Читать книгу Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 6

Mars is free now. We’re on our own. No one tells us what to do.

Ann stood at the front of the train as she said this.

But it’s so easy to backslide into old patterns of behaviour. Break one hierarchy and another springs up to take its place. We will have to be on guard for that, because there will always be people trying to make another Earth. The areophany will have to be ceaseless, an eternal struggle. We will have to think harder than ever before what it means to be Martian.

Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out of the windows at the terrain flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed Reds. In the harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land outside bare except for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked all Earthly power off Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by months of furious action; they were tired.

We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that we had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So we acted. We are making a better way to live.

This was the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to them again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered the revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police into Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Terrans up to Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of Sheffield, up the space cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be done. But in the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great victory, and some of the blank faces staring at Ann or out of the window seemed to want a break, a moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.

Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train’s levitation over the land.

Ann shook her head. Hiroko is a Green, she said, the original Green.

Hiroko invented the areophany, the young native countered.

That’s her first concern: Mars. She will help us, I know. I met her. She told me.

Except she’s dead, someone else said.

Another silence. The world flowed under them.

Finally a tall young woman stood up and walked down the aisle, and gave Ann a hug. The spell was broken; words were abandoned; they got to their feet and clustered in the open space at the front of the train, around Ann, and hugged her, or shook her hand – or simply touched her, Ann Clayborne, the one who had taught them to love Mars for itself, who had led them in the struggle for its independence from Earth. And though her bloodshot eyes were still fixed, gazing through them at the rocky battered expanse of the Tyrrhena Massif, she was smiling. She hugged them back, she shook their hands, she reached up to touch their faces. It will be all right, she said. We will make Mars free. And they said yes, and congratulated each other. On to Sheffield, they said. Finish the job. Mars will show us how.

Except she’s not dead, the young man objected. I saw her last month in Arcadia. She’ll show up again. She’ll show up somewhere.

At a certain moment before dawn the sky always glowed the same bands of pink as in the beginning, pale and clear in the east, rich and starry in the west. Ann watched for this moment as her companions drove them west, toward a mass of black land rearing into the sky – the Tharsis bulge, punctuated by the broad cone of Pavonis Mons. As they rolled uphill from Noctis Labyrinthus they rose above most of the new atmosphere; the air pressure at the foot of Pavonis was only 180 millibars, and then as they drove up the eastern flank of the great shield volcano it dropped under 100 millibars, and continued to fall. Slowly they ascended above all visible foliage, crunching over dirty patches of wind-carved snow; then they ascended above even the snow, until there was nothing but rock, and the ceaseless thin cold winds of the Jetstream. The bare land looked just as it had in the prehuman years, as if they were driving back up into the past.

It wasn’t so. But something fundamental in Ann Clayborne warmed at the sight of this ferric world, stone on rock in the perpetual wind, and as the Red cars rolled up the mountain all their occupants grew as rapt as Ann, the cabins falling silent as the sun cracked the distant horizon behind them.

Then the slope they ascended grew less steep, in a perfect sine curve, until they were on the flat land of the round summit plateau. Here they saw tent towns ringing the edge of the giant caldera, clustered in particular around the foot of the space elevator, some thirty kilometres to the south of them.

They stopped their cars. The silence in the cabins had shifted from reverent to grim. Ann stood at one upper cabin window, looking south toward Sheffield, that child of the space elevator: built because of the elevator, smashed flat when the elevator fell, built again with the elevator’s replacement. This was the city she had come to destroy, as thoroughly as Rome had Carthage; for she meant to bring down the replacement cable too, just as they had the first one in 2061. When they did that, much of Sheffield would again be flattened. What remained would be located uselessly on the peak of a high volcano, above most of the atmosphere; as time passed the surviving structures would be abandoned and dismantled for salvage, leaving only the tent foundations, and perhaps a weather station, and, eventually, the long sunny silence of a mountain summit. The salt was already in the ground.

A cheerful Tharsis Red named Irishka joined them in a small rover, and led them through the maze of warehouses and small tents surrounding the intersection of the equatorial piste with the one circling the rim. As they followed her she described for them the local situation. Most of Sheffield and the rest of the Pavonis rim settlements were already in the hands of the Martian revolutionaries. But the space elevator and the neighbourhood surrounding its base complex were not, and there lay the difficulty. The revolutionary forces on Pavonis were mostly poorly equipped militias, and they did not necessarily share the same agenda. That they had succeeded as far as they had was due to many factors: surprise, the control of Martian space, several strategic victories, the support of the great majority of the Martian population, the unwillingness of the United Nations Transitional Authority to fire on civilians, even when they were making mass demonstrations in the streets. As a result the UNTA security forces had retreated from all over Mars to regroup in Sheffield, and now most of them were in elevator cars, going up to Clarke, the ballast asteroid and space station at the top of the elevator; the rest were jammed into the neighbourhood surrounding the elevator’s massive base complex, called the Socket. This district consisted of elevator support facilities, industrial warehouses, and the hostels, dormitories and restaurants needed to house and feed the port’s workforce. ‘Those are coming in useful now,’ Irishka said, ‘because even so they’re squeezed in like trash in a compactor, and if there hadn’t been food and shelter they would probably have tried a breakout. As it is things are still tense, but at least they can live.’

It somewhat resembled the situation just resolved in Burroughs, Ann thought. Which had turned out fine. It only took someone willing to act and the thing would be done – UNTA evacuated to Earth, the cable brought down, Mars’s link to Earth truly broken.

So Irishka led them through the jumble that was East Pavonis, and their little caravan came to the rim of the caldera, where they parked their rovers. To the south on the western edge of Sheffield they could just make out the elevator cable, a line that was barely visible, and then only for a few kilometres out of its twenty-four thousand. Nearly invisible, in fact, and yet its existence dominated every move they made, every discussion – every thought they had, almost, speared and strung out on that black thread connecting them to Earth.

When they were settled in their camp Ann called her son Peter on the wrist. He was one of the leaders of the revolution on Tharsis, and had directed the campaign against UNTA that had left its forces contained in the Socket and its immediate neighbourhood. A qualified victory at best, but it made Peter one of the heroes of the previous month.

Now he answered the call and his face appeared on her wrist. He looked quite like her, which she found disconcerting. He was absorbed, she saw, concentrating on something other than her call.

‘Any news?’ she asked.

‘No. We appear to be at something of an impasse. We’re allowing all of them caught outside free passage into the elevator district, so they’ve got control of the train station and the south rim airport, and the subway lines from those to the Socket.’

‘Did the planes that evacuated them from Burroughs come here?’

‘Yes. Apparently most of them are leaving for Earth. It’s very crowded in there.’

‘Are they going back to Earth, or into Mars orbit?’

‘Back to Earth. I don’t think they trust orbit any more.’

He smiled at that. He had done a lot in space, aiding Sax’s efforts and so on. Her son the spaceman, the Green. For many years they had scarcely spoken to each other.

Ann said, ‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t see that we can take the elevator, or the Socket either. It just wouldn’t work. Even if it did, they could always bring the elevator down.’

‘So?’

‘Well—’ He looked suddenly concerned. ‘I don’t think that would be a good thing. Do you?’

‘I think it should come down.’

Now he looked annoyed. ‘Better stay out of the fall line then.’

‘I will.’

‘I don’t want anyone bringing it down without a full discussion,’ he told her sharply. ‘This is important. It should be a decision made by the whole Martian community. I think we need the elevator, myself.’

‘Except we have no way to take possession of it.’

‘That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it’s not something for you to take into your own hands. I heard what happened in Burroughs, but it’s different here, you understand? We decide strategy together. It needs to be discussed.’

‘It’s a group that’s very good at that,’ Ann said bitterly. Everything was always thoroughly discussed and then always she lost. It was past time for that. Someone had to act. But again Peter looked as if he were being taken from his real work. He thought he would be making the decisions about the elevator, she could see that. Part of a more general feeling of ownership of the planet, no doubt, the birthright of the nisei, displacing the First Hundred and all the rest of the issei. If John had lived that would not have been easy, but the king was dead, long live the king – her son, king of the nisei, the first true Martians.

But king or not, there was a Red army now converging on Pavonis Mons. They were the strongest military operation left on the planet, and they intended to complete the work begun when Earth had been hit by its great flood. They did not believe in consensus or compromise, and for them, knocking down the cable was killing two birds with one stone: it would destroy the last police stronghold, and it would also sever easy contact between Earth and Mars, a primary Red goal. No, knocking down the cable was the obvious thing to do.

But Peter did not seem to know this. Or perhaps he did not care. Ann tried to tell him, but he just nodded, muttering, ‘Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.’ So arrogant, like all the Greens, so blithe and stupid with all their prevaricating, their dealing with Earth, as if you could ever get anything from such a leviathan. No. It was going to take direct action, as in the drowning of Burroughs, as in all the acts of sabotage that had set the stage for the revolution. Without those the revolution wouldn’t even have begun, or if it had it would have been crushed immediately, as in 2061.

‘Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then’ Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.

‘Yeah yeah,’ Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

‘I’ll try to set one up,’ Peter said. She had got his attention at last, she saw; but there was an unpleasant look on his face, as if he had been threatened. ‘Before things get out of hand.’

‘Things are already out of hand,’ she told him, and cut the connection.

* * *

She checked the news on the various channels, Mangalavid, the Reds’ private nets, the Terran summaries. Though Pavonis and the elevator were now the focus of everyone on Mars, the physical convergence on the volcano was only partial. It appeared to her that there were more Red guerrilla units on Pavonis than the Green units of Free Mars and their allies; but it was hard to be sure. Kasei and the most radical wing of the Reds, called the Kakaze (‘fire wind’), had recently occupied the north rim of Pavonis, taking over the train station and tent at Lastflow. The Reds Ann had travelled with, most of them from the old Red mainstream, discussed moving around the rim and joining the Kakaze, but decided in the end to stay in East Pavonis. Ann observed this discussion silently but was glad at the result, as she wanted to keep her distance from Kasei and Dao and their crowd. She was pleased to stay in East Pavonis.

Many Free Mars troops were staying there as well, moving out of their cars into the abandoned warehouses. East Pavonis was becoming a major concentration of revolutionary groups of all kinds; and a couple of days after her arrival, Ann went in and walked over compacted regolith to one of the biggest warehouses in the tent, to take part in a general strategy session.

The meeting went about as she expected. Nadia was at the centre of the discussion, and it was useless talking to her now. Ann just sat on a chair against the back wall, watching the rest of them circle the situation. They did not want to say what Peter had already admitted to her in private: there was no way to get UNTA off the space elevator. Before they conceded that they were going to try to talk the problem out of existence.

Late in the meeting, Sax Russell came over to sit by her side.

‘A space elevator,’ he said. ‘It could be … used.’

Now, Ann was not the least bit comfortable talking to Sax. She knew that he had suffered brain damage at the hands of UNTA security, and had taken a treatment that had changed his personality; but somehow this had not helped at all; it only made things very strange, in that sometimes he seemed to her to be the same old Sax, as familiar as a much-hated brother; while at other times he did indeed seem like a completely different person, inhabiting Sax’s body. These two contrary impressions oscillated rapidly, even sometimes co-existed; just before joining her, as he had talked with Nadia and Art, he had looked like a stranger, a dapper old man with a piercing glare, talking in Sax’s voice and Sax’s old style. Now as he sat next to her, she could see that the changes to his face were utterly superficial. But though he looked familiar the stranger was now inside him – for here was a man who halted and jerked as he delved painfully after what he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out with something scarcely coherent.

‘The elevator is a, a device. For … raising up. A … a tool.’

‘Not if we don’t control it,’ Ann said to him carefully, as if instructing a child.

‘Control…’ Sax said, thinking over the concept as if it was entirely new to him. ‘Influence? If the elevator can be brought down by anyone who really wants to, then…’ He trailed away, lost in his thoughts.

‘Then what?’ Ann prompted.

‘Then it’s controlled by all. Consensual existence. It’s obvious?’

It was as if he were translating from a foreign language. This was not Sax; Ann could only shake her head, and try gently to explain. The elevator was the conduit for the metanationals to reach Mars, she told him. It was in the possession of the metanats now, and the revolutionaries had no means to kick their police forces off of it. Clearly the thing to do in such a situation was to bring it down. Warn people, give them a schedule, and then do it. ‘Loss of life would be minimal, and what there was would be pretty much the fault of anyone so stupid as to stay on the cable, or the equator.’

Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and she shook her head so violently that her cropped grey locks flew out like a clown’s ruff. She was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good reason at all, and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said curtly, ‘We need the elevator. It’s our conduit to Terra just as much as it’s their conduit to Mars.’

‘But we don’t need a conduit to Terra,’ Ann said. ‘It’s not a physical relationship for us, don’t you see? I’m not saying we don’t need to have an influence on Terra, I’m not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we need to try to work on them. But it’s not a physical thing, don’t you see? It’s a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It’s an information exchange. At least it is when it’s going right. It’s when it gets into a physical thing – a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police control – that’s when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took it down we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not yours.’

It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn’t imagine.

Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic table style said, ‘If we can bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down,’ blinking and everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again – Saxifrage Russell his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words’ inadequacy right in her mouth.

Still she tried. ‘People act on what’s there, Sax. The metanat directors and the UN and the governments will look up and see what’s there, and act accordingly. If the cable’s gone they just don’t have the resources or the time to mess with us right now. If the cable’s here, then they’ll want us. They’ll think, well, we could do it. And there’ll be people screaming to try.’ ‘They can always come. The cable is only a fuel-saver.’ ‘A fuel-saver which makes mass transfers possible.’ But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about control of orbit and safe conduct passes and the like.

The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said, ‘We’ve promised to … help them out.’

‘By sending them more metals?’ Ann said. ‘Do they really need those?’

‘We could … take people. It might help.’

Ann shook her head. ‘We could never take enough.’ He frowned. Nadia saw they weren’t listening to her, returned to the table. Sax and Ann fell into silence.

Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. But that had been so long ago she couldn’t even remember when exactly it was. In Antarctica? Somewhere. But not on Mars.

‘You know,’ Sax said in a conversational tone, again very unSaxlike but in a different way, ‘it wasn’t the Red militia that caused the Transitional Authority to evacuate Burroughs and the rest of the planet. If guerrillas had been the only factor then the Terrans would have gone after us, and they might well have succeeded. But those mass demonstrations in the tents made it clear that almost everyone on the planet was against them. That’s what governments fear the most; mass protests in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of people going into the streets to reject the current system. That’s what Nirgal means when he says political power comes out of the look in people’s eye. And not out of the end of a gun.’

‘And so?’ Ann said.

Sax gestured at the people in the warehouse. ‘They’re all Greens.’

The others continued debating. Sax watched her like a bird.

Ann got up and walked out of the meeting, into the strangely unbusy streets of East Pavonis. Here and there militia bands held posts on street corners, keeping an eye to the south, toward Sheffield and the cable terminal. Happy, hopeful, serious young natives. There on one corner a group was in an animated discussion, and as Ann passed them a young woman, her face utterly intent, flushed with passionate conviction, cried out, ‘You can’t just do what you want!’

Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy, without knowing why. This is how people change – in little quantum jumps when struck by outer events – no intention, no plan. Someone says ‘the look in people’s eye’, and the phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face glowing with passionate conviction, another phrase: you can’t just do what you want! And so it occurred to her (the look on that young woman’s face!) that it was not just the cable’s fate they were deciding – not just ‘should the cable come down’, but ‘how do we decide things?’ That was the critical postrevolutionary question, perhaps more important than any single issue being debated, even the fate of the cable. Up until now, most people in the underground had operated by a working method which said if we don’t agree with you we will fight you. That attitude was what had drawn people into the underground in the first place, Ann included. And once used to that method, it was hard to get away from it. After all, they had just proved that it worked. And so there was the inclination to continue to use it. She felt that herself.

But political power … say it did come out of the look in people’s eye. You could fight forever, but if people weren’t behind you …

Ann continued to think about that as she drove down into Sheffield, having decided to skip the farce of the afternoon strategy session in East Pavonis. She wanted to have a look at the seat of the action.

It was curious how little seemed to have changed in the day-to-day life of Sheffield. People still went to work, ate in restaurants, talked on the grass of the parks, gathered in the public spaces in this most crowded of tent towns. The shops and restaurants were jammed. Most businesses in Sheffield had belonged to the metanats, and now people read on their screens long arguments over what to do – what the employees’ new relationship to their old owners should be – where they should buy their raw materials, where they should sell – whose regulations they ought to obey, whose taxes they ought to pay. All very confusing, as the screen debates and nightly news vids and wrist nets indicated.

In the plaza devoted to the food market, however, things looked as they always did. Food was already mostly grown and distributed by co-ops; ag networks were in place, the greenhouses on Pavonis were still producing, and so in the market things ran as usual, goods paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit. Except once or twice Ann saw sellers in their aprons shouting red-faced at customers, who shouted right back, arguing over some point of government policy. As Ann passed by one of these arguments, which were no different than those going on among the leaders in East Pavonis, the disputants all stopped and stared at her. She had been recognized. The vegetable seller said loudly, ‘If you Reds would lay off they would just go away!’

‘Ah come on,’ someone retorted. ‘It isn’t her doing it.’

So true, Ann thought as she walked on.

A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems were still running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which was not something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did; but every tent’s operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their raw materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and nuclear reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were physically fragile, but if left alone, they could very well become politically autonomous; there was no reason for them to be owned, no justification for it.

So the necessities were served. Daily life plodded on, barely perturbed by revolution.

Or so it seemed at first glance. But there in the streets also were armed groups, young natives in threes and fours and fives, standing on street corners. Revolutionary militias around their missile launchers and remote sensing dishes – Green or Red, it didn’t matter, though they were almost certainly Greens. People eyed them as they walked by, or stopped to chat and find out what they were doing. Keeping an eye on the Socket, the armed natives said. Though Ann could see that they were functioning as police as well. Part of the scene, accepted, supported. People grinned as they chatted; these were their police, they were fellow Martians, here to protect them, to guard Sheffield for them. People wanted them there, that was clear. If they hadn’t, then every approaching questioner would have been a threat, every glance of resentment an attack; which eventually would have forced the militias from the street corners into some safer place. People’s faces, staring in concert; this ran the world.

So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she took a rim train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to the north arc of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze were occupying apartments in the little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had forcibly evicted some noncombatant residents, who naturally had trained down to Sheffield in fury, demanding to be reinstated in their homes, and reporting to Peter and the rest of the Green leaders that the Reds had set up truck – drawn rocket-launchers on the north rim, with the rockets aimed at the elevator and Sheffield more generally.

So Ann walked out into Lastflow’s little station in a bad mood, angry at the Kakaze’s arrogance, as stupid in its way as the Greens’. They had done well in the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dyke very visibly to give everyone a warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dyke after all the other revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the south, ready to rescue the city’s civilian population while the metanat security were forced to retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been needed and they had done it, without getting bogged down in debate. Without their decisiveness everyone would still be gathered around Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing a Terran expeditionary force to relieve them. It had been a perfectly delivered coup.

Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.

Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a fanshaped lava flow extending more than a hundred kilometres down the northeast flank of the mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise a flawlessly circular summit cone and caldera, and clearly it had come very late in the volcano’s history of eruptions. Standing down in the depression, one’s view of the rest of the summit was cut off – it was like being in a shallow hanging valley, with little visible in any direction – until one walked out to the drop-off at rim’s edge, and saw the huge cylinder of the caldera coring the planet, and on the far rim the skyline of Sheffield, looking like a tiny Manhattan over forty kilometres away.

The curtailed view perhaps explained why the depression had been one of the last parts of the rim to be developed. But now it was filled by a fair-sized tent, six kilometres in diameter and a hundred metres high, heavily reinforced as all tents up here had to be. The settlement had been home mostly to commuter labourers in the rim’s many industries. Now the rimfront district had been taken over by the Kakaze, and just outside the tent stood a fleet of large rovers, no doubt the ones that had caused the rumours about rocket-launchers.

As Ann was led to the restaurant that Kasei had made his headquarters, she was assured by her guides that this was indeed the case; the rovers did haul rocket-launchers, which were ready to flatten UNTA’s last refuge on Mars. Her guides were obviously happy about this, and happy also to be able to tell her about it, happy to meet her and guide her around. A varied bunch – mostly natives, with some Terran newcomers and oldtimers, of all ethnic backgrounds. Among them were a few faces Ann recognized: Etsu Okakura, Al-Khan, Yussuf. A lot of young natives unknown to her stopped them at the restaurant door to shake her hand, grinning enthusiastically. The Kakaze: they were, she had to admit to herself, the wing of the Reds for which she felt the least sympathy. Angry ex-Terrans or idealistic young natives from the tents, their stone eye – teeth dark in their smiles, their eyes glittering as they got this chance to meet her, as they spoke of kami, the need for purity, the intrinsic value of rock, the rights of the planet, and so on. In short, fanatics. She shook their hands and nodded, trying not to let her discomfort show.

Inside the restaurant Kasei and Dao were sitting by a window, drinking dark beer. Everything in the room stopped on Ann’s entrance, and it took a while for people to be introduced, for Kasei and Dao to welcome her with hugs, for meals and conversations to resume. They got her something to eat from the kitchen. The restaurant workers came out to meet her; they were Kakaze as well. Ann waited until they were gone and people had gone back to their tables, feeling impatient and awkward. These were her spiritual children, the media were always saying; she was the original Red; but in truth they made her uncomfortable.

Kasei, in excellent spirits, as he had been ever since the revolution began, said, ‘We’re going to bring down the cable in about a week.’

‘Oh you are!’ Ann said. ‘Why wait so long?’

Dao missed her sarcasm, ‘it’s a matter of warning people, so they have time to get off the equator.’ Though normally a sour man, today he was as cheery as Kasei.

‘And off the cable too?’

‘If they feel like it. But even if they evacuate it and give it to us, it’s still coming down.’

‘How? Are those really rocket-launchers out there?’

‘Yes. But those are there in case they come down and try to retake Sheffield. As for bringing down the cable, breaking it here at the base isn’t the way to do it.’

‘The control rockets might be able to adjust to disruptions at the bottom,’ Kasei explained. ‘Hard to say what would happen, really. But a break just above the areosynchronous point would decrease damage to the equator, and keep New Clarke from flying off as fast as the first one did. We want to minimize the drama of this, you know, avoid any martyrs we can. Just demolition of a building, you know. Like a building past its usefulness.’

‘Yes,’ Ann said, relieved at this sign of good sense. But it was curious how hearing her idea expressed as someone else’s plan disturbed her. She located the main source of her concern: ‘What about the others – the Greens? What if they object?’

‘They won’t,’ Dao said.

‘They are!’ Ann said sharply.

Dao shook his head. ‘I’ve been talking to Jackie. It may be that some of the Greens are truly opposed to it, but her group is just saying that for public consumption, so that they look moderate to the Terrans, and can blame the dangerous stuff on radicals out of their control.’

‘On us,’ Ann said.

They both nodded. ‘Just like with Burroughs,’ Kasei said with a smile.

Ann considered it. No doubt it was true. ‘But some of them are genuinely opposed. I’ve been arguing with them about it, and it’s no publicity stunt.’

‘Uh huh,’ Kasei said slowly.

Both he and Dao watched her.

‘So you’ll do it anyway,’ she said at last.

They continued to watch her. She saw all of a sudden that they would no more do what she told them to do than would boys ordered about by a senile grandmother. They were humouring her. Figuring out how they could best put her to use.

‘We have to,’ Kasei said. ‘It’s in the best interest of Mars. Not just for Reds, but all of us. We need some distance between us and Terra, and the gravity well re-establishes that distance. Without it we’ll be sucked down into the maelstrom.’

It was Ann’s argument, it was just what she had been saying in the meetings in East Pavonis. ‘But what if they try to stop you?’

‘I don’t think they can,’ Kasei said.

‘But if they try?’

The two men glanced at each other. Dao shrugged.

So, Ann thought, watching them. They were willing to start a civil war.

People were still coming up the slopes of Pavonis to the summit, filling up Sheffield, East Pavonis, Lastflow and the other rim tents. Among them were Michel, Spencer, Vlad, Marina and Ursula; Mikhail and a whole brigade of Bogdanovists; Coyote, on his own; a group from Praxis; a large train of Swiss; rover caravans of Arabs, both Sufi and secular; natives from other towns and settlements on Mars. All coming up for the endgame. Everywhere else on Mars, the natives had consolidated their control; all the physical plants were being operated by local teams, in co-operation with Separation de L’Atmosphere. There were some small pockets of metanat resistance, of course, and there were some Kakaze out there systematically destroying terraforming projects; but Pavonis was clearly the crux of the remaining problem – either the endgame of the revolution or, as Ann was beginning to fear, the opening moves of a civil war. Or both. It would not be the first time.

So she went to the meetings, and slept poorly at night, waking from troubled sleep, or from naps in the transit between one meeting and the next. The meetings were beginning to blur: all contentious, all pointless. She was getting tired, and the broken sleep did not help. She was nearly one hundred and fifty years old, after all, and had not had a gerontological treatment in twenty-five years, and she felt weary all through, all the time. So she watched from a well of growing indifference as the others chewed over the situation. Earth was still in disarray; the great flood was indeed proving to be the ideal trigger mechanism for which General Sax had waited. Sax felt no remorse for taking advantage of Earth’s trouble, Ann could see; he never thought once about the many deaths the flood had caused down there. She could read his face thought by thought as he talked about it – what would be the point of remorse? The flood was an accident, a geological catastrophe like an ice age or a meteor impact. No one should waste time feeling remorse for it, not even if they were taking advantage of it for their own purposes. Best to take what good one possibly could from the chaos and disorder, and not worry. All this was right on Sax’s face as he discussed what they should do next vis a vis Earth. Send a delegation, he suggested. Diplomatic mission, personal appearance, something about throwing things together; incoherent on the surface, but she could read him like a brother, this old enemy! Well, Sax – the old Sax anyway – was nothing if not rational. Therefore easy to read. Easier than the young fanatics of the Kakaze, now that she thought of it.

And one could only meet him on his own ground, speak to him on his own terms. So she sat across from him in the meetings and tried to concentrate, even though her mind seemed to be hardening somehow, petrifying inside her head. Round and round the arguments went: what to do on Pavonis? Pavonis Mons, Peacock Mountain. Who would ascend the Peacock Throne? There were potential Shahs everywhere – Peter, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Kasei, Maya, Nadia, Mikhail, Ariadne, the invisible Hiroko …

Now someone was invoking the Dorsa Brevia conference as the framework for discussion they should use. All very well, but without Hiroko among them the moral centre was gone, the one person in all Martian history, apart from John Boone, to whom everyone would defer. But Hiroko and John were gone, along with Arkady, and Frank, who would have come in useful now, if he had been on her side, which he wouldn’t have been. All gone. And they were left with anarchy. Curious how at a crowded table those absent could be more visible than those present. Hiroko, for instance; people referred to her frequently; and no doubt she was somewhere in the outback, deserting them as usual in their hour of need. Pissing them out of the nest.

Curious too how the only child of their lost heroes, Kasei the son of John and Hiroko, should be the most radical leader there, a disquieting man even though he was on her side. There he sat, shaking his grey head at Art, a small smile twisting his mouth. He was nothing like either John or Hiroko – well, he had some of Hiroko’s arrogance, some of John’s simplicity. The worst of both. And yet he was a power, he did what he wanted, and a lot of people followed him. But he was not like his parents had been.

And Peter, sitting just two seats away from Kasei, was nothing like her or Simon. It was hard to see what blood relationships meant; nothing, obviously. Though it did twist her heart to hear Peter speak, as he argued with Kasei and opposed the Reds at every point, making a case for some kind of interplanetary collaborationism. And never in these sessions addressing her, or even looking at her. It was perhaps intended as some kind of courtesy – I will not argue with you in public. But it looked like a slight – I will not argue with you because you don’t matter.

He continued to argue for keeping the cable, and agreed with Art about the Dorsa Brevia document, naturally, given the Green majority that had existed then and persisted now. Using Dorsa Brevia as a guide would assure the cable’s survival. Meaning the continued presence of the United Nations Transitional Authority. And indeed some of them around Peter were talking about ‘semi-autonomy’ in relation to Terra, instead of independence, and Peter went along with that; it made her sick. And all without meeting her eye. It was Simonlike, somehow, a kind of silence. It made her angry.

‘We have no reason to talk about long-term plans until we have solved the cable problem,’ she said, interrupting him and earning a very black look indeed, as if she had broken an understanding; but there was no understanding, and why should they not argue, when they had no real relationship – nothing but biology …

Art claimed that the UN was now saying that it would be willing to agree to Martian semi-autonomy, as long as Mars remained in ‘close consultation’ with Earth, and an active aid in Earth’s crisis. Nadia said she was in communication with Derek Hastings, who was now up in New Clarke. Hastings had abandoned Burroughs without a bloody battle, it was true, and now she claimed he was willing to compromise. No doubt; his next retreat would not be so easy, nor would it take him to a very pleasant place, for despite all the emergency action, Earth was now a world of famine, plague, looting – breakdown of the social contract, which was so fragile after all. It could happen here too; she had to remember that fragility when she got angry enough, as now, to want to tell Kasei and Dao to abandon the discussions and fire away. If she did that it very likely would happen; a strange sensation of her own power came over her then, as she looked around the table at the anxious, angry, unhappy faces. She could tip the balance; she could knock this table right over.

Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way or the other. More were in favour of cutting the cable than Ann would have guessed, not just Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt most threatened by the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth: Bedouins, the Polynesians, the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier natives. Still, they were in the minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority. Isolationist versus interactive; yet another fracture to add to all the others rending the Martian independence movement.

Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favour of keeping the cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with expulsion from Martian society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular, and afterward Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtly. It made Ann so angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to argue for bringing the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from Peter, but it scarcely registered – she talked in a white heat, forgetting all about the five-minute limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and on, though she had no idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of what she had already said. Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a lawyer’s brief – hopefully so – on the other hand, a part of her thought as her mouth ran on, perhaps she was just saying the word Mars over and over again, or babbling, and the audience simply humouring her, or else miraculously comprehending her in a moment of glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their heads like caps of jewels – and indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal, the old men’s bald pates like chunks of jasper, inside which all languages dead and living were understood equally; and for a moment they appeared all caught up together with her, all inside an epiphany of Red Mars, free of Earth, living on the primal planet that had been and could be again.

She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate with her, as it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no idea. She only knew she had caught his attention at last.

This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation. She spoke of the need to compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply contradictory, Ann thought; because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they could not afford to offend, and therefore they must change all Terran social reality.

‘But how!’ Ann cried. ‘When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a world! No fulcrum, no lever, no force—’

‘It isn’t just Earth,’ Nadia replied. ‘There are going to be other settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the asteroids. We’ve got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re the natural leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all that – a reduction in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.’

‘Getting in the way of progress,’ Ann said bitterly. ‘Think what Arkady would have said to that. No, look. We had a chance here to make something different. That was the whole point. We still have that chance. Everything that increases the space within which we can create a new society is a good thing. Everything that reduces our space is a bad thing. Think about it!’

Perhaps they did. But it made no difference. Any number of elements on Earth were sending up their arguments for the cable – arguments, threats, entreaties. They needed help down there. Any help. Art Randolph continued energetically lobbying for the cable on behalf of Praxis, which was looking to Ann as if it would become the next transitional authority, metanationalism in its latest manifestation or disguise.

But the natives were being won over by them slowly, intrigued by the possibility of ‘conquering Earth’, unaware of how impossible this was, incapable of imagining Earth’s vastness and immobility. One could tell them and tell them, but they would never be able to imagine it.

Finally it was time for an informal vote. It was representative voting, they had decided, one vote for each of the signatory groups to the Dorsa Brevia document, one vote also to all the interested parties that had arisen since then – new settlements in the outback, new political parties, associations, labs, companies, guerrilla bands, the several Red splinter groups. Before they started some generous naive soul even offered the First Hundred a vote, and everyone there laughed at the idea that the First Hundred might be able to vote the same way on anything. The generous soul, a young woman from Dorsa Brevia, then proposed that each of the First Hundred be given an individual vote, but this was turned down as endangering the tenuous grasp they had on representative governance. It would have made no difference anyway.

So they voted to allow the space elevator to remain standing, for the time being – and in the possession of UNTA, down to and including the Socket, without contestation. It was like King Canute deciding to declare the tide legal after all, but no one laughed except Ann. The other Reds were furious. Ownership of the Socket was still being actively contested, Dao objected loudly, the neighbourhood around it was vulnerable and could be taken, there was no reason to back off like this, they were only trying to sweep a problem under the rug because it was hard! But the majority were in agreement. The cable should remain.

* * *

Ann felt the old urge: escape. Tents and trains, people, the little Manhattan skyline of Sheffield against the south rim, the summit basalt all torn and flattened and paved over … There was a piste all the way around the rim, but the western side of the caldera was very nearly uninhabited. So Ann got in one of the smallest Red rovers, and drove around the rim counterclockwise, just inside the piste, until she came to a little meteorological station, where she parked the rover and went out through its lock, stiff in a walker that was much like the ones they had gone out in during the first years.

She was a kilometre or two away from the rim’s edge. She walked slowly east toward it, stumbling once or twice before she started to pay proper attention. The old lava on the flat expanse of the broad rim was smooth and dark in some places, rough and lighter in others. By the time she approached the edge she was in full areologist mode, doing a boulder ballet she could sustain all day, attuned to every knob and crack underfoot. And this was a good thing, because near the rim’s drop-off the land collapsed in a series of narrow curving ledges, the drops sometimes a step, sometimes taller than she was. And always the growing sense of empty air ahead, as the far side of the caldera and the rest of the great circle became visible. And then she was climbing down onto the last ledge, a bench only some five metres wide, with a curved back wall, shoulder-high: and below her dropped the great round chasm of Pavonis.

This caldera was one of the geological marvels of the solar system, a hole forty-five kilometres across and a full five kilometres deep, and almost perfectly regular in every way – circular, flat-floored, almost vertically walled – a perfect cylinder of space, cut into the volcano like a rock sampler’s coring. None of the other three big calderas even approached this simplicity of form; Ascraeus and Olympus were complicated palimpsests of overlapping rings, while the very broad, shallow caldera of Arsia was roughly circular, but shattered in every way. Pavonis alone was a regular cylinder: the Platonic ideal of a volcanic caldera.

Of course from this wonderful vantage point she now had, the horizontal stratification of the interior walls added a lot of irregular detail, rust and black and chocolate and umber bands indicating variations in the composition of the lava deposits; and some bands were harder than those above and below, so that there were many arcuate balconies lining the wall at different elevations – isolated curving benches, perched on the side of the immense rock throat, most never visited. And the floor so flat. The subsidence of the volcano’s magma chamber, located some one hundred and sixty kilometres below the mountain, had to have been unusually consistent; it had dropped in the same place every time. Ann wondered if it had been determined yet why that had been; if the magma chamber had been younger than the other big volcanoes, or smaller, or the lava more homogenous … Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon; no doubt she could look it up on the wrist. She tapped out the code for the Journal of Areological Studies, typed in Pavonis: ‘Evidence of Strombolian explosive activity found in west Tharsis clasts’. ‘Radial ridges in caldera and concentric graben outside the rim suggest late subsidence of the summit’. She had just crossed some of those graben. ‘Release of juvenile volatiles into atmosphere calculated by radiometric dating of Lastflow marks’.

She clicked off the wristpad. She no longer kept up with all the latest areology, she hadn’t for years. Even reading the abstracts would have taken far more time than she had. And of course a lot of areology had been badly compromised by the terraforming project. Scientists working for the metanats had concentrated on resource exploration and evaluation, and had found signs of ancient oceans, of the early warm wet atmosphere, possibly even of ancient life; on the other hand radical Red scientists had warned of increased seismic activity, rapid subsidence, mass wasting, and the disappearance of even a single surface sample left in its primal condition. Political stress had skewed nearly everything written about Mars in the past hundred years. The Journal was the only publication Ann knew of which tried to publish papers delimiting their inquiries very strictly to reporting areology in the pure sense, concentrating on what had happened in the five billion years of solitude; it was the only publication Ann still read, or at least glanced at, looking through the titles and some of the abstracts, and the editorial material at the front; once or twice she had even sent in a letter concerning some detail or other, which they had printed without fanfare. Published by the university in Sabishii, the Journal was peer-reviewed by like-minded areologists, and the articles were rigorous, well-researched and with no obvious political point to their conclusions; they were simply science. The journal’s editorials advocated what had to be called a Red position, but only in the most limited sense, in that they argued for the preservation of the primal landscape so that studies could be carried on without having to deal with gross contaminations. This had been Ann’s position from the very start, and it was still where she felt most comfortable; she had moved from that scientific position into political activism only because it had been forced on her by the situation. This was true for a lot of areologists now supporting the Reds. They were her natural peer group, really – the people she understood, and with whom she sympathized.

But they were few; she could almost name them individually. The regular contributors to the Journal more or less. As for the rest of the Reds, the Kakaze and the other radicals, what they advocated was a kind of metaphysical position, a cult – they were religious fanatics, the equivalent of Hiroko’s Greens, members of some kind of rock-worshipping sect. Ann had very little in common with them, when it came down to it; they formulated their Redness from a completely different worldview.

And given that there was that kind of fractionization among the Reds themselves, then what could one say about the Martian independence movement as a whole? Well. They were going to fall out. It was happening already.

Ann sat down carefully on the edge of the final bench. A good view. It appeared there was a station of some kind down there on the caldera floor, though from five thousand metres up, it was hard to be sure. Even the ruins of old Sheffield were scarcely visible – ah – there they were, on the floor under the new town, a tiny pile of rubble with some straight lines and plane surfaces in it. Faint vertical scorings on the wall above might have been caused by the fall of the city in ’61. It was hard to say.

The tented settlements still on the rim were like toy villages in paperweights. Sheffield with its skyline, the low warehouses across from her to the east, Lastflow, the various smaller tents all around the rim … many of them had merged, to become a kind of greater Sheffield, covering almost 180° of the rim, from Lastflow around to the southwest, where pistes followed the fallen cable down the long slope of west Tharsis to Amazonis Planitia. All the towns and stations would always be tented, because at twenty-seven kilometres high the air would always be a tenth as thick as it was at the datum – or sea level, one could now call it. Meaning the atmosphere up here was still only thirty or forty millibars thick.

Tent cities forever; but with the cable (she could not see it) spearing Sheffield, development would certainly continue, until they had built a tent city entirely ringing the caldera, looking down into it. No doubt they would then tent the caldera itself, and occupy the round floor – add about fifteen hundred square kilometres to the city, though it was a question who would want to live at the bottom of such a hole, like living at the bottom of a mohole, rock walls rising up around you as if you were in some circular roofless cathedral … perhaps it would appeal to some. The Bogdanovists had lived in moholes for years, after all. Grow forests, build climbers’ huts or rather millionaires’ penthouses on the arcuate balcony ledges, cut staircases into the sides of the rock, install glass elevators that took all day to go up or down … rooftops, terraces, skyscrapers reaching up toward the rim, heliports on their flat round roofs, pistes, flying freeways … oh yes, the whole summit of Pavonis Mons, caldera and all, could be covered by the great world city, which was always growing, growing like a fungus over every rock in the solar system. Billions of people, trillions of people, quadrillions of people, all as close to immortal as they could make themselves …

She shook her head, in a great confusion of spirits. The radicals in Lastflow were not her people, not really, but unless they succeeded, the summit of Pavonis and everywhere else on Mars would become part of the great world city. She tried to concentrate on the view, she tried to feel it, the awe of the symmetrical formation, the love of rock hard under her bottom. Her feet hung over the edge of the bench, she kicked her heels against basalt; she could throw a pebble and it would fall five thousand metres. But she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t feel it. Petrification. So numb, for so long … She sniffed, shook her head, pulled her feet in over the edge. Walked back up to her rover.

She dreamed of the long run-out. The landslide was rolling across the floor of Melas Chasma, about to strike her. Everything visible with surreal clarity. Again she remembered Simon, again she groaned and got off the little dyke, going through the motions, appeasing a dead man inside her, feeling awful. The ground was vibrating—

She woke, by her own volition she thought – escaping, running away – but there was a hand, pulling hard on her arm.

‘Ann, Ann, Ann.’

It was Nadia. Another surprise. Ann struggled up, disoriented. ‘Where are we?’

‘Pavonis, Ann. The revolution. I came over and woke you because a fight has broken out between Kasei’s Reds and the Greens in Sheffield.’

The present rolled over her like the landslide in her dream. She jerked out of Nadia’s grasp, groped for her shirt. ‘Wasn’t my rover locked?’

‘I broke in.’

‘Ah.’ Ann stood up, still foggy, getting more annoyed the more she understood the situation. ‘Now what happened?’

‘They launched missiles at the cable.’

‘They did!’ Another jolt, further clearing away the fog. ‘And?’

‘It didn’t work. The cable’s defence systems shot them down. They’ve got a lot of hardware up there now, and they’re happy to be able to use it at last. But now the Reds are moving into Sheffield from the west, firing more rockets, and the UN forces on Clarke are bombing the first launch sites, over on Ascraeus, and they’re threatening to bomb every armed force down here. This is just what they wanted. And the Reds think it’s going to be like Burroughs, obviously, they’re trying to force the action. So I came to you. Look, Ann, I know we’ve been fighting a lot. I haven’t been very, you know, patient, but look, this is just too much. Everything could fall apart at the last minute – the UN could decide the situation here is anarchy, and come up from Earth and try to take over again.’

‘Where are they?’ Ann croaked. She pulled on pants, went to the bathroom. Nadia followed her right in. This too was a surprise; in Underhill it might have been normal between them, but it had been a long long time since Nadia had followed her into a bathroom talking obsessively while Ann washed her face and sat down and peed. ‘They’re still based in Lastflow, but now they’ve cut the rim piste and the one to Cairo, and they’re fighting in west Sheffield, and around the Socket. Reds fighting Greens.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘So will you talk to the Reds, will you stop them?’

A sudden fury swept through Ann. ‘You drove them to this,’ she shouted in Nadia’s face, causing Nadia to crash back into the door. Ann got up and took a step toward Nadia and yanked her trousers up, shouting still: ‘You and your smug, stupid terraforming, it’s all green green green green, with never a hint of compromise! It’s just as much your fault as theirs, since they have no hope!’

‘Maybe so,’ Nadia said mulishly. She didn’t care about that, it was the past and didn’t matter; she waved it aside and would not be swerved from her point: ‘But will you try?’

Ann stared at her stubborn old friend, at this moment almost youthful with fear, utterly focused and alive.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Ann said grimly. ‘But from what you say, it’s already too late.’

It was indeed too late. The rover camp Ann had been staying in was deserted, and when she got on the wrist and called around, she got no answers. So she left Nadia and the rest of them stewing in the East Pavonis warehouse complex, and drove her rover around to Lastflow, hoping to find some of the Red leaders based there. But Lastflow had been abandoned by the Reds, and none of the locals knew where they had gone. People were watching TVs in the stations and cafe windows, but when Ann looked too she saw no news of the fighting, not even on Mangalavid. A feeling of desperation began to seep into her grim mood; she wanted to do something but did not know how. She tried her wristpad again, and to her surprise Kasei answered on their private band. His face in the little image looked shockingly like John Boone’s, so much so that in her confusion Ann didn’t at first hear what he said. He looked so happy, it was John to the life!

‘… had to do it,’ he was telling her. Ann wondered if she had asked him about that. ‘If we don’t do something they’ll tear this world apart. They’ll garden it right to the tops of the big four.’

This echoed Ann’s thoughts on the ledge enough to shock her again, but she collected herself and said, ‘We’ve got to work within the framework of the discussions, Kasei, or else we’ll start a civil war.’

‘We’re a minority, Ann. The framework doesn’t care about minorities.’

‘I’m not so sure. That’s what we have to work on. And even if we do decide on active resistance, it doesn’t have to be here and now. It doesn’t have to be Martians killing Martians.’

‘They’re not Martian.’ There was a glint in his eye, his expression was Hirokolike in its distance from the ordinary world. In that sense he was not like John at all. The worst of both parents; and so they had another prophet, speaking a new language.

‘Where are you now?’

‘West Sheffield.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Take the Socket, and then bring down the cable. We’re the ones with the weapons and the experience. I don’t think we’ll have much trouble.’

‘You didn’t bring it down first try.’

‘Too fancy. We’ll just chop it down this time.’

‘I thought that wasn’t the way to do it.’

‘It’ll work.’

‘Kasei, I think we need to negotiate with the Greens.’

He shook his head, impatient with her, disgusted that she had lost her nerve when push came to shove. ‘After the cable is down we’ll negotiate. Look Ann, I’ve gotta go. Stay out of the fall line.’

‘Kasei!’

But he was gone. No one listened to her – not her enemies, not her friends, not her family – though she would have to call Peter. She would have to try Kasei again. She needed to be there in person, to get his attention as she had Nadia’s – yes, it had come to that: to get their attention she had to shout right in their faces.

The possibility of getting blocked around East Pavonis kept her going west from Lastflow, circling counterclockwise as she had the day before, to come on the Red force from its rear, no doubt the best approach anyway. It was about a hundred and fifty kilometre drive from Lastflow to the western edge of Sheffield, and as she sped around the summit, just outside the piste, she spent the time trying to call the various forces on the mountain, with no success. Explosive static marked the fight for Sheffield, and memories of ’61 erupted with these brutal bursts of white noise, frightening her; she drove the rover as fast as it would go, keeping it on the piste’s narrow outside apron to make the ride smoother and faster – a hundred kilometres per hour, then faster – racing, really, to try to stave off the disaster of a civil war – there was a terrible dreamlike quality to it. And especially in that it was too late, too late. In moments like these she was always too late. In the sky over the caldera, starred clouds appeared instantaneously – explosions, without a doubt missiles fired at the cable and shot down in midflight, in white puffs like incompetent fireworks, clustered over Sheffield and peaking in the region of the cable, but puffing into existence all over the vast summit, then drifting off east on the Jetstream. Some of those rockets were getting nailed a long way from their target.

Looking up at the battle overhead she almost drove into the first tent of west Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown westward new tents had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava; now the construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits of framework, like shards of glass, and the tent fabric was missing in the remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover’s own lock, left the car. Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed over it into Sheffield.

The streets were deserted. Glass and bricks and bamboo shards and twisted magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgrass. At this elevation, tent failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty and dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay scattered, like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or dusted. There would be a lot of dead, people weren’t used to thinking about decompression any more, it was an old settlers’ worry. But not today.

Ann kept walking east. ‘Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter,’ she said to her wrist again and again. But no one replied.

She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the tent. Harsh sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their windows in place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course. Ahead, the cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky out of east Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.

The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly varying wavelength, synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This system cut through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was surprised when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, ‘Ann, it’s Dao. Up here.’

He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a building’s little emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were working with a trio of mobile rocket-launchers out in the street. Ann ran over to them, ducked into the doorway beside Dao. ‘This has to stop!’ she cried.

Dao looked surprised. ‘We’ve almost got the Socket.’

‘But what then?’

Talk to Kasei about that. He’s up ahead, going for Arsiaview.’

One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin air. Dao was back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she could to the buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that moment she didn’t care if she were killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was somewhere in Sheffield, in command of the Green revolutionaries who had been there from the beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the UNTA security forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no means the hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and Dao seemed to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her blessing. As once they had. But now—

She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang. Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried again over the wrist.

While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.

‘It isn’t logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming goals,’ he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her. ‘The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet.’

It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist’s little camera and said, ‘Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it – make it. Make it new.’

Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights she had ever seen, actually: ‘They love you, Ann. It’s that that can save us. Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and devolution – devotion. You’re the – the personification of certain values – for the natives. You can’t escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da Vinci, and it proved – helpful. Now it’s your turn. You must. You must – Ann – just this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your iconic value.’

So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted again, seemed to pull himself together: ‘… logical procedure is to establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests’. Just like his old self.

Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black expression on his face that she had never seen before.

‘Ann!’ He stared intently at his own wristpad. ‘Listen, mother – I want you to stop these people!’

‘Don’t you mother me,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying. Can you tell me where they are?’

‘I sure as hell can. They’ve just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving through – it looks like they’re trying to come up on the Socket from the south.’ Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. ‘Right.’ He looked back at her. ‘Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you’re trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it’s only a few extremists, and stay out of it. He’s going to do what he has to to keep the cable up, and I’m afraid he’s about to kill us all.’

‘I’ll talk to him.’

And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.

‘I’m Ann Clayborne,’ she said, and as his face twisted even further, she added, ‘I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not represent Red party policy.’

Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her throat. But she went on: ‘It’s the work of a splinter group, called the Kakaze. They’re the ones who broke the Burroughs dyke. We’re trying to shut them down, and expect to succeed by the end of the day.’

It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt as if Frank Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth; she couldn’t stand the sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her face betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without having said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter’s, who did not know she was back on line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall. ‘If they don’t stop on their own we’ll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will and it’ll all go to hell. Get everything ready for a counter-attack, I’ll give the word.’

‘Peter!’ she said without thinking.

The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.

‘You deal with Hastings,’ she choked out, barely able to look at him, traitor that he was. ‘I’m going for Kasei.’

Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which snaked overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent’s ventilation patterns. Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and shards of clear framework plastic were scattered on the green grass of the street. Ann stumbled past a body curled just like the figures modelled in ash in Pompeii. Arsiaview was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should go. The whoosh of rocket-launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the magnet of the madness – like a monopole, discharging Earth’s insanity onto them.

There might be a plan revealed here; the cable’s defences seemed to be capable of handling the Reds’ lightweight missiles, but if the attackers thoroughly destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for UNTA to come down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging overhead. It was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.

But it was a bad plan. Burroughs was down in the lowlands, where there was an atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while. Sheffield was high, and so they were back in the past, back in ’61 when a broken tent meant the end for everyone in it exposed to the elements. At the same time most of Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the wall of the caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down there, and if the fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a nightmare. But up on the surface where fighting was possible, people were exposed to fire from the cable above. No, it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even possible to see what was happening. There were more explosions near the Socket, static over the intercom, isolated words as the receiver caught bits of other coded frequencies cycling through: ’—taken ArsiaviewpM/cfc/c/c—’ ‘We need the AI back but I’d say X axis three two two, Y axis eightpkkkkk—’

Then another barrage of missiles must have been launched at the cable, for overhead Ann caught sight of an ascending line of brilliant explosions of light, no sound to them at all; but after that, big black fragments rained down on the tents around her, crashing through the invisible fabrics or smashing onto the invisible framework, then falling the last distance onto the buildings like the dropped masses of wrecked vehicles, loud despite the thin air and the intervening tents, the ground vibrating and jerking under her feet. It went on for minutes, with the fragments falling farther outward all the time, and any second in all those minutes could have brought death down on her. She stood looking up at the dark sky, and waited it out.

Things stopped falling. She had been holding her breath, and she breathed. Peter had the Red code, and so she called his number and tapped in a patch attempt, heard only static. But as she was turning down the volume in her earphones, she caught some garbled half-phrases – Peter, describing Red movements to Green forces, or perhaps even to UNTA. Who could then fire rockets from the cable defence systems down onto them. Yes, that was Peter’s voice, bits of it all cut with static. Calling the shots. Then it was only static.

At the base of the elevator brief flashes of explosive light transformed the lower part of the cable from black to silver, then back to black again. Every alarm inside Arsiaview began ringing or howling. All the smoke whipped away toward the east end of the tent. Ann got into a north-south alley and leaned back against the east wall of a building, flat against concrete. No windows on the alley. Booms, crashes, wind. Then the silence of near airlessness.

She got up and wandered through the tent. Where did one go when people were being killed? Find your friends if you can. If you can tell who they are.

She collected herself and continued looking for Kasei’s group, going to where Dao had said they would be, and then trying to think where they would go next. Outside the city was a possibility; but having come inside they might try for the next tent to the east, try to take them one by one, decompress them, force everyone below and then move on. She stayed on the street paralleling the tent wall, jogging along as fast as she could. She was in good shape but this was ridiculous, she couldn’t catch her breath, and she was soaking the inside of her suit with sweat. The street was deserted, eerily silent and still, so that it was hard to believe she was in the middle of a battle, and impossible to believe she would ever find the group for which she was looking.

But there they were. Up ahead, in the streets around one of the triangular parks – figures in helmets and suits, carrying automatic weapons and mobile missile-launchers, firing at unseen opponents in a building fronted with chert. The red circles on their arms, Reds—

A blinding flash and she was knocked down. Her ears roared. She was at the foot of a building, pressed against its polished stone side. Jaspilite: red jasper and iron oxide, in alternating bands. Pretty. Her back and bottom and shoulder hurt, and her elbow. But nothing was agonizing. She could move. She crawled around, looked back up to the triangle park. Things were burning in the wind, the flames little oxygen-starved orange spurts, going out already. The figures there were cast about like broken dolls, limbs akimbo, in positions no bones could hold. She got up and ran to the nearest knot of them, drawn by a familiar grey-haired head that had come free of its helmet. That was Kasei, only son of John Boone and Hiroko Ai, one side of his jaw bloody, his eyes open and sightless. He had taken her too seriously. And his opponents not seriously enough. His pink stone eye-tooth lay there exposed by his wound, and seeing it Ann choked and turned away. The waste. All three of them dead now.

She turned back and crouched, undipped Kasei’s wristpad. It was likely that he had a direct access band to the Kakaze, and when she was back in the shelter of an obsidian building marred by great white shatter-stars, she tapped in the general call code, and said, ‘This is Ann Clayborne, calling all Reds. All Reds. Listen, this is Ann Clayborne. The attack on Sheffield has failed. Kasei is dead, along with a lot of others. More attacks here won’t work. They’ll cause the full UNTA security force to come back down onto the planet again.’ She wanted to say how stupid the plan had been in the first place, but she choked back the words. ‘Those of you who can, get off the mountain. Everyone in Sheffield, get back to the west and get out of the city, and off the mountain. This is Ann Clayborne.’

Several acknowledgements came in, and she half-listened to them as she walked west, back through Arsiaview toward her rover. She made no attempt to hide; if she was killed she was killed, but now she didn’t believe it would happen; she walked under the wings of some dark covering angel, who kept her from death no matter what happened, forcing her to witness the deaths of all the people she knew and all the planet she loved. Her fate. Yes; there was Dao and his crew, all dead right where she had left them, lying in pools of their own blood. She must have just missed it.

And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in its centre, was another knot of bodies – not Reds – they wore green headbands, and one of them looked like Peter, it was his back – she walked over weak-kneed, under a compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally circled it. But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like Peter’s, poor thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.

She moved on carelessly. She came to her little rover without incident, got in and drove to the train terminal at the west end of Sheffield. There a piste ran down the south slope of Pavonis, into the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia. Seeing it, she conceived a plan, very simple and basic, but workable because of that. She got on the Kakaze band and made her recommendations as though they were orders. Run away, disappear. Go down into South Saddle, then around Arsia on the western slope above the snowline, there to slip into the upper end of Aganippe Fossa, a long straight canyon that contained a hidden Red refuge, a cliff dwelling in the northern wall. There they could hide and hide and start another long underground campaign, against the new masters of the planet. UNOMA, UNTA, metanat, Dorsa Brevia – they were all Green.

She tried calling Coyote, and was somewhat surprised when he answered. He was somewhere in Sheffield as well, she could tell; lucky to be alive no doubt, a bitter furious expression on his cracked face.

Ann told him her plan; he nodded.

‘After a time they’ll need to get farther away,’ he said.

Ann couldn’t help it: ‘It was stupid to attack the cable!’

‘I know,’ Coyote said wearily.

‘Didn’t you try to talk them out of it?’

‘I did.’ His expression grew blacker. ‘Kasei’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

Coyote’s face twisted with grief. ‘Ah, God. Those bastards.’

Ann had nothing to say. She had not known Kasei well, or liked him much. Coyote on the other hand had known him from birth, back in Hiroko’s hidden colony, and from boyhood had taken him along on his furtive expeditions all over Mars. Now tears coursed down the deep wrinkles on Coyote’s cheeks, and Ann clenched her teeth.

‘Can you get them down to Aganippe?’ she asked. ‘I’ll stay and deal with the people in East Pavonis.’

Coyote nodded. ‘I’ll get them down as fast as I can. Meet at West Station.’

‘I’ll tell them that.’

‘The Greens will be mad at you.’

‘Fuck the Greens.’

Some part of the Kakaze sneaked into the west terminal of Sheffield, in the light of a smoky dull sunset: small groups wearing blackened dirty walkers, their faces white and frightened, angry, disoriented, in shock. Wasted. Eventually there were three or four hundred of them, sharing the day’s bad news. When Coyote slipped in the back, Ann rose and spoke in a voice just loud enough to carry to all of them, aware as she never had been in her life of her position as the first Red; of what that meant, now. These people had taken her seriously and here they were, beaten and lucky to be alive, with dead friends everywhere in the town east of them.

‘A direct assault was a bad idea,’ she said, unable to help herself. ‘It worked in Burroughs, but that was a different kind of situation. Here it failed. People who might have lived a thousand years are dead. The cable wasn’t worth that. We’re going to go into hiding and wait for our next chance, our next real chance.’

There were hoarse objections to this, angry shouts: ‘No! No! Never! Bring down the cable!’

Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they went silent again.

‘It could backfire all too easily if we fight the Greens now. It could give the metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse than dealing with a native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The environmental part of the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We’ll just have to keep working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you understand?’

This morning they wouldn’t have. Now they still didn’t want to. She waited out the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed glare of Ann Clayborne … A lot of them had joined the fight because of her, back in the days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual working alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on the same side …

They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne was against them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that – without Kasei, without Dao – with the bulk of the natives Green, and firmly behind the leadership of Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor …

‘Coyote will get you off Tharsis,’ Ann said, feeling sick. She left the room, walked through the terminal and out of the lock, back into her rover. Kasei’s wristpad lay on the car’s dashboard, and she threw it across the compartment, sobbed. She sat in the driver’s seat and composed herself, and then started the car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.

She drove sightlessly back around the caldera, clockwise this time. Eventually she found herself in East Pavonis, and there they were, all still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they stared at her as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was personally responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day and throughout the revolution – just as they had stared at her after Burroughs, in fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him, and ignored the rest, or tried to, Irishka frightened, Jackie red-eyed and furious, her father killed this day after all, and though she was in Peter’s camp and so partly responsible for the crushing response to the Red offensive, you could see with one look at her that someone would pay – but Ann ignored all that, and walked across the room to Sax – who was in his nook in the far corner of the big central room, sitting before a screen reading long columns of figures, muttering things to his AI. Ann waved a hand between his face and his screen and he looked up, startled.

Strangely, he was the only one of the whole crowd who did not appear to blame her. Indeed he regarded her with his head tilted to the side, with a birdlike curiosity that almost resembled sympathy.

‘Bad news about Kasei,’ he said. ‘Kasei and all the rest. I’m glad that you and Desmond survived.’

She ignored that, and told him in a rapid undertone where the Reds were going, and what she had told them to do. ‘I think I can keep them from trying any more direct attacks on the cable,’ she said. ‘And from most acts of violence, at least in the short term.’

‘Good,’ Sax said.

‘But I want something for it,’ she said. ‘I want it and if I don’t get it, I’ll set them on you forever.’

‘The soletta?’ Sax asked.

She stared at him. He must have listened to her more often than she had thought. ‘Yes.’

His eyebrows came together as he thought it over. ‘It could cause a kind of ice age,’ he said.

‘Good.’

He stared at her as he thought about it. She could see him doing it, in quick flashes or bursts: ice age – thinner atmosphere – terraforming slowed – new ecosystems destroyed – perhaps compensate – greenhouse gases. And so on and so forth. It was almost funny how she could read this stranger’s face, this hated brother looking for a way out. He would look and look, but heat was the main driver of terraforming, and with the soletta gone, they would at least be restricted to Mars’s normal level of sunlight, thus slowed to a more ‘natural’ pace. It was possible that the inherent stability of that approach even appealed to Sax’s conservatism, such as it was.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘You can speak for these people?’ she said, waving disdainfully at the crowd behind them, as if all her oldest companions were not among them, as if they were UNTA technocrats or metanat functionaries …

‘No,’ he said. ‘I only speak for me. But I can get rid of the soletta.’

‘You’d do it against their wishes?’

He frowned. ‘I think I can talk them into it. If not, I know I can talk the Da Vinci team into it. They like challenges.’

‘Okay.’

It was the best she could get from him, after all. She straightened up, still nonplussed. She hadn’t expected him to agree. And now that he had, she discovered that she was still angry, still sick at heart. This concession – now that she had it, meant nothing. They would figure out other ways to heat things. Sax would make his argument using that point, no doubt. Give the soletta to Ann, he would say, as a way of buying off the Reds. Then forge on.

She walked out of the big room without a glance at the others. Out of the warehouses to her rover.

For a while she drove blindly, without any sense of where she was going. Just get away, just escape. Thus by accident she headed westward, and in short order she had to stop or run over the rim’s edge.

Abruptly she braked the car.

In a daze she looked out the windshield. Bitter taste in her mouth, guts all knotted, every muscle tense and aching. The great encircling rim of the caldera was smoking at several points, chiefly from Sheffield and Lastflow, but also from a dozen other places as well. No sight of the cable over Sheffield – but it was still there, marked by a concentration of smoke around its base, lofting east on the thin, hard wind. Another peak banner, blown on the endless Jetstream. Time was a wind sweeping them away. The plumes of smoke marred the dark sky, obscuring some of the many stars that shone in the hour before sunset. It looked as if the old volcano was waking again, rousing from its long dormancy and preparing to erupt. Through the thin smoke the sun was a dark red glowing ball, looking much like an early molten planet must have looked, its colour staining the shreds of smoke maroon and rust and crimson. Red Mars. But red Mars was gone, and gone for good. Soletta or not, ice age or not, the biosphere would grow and spread until it covered everything, with an ocean in the north, and lakes in the south, and streams, forests, prairies, cities and roads, oh she saw it all; white clouds raining mud on the ancient highlands, while the uncaring masses built their cities as fast as they could, the long run-out of civilization burying her world.