Читать книгу The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 13

The lab hummed quietly. Desks and tables and benches were cluttered with things, the white walls crowded with graphs and posters and cut-out cartoons, all vibrating slightly under bright artificial light. Like any lab anywhere: somewhat clean, somewhat disorderly. The one window in the corner was black and reflected the interior; it was night outside. The whole building was nearly empty.

But two men in lab coats stood at one of the benches, leaning forward to look at a computer screen. The shorter of the two tapped at the keyboard below the screen with a forefinger, and the image on the screen changed. Green corkscrews on a black field, squiggling so that they looked sharply three dimensional, as if the screen were a box. An image from an electron microscope; the field was only a few microns across.

“You see it’s a kind of plasmid repair of the gene sequence,” the short scientist said. “Breaks in the original strands are identified. Replacement sequences are synthesized, and when these replacement sequences are introduced into the cell, the breaks are seen as attachment sites, and the replacements bind to the originals.”

“Do you introduce them by transformation? Electroporation?”

“Transformation. Treated cells are injected along with a competent, and the repair strands make a conjugal transfer.”

“In vivo?”

“In vivo.”

A low whistle. “So you can repair any little thing? Cell division error?”

“That’s right.”

The two men stared at the corkscrews on the screen, waving about like the new tips of grapevines in a breeze.

“You’ve got proof?”

“Did Vlad show you those mice in the next room?”

“Yeah.”

“Those mice are fifteen years old.”

Another whistle.

They went next door into the mice room, muttering to each other under the hum of machinery. The tall one stared curiously into a cage, where patches of fur breathed under wood chips. When they left again they turned out the lights in both rooms. The flicker of the electron microscope screen illuminated the first lab, giving it a green cast. The scientists went to the window, talking in low voices. They looked out. The sky was purple with the coming day; stars were popping out of existence. Out on the horizon stood a black massive bulk, the flat-topped mound of an immense volcano. Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system.

The tall scientist shook his head. “This changes everything, you know.”

“I know.”

From the bottom of the shaft, the sky looked like a bright pink coin. The shaft was round, a kilometer in diameter, seven kilometers deep. But from the bottom it seemed much thinner and deeper than that. Perspective plays a lot of tricks on the human eye.

Such as that bird, flying down the round pink dot of the sky, looking so big. Except it wasn’t a bird. “Hey,” John said. The shaft director, a round-faced Japanese named Etsu Okakura, looked at him, and through their two faceplates John could see the man’s nervous grin. One of his teeth was discolored.

Okakura looked up. “Something falling!” he said quickly, and then: “Run!”

They turned and ran over the shaft floor. Quickly John found that although most of the loose rock had been swept off the starred black basalt, no effort had been made to make the shaft bottom perfectly level. Miniature craters and scarps became increasingly difficult as he gained speed; in this moment of primate flight the instincts formed in childhood reasserted themselves, and he kept pushing off too hard with each step, coming down on uninspected terrain with a jolt and then pushing off wildly again, a crazy run until finally he caught his toe and lost control and fell crashing across the ragged stone, arms flung out to save his faceplate. It was small comfort to see that Okakura had fallen as well. Fortunately the same gravity that had caused their tumbles was giving them more time to escape: the falling object had not yet landed. They got up and ran again, and once again Okakura fell. John glanced back and saw a bright metallic blur hit the rock, and then the sound of the impact was a solid whump, like a blow. Silver bits splashed away, some in their direction: he stopped running, scanned the air for incoming ejecta. No sound at all.

A big hydraulic cylinder flew out of the air and banged end over end to their left, and they both jumped. He hadn’t seen it coming.

After that, stillness. They stood nearly a minute, and then Boone stirred. He was sweating; they were in pressurized suits, but at 49°C the shaft bottom was the hottest place on Mars, and the suit’s insulation was built for cold. He made a move to help Okakura to his feet, but stopped himself; presumably the man would rather get up himself than owe giri to Boone for the help. If Boone understood the concept properly. “Let’s have a look,” he said instead.

Okakura got up, and they walked back over the dense black basalt. The shaft had long ago been bored into solid bedrock, in fact it was now about twenty percent of the way through the lithosphere. It was stifling at the bottom, as if the suits were entirely uninsulated. Boone’s air supply was a welcome coolness in the face and lungs. Framed by the dark shaft walls, the pink sky above was very bright. Sunlight illuminated a short conic section of the shaft wall. In midsummer the sun might shine all the way – no, they were south of the Tropic of Capricorn. In shadow forever, down here.

They approached the wreck. It had been a robot dump truck, hauling rock up the road that cut a spiral into the shaft wall. Pieces of the truck were mixed with big rough boulders, some scattered as much as a hundred meters from the point of impact. Beyond a hundred meters debris was rare; the cylinder that had flown by them must have been fired out under pressure of some kind.

A pile of magnesium, aluminum and steel, all twisted horribly. The magnesium and aluminum had partially melted. “Do you think it fell all the way from the top?” Boone asked.

Okakura didn’t respond. Boone glanced at him; the man was studiously avoiding his gaze. Perhaps he was frightened. Boone said, “There must have been a good thirty seconds between the time I caught sight of it and when it hit.”

At roughly three meters per second squared, that had been more than enough time for it to reach terminal velocity. So it had hit at about two hundred kilometers per hour. Not so bad, really. On Earth it would have come down in less than half the time, and might have caught them. Hell, if he hadn’t have looked up when he had, this one might have caught them. He made a quick calculation. It had probably been about halfway up the shaft when he saw it. But at that point it could have been falling for quite some time.

Boone slowly walked around into the gap between the shaft wall and the pile of scrap. The truck had landed on its right side, and the left side was deformed but recognizable. Okakura climbed several steps up the wreckage, then pointed at a black area behind the left front tire. John followed him up, scraped at the metal with the claw on his right glove’s forefinger. The black came away like soot. Ammonium nitrate explosion. The body of the truck was bent in there as if hammered. “A good-sized charge,” John observed.

“Yes,” Okakura said, and cleared his throat. He was frightened, that was sure. Well, the first man on Mars had almost been killed while in his care; and himself too, of course, but who knew which would scare him more? “Enough to push truck off road.”

“Well, like I said, there’s been some sabotage reported.”

Okakura was frowning through his faceplate. “But who? And why?”

“I don’t know. Anyone in your team seem to be having any psychological difficulties?”

“No.” Okakura’s face was carefully blank. Every group larger than five had someone experiencing difficulties, and Okakura’s little industrial town had a population of five hundred.

“This the sixth case I’ve seen,” John said. “Although none so close up.” He laughed. The image of the birdlike dot in the pink sky came back to him. “It would have been easy for someone to attach a bomb to a truck before it came down. Detonate it with a clock or an altimeter.”

“Reds, you mean.” Okakura was looking relieved. “We have heard of them. But it is …” He shrugged. “Crazy.”

“Yes.” John climbed gingerly off the wreck. They walked back across the floor of the shaft to the car they had come down in. Okakura was on another band, talking to people up top.

John stopped by the central pit to have a final look around. The sheer size of the shaft was hard to grasp: the muted light and vertical lines reminded him of a cathedral, but all the cathedrals ever built would have sat like dollhouses at the bottom of this great hole. The surreal scale made him blink, and he decided he had tilted his head back too long.

They drove up the road inscribed in the side wall to the first elevator, left the car and got in the cage. Up they went. Seven times they had to get out and walk across the wall road to the bottom of the next elevator. The ambient light grew to something more like ordinary daylight. Across the shaft he could see where the wall was scored by the double spiral of the two roads: thread-marks in an enormous screw hole. The shaft’s bottom had disappeared into the murk, he couldn’t even make out the truck.

In the last two elevators they ascended through regolith; first the megaregolith, which looked like cracked bedrock, and then the regolith proper, its rock and gravel and ice all hidden behind a concrete retainer, a smooth curved wall that looked like a dam, and was angled so far back that the final elevator was actually a cog rail train. They cranked up the side of this enormous funnel – Big Man’s bathtub drain, Okakura had said on the way down – and came finally to the surface, out into the sun.

Boone got out of the cog train and looked back down. The regolith retainer looked like the inner wall of a very smooth crater, with a two-laned road spiraling down it; but the crater had no floor. A mohole. He could see down the shaft a little way, but the wall was in shadow, and only the road spiraling down picked up any light, so that it appeared to be something like a freestanding staircase, descending through empty space to the planet’s core.

Three of the giant dump trucks ground slowly up the last stretch of the road, full of black boulders. These days it took them five hours to make the trip from the bottom of the shaft, Okakura said. Very little supervision, like most of the project, in both manufacture and operation. The inhabitants of the town only had to see to programming, deployment, maintenance, and troubleshooting. And, now, security.

The town, called Senzeni Na, was scattered over the floor of Thaumasia Fossae’s deepest canyon. Nearest to the hole was the industrial park; here most of the excavation equipment was manufactured, and the rock from the hole processed for its trace amounts of valuable metals. Boone and Okakura stepped into the rim station, changed out of their pressure suits into coppery jumpers, and entered one of the clear walktubes that connected all the buildings in the town. It was cold and sunny in the tubes, and everyone in them wore clothing with an outer layer of copper-colored foil, the latest in Japanese radproofing. Copper creatures, moving in clear tubes; it looked to Boone like a giant ant farm. Overhead the thermal cloud frosted into existence and shot up like steam from a valve, until it was caught by high winds and blown out in a long flattened contrail.

The town’s actual living quarters were built into the southeast wall of the canyon. A big rectangular section of the cliff had been replaced by glass; behind it was a tall open concourse, backed by five stories of terraced apartments.

They walked through the concourse and Okakura led him up to the town offices, on the fifth floor. A small crowd of concerned-looking people gathered in their wake, chattering to Okakura and among themselves. They all went through the office and out onto its balcony. John watched closely as Okakura described in Japanese what had happened. A number of his audience looked nervous, and most would not meet John’s eye. Had the near accident itself been enough to incur giri? It was important to make sure they didn’t feel publicly shown up, or anything like it. Shame was strong stuff for the Japanese, and Okakura was beginning to look desperately unhappy, as if he were deciding it had been his fault.

“Look, it could just as easily have been outsiders as someone from here,” John said boldly. He made some suggestions for future security. “The rim is a perfect barrier. Set up an alarm system, and a few people at the rim station could keep an eye on both the system and the elevators. A waste of time, but I guess we have to do it.”

Diffidently Okakura asked him if he knew anything about who might be responsible for the sabotage. He shrugged. “No idea, sorry. People opposed to the moholes, I guess.”

“But the moholes are dug,” one of them said.

“I know. I guess it’s symbolic.” He grinned. “But if a truck falls on someone, it would be a bad symbol.”

They nodded seriously. He wished he had Frank’s facility for languages, it would help to be able to communicate better with these people. They were hard to read; inscrutable and all that.

They wondered if he wanted to lie down.

“I’m okay,” he said. “It missed us. We’ll have to look into it, but today let’s just continue according to the schedule we had.”

So Okakura and several men and women led him on a tour of the town, and cheerfully he visited labs and meeting rooms, lounges and dining halls. He nodded and shook hands and said hi until he was sure he had met over fifty percent of Senzeni Na’s inhabitants. Most had not yet heard of the incident in the hole, and all were pleased to meet him; happy to shake his hand, to speak with him, to show him something, to look at him. It happened everywhere he went, reminding him unpleasantly of the fishbowl years between his first trip and his second.

But he did his job. An hour’s work, then four hours of being The First Man On Mars: the usual ratio. And as afternoon darkened to evening, and the whole town gathered for a banquet in honor of his visit, he settled back and patiently played his part. That meant shifting into a good mood, no easy task that night. In fact he took a break, went back to the bathroom in his room and swallowed a capsule manufactured by Vlad’s medical group in Acheron. It was a drug they had named omegendorph, a synthetic mix of all the endorphins and opiates they had found in the brain’s natural chemistry and a better feel-good drug than Boone would have imagined possible.

He returned to the banquet much more relaxed. In fact filled with a little glow. He had escaped death, after all, and by running like a wild man! Some more endorphins were not inappropriate. He moved easily from table to table, asking questions as he went. This was what pleased people, what gave them the festival feeling that a meeting with John Boone should bring. John liked being able to do that, it was the part of his job that made celebrity tolerable; because when he asked questions, people leaped to answer like salmon in the stream. It was peculiar, really, as if people were seeking to right the imbalance they felt in the situation, in which they knew so much about him while he knew so little about them. So that with the right encouragement, often a single carefully-judged prompt, they would erupt with the most astonishing spills of personal information: witnessing, testifying, confessing.

So he spent the evening learning about life at Senzeni Na (“Means, what have we done?” Quick grin.) And afterwards he was led to his big guest suite, the rooms thick with live bamboo, the bed seemingly hacked out of a stand of it. When he was alone he connected his code box to the phone, and called Sax Russell.

Russell was at Vlad’s new headquarters, a research complex built into a dramatic fin ridge in the Acheron Fossae north of Olympus Mons. Sax spent all his time there now, studying genetic engineering like an undergrad; he had become convinced that biotechnology was the key to terraforming, and he was determined to educate himself to the point where he could contribute actively to that part of the campaign, despite the fact that all his training was in physics. Modern biology was notoriously gooey, and a lot of physicists hated it; but the people at Acheron said Sax was a quick learner, and John believed it. Sax himself made little snicking noises at his own progress, but it was clear he was deep in. He talked about it all the time, “It’s the crux,” he would say. “We need the water out of the ground and the carbon dioxide out of the air, and it’s going to take biomass to do both.” And so he slaved at the screens and in the labs.

He listened to Boone’s report with his usual impassivity. Such a parody of the scientist, John thought. He even wore a lab coat. Seeing his characteristic blink made John think of a story he had heard one of Sax’s assistants tell, to a laughing audience at a party: in a secret experiment gone awry, a hundred lab rats that had been injected with an intelligence booster became geniuses. They revolted, escaped from their cages, captured their principal investigator, and strapped him down and retro-injected all their minds into his body, using a method they invented on the spot – and that scientist was Saxifrage Russell, white-coated, blinking, twitching, inquisitive, lab-bound. His brain the sum of a hundred hyperintelligent rats, “and named for a flower like lab rats are, it’s their little joke, see?”

It explained a lot. John smiled as he finished his report, and Sax cocked his head at him curiously. “Do you think this truck was meant to kill you?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do the people there seem?”

“Scared.”

“Think they’re in on it?”

John shrugged. “I doubt it. They’re probably just worried about what happens next.”

Sax flicked a hand out. “Sabotage like that won’t make the slightest dent in the project,” he said mildly.

“I know.”

“Who’s doing this, John?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be Ann, do you think? Has she become another prophet, like Hiroko or Arkady, with followers and a program and the like?”

“You have followers and a program too,” John reminded him.

“But I’m not telling my followers to wreck things and try to kill people.”

“Some people think you’re trying to wreck Mars. And people will certainly die as a result of terraforming, in accidents.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just reminding you. Trying to get you to see why someone might do this.”

“So you do think it’s Ann.”

“Or Arkady, or Hiroko, or someone we’ve never heard of in one of the new colonies. There are a lot of people here now. A lot of factions.”

“I know.” Sax walked over to a countertop, drained his battered old coffee mug. Finally he said, “I’d like you to try to find out who it is. Go where you need to go. Go talk to Ann. Reason with her.” There was a plaintive note in his voice: “I can’t even talk to her anymore.”

John stared at him, surprised at the display of emotion. Sax took this silence for reluctance, and went on: “I know it isn’t exactly your thing, but everyone will talk to you. You’re practically the only one left we can say that about. I know you’re doing the mohole work, but you can get your team to do your part of that, and keep visiting the moholes as part of this inquiry. There really isn’t anyone else who can do it. There’s no real police to turn to. Although if things keep happening, UNOMA will provide some.”

“Or the transnational.” Boone considered it. The sight of that truck, falling out of the sky … “All right. I’ll go talk to Ann, anyway. After that we should get together and talk about security for all the terraforming projects. If we can stop anything more from happening, that will keep UNOMA out.”

“Thanks, John.”

Boone wandered out onto his suite’s balcony. The concourse was filled with Hokkaido pines, the chilled air stiff with resin. Copper figures walked below, among the tree trunks. Boone considered the new situation. For ten years now he had worked for Russell on terraforming, managing the moholes and doing PR and the like, and he enjoyed the work; but he wasn’t on the cutting edge of any of the sciences involved, and so he was out of the decision-making loop. He knew that many people thought of him as a figurehead only, a celebrity for consumption back on Earth; a dumb space jock who had gotten lucky once, and was living off that for good. That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size. That was okay, especially since in his case they were wrong. His power was considerable, although perhaps only he could see the full extent of it, as it consisted of an endless succession of face-to-face meetings, of the influence he had over what people chose to do. Power wasn’t a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence. The figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.

Still, despite all that, there was something to be said for this new task. He could feel that already. It would be problematic, difficult, perhaps risky … above all, challenging. A new challenge: he liked that. Going back into his suite, getting into bed (John Boone Slept Here!) it occurred to him that now he was going to be not only the first man on Mars, but the first detective. He grinned at the thought, and the last action of the omegendorph set his nerves aglow.

Ann Clayborne was doing a survey in the mountains surrounding the Argyre Basin, which meant he could check out a glider and fly from Senzeni Na to her. So early the next morning he took the elevator balloon up the mooring mast to the stationary dirigible floating over the town, exulting as he rose in the ever-expanding view of the big Thaumasia canyons. From the dirigible he lowered himself into the cockpit of one of the gliders hooked to its underside. After securing himself he unhooked, and the glider dropped like a stone until he ran it into the mohole thermal, which tossed it violently upward. He fought for control and banked the big gossamer craft into a steep rising gyre, whooping as he battled the intense buffeting; it was like riding a soap bubble over a bonfire!

At five thousand meters the plume cloud flattened and spread out to the east. John swooped out of his spiral and headed southeast, playing with the glider as he went to get a feel for it. He would have to ride the winds carefully to make it to Argyre.

He aimed into the sun’s smeary yellow blaze. Wind keened over the wings. The land below him was a dark rough orange, shading to a very light orange at the horizon. The southern highlands were wildly pocked in every direction, with the raw, primordial, lunar look that saturation cratering always had. John loved flying over it, and he piloted unconsciously, concentrating on the land below. It was precious to sit back and fly, feeling the wind as if under his elbows, watching the land and not thinking a thing. He was sixty-four years old in this year 2047 (or “m-year 10” as he usually thought of it), and he had been the most famous man alive for almost thirty of those years; and nowadays he was happiest when he was alone, and flying.

After an hour had passed, he started thinking about his new task. It was important not to get caught up in fantasies of magnifying glasses and cigar ash, or gumshoe with handgun; there was work he could do even as he flew. He called up Sax, and asked if he could connect his AI into the UNOMA emigration and planetary travel records, without alerting UNOMA to the connection. After some investigation Sax got back to him and said that he could manage that, and so John sent a sequence of questions through, and then continued to fly. An hour and many craters later, Pauline’s redlight blinked rapidly, indicating a downloading of raw data. John asked the AI to run the data through various analyses, and when she was done he studied the results on the screen. Patterns of movement; they were confusing, but he hoped that when matched with the sabotage incidents, something might turn up. Of course there were people moving around off the record, the hidden colony among them; and who knew what Hiroko and the others thought of the terraforming projects? Still, it was worth a look.

The Nereidium Montes popped over the horizon ahead. Mars had never had much tectonic movement, and so mountain ranges were rare; those that existed tended to be crater rims writ large, rings of ejecta thrown out by impacts so great that the debris fell in two or three concentric ranges, each many kilometers wide, and extremely rugged. Hellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancient Oceanus Borealis. Debate raged over that question, and Ann, John’s final authority in such matters, had never expressed an opinion on it.

The Nereidium Montes made up the northern rim around Argyre, but currently Ann and her team were investigating the southern rim, the Charitum Montes. Boone adjusted his course southward, and in the early afternoon he soared low over the broad flat plain of the Argyre Basin. After the wild cratering of the highlands, the basin floor seemed smooth indeed, a flat yellowish plain bounded by the big curve of rim ridges. From his vantage he could see about ninety degrees of the arc of the rim, enough to give him a sense of the size of the impact that had formed Argyre; it was an amazing sight. Flying over thousands of Martian craters had given Boone a sense of the sizes they came in, and Argyre was simply off the scale; a quite big crater named Galle was no more than a pockmark in Argyre’s rim! A whole world must have crashed in here! Or, at the very least, a damn big asteroid.

Inside the southeast curve of the rim, on the basin floor against the foothills of the Charitum, he spotted the thin white line of a landing strip. Easy to spot human constructs in such desolation, their regularity stood out like a beacon. Thermals were rising hard off the sunwarmed hills, and he turned down into one, dropping with a vibratory humm, the craft’s wings bouncing visibly as it stopped. Dropping like a rock, like that asteroid, John thought with a grin, and he pulled up for the landing with a dramatic last flourish, putting down with as much precision as he could muster, aware of his reputation as a hot flyer, which of course had to be reinforced at every opportunity. Part of the job …

But it turned out there were only two people in the trailers by the strip, and neither of them had watched him land. They were inside watching TV news from Earth; they looked up when he came in the inner lock door, and jumped to their feet to greet him. Ann was up one of the mountain canyons with a team, they told him, probably no more than two hours’ drive away. John ate lunch with them, two Brit women with North accents, very tough and charming; then he took a rover and followed the tracks up a cleft into the Charitum. An hour’s twisting climb up a flat-bottomed arroyo brought him to a mobile trailer, with three rovers parked outside it. Together they gave it the look of a desiccated cafe in the Mojave.

The trailer was unoccupied. Footprints led away from the camp in many directions. After thinking it over Boone climbed a knoll west of camp, and sat down on its peak. He lay on the rock and slept until the cold penetrated his walker. Then he sat up and tongued a capsule of omegendorph, and watched the black shadows of the hills creep east. He thought about what had happened at Senzeni Na, running through his memories of the hours before and after the accident, the looks on people’s faces, what they had said. The image of the falling truck gave his pulse a little surge.

Copper figures appeared in a cleft between hills to the west. He stood and descended the knoll, and met them down at the trailer.

“What are you doing here?” Ann said over the first hundred’s band.

“I want to talk.”

She grunted and switched off.

The trailer would have been a bit crowded even without him. They sat in the main room knee-to-knee, while Simon Frazier heated spaghetti sauce and boiled water for pasta in the little kitchen nook. The trailer’s sole window faced east, and as they ate they watched the shadow of the mountains stretch out over the floor of the great basin. John had brought along a half-liter bottle of Utopian cognac, and he broke it out after dinner to moans of approval. As the areologists sipped he cleaned the dishes (“I want to”) and asked how their investigation was going. They were looking for evidence of ancient glacial episodes, which if found would support a model of the planet’s early history that included oceans filling the low spots.

But Ann, John thought as he listened to them; would she want to find evidence of an oceanic past? It was a model that tended to lend moral support to the terraforming project, implying as it did that they were only restoring an earlier state of things. So probably she would not want to find any such evidence. Would that disinclination bias her work? Well, sure. If not consciously, then deeper. Consciousness was just a thin lithosphere over a big hot core, after all. Detectives had to remember that.

But everyone in the trailer seemed to agree that they weren’t finding any evidence for glaciation, and they were all good areologists. There were high basins that resembled cirques, and high valleys with the classic U-shape of glacial valleys, and some dome-and-wall configurations that might have been the result of glacial plucking; all these features had been seen in satellite photos, along with one or two bright flashes that some people had thought might be reflections from glacial polish. But on the ground none of it was holding up. They had found no glacial polish, even in the most wind-protected sections of the U-shaped valleys; no moraines, lateral or terminal; no signs of plucking, or of transition lines where nanatuks would have stuck out of even the highest levels of ancient ice. Nothing. It was another case of what they called sky areology, which had a history going back to the early satellite photos, and even to the telescopes. The canals had been sky areology; and many more bad hypotheses had been formulated in the same way, hypotheses that were only now being tested with the rigor of ground areology. Most collapsed under the weight of surface data, got tossed in the canal as they said.

The glacial theory, however, and the oceanic model of which it was part, had always been more persistent than most. First, because almost every model of the planet’s formation indicated that there should have been a lot of water outgassing, and it had to have gone somewhere. And second, John thought, because there were a lot of people who would be comforted if the oceanic model were true; they would feel less uneasy about the morality of terraforming. Opponents to terraforming, therefore … No, he was not surprised that Ann’s team was not finding anything. Feeling the cognac a bit, and irritated by her unfriendliness, he said from the kitchen, “But if there were glaciers the most recent would have been, what, a billion years ago? That much time would take care of any of the superficial signs, I should think, glacial polish or moraines or nanatuks. Leaving nothing but the gross landforms, which is what you have. Right?”

Ann had been silent, but now she said, “The landforms aren’t unique to glaciation. All of them are common in Martian ranges, because they were all formed by rock falling out of the sky. Every kind of formation you can think of is out here somewhere, bizarre shapes limited only by the angle of repose.” She had refused any cognac, which surprised John, and now she stared at the floor with a disgusted look.

“Not U-shaped valleys, surely,” John said.

“Yes, U-shaped valleys too.”

“The problem is that the oceanic model isn’t very falsifiable,” Simon said quietly. “You can keep failing to find good evidence for it, and we are, but that doesn’t disprove it.”

The kitchen clean, John asked Ann to go out for a sunset walk. She hesitated, unwilling; but it was one of her rituals and everyone knew it, and with a quick grimace and a hard glance she agreed.

Once outside he led her up to the same peak he had napped on. The sky was a plum colored arch over the black serrated ridges surrounding them, and stars were popping into existence in a flood, hundreds per eyeblink. He stood by her side; she stared away from him. The ragged skyline might have been a scene from Earth. She was a bit taller than him, a gaunt, angular silhouette. John liked her, but whatever reciprocal liking she may have had for him – and they had had some good talks in years past – had dissipated when he chose to work with Sax. He could have done anything he liked, her hard looks said, and yet he had chosen terraforming.

Well, it was true. He put his hand before her, forefinger raised. She punched her wristpad and suddenly her breathing sighed in his ear. “What,” she said, without looking his way.

“It’s about the sabotage incidents,” he said.

“I thought so. I suppose Russell thinks I’m behind them.”

“It’s not so much that— ”

“Does he think I’m stupid? Does he imagine I think a little bit of vandalism will stop you from your boys’ games?”

“Well, it’s rather more than little bits. There’ve been six major incidents now, and any of them could have killed people.”

“Knocking mirrors out of orbit can kill people?”

“If they’re doing maintenance on them.”

She hmphed. “What else has happened?”

“A truck was knocked off one of the mohole shaft roads yesterday, and almost landed on me.” He heard her breath catch. “That’s the third truck to go. And that mirror was knocked into a spin with a maintenance worker on it, and she had to do a free solo to a station, it took her more than an hour to get there, and she almost didn’t make it. And then an explosives dump went off by accident at the Elysian mohole, a minute after a whole crew left it. And all the lichen at Underhill were killed by a virus that shut down the whole lab.”

Ann shrugged. “What do you expect from GEMs? It could have been an accident. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“It all adds up to peanuts. Does Russell think I’m stupid?”

“You know he doesn’t. But it’s a matter of tipping the balance. A lot of Terran money is being invested in the project, but it wouldn’t take much bad publicity to get a lot of it to drop out.”

“Maybe so,” Ann said. “But you ought to listen to yourself when you say things like that. You and Arkady are the biggest advocates of some kind of new Martian society, you two plus Hiroko, maybe. But the way Russell and Frank and Phyllis are bringing up Terran capital, the whole thing’s going to be out of your hands. It’ll be business as usual, and all your ideas will disappear.”

“I tend to think we all want something similar here,” John said. “We want to do good work in a good place. We just emphasize different parts of the process of getting there, that’s all. If we only coordinated our efforts, and worked as a team—”

“We don’t want the same things!” Ann said. “You want to change Mars, and I don’t. It’s as simple as that.”

“Well …” John faltered before her bitterness. They were moving slowly around the hill, in a complicated dance that imitated the conversation, sometimes face to face, sometimes back to back; and always her voice was right in his ear, and his in hers. He liked that about walker conversations, and used it, that insidious voice in the ear which could be so persuasive, caressing, hypnotic. “It’s not that simple, even so. I mean, you ought to be helping those of us who are closest to your beliefs, and opposing those furthest away.”

“I do that.”

“Which is why I came to ask you what you know about these saboteurs. It makes sense, right?”

“I know nothing about them. I wish them luck.”

“In person?”

“What?”

“I’ve traced your movements in the last couple of years, and you’ve always been near every incident, within a month or so before it happened. You were in Senzeni Na a few weeks ago on your way here, right?”

He listened to her breathe. She was angry. “Using me as cover,” she muttered, and something more he didn’t catch.

“Who?”

She turned her back on him. “You should ask the Coyote about this stuff, John.”

“The Coyote?”

She laughed shortly. “Haven’t you heard of him? He wanders around on the surface without a walker, people say. Pops up here and there, sometimes on both sides of the world in a single night. Knew Big Man himself, back in the good old days. And a big friend of Hiroko’s. And a big enemy of terraforming.”

“Have you met him?”

She didn’t reply.

“Look,” he said after nearly a minute of their shared breathing, “people are going to get killed. Innocent bystanders.”

“Innocent bystanders are going to get killed when the permafrost melts and the ground collapses under our feet. I don’t have anything to do with that either. I just do my work. Trying to catalog what was here before we came.”

“Yes. But you’re the most famous red of all, Ann. These people must have contacted you because of that, and I wish you’d discourage them. It might save some lives.”

She turned to face him. Her helmet’s faceplate reflected the western skyline, purple above, black below, the border between the two colors jagged and raw. “If you left the planet alone, it would save lives. That’s what I want. I’d kill you if I thought it would help.”

After that there was little to say. On the way back down to the trailer, he tried another topic. “What do you think happened to Hiroko and the rest of them?”

“They disappeared.”

John rolled his eyes. “She didn’t talk to you about it?”

“No. Did she talk to you?”

“No. I don’t think she talked to anyone but her group. Do you know where they went?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea why they left?”

“They probably wanted to get free of us. Make something new. What you and Arkady say you want, they really wanted.”

John shook his head. “If they do it, they’ll do it for twenty people. I mean to do it for everyone.”

“Maybe they’re more realistic than you.”

“Maybe. We’ll find out. There’s more than one way to do this, Ann. You have to learn that.”

She didn’t reply.

The others stared at them as they entered the trailer, and Ann, storming into the kitchen nook, was no help. John sat on the arm of the one couch and asked them more questions about their work, and about groundwater levels in Argyre and the southern hemisphere generally. The big basins were low in elevation, but had been dehydrated in the impacts that formed them; and in general it appeared that the planet’s water had mostly seeped north. Another part of the mystery: no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology, a solution to which might prove the key to explaining all the other enigmas of the Martian landscape, as tectonic plate theory had once explained so many different problems in geology. In fact some people wanted to use the tectonic explanation again, postulating that an old crust had slid over itself onto the southern half, leaving the north to form a new skin, then all of it freezing in position when planetary cooling stopped all tectonic movement. Ann thought that was ridiculous; in her opinion the northern hemisphere was simply the biggest impact basin of all, the ultimate bang of the Noachian. A similar-sized strike had knocked the moon out of the Earth, probably around the same time. The areologists discussed various aspects of the problem for a while, and John listened, asking an occasional neutral question.

They turned on the TV for news from Earth, and watched a short feature on the mining and oil drilling that was starting in Antarctica.

“That’s our doing you know,” Ann said from the kitchen. “They kept mining and oil out of Antarctica for almost a hundred years, ever since the IGY and the first treaty. But when terraforming began here it all collapsed. They’re running out of oil down there, and the Southern Club is poor, and there’s a whole continent of oil and gas and minerals right next to them, being treated like a national park by the rich northern countries. And then the south saw these same rich northern countries start to take Mars completely apart, and they said, What the hell, you can tear a whole planet apart and we’re supposed to protect this iceberg we’ve got right next door with all these resources we desperately need? Forget it! So they broke the Antarctic Treaty, and there they are drilling and no one’s done a thing about it. And now the last clean place on Earth is gone too.”

She walked over and sat before the screen, stuck her face in a mug of steaming hot chocolate. “There’s more if you want,” she said to John rudely. Simon gave him a sympathetic glance, and the others stared round-eyed at both of them, looking appalled to see a fight between two of the first hundred: what a joke that was! It almost made John laugh; and when he got up to pour a mug for himself, he leaned over impulsively and kissed Ann on the top of the head. She stiffened and he went on to the kitchen. “We all want different things from Mars,” he said, forgetting he had just said the opposite to Ann out on the hill. “But here we are, and there aren’t that many of us, and it’s our place. We make what we want of it, like Arkady says. Now you don’t like what Sax or Phyllis want, and they don’t like what you want, and Frank doesn’t like what anyone wants, and more people are coming every year supporting one position or another, even if they don’t know it. So it could get ugly. In fact it’s started to get ugly already, with these attacks on equipment. Can you imagine that happening at Underhill?”

“Hiroko’s group was ripping off Underhill the whole time they were there,” Ann said. “They had to’ve been, to take off like that.”

“Yeah, maybe. But they weren’t endangering people’s lives.” The image of the truck falling down the shaft came to him again, quick and vivid. He drank hot cocoa and scalded his mouth. “Damn! Anyway, whenever I get discouraged about all this I try to remember that it’s natural. It’s inevitable that people are going to fight, but now we’re fighting about Martian things. I mean people aren’t fighting over whether they’re American or Japanese or Russian or Arab, or some religion or race or sex or whatnot. They’re fighting because they want one Martian reality or other. That’s all that matters now. So we’re already halfway there.” He frowned at Ann, who stared at the floor. “Do you see what I mean?”

She glanced at him. “It’s the second half that matters.”

“All right, maybe so. You take too much for granted, but that’s the way people are. But you have to realize that you’re having your effect on us, Ann. You’ve changed the way everyone thinks about what we’re doing here. Hell, Sax and a lot of others used to talk about doing anything possible to terraform as quick as possible – driving a bunch of asteroids directly into the planet, using hydrogen bombs to try and start volcanoes – whatever it took! Now all those plans have been scrapped because of you and your supporters. The whole vision of how to terraform and how far to go with it has changed. And I think we can eventually reach a compromise value, where we get some protection from radiation, and a biosphere and maybe air we can breathe, or at least not die in immediately – and still leave it pretty much like it was before we came.” Ann rolled her eyes at this, but he forged on: “No one’s talking about pumping it up into a jungle planet you know, even if they could! It’ll always be cold, and the Tharsis bulge will always stick right out into space, in effect, so there’ll be a huge part of the planet that’s never touched. And that’ll be partly because of you.”

“But who’s to say that with that first step done, you won’t want more?”

“Maybe some will. But I for one will try to stop them. I will! I may not be on your side, but I see your point. And when you fly over the highlands like I did today, you can’t help but love it. People may try to change the planet, but all the while the planet will be changing them too. A sense of place, an aesthetics of landscape, all those things change with time. You know the people who first saw the Grand Canyon thought it was ugly as hell because it wasn’t like the Alps. It took them a long time to see its beauty.”

“They drowned most of it anyway,” Ann said blackly.

“Yeah yeah. But who knows what our kids will think is beautiful? It’s sure to be based on what they know, and this place will be the only place they know. So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us.”

“Areoforming,” Ann said, and a rare little smile flashed over her face; seeing it John felt his face flush; he hadn’t seen her smile like that in years, and he loved Ann, he loved to see her smile.

“I like that word,” she said now. She pointed a finger at him: “But I’ll hold you to it, John Boone! I’ll remember what you’ve said tonight!”

“Me too,” he said.

The rest of the evening was more relaxed. And the next day Simon saw him down to the airstrip, to the rover he was going to drive northward, and Simon, who usually would have seen him off with a smile and a handshake, at most a “nice to see you”, suddenly said to him, “I really appreciate what you said last night. I think it really cheered her up. Especially what you said about kids. She’s pregnant, you see.”

“What?” John shook his head. “She didn’t tell me. Are you the, the father?”

“Yeah.” Simon grinned.

“How old is she now, sixty?”

“Yeah. It’s stretching things a bit, so to speak, but it’s been done before. They took an egg frozen about fifteen years ago, fertilized it and planted it in her. We’ll see how it goes. They say Hiroko stays pregnant all the time these days, just keeps popping them like an incubator, same C section over and over.”

“They say a lot of things about Hiroko, but it’s all just stories.”

“Well, but we heard this from someone who supposedly knows.”

“The Coyote?” John said sharply.

Simon raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised she told you about him.”

John grunted, obscurely annoyed. No doubt his fame meant he missed out on a lot of gossip. “It’s good that she did. Well, anyway— “ He extended his right hand and they shook, hooking their fingers in the stiff clasp that had developed in the old space days. “Congratulations. Take care of her.”

Simon shrugged. “You know Ann. She does what she wants.”

So Boone drove north from Argyre for three days, enjoying the countryside and the solitude, and spending a few hours each afternoon ransacking the planetary records to track people’s movement, looking for correlations with the sabotage incidents. Early on the fourth morning he reached the Marineris canyons, which were some 1500 kilometers north of Argyre. He ran into a north-south transponder road, and followed it up a short rise to the southern rim of Melas Chasma, and got out of the rover to have a proper look.

He had never been to this part of the great canyon system; before the completion of the Marineris Transverse Highway it had been extremely hard to get to. It was dramatic, no doubt about it: the Melas cliff dropped a full three thousand meters from rim to canyon floor, so that the rim had a kind of glider’s view north. The other wall of the canyon was just visible out there, its rim peeking over the horizon; and between the two cliffs lay the spacious expanse of Melas Chasma, the heart of the whole Marineris complex. He could just make out the gaps in distant cliffs that marked the entrances to other canyons: Ius Chasma to the west, Candor to the north, Coprates to the east.

John walked the broken rim for more than an hour, pulling his helmet’s binocular lenses down over his faceplate for long periods of time, taking in as much as he could of the greatest canyon on Mars, feeling the euphoria of red land. He threw rocks over the side and watched them disappear, he talked to himself and sang, he hopped on his toes in a clumsy dance. Then he got back in his rover, refreshed, and drove a short distance along the rim, to the start of the cliff road.

Here the Transverse Highway became a single concrete lane, and switchbacked down the spine of an enormous rock ramp that extended down from the south rim to the canyon floor. This odd feature, called the Geneva Spur, pointed north almost perpendicularly from the cliff, straight toward Candor Chasma; it was so perfectly placed for their purposes that with the road on it, it looked like a ramp that the road-builders had constructed.

It was a steep spur, however, and the road had been forced to switchback all the way down, to keep the grade within reason. It was all visible from above; a thousand switchbacks snaking down the spine, looking like yellow thread stitched down a bump in a stained orange carpet.

Boone drove down this marvel carefully, turning the rover’s steering wheel left then right then left then right, time after time until he actually had to stop to rest his arms, and give himself a chance to look back and up at the southern wall behind him; it was steep indeed, fluted by a fractal pattern of deeply eroded ravines. Then it was off again for another half hour’s drive, hairpins left and right, again and again, until finally the road extended straight down the top of the flattening spur, which eventually spread out and merged into the canyon floor. And down there was a little cluster of vehicles.

It turned out to be the Swiss team that had just finished building the road, and he ended up spending the night with them. They were a group of about eighty: mostly young, mostly married, speaking German and Italian and French and, for his benefit, English, in several different accents. They had kids with them, and cats, and a portable greenhouse thick with herbs and garden vegetables. Soon they would be off like gypsies, in a caravan made up mostly of their earthmoving vehicles, traveling up to the west end of the canyon, to thread a road through Noctis Labyrinthus and onto the east flank of Tharsis. After that there would be other roads; perhaps one over the Tharsis Bulge between Arsia Mons and Pavonis Mons, perhaps one north to Echus Overlook. They weren’t sure yet, and Boone got the impression they didn’t really care; they planned to spend the rest of their lives traveling around building roads, so it didn’t much matter to them where they went next. Road gypsies forever.

They made sure all their kids shook John’s hand, and after dinner he gave a short talk, rambling in his usual way about their new life on Mars. “When I see you people out here it makes me really happy because it’s part of a new pattern to life: we’ve got the chance to create a new society out here – everything’s changing on the technical level and the social level might as well follow. I’m not exactly sure what the new society should be or should look like, that’s the hard part after all, but I know that it should be done, and I think you and all the other small groups out on the surface are figuring it out on an empirical basis. And seeing you helps me to think about it.” Which it did, though he was never much good at doing it on his feet; so he just slithered along a bit more in his free associational way, plucking whatever stuck out of the bag of his thoughts. And their eyes shone in the lamplight as they listened to him.

Later he sat with a few of them in a circle around a single lit lamp, and they stayed up through the night talking. The young Swiss asked him questions about his first trip, and about the first years in Underhill, both of which obviously had mythic dimensions for them, and he told them the real story, sort of, and made them laugh a lot; and asked them questions about Switzerland, how it worked, what they thought of it, why they were here rather than there. A blond woman laughed when he asked that. “Do you know about the Böögen?” she said, and he shook his head. “He’s part of our Christmas. Sami Claus comes to all the houses one by one, you see, and he has an assistant, the Böögen, who wears a cloak and a hood and carries a big bag. Sami Claus asks the parents how the children have been that year, and the parents show him the ledger, the record you know. And if the children have been good, Sami Claus gives them presents. But if the parents say the children have been bad, the Böögen sweeps them up in his bag and carries them away, and they’re never seen again.”

“What!” John cried.

“That is what they tell you. That is Switzerland. And that is why I am here on Mars.”

“The Böögen carried you here?”

They laughed, the woman too. “Yes. I was always bad.” She grew more serious. “But we will have no Böögen here.”

They asked him what he thought of the debate between the reds and the greens, and he shrugged and summarized what he could of Ann and Sax’s positions.

“I don’t think they are either right,” one of them said. His name was Jürgen and he was one of their leaders, an engineer who seemed some kind of cross between a burgermeister and a gypsy king, dark-haired and sharp-faced and serious. “Both sides say they are in favor of nature, of course. One has to say this. The reds say that the Mars that is already here is nature. But it is not nature, because it is dead. It is only rock. The greens tell this, and say they will bring nature to Mars with their terraforming. But that is not nature either, that is only culture. A garden, you know. An artwork. So neither way gets nature. There isn’t such a thing as nature possible on Mars.”

“Interesting!” John said. “I’ll have to tell Ann that, and see what she says. But …” He thought about it. “Then what do you call this? What do you call what you’re doing?”

Jürgen shrugged, grinned. “We don’t call it anything. It is just Mars.”

Perhaps that was being Swiss, John thought. He had been meeting them more and more in his travels, and they all seemed like that. Do things, and don’t worry too much about theory. Whatever seemed right.

Later still, after they had drunk another few bottles of wine, he asked them if they had ever heard of the Coyote. They laughed; one said, “He’s the one who came here before you, right?” They laughed again at his expression. “A story only,” one explained. “Like the canals, or Big Man. Or Sami Claus.”

Driving north the next day across Melas Chasma, John wished (as he had before) that everyone on the planet was Swiss, or at least like the Swiss. Or more like the Swiss in certain ways, anyway. Their love of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind of life: rational, just, prosperous, scientific. They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch of land they owned on Earth. The Swiss roadbuilding crew back there was Martian already, having brought the life and left the baggage behind.

He sighed, and ate lunch as his rover rolled past transponders north. It was not that simple, of course. The roadbuilding crew were traveling Swiss, gypsies of a sort, the kind of Swiss who spent most of their life out of Switzerland. There were a lot of those, but they were selected out by that choice, they were different. The Swiss who stayed at home were pretty intense about Swissness; still armed to the teeth, still willing to be the bagman for whoever brought them cash; still not a member of the UN. Although that fact, given the power UNOMA currently had over the local situation, made them even more interesting to John, as a model. That ability to be part of the world but to stand away from it at the same time; to use it, but hold it off; to be small but in control, to be armed to the teeth but never go to war; wasn’t that one way of defining what he wanted for Mars? It seemed to him there were some lessons there, for any hypothetical Martian state.

He spent a fair amount of his time alone thinking about that hypothetical state; it was a kind of obsession with him, and he found it very frustrating that he could not seem to come up with anything more than vague desires. And so now he thought hard about Switzerland and what it might tell him, he tried to be organized about it: “Pauline, please call up an encyclopedia article on the Swiss government.”

The rover passed transponder after transponder as he read the article that came up on the screen. He was disappointed to find that there was nothing obviously unique about the Swiss system of government. Executive authority was given to a council of seven, elected by the assembly. No charismatic president, which some part of Boone did not like very much. The assembly, aside from selecting the federal council, appeared to do little; it was caught between the power of the executive council and the power of the people, as exercised in direct initiatives and referenda, an idea they had gotten in the nineteenth century from California of all places. And then there was the federal system; the cantons in all their diversity were supposed to have a great deal of independence, which also weakened the assembly. But cantonal power had been eroding for generations, the federal government wresting away more and more. What did it add up to? “Pauline, please call up my constitution file.” He added a few notes to the file he had just recently begun: Federal council, direct initiatives, weak assembly, local independence, particularly in cultural matters. Something to think over, anyway. More data to add to the stew of his ideas. It helped somehow to write it down.

He drove on, remembering the roadbuilders’ calmness, their strange mixture of engineering and mysticism. The warmth of their welcome, which wasn’t something Boone took for granted; it didn’t always happen. In the Arab and Israeli settlements, for instance, he was received very stiffly, perhaps because he was seen as being anti-religion, perhaps because Frank had been spreading tales against him; he had been amazed to discover an Arabic caravan whose members believed he had forbidden the building of a mosque on Phobos; and they had only stared at him when he denied even hearing about such a plan. He was pretty sure that was Frank’s doing, word got back to him through Janet and others that Frank was prone to undercutting him in that way. So yes, there were definitely groups that greeted him coolly: the Arabs, the Israelis, the nuclear reactor teams, some of the transnational executives … groups with their own intense and parochial programs, people who objected to his larger perspective. Unfortunately there were a lot of them.

He came out of his reverie and looked around, and was surprised to discover that out in the middle of Melas it looked exactly as if he were out on the northern plains somewhere. The great canyon was two hundred kilometers wide at this point, and the curvature of the planet was so sharp that the north and south canyon walls, all three vertical kilometers of them, were completely under the horizons. Not until the following morning did the northern horizon double, and then separate out into the canyon floor and the great northern wall, which was cut in two by the gap of a short north-south canyon connecting Melas and Candor. It was only when he drove into that wide slot that he had the kind of view people thought of when they imagined being down in Marineris: truly giant walls flanked him on both sides, dark brown slabs riven by a fractal infinity of gullies and ridges. At the foot of the walls lay the huge spills of ancient rockfall, or the broken terracing of fossil beaches.

In this gap the Swiss road was a line of green transponders, snaking past mesas and arroyos, so that it looked as if Monument Valley had been relocated at the bottom of a canyon twice as deep and five times as wide as the Grand Canyon. The sight was too astonishing for John to be able to concentrate on anything else, and for the first time in his journey he drove all day with Pauline off.

North of the transverse gap, he drove into the huge sink of Candor Chasma, and now it was as if he were in a gigantic replica of the Painted Desert, with great deposition layers everywhere, bands of purple and yellow sediment, orange dunes, red erratics, pink sands, indigo gullies; truly a fantastic, extravagant landscape, disorienting to the eye because all the wild colors made it hard to figure out what was what, and how big it was, and how far away. Giant plateaus that seemed about to block his way would turn out to be curving strata on a distant cliff; small boulders next to the transponders would turn out to be enormous mesas half a day’s drive away. And in the sunset light all the colors blazed, the whole Martian spectrum revealed and blazing as if color was bursting out of the rock, everything from pale yellow to dark bruised purple. Candor Chasma! He was going to have to come back some time and explore it.

The day after that, he drove up the steady slope of the north Ophir road, which the Swiss crew had completed the previous year. Up and up and up; and then, without ever seeing a distinct rim he was out of the canyons, rolling past the domed holes of Ganges Catena, and then over the old familiar plain, following a wide road, over the tight horizon past Chernobyl and Underhill; then on for another day west to Echus Overlook, Sax’s new terraforming headquarters. His journey had taken a week, and crossed 2500 kilometers.

Sax Russell was back from Acheron, in his own place. He was a power now and no doubt about it, having been named by UNOMA a decade before as scientific head of the terraforming effort. And of course that decade of power had had its effect on him. He had solicited UN and transnational aid to build a whole town to serve as headquarters for the terraforming effort, and he had placed this town about five hundred kilometers due west of Underhill, on the edge of the cliff that formed the eastern wall of Echus Chasma. Echus was one of the narrowest and deepest canyons on the planet, and its eastern wall was even taller than south Melas; the section they had chosen to build the town into was a vertical basalt cliff four thousand meters high.

At the top of the cliff there was very little sign of the new town; the land behind the rim was almost unmarked, only a concrete pillbox here and there, and to the north the plume of a Rickover. But when John climbed out of his rover into one of the rim pillboxes, and got in one of the big elevators inside it, the extent of the town began to come clear; the elevators went down fifty floors. And when he descended fifty stories, he got out and found other elevators that would take him even lower, a whole series of them, descending right down to the floor of Echus Chasma. Say a story was ten meters; that meant there was room in the cliff for four hundred stories. Actually not that much of the room had been used yet, and most of the rooms built so far were clustered up in the highest twenty floors. Sax’s offices, for instance, were very near the top.

His meeting room was a big open chamber, with a continuous floor-to-ceiling window as its western wall. When John walked into the room looking for Sax, it was still mid-morning, and the window was almost clear; far, far below lay the chasm floor, still half in shadow, and there out in the sunlight stood the much lower western wall of Echus, and beyond that the great slope of the Tharsis bulge, rising higher and higher to the south. Out in the middle distance was the low bump of Tharsis Tholus, and to the left of it, just poking over the horizon, lay the purple cone of Ascraeus Mons, the northernmost of the great prince volcanoes.

But Sax was not in the meeting room, and he never looked out of this window as far as John could tell. He was next door in a lab, more lab rat than ever, hunch-shouldered and twitch-whiskered, gazing around at the floor, speaking in a voice that sounded like an AI. He led John through a whole sequence of labs, leaning forward to peer into screens or at inching graph paper, talking to John over a shoulder, in a state of distraction. The rooms they passed through were jammed with computers, printers, screens, books, rolls and stacks of paper, disks, GC-mass specs, incubators, fume hoods, long apparatus-filled lab tables, whole libraries; and placed on every precarious surface were potted plants, most of them unrecognizable bulges, armored succulents and the like, so that at a glance it looked like a virulent mold had sprung up and covered everything. “Your labs are getting kind of messy,” John said.

“The planet is the lab,” Sax replied.

John laughed, moved a bright yellow surarctic cactus from a countertop and sat down. It was said Sax never left these rooms anymore. “What are you simming today?”

“Atmospheres.”

Of course. It was a problem that gave Sax a serious case of the blinks. All the heat they were releasing or applying to the planet was thickening the atmosphere, but all their CO₂-fixing strategies were thinning it; and as the chemical composition of the air slowly shifted to something less poisonous it became less greenhouse-gassed as well, so that things cooled back down and the process slowed. Negative feedback countering positive feedback, all over the place. Juggling all these factors into any meaningful extrapolative program was more than anyone had yet accomplished to Sax’s satisfaction, so he had resorted to his usual solution; he was trying to do it himself.

He paced the narrow aisles left between equipment, moving chairs out of his way. “There’s just too much carbon dioxide. In the old days the modelers swept that under the rug. I think I’m going to have to have robots feed the southern polar cap into Sabatier factories. What we can process won’t sublime, and we can release the oxygen and make bricks of the carbon, I guess. We’ll have more carbon blocks than we’ll know what to do with. Black pyramids to go along with the white.”

“Pretty.”

“Uhn.” The Crays and the two new Schillers hummed away behind him, providing his monotonal recitative with a ground bass. These computers spent all their time running through one set of conditions after another, Sax said; but the results, while never the same, were seldom encouraging. The air was going to be cold and poisonous for a good while yet.

Sax wandered down the hall, and John followed him into what looked like another lab, although there was a bed and a refrigerator in one corner. Violently disarranged bookscapes were overgrown with potted plants, bizarre Pleistocene growths that looked as deadly as the air outside. John sat in the lone empty chair. Sax stood and looked down at a seashell shrub as John described his meeting with Ann.

“Do you think she’s involved?” Sax said.

“I think she may know who is. She mentioned someone called the Coyote.”

“Ah yes.” Sax glanced briefly at John – at his feet, to be precise. “She’s siccing us onto a legendary character. He’s supposed to have been on the Ares with us, you know. Hidden by Hiroko.”

John was so surprised that Sax had heard of the Coyote that it took him a while to figure out what else was disturbing about what he had said. But then it came to him. One night Maya had told him that she had seen a face, the face of a stranger. The voyage out had been hard on Maya, and he had discounted the tale. But now …

Sax was wandering around turning on lights, peering at screens, muttering about security measures. He opened the refrigerator door briefly and John caught a glimpse of more spiky growths; either he kept experiments in there, or else his snack food had suffered a truly virulent eruption of mold. John said, “You can see why most of the attacks have been on the moholes. They’re the easiest project to attack.”

Sax tilted his head to the side. “Are they?”

“Think about it. Your little windmills are everywhere, there’s nothing to be done about them.”

“People are disabling them. We’ve had reports.”

“What, a dozen? And how many are out there, a hundred thousand? They’re junk, Sax. Litter. Your worst idea.” And nearly fatal to his project, in fact, because of the algae dishes Sax had hidden in some of them. All of that algae had died, apparently; but if it hadn’t, and if anyone had been able to prove Sax had been responsible for its dissemination, he could have lost his job. It was yet another indication that Sax’s logical manner was a front.

Now his nose was wrinkled. “They add up to a terawatt a year.”

“And knocking a few apart won’t do anything to that. As for the other physical operations, the black snow algae is on the northern polar cap, and can’t be removed. The dawn and dusk mirrors are in orbit, and it’s not so easy to knock them out.”

“Someone did it to Pythagoras.”

“True, but we know who it was, and there’s a security team following her.”

“She may never lead them to anyone else. They may be able to afford to expend a person per act, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Yeah, but some simple changes in screening personnel would make it impossible for anyone to smuggle any tools aboard.”

“They could use what’s out there.” Sax shook his head. “The mirrors are vulnerable.”

“Okay. More than some projects, anyway.”

“Those mirrors are adding thirty calories per square centimeter per sol,” Sax said. “And more all the time.” Almost all the freighters from Earth were sunsailers now, and when they arrived in the Martian system they were linked to large collections of earlier arrivals parked in areosynchronous orbit, and programmed to swivel so that they reflected their light onto the terminators, adding a little bit of energy to each day’s dawn and dusk. The whole arrangement had been coordinated by Sax’s office, and he was proud of it.

“We’ll increase security for all the maintenance crews,” John said.

“So. Increased security on the mirrors and at the moholes.”

“Yes. But that’s not all.”

Sax sniffed. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the problem is that it isn’t just the terraforming projects per se that are potential targets. I mean, the nuclear reactors are part of the project too in their way; they provide a lot of your power, and they’re pumping out heat like the furnaces they are. If one of them were to go, it would cause all kinds of fallout, more political even than physical.”

The vertical lines between Sax’s eyes reached up nearly to his hairline. John held out his palms. “Not my fault. That’s just the way it is.”

Sax said, “AI, take a note. Look into reactor security.”

“Note taken,” one of the Schillers said, sounding just like Sax.

“And that’s not the worst,” John said. Sax twitched, glared furiously at the floor. “The bioengineering labs.”

Sax’s mouth became a tight line.

“New organisms are being cooked up daily,” John went on, “and it might be possible to create something that would kill everything else on the planet.”

Sax blinked. “Let’s hope none of these people think like you.”

“I’m just trying to think like them.”

“AI, take a note. Biolab security.”

“Of course Vlad and Ursula and their group have stuck suicide genes into everything they’ve made,” John said. “But those are meant to stop oversuccess, or mutational accidents. If someone were to deliberately circumvent them, and concoct something that fed on oversuccess, we could be in trouble.”

“I see that.”

“So. The labs, the reactors, the moholes, the mirrors. It could be worse.”

Sax rolled his eyes. “I’m glad you think so. I’ll talk to Helmut about it. I’ll be seeing him soon anyway. It looks like they’re going to approve Phyllis’s elevator at the next UNOMA session. That will cut the costs of terraforming tremendously.”

“Eventually it will, but the initial investment must be huge.”

Sax shrugged. “Push an Amor asteroid into orbit, set up a robot factory, let it go to work. It’s not as expensive as you might think.”

John rolled his eyes. “Sax, who’s paying for all this?”

Sax tilted his head, blinked. “The sun.”

John stood, suddenly hungry. “Then the sun calls the shots. Remember that.”

Mangalavid broadcast six hours of local amateur video every evening, a weird grab bag of stuff that John watched every chance he got. So after building a big green salad in the kitchen he went to the window room on the dorm floor, and watched while eating, glancing from time to time at the florid sunset over Ascraeus. The first ten minutes of that evening’s broadcast had been shot by a sanitary engineer working on a waste processing plant in Chasma Borealis; her voiceover was enthusiastic but boring: “What’s nice is we can pollute all we want with certain materials, oxygen, ozone, nitrogen, argon, steam, some biota – which gives us leeway we didn’t have back home, we just keep grinding what they give us till we can let it loose.” Back home, John said to himself, A newcomer. After her there was an attempt at a karate bout, both hilarious and beautiful at the same time; and then twenty minutes of some Russians staging Hamlet in pressure suits at the bottom of the Tyrrhena Patera mohole, a production that struck John as crazy until Hamlet caught sight of Claudius kneeling to pray, and the camera tilted up to show the mohole as cathedral walls, rising above Claudius to an infinitely distant shaft of sunlight, like the forgiveness he would never receive.

John shut off the TV and took the elevator down to the dorm. He got into bed and relaxed. Karate as ballet. The newcomers were all still engineers, construction workers, scientists of all kinds; but they didn’t seem as single-minded as the first hundred, and that was probably good. They still had a scientific mindset and worldview, they were practical, empirical, rational; one could hope that the selection process on Earth was still working against fanaticism, sending up people with a kind of traveling-Swiss sensibility, practical but open to new possibilities, able to form new loyalties and beliefs. Or so he hoped. He knew by now it was a bit naïve. You only had to look at the first hundred to realize scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so; educations too narrowly focused, perhaps. Hiroko’s team disappearing … Out there in the wild rock somewhere, lucky bastards … He fell asleep.

He worked at Echus Overlook a few days more, then got a call from Helmut Bronski in Burroughs, who wanted to confer with him about the new arrivals from Earth. John decided to take the train to Burroughs and see Helmut in person.

The night before his departure, he went to see Sax in his labs; when he walked in Sax said in his monotone, “We’ve found an Amor asteroid that’s ninety percent ice, in an orbit that will bring it near Mars in three years. Just what I’ve been looking for, in fact.” His plan was to place a robot-controlled mass driver on an ice asteroid and push it into an aerobraking orbit around Mars, thus burning it up in the atmosphere. This would satisfy UNOMA protocols forbidding the kind of mass destruction that a direct impact would cause, but it would still add massive quantities of water and separated hydrogen and oxygen to the atmosphere, thickening it with precisely the gases they needed most. “It could raise the atmospheric pressure by as much as fifty millibars.”

“You’re kidding!” The pre-arrival average at the datum had been between seven and ten millibars (Earth’s sea level averaged 1013), and all their efforts so far had only raised the average to around fifty. “One iceball will double the atmospheric pressure?”

“That’s what the simulations indicate. Of course with the initial level so low, doubling is not as impressive as it sounds.”

“Still, that’s great, Sax. And it’ll be hard to sabotage.”

But Sax didn’t want to be reminded of that. He frowned slightly, and slipped away.

John laughed at his skittishness, and went to the door. Then he stopped to think, and looked up and down the hall. Empty. And no video monitors in Sax’s offices. He went back in, grinning at his own furtive tiptoes, and glanced around at the paper chaos on Sax’s desk. Where to start? Presumably his AI would be the repository of anything interesting, but probably it would only respond to Sax’s voice, and would surely keep a record of any other inquiries. Quietly he opened a desk drawer. Empty. All the drawers in the desk were empty; he almost laughed out loud, stifled it. There was a stack of correspondence on a lab bench; he picked through it. Mostly notes from the biologists at Acheron. At the bottom of the stack was a single sheet of unsigned mail, with no return address or origin code; Sax’s printer had spit it out without any identification that John could see. The message was brief:

“1). We use suicide genes to curb proliferation. 2). There are so many heat sources now on the surface that we don’t think anyone can tell our exhaust from the rest of it. 3). We simply agreed we wanted to get off and work on our own, without interference. I’m sure you understand now.”

After a minute of staring at this John whipped his head up and looked around. Still alone. He glanced at the note again, put it back where he had found it and walked quietly out of Sax’s offices, back to the guest quarters. “Sax,” he said admiringly, “you tricky congress of rats!”

The train to Burroughs carried mostly freight, thirty narrow cars of it, with two passenger cars up front, running over a superconducting magnetic piste so quickly and smoothly that it was hard to believe the view; after John’s endless plods cross-country in rovers, it was almost frightening. The only thing to do was flood the pleasure centers in the old brain with omegendorph and sit back and enjoy it, looking out at what appeared to be some kind of terrain-following supersonic flight.

The piste had been routed roughly parallel to the 10° N latitude; eventually the plan was to ring the planet, but so far only the hemisphere between Echus and Burroughs had been finished. Burroughs had become the biggest town in the far hemisphere. The original settlement had been built by an American-based consortium, using a French-led EC design and was located at the upper end of Isidis Planitia, which was in effect a huge trough where the northern plains made a deep indentation into the southern highlands. The sides and head of the trough counteracted the planet’s curvature in such a way that the landscape around the town had something like Terran horizons, and as the train flew down the great trough Boone could see across mesa-dotted dark plains to horizons some sixty kilometers away.

Burroughs’s buildings were almost all cliff-dwellings, cut into the sides of five low mesas that were grouped together on a rise in the bend of an ancient curving channel. Big sections of the mesas’ vertical sides had been filled by rectangles of mirrored glass, as if postmodern skyscrapers had been turned on their sides and shoved into the hills. A startling sight, in fact, and far more impressive than Underhill, or even Echus Overlook, which had a great view but could not be seen. No, the glass-sided mesas of Burroughs, on their rise over a channel that seemed to be begging for water, with a view out to distant hills; these features combined to give the new town a quickly growing reputation as the most beautiful city on Mars.

Its western train station was inside one of the excavated mesas, a glass-walled room sixty meters high. John stepped out into this grand space and made his way through the crowds of people, head craned back like a hick in Manhattan. Train crews were dressed in blue jumpers, prospecting teams in walker green, UNOMA bureaucrats in suits, construction workers in work jumpers, colored like rainbows to suggest sportswear. UNOMA headquarters had been located in Burroughs three years before, and that had caused a real building boom; it was a close thing whether there were more UNOMA bureaucrats or construction workers in the station.

At the far end of the great room John found a subway entrance, and took a little subway car to the UNOMA headquarters. In the car he shook hands with a few people who recognized and approached him, feeling the old weirdness of the fishbowl return. He was back among strangers. In a city.

That night he had dinner with Helmut Bronski. They had met many times before, and John was impressed by the man, a German millionaire who had gotten into politics: tall, beefy, blond and red-faced, impeccably groomed, dressed in an expensive gray suit. He had been the EEC’s minister of finance when he took the UNOMA post. Now he told John the latest news, in a very urbane British English, eating roast beef and potatoes rapidly between bursts of sentences, holding his silverware in the workmanlike German fashion. “We are going to award a prospecting contract in Elysium to the transnational consortium Armscor. They will be shipping up their own equipment.”

“But Helmut,” John said, “won’t that violate the Mars treaty?”

Helmut made a wide gesture with the hand holding the fork: they were men of the world, his look said, they understood these kinds of things. “The treaty is superannuated, this is obvious to everyone dealing with the situation. But its scheduled revision is ten years away. In the meantime, we have to try to anticipate certain aspects of the revision. That’s why we give some concessions now. There is no rational reason to delay, and if we tried there would be trouble in the general assembly.”

“But the general assembly can’t be happy that you’ve given the first concession to an old South African weapons manufacturer!”

Helmut shrugged. “Armscor has very little relation to its origins. It is just a name. When South Africa became Azania, the company moved its home offices to Australia, and then to Singapore. And now of course it has become very much more than an aerospace firm. It is a true transnational, one of the new tigers, with banks of its own, and controlling interest in about fifty of the old Fortune 500.”

“Fifty of them?” John said.

“Yes. And Armscor is one of the smallest of the transnationals: that is why we picked it. But it still has a bigger economy than any but the largest twenty countries. As the old multinationals coalesce into transnational, you see, they really gather quite a bit of power, and they have influence in the general assembly. When we give one a concession, some twenty or thirty countries profit by it, and get their opening on Mars. And for the rest of the countries, that serves as a precedent. And so pressure on us is reduced.”

“Uh huh.” John thought it over. “Tell me, who negotiated this agreement?”

“Well, it was a number of us, you know.”

Helmut ate on, serenely ignoring John’s steady gaze.

John pursed his lips, looked away. He understood suddenly that he was talking with a man who, though a functionary, yet considered himself to be vastly more important on the planet than Boone. Genial, smooth-faced (and who cut his hair?), Bronski leaned back and ordered them after-dinner drinks. His assistant, their waitress for the evening, scurried off to oblige.

“I don’t believe I’ve been waited on before on Mars,” John observed.

Helmut met his gaze calmly, but his beefy color had heightened. John almost smiled. The UNOMA factor wanted to seem menacing, the representative of powers so sophisticated that John’s little weather station mentality couldn’t even comprehend them. But John had found in the past that a few minutes of his First Man On Mars routine was usually enough to crush that kind of attitude; and so he laughed, and drank, and told tales, and alluded to secrets only the first hundred were privy to, and made it clear to the assistant-waitress that he was the one in command at the table, and so on – behaving in general in an unconcerned, knowing, arrogant manner – and by the time they were finished with their sherbet and brandy Bronski was loud and blustery himself, clearly nervous and on the defensive.

Functionaries. John had to laugh.

But he was curious concerning the ultimate point of their conference, which still wasn’t clear to him. Perhaps Bronski had wanted to see in person how news of the new concession would affect one of the first hundred – perhaps to gauge the reaction of the rest? That would be silly, for to get a good gauge on the first hundred you would need to poll eighty of them at least; but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. John was used to being taken for a representative of things, for a symbol. The figurehead again. It could definitely be a waste of time.

He wondered if he could salvage something of his own from the evening, and as they were walking back to his guest suite, he said, “Have you ever heard of the Coyote?”

“An animal?”

He grinned, left it at that. In his room he lay on his bed, Mangalavid on the TV, thinking things over. Brushing his teeth before going to sleep, he looked his mirror image in the eye and scowled. He waved his toothbrush in the expansive gesture: “Vell,” he said in an unfair parody of Helmut’s slight accent, “ziss is business, you know! Business as usual!”

The next morning he had a few hours before his first meeting, and so he spent the time with Pauline, going over what he could find out about Helmut Bronski’s doings in the last six months. Could Pauline get into the UNOMA diplomatic pouch? Had Helmut ever been to Senzeni Na, or any of the other sabotage sites? While Pauline ran through her search algorithms John swallowed an omegendorph to kill his hangover, and thought about what lay behind this inspiration to search Helmut’s records. UNOMA constituted the ultimate authority on Mars these days, at least according to the letter of the law. In practice, as last night had made clear, it had the UN’s usual toothlessness before national armies and transnational money; unless it did their bidding it was helpless, it could not succeed against their desires and probably would never even try, as it was their tool. So what did they want, the national governments and the transnational boards of directors? If enough sabotages occurred, would that constitute a reason to bring in more of their own security? Would it tend to increase their control?

He made a disgusted noise. Apparently the only result of his investigation so far was that the list of suspects had tripled. Pauline said, “Excuse me, John,” and the information came up on her screen. The diplomatic pouch, she had found, was coded in one of the new unbreakable encryptions: you’d have to get the decryptions to enter it. Helmut’s movements, on the other hand, were easily traceable. He had been to Pythagoras, the mirror station that had been spun out of orbit, ten weeks ago. And to Senzeni Na two weeks before John’s visit. And yet no one at Senzeni Na had mentioned his appearance.

Most recently, he had just returned from the mining complex being set up at a place called Bradbury Point. Two days later John left to visit it.

Bradbury Point was located some eight hundred kilometers north of Burroughs, at the easternmost extension of the Nilosyrtis Mensae. The mensae were a series of long mesas, like islands of the southern highlands standing out in the shallows of the northern plains. The island mesas of Nilosyrtis had recently been found to be a rich metallogenic province, with deposits of copper, silver, zinc, gold, platinum and other metals. Concentrations of ore like this had been discovered in several locations on the so-called Great Escarpment, where the southern highlands dropped to the northern lowlands. Some areologists were going so far as to label the entire escarpment region a metallogenic province, banding the planet like the stitching on a baseball. It was another odd fact to add to the great north-south mystery, and a fact that was, of course, getting more than its share of attention. Excavations accompanied by intensive areological studies were being conducted by scientists working for UNOMA and, John discovered as he checked new arrivals’ employment records, the transnationals; all trying to find clues that would enable them to locate more deposits. But even on Earth the geology of mineral formation was not well understood, which was why prospecting still had large elements of chance in it; and on Mars, it was more mysterious yet. The recent finds on the Great Escarpment had been mostly an accident, and only now was the region becoming the main focus for prospecting.

The discovery of the Bradbury Point complex had accelerated this hunt, as it was turning out to be as big as the largest Terran complexes, perhaps the equal of the Bushveldt Complex of Azania. So: a gold rush in Nilosyrtis. And Helmut Bronski had visited the scene.

Which turned out to be small and utilitarian, a mere beginning; a Rickover and some refineries, next to a mesa hollowed out and filled by a habitat. The mines were scattered in the lowlands between mesas. Boone drove up to the habitat, coupled to the garage, then ducked through the locks. Inside a welcoming committee greeted him, and took him up to a window-walled conference room to talk.

There were, they said, about three hundred people in Bradbury, all employees of UNOMA, and trained by the transnational Shellalco. When they took John on a brief tour, he found they were a mix of ex-South Africans, Australians and Americans, all happy to shake his hand; about three-quarters men, pale and clean, looking more like lab techs than the blackened trolls John envisioned when he heard the word miner. Most of them were working on two-year contracts, they told him, and keeping track of the time they had left, by the week or even by the day. They ran the mines mostly by teleoperation, and looked shocked when Boone asked to go down into a mine for a look around. “It’s just a hole,” one said. Boone stared at them innocently; and after another moment’s hesitation, they scrambled to gather an escort team to take him out.

It took them two hours to get into walkers and out of a lock. They drove to the rim of a mine, and then down a ramp road into a terraced oval pit some two kilometers long. There they got out, and followed John as he walked around. Surrounded by big robotic dozers and dumptrucks and earth movers, his four escorts’ faceplates were all eyes; on the alert for a behemoth on the loose, John guessed. He stared at them, amazed at their timidity; it made him realize, all of a sudden, that Mars could be just another version of the hardship assignment, a hellish combination of Siberia, the interior of Saudi Arabia, the South Pole in winter, and Novy Mir.

Or else they just thought he was a dangerous man to be around. Which gave him a start. Everyone had no doubt heard of the falling dump truck; maybe it was just that. But could it be something more? Might these people be aware of something that he wasn’t? Reflecting on this for a while, John found his own eyes beginning to press glass; he had been thinking of the falling truck as an accident, or at least something that could only happen once. But his movements were easy to trace, everyone knew where he was. And every time you went outdoors you were only a walker away, as they said. And in a pit mine there were a lot of behemoths about …

But they got back in without incident. And that night they had the usual dinner and party in his honor, a hard-drinking party, with a lot of omegendorph consumption and loud raucous talk: a bunch of young tough engineers, pleased to find that John Boone was actually a fun guy to party with. A fairly common reaction among newcomers, especially younger men. John chatted them up, and had a good time, and slipped his inquiries into the flow pretty unnoticeably, he thought. They had not heard of the Coyote, which was interesting, as they did know about Big Man, and the hidden colony. Apparently the Coyote was not in that category of tale; he was some kind of insider thing, known, so far as John could tell, only to some of the first hundred.

The miners had had a recent unusual visit, however; an Arab caravan had come by, traveling the edge of Vastitas Borealis. And, they said, the Arabs had claimed to have been visited by some of “the lost colonists”, as they called them.

“Interesting,” John said. It seemed unlikely to him that Hiroko or any of her crew would reveal themselves, but who could tell. He might as well go check it out; after all, there was only so much he could do at Bradbury Point. Very little detective work, he was noticing, could be accomplished before a crime occurred. So he spent a couple more days observing the mining, but that told him little; it only reinforced his shock at the scale of the operation, at how much robotic earthmovers could tear away. “What are you going to do with all the metal?” he asked, after taking a look down into another great open pit mine, located twenty-five kilometers to the west of the habitat. “Getting it to Earth will cost more than it’s worth, won’t it?”

The chief of operations, a black-haired man with a hatchet face, grinned. “We’ll hold onto it until it’s worth more. Or until they build that space elevator.”

“You believe in that?”

“Oh yeah, the materials are there! Graphite whisker reinforced with diamond spirals, why you could almost build one on Earth with that. Here, it would be easy.”

John shook his head. That afternoon they drove for an hour back to the habitat, past raw pits and slag heaps, toward the distant plume of the refineries on the other sides of the habitat mesa. He was used to seeing the land torn up for building purposes, but this … it was amazing what a few hundred people could do. Of course it was the same technology that was allowing Sax to build a vertical town the whole height of the Echus Overlook, the same technology that allowed all the new towns to be built so quickly; but still, wreaking such havoc just to strip away metals, destined for Earth’s insatiable demand …

The next day he gave the operations chief a fiendishly tight security regimen, to be followed for two months; and then drove out into the wind-eroded tracks of the Arab caravan, and followed them north and east.

It turned out that Frank Chalmers was traveling with this Arab caravan. But he had not seen or heard of any visitation by Hiroko’s people, and none of the Arabs would admit to being the one who had told the story at Bradbury Point. A false lead, then. Or else one that Frank was helping the Arabs to eliminate; and if so, how would John find that out? Though the Arabs had only recently arrived on Mars, they were already Frank’s allies, no doubt about it; he lived with them, he spoke their language, and now, naturally, he was the constant mediator between them and John. Not a chance of an independent investigation, except what Pauline could do in the records, which she could do as well away from the caravan as in it.

Nevertheless, John traveled with them for a while as they roamed the great dune sea, doing areology and a bit of prospecting. Frank was only there briefly himself, to talk to an Egyptian friend; he was too busy to stay anywhere for long. His job as US Secretary made him as much of a globe-trotter as John, and they crossed paths pretty frequently. Frank had managed to keep his position as the American department head now through three administrations, even though it was a cabinet post; a remarkable feat, even without considering his distance from Washington. And so he was now overseeing the introduction of investment by the American-based transnationals, a responsibility that made him manic with overwork and puffed up with power, what John thought of as the business version of Sax, always moving, always gesturing with his hands as if conducting the music of his speech, which had shifted over the years to full-tilt Chamber of Commerce overdrive, “Got to stake a claim on the Escarpment before the transnats and the Germans snap everything up, lotta work to be done!” which was his constant refrain, often said while pointing for illustration at the little globe he carried with him in his lectern pocket. “Look at your moholes, I just entered them last week, one near the north pole, three in the sixties north and south, four along the equator, one near the south pole, all of them nicely placed west of volcanic rises to catch their updrafts, it’s beautiful.” He spun the globe and the blue dots marking the moholes blurred for a moment into blue lines. “It’s good to see you finally doing something useful.”

“Finally.”

“Look, here’s the new habitat factory in Hellas. They’re manufacturing starter units at a rate that’ll enable them to handle some three thousand emigrants per Ls ninety, and given the new fleet of roundtrip shuttles, that’s just barely enough.” He saw John’s expression and said quickly, “All heat in the end, John, so it helps the terraforming with more than just money and labor, I mean think about it.”

“But do you ever wonder what’s going to come of it all?” John asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, this deluge of people and equipment, while things are falling apart on Earth.”

“Things are always going to be falling apart on Earth. You might as well get used to it.”

“Yeah, but who’s going to own what up here? Who’s going to call the shots?”

Frank just made a face at John’s naïveté, at the very nature of the question. One look at his grimace and John could read it all, the whole complex of disgust and impatience and amusement. A part of John was pleased at this instant recognition; he knew his old friend better than he had ever known any of his family, so that the swarthy pale-eyed face glowering at him was like that of a brother, a twin that he couldn’t ever remember not knowing. On the other hand, he was annoyed with Frank for his condescension. “People are wondering about it, Frank. It’s not just me, and it’s not just Arkady. You can’t just shrug it off and act like it’s a stupid question, like there’s nothing to be decided.”

“The UN decides,” Frank said brusquely. “There’s ten billion of them, and ten thousand of us. That’s a million to one. If you want to influence those kind of odds you ought to have become the UNOMA factor like I told you to when they set up the position. But you didn’t listen to me. You just shrugged it off. You could have really done something, but now what are you? Sax’s assistant in charge of publicity.”

“And development, and security, and Terran affairs, and the moholes.”

“Ostrich!” Frank pounced. “Head in a hole! Come on, let’s go eat.”

John agreed and they went off to a dinner in the Arabs’ biggest rover, a meal of basted lamb and dill-flavored yogurt, delicious and exotic. But John found himself still irritated at Frank’s scorn, which never let up. The old rivalry, sharp as ever; and no First Man routine would ever make a dent in Frank’s sneery arrogance.

Thus when Maya Toitovna showed up unexpectedly the next day, traveling west on her way to Acheron, John gave her a longer hug than he might have otherwise; and by the time that night’s dinner was over, he had made certain that she would spend the night in his rover – a matter of a particular attentiveness, a certain laugh, a certain look, the nearly-accidental brushing of arms together as they stood trying sherbets, talking to the happy men of the caravan, who clearly found her fascinating … all their old code of conciliation and seduction, established through the years. And Frank could only watch, deadpan, talking in Arabic to his Egyptian friends.

And that night, as John and Maya made love in John’s rover bed, John pulled up from her briefly and looked down at her white body, and thought, So much for political power Frank buddy! That deadpan look had told it all, the fierce desire for Maya still there, still burning. Frank, like most of the men in the caravanserai that night, would have loved to have been in John’s place at that moment; once or twice in the past he no doubt had been; but not when John was around. No, tonight Frank would be reminded what real power was made of.

Distracted by such nastiness, it took John a while to pay any real attention to Maya herself. It had been almost five years since he and she had slept together, and in the intervening time he had had several other partners, and knew she had lived for a time with an engineer in Hellas. It was strange to begin again, as they knew each other intimately and yet didn’t. Her turning face flickering under him in the dim light, sister then stranger, sister then stranger … Something happened, then, something turned in him; all that exterior business fell away, all those games. Something in her face, in the way she was all there, the way she would give her whole self to him when they made love. He didn’t know anyone else who was quite like that.

And thus the old flame sparked again, uncertainly at first, as it had not been there at all in their first lovemaking. But then, after an hour’s quiet talk, they had started kissing and rolled together and suddenly it was ablaze and they were inside it. Lit up by Maya as usual, he had to admit it. She made him pay attention. Sex for her was not (as it tended to be for John) some kind of extension of sport; it was a grand passion, a transcendent state of being, and she was so tigerish when she got going that she always surprised him, woke him up, brought him up to her level, reminded him what sex could be. And it was wonderful to be reminded again, to learn that again; really wonderful. Omegendorph was nothing to it, how could he have forgotten, why did he keep wandering away from her as if she weren’t, somehow, irreplaceable? He crushed her with a hug and they twisted together, bit at each other, panted and moaned; came together as they had so often before, Maya pulling him over the edge with her. Their ritual.

And even afterwards, just talking, he somehow felt very much more fond of her. He had started things just to irk Frank, it was true; he had been completely careless of her; but now, lying beside her, he could feel how much he had missed her presence in the previous five years, how bland life had seemed. How much he had missed her! New feelings – they always surprised him, he kept assuming he was too old for them, that he had more or less stopped changing. And then something would happen. And so often that something (thinking back over the years) was a meeting with Maya …

She was still the same Maya Toitovna, however: mercurial, full of her own thoughts and plans, full of herself; she had no idea what John was doing out there on the dunes, and would never think to ask. And she would slash him to ribbons if he accidentally crossed her mood, he could tell that just in the sultry set of her shoulders, just in the way she padded off to the toilet. But he knew all that already, it was old news, something from the first years at Underhill, so long ago; and the sheer familiarity of it was pleasing – even her irritability was pleasing! Like Frank and his scorn. Well, he was getting old, and they were family. He almost laughed, he almost said something to set her off, then thought better of it. Just knowing was enough, no need for another demonstration, Lord! At that thought he did laugh, and she smiled to hear it, and came back to bed and shoved him in the chest. “Laughing at me again I see! Because of my fat bottom is it?”

“You know your bottom is perfect.” She shoved him again, insulted at what she considered a gross lie, and their wrestling drew them back into the reality of skin and salt, into the world of sex. At some point in the long lazy session he found himself thinking I love you, wild Maya, I really do. It was a disconcerting thought, a dangerous thought. Not something he would risk saying. But it felt true.

So a couple of days later, when she left to visit the Acheron group, and asked him to join her there, he was pleased. “Maybe in a couple of months.”

“No, no.” Her face was serious. “Come sooner, I want you there with me sooner.”

And when he agreed, on a whim, she grinned like a girl with a secret. “You won’t be sorry.” With a kiss she was off, driving south to Burroughs to catch the train west.

After that, there was less chance than ever of learning anything from the Arabs. He had offended Frank, and the Arabs closed ranks behind their friend, as was only right. Hidden colony? they said. What was that?

He sighed, gave up on it and decided to leave. Stocking his rover the night before his departure (the Arabs were punctilious about filling his hold with supplies), he pondered what he had accomplished so far in his investigation of the sabotages. So far Sherlock Holmes was in no danger, that was sure. Worse than that, there was now a whole society on Mars that was basically impenetrable to him. Moslems, what were they exactly? He read Pauline that evening after he was done stocking, and then he rejoined his hosts and watched them as closely as he was able, asking questions all that night long … He knew asking questions was the key to people’s souls, infinitely more useful than wit; but in this case it didn’t seem to make any difference. Coyote? Some kind of wild dog was it?

Baffled, he left the caravan the next morning and drove west, on the southern border of the dune sea. It would be a long journey to Acheron to join Maya, five thousand kilometers of dune after dune; but he preferred driving to going down to Burroughs and taking the train. He needed time to think. And really it was a kind of habit now, driving cross-country, or flying gliders – getting away, traveling slowly across the land. He had been on the road for years now, criss-crossing the northern hemisphere and making long excursions into the south, inspecting moholes or doing favors for Sax or Helmut or Frank, or looking into things for Arkady, or cutting ribbons at the opening of one thing or another – a town, a well, a weather station, a mine, a mohole – and always talking, talking in public speeches or private conversations, talking to strangers, old friends, new acquaintances, talking almost as fast as Frank did, and all in an attempt to inspire the people on the planet to figure out a way to forget history, to build a functioning society. To create a scientific system designed for Mars, designed to their specifications, fair and just and rational and all those good things. To point the way to a new Mars!

And yet after every year that passed, it seemed less likely to happen the way he had envisioned it. A place like Bradbury Point showed how rapidly things were changing, and people like the Arabs confirmed the impression; events were out of his control, and more than that, out of anyone’s control. There was no plan. He rolled west on autopilot, up and down over dune after dune, not seeing a thing, sunk deep in an attempt to understand what exactly history was, and how it worked. And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking – an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything. After all, he had been here from the very beginning! He had been the beginning, the first person to step on this world, and then he had returned against all the odds, and helped to build it from scratch! And yet now, despite all that, it was spinning away from him. Contemplating that fact made him tense with disbelief, and sometimes with a sudden furious frustration; to think that the whole thing was accelerating not only beyond his control, but even beyond his ability to comprehend – it wasn’t right, he had to fight it!

And yet how? Social planning of some sort … clearly they had to have it. This flailing about without a plan, in violation of even the flimsy plan people had made back at the beginning with the Mars treaty … well, societies without a plan, that was history so far; but history so far had been a nightmare, a huge compendium of examples to be avoided. No. They needed a plan. They had a chance at a new start here, they needed a vision. Helmut the oily functionary, Frank with his cynical acceptance of the status quo, his acceptance of the breakdown of the treaty, as if they were in a kind of gold rush; Frank was wrong. Wrong as usual!

But his own rushing about was probably wrong too. He had been operating on the unarticulated theory that if he only saw more of the planet, visited one more settlement, talked to one more person, that he would somehow (without really thinking too hard) get it – and that his holistic understanding would then flow back from him to everybody else, spreading out through all the new settlers and changing things. Now he was pretty sure that this feeling had been naive; there were so many people on the planet these days, he could never hope to connect with them, to become the articulator of all their hopes and desires. And not only that, but few of the newcomers seemed much like the first hundred in regard to their reasons for coming. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; there were still scientists coming up, and people like the Swiss roadbuilding gypsies. But he didn’t know them like he did the first hundred, and he never would. That little band had formed him, really, they had shaped his opinions and ideas, had taught him; they were his family, he trusted them. And he wanted their help, he needed it now more than ever. Perhaps it was that which explained the sudden new intensity of his feeling for Maya. And perhaps it was this that made him so angry with Hiroko – he wanted to talk to her, he needed her help! And she had abandoned them.

Vlad and Ursula had relocated their biotech complex to a finlike ridge in the Acheron Fossae, a narrow prominence which looked like the conning tower of a vast submerged submarine. They had honeycombed the upper part of it with excavations that extended from cliff to cliff; some of the rooms were a kilometer wide, and glass-walled on both sides. The windows on the south side had a view of Olympus Mons, some six hundred kilometers away; north-facing windows looked down onto the pale tan sands of Arcadia Planitia.

John drove up a wide ledge to the bottom of the fin, and plugged into the garage lock door, noticing as he did that the ground in the narrow canyon south of the settlement was lumpy with heaps of what appeared to be melted brown sugar.

“It’s a new kind of cryptogamic crust,” Vlad said when John asked him about it. “A symbiosis of cyanobacteria and Florida platform bacteria. The platform bacteria go very deep, and convert sulfates in the rock to sulfides, which then feed a variant of Microcoleus. The top layers of that grow in filaments, which bind to sand and clay in big dendritic formations, so it’s like little forest sylvanols with really long bacterial root systems. It looks like these root systems will keep on going right down through the regolith to bedrock, melting the permafrost as they go.”

“And you’ve released this stuff?” John said.

“Sure. We need something to bust up the permafrost, right?”

“Is there anything to stop it from growing planetwide?”

“Well, it has the usual array of suicide genes in case it begins to overwhelm the rest of the biomass, but if it keeps to its niche …”

“Wow.”

“It’s not too unlike the first life forms that covered the Terran continents, we think. We’ve just enhanced its speed of growth, and its root systems. The funny thing is that I think at first it’s going to cool the atmosphere, even though it’s warming things underground. Because it’ll really increase chemical weathering of the rock, and all those reactions absorb CO₂ from the air, so the air pressure is going to drop.”

Maya had come up and joined them with a big hug for John, and now she said, “But won’t the reactions release oxygen as fast as they absorb CO₂, and keep air pressure up?”

Vlad shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

John laughed. “Sax is a long term thinker. He’ll probably be pleased.”

“Oh yes. He authorized the release. And he’s coming to study here again when spring comes.”

They had dinner in a hall located high on the fin, just under the crest. Skylights opened above to the greenhouse on the crest itself, and windows ran the length of the north and south walls; stands of bamboo filled the walls to east and west. All the residents of Acheron were there for dinner, holding to an Underhill custom as they did in many other ways. The discussion at John and Maya’s table ranged widely, but kept returning to the current work, which involved trying to solve problems caused by the need to implant safeguards in all the GEMs they were releasing. Double suicide genes in every GEM was a practice the Acheron group had initiated on its own, and it was now going to be codified as UN law. “That’s all well and good for legal GEMs,” Vlad said. “But if some fools try something on their own and blow it, we could be in big trouble anyway.”

After dinner, Ursula said to John and Maya, “Since you’re here you ought to get your physicals. It’s been a while for both of you.”

John, who hated physicals and indeed all medical attention of any kind, demurred. But Ursula hounded him, and eventually he gave in, and visited her clinic a couple days later. There he was put through a battery of diagnostic tests that seemed even more intensive than usual, most of them run by imaging machines and computers with too-relaxing voices, telling him to move this way and then that, while John in complete ignorance did what he was told. Modern medicine. But after all that, he was poked and prodded and tapped in time-honored fashion by Ursula herself. And when it was over he was lying on his back with a white sheet over him, while she stood at his side, looking at read-outs and humming absently.

“You’re looking good,” she told him after several minutes of that. “Some of the usual gravity-related problems, but nothing we can’t deal with.”

“Great,” John said, feeling relieved. That was the thing about physicals; any news was bad news, one wanted an absence of news. Getting that was somehow a victory, and more so every time; but still, a negative accomplishment. Nothing had happened to him, great!

“So do you want the treatment?” Ursula asked, her back to him, her voice casual.

“The treatment?”

“It’s a kind of geronotological therapy. An experimental procedure. Somewhat like an inoculation, but with a DNA strengthener. Repairs broken strands, and restores cell division accuracy to a significant degree.”

John sighed. “And what does that mean?”

“Well, you know. Ordinary ageing is mostly caused by cell division error. After a number of generations, ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands depending which kind of cells you’re talking about, errors in reproduction start to increase, and everything gets weaker. The immune system is one of the first to weaken, and then other tissues, and then finally something goes wrong, or the immune system gets overwhelmed by a disease, and that’s it.”

“And you’re saying you can stop these errors?”

“Slow them down, anyway, and fix the ones that are already broken. A mix, really. The division errors are caused by breaks in DNA strands, so we wanted to strengthen DNA strands. To do it we would read your genome, and then build an auto repair genomic library of small segments that will replace the broken strands—”

“Auto repair?”

She sighed. “All Americans think that is funny. Anyhow we push this auto repair library into the cells, where they bind to the original DNA and help keep them from breaking.” She began to draw double and quadruple helixes as she talked, shifting inexorably into biotech jargon, until John could only catch the general drift of the argument, which apparently had its origins in the genome project and the field of genetic abnormality correction, with application methods taken from cancer therapy and GEM technique. Aspects of these and many other different technologies had been combined by the Acheron group, Ursula explained. And the result seemed to be that they could give him an infection of bits of his own genome, an infection which would invade every cell in his body except for parts of his teeth and skin and bones and hair; and afterwards he would have nearly flawless DNA strands, repaired and reinforced strands that would make subsequent cell division more accurate.

“How accurate?” he asked, trying to grasp what it all meant.

“Well, about like if you were ten years old.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, no. We’ve all done it to ourselves, back around Ls ten of this year, and so far as we can tell, it’s working.”

“Does it last forever?”

“Nothing lasts forever, John.”

“How long then?”

“We don’t know. We ourselves are the experiment, we figure we’ll find out as we go along. It seems possible we might be able to do the therapy again when the rate of division error begins to increase again. If that is successful, it could mean you would last for quite a while.”

“Like how long?” he insisted.

“Well, we don’t know, do we? Longer than we live now, that’s pretty sure. Possibly a lot longer.”

John stared at her. She smiled at the expression on his face, and he could feel that his jaw was slack with amazement; no doubt he looked less than brilliant, but what did she expect? It was … it was …

He was following his thoughts with difficulty as they skittered around. “Who have you told about this?” he asked.

“Well, we have asked everyone in the first hundred, when they get a check-up with us. And everyone here at Acheron has tried it. And the thing is, we’ve only combined methods that everyone has, so it won’t be long before others try putting it all together too. So we’re writing it up for publication, but we’re going to send the articles first to be reviewed by the World Health Organization. Political fallout, you know.”

“Um,” John said, considering it. News of a longevity drug loose on Mars, back among the teeming billions … my Lord, he thought. “Is it expensive?”

“Not extremely. Reading your genome is the most expensive part, and it takes time. But it’s just a procedure, you know, it’s just computer time. It’s very possible you could inoculate everyone on Earth. But the population problem down there is already critical as it is. They’d have to institute some pretty intense population control, or else they’d go Malthusian really fast. We thought we’d better leave the decisions to the authorities down there.”

“But word is sure to get out.”

“Is that true? They might try to put a clamp on it. Maybe even a comprehensive clamp, I don’t know.”

“Wow. But you folks … you just went ahead and did it?”

“We did.” She shrugged. “So what do you say? Want to do it?”

“Let me think about it.”

He went for a walk on the crest of the fin, up and down the long greenhouse stuffed with bamboo and food crops. Walking west he had to shield his eyes from the glare of the afternoon sun, even through the filtered glass; walking back east, he could look out at the broken slopes of lava stretching up to Olympus Mons. It was hard to think. He was sixty-six years old; born in 1982, and what was it back on Earth now, 2048? M-11, eleven long hi-rad Martian years. And he had spent thirty-five months in space, including three trips between Earth and Mars, which was still the record. He had taken on 195 rems in those trips alone, and he had low blood pressure and a bad HDL to LDL ratio, and his shoulders ached when he swam and he felt tired a lot. He was getting old. He didn’t have all that many years left, weird though it was to think of it; and he had a lot of faith in the Acheron group, who, now that he thought of it, were wandering around their aerie working and eating and playing soccer and swimming and so on with little smiles of absorbed concentration, with a kind of humming. Not like ten year-olds, certainly not; but with an aura of suffused, absorbed happiness. Of health, and more than health. He laughed out loud, and went back down into Acheron looking for Ursula. When she saw him she laughed too. “It’s not really that hard a choice, is it.”

“No.” He laughed with her: “I mean, what have I got to lose?”

So he agreed to it. They had his genome in their records, but it would take a few days to synthesize the collection of repair strands and clip them onto plasmids, and clone millions more. Ursula told him to come back in three days.

When he got back to the guest rooms Maya was already there, looking as shocked as he felt, wandering nervously from dresser to sink to window, touching things and looking around as if she had never seen such a room before. Vlad had told her about it after her physical, just as Ursula had with John. “Immortality plague!” she exclaimed, and laughed strangely. “Can you believe it?”

“Longevity plague,” he corrected her. “And no, I can’t. Not really.” He felt a little dizzy, and he could see she hadn’t heard him. Her agitation made him nervous. They heated soup, ate in a daze. Vlad had told Maya to come to Acheron, and intimated what it was all about; that was why she had insisted that John accompany her to Acheron. When she told him that, he felt a shiver of fondness for her. Standing next to her washing the dishes, observing her hands shake as she spoke, he felt exceptionally close to her; it was as if they knew each other’s thoughts, as if, after all the years, in the face of this bizarre development, there were no need for words, only for each other’s presence. That night in the warm dark of their bed she whispered hoarsely, “We’d better do it twice tonight. While it’s still us.”

Three days later they both got the treatment. John lay back on a medical couch in a small room, and stared at an intravenous plug in the back of his hand. An IV feed shot, just like all those he’d had before. Except this time he could feel a strange heat rising up his arm, flushing his chest, pouring down his legs. Was it real? Was he imagining it? For a second he felt extremely odd all over, as if his ghost had walked through him. Then he was just very hot. “Should I be this hot?” he asked Ursula anxiously.

“It’s like a fever at first,” she said. “Then we put a small shock through you to push the plasmids into your cells. After that it’s more chills than fever, as the new strands bond to the old. People often feel quite cold, actually.”

An hour later a big IV bag had drained into him. He was still hot, and his bladder was full. They let him get up and go to the bathroom, then when he returned he was strapped into what looked like a cross between a couch and an electric chair. That didn’t bother him; astronaut training had inured him to all devices. The shock when it came lasted about ten seconds, and felt like a disagreeable tickling everywhere in him. Ursula and the others detached him from the apparatus; Ursula, her eyes twinkling, gave him a kiss full on the mouth. She warned him again that in a while he would start to feel chilled, and that it would last for a couple of days. It was okay to sit in the saunas or whirlpool baths; in fact they recommended it.

So he and Maya sat in the corner of a sauna together, huddled in the penetrating warmth, watching the bodies of the other visitors, who came in white and went out pink. It seemed to John an image of what was happening to the two of them; come in sixty-five, go out ten. He really couldn’t believe it. It was still very hard for him to think, he found his thoughts simply blanked, his mind stunned. If brain cells were reinforced too, had his clogged unexpectedly? He had always been a ragged slow thinker. In fact this was probably no more than his usual obtuseness, brought to his attention because he was trying so hard to come to grips with the thing, to think what it meant. Could it really be true? Could they really be sidestepping death for some years, perhaps some … decades …?

They left the sauna to eat, and after their meals they took short walks in the crest greenhouse, looking out at the dunes to the north, the chaotic lava to the south. The view north reminded Maya of early Underhill, with the random litter of stones on Lunae replaced by Arcadia’s windswept quilt pattern of dunes; as if her memory had cleaned up her recollections of that time, making them more patterned, tinting their faded ochres and reds to rich lemon yellows. Patination of the past. He stared at her curiously. It had been M-11 years since those first days in the trailer park, and in most of the years since, the two of them had been lovers, with a number of (blessed) interruptions and separations, of course, caused by circumstances or, more usually, their inability to get along. But they had always started again when the opportunities came, and the upshot was that now they knew each other just about as well as any old married couple with a less interrupted history; perhaps even better, because any completely constant couple was likely to have stopped paying attention to each other at some point, while the two of them, with all their separations and reunions, fights and rapprochements, had had to relearn each other countless times. John said some of this to her, and they talked about it; it was a pleasure to talk about it; “We have had to keep paying attention,” Maya said intently, nodding with a look of solemn satisfaction, sure that this was mostly her doing. Yes, they had paid attention, they had never fallen into the mindless rut of habit. Surely, they both agreed as they sat in the baths, or walked the crest, this compensated for the time they had spent apart, more than compensated for it. Yes; no doubt they knew each other even better than any old married couple.

And so they talked, trying to stitch their pasts to this strange new future, in the anxious hope that it would not prove to be an unbridgeable rupture. And late the following evening, two days after the inoculation, sitting alone naked in the sauna, their flesh still cold, their skin all rosy with sweat, John looked at Maya’s body sitting there beside him, as real as a rock, and he felt a glow like the IV injection running all through him. He had not eaten much since the treatment, and the beige and yellow tiles they sat on had started to throb, as if lit from within; light gleamed on every water droplet covering the tiles, like tiny chips of lightning scattered everywhere, and Maya’s body sprawled over these sparkling tiles pulsing before him like a pink candle. The intense thereness of it – haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs – I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment. That’s why I want to know what is this? what is this? what is this? Now, remembering Sax’s odd word and his odd religion, John finally understood him; because he was feeling the thisness of the moment like a rock in his hand, and it felt as if his entire life had been lived only to get him to this moment. The tiles and the thick hot air were pulsing around him as if he were dying and being reborn, and sure, that was really the case if what Ursula and Vlad said were true. And there beside him in the process of being reborn was the pink body of Maya Toitovna, Maya’s body which he knew better than his own. And not only in this moment, but through time; he could recall vividly his first sight of her naked, floating toward him in the bubble chamber on the Ares, surrounded by a nimbus of stars and the black velvet of space. And every change in her since then was perfectly visible to him, the shift from the image in his memory to the body beside him was a hallucinatory time-dissolve, her flesh and skin shifting, dropping, lining – ageing. They were both older, creakier, heavier. That was the way it went. But really the amazing thing was how much had remained, how much they were still themselves. Lines from a poem came to him, the epitaph of the Scott expedition near Ross Station in Antarctica, they had all climbed the hill to see the big wooden cross together, and carved on it had been lines: much has gone yet much remains … something like that. He couldn’t remember – much had gone; it had been a long time ago, after all. But they had worked hard, and eaten well, and perhaps Mars’s gravity had been kinder than Earth’s would have been; because the obvious glowing truth was that Maya Toitovna was still a very beautiful woman, strong and muscly, her imperial face and gray wet hair still commanding his gaze, her breasts still magnets to his eye, completely different in appearance if she so much as shifted an elbow, and yet in every position completely familiar to him … his breasts, his arms, ribs, flanks. She was, for better and worse, the person he was closest to, a beautiful pink animal and also an avatar for him, of sex, of life itself on this bare rocky world. If this was what they were at sixty-six, and if the treatment did no more than hold them at this point, for even a few added years, or (the shock of it still) for decades? For decades! Well, it was astonishing. Absolutely too much to grasp, he had to stop trying or he would strip all the gears of his mind. But could it be? Could it really be? The aching desire of all true lovers through all the ages, to have a bit more time together, to be able to stretch out and live the love fully … Similar feelings seemed to be stirring Maya. She was in a great mood, she watched him from hooded eyes, with that come-hither half-smile he knew so well, one knee up and tucked in her armpit, not flaunting her sex at him but just comfortable, relaxing as she would if she were alone … yes, there was nothing like Maya in a good mood, no one could infect other people with it so much and so surely. He felt a rush of affection for that aspect of her character, an IV of sentiment, and he put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, eros just a spice in a feast of agape, and suddenly as usual the words just burst out of him, he said things to her that he had never said before, “Let’s get married!” he said, and when she laughed he did too, and said, “No, no, I mean it, let’s get married.” Get married and grow really, really old together, seize whatever gift years brought and make them a shared adventure, have kids, watch the kids have kids, watch the grandkids have kids, watch the great-grandkids have kids, my Lord who knew how long it might last? They might watch a whole nation of descendants flourish, become patriarch and matriarch, a kind of mini Martian Adam and Eve! And Maya laughed at each declaration, her eyes vivacious and sparkling with affection, windows to a soul in a very, very good mood, watching him and soaking him up, he could feel the blotter tug of her gaze watching him and laughing delightedly at each new absurd hilarious phrase that burst out of him, and saying to him “Something like that, yes, something like that,” and then hugging him hard. “Oh John,” she said. “You know how to make me happy. You are the best man I ever had.” She kissed him and he found that despite the sauna’s heat it was going to be easy to shift the emphasis from agape to eros; but now the two were one, indistinguishable, a great mingled flood of love. “So you’ll marry me and all?” he said as he locked the sauna door and they began to fall into it. “Something like that,” she said, eyes flashing, face ablaze with an absolutely ravishing smile.

When you expect to live another two hundred years, you behave differently than when you expect to live only twenty.

This they proved almost immediately. John spent the winter there at Acheron, on the edge of the CO₂ fog cap that still descended over the north pole every winter, studying areobotany with Marina Tokareva and her lab group. He did this on Sax’s instruction, and because he felt in no hurry to leave. Sax seemed to have forgotten about the search to find out who the saboteurs were, which made John a little suspicious; in his spare time he still made efforts through Pauline, concentrating on the areas he had been working on before Acheron; travel records mostly, and then employment records of all the people that had traveled to the areas where the sabotages had taken place. Presumably there were a lot of people involved, so individual travel records might not tell him much. But everyone on Mars had been sent there by an organization, and by checking which organizations had sent people to the relevant places, he hoped to get some indications. It was a messy business, and he had to rely on Pauline not only for statistics but advice, which was worrying.

The rest of the time he studied a branch of areobotany in which all the payoffs were at least decades away. Why not? He had the time, and might very well see the fruits of the work. So he watched Marina’s group design a new tree, studying with them and doing their lab work, washing glassware and the like. The tree was designed to serve as the canopy of a multi-layered forest which they hoped to grow on the dunes of Vastitas Borealis. It was based on a sequoia genome, but they wanted trees even bigger than sequoias, perhaps two hundred meters tall, with a trunk fifty meters in diameter at the base. Their bark would stay frozen most of the time, and their broad leaves, which would probably look as if they had tobacco leaf disease, were going to be able to absorb the baseline dose of UV radiation without damage to their purplish undersides. At first John thought the trees’ size was excessive, but Marina pointed out that they would be capable of taking in great quantities of carbon dioxide, fixing the carbon and transpiring the oxygen back into the air. And they were going to be quite a sight, or so they supposed; the actual shoots of the competing test prototypes were only ten meters tall, and it would be twenty years before the winners of the competition reached their mature heights. And right now all the prototypes still died in Mars jars; atmospheric conditions would have to change considerably before they would survive outdoors. Marina’s lab was getting ahead of the game.

But so was everyone else. This seemed to be a result of the treatment, it made sense on the face of it. Longer experiments. Longer (John groaned) investigations. Longer thoughts.

In many respects, however, nothing changed. John felt about the same as before, except it didn’t take omegendorph to get an occasional buzz humming through him, as if he had recently finished swimming a couple of kilometers, or cross-country skied for an afternoon, or, yes, taken a dose of omegendorph. Which now would have been carrying coals to Newcastle. Because things glowed. When he took the crest walk, the whole visible world glowed: stilled bulldozers, a crane like a gallows – he could watch anything for minutes on end. Maya left for Hellas, and it didn’t matter; their relations were back on the old rollercoaster ride, a lot of bickering and fits of temper on her part, but all that seemed unimportant, floating inside the glow, changing nothing in the way he felt toward her, or in the way she had, from time to time, turned on him that look of hers. He would see her in a few months, and talk to her on screen; meanwhile this was a separation he was not entirely unhappy to see.

It was a good winter. He learned a lot about areobotany and bioengineering, and in many of the evenings, after dinner, he would ask the Acheron people both individually and severally what they thought the eventual Martian society should be like, and how it should be run. At Acheron this usually led directly to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot economics; these to them were much more critical than politics, or what Marina called “the supposed decision-making apparatus”. Marina and Vlad were particularly interesting on this topic, as they had worked out a system of equations for what they called “eco-economics", which always sounded to John like “echo economics.” He liked listening to them explain the equations, and he asked them a lot of questions, learning about concepts like carrying capacity, coexistence, counteradaptation, legitimacy mechanisms, ecologic efficiency. “That’s the only real measure of our contribution to the system,” Vlad would say. “If you burn our bodies in a microbomb calorimeter you’ll find we contain about six or seven kilocalories per gram of weight, and of course we take in a lot of calories to sustain that through our lives. Our output is harder to measure, because it’s not a matter of predators feeding on us, as in the classic efficiency equations – it’s more a matter of how many calories we create by our efforts, or send on to future generations, something like that. And most of that is very indirect, naturally, and it involves a lot of speculation and subjective judgement. If you don’t go ahead and assign values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all.”

“Sounds about right to me,” John joked, but Vlad and Marina ignored him.

“Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is – people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.”

“Better just to concentrate on what we’re doing here,” Marina put in. “The basic equation is simple, efficiency merely equals the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in, times one hundred to put it in the form of a percentage. In the classic sense of passing along calories to one’s predator, ten percent was average, and twenty percent doing really well. Most predators at the tops of food chains did more like five percent.”

“This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers,” Vlad said. “Robber barons are not really very efficient.”

“So tigers don’t have predators not because they’re so tough, but because it’s not worth the effort,” John said.

“Exactly!”

“The problem is in calculating the values,” Marina said. “We have had to simply assign certain calorie-equivalent numerical values to all kinds of activities, and then go on from there.”

“But we were talking about economics?” John said.

“But this is economics, don’t you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real contribution to the human ecology. Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use – this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South.”

“They were predators on the South,” John said.

“Yes, and they will become predators on us too, if we let them. And like all predators their efficiency is low. But here, you see – in this theoretical state of independence that you speak of—” she grinned at John’s look of consternation — “you do, you have to admit that that is ultimately what you talk about all the time, John – well, there it should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the system.”

Dmitri, coming in the lab, said, “From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs!”

“No, that’s not the same,” Vlad said. “What it means is, You get what you pay for!”

“But that’s already true,” John said. “How is this different from the economics that already exist?”

They all scoffed at once, Marina most persistently: “There’s all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn’t do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money – that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.” She waved a hand in disgust.

“Well,” Vlad said, “we can say that their efficiency is very low, and that they predate on the system without having any predators, so that they are either the top of the chain or parasitical, depending on how you define it. Advertising, money brokering, some types of manipulation of the law, some politics …”

“But all of these are subjective judgements!” John exclaimed. “How have you actually assigned calorific values to such a variety of activities?”

“Well, we have done our best to calculate what they contribute back to the system in terms of well-being measured as a physical thing. What does the activity equal in terms of food, or water, or shelter, or clothing, or medical aid, or education, or free time? We’ve talked it over, and usually everyone at Acheron has offered a number, and we have taken the mean. Here, let me show you …”

And they would talk through the evening about it before the computer screen, and John would ask questions, and plug Pauline in to record the screens and tape the discussions, and they would go through the equations and jab their fingers at the flow charts, and then stop for coffee and perhaps take it up to the crest, to pace the length of the greenhouse arguing vehemently about the human value in kilocalories of plumbing, opera, simulation programming and the like. They were up on the crest, in fact, one afternoon near sunset, when John looked up from the equation on his wristpad, and stared up the long slope toward Olympus Mons.

The sky had darkened. It occurred to him that it might be just another double eclipse: Phobos was so close overhead that it blocked a third of the sun when it crossed in front of it, and Deimos about a ninth, and a couple times a month they crossed at the same time, causing a shadow to be cast across the land, as if a film had got in your eye, or you had had a bad thought.

But this wasn’t an eclipse; Olympus Mons was hidden from view, and the high southern horizon was a fuzzy bronze bar. “Look at that,” he said to the others, and pointed. “A dust storm.” They hadn’t had a global dust storm in over ten years. John called up the weather satellite photos on his wristpad. The origin of the storm had been near the Thaumasia mohole, Senzeni Na. He called up Sax and found him blinking philosophically, stating his surprise in mild tones.

“Winds at the edge of the storm were up to six hundred and sixty kilometers an hour,” Sax said. “A new planetary record. It looks like this is going to be a big one. I thought the cryptogamic soils in the storm start-up zones would have dampened them, or even stopped them. Obviously that model had something wrong with it.”

“Okay, Sax, too bad about that, but it’ll be okay, I gotta go now because it’s rolling right down on us now and I want to watch.”

“Have fun,” Sax said, deadpan, before John clicked him off. Vlad and Ursula were scoffing at Sax’s model; temperature gradients between biotically-defrosted soil and the remaining frosted areas would be greater than ever, and the winds between the two regions correspondingly fiercer; so that when they finally hit loose fines, off they would go. Totally obvious.

“Now that it’s happened,” John said. He laughed and moved down the greenhouse to watch the storm’s approach by himself. Scientists could be so catty.

The wall of dust rolled down the long lava slopes of Olympus Mons’s northern aureole. It had already halved the land visible since John first saw it, and now it approached like a giant breaking wave, a billowy chocolate milk wave ten thousand meters high, with a bronze filigree foaming up and off it, leaving great curved streamers in the pink sky above. “Wow!” John cried. “Here it comes! Here it comes!” Suddenly the crest of the Acheron fin seemed located a great distance above the long narrow canyons of the fossae below them, and lower fin ridges reared like dragon backs out of the cracked lava: a wild place from which to face the onrush of such a storm, too high, too exposed; John laughed again, and pressed himself against the southern windows of the greenhouse, looking down, out, around, shouting, “Wow! Wow! Look at it go! Wow!”

And then suddenly they were overwhelmed, dust flying over them, darkness, a high whooshing shriek. The first impact against Acheron ridge caused a wild flurry of turbulence, quick cyclonic twisters that appeared and disappeared, horizontal, vertical, at angles up the few steep gullies in the ridge; and the general shriek was punctuated by booms as these disturbances hit the ridge and collapsed. Then with dreamlike rapidity the wind settled into a smooth standing wave, and the dust rushed up past John’s face; the pit of his stomach lifted, as if the greenhouse were suddenly dropping with violent speed. Certainly that’s what it looked like; the ridge had caused a ferocious updraft. Stepping back, however, he saw the dust streaming overhead and then off to the north. On that side of the greenhouse he could see for a few kilometers, before the wind smashed into the ground again and cut off the view in continual explosions of dust. “Wow!”

His eyes were dry, and his mouth felt a bit caked. Lots of the fines were less than a micron across; was that a faint sheen of them, there already across the bamboo leaves? No. Only the weird light of the storm. But there would be dust on everything, eventually. No seal system could keep it out.

Vlad and Ursula were not completely confident of the greenhouse’s ability to withstand the wind, and they encouraged everyone up there to go downstairs. On the way down John re-established contact with Sax. Sax’s mouth was bunched into a tighter knot than usual. They would lose a lot of insolation with this storm, he said evenly. Equatorial surface temperatures had been averaging eighteen degrees higher than the baseline figures, but temperatures near Thaumasia were already down six degrees, and they would continue to plummet for the duration of the storm. And, he added with what seemed to John an almost masochistic completeness, the mohole thermals would loft the dust higher than ever before, so that it was all too possible that the storm might last for a long time.

“Buck up, Sax,” John advised. “I think it’ll be shorter than ever before. Don’t be so pessimistic.”

Later on, when the storm was going into its second M-year, Sax would remind John of this prediction with a little laugh.

Traveling during the storm was officially restricted to the trains and to certain heavily used double-transponder roads, but when it became obvious that it wasn’t going to die back down that summer, John ignored the restrictions and resumed his wanderings. He made sure that his rover was well-stocked, he had a backup rover follow him, and he had an extra-powerful radio transmitter installed. That and Pauline in the driver’s seat would be enough to get him around most of the northern hemisphere, he figured; rover breakdowns were rare, because of the really comprehensive internal monitoring systems hooked into their control computers; two rover breakdowns at once was almost unheard of, there had been only a single recorded fatality as a result of that happening. So he said good-bye to the Acheron group, and took off again.

Driving in the storm was like driving at night, except more interesting. The dust rocketed by in gusts, leaving little pockets of visibility that gave him quick dim sepia snatches of a view, the landscape rolling, everything seeming to be moving south. Then blank rushing tempests of dust would return again, flush against the windows. The rover rocked hard on its shock absorbers during the worst gusts, and the dust did indeed get into everything.

On the fourth day of his drive he turned straight south, and began to drive up the northwest slope of the Tharsis bulge. This was the great escarpment again, but here it was not a cliff, only a slope imperceptible in the storm’s dark, lasting for more than a day, until he was high on the side of Tharsis, five vertical kilometers higher than he had been in Acheron.

He stopped at another mine, located near crater Pt (called Pete), located in the upper end of the Tantalus Fossae. Apparently the Tharsis bulge had initiated the great lava flood covering Alba Patera, and later bulging had then cracked the lava shield; these were the Tantalus canyons. Some of them had cracked over a platinoid-rich mafic igneous intrusion that the miners had named the Merensky Reeflets. The miners were real Azanians this time, but Azanians who called themselves Afrikaners, and spoke Afrikaans among themselves; white men who welcomed John with heavy doses of God, volk, and trek. They had named the canyons they worked in Neuw Orange Free State and Neuw Pretoria. And they, like the miners at Bradbury Point, worked for Armscor. “Yes,” the operations head said happily, with an accent like a New Zealander’s. He had a heavily-jowled face, a ski-jump nose and a big crooked smile, and a very intense manner. “We’ve found iron, copper, silver, manganese, aluminum, gold, platinum, titanium, chromium, you name it. Sulfides, oxides, silicates, native metals, you name it. The Great Escarpment has them all.” The mine had been running for about an M-year; it consisted of strip mines on the canyon floors, with a habitat half buried in the mesa between two of the largest canyons, looking like a clear eggshell, packed with a meat of green trees and orange tile roofs.

John spent several days with them, being sociable and asking questions. More than once, thinking of the Acheron group’s eco-economics, he asked them how they were going to get their valuable but heavy product back to Earth. Would the energy cost of the transfer overwhelm the potential profit?

“Of course,” they said, just like the men at Bradbury Point. “It will take the space elevator to make it worthwhile.”

Their chief said, “With the space elevator we are in the Terran market. Without it we will never get off Mars.”

“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” John said. But they didn’t understand him, and when he tried to explain it they only went blank and nodded politely, anxious to avoid thinking about politics. Which was something Afrikaners were good at. When John realized what was going on, he found he could bring up the topic of politics to get some time to himself; it was, he said to Maya one night on the wrist, like tossing a tear gas canister in the room. It even enabled him to wander into the mining operations center alone for most of an afternoon, linking Pauline to the records and recording everything that she could lift. Pauline noticed no unusual patterns in the operation. But she did flag an exchange of communications with the Armscor home office; the local group wanted a security unit of a hundred persons, and Singapore had agreed to it.

John whistled. “What about UNOMA?” Security was supposed to be entirely their purview, and they gave out approval for private security pretty routinely; but a hundred people? John instructed Pauline to look into the UNOMA dispatches on the subject, and left for dinner with the Afrikaners.

Again the space elevator was declared a necessity. “They’ll just pass us by if we don’t have it, go straight out to the asteroids and not have any gravity well to worry about, eh?”

Despite the five hundred micrograms of omegendorph in his system, John was not in a happy mood. “Tell me,” he said at one point, “do any women work here?”

They stared at him like fish. They were even worse than Moslems, really.

He left the next day and drove up to Pavonis, intent on looking into the space elevator notion.

Up the long slope of Tharsis. He never saw the steep, blood-colored cone of Ascraeus Mons; it was lost in the dust along with everything else. Travel now consisted of life in a set of small rooms that bumped around a lot. He worked his way around Ascraeus on its west flank, and then motored up onto the crest of Tharsis, between Ascraeus and Pavonis; here the double-transponder road became an actual concrete ribbon under the wheels – concrete under a rush of dust, concrete that finally tilted up sharply, and led him straight up the northern slope of Pavonis Mons. It went on for so long that it began to feel like a slow blind takeoff into space.

The crater of Pavonis, as the Afrikaners had reminded him, was amazingly equatorial; the round O of its caldera sat like a ball placed right on the equator line. This apparently made the south rim of Pavonis the perfect tethering point for a space elevator, as it was both directly on the equator, and twenty-seven kilometers above the datum. Phyllis had already arranged for the construction of a preliminary habitat on the south rim; she had thrown herself into work on the elevator, and was one of its chief organizers.

Her habitat was dug into the rim wall of the caldera, in Echus Overlook style, so that windows in several stories of rooms looked out over the caldera, or would, when the dust cleared. Photos blown up and stuck on the walls showed that the caldera itself would eventually be revealed as a simple circular depression, with walls five thousand meters deep, slightly terraced near the bottom; the caldera had slumped often in earlier days, but always in nearly the same place. It was the only one of the great volcanoes to have been so regular; the other three had calderas that were like sets of overlapping circles, with each circle set at a different depth.

The new habitat, nameless at this point, had been built by UNOMA, but the equipment and personnel had been provided by the transnational Praxis, one of the biggest of them all. Currently the rooms that were finished were crowded with Praxis executives, or executives of some of the other transnationals who had subcontracts on the elevator project; among them representatives of Amex, Oroco, Subarashii, and Mitsubishi. And all their efforts were being coordinated by Phyllis, who was now apparently Helmut Bronski’s assistant in charge of the operation.

Helmut too was there, and after John had greeted him and Phyllis, and been introduced to some of the visiting consultants, he was led into a big high room with a window wall. Outside the window swirled clouds of dark orange dust dropping down into the caldera, so that it seemed that the room ascended, uncertainly, in a dim fluctuating light.

The room’s only furnishing was a globe of Mars one meter in diameter, resting waist-high on a blue plastic stand. Extending from the globe, specifically from the little bump that represented Pavonis Mons, was a silver wire about five meters long. At the end of the thread was a small black dot. The globe was rotating on the stand at about one rpm, and the silver wire and its terminating black dot rotated with it, always remaining above Pavonis.

A group of about eight people ringed this display. “Everything is to scale,” Phyllis said. “The areosynchronous satellite distance is 20,435 kilometers from the center of mass, and the equatorial radius is 3,386 kilometers, so the distance from the surface to the areosynchronous point is 17,049 kilometers; double that and add the radius, and you have 37,484 kilometers. We’ll have a ballast rock at the far end, so the actual cable won’t have to be quite as long. The diameter of the cable will be about ten meters, and will weigh about six billion tons. The material for it will have been mined from its terminal ballast point, which will be an asteroid that starts at around thirteen and a half billion tons, and ends up when the cable is finished at the proper ballast weight of around seven and a half billion tons. That’s not a very big asteroid, about two kilometers in radius to begin with; there are six Amor asteroids crossing Mars’s orbit that have been identified as candidates for the job. The cable will be manufactured by robots mining and processing the carbon in the asteroid’s chondrites. Then, in the last stages of construction, the cable will be maneuvered to its tethering point, here.” She pointed at the floor of the room in dramatic fashion. “At that point, the cable will be in areosynchronous orbit itself, barely touching down here, its weight suspended between the pull of the planet’s gravity and the centrifugal force of the upper half of the cable, and the terminal ballast rock.”

“What about Phobos?” John asked.

“Phobos is way down there, of course. The cable will be vibrating to avoid it, in what the designers call a Clarke oscillation. It won’t be a problem. Deimos will also have to be avoided by oscillation, but because its orbit is more inclined this won’t be such a frequent problem.”

“And when it’s in position?” Helmut asked, his face bright with pleasure.

“A few hundred elevators at least will be attached to the cable, and loads will be lifted into orbit using a counterweight system. There will be lots of material to load down from Earth as usual, so energy requirements for lifts will be minimized. It will also be possible to use the cable’s rotation as a slingshot; objects released from the ballast asteroid toward Earth will be using the power of Mars’s rotation as their push, and will have an energy-free high-speed take-off. It’s a clean, efficient, extraordinarily cheap method, both for lifting bulk into space and for accelerating it toward Earth. And given the recent discoveries of strategic metals, which are becoming ever more scarce on Earth, a cheap lift and push like this is literally invaluable. It creates the possibility of an exchange that wasn’t economically viable before; it will be a critical component of the Martian economy, the keystone of its industry. And it won’t be that expensive to build. Once a carbonaceous asteroid is pushed into the proper orbit, and a nuclear-powered robotic cable plant put to work on it, the plant will extrude cable like a spider spinning its thread. There will be very little to do but wait. The cable plant as designed will be able to produce over three thousand kilometers of cable a year – this means we need to start as soon as possible, but after production begins, it will only take ten or eleven years. And the wait will be well worth it.”

John stared at Phyllis, impressed as always by her fervor. She was like a convert giving witness, a preacher in a pulpit, quietly and confidently triumphant. The miracle of the skyhook. Jack and the Beanstalk, the Ascension to Heaven; it definitely had an air of the miraculous to it. “Really, we don’t have much choice,” Phyllis was saying. “This gets us out of our gravity well, eliminating it as a physical and economic problem. That’s crucial; without that we’ll be bypassed, we’ll be like Australia in the nineteenth century, too far away to be a significant part of the world economy. People will pass us by and mine the asteroids directly, because the asteroids have mineral wealth without gravitational constraints. Without the elevator we could become a backwater.”

Shikata ga nai, John thought sardonically. Phyllis glanced very briefly at John, as if he had spoken aloud. “We won’t let that happen,” she said. “And best of all, our elevator will serve as an experimental prototype for a Terran one. The transnational who gain expertise in building this elevator will be in a commanding position when it comes to bidding the contracts for the much larger Terran project that is sure to follow.”

On and on she went, outlining every aspect of the plan, and then answering questions from the executives with her usual polished brilliance. She got a lot of laughs; she was flushed, bright-eyed, John could almost see the tongues of fire flickering from her mass of auburn hair, which in the storm light looked like a cap of jewels. The executives and project scientists glowed under her look; they were onto something big, and they knew it. Earth was seriously depleted in many of the metals they were finding on Mars. There were fortunes to be made, enormous fortunes. And someone who owned a piece of the bridge over which every ounce of metal had to pass would make an enormous fortune as well, probably the greatest fortune of all. No wonder Phyllis and the rest of them looked like they were in church.

Before dinner that evening John stood in his bathroom, and without looking at himself in the mirror took out two tabs of omegendorph and swallowed them. He was sick of Phyllis. But the drug made him feel better; she was just another part of the game, after all; and when he sat down to dinner he was in an expansive mood. Okay, he thought; they have their gold mine of a beanstalk. But it wasn’t clear that they would be able to keep it to themselves; highly unlikely in fact. So that their fat-cat complacency was a bit silly, as well as grating, and he laughed in the middle of one of their enthusiastic exchanges and said, “Don’t you think it unlikely that an elevator like this will stay private property?”

“We don’t intend for it to be private property,” Phyllis said with her brilliant smile.

“But you expect to be paid for its construction. And then you expect concessions to be granted. You expert to make a profit from the venture, isn’t that what venture capitalism is all about?”

“Well, of course,” Phyllis said, looking offended that he had spoken of such things so explicitly. “Everyone on Mars will profit from it, that’s its nature.”

“And you’ll skim a percentage of every percentage.” Predators at the top of the chain. Or else parasites, up and down the length of it… “How rich did the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge get, do you think? Were there great transnational dynasties formed from the profits of the Golden Gate Bridge? No. It was a public project, wasn’t it. The builders were public employees, making a standard wage for their work. What do you want to bet that the Mars treaty doesn’t stipulate a similar arrangement for infrastructural construction here? I’m pretty sure it does.”

“But the treaty is up for revision in nine years,” Phyllis pointed out, her eyes glittering.

John laughed. “So it is! But you wouldn’t believe the support I see around this planet for a revised treaty that sets even tighter limits on Terran investment and profit. You just haven’t been paying attention. The thing you have to remember is that this is an economic system being built from scratch, on principles that make sense in scientific terms. There’s only a limited carrying capacity here, and to create a sustainable society we’ve got to pay attention to that. You can’t just lift raw materials from here to Earth – the colonial era is over, you have to remember that.” He laughed again at the glinty stares being leveled on him; it was as if gun-sights had been implanted in their corneas.

It only occurred to him later, back in his room and remembering those looks, that it probably had not been a very good idea to stick their noses in the situation so hard. The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen: This John Boone is bad news! he had whispered, eyes on John all the while; he had wanted John to see him. Well, another suspect then. It took John a while to get to sleep that night.

He left Pavonis the next day and headed east down Tharsis, intending to drive a full seven thousand kilometers to Hellas, to visit Maya. The journey was made strangely solitary by the great storm. He glimpsed the southern highlands in murky snatches only, through billowing sheets of sand, with the ever-shifting whistle of the wind as accompaniment. Maya was pleased he was coming to visit; he had never been to Hellas before, and a lot of people there were looking forward to meeting him. They had discovered a sizeable aquifer to the north of Low Point, so their plan was to pump water from that aquifer to the surface, and create a lake in the low point, a lake with a frozen surface which would be continuously subliming into the atmosphere, but which they would keep supplied from below. Sustained in that way it would both enrich the atmosphere, and serve as a reservoir and heat sink for cultivation, in a ring of domed farms built around the lake shore. Maya was very excited at the plans.

John’s long journey toward her passed in a mesmerized state, as he watched crater after crater loom out of the clouds of dust. One evening he stopped at a Chinese settlement where they knew hardly a word of English and lived in boxes like the trailer park. He and the settlers had to make use of an AI translation program which kept them both laughing for most of the evening. Two days later, he stopped for a day at a huge Japanese air mining facility in a high pass between craters. Here everyone spoke excellent English, but they were frustrated because the air miners had been brought to a standstill by the storm; the technicians smiled painfully, and escorted him through a nightmare complex of filtering systems that they had set up to try to keep the pumps working; and all for naught.

East three days from the Japanese he ran across a Sufi caravanserai located on top of a circular steep-walled mesa. This particular mesa had once been a crater floor, but it had been so hardened by impact metamorphosis that it had resisted the erosion that had cut away the surrounding soft land in the eons that followed and now stood above the plain like a thick round pedestal, its furrowed sides a kilometer high. John drove up a switchbacking ramp road to the caravanserai on top.

Up there he found that the mesa was situated in a permanent standing wave in the dust storm, so that there was more sunlight leaking through the dark clouds here than anywhere else he had been, even on the rim of Pavonis. Visibility was almost as truncated as everywhere else, but everything was more brightly colored, the dawns purple and chocolate, the days a vivid cloudy rush of umbers and yellow, orange and rust, pierced by the occasional bronzed sunbeam.

It was a great spot, and the Sufis proved to be more hospitable than any of the Arab groups he had met so far. They had come up in one of the latest Arab groups, they told him, as a concession to religious factions in the Arab world back home; and as Sufis were numerous among Islamic scientists, there had been very few objections to sending them as a coherent group of their own. One of them, a small black man named Dhu el-Nun, said to him, “It’s wonderful in this time of the seventy thousand veils that you, the great talib, has followed his tariqat here to visit us.”

“Talib?” John said. “Tariqat?”

“A talib is a seeker. And the seeker’s tariqat is his path, his special path you know, on the road to reality.”

“I see!” John said, still surprised at the friendliness of their greeting.

Dhu led him from the garage to a low black building which stood in the center of a ring of rovers, looking dense with concentrated energy; a squat round thing like a model of the mesa itself, its windows rough clear crystals. Dhu identified the black rock of the building as stishovite, a high-density silicate created by the meteor’s impact, when pressures of over a million kilograms per square centimeter had momentarily existed. The windows were made of lechatelierite, a kind of compressed glass also created by the impact.

Inside the building, a party of about twenty people greeted him, both men and women alike. The women were bareheaded and behaved just like the men, which again surprised John, and alerted him to the fact that things among the Sufis were different than they were among Arabs generally. He sat down and drank coffee with them, and started asking questions again. They were Qadarite Sufis, they told him, pantheists influenced by early Greek philosophy and modern existentialism, trying by modern science and the ru’ yat al-qalb, the vision of the heart, to become one with that ultimate reality which was God. “There are four mystical journeys,” Dhu said to him. “The first begins with gnosis and ends with fana, or passing away from all phenomenal things. The second begins when fana is succeeded by baqa, or abiding. At this point you journey in the real, by the real, to the real, and you yourself are a reality, a haqq. And after that you move on to the center of the spirit universe, and become one with all others who have done likewise.”

“I guess I haven’t begun the first journey yet,” John said. “I don’t know anything.”

They were pleased by this response, he could see. You can start, they told him, and poured him more coffee. You can always start. They were so encouraging and friendly compared to any of the Arabs John had met before that he opened up to them, and told them about his trip to Pavonis, and the plans for the great elevator cable. “No fancy in the world is all untrue,” Dhu said. And when John mentioned his last meeting with Arabs, on Vastitas Borealis, and how Frank had been accompanying them, Dhu said cryptically, “It’s the love of right lures men to wrong.”

One of the women laughed and said, “Chalmers is your nafs.”

“What’s that?” John asked.

They were all laughing. Dhu, shaking his head, said “He is not your nafs. One’s nafs is one’s evil self, which some used to believe lived in one’s chest.”

“Like an organ or something?”

“Like an actual creature. Mohammed ibn ’Ulyan for instance reported that something like a young fox leaped out of his throat, and when he kicked it it only got bigger. That was his nafs.”

“It is another name for your Shadow,” the woman who had brought it up explained.

“Well,” John said. “Maybe he is, then. Or maybe it’s just that Frank’s nafs gets kicked a lot.” And they laughed with him at the thought.

Later that afternoon sunlight pierced the dust more strongly than usual, lighting the streaming clouds so that the caravanserai seemed to rest in the ventricle of a giant heart, with the gusts of the wind saying beat, beat, beat, beat. The Sufis called out to each other when they looked through the lechatelierite windows, and quickly they suited up to go out into this crimson world, into the wind, calling to Boone to accompany them. He grinned and suited up, surreptitiously swallowing a tab of omeg as he did so.

Once outside they walked the circumference of the ragged edge of the mesa, looking out into the clouds and down onto the shadowed plain below, pointing out to John whatever features happened to be visible. After that they gathered near the caravanserai, and John listened to their voices as they chanted, various voices providing English translations for the Arabic and Farsi. “Possess nothing and be possessed by nothing. Put away what you have in your head, give what you have in your heart. Here a world and there a world, we are seated on the threshold.”

Another voice: “Love thrilled the chord in my soul’s lute, and changed me to love from head to foot.”

And they began to dance. Watching John suddenly got it, that they were whirling dervishes: they leaped into the air to the beat of drums pattering lightly over the common band, they leaped and whirled in slow unearthly spins, arms outstretched; and when they touched down they pushed off and did it again, for turn after turn after turn. Whirling dervishes in the great storm, on a high round mesa that had been a crater floor in the Noachian. It looked so marvelous in the bloody pulsing glow of light that John stood up and started to spin with them. He wrecked their symmetries, he sometimes actually collided with other dancers; but no one seemed to mind. He found that it helped to jump slightly into the wind, to keep from being blown off balance. A hard gust would knock you flat. He laughed. Some of the dancers were chanting over the common band, the usual quarter-tone ululations, punctuated by shouts and harsh rhythmic breathing, and the phrase “Ana el-Haqq, ana el-Haqq” – I am God, one translated, I am God. A Sufi heresy. The dancing was meant to hypnotize you – there were other Moslem cults that did it with self-flagellation, John knew. Spinning was better; he danced, he joined the chant on the common band by punctuating it with his own rapid breath, and with grunts and babble; then without thinking about it he began to add to the flow of sound the names for Mars, muttering them in the rhythm of the chant as he understood it. “Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma’adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.” He had memorized the list years ago, as a kind of party trick; now he was quite surprised to find what an excellent chant it made, how it spilled out of his mouth and helped stabilize his spinning. The other dancers were laughing at him, but in a good way, they sounded pleased. He felt drunk, his whole body was humming. He repeated the litany many times, then shifted to repeating the Arabic name, over and over: “Al-Qahira, Al-Qahira, Al-Qahira.” And then, remembering what one of the translating voices had told him, “Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira. Ana el-Haqq, ana Al-Qahira.” I am God, I am Mars, I am God … The others quickly joined him in this chant, lifted it into a wild song, and in the flash of rotating faceplates he caught sight of their grinning faces. They were really good spinners; as they whirled their outstretched fingers cut the rush of red dust into arabesques, and now as they spun they tapped him with their fingertips, guiding him or even actively pushing his clumsy turns into the weave of their pattern. He shouted the planet’s names and they repeated them after him, in call and response style; they chanted the names, Arabic, Sanskrit, Inca, all the names for Mars, mixed together in a soup of syllables, creating a polyphonic music that was beautiful and shivery-strange, for the names for Mars came from times when words sounded odd, and names had power: he could hear that when he sang them.

When he finally stopped dancing and sat to watch, he began to feel sick. The world swam, his middle ear thingie was no doubt still spinning like a roulette ball. The scene pulsed before him; it was impossible to say whether this was the swirling dust or something internal, but either way he goggled at what he saw: whirling dervishes, on Mars? Well, in the Moslem world they were deviants of a kind, and with an ecumenical bent rare in Islam. And scientists too. So they were his way into Islam, perhaps, his tariqat; and their dervish ceremonies could perhaps be shifted into the areophany, as during his chant. He stood, reeling; all of a sudden he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before. “Love thrilled the chord of love in my lute …” He was too dizzy. The others were laughing at him, supporting him. He talked to them in his usual way, hoping they would understand. “I feel sick. I think I’m going to throw up. But you must tell me why we can’t leave all the sad Terran baggage behind. Why we can’t invent together a new religion. The worship of Al-Qahira, Mangala, Kasei!”

They laughed, and carried him on their shoulders back toward the shelter. “I’m serious,” he said as the world spun. “I want you people to do it, I want your dancing to be in it, it’s obvious you should be the ones to design this religion, you’re doing it already.” But vomiting in a helmet was dangerous, and they only laughed at him and hustled him into the crushed-stone habitat as quickly as they could. There as he threw up a woman held his head, saying in musical subcontinental English, “The King asked his wise men for some single thing that would make him happy when he was sad, but sad when he was happy. They consulted and came back with a ring engraved with the message ‘This Too Will Pass.’”

“Straight into the recyclers,” Boone said. He lay back spinning. It was kind of an awful feeling, when you were trying to lie still. “But what do you want here? Why are you on Mars? You have to tell me what you want here.” They took him to the common room and set out cups, and a pot of aromatic tea. He still felt like he was spinning, and the dust rushing by the crystalline windows didn’t help.

One of the old women around him picked up the pot and poured John’s cup full. She put down the pot, gestured: “Now you fill mine.” John did so, unsteadily, and then the pot went around the room. Each pourer filled someone else’s cup.

“We start every meal this way,” the old woman said. “It is a little sign of how we are together. We have studied the old cultures, before your global market netted everything, and in those ages there existed many different forms of exchange. Some of them were based on the giving of gifts. Each of us has a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back.”

“Like the equation for ecologic efficiency,” John said.

“Maybe so. In any case, whole cultures were built around the idea of the gift, in Malaysia, in the American northwest, in many primitive cultures. In Arabia we gave water, or coffee. Food and shelter. And whatever you were given, you did not expect to keep, but gave it back again in your turn, hopefully with interest. You worked to be able to give more than you received. Now we think that this can be the basis for a reverent economics.”

“It’s just what Vlad and Ursula said!”

“Maybe so.”

The tea helped. After a while his equilibrium returned. They talked about other things, the great storm, the great hard plinth they lived on. Late that night he asked if they had heard of the Coyote, but they hadn’t. They did know stories about a creature they called the “hidden one”, the last survivor of an ancient race of Martians, a wizened thing who wandered the planet helping endangered wanderers, rovers, settlements. It had been spotted at the water station in Chasma Borealis last year, during an ice fall and subsequent power outage.

“It’s not Big Man?” John asked.

“No, no. Big Man is big. The hidden one is like us. Its people were Big Man’s subjects.”

“I see.”

But he didn’t, not really. If Big Man stood for Mars itself, then maybe the story of the hidden one had been inspired by Hiroko. Impossible to say. He needed a folklorist, or a scholar of myths, someone who could tell him how stories were born; but he had only these Sufis, grinning and weird, story creatures themselves. His fellow citizens in this new land. He had to laugh. They laughed with him and took him off to bed. “We say a bedtime prayer from the Persian poet Rumi Jalaluddin,” the old woman told him, and recited it:

“‘I died as mineral and became a plant,

I died as plant and rose to animal.

I died as animal and I was human.

Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Yet once more I shall die human,

To soar with angels blessed above.

And when I sacrifice my angel soul

I shall become what no mind ever conceived.’

“Sleep well,” she said into his drowsing mind. “This is all our path.”

The next morning he climbed stiffly into his rover, wincing with soreness and determined to eat some omeg as soon as he got on his way. The same woman was there to see him off, and he bumped his faceplate against hers affectionately.

“Whether it be of this world or of that,” she said, “your love will lead you yonder in the end.”

The transponder road led him through the brown wind-torn days, crossing the broken land south of Margaritifer Sinus. John would have to drive it again some other time to see any of it, for in the storm it was nothing but flying chocolate, pierced by momentary golden shafts of light. Near Bakhuysen Crater he stopped at a new settlement called Turner Wells; here they had tapped into an aquifer that was under such hydrostatic pressure at its lower end that they were going to generate power by running the artesian flow through a series of turbines. The water released would be poured into molds, frozen, and then hauled by robot to dry settlements all over the southern hemisphere. Mary Dunkel was working there, and she showed John around the wells, the power plant, and the ice reservoirs. “The exploratory drilling was actually scary as hell. When the drill hit the liquid part of the aquifer it was blasted back out of the well, and it was touch and go whether we were going to be able to control the gusher or not.”

“What would have happened if you hadn’t?”

“Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of water down there. If it broke the rock around the well, it might have gone like the big outflow channels in Chryse.”

“That big?”

“Who knows? It’s possible.”

“Wow.”

“That’s what I said! Now Ann has started an investigation into methods for determining aquifer pressures by the echoes they give back in the seismic tests. But there are people who would like to release an aquifer or two, see? They leave messages on the bulletin boards in the net. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sax is among them. Big floods of water and ice, lots of sublimation into the air, why shouldn’t he cheer?”

“But floods like those old ones would be as destructive to the landscape as dropping asteroids on it.”

“Oh, more destructive! Those channels downslope from the chaoses were incredible outbreaks. The best Terran analogy is the scablands in eastern Washington, have you heard of them? About eighteen thousand years ago there was a lake covering most of Montana, Lake Missoula they call it, composed of Ice Age meltwater and held in place by an ice dam. At some point this ice dam broke and the lake emptied catastrophically, about two trillion cubic meters of water, draining down the Columbia plateau and out to the Pacific in a matter of days.”

“Wow.”

“While it lasted it ran about a hundred times the discharge of the Amazon, and carved channels in the basalt bedrock that are as much as two hundred meters deep.”

“Two hundred meters!”

“Right. And this was nothing compared to the ones that cut the Chryse channels! The anastomosing up there covers areas— ”

“Two hundred meters of bedrock?”

“Yeah, well, it isn’t just normal erosion. In floods that big the pressures fluctuate so much that you get exsolution of dissolved gases, you know, and when those bubbles collapse they produce incredible pressures. Hammering like that can break anything.”

“So it would be worse than an asteroid strike.”

“Sure. Unless you dropped a really big asteroid. But there are people who think we should be doing that too, right?”

“Are there?”

“You know there are. But the floods are better yet, if you want to do that kind of thing. If you could direct one of them into Hellas, for instance, you’d have a sea. And you might be able to refill it faster than the surface ice sublimed.”

“Direct a flood like that?” John exclaimed.

“Well, yeah, that would be impossible. But if you found one in the right spot, you wouldn’t have to direct it. You should check where Sax has sent the dowsing team lately, see what it looks like to you.”

“But it would be forbidden by UNOMA for sure.”

“Since when has that mattered to Sax?”

John laughed. “Oh, it matters now. They’ve given him too much for him to ignore them. They’ve tied him down with money and power.”

“Maybe.”

That night at 3:30 a.m. there was a small explosion in one of the well heads, and alarm bells ripped them from sleep and sent them stumbling through the tunnels half-naked, to be faced with a gusher that was shooting up into the night’s flying dust, in a column of white water torn to shreds in the unsteady glare of hastily directed spotlights. The water was falling out of the dust clouds as chunks of ice, hail the size of bowling balls; wells downwind were being pummelled by these missiles, and the ice balls were already knee deep.

Given the discussion of the previous night John found himself quite alarmed by the sight, and he ran around until he found Mary. Through the noise of the eruption and the ever-present storm, Mary shouted in John’s ear: “Clear the area, I’m going to set off a charge beside the well and try to snuff it!” She ran off in her white nightshirt, and John rounded up the spectators and got them back down the tunnels to the station habitat. Mary joined them in the lock, huffing and puffing, and fiddled with her wristpad, and there was a low boom in the direction of the well. “Come on, let’s go see,” she said, and they got through the lock and ran back down the tunnels toward the window overlooking the well. There in a tumble of white ice balls lay the wreckage of the drill, on its side, and still. “Yeah! Capped!” Mary cried.

They cheered weakly. Some of them went down to the well area, to see if there was anything they could do to secure the situation. “Good work!” John said to Mary.

“I’ve read a lot about well capping since that first incident,” Mary said, still short of breath. “And we had it all set up to go. But we never actually had the chance. To try it. Of course. So you never know.”

John said, “Do your locks have recorders?”

“They do.”

“Great.”

John went to check them. He plugged Pauline into the station system, asked questions, scanning the answers as they appeared on his pad. No one had used the locks after the time-slip that night. He called the weather satellite overhead, and clicked into the radar and IR systems that Sax had given him the codes for, and scanned the area around Bakhuysen. No sign of any machines nearby, except some of the old windmill heaters. And the transponders showed that no one had been on the roads in the area since his arrival the previous day.

John sat heavily before Pauline, feeling sluggish and slow-witted. He couldn’t think of any other checks to make; and it seemed from those he had, that no one had been out that night to do the damage. The explosion could have been arranged days before, perhaps; although it would be hard to hide the device, the wells being worked on daily. He got up slowly and went to find Mary, and with her help talked to the people who had last worked on that well, the day before. No sign of tampering then, all the way until eight p.m. And after that everyone in the station had been at the John Boone party, the locks unused. So there really had been no chance.

He went back to his bed and thought about it. “Oh, by the way, Pauline; please check Sax’s records, and give me a list of all the dowsing expeditions in the last year.”