully understand that patriarchy no longer mattered, and perhaps never had— that it had always been caught in the Kegel grip of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological power that could not be controlled by any mere politics. The female hold on male sexual pleasure, on life itself— these were realities for patriarchs as much as anyone, despite all their repression, their fear of the female which had been expressed in so many ways, purdah, clitoridectomy, foot binding and so on— ugly stuff indeed, a desperate ruthless last-ditch defense, successful for a time, certainly— but now blown away without a trace. Now the poor fellows had to fend for themselves, and it was hard. Women like Jackie had them whipped. And women like Jackie liked to whip them.

“I want you to go out to the Uranian system,” Jackie was saying. “They’re just settling out there, and I want to get them early. You can pass along a word to the Galileans as well, they’re getting out of line.”

“I should do a co-op stint,” Zo said, “or it will become too obvious that it’s a front.”

After many years of running with a feral co-op based in Lunae, Zo had joined one of the co-ops that functioned in part as a front for Free Mars, allowing Zo and other operatives to do party work without it becoming obvious that that was their principal activity. The co-op Zo had joined built and installed crater screens, but she hadn’t worked for them in any real job for over a year.

Jackie nodded. “Put in some time, then take another leave. In a month or so.”

“Okay.”

Zo was interested in seeing the outer satellites, so it was easy to agree. But Jackie only nodded, showing no sign of awareness that Zo might not have agreed. Her mother was not a very imaginative person, when all was said and done. No doubt Zo’s father was the source of that quality in Zo, ka bless him. Zo did not want to know his identity, which at this point would only have been an imposition on her freedom, but she felt a surge of gratitude to him for his genes, her salvation from pure Jackieness.

Zo stood, too tired to take her mother any longer. “You look tired, and I’m beat,” she said. She kissed Jackie on the cheek as she went off to her room. “I love you. Maybe you should think about getting the treatment again.”

• • •

Her co-op was based in Moreux Crater, in the Protonilus Mensae, between Mangala and Bradbury Point. It was a big crater, puncturing the long slope of the Great Escarpment as it fell down toward the Boone’s Neck peninsula. The co-op was always developing new varieties of molecular netting to replace earlier nets, and the old tent fabrics; the mesh they had installed over Moreux was the latest thing, the polyhydroxybutyrate plastic of its fibers harvested from soybean plants, engineered to produce the PHB in the plants’ chloroplasts. The mesh held in the equivalent of a daily inversion layer, which made the air inside the crater about thirty percent thicker and considerably warmer than the outside air. Nets like this one made it easier to get biomes through the tough transition from tent to open air, and when permanently installed, they created nice meso-climates at higher altitudes or latitudes. Moreux extended up to forty-three degrees north, and winters outside the crater were always going to be fairly severe. With the mesh in place they were able to sustain a warm high-altitude forest, sporting an exotic array of plants engineered from the East African volcanoes, New Guinea, and the Himalayas. Down on the crater floor in the summer the days were seriously hot, and the weird blooming spiky trees as fragrant as perfume.

The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the northern arc of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window walls, overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath them. The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under vine-covered trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305 K, and people muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air to escape, or even working up a system where they could simply roll off the mesh during the summer.

Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the outer satellites. The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and green-house-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some feed-stocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.

One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.

Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly stunned through the whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric inquiries to his associates, and spent his time staring down at the forest below the town. When someone at dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I taught your mother once.”

“Yes,” Zo said.

“Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.

“I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.

“I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.

The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.

• • •

They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade under the eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a high canopy through which lemurs howled and leaped. The old man walked slowly along, peering at the heedless creatures of the forest, and he spoke seldom, mostly to ask if Zo knew the names of the various ferns and trees. All she could identify for him were the birds. “The names of plants go in one ear and out the other, I’m afraid,” she admitted cheerfully.

His forehead wrinkled at this.

“I think that helps me to see them better,” she added.

“Really.” He looked around again, as if trying it. “Does that mean you don’t see the birds as well as the plants?”

“They’re different. They’re my brothers and sisters, they have to have names. It’s part of them. But this stuff”— she gestured at the green fronds around them, giant ferns under spiky flowering trees—”this stuff is nameless, really. We make up names, but they don’t really have them.”

He thought about this.

“Where do you fly?” he said a kilometer down the overgrown trail.

“Everywhere.”

“Do you have favorite places?”

“I like Echus Overlook.”

“Good updrafts?”

“Very good. I was there until Jackie descended on me and put me to work.”

“It’s not your work?”

“Oh yes, yes. But my co-op is good at flex time.”

“Ah. So you will stay here awhile?”

“Only until the Galilean shuttle leaves.”

“Then you will emigrate?”

“No no. A tour, for Jackie. Diplomatic mission.”

“Ah. Will you visit Uranus?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see Miranda.”

“Me too. That’s one reason I’m going.”

“Ah.”

They crossed a shallow creek, stepping on exposed flat stones. Birds called, insects whirred. Sunlight filled the entire crater bowl now, but under the forest canopy it was still cool, the air shot with parallel columns and wires of slanting yellow light. Russell crouched to stare into the creek they had crossed.

“What was my mother like as a child?” Zo asked.

“Jackie?”

He thought about it. A long time passed. Just as Zo was concluding with exasperation that he had forgotten the question, he said, “She was a fast runner. She asked a lot of questions. Why why why. I liked that. She was the oldest of that generation of ectogenes, I think. The leader anyway.”

“Was she in love with Nirgal?”

“I don’t know. Why, have you met Nirgal?”

“I think so, yes. With the ferals once. What about with Peter Clayborne, was she in love with him?”

“In love? Later, maybe. When they were older. In Zygote, I don’t know.”

“You aren’t much help.”

“No.”

“Forgotten it all?”

“Not all. But what I remember is— hard to characterize. I remember Jackie asking about John Boone one day, just in the way you’re asking about her. More than once. She was pleased to be his granddaughter. Proud of him.”

“She still is. And I’m proud of her.”

“And— I remember her crying, once.”

“Why? And don’t say I don’t know!”

This balked him. Finally he looked up at her, with a smile almost human. “She was sad.”

“Oh very good!”

“Because her mother had left. Esther?”

“That’s right.”

“Kasei and Esther broke up, and Esther left for— I don’t know. But Kasei and Jackie stayed in Zygote. And one day she got to school early, on a day I was teaching. She asked why a lot. And this time too, but about Kasei and Esther. And then she cried.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I don’t. . . . ‘Nothing, I suppose. I didn’t know what to say. Hmm. . . . I thought she perhaps should have gone with Esther. The mother bond is crucial.”

“Come on.”

“You don’t agree? I thought all you young natives were sociobiologists.”

“What’s that?”

“Um— someone who believes that most cultural traits have a biological explanation.”

“Oh no. Of course not. We’re much freer than that. Mothering can be any kind of thing. Sometimes mothers are nothing but incubators.”

“I suppose so—”

“Take my word for it.”

“. . . But Jackie cried.”

On they hiked, in silence. Like a lot of the big craters, Moreux turned out to have several pie-wedge watersheds, converging on a central marsh and lake. In this case the lake was small and kidney-shaped, curving around the rough low knobs of a central peak complex. Zo and Russell came out from under the forest canopy on an indistinct trail that faded into elephant grass, and they would have gotten quickly lost except for the stream, which was oxbowing through the grass toward a meadow and then the marshy lake. Even the meadow was dominated by elephant grass, great circular clumps of it that stood well overhead, so that they often had a view of nothing but giant grasses and sky. The long blades of grass gleamed under the lilac midday zenith. Russell stumbled along well behind Zo, his round sunglasses like mirrors in his face, reflecting the grass bundles as he looked this way and that. He appeared utterly foxed, amazed at the surroundings, and he muttered into an old wristpad that hung on his wrist like a manacle.

A final oxbow into the lake had created a fine sand-and-pebble beach, and after testing with a stick for quicksand at the waterline, and finding the sand firm, Zo stripped off her sweaty singlet and walked out into the water, which got nice and cold a few meters offshore. She dove under, swam around, hit her head on the bottom. There was a beached boulder standing over some deep water, and she climbed it and dove in three or four times, doing a forward flip in the water right after entry; this forward somersault, difficult and graceless in the air, caused a quick little tug of weightless pleasure in the pit of her stomach, a feeling as close to orgasm as any nonorgasm she had ever felt. So she dove several times, until the sensation wore off and she was cooled. Then she walked out of the lake and lay on the sand, feeling its heat and the solar radiation cook both sides of her. A real orgasm would have been perfect, but despite the fact that she was laid out before him like a map of sex, Russell sat cross-legged in the shallows, absorbed apparently by the mud, naked himself except for sunglasses and wristpad. A farmer-tanned little bald wizened primate, like her image of Gandhi or Homo habilis. It was even a bit sexy how different he was, so ancient and small, like the male of some turtle-without-a-shell species. She pulled her knee to the side and shifted up her bottom in an unmistakable present posture, the sunlight hot on her exposed vulva.

“What amazing mud,” he said, staring at the glop in his hand. “I’ve never seen anything like this biome.”

“No.”

“Do you like it?”

“This biome? I suppose so. It’s a bit hot and overgrown, but interesting. It makes a change.”

“So you don’t object. You’re not a Red.”

“A Red?” She laughed. “No, I’m a whig.”

He thought that one over. “Do you mean to say that greens and Reds are no longer a contemporary political division?”

She gestured at the elephant grass and saal trees backing the meadow. “How could they be?”

“Very interesting.” He cleared his throat. “When you go to Uranus, will you invite a friend of mine?”

“Maybe,” Zo said, and shifted her hips back a bit.

He took the hint, and after a moment leaned forward and began to massage the thigh nearest him. It felt like a monkey’s little hands on her skin, clever and knowing. He could lose his whole hand in her pubic hair, a phenomenon he appeared to like, as he repeated it several times and got an erection, which she held hard as she came. It was not like being tabled, of course, but any orgasm was a good thing, especially out in the sun’s hot rain. And although his handling of her was basic, he did not exhibit any of that hankering for simultaneous affection which so many of the old ones had, a sentimentality which interfered with the much more acute pleasures that could be achieved one person at a time. So when her shuddering had stilled she rolled on her side, and took his erection in her mouth— like a little finger she could wrap her tongue entirely around— while giving him a good view of her body. She stopped once to look herself, big rich taut curves, and saw that the span of her hips stood nearly as high as his shoulders. Then back to it, vagina dentata, so absurd those frightened patriarchal myths, teeth were entirely superfluous, did a python need teeth, did a rock stamp need teeth? Just grab the poor creatures by the cock and squeeze till they whimpered, and what were they going to do? They could try to stay out of the grip, but at the same time it was the place they most wanted to be, so that they wandered in the pathetic confusion and denial of that double bind— and put themselves at the risk of teeth anyway, any chance they got; she nipped at him, to remind him of his situation; then let him come. Men were so lucky they weren’t telepathic.

Afterward they took another dip in the lake, and back on the sand he pulled a loaf of bread from his day pack. They broke the loaf in half and ate.

“Were you purring, then?” he said between swallows.

“Mm-hmm.”

“You had the trait inserted?”

She nodded, swallowed. “Last time I took the treatment.”

“The genes are from cats?”

“From tigers.”

“Ah.”

“It turns out to be a minor change in the larynx and vocal cords. You should try it, it feels really good.”

He was blinking and did not answer.

“Now who’s this friend you want me to take to Uranus?”

“Ann Clayborne.”

“Ah! Your old nemesis.”

“Something like that.”

“What makes you think she would go?”

“She might not. But she might. Michel says she’s trying some new things. And I think Miranda would be interesting to her. A moon knocked apart in an impact, and then reassembled, moon and impactor together. It’s an image I’d . . . like her to see. All that rock, you know. She’s fond of rock.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Russell and Clayborne, the green and the Red, two of the most famous antagonists in all the melodramatic saga of the first years of settlement. Those first years: a situation so claustrophobic Zo shuddered to think of it. Clearly the experience had brecciated the minds of all those who had suffered through it. And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage inflicted later on, as she recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s stories tended to blur together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony, Maya’s betrayals— all the arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so on— such sordid stuff, with scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far as she could tell. As if the old ones had been anaerobic bacteria, living in poison, slowly excreting the necessary conditions for the emergence of a fully oxygenated life.

Except perhaps for Ann Clayborne, who seemed, from the stories, to have understood that to feel joy in a rock world, you had to love rock. Zo liked that attitude, and so she said, “Sure, I’ll ask her. Or you should, shouldn’t you? You ask, and tell her I’m agreeable. We can make room in the diplomatic group.”

“It’s a Free Mars group?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

He asked her questions about Jackie’s political ambitions, and she answered when she could, looking down her body and its curves, the hard muscles smoothed by the fat under the skin— hipbones flanking the belly, navel, wiry black pubic hair (she brushed bread crumbs out of it), long powerful thighs. Women’s bodies were much more handsomely proportioned than men’s, Michelangelo had been wrong about that, although his David made a best case for his argument, a flier’s body if ever there was one.

“I wish we could fly back up to the rim,” she said.

“I don’t know how to fly the birdsuits.”

“I could have carried you on my back.”

“Really?”

She glanced at him. Another thirty or thirty-five kilos. . . . “Sure. It would depend on the suit.”

“It’s amazing what those suits can do.”

“It’s not just the suits.”

“No. But we weren’t meant to fly. Heavy bones and all. You know.”

“I do. Certainly the suits are necessary. Just not sufficient.”

“Yes.” He was looking at her body. “It’s interesting how big people are getting.”

“Especially genitals.”

“Do you think so?”

She laughed. “Just teasing.”

“Ah.”

“Although you would think the parts would grow that had increased use, eh?”

“Yes. Depth of chests have grown greater, I read.”

She laughed again. “The thin air, right?”

“Presumably. It’s true in the Andes, anyway. The distances from spine to sternum in Andean natives are nearly twice as large as they are in people who live at sea level.”

“Really! Like the chest cavities of birds, eh?”

“I suppose.”

“Then add big pecs, and big breasts. . . .”

He didn’t reply.

“So we’re evolving into something like birds.”

He shook his head. “It’s phenotypic. If you raised your kids on Earth, their chests would shrink right back down.”

“I doubt I’ll have kids.”

“Ah. Because of the population problem?”

“Yes. We need you issei to start dying. Even all these new little worlds aren’t helping that much. Earth and Mars are both turning into anthills. You’ve taken our world from us, really. You’re kleptoparasites.”

“That sounds redundant.”

“No, it’s a real term, for animals that steal food from their young during exceptionally hard winters.”

“Very apt.”

“We should probably kill you all when you turn a hundred.”

“Or as soon as we have children.”

She grinned. He was so imperturbable! “Whichever comes first.”

He nodded as if this were a sensible suggestion. She laughed, although it was vexing too: “Of course it will never happen.”

“No. But it won’t be necessary.”

“No? You’re going to act like lemmings and run off cliffs?”

“No. Treatment-resistant diseases are appearing. Older people are dying. It’s bound to happen.”

“Is it?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t think they’ll figure out ways to cure these new diseases, keep stringing things along?”

“In some cases. But senescence is complex, and sooner or later. . . .” He shrugged.

“That’s a bad thought,” Zo said.

She stood, pulled the dried fabric of her singlet up her legs. He stood and dressed too.

“Have you ever met Bao Shuyo?” he asked.

“No, who’s she?”

“A mathematician, living in Da Vinci.”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

They hiked uphill through the forest, from time to time stopping to look after the quick blur of an animal. A big jungle chicken, what looked like a lone hyena, standing looking down a wash at them. . . . Zo found she was enjoying herself. This issei was unteasable, unshockable; and his opinions were unpredictable, which was an unusual trait in the old, indeed in anyone. Most of the ancient ones Zo had met seemed especially bound in the tightly warped space-time of their values; and as the way people lived their values was in inverse proportion to how tightly they were bound in them, the old had ended up Tartuffes to a man, or so she had thought, hypocrites for whom she had no patience at all. She despised the old and their precious values. But this one didn’t seem to have any. It made her want to talk more with him.

When they got back to the village she patted him on the head. “That was fun. I’ll talk to your friend.”

“Thanks.”

• • •

A few days later she gave Ann Clayborne a call. The face that appeared on the screen was as forbidding as a skull.

“Hi, I’m Zoya Boone.”

“Yes?”

“It’s my name,” Zo said. “That’s how I introduce myself to strangers.”

“Boone?”

“Jackie’s daughter.”

“Ah.”

Clearly she didn’t like Jackie. A common reaction; Jackie was so wonderful that a lot of people hated her.

“I’m also a friend of Sax Russell’s.”

“Ah.”

Impossible to read what she meant by that one.

“I was telling him that I’m on my way out to the Uranian system, and he said you might be interested in joining me.”

“He did?”

“He did. So I called. I’m going to Jupiter and then Uranus, with two weeks on Miranda.”

“Miranda!” she said. “Who are you again?”

“I’m Zo Boone! What are you, senile?”

“Miranda, you said?”

“Yes. Two weeks, maybe more if I like it.”

“If you like it?”

“Yes. I don’t stay places I don’t like.”

Clayborne nodded as if that were only sensible, and so Zo added mock solemnly, as if to a child, “There’s a lot of rock there.”

“Yes yes.”

A long pause. Zo studied the face on the screen. Gaunt and wrinkled, like Russell, only in her case almost all the wrinkles were vertical. A face hacked out of wood. Finally she said, “I’ll think about it.”

“You’re supposed to be trying new things,” Zo reminded her.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Sax told you that?”

“No— I asked Jackie about you.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said again, and cut the connection.

So much for that, Zo thought. Still she had tried, and therefore felt virtuous, a disagreeable sensation. These issei had a way of pulling one into their realities; and they were all mad.

And unpredictable as well; the next day Clayborne called back, and said she would go.