Читать книгу The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson, Kim Stanley Robinson - Страница 14

Continuing on his blind road to Hellas he ran into Nadia, who was overseeing the construction of a new kind of dome over Rabe Crater. It was the largest dome yet built, taking advantage of the thickening of the atmosphere and the lightening of construction materials, which created a situation where gravity could be balanced with pressure, making the pressurized dome effectively weightless. The frame was to be made of reinforced areogel beams, the latest from the alchemists; areogel was so light and strong that Nadia went into little raptures as she described the potential uses for it. Crater domes themselves were a thing of the past, in her opinion; it would be just as easy to erect areogel pillars around the circumference of a town, bypassing the rock enclosures and putting the whole population inside what would be in effect a big clear tent.

She told John all about it as they walked around Rabe’s interior, now nothing but a big construction site. The whole crater rim was going to be honeycombed with skylighted rooms, and the domed interior would hold a farm that would feed thirty thousand. Earth-moving robots the size of buildings hummed out of the murk of the dust, invisible even fifty meters away. These behemoths were working on their own, or by teleoperation, and the teleoperators probably had too little view of their surroundings to make nearby foot traffic entirely safe. John followed Nadia nervously as she strolled about, remembering how skittish the miners at Bradbury Point had been – and there they had been able to see what was happening! He had to laugh at Nadia’s obliviousness. When the ground trembled underfoot, they just stopped and looked around, ready to leap away from any oncoming building-sized vehicles. It was quite a tour. Nadia railed against the dust, which was wrecking a lot of machinery. The great storm was now four months old, the longest in years; and it still showed no sign of ending. Temperatures had plummeted, people were eating canned and dried food, and an occasional salad or vegetable grown under artificial light. And dust was in everything. Even as they discussed it John could feel it caking his mouth, and his eyes were dry in their sockets. Headaches had become extremely common, as well as sinus trouble, sore throats, bronchitis, asthma, lung distress generally. Plus frequent cases of frostnip. And computers were becoming dangerously unreliable, a lot of hardware breakdown, a lot of AI neurosis or retardation. Middays inside Rabe were like living inside a brick, Nadia said, and sunsets looked like coal mine fires. She hated it.

John changed the subject. “What do you think of this space elevator?”

“Big.”

“But the effect, Nadia. The effect.”

“Who knows? You can never tell with a thing like that, can you?”

“It’ll make a strategic bottleneck, like the one Phyllis used to talk about when we were discussing who would build Phobos station. She’ll have made her own bottleneck. That’s a lot of power.”

“That’s what Arkady says, but I don’t see why it can’t be treated as a common resource, like a natural feature.”

“You’re an optimist.”

“That’s what Arkady says.” She shrugged. “I’m just trying to be sensible.”

“Me too.”

“I know. Sometimes I think we’re the only two.”

“And Arkady?”

She laughed.

“But you two are a couple!”

“Yes, yes. Like you and Maya.”

“Touché.”

Nadia smiled briefly. “I try to make Arkady think about things. That’s the best I can do. We’re meeting at Acheron in a month to take the treatment. Maya tells me it’s a good thing to do together.”

“I recommend it,” John said with a grin.

“And the treatment?”

“Beats the alternative, right?”

She chuckled. Then the ground growled through their boots, and they stiffened and jerked their heads around, looking for shadows in the murk. A black bulk like a moving hill appeared to their right. They ran to the side, stumbling and hopping over cobbles and debris, John wondering if this were another attack, Nadia rapping out commands over the common band, cursing the teleoperators for not keeping track of them on the IR. “Watch your screens, you lazy bastards!”

The ground stopped trembling. The black leviathan no longer moved. They approached it warily. A Brobdingnagian dump truck, on tracks. Built locally, by Utopia Planitia Machines: a robot built by robots, and big as an office block.

John stared up at it, feeling the sweat drip down his forehead. They were safe. His pulse slowed. “Monsters like this are all over the planet,” he said to Nadia wonderingly. “Cutting, scraping, digging, filling, building. Pretty soon some of them will attach themselves to one of those two-kilometer asteroids, and build a power plant that will use the asteroid itself as fuel to drive it into Martian orbit, at which point other machines will land on it, and begin to transform the rock into a cable about thirty-seven thousand kilometers long! The size of it, Nadia! The size!”

“It’s big all right.”

“It’s unimaginable, really. Something completely beyond human abilities as we were brought up to understand them. Teleoperation on a massive scale. A kind of spiritual waldo. Anything that can be imagined can be executed!” Slowly they walked around the giant black object before them: no more than a kind of dump truck, nothing compared to what the space elevator would be; and yet even this truck, he thought, was an amazing thing. “Muscle and brain have extended out through an armature of robotics that is so large and powerful that it’s difficult to conceptualize it. Maybe impossible. That’s probably part of your talent, and Sax’s too – to flex the muscles that no one else realizes we have yet. I mean holes drilled right through the lithosphere, the terminator lit with mirrored sunlight, all these cities filling mesas and stuck in the sides of cliffs – and now a cable strung out way past Phobos and Deimos, so long that it’s both in orbit and touching down at the same time! It’s impossible to imagine it!”

“Not impossible,” Nadia noted.

“No. And now of course we see the evidence of our power all around us, we almost get run down by it as it goes about its work! And seeing is believing. Even without an imagination you can see what kind of power we have. Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange these days, everyone talking about ownership or sovereignty, fighting, making claims. People squabbling like those old gods on Olympus, because nowadays we’re just as powerful as they were.”

“Or more,” Nadia said.

He drove on into the Hellespontus Montes, the curved mountain range surrounding Hellas Basin. Somehow, one night when he was sleeping his rover got off the transponder road. He woke up, and in breaks in the dust saw that he was in a narrow valley, walled with small cliffs that were cut by the typical fluting of ravines. It seemed likely that by staying on the valley floor he would cross the road again, so he headed on cross country. Then the valley floor was disrupted by shallow transverse grabens like empty canals, and Pauline kept having to stop and turn and try another branch in her route-finding algorithm, defeated by one gulch after another as they appeared out of the murk. When John got impatient and tried to take over, it only got worse. In the land of the blind, the autopilot is king.

But slowly he closed on the valley mouth, where the map showed the transponder road descending to a wider valley below. So that night he stopped, unworried, and sat in front of the TV and ate a meal. Mangalavid was showing the premiere performance of an aeolia built by a group in Noctis Labyrinthus. The aeolia turned out to be a small building, cut with apertures which whistled or hooted or squeaked, depending on the angle and strength of the wind hitting them. For the premiere the daily downslope wind in Noctis was augmented by some fierce katabatic gusts from the storm, and the music fluctuated like a composition, mournful, angry, dissonant or in sudden snatches harmonic: it seemed the work of a mind, an alien mind perhaps, but certainly something more than random chance. The almost aleatory aeolia, as a commentator said.

After that came news from Earth. The existence of the gerontological treatments had been leaked by a official in Geneva, and had flashed around the world in a day; and now there was a violent debate going on in the General Assembly concerning the matter. Many delegates were demanding that the treatments be made a basic human right, guaranteed by the UN for all, with funding from the developed nations placed immediately in a pool to make sure that financing for the treatments would be equally available to all. Meanwhile other reports were coming in: some religious leaders were coming out against the treatments, including the Pope; there were widespread riots, and some damage at certain medical centers. Governments were in a turmoil. All the faces on the TV were tense or angry, demanding change; and all the inequality, hatred and misery that the faces revealed made John flinch, he couldn’t watch. He fell asleep, and then slept poorly.

He was dreaming of Frank when a sound woke him. A knock on his windshield. It was the middle of the night. Groggily he hit the lock lock; sitting up he wondered that he had such a reflex action in him. When had he learned that one? He rubbed his jaw, turned on the common band. “Hello? Anyone out there?”

“The Martians.”

It was a man’s voice. His English was accented, but John couldn’t identify how.

“We want to talk,” the voice said.

John stood and looked out the windshield. At night, in the storm, there was precious little to see. But he thought he could pick out shapes in the blackness, there below him.

“We just want to talk,” the voice said.

If they had wanted to kill him they could have blown open the rover while he slept. Besides, he still couldn’t quite believe that anyone wished him harm. There was no reason for it!

So he let them in.

There were five of them, all men. Their walkers were frayed, dirty, patched with material that had not been made for walkers. Their helmets were without identification, stripped of all paint. As they took off the helmets he saw that one of the men was Asian, and young; he looked about eighteen. The youth went forward and sat in the driver’s seat, leaned over the steering wheel to look closer at the instrument array. Another got off his helmet; a short brown-skinned man, with a thin face and long dreadlocks. He sat on the padded bench across from John’s bed, and waited for the other three men to get their helmets off too. When they did they crouched on their haunches, watching John attentively. He had never seen any of them before.

The thin-faced man said, “We want you to slow the rate of immigration.” He was the one who had spoken outside; now his accent sounded Caribbean. He spoke in a low voice, almost in a whisper, and John found it very difficult not to emulate him.

“Or stop it,” the young man in the driver’s seat said.

“Shut up, Kasei.” The thin-faced man never took his gaze from John’s face. “There are too many people coming up. You know that. They’re not Martian, and they don’t care what happens here. They’re going to overwhelm us, they’re going to overwhelm you. You know that. You’re trying to turn them into Martians, we know, but they’re coming in a lot faster than you can work. The only thing that will work is slowing down the influx.”

“Or stopping it.”

The man rolled his eyes, appealed with a grimace for John’s understanding. The youth was young, his look said.

“I don’t have any say— ” John began, but the man cut him off:

“You can advocate it. You’re a power, and you’re on our side.”

“Are you from Hiroko?”

The youth snicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The thin-faced man said nothing. Four faces stared at John; the other looked resolutely out the window.

John said, “Have you been sabotaging the moholes?”

“We want you to stop the immigration.”

“I want you to stop the sabotage. It’s just bringing more people here. Police.”

The man eyed him. “What makes you think we can contact the saboteurs?”

“Find them. Break in on them at night.”

The man smiled. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Not necessarily.”

They had to be with Hiroko. Occam’s razor. There couldn’t be more than one hidden group. Or maybe there could. John felt light-headed, and wondered if they were doctoring the air. Releasing aerosol drugs. He definitely felt strange, it was all surreal, dreamy; the wind buffeted the rover, sent a sudden burst of aeolian music coursing by, a weird drawn-out hoot. His thoughts were slow and ponderous, and he felt the edge of a yawn. That’s it, he thought. I’m still trying to wake from a dream.

“Why do you hide?” he heard himself say.

“We’re building Mars. Just like you. We’re on your side.”

“You ought to help, then.” He tried to think. “What about the space elevator?”

“We don’t care about it.” The kid snicked. “That isn’t what matters. It’s people that matter.”

“The elevator will bring a lot more people.”

The man considered that. “Slow the immigration, and it can’t even be built.”

Another long silence, punctuated by the wind’s eerie commentary. Can’t even be built? Did they think people would build it? Or maybe they meant the money.

“I’ll look into it,” John said. The kid turned and stared at him, and John raised a hand to forestall him. “I’ll do what I can.” His hand stood before him, a huge pink thing. “That’s all I can say. If I promised results, it would be lying. I know what you mean. I’ll do what I can.” He thought about it more, with difficulty. “You ought to be out in the open, helping us. We need more help.”

“Each in his way,” the man said quietly. “We’ll be going now. We’ll keep track to see what you do.”

“Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her.”

The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.

The thin-faced man smiled briefly. “If I see her I will.”

One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue mass: an aerogel sponge, barely visible under the night-running lights. The hand holding it made a fist. Yes, a drug. He lunged out and caught the young one unawares, clawed the youth’s bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.

When he came to they were gone. He had a headache. He fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the visitation. “You’re a fool,” Frank said. “You don’t understand.”

When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the windshield. The winds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to be sure. Shapes in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory deprivation hallucinations. It really was sensory deprivation, this storm; and getting very claustrophobic indeed. He ate some omeg, suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeared. A difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?

But if they had been tracking him …

Back inside he called up the satellites. Radar and IR got nothing but his rover. Even walkers would have shown on the IR; so presumably they had a refuge nearby. Easy to hide in mountains like these. He called up his Hiroko map, and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging it north and south in the mountains. He had several circles on the Hiroko map by now, but none of them had been searched by ground crews with any thoroughness, and probably they never would be, as most of them were in chaotic terrain, ravaged land the size of Wyoming or Texas. “It’s a big world,” he muttered.

He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at the floor. Then he remembered the last thing he had done. He looked under his fingernails; a little skin matter was stuck there, yes. He got a sample dish from the little autoclave, and carefully scraped what was there onto the dish. Genome identification was far beyond the rover’s capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on record. If not, that too would be useful information. And maybe, John wasn’t sure, Ursula and Vlad could identify him by parentage.

He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeared that it was turning into a conference on agriculture under artificial lighting. The next morning John took him out for a walk in the cleartunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the east.

“I think I met the Coyote,” John said.

“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”

“No.”

Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums – about two percent, to be precise – and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was non-existent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation was still twenty-five percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of ending. Temperatures had dropped, and tempers were rising. All the new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.

Sax dismissed all that with a mild shrug. “It’s the last global storm,” he said. “It will go down in history as some kind of heroic age. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

This was poorly received. Sax, however, did not notice.

A few days later, Ann and Simon drove into the settlement with their boy Peter, who was now three. He had been, so far as they could tell, the thirty-third child born on Mars; the colonies established after the first hundred had been fairly prolific. John played with the boy on the floor as he and Ann and Simon caught up on news, and exchanged some of the thousand and one tales of the Great Storm. It seemed to John that Ann ought to be enjoying the storm and the horrendous knock it had put on the terraforming process, like some kind of planetary allergic response, the temperatures plummeting below the baseline, the reckless experimenters struggling with their puny clogged machines … But she was not amused. Irritated as usual, in fact. “A dowsing team drilled into a volcanic vent in Daedalia and came up with a sample containing unicellular micro-organisms significantly different from the cyanobacteria you released in the north. And the vent was pretty nearly encased in bedrock, and very far from any biotic release sites. They sent samples of the stuff up to Acheron for analysis, and Vlad studied it and declared that it looked like a mutant strain of one of their releases, perhaps injected into the sample rock by contaminated drilling equipment.” Ann poked John in the chest: “‘Probably Terran,’ Vlad said. Probably Terran!”

“Probabry tewwan!” her little boy said, catching Ann’s intonation perfectly.

“Well, it probably is,” John said.

“But we’ll never know! They’ll end up debating it for centuries to come, there’ll be a journal devoted to that issue alone, but we’ll never really know.”

“If it’s too close to tell, it’s probably Terran,” John said, grinning at the boy. “Anything that evolved separately from Terran life would give itself away in an instant.”

“Probably,” Ann said. (“Probabry.”) “Except what if there’s a common source, the space spores theory, for instance, or ejecta blasted from one planet to another with micro-organisms buried in its rock?”

“That’s not too likely, is it?”

“We don’t know. We’ll never know, now.”

John had a hard time sharing her concern. “They might have come from the Viking landers for all we know,” he said. “There’s never been a very effective effort to sterilize our explorations here, that’s just the way it is. Meanwhile we’ve got more pressing problems.” Such as a global dust storm longer than the longest one ever recorded, or an influx of immigrants whose commitment to Mars was as minimal as their housing, or an upcoming treaty revision that no one could agree on, or a terraforming effort that a lot of people hated. Or a home planet going critical. Or an attempt (or two) to do one John Boone some harm.

“Yeah yeah,” Ann said. “I know. But all that’s politics, we’ll never get away from that. This was science, a question I wanted answered. And now I can’t. Nobody can.”

John shrugged. “We’ll never answer that one, Ann. No matter what. That was one of those questions that was fated always to remain unanswered. Didn’t you know that?”

“Probabwy tewwan.”

A few days after that, a rocket landed on the little lake station spaceport pad, and a small group of Terrans emerged out of the dust, still bouncing around as they walked. Investigative agents, they said, here on UNOMA authority, to look into sabotage and related incidents. There were ten of them in all, eight clean-cut young men right out of the vids, and two attractive young women. Most had been assigned from the American FBI. Their leader, a tall brown-haired man named Sam Houston, requested an interview with Boone; John agreed politely.

When they met after breakfast the next morning – six of the agents there, including both women – he meekly answered every question without hesitation, though instinctively he told them only what he thought they knew already, plus a bit more to seem honest and helpful. They were polite and deferential; thorough in their questioning, extremely reticent if he asked them anything in return. They seemed unaware of much of the detail of the situation on Mars, and asked him about things that had happened in the first years at Underhill, or during the time of Hiroko’s disappearance. They obviously knew the events of that time, and the basic facts of the various relationships among the first hundred’s media stars; they asked him a lot of questions about Maya, Phyllis, Arkady, Nadia, the Acheron group, Sax … all of whom were well-known to these young Terrans, permanent fixtures on their TV. But it seemed they knew little beyond what had been taped and sent back to Earth. John, his mind wandering, wondered if that would be true of all Terrans. After all what other sources of information did they have?

At the end of the interview, one of them named Chang asked him if there was anything else he wanted to say. John, who had omitted an account of his midnight visit from the Coyote, among many other things, said, “I can’t think of anything!”

Chang nodded, and then Sam Houston said, “We’d appreciate it if you’d give us access to your AI on these matters,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” John said, looking apologetic. “I don’t give access to my AI.”

“You have a destruct lock on it?” Houston said, looking surprised.

“No. I just don’t do it. Those are my private records.”

John stared the man in the eye, watched him squirm under the gaze of his associates.

“We, um, we can get a warrant from UNOMA, if you like.”

“I doubt you can, actually. And even if you do I won’t let you in.”

John smiled at him, almost laughed. Another moment where being the First Man On Mars was useful. There was nothing they could do to him without causing far more trouble than it was worth. He stood up, surveyed the little gang with as much easy arrogance as he could muster, which was quite a lot. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

He left the room. “Pauline, click into the building comm center and copy anything you can that they send out.” He called Helmut, remembering that his own calls would be opened as well; he kept his questions brief, as if just checking credentials. Yes, a team had been sent out by UNOMA. They were part of a task force, assembled in the last six months to deal with problems.

Police on Mars, then, as well as a detective. Well, it was to be expected. But it was a nuisance nevertheless. He couldn’t do much with them hanging around watching him, suspicious because he hadn’t given them access to Pauline. And really there wasn’t that much to do in Hellas anyway. There had been no incidents of sabotage there, and it seemed unlikely that any would occur now. Maya was unsympathetic: she didn’t want to be bothered with his problems, she had enough problems of her own, with the technical aspects of the aquifer project. “You’re probably their chief suspect,” she said irritably. “These things keep happening to you, a truck in Thaumasia, a well at Bakhuysen, and now you won’t let them into your records. Why don’t you just do it?”

“Because I don’t like them,” John said, glaring at her. It was back to normal with Maya. Well, not really; they went through their routines in a kind of high spirits, as if playing a good role in the theater, knowing they had time for everything, knowing now what was real, what lay at the base of the relationship. So in that sense it was much better. On the surface, however, it was the same old melodrama. Maya refused to understand, and in the end John gave up. After that he spent a couple of days thinking it over. He went down to the station’s labs, and had the sample of skin taken from under his fingernails cultured, cloned, and read. No one with that genome was in the planetary records, so he sent the information to Acheron requesting an analysis and any information they could give. Ursula sent their results back coded, with a single word added at the end. Congratulations.

He read the message again, swore out loud. He went out for a walk, alternately laughing and swearing. “Damn you, Hiroko! Damn you to hell! Get out of your hole and help us! Ah, ha ha ha! You bitch! I’m sick of this Persephone shit!”

Even the walktubes were oppressive at that moment and he went to the garage, suited up and went out the lock for a walk outside, the first in many days. He was out at the end of the northern arm of the town on a smooth desert floor. He wandered around, staying within the fluctuating column of dust-free air that every city created, thinking the situation over as he surveyed the city. Hellas was going to be much less impressive than Burroughs, or Acheron, or Echus, or even Senzeni Na; located at the low point of the basin, it had no heights to build on, no prospect. Although the whipping dust made it a poor time to judge that. The town had been built in a crescent which would eventually become the shoreline of the new lake; that might look nice when it happened – a waterfront – but meanwhile it was as featureless as Underhill, with all the latest in power plant and service apparatus, intake vents, cables, tunnels like giant sloughed snakeskins … the old scientific station look, no aesthetics involved. Well, that was fine. They couldn’t put every town on a mountaintop.

Two people passed him, their faceplates polarized. Odd, he thought, it being so gloomy in the storm. Then they leaped on him, knocked him down. He shoved off the sand with a wild John Carter leap and threw his fists around him, but to his surprise they were running off into the clouds of dust whipping by. He staggered, stared after them. They disappeared behind the veils of dust. His blood jolted through him; then he felt his shoulders burn. He reached up and back; they had cut his walker open. He pressed his hand over the rip and began to run hard. He couldn’t feel his shoulders at all any more. It was awkward to run with his arm up and behind his neck. His air supply appeared to be all right – no – a tear in the tube, at the neck. He took his hand from his shoulder long enough to dial maximum flow on his wristpad. The cold flowed down his back like ghost ice water. A hundred below 0°C. He was holding his breath and could feel dust on his lips, caking his mouth. Impossible to tell how much CO₂ was getting into his oxygen supply, but it didn’t take much to kill you.

The garage appeared out of the murk; he had run right to it, and was feeling mighty pleased with himself until he came to the lock door and pushed the open button and nothing happened. It was easy to lock a lock’s outer door, just leave the inner one open. His lungs burned, he needed a breath. He ran around the garage to the walktube that connected it to habitat proper, reached it, stared in through the layers of plastic. No one in sight. He took his hand away from the rip on his shoulder and as quickly as he could opened the box on his left forearm and took out the little drill, turned it on and plunged it into the plastic, which gave without breaking and gathered up around the spinning bit, until the drill almost broke his elbow; he poked wildly with it and finally got the plastic to tear, then ripped downward, widening the hole until he could dive through it helmet first. When he was inside to the waist he held still, using his body as a rough plug for the hole. He unclipped his helmet and ripped it off his head and gasped for breath as if coming up from a long dive, out in out in out in. Get that CO₂ out of the blood. His shoulders and neck were numb. Down at the garage an alarm bell was ringing.

After a twenty second compressed burst of thought, he yanked his legs through the hole and ran down the quickly depressurizing tube toward the habitat, away from the garage. Happily the door there opened on command. Once inside he jumped in an elevator and dropped to the third floor below the ground, where he was staying in one of the guest suites. He let the elevator door open and looked out. No one in sight. He hustled down to his room. Inside he stripped off the walker and stashed it and the helmet in his closet. In the bathroom he winced at the sight of his whitened shoulders and upper back; a really horrible case of frostnip. He took some oral painkiller and a triple dose of omegendorph, put on a shirt with a collar, pants, shoes. He combed his hair, composed himself. The face in the mirror looked glassy-eyed and distracted, almost stunned; he threw his face through the most violent contortions, slapped it, resettled his expression, started breathing in a deep pattern. The drugs began to kick in, and his reflection looked a little better.

He went out into the hall and walked to the big trench wall concourse, which extended downward three more stories. He walked along the railing looking at the people below, feeling a curious mixture of elation and rage. Then Sam Houston and one of his women colleagues approached him.

“Excuse me, Mr Boone, but will you please come with us?”

“What’s up?” he said.

“There’s been another incident. Someone cut open one of the walkway tubes.”

“Cut open a walktube? You call that an incident? We have mirror satellites flying out of orbit, and trucks falling into moholes, and you’re calling a prank like that an incident?”

Houston glared at him, and Boone almost laughed at the man. “How do you think I can help?” he asked.

“We know you’ve been working on this for Dr Russell. We thought you might like to be informed.”

“Oh, I see. Well, let’s go have a look then.”

And then it was a matter of going through the paces, for nearly two hours, his shoulders burning like fire the whole time. Houston and Chang and the other investigators spoke to him as if in confidence, and anxious for his input; but their gazes were coolly evaluative. John returned them with a little smile.

“Why now, I wonder?” Houston said at one point.

“Maybe someone doesn’t like you being here,” John said.

Only when the whole charade was finished did he have time to think about why he wanted to keep them from finding out about the attack. No doubt it would have drawn more investigators up, and that was bad; and certainly it would have become the top news story all over Mars and Earth, tossing him back into maximum fishbowl. And he was sick of the fishbowl.

But there was something more than that that he couldn’t quite pin down. The subconscious detective. He snorted with disgust. To distract himself from the pain he stalked around from dining hall to dining hall, hoping to catch some expression of poorly-concealed surprise when he walked into each room. Back from the dead! Which one of you murdered me! And once or twice he saw someone flinch from his roving gaze. But the fact was, he thought dourly, many people flinched when he looked at them. As if avoiding the gaze of a freak, or a condemned man. He had never felt his fame in quite that way before, and it made him angry.

The painkillers were wearing off, and he returned early to his rooms. His door was open. When he rushed in he found two of the UNOMA investigators inside. “What are you doing!” he cried angrily.

“Just looking out for you,” one of them said smoothly. They glanced at each other. “Wouldn’t want someone to try something.”

“Like breaking and entering?” Boone said, leaning against the doorway.

“Part of the job, sir. Sorry we’ve upset you.” They shuffled nervously, trapped in his room.

“Just who gave you authorization for this?” Boone said, folding his arms over his chest.

“Well.” They looked at each other again. “Mr Houston is our superior officer—”

“Call him and get him here.”

One of them whispered into his wristpad. In a suspiciously short time Sam Houston appeared down the hallway, and as he hurried up glowering John laughed. “What were you doing, hiding around the corner?”

Houston walked right up to him, stuck his face forward and said in a low voice, “Look, Mr Boone, we’re in the midst of a very important investigation here, and you are obstructing it. Despite what you seem to believe you are not above the law—”

Boone jerked forward so that Houston had to flinch to avoid their bumping noses. “You aren’t the law,” he said. He unfolded his arms and poked Houston in the chest, driving him back further down the hall. Now Houston was losing his temper and Boone laughed at him. “What are you going to do to me, officer? Arrest me? Threaten me? Give me something good to include in my next report on Eurovid? Would you like that? Would you like me to show the world how John Boone was harassed by some tin-god tin-badge functionary, who came to Mars thinking he was a sheriff in the wild west?” He remembered his opinion that anyone who spoke of themselves in the third person was a self-declared idiot, and laughed and said, “John Boone doesn’t like that kind of thing! No he doesn’t!”

The other two had taken the opportunity to slip out of his room, and were now watching closely. Houston’s face was the color of Ascraeus Mons, and his teeth were revealed. “No one’s above the law,” he grated. “There are criminal acts occurring here, very dangerous ones, and quite a few of them happen when you’re around.”

“Like breaking and entering.”

“If we determine that we need to check your quarters, or your records, to pursue our investigation, then we’re going to do that. We have that authority.”

“I say you don’t,” John said arrogantly, and snapped his fingers in the man’s face.

“We are going to search your rooms,” Houston said, articulating each word very carefully.

“Get away,” Boone said, contemptuously jerking at the other two and waving them back. He laughed, lip curled with scorn: “That’s right, go! Get out of here, you incompetents – go back and read the regs on search and seizure!”

He went in his room and closed the door behind him.

He paused. It sounded like they were leaving, but either way he had to act like he didn’t care. He laughed, went to the bathroom and took some more painkillers.

They hadn’t yet gotten to the closet, which was lucky; it would have been hard to explain the torn walker without telling the truth, and that would have been messy. Curious how tangled things got when you concealed the fact that someone had tried to kill you. That made him pause. The attempt had been pretty clumsy, after all. There must have been a hundred more effective ways to kill someone out in a walker on Mars. So if they were just trying to scare him, or were perhaps hoping that he would try to conceal the attack, so that they could find him lying, and then have something on him …

He shook his head, confused. Occam’s razor, Occam’s razor. The detective’s primary tool. If someone attacks you they mean you harm, that was the basic, the fundamental fact. It was important to find out who the attackers were. And so on. The painkillers were strong, and the omegendorph was wearing off. It was getting hard to think. It was going to be a problem disposing of the walker; the helmet in particular was a big bulky thing. But now he was into it, and there was no graceful way out. He laughed; he knew he would think of something eventually.

He wanted to talk to Arkady. A call determined that Arkady had finished the gerontological treatment in Acheron with Nadia however, and had gone up to Phobos. John had still never visited the fast little moon. “Why don’t you come on up and see it?” Arkady said over the phone. “Better to talk in person, yes?”

“Okay.”

He hadn’t been in space since the landing from the Ares twenty-three years before and the familiar sensations of acceleration and weightlessness brought on an unexpected bout of nausea. He told Arkady about it as they docked with Phobos, and Arkady said, “It always used to happen to me, until I started drinking vodka right before takeoff.” He had a long physiological explanation for this, but the details began to pull John back over the edge and he cut him off. Arkady laughed; the gerontological treatment had given him its usual post-operative lift, and he had been a happy man to begin with: he didn’t look like he would be sick again for a thousand years.

Stickney turned out to be a bustling little town, the crater’s concrete dome lined with the latest heavy-duty radiation proofing, and the floor of the crater terraced in concentric rings down to a bottom plaza. The rings alternated between parks and two-storied buildings with gardens on their roofs. There were nets in the air for people who lost control of their leaps across the city, or took off by accident: escape velocity was only fifty kilometers per hour, so it was almost possible to run right off the moon. Just under the dome foundation John spotted a small version of the exterior circumnavigating train, running horizontally compared to the buildings of the town, and moving at a speed that returned its passengers to a sensation of Martian gravity. It stopped four times a day to take people on, but if John took refuge in it that would only delay his acclimatization, so he went to the guest room assigned to him, and miserably waited out the nausea. It seemed he was a planet dweller now, a Martian for good, so that leaving it was pain. Ridiculous but true.

The next day he felt better, and Arkady took him on a tour of Phobos. The interior was honeycombed with tunnels, galleries, drifts, and several enormous open chambers, many of them still being enlarged, mined for water and fuel. Most of the interior tunnels inside the moon were smooth functional tubes, but the interior rooms and some of the big galleries had been built according to Arkady’s socio-architectural theories, and he showed John around some of these: circular hallways, mixed work and recreation areas, terracing, etched metallic walls, all features that had become standard during Mars’s crater-oriented phase of construction, but of which Arkady was still proud.

Three of the little surface craters on the side opposite to Stickney had been domed with glass and filled with villages which had a view of the planet rushing beneath them – views never available from Stickney, as Phobos’s long axis was permanently aligned toward Mars, with the big crater always pointed away. Arkady and John stood in Semenov, looking up through the dome at Mars, which filled half the sky and was shrouded by its dust clouds, all its features obscured. “The Great Storm,” Arkady said. “Sax must be going mad.”

“No,” John said. “A thing of the moment, he says. A glitch.”

Arkady hooted. Already the two of them had fallen back into their old easy camaraderie, the feeling that they were equals, brothers from way back. Arkady was the same as ever, laughing, joking, a great kidder, ideas and opinions flooding out of him, confident in a way that John enjoyed immensely, even now, when he was sure many of Arkady’s ideas were wrong, and even dangerous.

“Sax is probably right, in fact,” Arkady said. “If those ageing treatments work, and we are living decades longer than previously, it will certainly cause a social revolution. Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work – no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again. But look, if you learn it, and then stare at it for fifty more years, you will eventually be saying, Why not make this more rational? Why not make it closer to our heart’s desire? What’s stopping us?”

“Maybe that’s why things are getting so strange down there,” John said. “But somehow I don’t think these people are taking the long view.” He gave Arkady a quick account of the sabotage situation, and ending it by saying boldly: “Do you know who’s doing it, Arkady? Are you involved?”

“What, me? No, John, you know me better than that. These destructions are stupid. The work of reds, from the look of it, and I am no red. I don’t know exactly who is doing it. Probably Ann does, have you asked her?”

“She says she doesn’t know.”

Arkady cackled. “Still my same John Boone! I love it. Look here, my friend, I will tell you why these things are happening, and then you can work at it systematically, and perhaps see more. Ah, here’s the subway to Stickney – come on, I want to show you the infinity vault, it’s really a nice piece of work.” He led John to the little subway car, and they floated down a tunnel to near the center of Phobos, where the car stopped and they got out. They pushed across the narrow room, and pulled themselves down a hall; John noted that his body had adjusted to the weightlessness, that he could float and keep his trim again. Arkady led him into an expansive open gallery, which on first glance appeared to be too large to be contained inside of Phobos: floor, wall and ceiling were paneled in faceted mirrors, and each round slab of polished magnesium had been angled so that anyone in its microgravity space was reflected in thousands of infinite regresses.

They touched down on the floor and hooked their toes through rings, floating like sea bottom plants in a shifting crowd of Arkadys and Johns. “You see, John, the economic basis of life on Mars is now changing,” Arkady said. “No, don’t you dare scoff! So far we have not been living in a money economy, that’s the way scientific stations are. It’s like winning a prize that frees you from the economic wheel. We won that prize, and so did a lot of others, and we’ve all been here for years now, living that way. But now more people are flooding onto Mars, thousands of them! And many of them plan to work here, make some money, and return to Earth. They work for the transnationals that have gotten UNOMA concessions. The letter of the Mars treaty is being kept because supposedly UNOMA is in charge of it all, but the spirit of the treaty is being broken left and right, by the UN itself.”

John was nodding. “Yes, I’ve seen that. Helmut told me about it right to my face.”

“Helmut is a snail. But listen, when the treaty renewal comes up, they will change the letter of the law to match the new spirit. Or even give themselves licence to do more. It’s the discovery of strategic metals, and all the open space. These represent salvation to a lot of countries down there, and new territory for the transnationals.”

“And you think they’ll have enough support to change the treaty?”

Millions of Arkadys stared bug-eyed at millions of Johns. “Don’t be so naive! Of course they have enough support! Look, the Mars treaty is based on the old Outer Space treaty. That was the first mistake, because the Outer Space treaty was in fact a very fragile arrangement, and so the Mars treaty is too. According to the treaty’s own provisions, countries can become voting members of the treaty council by establishing an interest here, which is why we’re seeing all the new national scientific stations, the Arab League, Nigeria, Indonesia, Azania, Brazil, India and China and all the rest. And quite a few of these new countries are becoming treaty members specifically with the intent to break the treaty at renewal time. They want to open up Mars to individual governments, outside UN control. And the transnationals are using flag of convenience countries like Singapore and the Seychelles and Moldavia to try to open Mars to private settlement, ruled by corporations.”

“The renewal is still a few years off,” John said.

A million Arkadys rolled their eyes. “It’s happening now. Not just in talk, but in what’s happening day-to-day down there. When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world, we didn’t even own things – some clothes, a lectern, and that was it! Now you know what I think, John. This arrangement resembles the prehistoric way to live, and it therefore feels right to us, because our brains recognize it from three millions of years practicing it. In essence our brains grew to their current configuration in response to the realities of that life. So as a result people grow powerfully attached to that kind of life, when they get the chance to live it. It allows you to concentrate your attention on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy one’s curiosity, or play. That is Utopia, John, especially for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric Utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.”

“You’d think everyone would join,” John said.

“Yes, and they might, but it isn’t being offered to them. And that means it wasn’t a true Utopia. We clever primate scientists were willing to carve out islands for ourselves, rather than work to create such conditions for everyone. And so in reality, the islands are part of the transnational order. They are paid for, they are never truly free, there is never a case of truly pure research. Because the people who pay for the scientist islands will eventually want a return on their investment. And now we are entering that time. A return is being demanded for our island. We were not doing pure research, you see, but applied research. And with the discovery of strategic metals the application has become clear. And so it all comes back, and we have a return of ownership, and prices, and wages. The whole profit system. The little scientific station is being turned into a mine, with the usual mining attitude toward the land over the treasure. And the scientists are being asked, what you do, how much is it worth? They are being asked to do their work for pay, and the profit of their work is to be given over to the owners of the businesses they are suddenly working for.”

“I don’t work for anyone,” John said.

“Well, but you work on the terraforming project, and who pays for that?”

John tried out Sax’s answer: “The sun.”

Arkady hooted. “Wrong! It’s not just the sun and some robots, it’s human time, a lot of it. And those humans have to eat and so on. And so someone is providing for them, for us, because we have not bothered to set up a life where we provide for ourselves.”

John frowned. “Well, in the beginning we had to have the help. That was billions of dollars of equipment flown up here. Lots of work time, like you say.”

“Yes, it’s true. But once we arrived we could have focused all our efforts on making ourselves self-sufficient and independent, and then paid them back and been done with them. But we didn’t, and now the loan sharks are here. Look, back in the beginning, if someone were to ask us who made more money, you or me, it would have been impossible to say, right?”

“Right.”

“A meaningless question. But now you ask, and we have to confer. Do you consult for anybody?”

“Nobody.”

“Me neither. But Phyllis consults for Amex, and Subarashii, and Armscor. And Frank consults for Honeywell-Messerschmidt, and GE, and Boeing, and Subarashii. And so on. They are richer than us. And in this system, richer is more powerful.”

We’ll just see about that, John thought. But he didn’t want to make Arkady laugh again, so he didn’t say it.

“And it is happening everywhere on Mars,” Arkady said. Around them clouds of Arkadys waved their arms, looking like a Tibetan mandala of red-haired demons. “And naturally there are people who notice what’s going on. Or I tell them. And this is what you must understand, John; there are people who will fight to keep things the way they were. There are people who loved the feel of life as a scientist primitive, so much that they will refuse to give it up without a fight.”

“So the sabotages…”

“Yes! Perhaps some of them are done by these people. It is counterproductive, I think, but they don’t agree. Mostly the sabotage is done by people who want to keep Mars the way it was before we arrived. I am not one of those. But I am one of those who will fight to keep Mars from becoming a free zone for transnational mining. To keep us all from becoming happy slaves for some executive class, walled in its fortress mansion.” He faced John, and out of the corner of his eye John saw around them an infinity of confrontations. “Don’t you feel the same?”

“I do, actually.” He grinned. “I do! I think if we disagree, it’s mostly on the matter of methods.”

“What methods do you propose to use?”

“Well – basically, I want to get the treaty renewed as it stands, and then adhered to. If that happens then we’ll have what we want, or we’ll have the basis for getting to full independence, at least.”

“The treaty will not be renewed,” Arkady said flatly. “It will take something much more radical to stop these people, John. Direct action – yes, don’t you look so unbelieving! Seizure of some property, or of the communication system – the institution of our own set of laws, backed by everyone here, out in the streets – yes, John, yes! It will come to that, because there are guns under the table. Mass demonstration and insurrection is the only thing that will beat them, history shows this.”

A million Arkadys clustered around John, looking graver than any Arkady he could ever remember seeing – so grave that the blossoming rows of John’s own face exhibited a regressive expression of slack-jawed concern. He pulled his mouth shut. “I’d like to try my way first,” he said.

Which made all the Arkadys laugh. John gave him a playful shove on the arm and Arkady went to the floor, then pushed off and tackled him. They wrestled while they could keep contact and then flew away to opposite sides of the chamber; in the mirrors, millions of them flew away into infinity.

After that they went back to the subway, and to dinner in Semenov. As they ate they looked up at the surface of Mars, swirled like a gas giant. Suddenly it looked to John like a great orange cell, or embryo, or egg. Chromosomes whipping about under a mottled orange shell. A new creature waiting to be born, genetically engineered for sure; and they were the engineers, still working on what kind of creature it would be. They were all trying to clip the genes they wanted (their own) onto plasmids and insert them into the planet’s DNA spirals, to get the expressions they wanted from the new chimerical beast. Yes. And John liked much of what Arkady wanted to put into it. But he had his own ideas as well. They would see who managed to create more of the genome in the end.

He glanced at Arkady, who was also looking up at the sky-filling planet, with the same grave expression that had been on his face in the hall of mirrors. It was a look that had been impressed on John very accurately and powerfully, he found, but in a weird multiple fly’s-vision format.

John descended back into the murk of the Great Storm, and down in the dim blustery sandswept days he saw things he hadn’t seen before. That was the value of talking with Arkady. He paid attention to things in a new way; he travelled south from Burroughs, for instance, to Sabishii (“Lonely”) Mohole, and visited the Japanese who lived there. They were old-timers, the Japanese equivalent of the first hundred, on Mars only seven years after the first hundred had arrived; and unlike the first hundred they had become a very tight unit, and had “gone native” in a big way. Sabishii had remained small, even after the mohole was dug there. It was out in a region of rough boulders near Jarry-Desloges Crater, and as he drove down the last part of the transponder trail to the settlement, John caught brief glimpses of boulders carved into oversized faces or figures, or covered with elaborate pictographs, or hollowed out into little Shinto or Zen shrines. He stared in the dustclouds after these visions, but they were always gone like hallucinations, half-seen and then disappeared. As he passed into the tattered zone of clear air directly downwind from the mohole, he noticed that the Sabishiians were taking the rock hauled out of the great shaft to this area and arranging it into curving mounds – a pattern – from space it would look like, what, a dragon? And then he arrived at the garage and was greeted by a group of them, barefoot and long-haired, in frayed tan jumpers or sumo-wrestler jock straps: wizened old Japanese Martian sages, who talked about the kami centers in the region, and how their deepest sense of on had long ago shifted from the emperor to the planet. They showed him their labs, where they were working on areo-botany and radiation-proofed clothing materials. They had also done extensive work on aquifer location, and climatology in the equatorial belt. Listening to them it seemed to John that they just had to be in touch with Hiroko, it didn’t make sense that they weren’t. But they shrugged when he asked about her. John went to work drawing them out, establishing the atmosphere of trust that he was so often able to generate in old-timers, the sense that they went back a long way together, into their own Noachian. A couple of days of asking questions, of learning the town, of showing that he was “a man who knew giri”, and slowly they began to open up, telling him in a quiet but blunt way that they did not like the sudden growth of Burroughs, nor the mohole next to them, nor the population increase in general, nor the new pressures put on them by the Japanese government to survey the Great Escarpment and “find gold”. “We refuse,” said Nanao Nakayama, a wrinkled old man with scraggly white whiskers and turquoise earrings, and long white hair in a pony tail. “They cannot make us.”

“And if they try?” John asked.

“They will fail.” And his easy assurance caught John’s attention; and he remembered the conversation with Arkady among the mirrors.

So some of the things he now saw were the result of paying attention in a new way, of asking new questions. But others were the result of Arkady sending word down through his network of friends and acquaintances, to identify themselves to John and show him around. Thus when John stopped in settlements on the way from Sabishii to Senzeni Na, he was often approached by small groups of two, or three, or five, who introduced themselves and said, Arkady thought you might be interested to see this… And they would lead him to see an underground farm with an independent power plant, or a cache of tools and equipment, or a hidden garage full of rovers, or complete little mesa habitats, empty but ready for occupation. John would follow them bug-eyed and slack-jawed, asking questions and shaking his head in amazement. Yes, Arkady was showing him things; there was a whole movement down here, a little group in every town!

Eventually he came to Senzeni Na. He was returning because Pauline had identified two workers there as absent without explanation from their jobs, on the day the truck had fallen on him. The day after he arrived he interviewed them, but they proved to have plausible explanations for their absence from the net; they had been out climbing. But after he had apologized for taking their time, and started back to his room, three other mohole technicians introduced themselves as friends of Arkady’s. John greeted them enthusiastically, glad that something would come of the trip; and in the end a group of eight took him in a rover to a canyon paralleling the mohole’s canyon. They drove down through the obscuring dust to a habitat dug into an overhanging canyon wall: it was invisible to satellites, its heat released from a number of dispersed small vents which from space would look like Sax’s old windmill heaters. “We figure that’s how Hiroko’s group has done it,” one of his guides told him. Her name was Marian, and she had a long beak of a nose and eyes that were set too close together, so that her gaze was very intent.

“Do you know where Hiroko is?” John asked.

“No, but we think they’re in the chaos.”

The universal response. He asked them about the cliff dwelling. It had been built, Marian told him, with equipment from Senzeni Na. It was currently uninhabited, but ready if needed.

“Needed for what?” John said as he walked around the little dark rooms of the place.

Marian stared at him. “For the revolution, of course.”

“The revolution!”

John had very little to say on the drive back. Marian and her companions sensed his shock, and it made them uneasy too; perhaps they were concluding that Arkady had made a mistake in asking them to show John their habitat. “There are a lot of these being prepared,” Marian said defensively. Hiroko had given them the idea, and Arkady thought they might come in handy. She and her companions began ticking them off on their fingers: a whole stockpile of air and ice mining equipment, buried in a dry ice tunnel at one of the south polar cap processing stations; a wellhole tapping the big aquifer under Kasei Vallis; scattered greenhouse labs around Acheron, growing pharmacologically useful plants; a communications center in the basement of Nadia’s concourse at Underhill. “And that’s just what we know about. There are one-read samizdat appearing in the net that we had nothing to do with, and Arkady’s certain that there are other groups out there, doing the same thing we are. Because when push comes to shove, we’re all going to need places to hide and fight from.”

“Oh come on,” John said. “You all have to get it through your heads that this whole revolution scenario is nothing but a fantasia on the American revolution, you know, the great frontier, the hardy pioneer colonists exploited by the imperial power, the revolt to go from colony to sovereign state – it’s all just a false analogy!”

“Why do you say that?” Marian demanded. “What’s different?”

“Well for one thing, we’re not living on land that can sustain us. And for another, we don’t have the means to revolt successfully!”

“I disagree with both those points. You should talk to Arkady more about that.”

“I’ll try. Anyway I think there’s a better way of doing it than all this sneaking around stealing equipment, something more direct. We simply tell UNOMA what the new Mars treaty is going to say.”

His companions shook their heads scornfully.

“We can talk all we want,” Marian said, “but that’s not going to change what they do.”

“Why not? Do you think they can just ignore the people who are living here? They may have continuous shuttles now, but we’re still eighty million kilometers away from them, and we’re here and they’re not. It may not be North America in the 1760s, but we do have some of the same advantages: we’re at a great distance, and we’re in possession. The important thing is not to fall into their way of thinking, into all the same old violent mistakes!”

And so he argued against revolution, nationalism, religion, economics – against every mode of Terran thought that he could think of, all mashed together in his usual style. “Revolution never even worked on Earth, not really. And here it’s all outmoded. We should be inventing a new program, just like Arkady says, including the ways to take control of our fate. With you all living a fantasy of the past you’re leading us right into the repression you’re complaining about! We need a new Martian way, a new Martian philosophy, economics, religion!”

They asked him just what these new Martian modes of thought might be, and he raised his hands. “How can I say? When they’ve never existed it’s hard to talk about them, hard to imagine them, because we don’t have the images. That’s always the problem when you try to make something new, and believe me I know, because I’ve been trying. But I think I can tell you what it will feel like; it will feel like the first years here, when we were a group and we all worked together. When there was no purpose in life except to settle and discover this place, and we all decided together what we should do. That’s how it should feel.”

“But those days are gone,” Marian said, and the others nodded. “That’s just your own fantasy of the past. Nothing but words. It’s like you’re holding a philosophy class in a giant gold mine, with armies bearing down on both sides.”

“No no,” John said. “I’m talking about methods for resistance, methods appropriate to our real situation, and not some revolutionary fantasy out of the history books!”

And around they went, again and again, until they were back at Senzeni Na, and had retired to the workers’ rooms on the lowest residential floor. There they argued passionately, through the time-slip and long into the night; and as they argued a certain elation filled John, because he could see them beginning to think about it – it was clear that they were listening to him, and that what he said, and what he thought of them, mattered to them. This was the best return yet on the old First Man fishbowl; combined with Arkady’s stamp of approval, it gave him an influence over them that was palpable, he could shake their confidence, he could make them think, he could force them to re-evaluate, he could change their minds!

And so in the murky purple Great Storm dawn they wandered down the halls to the kitchen and talked on, looking out the windows and bolting down coffee, glowing with a kind of inspiration, with the age-old excitement of honest debate. And when they finally quit to go catch a little sleep before the day got going, even Marian was clearly shaken, and all of them were deep in thought, half-convinced that John was right.

John walked back to his guest suite feeling tired but happy. Whether Arkady had intended to or not, he had made John one of the leaders of his movement. Perhaps he would come to regret it, but there was no going back now. And John was sure it was for the best. He could be a sort of bridge between this underground and the rest of the people on Mars – operating in both worlds, reconciling the two, forging them into a single force that would be more effective than either alone. A force with the mainstream’s resources and the underground’s enthusiasm, perhaps. Arkady considered that an impossible synthesis; but John had powers that Arkady didn’t. So that he could, well, not usurp Arkady’s leadership, but simply change them all.

The door to his room in the guest quarters was open. He rushed in, alarmed, and there in the room’s two chairs sat Sam Houston and Michael Chang. “So,” Houston said. “Where have you been?”

“Oh come on,” John said. His temper flared, his good mood burnt off in a flash. “Did I pick the wrong door by mistake?” He leaned back out to look. “No, I didn’t. These are my rooms.” He lifted his arms and clicked on his wristpad’s recorder. “What are you doing in here?”

“We want to know where you’ve been,” Houston said evenly. “We’ve got the authority to enter all the rooms here, and to get all our questions answered. So you might as well start.”

“Come on,” John scoffed. “Don’t you ever get tired of playing the bad cop? Don’t you guys ever trade off?”

“We just want answers to our questions,” Chang said gently.

“Oh please, mister good cop,” John said. “We all want answers to our questions, don’t we?”

Houston stood up; already he was on the edge of losing his temper, and John walked right over to him and stopped with their chests about ten centimeters apart. “Get out of my rooms,” he said. “Get out now, or I’ll throw you out, and then we’ll figure out who had the right to be in here.”

Houston merely stared at him, and without warning John shoved him hard in the chest; Houston ran into his chair and sat down involuntarily, bounced up going for John, but Chang jumped between them, saying, “Wait a second, Sam, wait a second,” while John shouted “Get out of my rooms!” over and over at the top of his lungs, bumping against Chang’s back and glaring over his shoulder into Houston’s red face. John nearly burst into laughter at the sight; his high spirits had returned with the success of the shove, and he stalked to the door bellowing “Get out! Get out! Get out!” so that Houston would not see the grin on his face. Chang pulled his angry colleague out into the hall and John followed. The three of them stood there, Chang carefully placing himself between his partner and John. He was bigger than either of them, and now he faced John with a worried, irritated look.

“Now what did you want?” John said innocently.

“We want to know where you’ve been,” Chang said doggedly. “We have reason to suspect that your so-called investigation of the sabotage incidents has been a very convenient cover for you.”

“I suspect the same of you,” John said.

Chang ignored him. “Things keep happening right after your visits, you see — ”

“They happen right during your visits.”

“—hoppers of dust were dropped in every mohole you visited during the Great Storm. Computer viruses attacked the software in Sax Russell’s office at Echus Overlook, right after your consultation with him in 2047. Biological viruses attacked the fast lichens at Acheron right after you left. And so on.”

John shrugged. “So? You’ve been here two months, and that’s the best you can do?”

“If we’re right, it’s good enough. Where were you last night?”

“Sorry,” John said. “I don’t answer questions from people who break into my rooms.”

“You have to,” Chang said. “It’s the law.”

“What law? What are you going to do to me?” He turned toward the open door of the room and Chang moved to block him; he lost his temper again and jerked toward Chang, who flinched but remained in the doorway, immovable. John turned and walked away, back down to the commons.

He left Senzeni Na that afternoon in a rover, and took the transponder road north along the eastern flank of Tharsis. It was a good road and three days later he was 1300 kilometers to the north, just northwest of Noctis Labyrinthus, and when he came to a big transponder intersection, with a new fuel station, he hung a right and took the road east to Underhill. Each day as the rover rolled along blindly through the dust, he worked with Pauline. “Pauline, would you please look up all planetary records for theft of dental equipment?” She was as slow as a human in processing an incongruous request, but eventually the data were there. Then he had her go over the movement records of every suspect he could think of. When he was sure where everyone had been, he gave Helmut Bronski a call to protest the actions of Houston and Chang. “They say they’re working with your authorization, Helmut, so I thought you should know what they’re doing.”

“They are trying their best,” Helmut said. “I wish you would stop harassing them and co-operate, John. It could be helpful. I know you have nothing to hide, so why not be more helpful?”

“Come on, Helmut, they don’t ask for help. It’s rank intimidation. Tell them to stop it.”

“They are only trying to do their job,” Helmut said blandly. “I have not heard of anything illegitimate.”

John broke the connection. Later on he called Frank, who was in Burroughs. “What’s with Helmut? Why is he turning the planet over to these policemen?”

“You idiot,” Frank said. He was typing madly at a computer screen as he talked, so that he seemed to be only barely conscious of what he was saying. “Aren’t you paying any attention at all to what’s going on here?”

“I thought I was,” John said.

“We’re knee-deep in gasoline! And these goddamned ageing treatments are the match. But you never understood why we were sent here in the first place, so why should you understand anything now?” He typed on, staring hard into his screen.

John studied the little image of Frank on his wrist. Finally he said, “Why were we sent here in the first place, Frank?”

“Because Russia and our United States of America were desperate, that’s why. Decrepit outmoded industrial dinosaurs, that’s what we were, about to get eaten up by Japan and Europe and all the little tigers popping up in Asia. And we had all this space experience going to waste, and a couple of huge and unnecessary aerospace industries, and so we pooled them and came here on the chance that we’d find something worthwhile, and it paid off! We struck gold, so to speak. Which is only more gasoline poured onto things, because gold rushes show who’s powerful and who’s not. And now even though we got a head start up here, there are a lot of new tigers down there who are better at things than we are, and they all want a piece of the action. There’s a lot of countries down there with no room and no resources, ten billion people standing in their own shit.”

“I thought you told me Earth would always be falling apart.”

“This isn’t falling apart. Think about it – if this damned treatment only goes to the rich, then the poor will revolt and it’ll all explode – but if the treatment goes to everyone, then populations will soar and it’ll all explode. Either way it’s gone! It’s going now! And naturally the transnats don’t like that, it’s horrible for business when the world blows up. So they’re scared, and they’re deciding to try to hold things together by main force. Helmut and those policemen are only the smallest tip of the iceberg – a lot of policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so is our only chance of getting to some kind of population stabilization without a catastrophe. Control from above, the stupid bastards.”

Frank shook his head disgustedly, then leaned toward his screen and became absorbed in its contents.

John said, “Did you get the treatment, Frank?”

“Of course I did. Leave me alone, John, I’ve got work to do.”

The southern summer was warmer than the previous one that had been shrouded in the Great Storm, but still colder than any recorded. The storm was now almost two M-years long, over three Terran years, but Sax was philosophical about it. John called him at Echus Overlook, and when John mentioned the cold nights he was experiencing Sax only said, “We’ll very likely have low temperatures for the greater part of the terraforming period. But warmer per se isn’t what we’re trying for. Venus is warm. What we want is survivable. If we can breathe the air, I don’t care if it’s cold.”

Meanwhile it was cold, cold everywhere, the nights down to a hundred below every night, even on the equator. When John reached Underhill, a week after leaving Senzeni Na, he found there was a kind of pink ice covering the sidewalks; it was nearly invisible in the storm’s dim light, and walking around was a treacherous business. The people at Underhill spent most of their time indoors. John occupied a few weeks by helping the local bioengineering team field test a new fast snow algae. Underhill was crowded with strangers. Most of them were young Japanese or Europeans, who fortunately still used English to communicate with each other. John roomed in one of the old barrel vaults, near the northeast corner of the quadrant. The old quadrant was less popular than Nadia’s concourse, smaller and dimmer, and many of its vaults were now used for storage. It was strange to walk the square of hallways, remembering the pool, Maya’s room, the dining hall – now all dark, and stacked with boxes. Those years when the first hundred had been the only hundred. It was getting hard to remember what that had been like.

He kept track through Pauline of the movements of quite a few people, the UNOMA investigating force among them. It was a not-very-rigorous surveillance, as it was not always easy to track the investigators, especially Houston and Chang and their crew, whom he suspected were going off-net deliberately. Meanwhile the spaceports’ arrival records gave more evidence every month that Frank had been right about them being only the tip of the iceberg; a lot of people coming down at Burroughs in particular were working for UNOMA without job specifications, and then spreading out to the mines and moholes and other settlements, and going to work for the local security heads. And their Terran employment records were very interesting indeed.

Often at the end of a session with Pauline John would leave the quadrant, and go for a walk outside, feeling disturbed and thinking hard. There was a lot more visibility than there had been: things were clearing up a bit out on the surface, though the pink ice still made walking tricky. It seemed the Great Storm was lessening. Wind speeds on the surface were only two or three times the pre-storm average of thirty kilometers per hour, and the dust in the air was sometimes little more than a kind of thick haze, turning the sunsets into blazing pastel swirls of pink, yellow, orange, red and purple, with random streaks of green or turquoise appearing and disappearing, along with icebows and sundogs, and occasional brilliant shafts of pure yellow light: nature at her most tasteless, transient and spectacular. And watching all that hazy color and movement John would be distracted from his thoughts and climb the great white pyramid to have a look around, and then go back inside ready to start the fight again.

One evening after one of these sunset extravaganzas he climbed down the peak of the great pyramid, and walked slowly back toward Underhill – and then he spotted two figures climb out one of the garage side doors, and down a clear crawltube into a rover. There was something quick and furtive in their motion, and he stopped to look closer: they did not have their helmets on, and he recognized Houston and Chang by the backs of their heads and the size of their bodies. They moved with scurrying Terran inefficiency into the rover, and drove toward him. John polarized his faceplate and started walking again, head down, trying to look like someone coming in from work, veering to the side a bit to increase the distance between him and them. The rover dove into a thick dust cloud and disappeared abruptly.

By the time he got to the lock doors he was deep in thought, and almost frightened. He stood motionlessly at the door, thinking it over, and when he moved it was not to the door, but to the intercom console in the wall next to the door. There were several different kinds of jacks under the speakers, and carefully he unplugged the stopper in one and cleared away the fines crusting the edge – these jacks were never used anymore – and plugged in his wristpad. He tapped in the code for Pauline, and waited for encryption and decryption to work through. “Yes, John?” said Pauline’s voice from his helmet intercom speaker.

“Turn on your camera please, Pauline, and pan my room.”

Pauline was sitting on the side table by his bed, plugged into the wall. Her camera was a little fiber thing, rarely used, and the image on his wristpad was small. The room was dim with only a nightlight on; and his faceplate’s curve was yet another barrier, so that even with the wristpad right against it, he couldn’t quite make out the images; gray shapes, shifting. There was the bed, there was something on it, then the wall. “Back ten degrees,” John said, and squinted trying to comprehend the two centimeter square image. His bed. There was a man lying on his bed. Wasn’t that what it was? The bottom of a shoe, torso, hair. It was hard to tell. It didn’t move. “Pauline, do you hear anything in the room?”

“The vents, the electricity.”

“Transmit to me what you’re picking up on your mike, at full volume.” He leaned his head to the left against his helmet, cramming his ear against the helmet speaker. A hiss, a whoosh, static. There was too much transmission error in a process like this, especially using these corroded old jacks. But certainly he heard no breathing. “Pauline, can you enter the Underhill monitoring system, and locate our vault’s door camera, and transmit its image to my wrist, please?”

He had directed the installation of Underhill’s security system, just a few years before; Pauline still had all the plans and codes, and it didn’t take long for her to replace the image on his wrist with that of the suite outside his room, seen from above. The suite’s lights were on, and in the camera’s sweeps he could see that his door was shut; that was all.

He let his wrist fall to his side and thought it over. Five minutes passed before he raised it again and began giving instructions through Pauline to the Underhill security system. Possession of the codes allowed him to instruct the entire camera system to erase its surveillance tapes, and then to run them in an hour loop rather than the usual eight-hour one. Then he instructed two of the cleaning robots to come to his room, and open its door. While they did that he stood shivering, waiting for them to make their slow roll through the vaults. When they opened his door, he saw them through Pauline’s little eye; light poured into the room and momentarily blazed, then adjusted, and he had a much clearer view. Yes, it was a man on his bed. John’s breath went shallow. He teleoperated the robots, using the minute button toggles on his wristpad. It was a jerky procedure, but if lifting the man woke him up, so much the better.

It didn’t. The man lolled down on both sides of the robot’s cradling arms, which lifted him with their algorithmic delicacy. A body hanging down. The man was dead.

John deliberately took a deep breath, then held it and continued the teleoperation, directing the first robot to deposit the body in the second robot’s big trash hopper. Sending the robots back down the hall to their storage vault was easy. Several people walked by them as they rolled along, but there was nothing he could do about that. The body was not visible except from above, and hopefully no one was paying enough attention to remember the robots later.

When he got them in their storage room, he hesitated. Should he take the body to the incinerators in the Alchemists’ Quarter? But no – now that it was out of his room, he didn’t need to get rid of the body. In fact he would need it later. For the first time he wondered who it was. He directed the first robot to put its extensor eye against the body’s right wrist, and read with its magnetic imager. It took a long time for the eye to hit the right spot on the wrist. Then it held fast. The minute tag that everyone had implanted on a wristbone held information in the standard dot language, and it only took a minute for Pauline to get an ID. Yashika Mui, UNOMA auditor, based at Underhill, arrived 2050. An actual person. A man who might have lived a thousand years.

John began to shiver. He leaned against the glazed blue brick wall of Underhill. It would be an hour before he could go inside, or a little less. Impatiently he pushed off and walked around the quadrant. It took about fifteen minutes to walk around it usually, but now he found he was doing it in ten. After the second turn he walked over to the trailer park.

Only two of the old trailers were still there, and they were apparently abandoned or used only for storage. Figures loomed out of the night dust between them, and for a second he was afraid, but they passed on by. He returned to the quadrant and circled it again, then walked out the path to the Alchemists’ Quarter. He stood looking at the antiquated complex of tubes and piping and squat white buildings, all covered with their black calligraphic equations. He thought of their first years. And now it had come to this, in what seemed the blink of an eye. In the gloom of the Great Storm. Civilization, corruption, crisis. Murder on Mars. He gritted his teeth.

An hour had passed, it was nine p.m. He went back to the lock and went inside, took off his helmet and walker and boots in the changing room and stripped, went into the showers and showered, dried off and put on a jumper, combed his hair. He took a deep breath and walked around the south side of the quadrant and up through the vaults to the one with his room. As he was opening his door he was not surprised to see four of the UNOMA investigators appear, but he tried to act surprised when they ordered him to stop: “What’s this?” he said.

It wasn’t Houston or Chang, but rather three men, with one of the women from that first group at Low Point. The men clustered at his sides without really responding to him, and pulled his door completely open and two of them went inside; John controlled the urge to punch them, or shout at them, or laugh at the expressions that came over their faces when they saw that his room was empty; he merely stared curiously at them, and tried to limit himself to the irritation he would have shown had he been ignorant of what was going on. This irritation would have been considerable of course, and once he opened that door inside himself it was hard indeed to keep all his fury from banging through, hard to keep it to an innocent’s level; they had to be snapped at as if they were overzealous policemen, rather than assaulted as murderous functionaries; and that was extremely hard to hold to.

In their confusion at the unexpected situation he managed to drive them off with a few biting sentences, and when he had closed the door on them he stood in the middle of his room. “Pauline, transmit what’s happening on the security system to yourself, please, and record. Show me whatever cameras have them.”

So Pauline tracked them. It only took a couple of minutes for them to go to the security control room, where they were joined by Chang and others. They went after the camera packs. John sat at Pauline’s screen and watched right along with them as they ran the loops back and found that they were only an hour long, and that the events of the afternoon had been erased. That would give them something to think about. He smiled grimly and told Pauline to get off the system.

A wave of exhaustion swept through him. It was only eleven, but all adrenalin and the morning’s dose of omegendorph had drained out of him, and he was tired. He sat on his bed, but then remembered what had last been there, and got up. In the end he slept on the floor.

He was awakened in the timeslip by Spencer Jackson, with news of a body discovered in a robot hopper. He went and stood wearily beside Spencer in the clinic, staring at the body of Yashika Mui while several of the investigators eyed him warily. The diagnostic machinery was as good at autopsy as anything else, maybe better; tests of minute samples were indicating a blood coagulant. Somberly John ordered a full criminal autopsy; Mui’s body and clothes had to be scanned, and all microscopic particles read against his genome, and all foreign particles read against the list of people who were currently in Underhill. John stared at the UNOMA investigators as he gave this instruction, but they didn’t blink. Probably they had been wearing gloves and walkers, or teleoperated the whole thing as he had. He had to turn away to hide his disgust; he couldn’t let on that he knew!

But then of course they knew that they had put the body there; and so they must suspect that he was the one who had removed it, and erased the camera tapes. So they already knew that he knew, or suspected he did. But they couldn’t be sure; and there was no reason to give anything away.

An hour later he went back to his room, and lay on the floor again. Although he was still exhausted, he could no longer sleep. He stared at the ceiling, thinking it over. Thinking over everything that he had learned.

Near dawn he felt he had things sorted out. He gave up on sleep, and got up to go out for another walk; he needed to be outside, away from the human world and all its sickening corruption, out into the great rush of the wind, made so dramatically visible by the storm’s flying dust.

But when he got out of the lock door, there were stars overhead. The complete net of them – all the thousands burning as of old, without the slightest twinkle or flicker, the faint ones so dense that the black sky itself appeared slightly whitish, as if the whole sky were the Milky Way.

When he had recovered from his astonishment, and the almost-forgotten wonder of the stars, he got on his intercom and called in the news.

It caused pandemonium; people heard and woke their friends, and rushed down to the changing rooms to grab a walker before the supply was exhausted. And the lock doors started opening and spewing out crowds.

The sky to the east turned a blackish red, and then lightened quickly. The whole sky shifted to a dark rose shade, and then began to glow. The stars disappeared by the hundreds, until only Venus and the Earth hung in the east, over a growing intensity of light. The sky in the east grew brighter, and brighter again, until it seemed brighter than day could ever get; even behind faceplates their eyes watered, and some cried out over the common band at the sight. There were figures scampering around, the intercom babbling, the sky growing impossibly brighter, and brighter, and brighter yet, until it seemed it would burst: it pulsated with glowing pink light, the dots that were Venus and Earth overwhelmed by it. And then the sun cracked the horizon and fountained across the plain like a thermonuclear bomb, and the people roared and jumped up and down and ran among the long black shadows of the rocks and the buildings. All east-facing walls were great blocks of Fauvist color, their glaze mosaics stunning, hard to look at directly. The air was clear as glass and indeed seemed a solid substance, imbuing the things stuck in it with razor-edged clarity.

John walked out away from the crowds, east toward Chernobyl. He turned his intercom off. The sky was a darker pink than he remembered, with a touch of purple at the zenith. Everyone in Underhill was going crazy; many of the people there had never seen the sun shine on Mars, and no doubt it felt like they had lived their whole lives in the Great Storm. And now it was over, and they were wandering out in the sunshine drunk with it, slipping on pink ice left and right, getting in yellow snowball fights, climbing the frosted pyramids. When John saw that he turned, and went up the steps of the last pyramid himself, to have a look at the tors and hollows around Underhill. They were somewhat frosted and silted over, but otherwise just the same. He turned on the common band, but turned it back off; people, still inside were howling for walkers, and no one outside was paying any attention to them. It had been an hour since sunrise, one cried, though John found that hard to believe. He shook his head; the raucous voices, and the memory of the body on his bed, made it hard to feel much joy in the end of the storm.

Eventually he went back inside, and gave his walker over to a pair of women his size who were squabbling over who got to use it next, went down to the comm center and called Sax in Echus Overlook. When he got him he congratulated him on the end of the storm.

Sax waved this away brusquely, as if it had happened years before. “They’ve boarded Amor 2051B,” he said. This was the ice asteroid they had found for insertion into Martian orbit. They were in the process of installing rockets on it, which would knock it onto a course that would bring it in on a trajectory similar to the Ares’; without a heat shield the aerobraking would burn it up. All looked well for a MOI ETA about six months away. That was the big news, Sax implied in his blinking, calm way. The Great Storm was history.

John had to laugh. But then he thought of Yashika Mui, and he told Sax about it because he wanted someone else’s celebration to be ruined as well. Sax only blinked. “They’re getting serious,” he finally said. Disgusted, John said goodbye and got off.

He wandered back out through the vaults, disturbed by a fiercely clashing mix of good and bad emotions. He returned to his room and took an omegendorph and one of the new pandorphs Spencer had given him, and then he went out into the quadrant’s central atrium, and wandered among the plants, all skinny storm spawn, troping toward the light bulbs running overhead. The sky was still a clear dark pink, still very bright. A lot of the people who had gone out first were now back and in the atrium between the rows of crops, partying. He ran into a few friends, some acquaintances, mostly strangers. He went back into the vaults, through rooms full of strangers who sometimes cheered when he walked in. If they yelled “Speech!” long enough he would stand on a chair and rattle something off, feeling the endorphins, which today were rendered unpredictable in their effect by the thought of the murdered man. Sometimes he was pretty vehement, and he never knew what he was going to say until it came out of him. We saw John Boone drunk on his ass, they would say, the day the Great Storm ended. Fine, he thought, let them say what they wanted. It never mattered what he did anymore anyway, as far as the legend was concerned.

One room contained a crowd of Egyptians, not like his Sufis but orthodox Moslems, talking like the wind and drinking cups of coffee, high on caffeine and sunlight, flashing white smiles under their moustaches, extremely cordial for once, in fact pleased to see him there. He warmed to that, and flying on the momentum of the day he said, “Look, we’re part of a new world. If you don’t base your actions on Martian reality then you become a kind of schizophrenic, with your body on one planet and your spirit on another. No society split like that can function for long.”

“Well, well,” one of them said with a smile. “You must understand we have traveled before. We are a traveling people. But wherever we are, Mecca is our spirit’s home. We could fly to the other side of the universe and that would still be true.”

Nothing to say to that; and in fact such direct honesty was so much cleaner than what he had been dealing with through the night that he nodded, and said, “I see. I understand.” Compare that after all to the hypocrisy of the West, where people talked of profit at prayer breakfasts, people who couldn’t articulate a single belief they had; people who thought their values were physical constants, who would say “That’s just the way things are,” like Frank so often did.

So John stayed and talked with the Egyptians for a while, and when he left them he was feeling better. He wandered back to his vault, listening to the rowdy voices pouring into the hallway from every room; shouts, shrieks, happy scientist talk, “these things are such halophytes that they don’t like brine because there’s too much water in it,” peals of laughter.

He had an idea. Spencer Jackson lived in the vault next door to John’s, and was passing through when John hurried in, so John told him the idea. “We ought to gather everyone we can for a big celebration of the storm’s end. All the sort-of Mars-centered groups, you know, or really everyone who can possibly make it. Anyone who wants to be there.”

“Where?”

“Up on Olympus Mons,” he said without considering it. “We could probably get Sax to time the arrival of his ice asteroid so that we could watch it from there.”

“Good idea!” Spencer said.

Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, and therefore a cone that is not steep in most places, its great height resulting from its even greater breadth; it is twenty-five kilometers higher than the surrounding plain, but eight hundred kilometers across, so its slope averages about six degrees. But around the circumference of its great bulk there is a circular escarpment some seven kilometers high, and this spectacular cliff, twice as tall as that at Echus Overlook, is in many places close to vertical. Sections of it had already lured the few climbers on the planet, but no one had yet succeeded in climbing it, and for most of the inhabitants of the planet it remained merely a spectacular impediment on the way to the summit caldera. Travelers on the ground made it up the escarpment by way of a wide ramp on the north side, where one of the last lava flows had overrun the cliff – areologists told tales of what it must have been like, of a river of molten rock a hundred kilometers wide, too bright to look at, falling seven thousand meters onto the black lava-crusted plain, piling higher and higher and higher. This spill of lava had left a rampway with nothing more than a slight jog in it where the escarpment had been overrun; it was an easy ascent, and after it, an uphill drive of some two hundred kilometers took one to the rim of the caldera.

The summit rim of Olympus Mons is so broad and flat that while it has an excellent view down into the many-ringed caldera, the rest of the planet cannot be seen from it; looking outward one sees only the outer edge of the rim, and then the sky. But on the south side of the rim there is a small meteor crater, with no name but its map designation, THA-Zp. The interior of this little crater is somewhat sheltered from the thin jet stream rushing over Olympus Mons, and standing on the southern arc of its fresh spiky rim, an observer finally has a view down the slope of the volcano, and then over the vast rising plain of west Tharsis: like looking down at the planet from a platform in low space.

It took almost nine months before the asteroid was brought to a rendezvous with Mars, and word of John’s celebration had had time to get around. So they came in scattered rover caravans, in twos and fives and tens, up the north ramp and around to the southern outer slope of Zp; and they erected a number of big crescent-shaped clear-walled tents, with rigid clear floors that stood two meters off the ground, resting on clear entry stalks. They were the very latest thing in temporary shelter, in fact, and all set with their inner arcs facing uphill, so that when they were done they had a row of crescents stacked like stairs, like greenhouse gardens on a terraced hillside, overlooking the immense sweep of a bronze world. Every day for a week the caravans arrived, and dirigibles labored up the long slope, and were tethered inside Zp, filling it so that the interior of the little crater looked like a bowl of birthday balloons.

The size of the crowd surprised John, as he had expected only a few friends to travel to such a remote site. It was yet another proof of his inability to comprehend the planet’s current population; there were nearly a thousand people gathered there together, it was amazing. Although many were faces he had seen before, and quite a few he knew by name. So it was a collection of friends, in a way. It was as if a home town that he hadn’t known existed had suddenly sprung up around him. And since so many of the first hundred had come, forty of them in all, including Maya and Sax, Ann and Simon and Nadia and Arkady, Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the Acheron group, Spencer, Rya, Alex and Raul and Janet and Mary and Dmitri and Elena and the rest of the Phobos group, and Arnie and Sasha and Yeli and several more, some of whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years – everyone he was close to, in fact, except for Frank, who had said he was too busy, and Phyllis, who hadn’t replied to the invitation at all.

And it wasn’t just the first hundred; many of the others were old friends as well, or friends of friends: a lot of Swiss, including the roadbuilding gypsies; Japanese from all over; most of the Russians on the planet; his Sufi friends; and all of them scattered up and down the terraced crescent tents, in collections of caravan groups and dirigible teams, rushing from time to time to the locks to greet the latest arrivals.

During the days many of them wandered around outside the tents, collecting loose rock from the great curved slope. The Zp meteor’s impact had scattered chunks of brecciated lava everywhere, including shishtovite shattercones like pottery shards, some dead black, others a bright blood red, or flecked with impact diamonds. An areological team from Greece started laying these in a pattern on the ground under the raised floor of their tent, and they had brought a little kiln with them, so they could glaze some shards yellow or green or blue, to accent their designs. This idea caught on as soon as others saw it, and within two days each clear tent floor stood over a flagged parquet with a mosaic design: circuitry maps, pictures of birds and fish, fractal abstracts, Escher drawings, the Tibetan calligraphy spelling Om Mani Padme Hum, maps of the planet and of smaller regions, equations, people’s faces, landscapes, and so on.

John spent his time wandering from tent to tent, talking with people and enjoying the carnival atmosphere – an atmosphere which did not preclude arguments, there were a lot of those – but most people spent the time partying, talking, drinking, going out on excursions on the wavy surface of the old lava flows, making mosaic floors, dancing to music made by various amateur bands. The best of these was a magnesium drum band, the instruments local, the players from Trinidad and Tobago, a notorious transnational flag of convenience with a vigorous local resistance movement of which the band were representatives. There was also a country and western group with a good slide guitar player, and an Irish band with home-made instruments and a large shifting membership, which allowed it to play more or less non-stop. These three bands were all surrounded by crowds of dancers, and indeed the tents they occupied had all of their movement transformed into a kind of pulsing dance, as just getting from here to there was suddenly stuffed with the grace and exuberance of the music, the gravity, the view.

So it was a great festival, and John was pleased, partying hard in every waking moment. He didn’t need any omegendorph or pandorph; once when Marian and the Senzeni Na crowd hustled him in a corner and started passing tabs around, he could only laugh; “I don’t think so right now,” he said to the young hotheads, waving a hand weakly. “It’d be carrying coals to Newcastle at this point, really it would.”

“Carrying coals to Newcastle?”

“He means it’d be like taking permafrost to Borealis.”

“Or pumping more CO₂ into the atmosphere.”

“Bringing lava to Olympus.”

“Putting more salt in the goddamn soil.”

“Putting any more ferric oxide anywhere on the whole damn planet!”

“Exactly,” John said, laughing. “I’m already full red.”

“Not as red as these folks,” one of them said, pointing down to the west. A string of three sand-colored dirigibles floated up the slope of the volcano. They were small and antiquated, and did not answer radio inquiries. By the time they had scraped over Zp’s rim and anchored among the larger and more colorful dirigibles in the crater, everyone was waiting to hear from the observers at the lock who they might be. When their gondolas popped open, and twenty or so figures in walkers stepped out, a silence fell. “That’s Hiroko,” Nadia said suddenly over the common band. The first hundred made their way quickly to the upper tent, looking up at the walktube that ran over the rim. And then the new visitors were walking down the tube to the tent lock, and were through and inside, and yes, it was Hiroko – Hiroko, Michel, Evgenia, Iwao, Gene, Ellen, Rya, Raul, and a whole crowd of youngsters.

Shrieks and shouts pierced the air, people were embracing, a few crying, and there were a good number of angry accusations; John himself couldn’t help it when he got a chance to hug Hiroko, all those hours in his rover worrying about things, wishing he could have talked to her; now he took her shoulders in his hands and almost shook her, ready for hot words to pour from his throat; but her grinning face was so much like his memory of her and yet not – her face thinner and more lined, not her and yet clearly her – that her face blurred and flowed in his vision, from what he expected to see to what he saw. He was confused enough by this hallucinatory smear (in his feelings too) that he only said, “Oh, I’ve wanted to talk to you so!”

“And me to you,” she said, although it was hard to hear her in the din; Nadia was intervening between Maya and Michel, for Maya was shouting “Why didn’t you tell me?” again and again, before bursting into tears. John was distracted by this, and then he saw Arkady’s face over Hiroko’s shoulder, bunched in an expression that said there’s going to be questions answered later, and he lost his train of thought. There were going to be some hard things said – but still, here they were! Here they were. Down in the tents the noise level had jumped twenty decibels. People were cheering their reunion.

Late in the afternoon John convened the first hundred, now numbering almost sixty. They gathered in the highest tent by themselves, and looked out over those below, and the land beyond.

It was all so much huger than Underhill and the tight rocky plain around it. Everything had changed, it seemed; the world and its civilization all grown vastly larger and more complicated. And yet there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human faces age: time texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyes. They were in their seventies now, most of them. And the world was indeed larger – in many different ways: after all it was now quite possible that they were destined to watch each other age a lot more, if they were lucky. It was a strange sensation.

So they milled about, looking at the people in the tents below, and beyond them to the variegated orange carpet of the planet; and the conversations rushed this way and that in quick chaotic waves, creating interference patterns, so that sometimes they all went still at once and stood there together, stunned or bemused or grinning like dolphins. In the tents below, people occasionally looked up through the plastic arcs at them, curious to catch a glimpse of such a historic meeting.

Finally they sat in a scattering of chairs, passing around cheese and crackers and bottles of red wine. John leaned back in his chair and looked around. Arkady had one arm over Maya’s shoulders, the other over Nadia’s, and the three of them were laughing at something Maya had said; Sax was blinking his owlish pleasure, and Hiroko was beaming. John had never seen that look on her face in the early years. It was a shame to disturb such a mood, but there would never be a good time; and the mood would return. So in a quiet moment he said to Sax in clear loud tones, “I can tell you who’s behind the sabotages.”

Sax blinked. “You can?”

“Yes.” He looked Hiroko in the eye. “It’s your people, Hiroko.”

That sobered her, though she still smiled: but it was the contained, private smile of old. “No no,” she said mildly, and shook her head. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

“I figured not. But your people are doing it without your knowledge. Your children, in fact. Working with the Coyote.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she threw a quick glance down at the tents below.

When she looked at John again he went on. “You grew them, right? Fertilized a bunch of your eggs, and grew them in vitro?”

After a pause she nodded.

“Hiroko!” Ann said. “You don’t have any idea how well that ectogene process works!”

“We tested it,” Hiroko said. “The kids have turned out all right.”

Now the whole group was silent, and watching Hiroko and John. He said, “Maybe so, but some of them don’t share your ideas. They’re doing things on their own, like kids will. They have eyeteeth made of stone, isn’t that right?”

Hiroko wrinkled her nose. “They’re crowns. A composite rather than true stone. A silly fashion.”

“And a kind of badge. And there are people out on the surface who have picked it up, people in contact with your kids, helping them with the sabotages. I almost got killed by some of them in Senzeni Na. My guide there had a stone eyetooth, although it took me a long time to remember where it was I had seen it. I assume it was an accident that we were down there at the time the truck fell. I hadn’t given them any warning I was going to visit, so I assume the whole thing was planned before I got there, and they didn’t know to stop it. Okakura probably went down the hole thinking he was going to get squished like a bug for the cause.”

After another pause Hiroko said, “Are you sure?”

“I’m pretty sure. It was confusing for a long time, because it’s not just them – there’s more than one thing going on. But when I remembered where I had seen that first stone tooth I looked into it, and I found out that a whole shipment of dental equipment from Earth arrived empty, back in 2044. A whole freighter ripped off. It made me think I was onto something. And then, the sabotages kept happening in places and at times when no one who was in the net could possibly have done it. Like that time I visited Mary at the Margaritifer aquifer, and the well housing was blown up. It was clear it hadn’t been done by anyone stationed there, it just wasn’t possible. But that’s a really isolated station, and there was no one else anywhere nearby at the time. So it had to be someone outside the net. And so I thought of you.”

He shrugged apologetically. “When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn’t have been done by anyone in the net. And in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was usually spotted in the area. It’s becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but still. I figured it was you, and I had my AI do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three thousand kilometer circle with the chaotic terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center point. That’s a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteurs to hide. And we’ve all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill.”

Hiroko’s face revealed nothing. Finally she said, “I will look into this.”

“Good.”

Sax said, “John, you said there was more than one thing going on?”

John nodded. “It hasn’t just been sabotage, you see. Someone’s been trying to kill me.”

Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shocked. “At first I thought it was the saboteurs,” John said, “trying to stop my investigation. It made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confused. But now I’m pretty sure that that time was a mistake. The saboteurs aren’t interested in killing me – they could have done it and they didn’t. One night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the Coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the Ares—”

This caused an uproar; it looked like a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and Maya was on her feet pointing a dramatic finger at Hiroko, crying out. John shouted them all down, forged on: “Their visit – their visit! – that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had been there. So those were the saboteurs, but they weren’t trying to kill me, obviously. But one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open.”

He nodded at his friends’ exclamations. “That was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing the elevator and so on.”

Arkady was laughing at him, but John ignored him and forged on. “After that, I was harassed several times by UNOMA investigators that Helmut allowed to come up, and he did that under pressure from those same transnationals. And in fact I found out that most of those investigators had worked for Armscor or Subarashii on Earth, rather than for the FBI like they told me. Those are the transnationals most involved with the elevator project and the mining on the Great Escarpment, and now they’ve got their own security people established everywhere, and this roving team of so-called investigators. And then, just before the big storm ended, some of those investigators tried to get me accused of that murder that happened at Underhill. Yes they did! It didn’t work, and I can’t absolutely prove it was them, but I saw two of them working on the set-up. And I think they killed that man, too, just to get me in trouble. To get me out of their way.”

“You should tell Helmut,” Nadia said. “If we present a united front and insist that these people be sent back to Earth, I don’t think he could deny us.”

“I don’t know how much real power Helmut has anymore,” John said. “But it would be worth a try. I want these people kicked off the planet. And those two in particular I’ve got recorded by the Senzeni Na security system, both going into the med clinic and messing with the cleaning robots before I did. So the circumstantial evidence against them is about as strong as it could be.”

The others didn’t know quite what to make of this, but it turned out that several of them had also been harassed by other UNOMA teams – Arkady, Alex, Spencer, Vlad and Ursula, even Sax – and they quickly agreed that an attempt to get the investigators deported was a good idea. “Those two in particular ought to be deported at best,” Maya said hotly.

Sax simply tapped at his wristpad, and called Helmut up on the phone right then and there: he laid the situation out to Helmut, and the angry group pitched in from time to time. “We’ll take this to the Terran press if you don’t act on it,” Vlad declared.

Helmut frowned, and after a pause he said, “I’ll look into it. Those agents that you complain about in particular will be rotated back home, for sure.”

“Check their DNA again before you let them go,” John said. “The murderer of that man in Underhill is among them, I’m sure of it.”

“We will check,” Helmut said heavily.

Sax cut the connection, and John looked around at his friends again. “Okay,” he said. “But it’ll take more than a call to Helmut to make all the changes we need. The time has come to act together again, across a whole range of issues, if we want the treaty to survive. That as a minimum, you know. A start on the rest of it. We need to form a coherent political unit no matter what kind of disagreements we might have.”

“It won’t matter what we do,” Sax said mildly, but he was jumped on immediately, in an incomprehensible babble of competing protests.

“It does matter!” John cried. “We’ve got as much chance as anyone does of directing what happens here.”

Sax shook his head, but the others were listening to John, and most seemed to agree with him: Arkady, Ann, Maya, Vlad, each from their different perspective… It could be done, John could see it in their faces. Only Hiroko he could not read; her face was a blank, closed in a way that brought back a sharp pang of recollection. She had always been that way to John, and suddenly it made him ache with frustration and remembered pain, and he got annoyed.

He stood, and waved a hand outward; it was nearing sunset, and the enormous curved plate of the planet was dappled with an infinite texture of shadows. “Hiroko, can I have a word with you in private? Just for a second. We can go down into the tent below here. I just have a couple questions, and then we can come right back up.”

The others stared at them curiously. Under that gaze Hiroko finally bowed, and walked ahead of John to the tube down to the next tent.

They stood at one tip of that tent’s crescent, under the gazes of their friends above, and the occasional observer below. The tent was mostly empty; people were respecting the first hundred’s privacy by leaving a gap.

“You have suggestions for how I can identify the saboteurs?” Hiroko said.

“You might start with the boy named Kasei,” John said. “The one that is a mix of you and me.”

She would not meet his eye.

John leaned toward her, getting angry. “I presume there’s kids from every man in the first hundred?”

Hiroko tilted her head at him, and shrugged very slightly. “We took from the samples everyone gave. The mothers are all the women in the group, the fathers all the men.”

“What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?” John asked. “To make our children without asking us – to run away and hide in the first place – why? Why?”

Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. “We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn’t going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life—”

“But don’t you see how selfish that is? We all had a vision, we all wanted it to be different, and we’ve been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you’ve been gone, off creating a little pocket world for your little group! I mean we could have used your help! I wanted to talk to you so often! Here we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven’t talked to me in twenty years!”

“We didn’t mean to be selfish,” Hiroko said slowly. “We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life.”

“But if you do it in secret then no one can see it!”

“We never planned to stay secret forever. The situation has gotten bad, and so we’ve stayed away. But here we are now, after all. And when we are needed, when we can help, we will appear again.”

“You’re needed every day!” John said flatly. “That’s how social life works. You’ve made a mistake, Hiroko. Because while you’ve been hiding, the chances for Mars remaining its own place have gone way down, and a lot of people have been working to speed that disappearance, including some of the first hundred. And what have you done to stop them?”

Hiroko said nothing. John went on: “I suppose you’ve been helping Sax a little in secret. I saw one of your notes to him. But that’s another thing I object to – helping out some of us and yet not others.”

“We all do that,” Hiroko said, but she looked uncomfortable.

“Have you had the gerontological treatments in your colony?”

“Yes.”

“And you got the process from Sax?”

“Yes.”

“Do these kids of yours know their parentage?”

“Yes.”

John shook his head, exasperated and more. “I just can’t believe you would do these things!”

“We do not ask for your belief.”

“Obviously not. But aren’t you the least bit concerned about stealing our genes and making kids by us without our knowledge or consent? About bringing them up without giving us any part in their upbringing, any part in their childhood?”

She shrugged. “You can have your own kids if you want. As for these, well. Were any of you interested in having children twenty years ago? No. The subject never came up.”

“We were too old!”

“We were not too old. We chose not to think of it. Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. You did not want children, and so you did not know about late birth. But we did, and so we learned the techniques. And when you meet the results, I think you will see it was a good idea. I think you will thank us. What have you lost, after all? These children are ours. But they have a genetic link to you, and from now on they will exist for you, as an unexpected gift, say. As a quite extraordinary gift.” Her Mona Lisa smile appeared and disappeared.

The concept of the gift, again. John paused to think about it. “Well,” he finally said. “We’ll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect.”

Twilight had turned the atmosphere below them into a dark purple band, running like a velvet border around the black star-studded bowl which had appeared over their heads. In the tents below they were singing, led by the Sufis: “Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgala, Aquakuh; Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgala, Aquakuh,” and around again, time after time, adding grace notes that were other names for Mars, and encouraging the bands already there to add instrumental accompaniments of all kinds, until every tent was filled with this song, all of them singing together. The Sufis then began their whirling, and little knots of dancers swirled all through the crowds.

“Will you at least stay in contact with me now?” John said intently to Hiroko. “Will you give me that?”

“Yes.”

They returned to the upper tent and the group went down together into the general party and joined the celebration. John made his way slowly to the Sufis, and tried the spins he had learned from them on their mesa, and people cheered and caught him when he spun out of control into the spectators. After one fall he was helped to his feet by the thin-faced man with dreadlocks who had led the midnight visit to his rover. “Coyote!” John cried.

“It’s me,” the man said, and his voice caused a ripple of electricity down John’s spine. “But no reason for alarm.”

He offered John a flask; after a moment’s hesitation John took it and drank. Fortune favors the bold, he thought. Tequila, apparently. “You’re Coyote!” he shouted over the music of the magnesium drum band.

The man grinned widely and nodded once, took the flask back and drank.

“Is Kasei with you?”

“No. He doesn’t like this meteor.” And then with a friendly slap to the arm the man moved off into the swirling crowd. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Have fun!”

John watched him disappear among the faces in the crowd, feeling the tequila burn in his stomach. The Sufis, Hiroko, now Coyote; the gathering was blessed. He saw Maya and hurried over to her and threw an arm over her shoulder, and they walked through the tents and the connecting tunnels, and people toasted them as they passed. The semi-rigid tent floors were gently bouncing up and down.

The countdown reached two minutes, and many people ascended to the upper tents, and then pressed against the clear walls of the south-facing arcs. The ice asteroid would probably burn up in a single orbit, its injection trajectory was so steep; an object a quarter the size of Phobos burned to steam and then, as it got hotter, to oxygen and hydrogen molecules; and all in a matter of minutes. No one could be sure what it would look like.

So they stood there, some of them still singing the chords of the name round. And then a final countdown was picked up by more and more of them, until they were all into the last ten, shouting out the reversed sequence of numbers at the top of their lungs, in the astronaut’s primal scream. They roared out “zero!", and for three breathless heartbeats nothing happened; then a white ball trailing a blazing fan of white fire came shooting up over the southwestern horizon, as big as the comet in the Bayeux Tapestry, and brighter than all the moons and mirrors and stars combined. Burning ice, bleeding across the sky, white on black, hurtling fast and low, so low that it was not much higher than they were on Olympus, so low that they could see white chunks bursting back through the tail and falling away like giant sparks. Then about halfway across the sky it broke into fragments, and the whole collection of incandescent blazes tumbled east, scattering like buckshot. All the stars suddenly shuddered; it was the first sonic boom, striking the tents and shaking them. A second boom followed, and the phosphor chunks bounced wildly for a moment as they tumbled down the sky and disappeared over the southeast horizon. Their firebrake tails followed them into Mars, and disappeared, and it was suddenly dark again, the ordinary night sky standing overhead as if nothing had happened. Except the stars were twinkling.

After all that anticipation, the passage had taken no more than three or four minutes. The celebrants had mostly gone silent at the sight, but many had cried out involuntarily at the sight of the breakup, as during a fireworks show; and again at the impact of the two sonic booms. Now, in the old dark, the silence was complete, and people stood in their tracks. What could you do after something like that?

But there was Hiroko, making her way down through the tents to the one where John and Maya and Nadia and Arkady were standing together. As she walked she chanted, in a tone that was quiet but carried throughout each tent she crossed: “Al-Qahira, Ares, Aquakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma’adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Mawrth, Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud, Tiu.” She walked through the crowd right to John, and facing him she plucked up his right hand and pulled it aloft, and suddenly shouted, “John Boone! John Boone!”

And then everyone was cheering and yelling “Boone! Boone! Boone! Boone!” and others were shouting “Mars! Mars! Mars!”

John’s face blazed like the meteor had, and he felt stunned, as if a piece of it had pinged him on the head. His old friends were laughing at him, and Arkady yelled “Speech!” in what he imagined was an American accent: “Speech! Speech! Speeeeeeeeeech!”

Others picked this up, and after a time the noise died down, and they watched him expectantly, laughter rippling through them at the sight of his slack-faced astonishment. Hiroko released his hand, and he raised the other one helplessly, holding both overhead with hands outstretched.

“What can I say, friends?” he cried. “This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.”

But his blood ran high with adrenalin, with tequila and omegendorph and happiness, and without willing it the words spilled out of him as they so often had before. “Look,” he said, “here we are on Mars!” (Laughter) “That’s our gift and a great gift it is, the reason we have to keep giving all our lives to keep the cycle going, it’s like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative life and especially this step across to a new world, this place that is neither nature nor culture, transformation of a planet into a world and then a home. Now we all know that different people have different reasons for being here and just as important the people who sent us up had different reasons for sending us, and now we’re beginning to see the conflicts caused by those differences, there are storms brewing on the horizon, meteors of trouble flying in and some of them are going to strike dead on rather than skip overhead like that blaze of white ice just did!” (Cheers). “It may get ugly, at times it almost certainly will get ugly, so we have to remember that just as these meteor strikes enrich the atmosphere, thicken it and add the elixir oxygen to the poison soup outside these tents, the human conflicts coming down may do the same, melting the permafrost at our social base, melting all those frozen institutions away and leaving us with the necessity of creation, the imperative to invent a new social order that is purely Martian, as Martian as Hiroko Ai, our own Persephone now come back up out of the regolith to announce the start of this new spring!” (Cheers) “Now I know I used to say that we had to invent it all from scratch but in these last few years traveling around and meeting you all I’ve seen that I was wrong to say that, it’s not like we have nothing and are being forced to conjure forms godlike out of the vacuum – we have the genes you might say, the memes as Vlad says meaning our cultural genes, so that it’s in the nature of an act of genetic engineering what we do here, we have the DNA pieces of culture all made and broken and mixed by history, and we can choose and cut and clip together from what’s best in that gene pool, knit it all together the way the Swiss did their constitution, or the Sufis their worship, or the way the Acheron group made their latest fast lichen, a bit from here and there, whatever’s appropriate, keeping in mind the seven generation rule, thinking seven generations back and seven generations forward, and seven times seven if you ask me because now it’s our lives we’re talking about extending way off into the years, we don’t know how that will affect us yet, but it’s certainly true that altruism and self-interest have collapsed together more tightly than ever before. But also it’s still and always our children’s lives and our children’s children and on down forever that we have to think of, we must act in a way that gives them just as many chances as we have been given and hopefully more, channeling the sun’s energy in ever more ingenious ways to reverse the flow of entropy in this little pocket of the universal flow. And I know that’s an awfully general way of putting it when this treaty that orders our lives here is coming up for renewal so soon, but we have to keep that level in mind because what’s coming is not just a treaty but more a kind of constitutional congress, because we’re dealing with the genome of our social organization here – you can do this, you can’t do that, you have to do this, to eat or to give. And we’ve been living by a set of rules established for empty land, the Antarctic treaty so fragile and idealistic which has held that cold continent free of intrusion for so long, up until the last decade in fact when it’s been chipped away at, and that’s a sign of what’s beginning to happen here too. The encroachment on that set of rules has begun everywhere, like a parasite feeding on the edges of its host organism, because that’s what the replacement set of rules is: the old parasitic greed of the kings and their henchmen – this system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism all over again, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic – it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, and so of course the so-called rich elite are in actuality poor as well, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too as parasites that have taken control can be, sucking the gifts of human work away from their rightful recipients which are the seven generations, and feeding on them while increasing the repressive powers that keep them in place!” (Cheers)

“So it’s democracy versus capitalism at this point, friends, and we out on this frontier outpost of the human world are perhaps better positioned than anyone else to see this and to fight this global battle, there’s empty land here, there’s scarce and non-renewable resources here, and we’re going to get swept up into the fight and we cannot choose not to be part of it, we are one of the prizes and our fate will be decided by what happens throughout the human world. That being the case, we had better band together for the common good, for Mars and for us and for all the people on earth and for the seven generations, it’s going to be hard it’s going to take years, and the stronger we are the better our chances, which is why I’m so happy to see that burning meteor in the sky pumping the matrix of life into our world, and why I’m so happy to see you all here to celebrate it together, a representative congress of all that I love in this world, but look I think that steel drum band is ready to play, aren’t you?” (shouts of assent) “so why don’t you folks start and we’ll dance till dawn and tomorrow scatter on the winds and down the sides of this great mountain, to carry the gift everywhere.”

Mad cheers. The magnesium drum band picked them up into its staccato flurry of plinks and plonks, and the crowd heaved into motion again.

They partied all night long. John spent the time wandering from tent to tent, shaking hands and hugging people, “Thanks, thanks, thanks. I don’t know, I don’t remember what I said. But this is what I meant all along, this right here.” His old friends laughed at him. Sax, drinking coffee and looking supremely relaxed, said to him, “Syncretism is it? Very interesting, very well put”—with the tiniest of smiles. Maya kissed him, Vlad and Ursula and Nadia kissed him; Arkady lifted him up and with a great roar swirled him around in the air, giving him a hairy kiss on each cheek and shouting, “Hey, John, could you repeat that please?” hooting at the very thought. “You amaze me, John, you always amaze me!” And Hiroko with her private smile, with Michel and Iwao flanking her, grinning at him…

Michel said, “I think this is what Maslow meant by the term peak experience,” and Iwao groaned and elbowed him, while Hiroko reached out and touched John on the arm with her forefinger, as if to pass along a certain animating touch, a power, a gift.

They next day they sorted and bagged the party wreckage and took down the tents, leaving the flagstone terraces behind, like strands of cloisonné necklace draped down the side of the old black volcano. They said good-bye to the dirigible crews, and the dirigibles drifted down the slope like balloons slipped from a child’s fist; the sand-colored ones of the hidden colony got hard to see very quickly.

As he got in his rover with Maya John said good-byes, and as they drove around the rim of Olympus Mons they caravaned with rovers containing Arkady and Nadia, and Ann and Simon and their son Peter. In conversations that day John said, “We need to talk to Helmut, and get the UN to accept us as speakers at large for the local population. And we need to present the UN with a draft of the revised treaty. Around Ls ninety I’m scheduled to go to a dedication ceremony for a new tent city on east Tharsis. Helmut is supposed to be there, maybe we could meet then?”

Only a few of them could make it, but they were named delegates for the rest, and the plan was agreed on. After that they talked about what the contents of the draft treaty should be, calling around to all the caravans and the dirigibles. The next day they came to the ramp down the northern escarpment, and at its foot they took off each in every direction. “That was a good party!” John said over the radio to each in turn. “See you at the next one!”

The Sufis rolled by while they were stopped, and they waved from their windows came on the radio to say good-bye as well. John recognized the voice of the old woman who had tended him at the toilet after his dance in the storm; as he was waving at their caravan she said over the radio,

“Whether it be of this world or of that,

Your love will lead us yonder at the last.”