Читать книгу Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 7

To Sax it looked like that least rational of conflicts, civil war. Two parts of a group shared many more interests than disagreements, but fought anyway. Unfortunately it was not possible to force people to study cost-benefit analysis. Nothing to be done. Or – possibly one could identify a crux issue causing one or both sides to resort to violence. After that, try to defuse that issue.

Clearly in this case a crux issue was terraforming. A matter with which Sax was closely identified. This could be viewed as a disadvantage, as a mediator ought ideally to be neutral. On the other hand, his actions might speak symbolically for the terraforming effort itself. He might accomplish more with a symbolic gesture than anyone else. What was needed was a concession to the Reds, a real concession, the reality of which would increase its symbolic value by some hidden exponential factor. Symbolic value: it was a concept with which Sax was trying hard to come to grips. Words of all kinds gave him trouble now, so much so that he had taken to etymology to try to understand them better. A glance at the wrist: symbol, ‘something that stands for something else’, from the Latin symbolum, adopted from a Greek word meaning throw together. Exactly. It was alien to his understanding, this throwing together, a thing emotional and even unreal, and yet vitally important.

The afternoon of the battle for Sheffield, he called Ann on the wrist and got her briefly, and tried to talk to her, and failed. So he drove to the edge of the city’s wreckage, not knowing what else to do, looking for her. It was very disturbing to see how much damage a few hours’ fighting could do. Many years of work lay in smoking shambles, the smoke not fire – ash particulates for the most part but merely disturbed fines, old volcanic ash blown up and then torn east on the Jetstream. The cable stuck out of the ruins like a black line of carbon nanotube fibres.

There was no sign of any further Red resistance. Thus no way of locating Ann. She was not answering her phone. So Sax returned to the warehouse complex in East Pavonis, feeling balked. He went back inside.

And then there she was, in the vast warehouse, walking through the others toward him as if about to plunge a knife in his heart. He sank in his seat unhappily, remembering an overlong sequence of unpleasant interviews between them. Most recently they had argued on the train ride out of Libya Station. He recalled her saying something about removing the soletta and the annular mirror; which would be a very powerful symbolic statement indeed. And he had never been comfortable with such a major element of the terraforming’s heat input being so fragile.

So when she said, ‘I want something for it,’ he thought he knew what she meant, and suggested removing the mirrors before she could. This surprised her. It slowed her down, it took the edge off her terrible anger. Leaving something very much deeper, however – grief, despair – he could not be sure. Certainly a lot of Reds had died that day, and Red hopes as well. ‘I’m sorry about Kasei,’ he said.

She ignored that, and made him promise to remove the space mirrors. He did, meanwhile calculating the loss of light that would result, then trying to keep a wince off his face. Insolation would drop by about twenty per cent, a very substantial amount indeed. ‘It will start an ice age,’ he muttered.

‘Good,’ she said.

But she was not satisfied. And as she left the room, he could see by the set of her shoulders that his concession had done little if anything to comfort her. One could only hope her cohorts were more easily pleased. In any case it would have to be done. It might stop a civil war. Of course a great number of plants would die, mostly at the higher elevations, though it would affect every ecosystem to some extent. An ice age, no doubt about it. Unless they reacted very effectively. But it would be worth it, if it stopped the fighting.

It would have been easy just to cut the great band of the annular mirror and let it fly away into space, right out of the plane of the ecliptic. Same with the soletta: fire a few of its positioning rockets and it would spin away like a Catherine wheel.

But that would be a waste of processed aluminium silicate, which Sax did not like to see. He decided to investigate the possibility of using the mirrors’ directional rockets, and their reflectivity, to propel them elsewhere in the solar system. The soletta could be located in front of Venus, and its mirrors realigned so that the structure became a huge parasol, shading the hot planet and starting the process of freezing out its atmosphere; this was something that had been discussed in the literature for a long time, and no matter what other plans for terraforming Venus one had, this was the standard first step. Then having done that, the annular mirror would have to be placed in the corresponding polar orbit around Venus, as its reflected light helped to hold the soletta/parasol in its position against the push of solar radiation. So the two would still be put to use, and it would also be a gesture, another symbolic gesture, saying, Look here – this big world might be terraformable too. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible. Thus some of the psychic pressure on Mars, ‘the only other possible Earth’, might be relieved. This was not logical, but it didn’t matter; history was strange, people were not rational systems, and in the peculiar symbolic logic of the limbic system, it would be a sign to the people on Earth, a portent, a scattering of psychic seed, a throwing together. Look there! Go there! And leave Mars alone.

So he talked it over with the Da Vinci space scientists, who had effectively taken over control of the mirrors. The lab rats, people called them behind their backs, and his (though he heard anyway); the lab rats, or the saxaclones. Serious young native Martian scientists, in fact, with just the same variations of temperament as grad students and post-docs in any lab anywhere, any time; but the facts didn’t matter. They worked with him and so they were the saxaclones. Somehow he had become the very model of the modern Martian scientist; first as white-coated lab rat, then as full-blown mad scientist, with a crater-castle full of eager Igors, mad-eyed but measured in manner, little Mr Spocks, the men as skinny and awkward as cranes on the ground, the women drab in their protective non-coloration, their neuter devotion to Science. Sax was very fond of them. He liked their devotion to science, it made sense to him – an urge to understand things, to be able to express them mathematically. It was a sensible desire. In fact it often seemed to him that if everyone were a physicist then they would be very much better off. ‘Ah, no, people like the idea of a flat universe because they find negatively curved space difficult to deal with.’ Well, perhaps not. In any case the young natives at Da Vinci Crater were a powerful group, strange or not. At this point Da Vinci was in charge of a lot of the underground’s technological base, and with Spencer fully engaged there, their production capability was staggering. They had engineered the revolution, if the truth were told, and were now in de facto control of Martian orbital space.

This was one reason why many of them looked displeased or at least nonplussed when Sax first told them about the removal of the soletta and annular mirror. He did it in a screen meeting, and their faces squinched into expressions of alarm: Captain, it is not logical. But neither was civil war. And the one was better than the other.

‘Won’t people object?’ Aonia asked. ‘The Greens?’

‘No doubt,’ Sax said. ‘But right now we exist in, in anarchy. The group in East Pavonis is a kind of proto-government, perhaps. But we in Da Vinci control Mars space. And no matter the objections, this might avert civil war.’

He explained as best he could. They got absorbed in the technical challenge, in the problem pure and simple, and quickly forgot their shock at the idea. In fact giving them a technical challenge of that sort was like giving a dog a bone. They went away gnawing at the tough parts of the problem, and just a few days later they were down to the smooth polished gleam of procedure. Mostly a matter of instructions to AIs, as usual. It was getting to the point where having conceived a clear idea of what one wanted to do, one could just say to an AI, ‘please do thus and such’ – please spin the soletta and annular mirror into Venusian orbit, and adjust the slats of the soletta so that it becomes a parasol shielding the planet from all of its incoming insolation; and the AIs would calculate the trajectories and the rocket firings and the mirror angles necessary, and it would be done.

People were becoming too powerful, perhaps. Michel always went on about their godlike new powers, and Hiroko in her actions had implied that there should be no limit to what they tried with these new powers, ignoring all tradition. Sax himself had a healthy respect for tradition, as a kind of default survival behaviour. But the techs in Da Vinci cared no more for tradition than Hiroko had. They were in an open moment in history, accountable to no one. And so they did it.

Then Sax went to Michel. ‘I’m worried about Ann.’

They were in a corner of the big warehouse on East Pavonis, and the movement and clangour of the crowd created a kind of privacy. But after a look around Michel said, ‘Let’s go outside.’

They suited up and went out. East Pavonis was a maze of tents, warehouses, manufactories, pistes, parking lots, pipelines, holding tanks, holding yards; also junkyards and scrap-heaps, their mechanical detritus scattered about like volcanic ejecta. But Michel led Sax westward through the mess, and they came quickly to the caldera rim, where the human clutter was put into a new and larger context, a logarithmic shift that left the pharaonic collection of artefacts suddenly looking like a patch of bacterial growth.

At the very edge of the rim, the blackish speckled basalt cracked down in several concentric ledges, each lower than the last. A set of staircases led down these terraces, and the lowest was railed. Michel led Sax down to this terrace, where they could look over the side into the caldera. Straight down for five kilometres. The caldera’s large diameter made it seem less deep than that; still it was an entire round country down there, far, far below. And when Sax remembered how small the caldera was proportional to the volcano entire, Pavonis itself seemed to bulk under them like a conical continent, rearing right up out of the planet’s atmosphere into low space. Indeed the sky was only purple around the horizon, and blackish overhead, with the sun a hard gold coin in the west, casting clean, slantwise shadows. They could see it all. The fines thrown up by the explosions were gone, everything returned to its normal telescopic clarity. Stone and sky and nothing more – except for the thread of buildings cast around the rim. Stone and sky and sun. Ann’s Mars. Except for the buildings. And on Ascraeus and Arsia and Elysium, and even on Olympus, the buildings would not be there.

‘We could easily declare everything above about eight kilometres a primal wilderness zone,’ Sax said. ‘Keep it like this forever.’

‘Bacteria?’ Michel asked. ‘Lichen?’

‘Probably. But do they matter?’

‘To Ann they do.’

‘But why. Michel? Why is she like that?’

Michel shrugged.

After a long pause he said, ‘No doubt it is complex. But she was mistreated as a girl, did you know that?’

Sax shook his head. He tried to imagine what that meant.

Michel said, ‘Her father died. Her mother married her stepfather when she was eight. From then on he mistreated her, until she was sixteen, when she moved to the mother’s sister. I’ve asked her what the mistreatment consisted of, but she says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Abuse is abuse, she said. She doesn’t remember much anyway, she says.’

‘I believe that.’

Michel waggled a gloved hand. ‘We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.’

They stood there looking into the caldera.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Sax said.

Michel looked glum. ‘Is it? There were fifty women in the First Hundred. Odds are more than one of them was abused by men in their lives. More like ten or fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated, struck, mistreated … that’s just the way it was.’

‘It’s hard to believe.’

‘Yes.’

Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless with a single blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had needed to do it, though. Or so it had felt at the time.

‘Everyone has their reasons’ Michel said, startling him. ‘Or so they think.’ He tried to explain – tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it something other than plain evil. ‘At the base of human culture,’ he said as he looked down into the country of the caldera, ‘is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then some time in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies used to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father – this strategy often lasts forever, and the people of that culture worship their king and their father god, and so on. Or the ego ideal might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to the brotherhood of men. There are names and full descriptions for all these complexes – the Dionysian, the Persean, the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all exist, and they are all neurotic, in that they all lead to misogyny, except for the Dionysian complex.’

‘This is one of your semantic rectangles?’ Sax asked apprehensively.

‘Yes. The Apollonian and the Heraclean complexes might describe Terran industrial societies. The Persean its earlier cultures, with strong remnants of course right up to this day. And they are all three patriarchal. They all denied the maternal, which was connected in patriarchy with the body and with nature. The feminine was instinct, the body, and nature; while the masculine was reason, mind, and law. And the law ruled.’

Sax, fascinated by so much throwing together, said only, ‘And on Mars?’

‘Well, on Mars it may be that the ego ideal is shifting back to the maternal. To the Dionysian again, or to some kind of post-Oedipal reintegration with nature, which we are still in the process of inventing. Some new complex that would not be so subject to neurotic over-investment.’

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborated a pseudo-science could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics. But what they did not understand was that physics, while admittedly complicated, was always trying very hard to become simpler.

Michel, however, was continuing to elaborate. Correlated to patriarchy was capitalism, he was saying, a hierarchical system in which most men had been exploited economically, also treated like animals, poisoned, betrayed, shoved around, shot. And even in the best of circumstances under constant threat of being tossed aside, out of a job, poor, unable to provide for loved dependants, hungry, humiliated. Some trapped in this unfortunate system took out their rage at their plight on whomever they could, even if that turned out to be their loved ones, the people most likely to give them comfort. It was illogical, and even stupid. Brutal and stupid. Yes. Michel shrugged; he didn’t like where this train of reasoning had led him. It sounded to Sax as if the implication was that many men’s actions indicated that they were, alas, fairly stupid. And the limbic array got all twisted in some minds, Michel was going on, trying to veer away from that, to make a decent explanation. Adrenalin and testosterone were always pushing for a fight-or-flight response, and in some dismal situations a satisfaction circuit got established in the get hurt/hurt back axis, and then the men involved were lost, not only to fellow feeling but to rational self-interest. Sick, in fact.

Sax felt a little sick himself. Michel had explained away male evil in several different ways in no more than a quarter of an hour, and still the men of Earth had a lot to answer for. Marsmen were different. Although there had been torturers in Kasei Vallis, as he well knew. But they had been settlers from Earth. Sick. Yes, he felt sick. The young natives were not like that, were they? A Marsman who hit a woman or molested a child would be ostracized, excoriated, perhaps beaten up, he would lose his home, he would be exiled to the asteroids and never allowed back. Wouldn’t he?

Something to look into.

Now he thought again of Ann. Of how she was: her manner, so obdurate; her focus on science, on rock. A kind of Apollonian response, perhaps. Concentration on the abstract, denial of the body and therefore of all its pain. Perhaps.

‘What would help Ann now, do you think?’ Sax said.

Michel shrugged again. ‘I have wondered that for years. I think Mars has helped her. I think Simon helped her, and Peter. But they have all been at some kind of distance. They don’t change that fundamental no in her.’

‘But she – she loves all this,’ Sax said, waving at the caldera. ‘She truly does.’ He thought over Michel’s analysis. ‘It’s not just a no. There’s a yes in there as well. A love of Mars.’

‘But if you love stones and not people,’ Michel said, ‘it’s somehow a little … unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know—’

‘I know—’

‘—and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content with it.’

‘She doesn’t like what’s happening to her world.’

‘No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most? I’m not so sure. It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.’

Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first … and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure build-up, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like – what? – an ecology – a fellfield – or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well – a bit grandiose, that – really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better – weather-storm fronts of thought, high pressure zones, low pressure cells, hurricanes – the jetstreams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds … life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

‘What are you thinking?’ Michel asked.

‘Sometimes I worry,’ Sax admitted, ‘about the theoretical basis of these diagnoses of yours.’

‘Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very accurate.’

‘Both precise and accurate?’

‘Well, what, they’re the same, no?’

‘No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still being not very precise. Often true values aren’t really determinable, of course.’

Michel had a curious expression on his face. ‘You’re a very accurate person, Sax.’

‘It’s just statistics,’ Sax said defensively. ‘Every once in a while language allows you to say things precisely.’

‘And accurately.’

‘Sometimes.’

They looked down into the country of the caldera.

‘I want to help her,’ Sax said.

Michel nodded. ‘You said that. I said I didn’t know how. For her, you are the terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help her. Do you think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?’

Sax thought about it for a while. ‘It could get her outdoors. Outdoors without helmets, eventually without even masks.’

‘You think she wants that?’

‘I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum. The animal, you know. It feels right.’

‘I don’t know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.’

Sax considered it.

Then the whole landscape darkened.

They looked up. The sun was black. Stars shone in the sky around it. There was a faint glow around the black disc, perhaps the sun’s corona.

Then a sudden crescent of fire forced them to look away. That was the corona; what they had seen before had probably been the lit exosphere.

The darkened landscape lightened again, as the artificial eclipse came to an end. But the whole sun that returned was distinctly smaller than what had shone just moments before. The old bronze button of the Martian sun! It was like a friend come back for a visit. The world was dimmer, all the colours of the caldera one shade darker, as if invisible clouds obscured the sunlight. A very familiar sight, in fact – Mars’s natural light, shining on them again for the first time in twenty-eight years.

‘I hope Ann saw that,’ Sax said. He felt chilled, although he knew there had not been enough time for the air to have cooled, and he was suited up in any case. But there would be a chill. He thought grimly of the fellfields scattered all over the planet, up at the four or five kilometre elevation, and lower in the mid and high latitudes. Up at the edge of the possible, whole ecosystems would now start dying. Twenty per cent drop in insolation: it was worse than any Terran ice age, more like the darkness after the great extinction events – the KT event, the Ordovician, the Devonian, or the worst one of all, the Permian event two hundred and fifty million years ago, which killed up to ninety-five per cent of all the species alive at the time. Punctuated equilibrium; and very few species survived the punctuations. The ones that did were tough, or just lucky.

Michel said, ‘I doubt it will satisfy her.’

This Sax fully believed. But for the moment he was distracted by thinking how best to compensate for the loss of the soletta’s light. It would be better not to have any biomes suffering great losses. If he had his way, those fellfields were just something Ann was going to have to get used to.

It was Ls 123, right in the middle of the northern summer/southern winter, near aphelion, which along with higher elevation caused the south’s winter to be much colder than the north’s; temperatures regularly dipped to 230° K, not much warmer than the primal colds that had existed before their arrival. Now, with the soletta and annular mirror gone, temperatures would drop further still. No doubt the southern highlands were headed for a record winterkill.

On the other hand, a lot of snow had already fallen in the south, and Sax had gained a great respect for snow’s ability to protect living things from cold and wind. The subnivean environment was quite stable. It could be that a drop in light, and subsequently in surface temperature, would not do that much harm to snowed-over plants, already shut down by their winter hardening. It was hard to say. He wanted to get into the field and see for himself. Of course it would be months or perhaps years before any difference would be quantifiable. Except in the weather itself, perhaps. And weather could be tracked merely by watching the meteorological data, which he was already doing spending many hours in front of satellite pictures and weather maps, watching for signs. As were many other people, particularly meteorologists. It made for a useful diversion when people came by to remonstrate with him for removing the mirrors, an event so common in the week following the event that it became tiresome.

Unfortunately weather on Mars was so variable that it was difficult to tell if the removal of the big mirrors was affecting it or not. A very sad admission of the state of their understanding of the atmosphere, in Sax’s opinion. But there it was. Martian weather was a violent, semi-chaotic system. In some ways it resembled Earth’s, not surprising given that it was a matter of air and water moving around the surface of a spinning sphere: Coriolis forces were the same everywhere, and so here as on Earth there were tropical easterlies, temperate westerlies, polar easterlies, Jetstream anchor points and so on; but that was almost all one could say for sure about Martian weather. Well – you could say that it was colder and drier in the south than in the north. That there were rainshadows downwind of high volcanoes or mountain chains. That it was warmer near the equator, colder at the poles. But this sort of obvious generalization was all that they could assert with confidence, except for some local patterns, although most of those were subject to lots of variation – more a matter of highly analysed statistics than lived experience. And with only fifty-two M-years on record, with the atmosphere thickening radically all the while, with water being pumped onto the surface, etc, etc, it was actually fairly difficult to say what normal or average conditions might be.

Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on East Pavonis. People kept interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile political situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weather’s. Already it was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds; there were sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent fights in defence of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-metre rise in sea level was going to push them off stage.

Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel for supper out in his rover.

‘There’s no such thing as a fresh start,’ he said as he put water on to boil.

‘The Big Bang?’ Michel suggested.

‘As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the – the dumpiness of the early universe was caused by the earlier-dumpiness of the previous universe, collapsing down into its Big Crunch.’

‘I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.’

‘Singularities are strange – outside their event horizons, quantum effects allow some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting those particles out apparently caused small clumps to start and become big ones.’ Sax frowned; he was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. ‘But I was referring to the flood on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of conditions as a singularity, by any means. In fact there must be people down there who don’t think of it as a break at all.’

‘True.’ For some reason Michel was laughing. ‘We should go down there and see, eh?’

As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, ‘I want to get out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going away.’

‘You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim …’ Michel shuddered.

‘Yes, but that only makes me more curious.’

‘Well – we’ll hold down the fort for you.’

As if one had physically to occupy any given space in order to be there. ‘The cerebellum never gives up,’ Sax said.

Michel grinned. ‘Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.’

Sax frowned.

Before he left, he called Ann.

‘Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to South Tharsis, to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the areobio-sphere, together?’

She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she thought it over – the cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her conscious verbal response: ‘No.’ And then she cut the connection, looking somewhat frightened.

Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for going into the field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they were. Talking to her. Something like that. His mental image of what he would say to her if he actually got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her. Make her see it.

Well, one couldn’t make people see things.

He went to say goodbye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make people see things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when he talked about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now and still she hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made Sax smile a little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who obviously loved Ann. As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was in the nature of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it – to fall in love with all the objects of his ‘scientific study’. Every astronomer loves the stars. Well, who knew. Sax reached out and clasped Michel’s upper arm, who smiled happily at this unSaxlike behaviour, this ‘change in thinking’. Love, yes; and how much more so when the object of study consisted of women known for years and years, studied with the intensity of pure science – yes, that would be a feeling. A great intimacy, whether they co-operated in the study or not. In fact they might even be more beguiling if they didn’t co-operate, if they refused to answer any questions at all. After all if Michel wanted questions answered, answered at great length even when they weren’t asked, he always had Maya, Maya the all-too-human, who led Michel on a hard steeplechase across the limbic array, including throwing things at him, if Spencer was to be believed. After that kind of symbolism, the silence of Ann might prove to be very endearing. ‘Be careful,’ Michel said: the happy scientist, with one of his areas of study standing before him, loved like a brother.

Sax took a solo rover and drove it down the steep, bare southern slope of Pavonis Mons, then across the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia Mons. He contoured around the great cone of Arsia Mons on its dry eastern side. After that he drove down the southern flank of Arsia, and of the Tharsis bulge itself, until he was on the broken highlands of Daedalia Planitia. This plain was the remnant of a giant ancient impact basin, now almost entirely erased by the uptilt of Tharsis, by lava from Arsia Mons, and by the ceaseless winds, until nothing was left of the impact basin except for a collection of areologists’ observations and deductions, faint radial arrays of ejecta scrapes and the like, visible on maps but not in the landscape.

To the eye as one travelled over it, it looked like much of the rest of the southern highlands: rugged, bumpy, pitted, cracked land. A wild rockscape. The old lava flows were visible as smooth lobate curves of dark rock, like tidal swells fanning out and down. Wind streaks both light and dark marked the land, indicating dust of different weights and consistencies: there were light, long triangles on the southeast sides of craters and boulders, dark chevrons to the northwest of them, and dark splotches inside the many rimless craters. The next big dust storm would redesign all these patterns.

Sax drove over the low stone waves with great pleasure, down down up, down down up, reading the sand paintings of the dust streaks like a wind chart. He was travelling not in a boulder car, with its low, dark room and its cockroach scurry from one hiding place to the next, but rather in a big, boxy areologist’s camper, with windows on all four sides of the third-storey driver’s compartment. It was a very great pleasure indeed to roll along up there in the thin, bright daylight, down and up, down and up, down and up over the sand-streaked plain, the horizons very distant for Mars. There was no one to hide from; no one hunting for him. He was a free man on a free planet, and if he wanted to he could drive this car right around the world. Or anywhere he pleased.

The full impact of this feeling took him about two days’ drive to realize. Even then he was not sure that he comprehended it. It was a sensation of lightness, a strange lightness that caused little smiles to stretch his mouth repeatedly for no obvious reason. He had not been consciously aware, before, of any sense of oppression or fear – but it seemed it had been there – since 2061, perhaps, or the years right before it. Sixty-six years of fear, ignored and forgotten but always there – a kind of tension in the musculature, a small hidden dread at the core of things. ‘Sixty-six bottles of fear on the wall, sixty-six bottles of fear! Take one down, pass it around, sixty-five bottles of fear on the wall!’

Now gone. He was free, his world was free. He was driving down the wind-etched tilted plain, and earlier that day snow had begun to appear in the cracks, gleaming aquatically in a way dust never did; and then lichen; he was driving down into the atmosphere. And no reason, now, why his life ought not to continue this way, puttering about freely every day in his own world lab, and everybody else just as free as that!

It was quite a feeling.

Oh they could argue on Pavonis, and they most certainly would. Everywhere in fact. A most extraordinarily contentious lot they were. What was the sociology that would explain that? Hard to say. And in any case they had co-operated despite their bickering; it might have been only a temporary confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now – with so many traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to called the necessity of creation; and creation was hard. Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.

But they had certain capabilities now as a group, as a – a civilization. The accumulated body of scientific knowledge was growing vast indeed, and that knowledge was giving them an array of powers that could scarcely be comprehended, even in outline, by any single individual. But powers they were, understood or not. Godlike powers, as Michel called them, though it was not necessary to exaggerate them or confuse the issue – they were powers in the material world, real but constrained by reality. Which nevertheless might allow – it looked to Sax as if they could – if rightly applied – make a decent human civilization after all. After all the many centuries of trying. And why not? Why not? Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level possible? They could provide for everyone in an equitable way, they could cure disease, they could delay senescence until they lived for a thousand years, they could understand the universe from the Planck distance to the cosmic distance, from the Big Bang to the eskaton – all this was possible, it was technically achievable. And as for those who felt that humanity needed the spur of suffering to make it great, well they could go out and find anew the tragedies that Sax was sure would never go away, things like lost love, betrayal by friends, death, bad results in the lab. Meanwhile the rest of them could continue the work of making a decent civilization. They could do it! It was amazing, really. They had reached that moment in history when one could say it was possible. Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique. The odds were against that, it suggested that it was an artefact of perspective, one had to assume that things were more or less constant and that one lived in average times – the so-called principle of mediocrity. Never a particularly attractive principle, Sax had thought; perhaps it only meant that justice had always been achievable; in any case, there it was, an extraordinary moment, right there outside his four windows, burnished under the light touch of the natural sun. Mars and its humans, free and powerful.

It was too much to grasp. It kept slipping out of his mind, then reoccurring to him, and surprised by joy he would exclaim, ‘Ha! Ha!’ The taste of tomato soup and bread; ‘Ha!’ The dusky purple of the twilight sky; ‘Ha!’ The spectacle of the dashboard instrumentation, glowing faintly, reflected in the black windows; ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! My oh my.’ He could drive anywhere he wanted to. No one told them what to do. He said that aloud to his darkened AI screen: ‘No one tells us what to do!’ It was almost frightening. Vertiginous. Ka, the yonsei would say. Ka, supposedly the little red people’s name for Mars, from the Japanese ka, meaning fire. The same word existed in several other early languages as well, including proto-Indo-European; or so the linguists said.

Carefully he got in the big bed at the back of the compartment, in the hum of the rover’s heating and electrical system, and he lay humming to himself under the thick coverlet that caught up his body’s heat so fast, and put his head on the pillow and looked out at the stars.

The next morning a high pressure system came in from the northwest, and the temperature rose to 262° K. He had driven down to five kilometres above the datum, and the exterior air pressure was 230 millibars. Not quite enough to breathe freely, so he pulled on one of the heated surface suits, then slipped a small air tank over his shoulders, and put its mask over his nose and mouth, and a pair of goggles over his eyes.

Even so, when he climbed out of the outer lock door and down the steps to the sand, the intense cold caused him to sniffle and tear up, to the point of impeding his vision. The whistle of the wind was loud, though his ears were inside the hood of his suit. The suit’s heater was up to the task, however, and with the rest of him warm, his face slowly got used to it.

He tightened the hood’s drawstring and walked over the land. He stepped from flat stone to flat stone; here they were everywhere. He crouched often to inspect cracks, finding lichen and widely scattered specimens of other life: mosses, little tufts of sedge, grass. It was very windy. Exceptionally hard gusts slapped him four or five times a minute, with a steady gale between. This was a windy place much of the time, no doubt, with the atmosphere sliding south around the bulk of Tharsis in massed quantities. High pressure cells would dump a lot of their moisture at the start of this rise, on the western side; indeed at this moment the horizon to the west was obscured by a flat sea of cloud, merging with the land in the far distance, out there two or three kilometres lower in elevation, and perhaps sixty kilometres away.

Underfoot there were only bits of snow, filling some of the shaded crack systems and hollows. These snowbanks were so hard that he could jump up and down on them without leaving a mark. Windslab, partially melted and then refrozen. One scalloped slab cracked under his boots, and he found it was several centimetres thick. Under that it was powder, or granules. His fingers were cold, despite his heated gloves.

He stood again and wandered, mapless over the rock. Some of the deeper hollows contained ice pools. Around midday he descended into one of these and ate his lunch by the ice pool, lifting the air mask to take bites out of a grain and honey bar. Elevation 4-5 kilometres above the datum; air pressure 267 millibars. A high pressure system indeed. The sun was low in the northern sky, a bright dot surrounded by pewter.

The ice of the pool was clear in places, like little windows giving him a view of the black bottom. Elsewhere it was bubbled or cracked, or white with rime. The bank he sat on was a curve of gravel, with patches of brown soil and black dead vegetation lying on it in a miniature berm – the high-water mark of the pond, apparently, a soil shore above the gravel one. The whole beach was no more than four metres long, one wide. The fine gravel was an umber colour, piebald umber or … He would have to consult a colour chart. But not now.

The soil berm was dotted by pale green rosettes of tiny grass blades. Longer blades stood in clumps here and there. Most of the taller blades were dead, and light grey. Right next to the pond were patches of dark green succulent leaves, dark red at their edges. Where the green shaded into red was a colour he couldn’t name, a dark lustrous brown stuffed somehow with both its constituent colours. He would have to call up a colour chart soon it seemed; lately when looking around outdoors he found that a colour chart came in handy about once a minute. Waxy almost-white flowers were tucked under some of these bi-coloured leaves. Further on lay some tangles, red-stalked, green-needled, like beached seaweed in miniature. Again that intermixture of red and green, right there in nature staring at him.

A distant wind-washed hum; perhaps the harping rocks, perhaps the buzz of insects. Black midges, bees … in this air they would only have to sustain about 30 millibars of CO₂, because there was so little partial pressure driving it into them, and at some point internal saturation was enough to hold any more out. For mammals that might not work so well. But they might be able to sustain 20 millibars, and with plant life flourishing all over the planet’s lower elevations, CO₂ levels might drop to 20 millibars fairly soon; and then they could dispense with the air tanks and the facemasks. Set loose animals on Mars.

In the faint hum of the air he seemed to hear their voices, immanent or emergent, coming in the next great surge of viriditas. The hum of distant voices; the wind; the peace of this little pool on its rocky moor; the Nirgalish pleasure he took in the sharp cold … ‘Ann should see this,’ he murmured.

Then again, with the space mirrors gone, presumably everything he saw here was doomed. This was the upper limit of the biosphere, and surely with the loss of light and heat the upper limit would drop, at least temporarily, perhaps for good. He didn’t like that; and it seemed possible there might be ways to compensate for the lost light. After all, the terraforming had been doing quite well before the mirrors’ arrival; they hadn’t been necessary. And it was good not to depend on something so fragile, and better to be rid of it now rather than later, when large animal populations might have died in the setback along with the plants.

Even so it was a shame. But the dead plant matter would only be more fertilizer in the end, and without the same kind of suffering as animals. At least so he assumed. Who knew how plants felt? When you looked closely at them, glowing in all their detailed articulation like complex crystals, they were as mysterious as any other life. And now their presence here made the entire plain, everything he could see, into one great fellfield, spreading in a slow tapestry over the rock; breaking down the weathered minerals, melding with them to make the first soils. A very slow process. There was a vast complexity in every pinch of soil; and the look of this fellfield was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

To weather. This whole world was weathering. The first printed use of the word with that meaning had appeared in a book on Stonehenge, appropriately enough, in 1665. ‘The weathering of so many Centuries of Years.’ On this stone world. Weathering. Language as the first science, exact yet vague, or multivalent. Throwing things together. The mind as weather. Or being weathered.

There were clouds coming up over the nearby hillocks to the west, their bottoms resting on a thermal layer as levelly as if pressing down on glass. Streamers like spun wool led the way east.

Sax stood up and climbed out of the pool’s depression. Out of the shelter of the hole, the wind was shockingly strong – in it the cold intensified as if an ice age had struck full force that very second. Windchill factor, of course; if the temperature was 262° K, and the wind was blowing at about seventy kilometres an hour, with gusts much stronger, then the windchill factor would create a temperature equivalent of about 250° K. Was that right? That was very cold indeed to be out without a helmet. And in fact his hands were going numb. His feet as well. And his face was already without feeling, like a thick mask at the front of his head. He was shivering, and his blinks tended to stick together; his tears were freezing. He needed to get back to his car.

He plodded over the rockscape, amazed at the power of the wind to intensify cold. He had not experienced windchill like this since childhood, if then, and had forgotten how frigid one became. Staggering in the blasts, he climbed onto a low swell of the ancient lava and looked upslope. There was his rover – big, vivid green, gleaming like a spaceship – about two kilometres up the slope. A very welcome sight.

But now snow began to fly horizontally past him, giving a dramatic demonstration of the wind’s great speed. Little granular pellets clicked against his goggles. He took off toward the rover, keeping his head down and watching the snow swirl over the rocks. There was so much snow in the air that he thought his goggles were fogging up, but after a painfully cold operation to wipe the insides, it became clear that the condensation was actually out in the air. Fine snow, mist, dust, it was hard to tell.

He plodded on. The next time he looked up, the air was so thick with snow that he couldn’t see all the way to the rover. Nothing to do but press on. It was lucky the suit was well insulated and sewn through with heating elements, because even with the heat on at its highest power, the cold was cutting against his left side as if he were naked to the blast. Visibility extended now something like twenty metres, shifting rapidly depending on how much snow was passing by at the moment; he was in an amorphously expanding and contracting bubble of whiteness, which itself was shot through with flying snow, and what appeared to be a kind of frozen fog or mist. It seemed likely he was in the storm cloud itself. His legs were stiff. He wrapped his arms around his torso, his gloved hands trapped in his armpits. There was no obvious way of telling if he was still walking in the right direction. It seemed as if he was on the same course he had been when visibility had collapsed, but it also seemed as if he had gone a long way toward the rover.

There were no compasses on Mars; there were, however, APS systems in his wristpad and back in the car. He could call up a detailed map on his wristpad and then locate himself and his car on it; then walk for a while and track his positions; then make his way directly toward the car. That seemed like a great deal of work – which brought it to him that his thinking, like his body, was being affected by the cold. It wasn’t that much work, after all.

So he crouched down in the lee of a boulder and tried the method. The theory behind it was obviously sound, but the instrumentation left something to be desired; the wristpad’s screen was only five centimetres across, so small that he couldn’t see the dots on it at all well. Finally he spotted them, walked a while, and took another fix. But unfortunately his results indicated that he should be hiking at about a right angle to the direction he had been going.

This was unnerving to the point of paralysis. His body insisted that it had been going the right way; his mind (part of it, anyway) was pretty certain that it was better to trust the results on the wristpad, and assume that he had gone off course somewhere. But it didn’t feel that way; the ground was still at a slope that supported the feeling in his body. The contradiction was so intense that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal torque twisting him until it actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his body was twisting to the side against the pressure of what the wristpad was telling him – the physiological effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was amazing. It almost made one believe in the existence of an internal magnet in the body, as in the pineal glands of migrating birds – but there was no magnetic field to speak of. Perhaps his skin was sensitive to solar radiation to the point of being able to pinpoint the sun’s location, even when the sky was a thick dark grey everywhere. It had to be something like that, because the feeling that he was properly oriented was so strong!

Eventually the nausea of the disorientation passed, and in the end he stood and took off in the direction suggested by the wristpad, feeling horrible about it, listing a little uphill just to try and make himself feel better. But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science. And so he plodded on, traversing the slope, shading somewhat uphill, clumsier than ever. His nearly insensible feet ran into rocks that he did not see, even though they were directly beneath him; he stumbled time after time. It was surprising how thoroughly snow could obscure the vision.

After a while he stopped, and tried again to locate the rover by APS; and his wristpad map suggested an entirely new direction, behind him and to the left.

It was possible he had walked past the car. Was it? He did not want to walk back into the wind. But now that was the way to the rover, apparently. So he ducked his head down into the biting cold and persevered. His skin was in an odd state, itching under the heating elements crisscrossing his suit, numb everywhere else. His feet were numb. It was hard to walk. There was no feeling in his face; clearly frostbite was in the offing. He needed shelter.

He had a new idea. He called up Aonia, on Pavonis, and got her almost instantly.

‘Sax! Where are you?’

‘That’s what I’m calling about!’ he said. ‘I’m in a storm on Daedalia! And I can’t find my car! I was wondering if you would look at my APS and my rover’s! And see if you can tell me which direction I should go!’

He put the wristpad right against his ear. ‘Ka wow, Sax.’ It sounded like Aonia was shouting too, bless her. Her voice was an odd addition to the scene. ‘Just a second, let me check! … Okay! There you are! And your car too! What are you doing so far south? I don’t think anyone can get to you very quickly! Especially if there’s a storm!’

‘There is a storm,’ Sax said. ‘That’s why I called.’

‘Okay! You’re about three hundred and fifty metres to the west of your car.’

‘Directly west?’

‘—and a little south! But how will you orient yourself?’

Sax considered it. Mars’s lack of a magnetic field had never struck him as such a problem before, but there it was. He could assume the wind was directly out of the west, but that was just an assumption. ‘Can you check the nearest weather stations and tell me what direction the wind is coming from?’ he said.

‘Sure, but it won’t be much good for local variations! Here, just a second, I’m getting some help here from the others.’

A few long icy moments passed.

‘The wind is coming from west north west, Sax! So you need to walk with the wind at your back and a touch to your left!’

‘I know. Be quiet now, until you see what course I’m making, and then correct it.’

He walked again, fortunately almost downwind. After five or six painful minutes his wrist beeped.

Aonia said, ‘You’re right on course!’

This was encouraging, and he carried on with a bit more speed, though the wind was penetrating through his ribs right to his core.

‘Okay, Sax! Sax?’

‘Yes!’

‘You and your car are right on the same spot!’

But there was no car in view.

His heart thudded in his chest. Visibility was still some twenty metres; but no car. He had to get shelter fast. ‘Walk in an ever-increasing spiral from where you are,’ the little voice on the wrist was suggesting. A good idea in theory, but he couldn’t bear to execute it; he couldn’t face the wind. He stared dully at his black plastic wristpad console. No more help to be had there.

For a moment he could make out snowbanks, off to his left. He shuffled over to investigate, and found that the snow rested in the lee of a shoulder-high escarpment, a feature he did not remember seeing before, but there were some radial breaks in the rock caused by the Tharsis rise, and this must be one of them, protecting a snowbank. Snow was a tremendous insulator. Though it had little intrinsic appeal as shelter. But Sax knew mountaineers often dug into it to survive nights out. It got one out of the wind.

He stepped to the bottom of the snowbank, and kicked it with one numb foot. It felt like kicking rock. Digging a snow cave seemed out of the question. But the effort itself would warm him a bit. And it was less windy at the foot of the bank. So he kicked and kicked, and found that underneath a thick cake of windslab there was the usual powder. A snow cave might be possible after all. He dug away at it.

‘Sax, Sax!’ cried the voice from his wrist. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Making a snow cave,’ he said. ‘A bivouac.’

‘Oh, Sax – we’re flying in help! We’ll be able to get in next morning no matter what, so hang on! We’ll keep talking to you!’

‘Fine.’

He kicked and dug. On his knees he scooped out hard granular snow, tossing it into the swirling flakes flying over him. It was hard to move, hard to think. He bitterly regretted walking so far from the rover, then getting so absorbed in the landscape around that ice pond. It was a shame to get killed when things were getting so interesting. Free but dead. There was a little hollow in the snow now, through an oblong hole in the windslab. Wearily he sat down and wedged himself back into the space, lying on his side and pushing back with his boots. The snow felt solid against the back of his suit, and warmer than the ferocious wind. He welcomed the shivering in his torso, felt a vague fear when it ceased. Being too cold to shiver was a bad sign.

Very weary, very cold. He looked at his wristpad. It was four p.m. He had been walking in the storm for just over three hours. He would have to survive another fifteen or twenty hours before he could expect to be rescued. Or perhaps in the morning the storm would have abated, and the location of the rover become obvious. One way or another he had to survive the night by huddling in a snow cave. Or else venture out again and find the rover. Surely it couldn’t be far away. But until the wind lessened, he could not bear to be out looking for it.

He had to wait in the snow cave. Theoretically he could survive a night out, though at the moment he was so cold it was hard to believe that. Night temperatures on Mars still plummeted drastically. Perhaps the storm might lessen in the next hour, so that he could find the rover and get to it before dark.

He told Aonia and the others where he was. They sounded very concerned, but there was nothing they could do. He felt irritation at their voices.

It seemed many minutes before he had another thought. When one was chilled, blood flow was greatly reduced to the limbs – perhaps that was true for the cortex as well, the blood going preferentially to the cerebellum where the necessary work would continue right to the end.

More time passed. Near dark, it appeared. Should call out again. He was too cold – something seemed wrong. Advanced age, altitude, CO₂ levels – some factor or combination of factors was making it worse than it should be. He could die of exposure in a single night. Appeared in fact to be doing just that. Such a storm! Loss of the mirrors, perhaps. Instant ice age. Extinction event.

The wind was making odd noises, like shouts. Powerful gusts no doubt. Like faint shouts, howling, ‘Sax! Sax! Sax!’

Had they flown someone in? He peered out into the dark storm, the snowflakes somehow catching the late light and tearing overhead like dim white static.

Then between his ice-crusted eyelashes he saw a figure emerge out of the darkness. Short, round, helmeted. ‘Sax!’ The sound was distorted, it was coming from a loudspeaker in the figure’s helmet. Those Da Vinci techs were very resourceful people. Sax tried to respond, and found he was too cold to speak. Just moving his boots out of the hole was a stupendous effort. But it appeared to catch this figure’s eye, because it turned and strode purposefully through the wind, moving like a skilful sailor on a bouncing deck, weaving this way and that through the slaps of the gusts. The figure reached him and bent down and grabbed Sax by the wrist, and he saw its face through the faceplate, as clear as through a window. It was Hiroko.

She smiled her brief smile and hauled him up out of his cave, pulling so hard on his left wrist that his bones creaked painfully.

‘Ow!’ he said.

Out in the wind the cold was like death itself. Hiroko pulled his left arm over her shoulder, and, still holding hard to his wrist just above the wristpad, she led him past the low escarpment and right into the teeth of the gale.

‘My rover is near,’ he mumbled, leaning hard on her and trying to move his legs fast enough to make steady plants of the foot. So good to see her again. A solid little person, very powerful as always.

‘It’s over here,’ she said through her loudspeaker. ‘You were pretty close.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘We were tracking you as you came down Arsia. Then today when the storm hit I checked you out, and saw you were out of your rover. After that I came out to see how you were doing.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You have to be careful in storms.’

Then they were standing before his rover. She let go of his wrist, and it throbbed painfully. She bonked her faceplate against his goggles. ‘Go on in,’ she said.

He climbed carefully up the steps to the rover’s lock door; opened it; fell inside. He turned clumsily to make room for Hiroko, but she wasn’t in the door. He leaned back out into the wind, looked around. No sight of her. It was dusk; the snow now looked black. ‘Hiroko!’ he cried.

No answer.

He closed the lock door, suddenly frightened. Oxygen deprivation – he pumped the lock, fell through the inside door into the little changing room. It was shockingly warm, the air a steamy blast. He plucked ineffectively at his clothes, made no progress. He went at it more methodically. Goggles and face-mask off. They were coated with ice. Ah – possibly his air supply had been restricted by ice in the tube between tank and mask. He sucked in several deep breaths, then sat still through another bout of nausea. Pulled off his hood, unzipped the suit. It was almost more than he could do to get his boots off. Then the suit. His underclothes were cold and clammy. His hands were burning as if on fire. It was a good sign, proof that he was not substantially frostbitten; nevertheless it was agony.

His whole skin began to buzz with the same inflamed pain. What caused that, return of blood to capillaries? Return of sensation to chilled nerves? Whatever it was, it hurt almost unbearably. ‘Ow!’

He was in excellent spirits. It was not just that he had been spared from death, which was nice; but that Hiroko was alive. Hiroko was alive! It was incredibly good news. Many of his friends had assumed all along that she and her group had slipped away from the assault on Sabishii, moving through that town’s mound maze back out into their system of hidden refuges; but Sax had never been sure. There was no evidence to support the idea. And there were elements in the security forces perfectly capable of murdering a group of dissidents and disposing of their bodies. This, Sax had thought, was probably what had happened. But he had kept this opinion to himself, and reserved judgement. There had been no way of knowing for sure.

But now he knew. He had stumbled into Hiroko’s path, and she had rescued him from death by freezing, or asphyxiation, whichever came first. The sight of her cheery, somehow impersonal face – her brown eyes – the feel of her body supporting him – her hand clamped over his wrist … he would have a bruise because of that. Perhaps even a sprain. He flexed his hand, and the pain in his wrist brought tears to his eyes, it made him laugh. Hiroko!

After a time the fiery return of sensation to his skin banked down. Though his hands felt bloated and raw, and he did not have proper control of his muscles, or his thoughts, he was basically getting back to normal. Or something like normal.

‘Sax! Sax! Where are you? Answer us, Sax!’

‘Ah. Hello there. I’m back in my car.’

‘You found it? You left your snow cave?’

‘Yes. I – I saw my car, in the distance, through a break in the snow.’

They were happy to hear it.

He sat there, barely listening to them babble, wondering why he had spontaneously lied. Somehow he was not comfortable telling them about Hiroko. He assumed that she would want to stay concealed; perhaps that was it. Covering for her …

He assured his associates that he was all right, and got off the phone. He pulled a chair into the kitchen and sat on it. Warmed soup and drank it in loud slurps, scalding his tongue. Frostbitten, scalded, shaky – slightly nauseous – once weeping – mostly stunned – despite all this, he was very, very happy. Sobered by the close call, of course, and embarrassed or even ashamed at his ineptitude, staying out, getting lost and so on – all very sobering indeed – and yet still he was happy. He had survived, and even better, so had Hiroko. Meaning no doubt that all of her group had survived with her, including the half-dozen of the First Hundred who had been with her from the beginning, Iwao, Gene, Rya, Raul, Ellen, Evgenia … Sax ran a bath and sat in the warm water, adding hotter water slowly as his body core warmed; and he kept returning to that wonderful realization. A miracle – well not a miracle of course – but it had that quality, of unexpected and undeserved joy.

When he found himself falling asleep in the bath he got out, dried off, limped on sensitive feet to his bed, crawled under the coverlet, and fell asleep, thinking of Hiroko. Of making love with her in the baths in Zygote, in the warm relaxed lubriciousness of their bathhouse trysts, late at night when everyone else was asleep. Of her hand clamped on his wrist, pulling him up. His left wrist was very sore. And that made him happy.

The next day he drove back up the great southern slope of Arsia, now covered with clean white snow to an amazingly high altitude, 10.4 kilometres above the datum to be exact. He felt a strange mix of emotions, unprecedented in their strength and flux, although they somewhat resembled the powerful emotions he had felt during the synaptic stimulus treatment he had taken after his stroke – as if sections of his brain were actively growing – the limbic system, perhaps, the home of the emotions, linking up with the cerebral cortex at last. He was alive, Hiroko was alive, Mars was alive; in the face of these joyous facts the possibility of an ice age was as nothing, a momentary swing in a general warming pattern, something like the almost-forgotten Great Storm. Although he did want to do what he could to mitigate it.

Meanwhile, in the human world there were still fierce conflicts going on everywhere, on both worlds. But it seemed to Sax that the crisis had somehow got beyond war. Flood, ice age, population boom, social chaos, revolution; perhaps things had become so bad that humanity had shifted into some kind of universal catastrophe rescue operation, or, in other words, the first phase of the postcapitalist era.

Or maybe he was just getting overconfident, buoyed by the events on Daedalia Planitia. His Da Vinci associates were certainly very worried, they spent hours onscreen telling him every little thing about the arguments ongoing in East Pavonis. But he had no patience for that. Pavonis was going to become a standing wave of argument, it was obvious. And the Da Vinci crowd, worrying so – that was simply them. At Da Vinci if someone even raised his voice two decibels people worried that things were getting out of control. No. After his experience on Daedalia, these things simply weren’t interesting enough to engage him. Despite the encounter with the storm, or perhaps because of it, he only wanted to get back out into the country. He wanted to see as much of it as he could – to observe the changes wrought by the removal of the mirror – to talk to various terraforming teams about how to compensate for it. He called Nanao in Sabishii, and asked him if he could come visit and talk it over with the university crowd. Nanao was agreeable.

‘Can I bring some of my associates?’ Sax asked.

Nanao was agreeable.

And all of a sudden Sax found he had plans, like little Athenas jumping out of his head. What would Hiroko do about this possible ice age? That he couldn’t guess. But he had a large group of associates in the labs at Da Vinci who had spent the last decades working on the problem of independence, building weapons and transport and shelters and the like. Now that was a problem solved, and there they were, and an ice age was coming. Many of them had come to Da Vinci from his earlier terraforming effort, and could be talked into returning to it, no doubt. But what to do? Well, Sabishii was four kilometres above the datum, and the Tyrrhena Massif went up to five. The scientists there were the best in the world at high altitude ecology. So: a conference. Another little Utopia enacted. It was obvious.

That afternoon Sax stopped his rover in the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia, at the spot called Four Mountain View – a sublime place, with two of the continent – volcanoes filling the horizons to north and south, and then the distant bump of Olympus Mons off to the northwest, and on clear days (this one was too hazy) a glimpse of Ascraeus, in the distance just to the right of Pavonis. In this spacious, sere highland he ate his lunch, then turned east, and drove down toward Nicosia, to catch a flight to Da Vinci, and then on to Sabishii.

He had to spend a lot of screen time with the Da Vinci team and many other people on Pavonis, trying to explain this move, reconciling them to his departure from the warehouse meetings. ‘I am in the warehouse in every sense that matters,’ he said, but they wouldn’t accept that. Their cerebellums wanted him there in the flesh, a touching thought in a way. ‘Touching’ – a symbolic statement that was nevertheless quite literal. He laughed, but Nadia came on and said irritably, ‘Come on Sax, you can’t give up just because things are getting sticky; in fact that’s exactly when you’re needed, you’re General Sax now, you’re the great scientist, you have to stay in the game.’

But Hiroko showed just how present an absent person could be. And he wanted to go to Sabishii.

‘But what should we do?’ Nirgal asked him, and others too in less direct ways.

The situation with the cable was at an impasse; on Earth there was chaos; on Mars there were still pockets of meta-national resistance, and other areas in Red control, where they were systematically tearing out all terraforming projects, and much of the infrastructure as well. There were also a variety of small revolutionary splinter movements that were taking this opportunity to assert their independence, sometimes over areas as small as a tent or a weather station.

‘Well,’ Sax said, thinking about all this as much as he could bear to, ‘whoever controls the life support system is in charge.’

Social structure as life support system – infrastructure, mode of production, maintenance … he really ought to speak to the folks at Separation de L’Atmosphere, and to the tentmakers. Many of whom had a close relation to Da Vinci. Meaning that in certain senses he himself was as much in charge as anyone. A bad thought.

‘But what do you suggest we do?’ Maya demanded; something in her voice made it clear she was repeating the question.

By now Sax was closing in on Nicosia, and impatiently he said, ‘Send a delegation to Earth? Or convene a constitutional congress, and formulate a first approximation constitution, a working draft.’

Maya shook her head. ‘That won’t be easy, with this crowd.’

‘Take the constitutions of the twenty or thirty most successful Terran countries,’ Sax suggested, thinking out loud, ‘and see how they work. Have an AI compile a composite document, perhaps, and see what it says.’

‘How would you define most successful?’ Art asked.

‘Country Futures Index, Real Values Gauge, Costa Rica Comparisons – even Gross Domestic Product, why not?’ Economics was like psychology, a pseudo-science trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyper-elaboration. And Gross Domestic Product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British Thermal Unit, that ought to have been retired long before. But what the hell—‘Use several different sets of criteria, human welfare, ecologic success, what have you.’

‘But Sax,’ Coyote complained, ‘the very concept of the nation-state is a bad one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.’

‘Could be,’ Sax said. ‘But as a starting point.’

‘All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,’ Jackie said.

It was strange how certain elements of the Greens were as obsessed by total independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, ‘In physics I often bracket the problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they don’t get solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that kind of problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.’

But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about the cable, what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds who had apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring all his suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for General Sax in the postrevolutionary world.

Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want to go into the town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of Spencer’s from Dawes’s Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built just before the revolt, in anticipation of the freedom from the need for stealth. As the AI pilot floated the big silver-winged craft over the great maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom of the fuselage which had a large clear floor, so that they could look over the arms of their chairs at the view below; in this case, the immense linked network of troughs which was the Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth plateaus that stood between the canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice places to live, somewhat like Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a model town in a glass bottle.

The plane’s crew started talking about Separation de L’Atmosphere, and Sax listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the revolution’s armaments and with basic materials research, while ‘Sep’ as they called it had dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they still had a healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them functioning was a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of them said. Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.

Sep was associated with Praxis, apparently, and each tent or covered canyon was run by a separate organization. They pooled information and shared roving consultants and construction teams. Since they deemed themselves necessary services, they ran on a co-operative basis – on the Mondragon plan, one said, non-profit version – though they made sure to provide their members with very nice living situations and lots of free time. ‘They think they deserve it, too. Because when something goes wrong they have to act fast or else.’ Many of the covered canyons had had close calls, sometimes the result of meteor strike or other drama, other times more ordinary mechanical failures. The usual format for covered canyons had the physical plant consolidated at the higher end of the canyon, and this plant sucked in the appropriate amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and trace gases from the surface winds. The proportions of gases and the pressure range they were kept at varied from mesocosm to mesocosm, but they averaged around 500 millibars, which gave some lift to the tent roofs, and was pretty much the norm for indoor spaces on Mars, in a kind of invocation of the eventual goal for the surface at the datum. On sunny days, however, the expansion of air inside the tents was very significant, and the standard procedures for dealing with it included simply releasing air back into the atmosphere, or else saving it by compressing it into huge container chambers hollowed out of the canyon cliffs. ‘So one time I was in Dao Vallis,’ one of the techs said, ‘and the excess air chamber blew up, shattering the plateau and causing a big landslide that fell down onto Reull Gate and tore open the tent roof. Pressures dropped to the local ambient, which was about 260, and everything started to freeze, and they had the old emergency bulkheads,’ which were clear curtains only a few molecules thick but very strong, as Sax recalled, ‘and when they deployed automatically around the break, this one woman got pinned to the ground by the super-sticky at the bottom of the bulkhead, with her head on the wrong side! We ran over to her and did some quick cut and paste and got her loose, but she almost died.’

Sax shivered, thinking of his own recent brush with cold; and 260 millibars was the pressure one would find on the peak of Everest. The others were already talking about other famous blowouts, including the time Hiranyagarbha’s dome had fallen in its entirety under an ice rain, despite which no one had died.

Then they were descending over the great cratered high plain of Xanthe, coming down on the Da Vinci Crater floor’s big sandy runway, which they had just started using during the revolution. The whole community had been preparing for years for the day when stealthing would become unnecessary, and now a big curve of copper-mirrored windows had been installed in the arc of the southern crater rim. There was a layer of snow in the bottom of the crater, which the central knob broke out of quite dramatically. It was possible they could arrange for a lake in the crater floor, with a central knob island, which would have as its horizon the circling cliffy hills of the crater rim. A circular canal could be built just under the rim cliffs, with radial canals connecting it to the inner lake; the resulting alternation of circular water and land would resemble Plato’s description of Atlantis. In this configuration Da Vinci could support, in near self-sufficiency, some twenty or thirty thousand people, Sax guessed; and there were scores of craters like Da Vinci. A commune of communes, each crater a city-state of sorts, its polis fully capable of supporting itself, of deciding what kind of culture it might have; and then with a vote in a global council of some kind … No regional association larger than the level of the town, except for arrangements of local interchange … might it work?

Da Vinci made it seem as if it might. The south arc of the rim was alive with arcades and wedge-shaped pavilions and the like, now all shot through with sunlight. Sax toured the whole complex one morning, visiting one lab after the next, and congratulating the occupants on the success of their preparations for a smooth removal of UNTA from Mars. Some political power came out of the end of a gun, after all, and some out of the look in the eye; and the look in the eye changed depending on whether a gun was pointed at it or not. They had spiked the guns, these people, the saxaclones, and so they were in high spirits – happy to see him, and already looking for different work – back to basic research, or figuring out uses for the new materials that Spencer’s alchemists were constantly churning out; or studying the terraforming problem.

They were also paying attention to what was going on in space and on Earth. A fast shuttle from Earth, contents unknown, had contacted them requesting permission to make an orbital insertion without a keg of nails being thrown in its way. So a Da Vinci team was now nervously working out security protocols, in heavy consultation with the Swiss embassy, which had taken an office in a suite of apartments at the northwest end of the arc. From rebels to administrators; it was an awkward transition.

‘What political parties do we support?’ Sax asked.

‘I don’t know. The usual array I guess.’

‘No party gets much support. Whatever works, you know.’

Sax knew. That was the old tech position, held ever since scientists had become a class in society, a priest caste almost, intervening between the people and their power. They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants – empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments and other mass delusional systems of that sort.

The standard scientist politics, in other words. Sax had once tried to explain this outlook to Desmond, causing his friend for some reason to laugh prodigiously, even though it made perfect sense. Well, it was a bit naive, therefore a bit comical, he supposed; and like a lot of funny things, it could be that it was hilarious right up to the moment it turned horrible, because it was an attitude that had kept scientists from going at politics in any useful way for centuries now; and dismal centuries they had been.

But now they were on a planet where political power came out of the end of a mesocosm aerating fan. And the people in charge of that great gun (holding the elements at bay) were at least partly in charge. If they cared to exercise the power. Gently Sax reminded people of this when he visited them in their labs; and then to ease their discomfort with the idea of politics, he talked to them about the terraforming problem. And when he finally got ready to leave for Sabishii, about sixty of them were willing to come with him, to see how things were going down there. ‘Sax’s alternative to Pavonis,’ he heard one of the lab techs describe the trip. Which was not a bad thought.

Sabishii was located on the western side of a five-kilometre high prominence called the Tyrrhena Massif, south of Jarry-Desloges Crater, in the ancient highlands between Isidis and Hellas, centred at longitude 275°, latitude 15° south. A reasonable choice for a tent town site, as it had long views to the west, and low hills backing it to the east, like moors. But when it came to living in the open air, or growing plants out in the rocky countryside, it was a bit high; in fact it was, if you excluded the very much larger bulges of Tharsis and Elysium, the highest region on Mars, a kind of bioregion island, which the Sabishiians had been cultivating for decades.

They proved to be severely disappointed by the loss of the big mirrors, one might even say thrown into emergency mode, an all-out effort to do what they could to protect the plants of the biome; but it was precious little. Sax’s old colleague Nanao Nakayama shook his head. ‘Winterkill will be very bad. Like ice age.’

‘I’m hoping we can compensate for the loss of light,’ Sax said. ‘Thicken the atmosphere, add greenhouse gases – it’s possible we could do some of that with more bacteria and suralpine plants, right?’

‘Some,’ Nanao said dubiously. ‘A lot of niches are already full. The niches are quite small.’

They settled in over a meal to talk about it. All the techs from Da Vinci were there in the big dining hall of the Claw, and many Sabishiians were there to greet them. It was a long, interesting, friendly talk. The Sabishiians were living in the mound maze of their mohole, behind one talon of the dragon figure it made, so that they didn’t have to look at the burned ruins of their city when they weren’t working on it. The rebuilding was much reduced now, as most of them were out dealing with the results of the mirror loss. Nanao said to Tariki, in what was clearly the continuation of a long-standing argument, ‘It makes no sense to rebuild it as a tent city anyway. We might as well wait, and build it open air.’

‘That may be a long wait,’ Tariki said, glancing at Sax. ‘We’re near the top of the viability atmosphere named in the Dorsa Brevia document.’

Nanao looked at Sax. ‘We want Sabishii under any limit that is set.’

Sax nodded, shrugged; he didn’t know what to say. The Reds would not like it. But if the viable altitude limit was raised a kilometre or so, it would give the Sabishiians this massif, and make little difference on the larger bulges – so it seemed to make sense. But who knew what they would decide on Pavonis? He said, ‘Maybe we should focus now on trying to keep atmospheric pressures from dropping.’

They looked sombre.

Sax said, ‘You’ll take us out and show us the massif?’

They cheered up. ‘Most happy.’

The land of the Tyrrhena Massif was what the areologists in Sax’s day had called the ‘dissected unit’ of the southern highlands, which was much the same as the ‘cratered unit’, but further broken by small channel networks. The lower and more typical highlands surrounding the massif also contained areas of ‘ridged unit’ and ‘hilly unit’. In fact, as quickly became obvious the morning they drove out onto the land, all aspects of the rough terrain of the southern highlands were on view, often all at once: cratered, broken, uneven, ridged, dissected and hilly land, the quintessential Noachian landscape. Sax and Nanao and Tariki sat on the observation deck of one of the Sabishii university rovers; they could see other cars carrying other colleagues, and there were teams out walking ahead of them. On the last hills before the horizon to the east, a few energetic people were fell-running. The hollows of the land were all lightly dusted with dirty snow. The massif was centred 15° south of the equator, and they got a fair bit of precipitation around Sabishii, Nanao said. The southeast side of the massif was drier, but here, the cloud masses pushed south over the ice in Isidis Planitia and climbed the slope and dropped their loads.

Indeed, as they drove uphill great waves of dark cloud rolled in from the northwest, pouring over them as if chasing the fell-runners. Sax shuddered, remembering his recent exposure to the elements; he was happy to be in a rover, and felt he would need only short walks away from it to be satisfied.

Eventually, however, they stopped on a high point in a low old ridge, and got out. They made their way over a surface littered with boulders and knobs, cracks, sand drifts, very small craters, breadloafed bedrock, scarps and alases, and the old shallow channels that gave the dissected unit its name. In truth there were deformational features of every kind to be seen, for the land here was four billion years old. A lot had happened to it, but nothing had ever happened to destroy it completely and clean the slate, so all four billion years were still there to be seen, in a veritable museum of rockscapes. It had been thoroughly pulverized in the Noachian, leaving regolith several kilometres deep, and craters and deformities that no aeolian stripping could remove. And during this early period the other side of the planet had had its lithosphere to a depth of six kilometres blasted into space by the so-called Big Hit; a fair amount of that ejecta had eventually landed in the south. That was the explanation for the Great Escarpment, and the lack of ancient highlands in the north; and one more factor in the extremely disordered look of this land.

Then also, at the end of the Hesperian had come the brief warm wet period, when water had occasionally run on the surface. These days most areologists thought that this period had been quite wet but not really very warm, annual averages of well under 273 still allowing for surface water sometimes, replenished by hydrothermal convection rather than precipitation. This period had lasted for only a hundred million years or so, according to current estimates, and it had been followed by billions of years of winds, in the arid cold Amazonian Age, which had lasted right up to the point of their arrival. ‘Is there a name for the age starting with M-l?’ Sax asked.

‘The Holocene.’

And then lastly, everything had been scoured by two billion years of ceaseless wind, scoured so hard that the older craters were completely rimless, everything stripped by the relentless winds stratum by stratum, leaving behind a wilderness of rock. Not chaos, technically speaking, but wild, speaking its unimaginable age in polyglot profusion, in rimless craters and etched mesas, dips, hummocks, escarpments, and oh so many blocky pitted rocks.

Often they stopped the rover to walk around. Even small mesas seemed to tower over them. Sax found himself staying near their rover, but nevertheless he came upon all kinds of interesting features. Once he discovered a rover-shaped rock, cracked vertically all the way through. To the left of the block, off to the west, he had a view to a distant horizon, the rocky land out there a smooth yellow glaze. To the right, the waist-high wall of some old fault, pocked as if by cuneiform. Then a sand drift bordered by ankle-high rocks, some of them pyramidal dark basaltic ventifacts, others lighter, pitted, granulated rocks. There a balanced shattercone, big as any dolmen. There a sand tail. There a crude circle of ejecta, like an almost completely weathered Stonehenge. There a deep snake-shaped hollow – the fragment of a watercourse, perhaps – behind it another gentle rise – then a distant prominence like a lion’s head. The prominence next to it was like the lion’s body.

In the midst of all this stone and sand, plant life was unobtrusive. At least at first. One had to look for it, to pay close attention to colour, above all else to green, green in all its shades, but especially its desert shades – sage, olive, khaki and so on. Nanao and Tariki kept pointing out specimens he hadn’t seen. Closer he looked, and closer again. Once attuned to the pale, living colours, which blended so well with the ferric land, they began to jump out from the rust and brown and umber and ochre and black of the rockscape. Hollows and cracks were likely places to see them, and near the shaded patches of snow. The closer he looked, the more he saw; and then, in one high basin, it seemed there were plants tucked everywhere. In that moment he understood; it was all fellfield, the whole Tyrrhena Massif.

Then, coating entire rockfaces, or covering the inside areas of drip catchments, were the dayglow greens of certain lichens, and the emerald or dark velvet greens of the mosses. Wet fur.

The diversicoloured palette of the lichen array; the dark green of pine needles. Bunched sprays of Hokkaido pines, foxtail pines, Sierra junipers. Life’s colours. It was somewhat like walking from one great roofless room to another, over ruined walls of stone. A small plaza; a kind of winding gallery; a vast ballroom; a number of tiny interlocked chambers; a sitting room. Some rooms held krummholz bansei against their low walls, the trees no higher than their nooks, gnarled by wind, cut along the top at the snow level. Each branch, each plant, each open room, as shaped as any bonsai – and yet effortless.

Actually, Nanao told him, most of the basins were intensively cultivated. ‘This basin was planted by Abraham.’ Each little region was the responsibility of a certain gardener or gardening group.

‘Ah!’ Sax said. ‘And fertilized, then?’

Tariki laughed. ‘In a manner of speaking. The soil itself has been imported, for the most part.’

‘I see.’

This explained the diversity of plants. A little bit of cultivation, he knew, had been done around Arena Glacier, where he had first encountered the fellfields. But here they had gone far beyond those early steps. Labs in Sabishii, Tariki told him, were trying their best to manufacture topsoil. A good idea; soil in fellfields appeared naturally at a rate of only a few centimetres a century. But there were reasons for this, and manufacturing soil was proving to be extremely difficult.

Still, ‘We pick up a few million years at the start,’ Nanao said. ‘Evolve from there.’ They hand-planted many of their specimens, it seemed, then for the most part left them to their fate, and watched what developed.

‘I see,’ Sax said.

He looked more closely yet. The clear dim light: it was true that each great open room displayed a slightly different array of species. ‘These are gardens, then.’

‘Yes … or things like that. Depends.’

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on.

These were influences only, Tariki added. As they did the work, they developed visions of their own. They followed the inclination of the land, as they saw that some plants prospered, and others died. Co-evolution, a kind of epigenetic development.

‘Nice,’ Sax said, looking around. For the adepts, the walk from Sabishii up onto the massif must have been an aesthetic journey, filled with allusions and subtle variants of tradition that were invisible to him. Hiroko would have called it areo-formation, or the areophany. ‘I’d like to visit your soil labs.’

‘Of course.’

They returned to the rover, drove on. Late in the day, under dark threatening clouds, they came to the very top of the massif, which turned out to be a kind of broad, undulating moor. Small ravines were filled with pine needles, sheered off by winds so that they looked like the blades of grass on a well-mowed yard. Sax and Tariki and Nanao again got out of the car, walked around. The wind cut through their suits, and the late afternoon sun broke out from under the dark cloud cover, casting their shadows all the way out to the horizon. Up here on the moors there were many big masses of smooth, bare bedrock; looking around, the landscape had the red, primal look Sax remembered from the earliest years; but then they would walk to the edge of a small ravine, and suddenly be looking down into green.

Tariki and Nanao talked about ecopoesis, which for them was terraforming redefined, subtilized, localized. Transmuted into something like Hiroko’s areoformation. No longer powered by heavy industrial global methods, but by the slow, steady, and intensely local process of working on individual patches of land. ‘Mars is all a garden. Earth too for that matter. This is what humans have become. So we have to think about gardening, about that level of responsibility to the land. A human-Mars interface that does justice to both.’

Sax waggled a hand uncertainly. ‘I’m used to thinking of Mars as a kind of wilderness,’ he said, as he looked up the etymology of the word garden. French, Teutonic, Old Norse, gard, enclosure. Seemed to share origins with guard, or keeping. But who knew what the supposedly equivalent word in Japanese meant? Etymology was hard enough without translation thrown into the mix. ‘You know – get things started, let loose the seeds, then watch it all develop on its own. Self-organizing ecologies, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Tariki said, ‘but wilderness too is a garden now. A kind of garden. That’s what it means to be what we are.’ He shrugged, his forehead wrinkled; he believed the idea was true, but did not seem to like it. ‘Anyway, ecopoesis is closer to your vision of wilderness than industrial terraforming ever was.’

‘Maybe,’ Sax said. ‘Maybe they’re just two stages of a process. Both necessary.’

Tariki nodded, willing to consider it. ‘And now?’

‘It depends on how we want to deal with the possibility of an ice age,’ Sax said. ‘If it’s bad enough, kills off enough plants, then ecopoesis won’t have a chance. The atmosphere could freeze back onto the surface, the whole process crash. Without the mirrors, I’m not confident that the biosphere is robust enough to continue growing. That’s why I want to see those soil labs you have. It may be that industrial work on the atmosphere remains to be done. We’ll have to try some modelling and see.’

Tariki nodded, and Nanao too. Their ecologies were being snowed under, right before their eyes; flakes drifted down through the transient bronze sunlight at this very moment, tumbling in the wind. They were open to suggestion.

Meanwhile, as throughout these drives, their young associates from Da Vinci and Sabishii were running over the massif together, and returning to Sabishii’s mound maze babbling through the night about geomancy and areomancy, ecopoetics, heat exchange, the five elements, greenhouse gases, and so on. A creative ferment that looked to Sax very promising. ‘Michel should be here,’ he said to Nanao. ‘John should be here. How he would love a group like this.’

And then it occurred to him: ‘Ann should be here.’

So he went back to Pavonis, leaving the group in Sabishii talking things over.

Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people, spurred on by Art Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional congress. Write an at least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then establish the government described.

‘Good idea,’ Sax said. ‘Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.’

Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout, others wouldn’t.

He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis – gone, people said, to a Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went there but Reds, they said.

After some thought Sax asked for Steve’s help, and looked up the outpost’s location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and flew north, past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past his old headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.

Ann too had no doubt flown this route, and thus gone by the first headquarters of the terraforming effort. Terraforming … there was evolution in everything, even in ideas. Had Ann noticed Echus Overlook, had she even remembered that small beginning? No way of telling. That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was very like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a book that had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the conclusion occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, shared a meal – then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their lives; for every world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as empty as Mars had been in the beginning.

He flew past the blackened curve of Kasei Vallis without noting it at all.

The Reds had long ago hollowed out a rock the size of a city block, in a promontory that served as the last dividing wedge in the intersection of two of the Tempe Fossae, just south of Perepelkin Crater. Windows under overhangs gave them a view over both of the bare straight canyons, and the larger canyon they made after their confluence. Now all these fossae cut down what had become a coastal plateau; Mareotis and Tempe together formed a huge peninsula of ancient highlands, sticking far into the new ice sea.

Sax landed his little plane on the sandy strip on top of the promontory. From here the ice plains were not visible; nor could he spot any vegetation – not a tree, not a flower, not even a patch of lichen. He wondered if they had somehow sterilized the canyons. Just primal rock, with a dusting of frost. And nothing they could do about frost, unless they wanted to tent these canyons, to keep air out rather than in. ‘Hmm,’ Sax said, startled at the idea.

Two Reds let him in the lock door on the top of the promontory, and he descended the stairs with them. The shelter appeared to be nearly empty. Just as well. It was nice only to have to withstand the cold gazes of two young women leading him through the rough-hewn rock galleries of the refuge, rather than a whole gang. Interesting to see Red aesthetics. Very spare, as might be expected – not a plant to be seen – just different textures of rock: rough walls, rougher ceilings, contrasted to a polished basalt floor, and the glistening windows overlooking the canyons.

They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave, no straighter than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were mosaics inlaid into the back wall; made of bits of coloured stone, polished and set against each other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed almost to represent something, if only he could focus properly on them. The floor was a stone parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The gallery went on and on – big, dusty – the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps. Reds preferred their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as unfortunate necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have walked down the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and Sax felt that this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be unobtrusive before the land itself, to melt into it.

As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window-seat. Sax stopped abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as an ignorant traveller might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting there. He looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didn’t see that much any more, and the longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had told him, once, that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had been some years before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame. Now, with the Red rebellion quelled, she was ash. Grey flesh. It was an awful sight. She was somewhere around one hundred and fifty years old, like all the First Hundred left alive, and without the treatments … she would soon die.

Well. Strictly speaking, she was at the physiological equivalent of being seventy or so, depending on when she had last had the treatments. So not that bad. Perhaps Peter would know. But the longer one went between treatments, he had heard, the more problems cropped up, statistically speaking. It made sense. It was only wise to be prudent.

But he couldn’t say that to her. In fact, it was hard to think what he could say to her.

Eventually her gaze lifted. She recognized him and shuddered, her lip lifting like a trapped animal’s. Then she looked away from him, grim, stone-faced. Beyond anger, beyond hope.

‘I wanted to show you some of the Tyrrhena Massif,’ he said lamely.

She got up like a statue rising, and left the room.

Sax, feeling his joints creak with the pseudo-arthritic pain that so often accompanied his dealings with Ann, followed her.

He was trailed in his turn by the two stern-looking young women. ‘I don’t think she wants to talk to you,’ the taller one informed him.

‘Very astute of you,’ Sax said.

Far down the gallery, Ann was standing before another window: spellbound, or else too exhausted to move. Or part of her did want to talk.

Sax stopped before her.

‘I want to get your impressions of it,’ he said. ‘Your suggestions for what we might do next. And I have some, some, some areological questions. Of course it could be that strictly scientific questions aren’t of interest to you any more—’

She took a step toward him and struck him on the side of the face. He found himself slumped against the gallery wall, sitting on his bottom. Ann was nowhere to be seen. He was being helped to his feet by the two young women, who clearly didn’t know whether to cheer or groan. His whole body hurt, more even than his face, and his eyes were very hot, stinging slightly. It seemed he might cry before these two young idiots, who by trailing him were complicating everything enormously; with them around he could not yell or plead, he could not go on his knees and say Ann, please, forgive me. He couldn’t.

‘Where did she go?’ he managed to say.

‘She really, really doesn’t want to talk to you,’ the tall one declared.

‘Maybe you should wait and try later,’ the other advised.

‘Oh shut up!’ Sax said, suddenly feeling an irritation so vehement that it was like rage. ‘I suppose you would just let her stop taking the treatment and kill herself!’

‘It’s her right,’ the tall one pontificated.

‘Of course it is. I wasn’t speaking of rights. I was speaking of how a friend should behave when someone is suicidal. Not a subject you are likely to know anything about. Now help me find her.’

‘You’re no friend of hers.’

‘I most certainly am.’ He was on his feet. He staggered a little as he tried to walk in the direction he thought she had gone. One of the young women tried to take his elbow. He avoided the help and went on. There Ann was, in the distance, collapsed in a chair, in some kind of dining chamber, it seemed. He approached her, slowing like Apollo in Zeno’s paradox.

She swivelled and glared at him.

‘It’s you who abandoned science, right from the start,’ she snarled. ‘So don’t you give me that shit about not being interested in science!’

‘True,’ Sax said. ‘It’s true.’ He held out both hands. ‘But now I need advice. Scientific advice. I want to learn. And I want to show you some things as well.’

But after a moment’s consideration she was up and off again, right past him, so that he flinched despite himself. He hurried after her; her gait was much longer than his, and she was moving fast, so that he had almost to jog. His bones hurt.

‘Perhaps we could go out here,’ Sax suggested. ‘It doesn’t matter where we go out.’

‘Because the whole planet is wrecked,’ she muttered.

‘You must still go out for sunsets occasionally.’ Sax persisted. ‘I could join you for that, perhaps.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Ann.’ She was a fast walker, and enough taller than him that it was hard to keep up with her and talk as well. He was huffing and puffing, and his cheek still hurt. ‘Please, Ann.’

She did not answer, she did not slow down. Now they were walking down a hall between suites of living quarters, and Ann sped up to go through a doorway and slam the door behind her. Sax tried it; it was locked.

Not, on the whole, a promising beginning.

Hound and hind. Somehow he had to change things so that it was not a hunt, a pursuit. Nevertheless: ‘I huff, I puff, I blow your house down.’ he muttered. He blew at the door. But then the two young women were there, staring hard at him.

One evening later that week, near sunset, he went down to the changing room and suited up. When Ann came in he jumped several centimetres. ‘I was just going out,’ he stammered. ‘Is that okay with you?’

‘It’s a free country.’ she said heavily.

And they went out of the lock together, into the land. The young women would have been amazed.

* * *

He had to be very careful. Naturally, although he was out there with her to show to her the beauty of the new biosphere, it would not do to mention plants, or snow, or clouds. One had to let things speak for themselves. This was perhaps true of all phenomena. Nothing could be spoken for. One could only walk over the land, and let it speak for itself.

Ann was not gregarious. She barely spoke to him. It was her usual route, he suspected as he followed her. He was being allowed to come along.

It was perhaps permissible to ask questions: this was science. And Ann stopped often enough, to look at rock formations up close. It made sense at those times to crouch beside her, and with a gesture or a word ask what she was finding. They wore suits and helmets, even though the altitude was low enough to have allowed breathing with only the aid of a CO₂ filter mask. Thus conversations consisted of voices in the ear, as of old. Asking questions.

So he asked. And Ann would answer, sometimes in some detail. Tempe Terra was indeed the Land of Time, its basement material a surviving piece of the southern highlands, one of those lobes of it that stuck far into the northern plains – a survivor of the Big Hit. Then later Tempe had fractured extensively, as the lithosphere was pushed up from below by the Tharsis bulge to the south. These fractures included both the Mareotis Fossae and the Tempe Fossae surrounding them now.

The spreading land had cracked enough to allow some latecomer volcanoes to emerge, spilling over the canyons. From one high ridge they saw a distant volcano like a black cone dropped from the sky; then another, looking just like a meteor crater as far as Sax could see. Ann shook her head at this observation, and pointed out lava flows and vents, features all visible once they were pointed out, but not at all obvious under a scree of later ejecta rubble and (one had to admit it) a dusting of dirty snow, collecting like sand drifts in wind shelters, turning sand-coloured in the sunset light.

To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text, written by its own long past; that was Ann’s vision, achieved by a century’s close observation and study, and by her own native gift, her love for it. Something to behold, really – something to marvel at. A kind of resource, or treasure – a love beyond science, or something into the realm of Michel’s mystical science. Alchemy. But alchemists wanted to change things. A kind of oracle, rather. A visionary, with a vision just as powerful as Hiroko’s, really. Less obviously visionary, perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an acceptance of what was there; love of rock, for rock’s sake. For Mars’s sake. The primal planet, in all its sublime glory, red and rust, still as death; dead; altered through the years only by matter’s chemical permutations, the immense slow life of geophysics. It was an odd concept – abiologic life – but there it was, if one cared to see it, a kind of living, out there spinning, moving through the stars that burned, moving through the universe in its great systolic/diastolic movement, its one big breath, one might say. Sunset somehow made it easier to see that.

Trying to see things Ann’s way. Glancing furtively at his wristpad, behind her back. Stone, from Old English stdn, cognates everywhere, back to proto-Indo-Eurdpean sti, a pebble. Rock, from medieval Latin rocca, origin unknown; a mass of stone. Sax abandoned the wristpad and fell away into a kind of rock reverie, open and blank. Tabula rasa, to the point where apparently he did not hear what Ann herself was saying to him; for she snorted and walked on. Abashed, he followed, and steeled himself to ignore her displeasure, and ask more questions.

There seemed to be a lot of displeasure in Ann. In a way this was reassuring; lack of affect would have been a very bad sign; but she still seemed quite emotional. At least most of the time. Sometimes she focused on the rock so intently it was almost like watching her obsessed enthusiasm of old, and he was encouraged; other times it seemed she was just going through the motions, doing areology in a desperate attempt to stave off the present moment; stave off history; or despair; or all of that. In those moments she was aimless, and did not stop to look at obviously interesting features they passed, and did not answer his questions about same. The little Sax had read about depression alarmed him; not much could be done, one needed drugs to combat it, and even then nothing was sure. But to suggest anti-depressants was more or less the same as suggesting the treatment itself; and so he could not speak of it. And besides, was despair the same as depression?

Happily, in this context, plants were pitifully few. Tempe was not like Tyrrhena, or even the banks of the Arena Glacier. Without active gardening, this was what one got. The world was still mostly rock.

On the other hand, Tempe was low in altitude, and humid, with the ice ocean just a few kilometres to the north and west. And various Johnny Appleseed flights had passed over the entire southern shoreline of the new sea-part of Biotique’s efforts, begun some decades ago, when Sax had been in Burroughs. So there was some lichen to be seen, if you looked hard. And small patches of fellfield. And a few krummholz trees, half-buried in snow. All these plants were in trouble in this northern summer-turned-winter, except for the lichen of course. There was a fair bit of miniaturized fall colour already, there in the tiny leaves of the ground-hugging koenigia, and pygmy buttercup, and icegrass, and, yes, arctic saxifrage. The reddening leaves served as a kind of camouflage in the ambient redrock; often Sax didn’t see plants until he was about to step on them. And of course he wasn’t drawing attention to them anyway, so when he did stumble on one, he gave it a quick evaluative glance and walked on.

They climbed a prominent knoll overlooking the canyon west of the refuge, and there it was: the great ice sea, all orange and brass in the late light. It filled the lowland in a great sweep and formed its own smooth horizon, from southwest to northeast. Mesas of the fretted terrain now stuck out of the ice like sea stacks or cliff-sided islands. In truth this part of Tempe was going to be one of the most dramatic coastlines on Mars, with the lower ends of some fossae filling to become long fjords or lochs. And one coastal crater was right at sea level, and had a break in its sea side, making it a perfect round bay some fifteen kilometres wide, with an entry channel about two kilometres across. Farther south, the fretted terrain at the foot of the Great Escarpment would create a veritable Hebrides of an archipelago, many of the islands visible from the cliffs of the mainland. Yes, a dramatic coastline. As one could see already, looking at the broken sheets of sunset ice.

But of course this was not to be noted. No mention at all of the ice, the jagged bergs jumbled on the new shoreline. The bergs had been formed by some process Sax wasn’t aware of, though he was curious – but it could not be discussed. One could only stand in silence, as if having stumbled into a cemetery.

Embarrassed, Sax kneeled to look at a specimen of Tibetan rhubarb he had almost stepped on. Little red leaves, in a floret from a central red bulb.

Ann was looking over his shoulder. ‘Is it dead?’

‘No.’ He pulled off a few dead leaves from the exterior of the floret, showed her the brighter ones beneath. ‘It’s hardening for the winter already. Fooled by the drop in light.’ Then Sax went on, as if to himself: ‘A lot of the plants will die, though. The thermal overturn,’ which was when air temperatures turned colder than the ground temperatures, ‘came more or less overnight. There won’t be much chance for hardening. Thus lots of winterkill. Plants are better at handling it than animals would have been. And insects are surprisingly good, considering they’re little containers of liquid. They have supercooling cryoprotectants. They can stand whatever happens, I think.’

Ann was still inspecting the plant, and so Sax shut up. It’s alive, he wanted to say. Insofar as the members of a biosphere depend on each other for existence, it is part of your body. How can you hate it?

But then again, she wasn’t taking the treatment.

The ice sea was a shattered blaze of bronze and coral. The sun was setting, they would have to get back. Ann straightened and walked away, a black silhouette, silent. He could speak in her ear, even now when she was a hundred metres away, then two hundred, a small black figure in the great sweep of the world. He did not; it would have been an invasion of her privacy, almost of her thoughts. But how he wondered what those thoughts were. How he longed to say Ann, Ann, what are you thinking? Talk to me, Ann. Share your thoughts.

The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone. Oh Ann, please talk to me.

* * *

But she did not talk to him. On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer. Even though in the growing piles of wind-drifted snow, plants were scarcely visible any more. It was getting dark, another storm was sweeping in, low over the black-and-copper sea. A pad of moss, a lichened rockface; mostly it was rock alone, just as it had ever been. Nevertheless.

Then as they were getting back into the refuge lock, Ann fell in a faint. On the way down she hit her head on the door-jamb. Sax caught her body as she was landing on a bench against the inner wall. She was unconscious, and Sax half-carried her, half-dragged her all the way into the lock. Then he pulled the outer door shut, and when the lock was pumped, pulled her through the inner door into the changing room. He must have been shouting over the common band, because by the time he got her helmet off, five or six Reds were there in the room, more than he had seen in the refuge so far. One of the young women who had so impeded him, the short one, turned out to be the medical person of the station, and when they got Ann up onto a rolling table that could be used as a gurney, this woman led the way to the refuge’s medical clinic, and there took over. Sax helped where he could, getting Ann’s walker boots off her long feet with shaking hands. His pulse rate – he checked his wristpad – was a hundred and forty-five beats a minute – and he felt hot, even light-headed.

‘Has she had a stroke?’ he said. ‘Has she had a stroke?’

The short woman looked surprised. ‘I don’t think so. She fainted. Then struck her head.’

‘But why did she faint?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked at the tall young woman, who sat next to the door. Sax understood that they were the senior authorities in the refuge. ‘Ann left instructions for us not to put her on any kind of life support mechanism, if she were ever incapacitated like this.’

‘No,’ Sax said.

‘Very explicit instructions. She forbade it. She wrote it down.’

‘You put her on whatever it takes to keep her alive,’ Sax said, his voice harsh with strain. Everything he had said since Ann’s collapse had been a surprise to him; he was a witness to his actions just as much as they were. He heard himself say, ‘It doesn’t mean you have to keep her on it, if she doesn’t come around. It’s just a reasonable minimum, to make sure she doesn’t go for nothing.’

The doctor rolled her eyes at this distinction, but the tall woman sitting in the doorway looked thoughtful.

Sax heard himself go on: ‘I was on life support for some four days, as I understand it, and I’m glad no one decided to turn it off. It’s her decision, not yours. Anyone who wants to die can do it without having to make a doctor compromise her Hippocratic oath.’

The doctor rolled her eyes even more disgustedly than before. But with a glance at her colleague, she began to pull Ann onto the life support bed; Sax helped her; and then she was turning on the medical AI, and getting Ann out of her walker. A rangy old woman, now breathing with an oxygen mask over her face. The tall woman stood and began to help the doctor, and Sax went and sat down. His own physiological symptoms were amazingly severe, marked chiefly by heat all through him, and a kind of incompetent hyperventilation; and an ache that made him want to cry.

After a time the doctor came over. Ann had fallen into a coma, she said. It looked like a small heart rhythm abnormality had caused her to faint in the first place. She was stable at the moment.

Sax sat in the room. Much later the doctor returned. Ann’s wristpad had recorded an episode of rapid irregular heartbeat, at the time she fainted. Now there was still a small arrhythmia. And apparently anoxia, or the blow to the head, or both, had initiated a coma.

Sax asked what a coma was, and felt a sinking feeling when the doctor shrugged. It was a catch-all term, apparently, for unconscious states of a certain kind. Pupils fixed, body insensitive, and sometimes locked into decorticate postures. Ann’s left arm and leg were twisted. And unconsciousness of course. Sometimes odd vestiges of responsiveness, clenching hands and the like. Duration of coma varied widely. Some people never came out of them.

Sax looked at his hands until the doctor left him alone. He sat in the room until everyone else was gone. Then he got up and stood at Ann’s side, looking down at her masked face. Nothing to be done. He held her hand; it did not clench. He held her head, as he had been told Nirgal had held his when he was unconscious. It felt like a useless gesture.

He went to the AI screen, and called up the diagnostic program. He called up Ann’s medical data, and ran back the heart monitor data from the incident in the lock. A small arrhythmia, yes; rapid, irregular pattern. He fed the data into the diagnostic program, and looked up heart arrhythmia on his own. There were a lot of aberrant cardiac rhythm patterns, but it appeared that Ann might have a genetic predisposition to suffer from a disorder called long QT syndrome, named for a characteristic abnormal long wave in the electrocardiogram. He called up Ann’s genome, and instructed the AI to run a search in the relevant regions of chromosomes three, seven and eleven. In the gene called HERG, in her chromosome seven, the AI identified a small mutation: one reversal of adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine. Small, but HERG contained instructions for the assembly of a protein that served as a potassium ion channel in the surface of heart cells, and these ion channels acted as a switch to turn off contracting heart cells. Without this brake the heart could go arrhythmic, and beat too fast to pump blood effectively.

Ann also appeared to have another problem, with a gene on chromosome three called SCN5A. This gene encoded a different regulatory protein, which provided a sodium ion channel on the surface of heart cells. This channel functioned as an accelerator, and mutations here could add to the problem of rapid heartbeat. Ann had a CG bit missing.

These genetic conditions were rare, but for the diagnostic AI, that was not an issue. It contained a symptomology for all known problems, no matter how rare. It seemed to consider Ann’s case to be fairly straightforward, and it listed the treatments that existed to counteract the problems presented by the condition. There were a lot of them.

One of the treatments suggested was the recoding of the problem genes, in the course of the standard gerontological treatments. Persistent gene recodings through several longevity treatments should erase the cause of the problem right at the root, or rather in the seed. It seemed strange that this hadn’t been done already, but then Sax saw that the recommendation was only about two decades old; it came from a period after the last time Ann had taken the treatments.

For a long time Sax sat there, staring at the screen. Much later he got up. He began to inspect the Reds’ medical clinic, instrument by instrument, room by room. The nursing attendants let him wander; they thought he was distraught.

This was a major Red refuge, and it seemed likely to him that one of the rooms might contain the equipment necessary to administer the gerontological treatments. Indeed it was so. A small room at the back of the clinic appeared to be devoted to the process. It didn’t take much: a bulky AI, a small lab, the stock proteins and chemicals, the incubators, the MRIs, the IV equipment. Amazing, when you considered what it did. But that had always been true. Life itself was amazing: simple protein sequences only, at the start, and yet here they were.

So. The main AI had Ann’s genome record. But if he ordered this lab to start synthesizing her DNA strands for her (adding the recodings of HERG and SCN5A) the people here would surely notice. And then there would be trouble.

He went back to his tiny room to make a coded call to Da Vinci. He asked his associates there to start the synthesis, and they agreed without any questions beyond the technical ones. Sometimes he loved those saxaclones with all his heart.

After that it was back to waiting. Hours passed; more hours; more hours. Eventually several days had passed, with no change in Ann. The doctor’s expression grew blacker and blacker, though she said nothing more about unhooking Ann. But it was in her eye. Sax took to sleeping on the floor in Ann’s room. He grew to know the rhythm of her breathing. He spent a lot of time with a hand cradling her head, as Michel had told him Nirgal had done with him. He very much doubted that this had ever cured anybody of anything, but he did it anyway. Sitting for so long in such a posture, he had occasion to think about the brain plasticity treatments that Vlad and Ursula had administered to him after his stroke. Of course a stroke was a very different thing to a coma. But a change of mind was not necessarily a bad thing, if one’s mind was in pain.

More days passed without a change, each day slower and blanker and more fearful than the one before. The incubators in the Da Vinci labs had long since cooked up a full set of corrected Ann – specific DNA strands, and anti-sense rein-forcers, and glue-ons – the whole gerontological package, in its latest configuration.

So one night he called up Ursula, and had a long consultation with her. She answered his questions calmly, even as she struggled with the idea of what he wanted to do. ‘The synaptic stimulus package we gave you would produce too much synaptic growth in undamaged brains,’ she said firmly. ‘It would alter personality to no set pattern.’ Creating madmen like Sax, her alarmed look said.

Sax decided to skip the synaptic supplements. Saving Ann’s life was one thing, changing her mind another. Random change was not the goal anyway. Acceptance was. Happiness – Ann’s true happiness, whatever that might be – now so far away, so hard to imagine. He ached to think of it. It was extraordinary how much physical pain could be generated by thought alone – the limbic system a whole universe in itself, suffused with pain, like the dark matter that suffused everything in the universe.

‘Have you talked to Michel?’ Ursula asked.

‘No. Good idea.’

He called Michel, explained what had happened, and what he had in mind to do. ‘My God, Sax,’ Michel said, looking shocked. But in only a few moments he was promising to come. He would get Desmond to fly him to Da Vinci to pick up the treatment supplies, and then fly on up to the refuge.

So Sax sat in Ann’s room, a hand to her head. A bumpy skull; no doubt a phrenologist would have had a field day.

Then Michel and Desmond were there, his brothers, standing beside him. The doctor was there too, escorting them, and the tall woman and others as well; so everything had to be communicated by looks, or the absence of looks. Nevertheless everything was perfectly clear. Desmond’s face was if anything too clear. They had Ann’s longevity package with them. They only had to wait their chance.

Which came quite soon; with Ann settled into her coma, the situation in the little hospital was routine. The effects of the longevity treatment on a coma, however, were not fully known; Michel had scanned the literature, and the data were sparse. It had been tried as an experimental treatment in a few unresponsive comas before, and had been successful in rousing victims almost half the time. Because of that Michel now thought it was a good idea.

And so, soon after their arrival, the three of them got up in the middle of the night, and tiptoed past the sleeping attendant in the medical centre’s anteroom. Medical training had had its usual effect, and the attendant was sound asleep, though awkwardly propped in her chair. Sax and Michel hooked Ann up to the IVs, and stuck the needles in the veins on the backs of her hands, working slowly, carefully, precisely. Quietly. Soon she was hooked up, the IVs were flowing, the new protein strands were in her bloodstream. Her breathing grew irregular, and Sax felt hot with fear. He groaned silently. It was comforting to have Michel and Desmond here, each holding an arm as if supporting him, keeping him from falling; but he wished desperately for Hiroko. This was what she would have done, he was certain of it. Which made him feel better. Hiroko was one of the reasons he was doing this. Still he longed for her support, her physical presence, he wished she would show up to help him like she had on Daedalia Planitia. To help Ann. She was the expert at this kind of radically irresponsible human experimentation, this would have been small potatoes to her …

When the operation was finished, they took out the IV needles and put the equipment away. The attendant slept on, mouth open, looking like the girl she was. Ann was still unconscious, but breathing easier, Sax felt. More strongly.

The three men stood looking down at Ann together. Then they slipped out, and tiptoed back down the hall to their rooms. Desmond was dancing on his toes like a fool, and the other two shushed him. They got back in their beds but couldn’t sleep; and couldn’t talk; and so lay there silently, like brothers in a big house, late at night, after a successful expedition out into the nocturnal world.

The next morning the doctor came in. ‘Her vital signs are better.’

The three men expressed their pleasure at this.

Later, down in the dining hall, Sax had a strong urge to tell Michel and Desmond about his encounter with Hiroko. The news would mean more to these two than anyone else. But something in him was afraid to do it. He was afraid of seeming overwrought, perhaps even delusional. That moment when Hiroko had left him at the rover, and walked off into the storm – he didn’t know what to think of that. In his long hours with Ann he had done some thinking, and some research, and he knew now that Terran climbers alone at high altitude, suffering from oxygen loss, not infrequently hallucinated companion climbers. Some kind of doppelganger figure. Rescue by anima. And his air tube had been partially clogged.

He said, ‘I thought this was what Hiroko would have done.’

Michel nodded. ‘It’s bold, I’ll hand you that. It has her style. No, don’t misunderstand me – I’m glad you did it.’

‘About fucking time, if you ask me,’ said Desmond. ‘Someone should have tied her down and made her take the treatment years ago. Oh my Sax, my Sax—’ he laughed happily. ‘I only hope she doesn’t come to as crazy as you did.’

‘But Sax had a stroke,’ Michel said.

‘Well,’ Sax said, concerned to set the record straight, ‘actually I was somewhat eccentric before.’

His two friends nodded, mouths pursed. They were in high spirits, though the situation was still unresolved. Then the tall doctor came in; Ann had come out of her coma.

Sax felt that his stomach was still too contracted by tension to take in food, but he noted that he was disposing of a pile of buttered toast quite handily. Wolfing it down, in fact.

‘But she’s going to be very angry at you,’ Michel said.

Sax nodded. It was, alas, probable. Likely, even. A bad thought. He did not want to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company.

‘You should come with us to Earth,’ Michel suggested. ‘Maya and I are going with the delegation, and Nirgal.’

‘There’s a delegation going to Earth?’

‘Yes, someone suggested it, and it seems like a good idea. We need to have some representatives right there on Earth talking to them. And by the time we get back from that, Ann will have had time to think it over.’

‘Interesting,’ Sax said, relieved at the mere suggestion of an escape from the situation. In fact it was almost frightening how quickly he could think of ten good reasons for going to Earth. ‘But what about Pavonis, and this conference they’re talking about?’

‘We can stay part of that by video.’

‘True.’ It was just what he had always maintained.

The plan was attractive. He did not want to be there when Ann woke up. Or rather, when she found out what he had done. Cowardice, of course. But still. ‘Desmond, are you going?’

‘Not a fucking chance.’

‘But you say Maya is going too?’ Sax asked Michel.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. The last time I, I, I tried to save a woman’s life, Maya killed her.’

‘What? What – Phyllis? You saved Phyllis’s life?’

‘Well – no. That is to say, I did, but I was also the one who put her in danger in the first place. So I don’t think it counts.’ He tried to explain what had happened that night in Burroughs, with little success. It was fuzzy in his own mind, except for certain vivid horrible moments. ‘Never mind. It was just a thought. I shouldn’t have spoken. I’m …’

‘You’re tired,’ Michel said. ‘But don’t worry. Maya will be away from the scene here, and safely under our eye.’

Sax nodded. It was sounding better all the time. Give Ann some time to cool off; think it over; understand. Hopefully. And it would be very interesting of course to see conditions on Earth at first hand. Extremely interesting. So interesting that no rational person could pass up the opportunity.